Daddy's Scarecrows

- And the mermaid bit the old man's heart with her teeth! - Daddy howls in a grave voice and makes scary eyes.

I'm five years old and I duck under the covers. It's about to get really scary.

- The old man shook his head and ran to the river. And the mermaid slipped her fingers under his ribs, pulled them apart, and clung to him with her teeth. The old man roared and fell off the steep bank into the water...

I had covered my ears with my palms: that's enough, that's enough!

I mentally vow never to hear another scary bedtime story about how the old man caught a mermaid in a hole in the ice, took pity on her, and brought her home.

But a week goes by, another week, and I want to be "scared" again.

My hand involuntarily reaches for the shelf of Alexei Tolstoy's fairy tales.

- Daddy, read about the mermaid!

Why do kids like to be scared? They read the Brothers Grimm and Stephen King. They watch horror movies about vampires, and at night they tell each other horror stories about the Black Hand and the Coffin on Wheels.

I guess that's how we learn to overcome our fears, to control our emotions, our bodies.

It's like riding a roller coaster - you're shaking and your heart is ready to jump out of your chest, but how great is it to plunge into the abyss from a dizzying steepness. It's breathtaking!

But as a child, I was only willing to let my nerves be tickled if I felt completely safe. I would hardly have wanted to be alone with monsters from the movies if there was no one there to protect me. In the pioneer camp, I even refused to sleep by the window. What if the Hoofman looked in the window at night?

The Hoofman

In the time of my childhood in the camp "Zvezdochka" there was such a legend: there was a boy who lived in the village of Adam. One day he went to the railway, and the hooligans who had escaped from the pioneer camp pushed him under the train. The engineer did not brake in time and the boy's legs were cut off.

To replace his lost legs, the doctors at the village hospital sewed him the first thing they could find - pigs' hooves. And so the boy became the Hoofman.

When he was released from the hospital, he immediately sought out his tormentors to take revenge.

But the camp shift was long over, and the town hooligans had gone home. So Hoofman began to take revenge on all the children.

Every night he would go tsk-tsk-tsk on his hooves into the pioneer camp and look in the windows. Anyone who saw him would die of a broken heart or go mad.

Hoofman grew up and became an angry and resentful man. Driven by revenge, he still came to the camp at night and terrorized those who were awake.

I was so frightened by these stories that when I returned to the city, I was afraid to see him for a long time. I involuntarily looked at the feet of all the men I met, because according to the legend, a Hoofman did not wear shoes.

I could see that terrible man everywhere.

The pioneer leaders, of course, did not believe in a Hoofman. They generally believed that children should sleep at night and not scare each other with horror stories.

But we did it anyway. We used to summon Leopold the Cat, the Swearing Devil, and the Queen of Spades. We poured water into a clear jar, put three hairs in it - red, white and black - and put a lid on the jar. The bravest would climb into the closet, turn the jar upside down, and try to see the cat inside.

I won't lie, no matter how hard I looked, I never failed to see Leopold. Nor did I hear the devil, who cursed exquisitely. Although the girls assured me that he was not scary, on the contrary, he was very funny.

But whenever we tried to call the Queen of Spades, something strange, even sinister, would happen in the bedroom. The lights would flicker on and off, and in the middle of the night we would hear footsteps in the hallway. You look out the door and there's no one there.

And once a small pocket mirror with a drawn door and a ladder on it broke out of my hands.

Of course, all this can be considered a coincidence - girls can see anything when they're scared.

Besides, we didn't mind playing a prank ourselves.

We could pull a sheet over a sleeping friend and wake him up with a scream: "The ceiling is falling!"

But one ritual game never leaves my mind. Even today, more than a quarter of a century later, I cannot find a clear explanation for it.

Pannochka is dead

In the Yuri Gagarin sanatorium in the Urals we learned from the older girls that there is such a game as "Pannochka". Many children played it at that time.

We, seven ordinary schoolgirls, locked ourselves in a bedroom so that no one would disturb us.

Boys - they always spoil everything, giggle at the most inappropriate moment, or get scared and run away, and the main condition of the game "Pannochka" - absolute seriousness.

With the help of children's counting, we chose a pannochka and wrapped it in a sheet.

The pannochka was not thin, we could hardly drag Radka Berezova to the bed.

The rest was done in complete silence. Although, as usually happens in such cases, we could hardly keep from laughing, for no reason.

We stood on either side of the bed, and Tanya Khozhainova said in a grave voice:

- Panochka is dead.

- Really dead, - we repeated in unison.

- We won't bury her.

- No, we will not bury her. Let the devils bury her!

Then we put two forefingers under the "deceased" and began to lift her up slowly.

I remember how I was struck by the incredible ease with which we performed this difficult (considering the size of the "pannochka") rite.

Fatty Rada weighed less than a feather!

- Oh, girls! - cried Ira Bukhvalova.

In the same second Radka became heavier and fell down like a stone.

- Fool! - Tanya hissed at Ira. - I told you to be quiet!

Radka staggered angrily in her shroud and said, "Be careful, or you will really kill me".

We began the ritual again:

- Pannochka is dead.

- Really dead.

At first we lifted and lowered the "pannochka" together, the six of us, but each time one of the girls moved to the side.

Finally it was just the two of us.

It seemed unbelievable, but Tanya and I easily lifted Radka above our heads with the tips of two forefingers. Pannochka's body was absolutely weightless, as if we were holding an empty sheet above us.

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I don't know how to explain this phenomenon. Maybe we fell into a kind of trance without realizing it. I mean, if we were playing the game now, I don't think we would have succeeded.

When you are a child, you somehow believe more in miracles, and you treat everything mysterious and incomprehensible with much more reverence.

At that time, in the camp, none of us doubted that the spirit of Gogol's Pannochka had really entered Radka's body.

Would we have been able to believe it as adults? Hardly.

And yet this story was in my life, not in a dream, but in reality.

About Pushkin and the Dead Girl

As children, when we gathered at someone's birthday party, we liked to play a variety of games. For example, we'd choose a victim and offer to participate in a spiritual seance. The intrigued victim would, of course, agree.

He or she would be blindfolded and taken to a dark room. The host would say three times:

- Spirit of Pushkin, come!

After the third time, the door to the room would open and Pushkin would enter.

Not the real Pushkin, of course. His role was played by one of us who was in cahoots with us.

The leader of the game used to take the palm of the victim and pass it over the hand of "Pushkin", saying:

- This is his hand.

Then he would touch his leg:

- This is his foot.

Then it was the head's turn:

- This is his head.

- And this is his eye! - With these words, the game leader dipped the victim's finger sharply into a saucer in which a pea of toothpaste had been squeezed.

Squeals, screams...

Sometimes at such parties an uninitiated peer or peer-girl would be privately informed that in the next room was the body of a girl who had been hit by a streetcar. For some reason, no one was embarrassed by the fact that there were no streetcars in our city and never had been. And in general, where would a dead girl come from in someone else's apartment?

But the curious classmate never asked such questions, on the contrary, he always expressed his wish to see the deceased.

Everything in the room was ready for the performance. The tallest of us would lie on the floor, and a jacket or hooded cloak would be pulled over his legs, with the empty sleeves hanging loosely over the sides.

Sometimes mittens were tucked into the sleeves. A black cloth was thrown over the place in the hood where the face of the "dead girl" was supposed to be.

A chair was placed on top of the "corpse" so that the back of the chair hid the upper part of the torso from prying eyes.

To add to the mystery, candles were usually lit and the lights were turned off.

When the object of the prank entered the room, all he saw was a person lying on the floor with his arms outstretched and a chair in which he was supposed to sit facing the "corpse".

- This is Masha from the sixth grade, - one of the guests used to tell him.

And then he would begin a tearful story about Masha's sad fate.

The unsuspecting classmate listened with open mouth. He really felt sorry for the strange girl.

At the very moment when he was completely relaxed, the person hiding under the chair had to raise his legs sharply at right angles. The surprise effect was amazing!

Imagine sitting quietly and peacefully looking at a breathless body, and suddenly the "dead girl" jumps up right in your face and hugs you with her empty sleeves. This is not for the faint of heart!

An evil pit

And how many horror stories circulated around our provincial city at the time of its construction, especially in the new district on the left bank of the river.

In the spring of 1987, builders dug a huge pit for the future department store on Kalinin Street. It quickly filled with water, and rumors spread throughout the city that a mutant monster lived in its murky depths. It hunted lonely passers-by, grabbing them by the legs and dragging them to the bottom.

A legend about a boy who drowned was passed from mouth to mouth.

A schoolboy had actually drowned in the pit once - he was floating on a raft in the spring and it overturned. But the boys at school assured that the raft had nothing to do with it, one of the passers-by had seen the boy grabbed by a water monster and dragged to the bottom. And now the boy comes out of the water every night, wanders along the shore, and cries. Good people feel sorry for him, want to help him, but then they disappear themselves - because the boy needs a new victim. It is not a boy at all, but a monster reincarnated in him.

The Invisible Man

In general, Kalinin Street was notorious among young legend-makers.

They said that an invisible man lived in the technical entrance of house No. 5.

No one saw him, did not even know what he looked like, and how do you know that? He is invisible.

But the legend said that whoever crossed the cursed threshold of the entrance would disappear from the face of the earth forever.

In third grade, my friends and I planned to outwit the Invisible Man and sneak past him unnoticed. We walked fearlessly to the famous entrance, opened the heavy wooden door with a creak...

Out of the darkness came the dampness of the cellar and the deadly cold.

All our courage vanished in an instant. No one dared to enter the "nowhere". So we threw a cat in the doorway.

The cat mewed pitifully and disappeared into the darkness.

We stood under the windows for a long time, discussing the evil entrance, the Invisible Man, and the fate of the poor stray cat. We decided to come back tomorrow.

But the next day, workers from the Department of Housing and Utilities came and nailed the door to the entrance shut - because one of the tenants complained that some children were wandering around and disturbing him.

The Black Hand

The Black Hand also lived in Kalinin Street.

It was said to prey exclusively on the fourth floors.

The Black Hand would appear out of the darkness, grab people by the throat and strangle them.

But it did not attack everyone, only those who had something to do with the number four: they studied in the fourth class, were born on the fourth day, lived in a house with the number four, or had recently received a grade of D in school. After all, D is the fourth letter in the English alphabet.

There was no escape from the Black Hand. It could pass through walls and always caught up with its prey.

I lived in an apartment building with two elevators, and I was very afraid of them.

I weighed very little, so for the elevator it was like I didn't exist.

I'd get in, push the button. The button would pop out of its socket with a resounding click, the doors would slam shut, the lights would go out, but the elevator would never move.

After standing there for a minute, the elevator would start humming and go wherever it wanted to go, up or down, depending on which floor it was called to.

That feeling of animal fear as you rush through the dark to nowhere still haunts me in my nightmares. To make friends with the elevators (to me they were living creatures), I made up names for them. I called the freight one Pasha and the passenger one Anton, in honor of two boys I liked at the time.

Before entering the cabin, I would always say hello and then, holding the button in the socket with my thumb, I would start singing loudly all the songs I knew.

In spite of my singing, the light in the cabin still went out. And if I usually got to the first floor more or less safely, nothing helped when I wanted to get up. The elevator would not obey me, and instead of taking me to the ninth floor, it would take me to the tenth or, say, the thirteenth.

That's why I preferred to take the stairs.

The staircase was separated from the apartments in the high-rise by a concrete wall - it was a so-called fire escape with a separate emergency exit. The only way to get there was through the common balcony.

Due to its complete isolation, the staircase served as a toilet for children and drunks.

Stinking puddles never dried there, neither in winter nor in summer. All the light bulbs were long broken or unscrewed, plunging the emergency exit into darkness in the evenings.

Where else but here could the Black Hand live?

I lived in an apartment building with two elevators, and I was very afraid of them.

I weighed very little, so for the elevator it was like I didn't exist.

I'd get in, push the button. The button would pop out of its socket with a resounding click, the doors would slam shut, the lights would go out, but the elevator would never move.

After standing there for a minute, the elevator would start humming and go wherever it wanted to go, up or down, depending on which floor it was called to.

That feeling of animal fear as you rush through the dark to nowhere still haunts me in my nightmares. To make friends with the elevators (to me they were living creatures), I made up names for them. I called the freight one Pasha and the passenger one Anton, in honor of two boys I liked at the time.

Before entering the cabin, I would always say hello and then, holding the button in the socket with my thumb, I would start singing loudly all the songs I knew.

In spite of my singing, the light in the cabin still went out. And if I usually got to the first floor more or less safely, nothing helped when I wanted to get up. The elevator would not obey me, and instead of taking me to the ninth floor, it would take me to the tenth or, say, the thirteenth.

That's why I preferred to take the stairs.

The staircase was separated from the apartments in the high-rise by a concrete wall - it was a so-called fire escape with a separate emergency exit. The only way to get there was through the common balcony.

Due to its complete isolation, the staircase served as a toilet for children and drunks.

Stinking puddles never dried there, neither in winter nor in summer. All the light bulbs were long broken or unscrewed, plunging the emergency exit into darkness in the evenings.

Where else but here could the Black Hand live?

I studied on the second shift. Classes ended late. It was useless to ask my parents to pick me up from school. They considered my fear of elevators to be nonsense that had to be fought mercilessly. As a last resort, they told me to wait for the neighbors and go up with them. I often did that, but there were days when there was no one to help me. The only thing left was to go up the stairs.

But there, on a spit-covered fire escape, you could easily run into a sex maniac, a group of drunken youths, or worse, the Black Hand.

So before I stepped into the darkness, I listened for a long time to various sounds.

I climbed by feel, and at the slightest rustle I pressed myself against the wall, afraid that the Black Hand, which of course flew silently, would claw at my throat.

Every time I reached the necessary floor, I was on the verge of fainting, but at the same time I was filled with elation - the danger was over, I was safe!

I couldn't admit to anyone, not even myself, that I was attracted to risk, and I secretly longed to meet the Black Hand, but I had never met it.

Cat's Eye

Cat's Eye is another creepy story from those years.

Its background is as follows: there was a girl who lived in Glazov. She was very evil: she tortured hamsters, cut off frogs' legs, dragged cats by their tails.

Once she hit a kitten in the eye with a stone. The eye flew out and began to take revenge on people - all of them, indiscriminately.

During the day it slept in cellars and attics, and at midnight it went hunting, flying through the streets and scaring to death the late passers-by - that was its revenge.

Anyone who saw it would die for reasons unknown to science.

The wicked little girl who had once hurt the kitten was also found dead in the attic.

She was missing an eye and had a striped cat's tail on her chest.

To be continued