Chapter 2
A Spirit Pygmy

Eugeny Moshkin, Petruchio Chimodanov, and Nata Vikhrova were sitting in the fireplace hall in 13 Bolshaya Dmitrovka and waiting for the return of Daphne and Methodius, who had gone to the taxidermist for fresh skins for business correspondence. They were bored, and for something to do, Nata began to ask Moshkin and Chimodanov whether they had ever fallen in love.

“Love? For me it’s irrelevant! I haven’t yet achieved anything real. I emphasize! I simply have no time for it,” Petruchio snorted.

“Now you underscore it!” Nata chuckled and raised an eyebrow threateningly.

“BUT! I’m also not very afraid… If your magic works on me, then not for long!” Chimodanov stated.

“Why’s that?”

“I was born on the same day as you. I have primordial immunity to your magic. Julitta told me this… Sooner or later I’ll recover and take vengeance. I’ll send a whole bunch of plasticine killers to you! Thousands of them! They’ll climb out of all crevices and sewers, and each will have a poisoned pin in its hand!”

Nata shivered. “I have had enough of your Zuduka! It always hides in some corner and makes mischief! It recently filled my whole pocket with toothpaste!” she muttered conciliatorily.

Realizing that he had won this round and Nata’s magic would not threaten him, Chimodanov grinned contentedly. “Here’s what I think. The smarter and more complex the creature, the more time passes from the moment of birth to the moment it falls in love. Well, for example, the hamster. It’s all of three months old and it’s already a father. In six months, a grand-dad… But an elephant will have a family only after fifty years.”

“What are you, an elephant? Thanks for admitting it,” Nata remarked mercifully.

“It’s also the same with people,” Petruchio continued, not listening to her. “Some, well, like you, Vikhrova, have already stopped developing at thirteen. And what’s there for them to do next? Unwilling to learn. Too early to lie in a coffin. Still have time to work. The only thing remaining is to fall in love. Those who are smarter, first learn, get settled in life, and then fall in love at around thirty or thirty five. I don’t know why, but it’s always this way.”

Nata looked at Chimodanov through a hole in her fist. “Here’s what I suggest to you,” she purred maliciously. “When would you intend on falling in love? At thirty-five? Why so early? What if you don’t manage? Fall in love at seventy! In the meantime, take mama by the arm and install traffic lights with her.”

Chimodanov could not find an answer, and Nata had already turned to Moshkin, “And you, Gene? Were you ever in love?”

Eugeny moved his lips and glanced hesitantly at her. His answer sounded strange. “Do dreams count?” he asked.

Nata’s jaw dropped like the rating of a politician who accidentally ate a live kitten in front of the camera. “How’s that? You dreamt of someone? Or you were in love in a dream?”

“Why was? I still am,” Moshkin replied seriously and did not answer any more questions, despite all of Nata’s persuasion.

Vikhrova’s curiosity was never satisfied. She had no choice but to stroll around the hall, examining and twirling the occasional knickknacks and black magic protective talismans in her hands.

The hall, recently arranged from nothing in the literal sense by the efforts of Ares with Julitta helping him, was located on the second floor exactly between the student rooms. Four doors faced each other in pairs.

“It’ll be quite good for you here, my chicks! All kinds of trash eternally crowd in reception below. Not a single succubus will poke in here, and I don’t even talk about agents!” Julitta said.

“Shielding runes?” Moshkin asked, having had time to pick up superficial knowledge.

“Nope. Ask her over there!” Julitta said and somehow incomprehensibly looked at Daphne, either approvingly or, on the contrary, defiantly.

Daph smiled modestly. “Just a twig of an Eden beech… I accidentally had it in my backpack and I slipped it under the threshold. Spirits of Gloom can’t stand our plants.”

“And Ares? He allowed it?” Nata asked incredulously.

“Not enough power in a small branch to bother him particularly.”

“So, does he know or not?”

“Not that he knows, and at the same time not that he doesn’t know… Let’s say this: he closes his eyes to small things, because his office is downstairs, and Tukhlomon annoyed him badly…” Julitta announced with a smile.

The aforementioned conversation took place the previous night, and in the morning, Ares and Julitta took off in haste to Tartarus for some celebration connected with the hunchback Ligul. Methodius did not particularly get to the heart of it. Ares said that he would explain everything later. Soon, Methodius and Daph also left. As already said, to the taxidermist.

* * *

“I didn’t really have one sneaker, no? Well, this morning?” Moshkin suddenly asked. He had already sat for about three minutes with an unhappy face, gathering courage for this simple question.

“Not one,” Nata assured him.

“You’re sure? Hundred percent?”

“Over two hundred.”

“Then I’ve lost the second one! Did anyone see it anywhere?” Moshkin complained.

“Watch over your goulashes yourself, dearie! I’m not the sultan’s eighteenth wife to you, in charge of shoes,” Nata remarked.

“I did… Took them off for all of a minute, and then…” Eugeny, smiling guiltily and amiably, showed off a foot in a white sock.

“I love looking at other people’s socks! And if I throw up?” Nata asked.

Chimodanov chuckled. As recently as the morning before yesterday he had the opportunity to observe how Nata learned to read a rat’s innards. However, the divination did not go right from the very beginning, according to Julitta’s assertion, because Nata was chewing gum while gutting the dead rat.

“It’s disrespectful. Magic doesn’t like that,” Julitta remarked.

“You think… I don’t care…” Nata said.

Now she was sitting at the table, on which Marie de’ Medici^[2] once kept the severed head of her favourite, and drinking tea, stirring the sugar in the cup with a silver spoon. This was the spoon of the famous pharmacist-poisoner, who lived in town N. of the Tula province in the middle of the XIX century. Next to it was a small sausage knife, with which Yashka the convict ambushed two merchants in the inn’s courtyard.

Yes, all the objects in the fireplace hall had just such gloomy history. Thus, taking from the table a random pencil stub, it was possible to assume with confidence that either it had been shoved into someone’s eye, or Lavrentii Beria,^[3] sitting at home on a settee under a fig tree, had made notes with it on official papers.

At first, it was not too pleasant for Methodius and the rest to be among such objects; however, they soon got accustomed to it. Well, a chair is a chair, a table, a table, and a knife, a knife. Man was created such that nothing terrifies him infinitely. What is the difference who, when, and whom, if the firewood in the fireplace, which once warmed the great inquisitor, crackles so comfortably at home? Possibly, this was Gloom’s plan – to gradually, step by step, concession after concession, to erode the ability to wonder and be horrified and to push back the boundary of tolerance, until finally, permissiveness becomes all-encompassing.

Zuduka, the only one of Chimodanov’s artificial monsters he brought with him, jumped out from under the table. Hobbling, Zuduka made its way to Moshkin, dragging a sneaker by the lace.

“You found it! Smart boy! Good boy!” Eugeny was moved.

Zuduka hurriedly hobbled to him, for some reason continually looking back.

“Don’t! I don’t advise it!” Chimodanov said lazily, cutting a wafer cake with Yashka the convict’s knife.

“Why? It’s mine!” Eugeny was surprised. The sneaker was already in his hand.

Zuduka, which he was about to thank, fled with all possible haste, not waiting for a reward.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with your sneaker, but if I were you, I wouldn’t put it on…” Petruchio continued thoughtfully.

“Yes, but…”

“You don’t notice anything suspicious? That’s right! A smoldering fuse! Throw it, idiot!”

Moshkin obediently threw it. A white flash tossed the sneaker up and tore it to shreds. Tongues of flame danced on the curtains. Eugeny put them out with water left in the carafe the minute he glanced at it.

“Zudu-u-uka!” Chimodanov screamed, shaking his fist. “Zudu-u-ka! I’m going to kill you!”

The bald monster, giggling, hid under the sofa, on which the actor playing Othello, overdoing it, once strangled the actress playing Desdemona.^[4] There was no possibility whatsoever to pull Zuduka out from there. After kicking the sofa several times for order, Chimodanov squatted down and picked an empty small box off the floor. Then another, and another…

“Everything’s clear. It stuffed the whole sneaker with match heads! It must have been planning a big bang!” he informed them.

“Why?” Moshkin asked.

“Just because. It’s a genius of malicious thoughts. You didn’t offend it?” Chimodanov asked.

“No. I didn’t even look at it!” Moshkin said, losing confidence with each following word.

Petruchio nodded. “Clear,” he said.

“What’s clear?”

“It’s angry that you didn’t pay it any attention. Zuduka is terribly self-centred.”

“And who would?” Nata chuckled. “His owner is solid ‘b-but!’ with double underscores.”

Nata got up and, having approached the mirror, began to examine herself attentively. She did not do this like teenage boys and their fathers, i.e. statically, without changing anything in himself and only visually evaluating the width of the shoulders and how the suit fits, but very actively, in a feminine way. Her hands flittered, now fixing her hair, now anxiously touching different parts of her skin, which must have seemed problematic to her.

“How do you like it here? This house in the centre and the other absurdities?” she asked languidly.

“It’s quite something… If we forget that we were recently nearly finished off,” said Chimodanov. “Besides, there’s no need to hide monsters from anyone! Even if Zuduka smashes all the walls here, Ares only grunts. At home, if you accidentally break the TV, you’ll be nagged to death… ‘Think about your behaviour! Do you need to put road signs in the hallway?’ And all that… What, is it my fault that Zuduka found a chainsaw? Huh?! Why did you saw the legs off the nightstand, scamp?” Petruchio kicked the sofa again. Something moved under the sofa.

“Do you miss your mother?” Moshkin asked.

Chimodanov shrugged his shoulders uncertainly. “I see her a couple of times a week. That’s enough for me. I didn’t think she would give in to me studying in some boarding school, but Glumovich charmed her terribly! He joined her in the civil commission! Counts traffic lights on Tverskaya Street, translates letters into English, and recently unscrewed a No Entry sign somewhere and presented it to her together with a bouquet,” he yawned.

“And if your mama has a fancy to appear unexpectedly at the school to visit you there?”

“Don’t think so. Ares swore that she wouldn’t even have such thoughts,” Petruchio said confidently.

“And you, Moshkin, how do you like it here?” Nata asked.

Eugeny honestly thought about it. “I don’t know. Still not used to it. Although Ares said that, in addition to water, I’ll possibly be able to control fire in a couple of years. It seems, I only need to grasp the essence… The main thing is primary magic and the gift of a guard. The rest is here!” he touched his forehead with a finger.

“And how do you like it here?” Chimodanov asked.

“It’s cool here,” Nata said. “Better than home. A massive room with an oak bolt. No one can poke his nose in.”

“Don’t you miss home?”

“Are you kidding? I don’t want to be home! I essentially didn’t have a home,” Nata stated.

“How’s that?”

“It’s like this. Mama has a new husband. All the time this ‘attention!’ Butts in telling me how to dress. ‘This is indecent! You’re running around with such hair?’ And all that. And then my older sister got married. If mother’s husband is a soldier, then this one is a bozo. He put a password on the computer. Takes my tapes without asking and writes some of his own nonsense on them.”

“How many rooms do you have?”

“Two,” Nata said.

“Oho. Fun for you! And you didn’t think to… well, you know?” Petruchio uttered.

“Zombify? Are you kidding? Then where would I go to get away from those two baboons? They so hate each other. Mama’s husband is this soldier all over, while Inka’s husband dodges the army.”

Nata said this so disdainfully, as if her mother and sister were married not to people but to some irksome cockroaches. Moshkin thought that it was better not to pity her now. You would only get it in the nose for pity.

Nata’s gaze stopped pensively at Methodius’ door. “By the way, who thinks what about Buslaev? In my opinion, he’s all right, a normal guy, although this girl that’s with him… pfff…”

“Are you talking about Daph?” Chimodanov asked dreamily.

“Yeah. Some walking absurdity! How she squints her eyes when she’s angry! I’m, you know, good and all that, but you got to me. The enthusiasm? The backpack? A cat with wings! And the balalaika in a holster?”

“I emphasize: it’s a flute,” Chimodanov said drily. Whatever Nata might say, he liked Daphne. But he liked Methodius considerably less. Although, it was not surprising. People are much more lenient to creatures of the opposite sex. They willingly forgive everything that, for which their own sex would have been smeared on the wall long ago.

Nata looked at Chimodanov very sourly. “You already emphasized. Imagine, I surmised…”

“Apparently, you’re provoking us to disapproval. Are you sure that it’s the correct way?” Moshkin said. Like the majority of timid people prone to reverie, he was very smart and observant.

“And you, cornstalk, jump on one leg and keep quiet! You’ll soil your nose!” Nata frowned.

Zuduka crawled out from under the sofa, holding in its teeth a kind of fly swatter on a long handle, the wide end of which was all studded with nails, and began to sneak up on Nata. Chimodanov discreetly showed it a fist. Pictorially playing bewilderment, Zuduka sat down on the floor and started to scratch its back with the fly swatter handle.

* * *

Methodius and Daphne returned at about ten in the evening. After disgustedly dumping about three dozen rat skins and two dog skins into the corner, Methodius washed his hands for a long time.

“We in Eden write on birch bark, effortless and pretty. Or on papyrus. Or on eucalyptus leaves. You write and you appreciate the fragrance!” Daph said, teasing him.

“Birch bark is the skin of birches. If so, then I prefer a well-skinned rat,” Methodius said and leaned over, pretending that he wanted to snatch a rat skin with his teeth.

Daphne recoiled in fear. Depressiac, having accidentally dozed off on her shoulder, fell down into the wine fountain and, after jumping out, sticky and disgusting, began to scamper around reception, toppling everything that could be overturned in theory and in practice.

On hearing the noise, Nata, Chimodanov, and Eugeny Moshkin went down.

* * *