Chapter 2. School Years and New Mysteries

I began to be afraid to speak. In school, every time a teacher was about to ask someone to answer a question, my heart would begin to pound quickly. The pulse immediately calmed down if someone else was asked.

In the following school years, I began to worry about whether I would have to answer or not on the way to school.

Chatting with friends was also difficult for me. I remember clearly the moments when a friend or acquaintance was mistaken in some question, and I knew the exact answer to the topic being discussed, an answer that could help another person, but I was so afraid that I would stumble on one word that I just could not allow myself to open my mouth. I just stayed silent.

One such moment happened in the village during the summer holidays. I walked then with friends in the evening. We walked a long circle around the village, and our conversation touched on unexplained phenomena. My experience with the bright yellow entity was ideal for our conversation… If only I could force myself to overcome the fear of speaking. The thought of all the negative that could have happened if I had started to stutter blocked all desire to share my unusual experience.

In school years I once thought about the fact that I was speaking absolutely normally in my imagination, to myself, and also when I was alone and was talking aloud to myself – it was simply impossible to stutter. It is a pity that at that time I did not give much importance to my remark – after all, the solution was so close!

When I spent short school holidays in Moscow, I went to visit my grandmother and grandfather on the paternal side – my mother’s parents died before I was born. They lived on the outskirts of Moscow, near the MKAD. Their two-room apartment was on the top floor of a seventeen-story building. The windows overlooked a ravine and a stream below, and the forests beyond the ring road. As a child, I liked to look far ahead into the distance from their windows, as well as at what was happening right under the house.

My parents gave me the Dendy game console, and I constantly took it with me to my grandmother, so that I had something to do when I did not walk with my grandfather and grandmother outside – I usually sledded down the hills in front of the house.

Grandma was very pious. She had several icons hanging in the red corner of the room and in the bathroom. She often read various prayers.

At one time, my mother and I came to grandparents on March 8th. Then my grandfather wanted to teach me singing in order to try to help me this way with my speech stutters.

Alas, in the early morning when my mother and I returned home, and I was going to go to school, my grandmother called to report the death of my grandfather. I cried that morning very hard because of his death. I think this was the first time when I thought deeply about death. Does anything happen when we die?

In subsequent years I sometimes had this question again. For example, I remember thinking about life and death when I learned about the death of Steve Irwin.

At another time, on May holidays, my mother and I were going to go to Malye Gorki, but our alarm clock broke, and father could not take us in his car. Back then I really liked to spend time in the village. There had never been a single case that I did not spend the summer months there. That evening, before falling asleep, I wished to wake up at five o’clock in the morning – the time when we needed to get up to catch a train. What surprised me was that when I woke up and looked at the digital clock of the VCR, I saw “5:00” on it.

Thus, we were able to go to the village.

I talked about this interesting case with Lena, a village friend, when we burned a fire in the dugout in my backyard.

Then I became more confident in the environment of my old village friends, as a result of which I stopped being afraid to speak and spoke almost without hesitation in the summer in the village.

I think that it was that same day when I had the following dream: “Night. I walk through the grass to the backyards in the direction of the dugout, from the chimney of which smoke is coming out. I do not know why, but instead of going to the front door, I go to the dug hole of our fireplace’s chimney. I look down and see how a thin hand, completely covered with black short hair, moves around firewood with a stick in our fireplace. Then I had a clear thought in my mind that it was – a werewolf.”

I woke up. It was a gray, cloudy day.

We had breakfast in the kitchen of the Big House when Uncle Vitya came to visit us at eleven o'clock. He briefly said that he saw a smoke coming from our dugout as he walked past it through the backyards, walking from a bus stop, which is one and a half kilometers from our house. I thought then that Lena was there, who was the only one who, except me, came to the village on that rainy weekend.

Having finished eating, I went to the dugout. I calmly went to its entrance and opened the door. There was no one inside. I immediately noticed how coals were smoldering in the fireplace of the dugout, and a barely visible smoke was coming from them. It was at that moment that I for the first time remembered the dream that I had that night…

I immediately went to collect Lena, but she was still sleeping. It was about twelve o’clock, and she often slept for a very long time.

Of course, now I understand that the girl most likely would not go to burn a fire in a dugout in the backyard on a cloudy day – and on any other. I asked another friend if he was in the dugout that day, to which he answered negatively. In addition, he would not leave the coals not extinguished. Each time we burned bonfires, he always extinguished them to the end, being a responsible person. The question of who made the fire that day in our dugout remains unanswered, as well as why I had a dream about it, and why in it I saw someone completely covered in black fur…

It is worth saying that almost all the unusual cases that happened to me before my eighteenth birthday took place in the village.

There was a moment when I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard floorboards bend in the kitchen of our house. The frequency of steps indicated that someone was walking in a slow, calm step. I thought that my mother was returning home from the toilet, but when I turned my head towards the door, I realized that my mother was sleeping in her bed. Nobody else could walk in the kitchen that night – my father was in Moscow, and aunt Liza very rarely went to our Little House during the day, and she certainly would not have walked in our kitchen in the middle of the night in the dark. The Big House has its own exit to the garden.

Another incident occurred when I was sitting on the porch of the Little House while repairing my bike. I remember clearly how I felt then that someone was looking at me from behind. I turned around, but there was nobody – neither in the kitchen, nor on the terrace. But I could feel someone's presence.

Many years later, when I began to sleep on the terrace, something hit twice very hard on the door of the terrace. A couple of seconds before that, my mother went outside, but she never slammed the doors like that, on the contrary, she always closed them very quietly and calmly.

And the other night, when I was lying in the bed of the terrace, preparing to sleep, I felt a cool clot fly slowly over my face.

The next unusual event occurred when, not far from my house, I was digging a hole for a pillar with two village friends. As far as I remember, it was a clear, cloudless summer day. There were three female friends with us. During our excavations, we came across a rounded gray stone. It was a little smaller than a human head, as far as I remember. We noticed that it was as if the features of a human face could be distinguished on the surface of the rock… Having put the gray stone on a bench, we continued digging. Soon we came across a long black stone. Its length was approximately equal to the diameter of the gray stone, and the width was much less than its length. We put it near the gray stone. Not much time had passed when we noticed how from the south a cloud of gray-brown color began to cover the whole sky. It was unusual. But it was another cloud that made us nervous, also quickly moving from south to north… That cloud was black and stretched out across the sky from west to east, but in width it was clearly very narrow – that is, the gray cloud was for some time as if divided into two parts by the black one. The wind picked up. We realized that stones we dug out somehow affect the clouds, however strange it may sound, and we decided to bury them back. Both clouds disappeared very quickly… We never talked about this incident.

Another unusual experience happened in Moscow in my apartment. It was night. Darkness. I went to bed after a long day, but I could not fall asleep for a very long time. I do not remember exactly why, but I decided to slightly hit my head on the pillow three times. For the first two times, everything was fine, but when I raised my head after the third hit, I found that it was already day – the sun was shining high in the sky, people were walking the street. That is, from my point of view, the night changed to a day in a split second that I was with my face in the pillow. It is worth noting that I no longer wanted to sleep and was completely awake.

Many years later, I accidentally found a story that tells about the exact same instant “loss” of time.^[1] Two girls played with an Ouija board at about 9pm. They began to receive strange answers, and the next thing they knew it suddenly was 7 o’clock in the morning. It was as if they blinked and the sun was already up. They just sat, as before, not understanding what had happened.

I have no suppositions as to why such a “loss”, or someone can say a “leap”, in time happens. This is one of the new mysteries of the Universe for me.

Such events were rare for me, but they left a very big impression in my life.

Mostly I spent summer time in the village outdoors, walking with friends from morning to evening. I really enjoyed cycling, and I often rode my bicycle around the countryside immediately after breakfast. My friends and I often went cycling to neighboring villages, and in the evenings, we sat by the bonfire. Sometimes I helped my mother with village housework. My father visited us for the weekends, and every time I was very glad to see him. Sometimes I deliberately returned home to see him. As I said, we lived separately in Moscow, and I did not often see my father. As for my speech problems, I remembered deep down that he was the cause of their occurrence, but as a friendly and cheerful child, I almost forgot about that long-standing incident…

The same is true with friends who laughed at my inability to pronounce words. Despite all the difficulties that I experienced during the school seasons of the year, I almost did not hold back the anger at them. In the end, when we matured, they were able to change for the better.

However, the old memory of numerous acts of ridicule did not leave me.

But there were also cases when, after returning from the village to Moscow, I not only spoke and answered during school lessons without any problems, I also myself raised my hand for an answer – I would become so confident in myself. In one period of my life, I was full of enthusiasm to wake up in the morning and go to school, because I liked the learning process and the fact that I could speak perfectly, like all other people.

Moreover, during such periods of my life, I was by no means taciturn. So, I remember my mother's story how she rode in the same tram with me and Anton, my childhood friend, and she said that I was constantly chatting then. We did not know that my mother was in the car and just decided not to interfere with our conversation.

But sooner or later, confidence always went away. The reasons could be very different. For example, I remember how one day on New Year's Eve, when I was still in high school, a man rang the doorbell of our apartment. He rang other people in our corridor too, as he was just looking for a company to celebrate the New Year. I think that our neighbor, an elderly woman, recognized him as a resident from the adjacent block of our apartment building, and mom agreed to let him into our tiny one-room apartment. He behaved completely normal and adequate, but this could not console my appearing concern for my mother. I simply could not know what could happen next, and I was worried about this unexpected situation and the unknown. After he left, he rang the doorbell again after a couple of moments to ask if I would like to walk with him sometime. At that moment I felt very embarrassed for my father, and I felt like I was betraying him, just by being in this situation. My mother and I politely refused. After this moment, I had to go out with my Moscow friends to celebrate the New Year, as we did in previous years. But when my best friend came after me, I spent several minutes refusing to go out, because I was afraid for my mother, afraid that that man might come back again. At that time, I could not tell the whole truth to my friend, as I was ashamed. I simply kept refusing to go outside for celebrations, until he was finally tired, and he went to celebrate with the rest of the friends without me. This was the first moment when my touch with friends began to break. Having returned to school after the holidays, I again began to have problems with speech and again became insecure – which I constantly remembered about. As for that man, I never saw him again.

However, there was another case in elementary school when I lost a friend for an absurd reason. He was my classmate, and we often walked together after school, or played Dendy at his home. He lived far from school and, I think, because of this, he started going to another. One day I came home after being outside for a long time with friends and the telephone rang. It was that same friend who called me to go outside. Then, without thinking, I said that I had already been outside – I understood how my “I had already been outside” sounded when it was too late. He hung up and never called again. We had an old drum phone without a caller ID at that time, and I did not have my friend’s phone number because, as I recall, he did not have a phone before. I could not contact him in any way, and thus I lost my first friend. I am not sure exactly, but maybe many years later I saw him and his grandmother while riding in a tram not far from my school and home. He also saw me. If that was really my old school friend, then he clearly remembered me and, judging by what reached me from his conversation, he remembered our very last telephone “conversation”. Perhaps I should have approached and apologized, explaining the misunderstanding, but then I was not in the best shape, and I was not sure if it was him because more than ten years had passed since we saw each other.