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“You don’t think I’m me, do you?” Athenais guessed his fears.
“Answer the video call, and I won’t doubt you.”
“It will be tomorrow.”
“Why it will be not tonight?”
“I’m in too dark a place today.”
“What’s going to change tomorrow?”
“There’s going to be a reshuffle. There will be a feast.”
“You mean a feast?”
“It is a sort of.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Have you ever attended a feast without a table? It is in the manner of eastern traditions or ancient Roman ones?”
The Romans ate on their beds, but in the East it was customary to sit on the floor among the cushions, but there had to be a table. Nikita could not understand his companion’s games.
“Are you talking about some scenery for a movie about the Ancient East, or about Ancient Rome, or even about the Stone Age?”
There was a pause.
“What is your profession?” Nikita said. “Are you an actress?”
“I am a former movie star.”
“What do you mean?” Nikita even got scared. Ambitious movie stars never call themselves exes, and she so easily admits that her career is behind her. She was probably badly injured on the set. If she was crippled or burned, that would explain why she won’t go on video chat.
The pretty picture remains, but the pretty face is gone. He is communicating with an illusion.
“Ex means dead,” Athenais dumbfounded him with the answer.
“What do you mean, dead?” She couldn’t be talking to him as a ghost, could she?
“Everyone thinks I’m dead,” Athenais confirmed. “You can read about it in the press.”
Nikita was stunned. This has got to be a practical joke! She’s either trying to scare him to death or she’s deliberately playing him for a fool.
“Are you dead?” He dared to ask her directly.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I’m talking to the computer, not you. Let’s meet and I’ll decide.”
“Dating is risky.”
“Why is it risky?”
Nikita had to take his mind off the conversation for a moment. Ex-girlfriends were calling him through a dating site. He had to reject several video calls. Only then did he manage to get back to chatting with Athenais.
“They say movie stars aren’t as beautiful in person as they are in pictures,” Nikita quipped. This is a proven way to get a girl on a date. She has to show up in person and prove that she’s as beautiful as in the picture.
“Well, I’m not in life now, I’m in the realm of death,” Athenais instantly retorted. “Beauty is frozen here, like in the pyramids of the pharaohs.”
“Is there a working computer in the realm of death?” Highly doubtful!
Athenais didn’t answer for a long time. Either she was communicating with other site users, or the insolent question offended her.
“I’m a dead movie star,” she typed again. Perhaps the answer had a metaphorical meaning: ex means dead. Not literally dead! Dead people don’t sit in chat rooms.
After that, she passed out. It was already four in the morning. Nikita had sat with her in the chat room for too long. Now he would sleep through class again. How was it that Athenais was taking up more of his time than even computer games? Talking to her was addictive.
Messages from Lada, Dasha, Dusya, Valya, and Mania went ignored. Nikita also received dozens of messages at once from the “red hood,” as he had already called the scary stranger to himself. His name was Aneh. That, at any rate, was how the nickname was printed. Naturally, the name might have been made up.
Aneh was creepy-looking, and he didn’t want to talk to him at all. He was probably one of Athenais’ acquaintances. Why else would he suddenly be interested in Nikita? His last message confirmed that:
“How do you like communicating with a dead star?”
Nikita ignored Aneh’s questions and deleted all correspondence with him. However, it resurfaced again. A few more attempts to delete it did nothing either. Okay, let it stay, Nikita gave up after the tenth attempt. The main thing is not to start multiplying, like a Trojan virus.
Apparently, he accidentally clicked again and answered the video-call, because on the screen again flashed a video with a black man in a red hood. On closer inspection, though, Aneh is not a Negro. It was like he was all burned up. Gold earring rings were threaded through his large nostrils. From the earrings stretched chains. For some reason they resembled fetters.
Did Aneh want to communicate or scare the hell out of Nikita?
“Sorry, but I prefer to communicate with girls,” Nikita waved him off and left the site.
The computer screen began to crack, as if someone had punched it from the inside. Something burst from behind Nikita. Splinters flew off. The plafond of a lamp shattered. The room went dark. And something rustled in the corners, like rats crawling around.
Press clippings
All night long someone’s claws had been scraping against the couch. Nikita was used to hearing his neighbors arguing through the ceiling at night, but he was not accustomed to animal wrangling. He even checked a couple of times to see if there were any mice in the apartment. Nothing seemed to be chewed off, so it was too early to put mousetraps in.
The lamp shade did break during the night. The shards of the lamp were lying all over the room. It took a lot of effort to collect them. Now he would have to wear slippers to prevent any small splinter from sticking in his foot. Nikita was used to walking barefoot at home. Finding homemade slippers turned out to be an impossible task. His mother told him to vacuum the carpets once a week, but the vacuum cleaner was broken. One week alone has passed. At the end of the month his mother would come back and probably make a big fuss. The house had not been cleaned, everything was dusty, the walls were scratched, the new wallpaper was irreparably ruined, and the lamp plafond was broken as well. What on earth was her son doing?
Answer his mother honestly, and she would raise her son with laughter. He sat in a chat room and made contact with a dead movie star. He could be called a modern day medium. He knows how to summon the souls of dead celebrities over the Internet. Or is the pretty girl just messing with him? Let’s say she really is a celebrity who decided to trick ordinary guys. Why does a monster in red appear in a chat room at the same time as her?
There was no way to call Aneh anything other than a monster. After a short video of him, there should have been cracks on the computer screen, but there weren’t any. They couldn’t have disappeared overnight, could they? A computer isn’t a living thing; injuries don’t heal on it like they do on human skin.
Nikita ran his fingers over the smooth screen. At night he dreamed that the cracks on the computer were bleeding.
He must have thought the computer had crashed yesterday. Good thing it was working properly. The power supply and monitor came on quickly. There were no alarm warnings from the system or demands to reboot.
Nikita got on the Internet urgently. He was interested in the press. The sites of Metro, Vechernaya Moskva, and Zvezdny Boulevard flashed before his eyes. There was only yesterday’s and today’s news. Not a word about Athenais. Probably have to look at last year’s articles.
It’s a good thing he thought of it. Yes, indeed, there was such a star. He read excerpts about her in last year’s press. She had once outshone all the stars. In addition to the glamour publications, serious magazines had written about her. A year ago the star was killed in a terrorist attack. The attack took place at the Blue Lotus Cinema, where the night premiere with Athenais film was taking place. No details of the terrorist attack were available.
Nikita leafed through the Internet versions of newspapers and magazines, copying the articles he was looking for. Dozens of copied pages had accumulated in a separate folder on his computer. Nikita clicked the mouse and typed the name of the folder “Press clippings. Now he had a memo about the movie star and her demise. Athenais was not a dream or a myth. She lived. She was in the movies. She died. It’s all registered in the press. The movie star existed in reality, but now she’s dead.
So who’s chatting with him on her behalf?
Nikita should have chickened out and disconnected from chatting with a con artist or a ghost. However, he was not the cowardly type.
As soon as night fell, he logged onto the dating site and waited. Athenais was gone for a long time. From nothing to do, Nikita exchanged a few minor phrases with Dusya and Valya. He was no longer attracted to mere girls. The beautiful ghost turned out to be more attractive.
Nikita glanced from time to time at the winged photo of Athenais. She didn’t show up online until after one o’clock in the morning, and she didn’t even dignify him with a greeting. He worked up the courage and addressed her first:
“Good afternoon, are you in the middle of the night?”
The keys slid under his fingers and his fingertips were sweaty. Nikita was nervous. The beautiful photo came to life for a moment, as if it had flapped its wing.
“How are you?” Athenais asked.
Did she wonder if she was wondering how he was doing? Nikita answered sarcastically.
“I am still alive.”
“Everyone is temporarily alive.”
Is that a threat? He doesn’t think so, because she’s not exaggerating. All people are born just to live life and die. It’s a philosophy. Many people like to think that somewhere ahead there is death. Nikita had seen a picture somewhere in which death with a scythe was already standing over a baby’s grave. He couldn’t even remember which museum it was in. He’d rather talk about what’s important.
“So, are you really a movie star?”
Silence in response.
She’s dead and alive at the same time. This isn’t a prank.
“Did you somehow survive that terrorist attack?”
“It wasn’t a terrorist attack.”
“Then what was?”
There’s a long silence. He thought the text wouldn’t come through.
“It was a duel.”
“Was it a duel?”
“It was a duel with a man who was in love with a demon.”
It sounds like nonsense.
That’s how people get sucked into the whirlpool of vicious habits. He wished he could tear himself away, but he couldn’t. Athenais, or whoever was on the other side of the chat room, had completely mesmerized him. Whoever was writing on her behalf did so skillfully, as if setting a net on a simpleton. Nikita was caught in that net, and Athenais’ photo completed the job. It was so beautiful that you couldn’t take your eyes off of it. Even communicating with her photo was a pleasure. What would have happened to him if she’d been there?
“I am,” the phrase came out suddenly, like an answer to his thoughts.
“Where are you? Are you in an abandoned movie theater at the end of the world?”
“I am in your room.”
The lights suddenly went out. The computer continued to run on an uninterrupted power supply that would last for fifteen minutes, no more. Time to end the dialogue, but there was something in the room. Something hissed and crawled toward the desk. Someone’s claws scratched at his leg.
The pain was sharp, like a cut with a razor blade. In the darkness he couldn’t even see who had attacked him. Good thing the smartphone was handy. Nikita hurriedly switched on the smartphone’s flashlight. The thing crawled away with a squeal and hid behind the couch. It didn’t look like a cat or a dog, but its claws were the size of razor blades.
Nikita put his fingers to his aching foot. Immediately his fingers bled.
“What the hell!” The boy said.
Who could ever get into a locked apartment? If the balcony hadn’t been glazed, he might have thought some nimble black monkey had got in through it. But are there such things as clawed monkeys?
From the computer screen a buzzer buzzed. Could it be a video chat? Athenais was calling him? She herself! Nikita, without thinking, answered. Now she could see him and he could see her. A winged girl flashed through the unfolding window. Just like in the picture! Just like in the movie!
And what if this is a frame from the movie?
No, it wasn’t. Athenais stared at him point-blank. Behind her, he could see the wall, littered with hieroglyphics. Maybe it was some kind of fancy wallpaper, obviously custom-made.
Nikita shuddered when he noticed the razor blade in Athenais’ hand, dipped in blood. She held it close to the screen and smiled for some reason.
And then the continuous power source hummed nervously. The power supply was running low and the computer went down.
Angel in the chat room
One razor did disappear from the bathroom cabinet. It was the sharpest. It wasn’t found on the floor. But there were deep scratches on the tiles, like some kind of animal had been in here. This animal was definitely not hiding in the apartment. Nikita searched the place. There were scratches everywhere, but no animals.
But the atmosphere in the apartment became ominous, as if a horror movie was about to start on the screen of a long-broken TV set in the living room.
For the first time in his life, Nikita felt as if he were living not in an apartment, but in a funeral home. Loneliness probably had a bad effect on him. He needed to go to class regularly, not just sit inside the four walls. The emptiness of home was beginning to frighten him. Clawed monsters seemed to lurk even on the coat racks in the hallway.
Before, when his parents came home from work in the evenings, he didn’t feel isolated. Plates clattered in the kitchen, his mother’s phone was ringing off the hook. Chatting with girlfriends and going to the theater were her favorite pastimes. Then my parents divorced. My father left me for a younger woman, and my mother became nervous and hysterical, but she remained an incorrigible theatergoer. While she was at home, the phone was bursting with calls from her girlfriends, with whom she discussed dress rehearsals and rehearsals before the premieres. No one was calling now. Everyone knew his mother was on a business trip. The phone bill for the month could be considered paid for nothing. Probably his mother forgot to pay it. Nikita himself never used the old-fashioned phone in his mother’s room. A cell phone was enough for him, but a vintage phone with a roll of numbers instead of buttons was worthy of a museum display case. A stray thought flashed through his mind that Athenaïs would have liked it. It wasn’t hard to imagine her putting the old-fashioned curved handset to her ear, pulling the golden curl away from her lobe to hear better.
As the monster’s black claws stretched from the telephone receiver, caressing her ear…
Stop! That’s not his thought anymore! This is a frame from some horror movie. Nikita suddenly regretted his childhood fascination with horror movies. Athenais was provoking him to return to his former fascination with horror.
He was looking to meet a nice girl, and he found a sinister hobby. Now you can chat about horror for a long time. He really wanted to meet her. What a miracle it would be if she were there, if he could touch her, give her signs of attention, invite her to tea. In the modest surroundings of the city apartment, the beautiful Athenais would have looked like a fairy from a fairy tale.
It was chilly outside now. It was already cold in Moscow in the fall. You couldn’t go outside without a warm jacket. Nikita tried to imagine what Athenais would look like in a half-coat or quilted jacket. For some reason Athenais’ image did not fit with his thoughts of casual clothing. It was hard to imagine her without wings, a top that exposed her shoulders, and massive Egyptian jewelry.
Athenais had the role of an angel. There was nothing to be done about it. Nikita spent a long time surfing the Internet looking for pictures of Athenais in plain clothes. Everywhere there were only pictures of her in the role of an angel. Most likely, they were not even pictures, but pictures from the movie.
Athenais only played angels and only the fallen. It wasn’t hard to click the link again and review the movie with her in it. Nikita acted like an investigator – adding up the details of the mosaic. That’s how his life became a detective. If you watch the movie several times, you start to understand more of the meaning behind it.
Athenais played the most beautiful angel in heaven, who once, at the dawn of time, rebelled against God. The angel’s name was Dennitsa, which meant dawn.
