Alone at home

Like many kids, I was afraid to be home alone. Especially at night.

I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was waiting for me in the dark hallway. And as soon as I left the room, he would grab me.

Our whole apartment was inhabited by monsters. There was a giant worm in the hallway.

Once, on my way home from kindergarten, I picked a small wild apple from a tree, and at home I saw a booger in it. Frightened, I threw the wormy apple into the closet where the coats were hanging.

Since then, the booger has grown in my imagination and turned into a nasty monster.

If I had to stay home alone, I would turn on the lights in every room, turn on the TV, and wait for my parents to come home.

Sometimes, on those evenings, someone would ring our doorbell, long and insistent, as if to lure me out.

I rarely went to the door and never opened it, I was afraid. But sometimes my curiosity would get the better of me and I would tiptoe to the door and peek through the keyhole.

That was my cunning. If you look through the peephole, the person standing behind the door will immediately see that someone is at home because of the play of light and shadow, and will not leave until the door is not opened. It is much safer to watch from below.

One day there was a knock at our door. I put down my book and crept quietly to my observation post. I looked through the keyhole and almost screamed with horror.

There was someone's eye staring at me!

I knew there was an invisible man who hunted in the city. He would ring the doorbell, and when it was opened, he would grab his prey and strangle it. So did the Queen of Spades, the Red Hand, and the Black Hand. And then there was the Cat's Eye. The trick was that the Cat's Eye could slip through a keyhole if it wasn't sealed with paper and scare the hell out of you.

Of course, I thought it had come for me!

But I was lucky. The thing is that in our house lived a legless neighbor, Uncle Volodya. He was drunk when he fell under a train, and since then he has been moving around on a cart with small wheels. He pushed himself off the ground with a wooden handle that he held in his only surviving hand.

Uncle Volodya was a friend of my father's and often visited us at home.

It was his watchful eye at the level of the keyhole that I mistook for a cat's.

Eye of the Dragon

The dark hallway in our apartment frightened me so much that I was afraid to even go to the kitchen for tea.

I would sit in my room hungry or, when I finally gathered my courage, run to the kitchen without turning around.

After drinking tea, a new problem arose - the toilet. It was easier for me to pee on a newspaper like a dog than to go to the toilet, because the dragon lived there.

Do you wonder where it came from?

My father was a smoker, and every time he went on vacation, he would stock up on "Belomor". He would buy fifty packs and stack them in a suitcase like in an American movie. Only there, the suitcases were filled to the brim with dollars, and my father filled them with his favorite brand of cigarettes.

Dad smoked a lot, and always in the toilet - his "private office," as he called it.

A winter Saturday evening. Inky twilight creeps in through the windows, but Dad doesn't turn on the toilet light. He sits thoughtfully on the toilet bowl, blowing rings of tobacco smoke from his mouth.

The door to the "office" is wide open. Blue clouds slowly fill the hallway.

- How many times do I have to tell you to close that door? - Mom yells from the kitchen. - You've smoked all over the house!

Dad grumbles unhappily, but closes the door. But not for long - until the next smoke break, which starts in five minutes.

Because of my father's addiction to smoking, I never noticed the smell of tobacco as a child. It seemed as natural to me as the air. It was "Daddy's" smell. If there was a cigarette trail behind someone, or if the entrance was smoky, it seemed to me that my father was somewhere nearby.

In the evenings, when he was in his "office," rustling a crumpled cardboard box and shaking a box of matches, I would sneak into the hallway and stay by the door.

Here, in front of my eyes, magic always happened.

A red light flashed brightly in the darkness. It was alive, glowing in the depths of the cave, like a dragon's eye - peering out, scanning me. Then it would rise sharply, quickly slicing the air diagonally, and begin to spin wildly, drawing intricate geometric shapes - zigzags, figure eights, circles. After that, the flames would scatter into a myriad of tiny stars, then regain their shape and twist into a fiery spiral.

At some point, the image of a fairy tale dragon appeared before my eyes.

The dragon was dancing, wriggling its whole body, falling gracefully on its front legs, doing somersaults, waving its scaly tail, sending sparks flying in a whirlwind.

The dance was mesmerizing and put me in a hypnotic state. It never occurred to me that behind the fire-breathing dragon whose dance I was absorbed in was my father. That it was his hand with a cigarette drawing hieroglyphics in the darkness.

That's why I feared the dragon's cave of fire when my father was away.

Who wanders there at night?

But the greatest horror of my childhood lurked under my parents' bed. There lived a creature that would crawl out from under it at night, giggling and tapping its paws gently on the floorboards.

Sometimes my sister and I would sleep on that bed, and sometimes at night I would have a vision problem - I could see things that other eyes could not.

The mattress would suddenly become transparent, like glass, and the creature hiding under the bed would be visible. It had a human body and a lynx face - furry, with gray tasseled ears, like the cat in the Mary Poppins movie - the one in the red jacket singing "You're Perfect" in the window.

It also looked like the soft teddy bear I'd gotten for my birthday. It too had a fluffy head and a fully human body dressed in a colorful jumpsuit. Or maybe the creature under the bed just always took the form of my toy.

I was afraid that one day the "lynx" would attack me, for example by grabbing my leg.

So in the morning I would jump to the floor, trying to land as far away from the bed as possible, and without looking back I would run to the bathroom to wash my face.

I would do the same before going to bed, jumping onto the bed in one giant leap.

During the day, the "lynx man" disappeared. At least I didn't hear him make any noise.

One night, when I was brave enough, I looked under the bed and was horrified. There were someone's angry green eyes.

We didn't have pets in those days. The cat Anfisa, which belonged to my great-grandmother, disappeared immediately after the death of her beloved mistress, and the dogs, which my father tried to get twice, did not take root in the house. One was hit by a car, the other choked on a chicken bone.

My mother came running from the next room because of my screams. I told her about the eyes, but she didn't believe me. She touched my forehead and put a thermometer under my arm, wondering if I was sick.

My forehead was cool, my temperature was normal - 36 and 6.

- Don't make things up, go to bed! - Mom said sternly and went out, closing the door behind her.

Soon dad came into the room, turned on the TV and started watching hockey.

I fell asleep to the clink of skates, the clatter of sticks, and the roar of the crowd.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

...I woke up to someone pulling on my arm.

There was a narrow gap between the wall and the bed that a child's hand could barely fit through. That's where I was being pulled.

"Dad must be joking," I thought in my sleep.

But as soon as I realized it wasn't my dad, I clung to the pillow and started screaming.

My arm was pinched and slowly twisted. It felt like it was being ripped off. I jerked violently, broke free, and rolled to the floor.

The face of a lynx flashed in front of me. It was grinning. Furry paws reached out from the darkness and grabbed me by the shoulders, almost dragging me under the bed.

Luckily, Daddy was able to grab my legs and pull me back up.

Actually, he couldn't see what was going on in there, and he didn't want to save me.

Dad was angry that I was interrupting his game with my "silly antics".

The lynx hissed and disappeared into the darkness.

I was afraid it would come back for me, but the monster never returned.

The Hobgoblin

I was afraid to stay at home alone in our apartment.

In Tagil, at Grandma Dusya's, I was not afraid of anything, although my cousins did not want to spend the night at Grandma's under any pretext, they said that she had a hobgoblin.

By the way, he was a hooligan.

It was said that once he lifted the bed on which Uncle Grisha slept off the floor. Another time he lay down on my grandmother's side and almost hugged her. What an impertinent fellow!

One night I was sleeping alone in my grandmother's apartment. I was half asleep when I heard the door to my room open and someone small, like a cat, came in with a springy, soft gait. He jumped on the desk and began to rustle papers.

Well, I thought, the damn cat is tearing up my notebooks (Grandma and Grandpa used to feed a stray cat, and sometimes it stayed with us until morning).

I wanted to get up and kick the bandit out, but suddenly I felt uncomfortable.

I lay there with my eyes closed, afraid to move. What if it wasn't a cat?

What if the cousins were right and there really was a hobgoblin living in the house?

At that moment, the creature on the table became alarmed, jumped to the floor, and headed straight for me. I was so frightened that all I could do was fall asleep. I'd done it before - forced myself to fall asleep by willpower.

Under normal circumstances my method never worked, but when I panicked (and it happened to me a few times) I was like a worm in a split second, screwed into an imaginary black pipe. As I wound up, I kept saying to myself: I don't want to see or hear anything, I'm going to sleep, sleep, sleep. And I really did fell asleep immediately.

The next morning, I wouldn't have remembered the events of the night had it not been for the mess on the table, where everything was upside down. Crumpled, tattered notebooks were everywhere - on the chair, on the floor. So I wasn't dreaming.

I called for the cat, searched the whole house, but he was nowhere to be found. The windows, the doors, everything was closed. No one had gone in or out of the house. Where could he have gone? I never found him.

An Inner Voice

Another incredible story happened to me at Grandma Dusya's house.

My grandmother loved to pick mushrooms. She would come back from the woods with sacks full of mushrooms to be cooked, fried, steamed, dried and preserved for the winter.

Once she fried a whole pan of mushrooms, and after lunch she and my grandfather went to the dacha.

I didn't have any appetite. After picking at my plate with a fork, for some reason I thought: I'll be lucky if these mushrooms don't poison me.

Then I read a book, watched TV, and a few hours later I suddenly felt sick.

I had all the symptoms of poisoning-high fever, weakness, nausea, ice-cold sweat. I was so nauseous that I could not stand on my feet, so I crawled on all fours from the bathtub to the toilet. My heart was racing and I could barely feel my pulse on my wrist. I felt like I was going to lose consciousness.

I used to get food poisoning as a kid, but this was the first time it was this bad.

Was there a poisonous mushroom in the mix?

Should I call an ambulance? But Grandma doesn't have a phone, and the neighbors aren't home, they're at the dacha too - it's the weekend.

Should I crawl to the window and call for help? It was embarrassing for me. And to be honest, I don't have the strength anymore. I've lost my consciousness.

I came to from the cold on the floor of the hallway and thought, "This is where they will find me".

I didn't want to die. I didn't care so much about dying as I did about how and where my relatives would bury me. I had no doubt: they wouldn't bother to take the body to Glazov, they'd just bury me in the Tagil cemetery, that's all.

I was there once, and the cemetery made a heavy impression on me - swampy forest, a jumble of graves, rusty coils of barbed wire fencing off squatter plots so that no strangers would bury their own on this land.

And most of all, the unbearable stench from the sewage treatment plant next to the cemetery.

No way! I want them to take me back home. Maybe I should leave a note to Grandma Dusya?

And this is where I started to hear voices in my head. Actually, there was only one voice, my own, but since I was talking to myself, it sounded like two people arguing. The first said, "Forget the note, maybe they'll guess your dying wish somehow. The other grumbled: "I bet they won't guess! They'll throw you in the swamp, and you'll rot in eternal dampness." "So be it," replied the first, indifferently. "What a fool! - replied the second angrily. - I'm not going to die here!"

I began to pray desperately. I asked God to let me live because I was only fifteen and had not accomplished anything. I asked for mercy for my parents. What would happen to them? They wouldn't accept my death. I have no doubt that my death was near. Sometimes I looked at myself as if from the outside. My life was slowly fading away, my thoughts were confused, everything was so distant, unnecessary, fleeting.

Anyway, I forced myself to crawl to bed. I slipped under the covers and closed my eyes. When I opened them, it was dusk outside the window.

Usually after food poisoning my body would feel weak and dizzy for a long time, but now there was no such thing. I didn't feel nauseous, weak, or have a stomach ache. I felt alert and rested. And only the thought of mushrooms made me feel disgusted, a sure sign that they were the cause of my poisoning.

But my grandparents also ate mushrooms and nothing happened to them. What was wrong with me?

A Half-Breed

Many years later, I think I found the answer to the question that had been bothering me.

I met a woman who was an ethnographer.

Albina was Udmurt by nationality, but she looked like a typical Indian, a kind of squaw - tall, statuesque, with broad cheekbones and a black braid as thick as an arm.

She gave lectures on ethnography to students at the Pedagogical Institute, telling them how she could easily find out which genes predominated in a person with the help of an interesting test.

This test is very simple: Imagine you are in an open field and a pack of wolves is attacking you - what will you do? The second situation: wolves catch up with you in the forest. What would you do?

When I tried to imagine myself in a field surrounded by a pack of wolves, my first impulse was to lie down on the ground and surrender to the predators. But my inner voice said, "No way! Surrender without a fight? Hell, no!

If you are going down, go down in a blaze of glory. So grab a stick, a stone, anything on the ground and smash the gray robbers in the face.

In the forest, I would climb a tree without a second thought. I can't be afraid of wolves there.

"You are a half-breed," Albina pronounced her verdict. - You have Udmurt and Tatar blood in your veins. And she explained: Udmurts, whose ancestors lived in the forests, feel unsafe in the open. In the bare steppe, they would rather surrender to the mercy of the enemy than fight him. But the forest is their home, they feel like fish in water, and they can hide there so that no hunting dog can find them.

Nomads are another matter. They'll fight anyone, anytime, anywhere. Even in the forest, where they can hide and wait out the storm. It's not in their nature to hide from danger.

I think it's good to be a half-blood, you can try to find a way out of any situation.

In the case of the mushroom poisoning, my blood voice probably played a big role - it didn't let me lose heart, forced me to fight to the end and win.

In a wasteland

The ability to protect myself has come in handy many times in my life.

One night I was walking home through a dark wasteland when I heard hurried footsteps behind me. The footsteps came closer. Before I knew it, someone was standing behind me with his arms around my neck.

It was pure coincidence that saved me, for some reason I thought it was a joke from one of my friends and I started laughing, gently pulling myself out of his arms and saying, "Come on, let me go".

This behavior of mine confused the attacker a bit. He loosened his grip, then withdrew his hands. I turned around. A guy I didn't know was standing in front of me. He scared the hell out of me.

When the stranger saw the fear in my eyes, he grabbed me again, but I yelled at him: "Go away!" He replied something insolent, but I shouted again: "Shut up!" The guy became silent. But he was still following me, trying to save face, begging: "Why are you like this, don't go away, wait". But I kept walking, and when I could see the streetlights in the distance, he finally fell behind me. To say that I trembled with fear is to say nothing.

Red-haired villain

In the spring of 1996, I was doing an industrial training internship at a food processing plant.

I had just turned eighteen when rumors spread through town that a maniac was in Glazov, stalking and raping women.

He attacked suddenly, under the cover of night - in doorways, in alleys, in wastlands. He was determined and ruthless. And although he did not kill his victims, the police were unable to catch him for a long time. For some reason, none of the women could remember his face. All they knew about the criminal was that he was a redhead.

The fact that the rapist was still at large terrified the entire female half of the city. Every night after our shifts, we were taken home in a service bus. The driver waited until each woman was in the doorway before he drove off.

My father always waited for me at the front door when I came home from work.

Before I got on the bus, I would call home and my father would come out to meet me.

The pastry chefs at the food processing plant were jealous of me, teasing me and calling me "Daddy's daughter. They probably wanted someone to meet them too, but since most of them were unmarried and divorced, there was no one to wait for them at home except children and cats.

I even refused to take the bus home and started walking alone. I felt like the heroine of a thriller - deserted streets at night, no cars, no people...

One day I reached Karl Marx Boulevard, just a short walk from our house, and suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the figure of a man in the distance.

The man was crossing the boulevard, but when he saw me, he turned and walked quickly in my direction. As he approached the lamppost, I could see his face. The usual face of a young, pimply man. Except for one "but"... He had red hair!

And if up to that moment I had been slow, as if waiting for something - maybe I thought it was someone I knew, or a passerby who needed to know what time it was - here it was as if someone pushed me from behind: run!

And I ran towards the house. The stranger ran after me.

I was running at full speed, there's a reason I ran track as a kid.

As I ran, I had only one thought in my head: if only the elevator was downstairs, if only I was lucky.

And the chase is getting closer. I hear heavy breathing behind me. "You won't get away!" he shouts at me. Mommy, how scary! Was I really going to get caught?

I hurried to the lobby. The elevator was downstairs. I jump in and push the button for the ninth floor.

The door slams, followed by a boom-boom - shoes clattering on the stairs.

Now, elevator, hurry, close your doors, please... Come on! Oh, thank God, I did it!

As I took the elevator to safety, I heard my pursuer slam his fist against the elevator doors and growl like a predator who had lost his prey.

A few months later, the police caught the redheaded maniac.

The bad guy was on local TV. He was really the one who chased me that night.

To be continued