‘Alisa?’ Olechka’s curious little face had appeared in the doorway. ‘Are you coming in to see us for a minute?’
The girl was barefoot, in just her pants and top. She’d already gone to bed, but she had got impatient.
‘I’ll be right there,’ I said. ‘Shall I tell you all a story?’
Olechka lit up:
‘Uhuh.’
‘A happy one or a scary one?’
The girl wrinkled up her little forehead. But, of course, curiosity won out.
‘A scary one.’
All children like scary stories.
‘Run back to bed now,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right there.’
Ten minutes later I was sitting on Olechka’s bed in the dormitory, telling the girls a story in a low voice:
‘And in the morning the girl woke up and went over to the mirror and looked – and all her teeth were red! She tried cleaning them with toothpaste, and washing them with soap, but they were still as red as ever. She couldn’t say a single word to her parents, in case they noticed. It was a good thing her younger brother was ill and her parents took no notice of her at all. That’s the way it always is, the little ones get all the attention and nobody even looks at you, not even if all your teeth are red …’
Scary children’s stories are so wonderful! Especially if you tell them at night, with a mysterious half-light coming in through the window, to a pack of silly little girls.
‘I’ve guessed it already,’ Natasha said in a bored voice. Such a serious girl, you couldn’t impress her with scary stories. The others started hissing at her indignantly and she shut up. I carried on, feeling Olechka’s heart pounding as she pressed herself against me. There would be a good harvest for me there …
‘On the third night the girl tied her right plait to her bed with a piece of string,’ I went on in a mysterious whisper. ‘And at midnight she woke up because the string was stretched tight and it was pulling on her hair and hurting. And the girl saw that she was standing over her little brother’s bed and her teeth were chattering! Chattering!’
Larisa gave a quiet squeal. Not because she was frightened, but because it was the right thing to do. And of course one of the girls began happily chattering her teeth together.
‘Then the girl went into the kitchen and took out the hammer and the pincers that her father kept in the cupboard, and before morning came she secretly pulled out all her own teeth. It hurt very badly, but she managed it, because she was a brave girl and she had strong hands. And the next morning her little brother got better. And the girl’s teeth grew back better than ever, because the first ones were her milk teeth!’
I lowered my voice to a whisper and said solemnly:
‘Only they were still pink anyway!’
One of the girls who had been waiting for a happy ending gasped in fright. And I concluded solemnly:
‘And the parents still loved her little brother more than her anyway. Because he was really very ill that time and they were really worried about him.’
And that was all. I wondered how many of the girls had younger brothers. The birth rate in Russia is low, but if the first child is a girl, people usually try for a second.
My mother had wanted to do that. When she was already too old, past thirty, what a fool … But I was already an Other, even at the young age of twelve. And I dealt with the unexpected problem. Though probably I shouldn’t have bothered. If I did have a brother, what would have been so bad about that? Even if he was only a half-brother … and only I would have known that for sure, even my mum had her doubts … and especially since he could have turned out to be an Other, not just a brother but an ally … But what’s done can’t be undone.
‘And now – to sleep!’ I ordered the girls in a cheerful voice.
Of course, they started asking me to tell them another story. But I refused. It was half past eleven already, and I still had to get to the beach … the girls’ voices were already ragged and sleepy. When I left, Gulnara tried to tell a scary story of her own, but all the pauses and hesitations suggested that she would fall asleep halfway through it.
I went back to my room, stretched out on the bed and started waiting.
I wondered what Igor was doing right then.
Was he entertaining his kids too?
Or was he drinking vodka with some other camp leaders?
Or was he screwing one of them?
Or had he forgotten he was intending to go swimming that night and sleeping peacefully in his bed?
I shook my head. No. Anything but the last option.
He was reliable. Almost … almost like Zabulon. What an absurd comparison: there weren’t many even among the Dark Others, who could call Zabulon ‘reliable’. But I could. I had a perfect right to do it. Love is a great power, and such a strange power.
What if Igor turned out to be a potential Other?
I squeezed my eyes tight shut in simultaneous sweet anticipation and panic. What would I do then? Then it wouldn’t be amusement with an ordinary man that Zabulon had approved, but a genuine love triangle.
What was wrong with me?
There couldn’t be any triangle. Not even if Igor did turn out to be an uninitiated Other. He’d go running off with his tail between his legs and forget he ever had an affair with Zabulon’s girl.
And I would forget it too.
The time dragged by unbearably slowly. The hands on my watch crept along hesitantly, as if they weren’t even sure that time was passing. I had been going to wait for half an hour, but I gave in after twenty minutes. I didn’t have the strength to hold out any longer.
I got up and walked quietly through into the girls’ dormitory …
There was silence. The calm, pleasant silence of a large children’s dormitory with just a few sounds – breathing, snuffling, lips smacking sleepily.
‘Girls!’ I called quietly.
No answer.
I set off along the row of beds, gently touching shoulders, arms, hair … Nothing … nothing … nothing …
Here was something.
It was Olechka.
I knelt down beside her bed and lowered my hand onto her sweaty forehead. I heard her dream and felt the flow of power.
The dream was confused and incoherent, it had nothing to do with my bedtime story. Olechka was dreaming that she was climbing to the top of a tower – an old tower that was leaning slightly and had a half-ruined stone balustrade with huge gaping holes in it. Down below at the foot of the tower there was either a medieval town or an ancient monastery. And the strange thing was that although the tower was in semi-darkness, down below the sun was shining. And there were people wandering about between the decrepit buildings – happy and cheerful, dressed in light summer clothes, holding cameras and colourful magazines. They were enjoying themselves so much, it couldn’t possibly occur to them to look upwards at the sky and see the little girl walking towards a gap in the balustrade as if she was under a spell.
I needed to hang on just a little bit longer. Wait until Olechka started falling – she was bound to fall, that was where the dream was leading her. I don’t know what happened to me, but I suddenly gathered my strength and sucked in her dream. Every last morsel of it.
The dark tower above the cheerful crowd, and the gaping holes in the balustrade, and the cold indifference and the fearsome, alluring height. Everything that could give me power.