Christmas on K. bridge. 5. Iconographer

"TALES OF GHOSTS"

about Love and Death from the Land of Mists
a collection of short stories
in the “Playing Another Reality” series

"CHRISTMAS on KUZNETSKY BRIDGE"

5. An ICONOGRAPHER

Who would have thought that solving the flat problem could radically change my fate and move me to a completely different reality! God works in mysterious ways, ladies and gentlemen!

It all started with a fight with my girl, and then with my mother. Or rather, my girlfriend left me because I couldn’t give her an apartment for the anniversary of our acquaintance. And then, sadly to admit it now, I left my mother as well. Of course, she had nothing to do with it, it was not for mother to give an apartment to my girlfriend. Besides, she had never got an apartment at all, we lived in a village. However, in the end, having left our provincial dark corner without losing hope for a bright future, I moved to the city.

At first, I had to work as a food delivery guy and live in a dorm, a run-down one-room apartment on the ground floor in the suburbs, rented at once by seven boys, me and six other couriers like me. A year later, having got a job as a driver in a taxi service, I was able to save up money to rent a separate flat.

I must say, I needed an apartment urgently, because I had met Leila. A magically charming, black-eyed goddess with an Arabic name, translated as “Twilight”, or simply “Night”, she, and not without pride, positioned herself as a native citizen in the 1,001st generation and lived with her parents in a prestigious area near a women’s Orthodox monastery. Of course, I didn’t dare to take Leyla by storm together with her parents and their apartment, thus I decided to rent a studio nearby, already furnished and repaired, so as not to bother.

However, nothing suitable was found in that area, except for the two-bedroom flat on the 13th floor. The flat turned out to be quite light, with excellent repairs, furniture and household appliances, but with a… cockroach: instead of paintings, there were… icons on the walls everywhere, and the rental agreement stated that it was strictly forbidden to remove them from the walls.

The real estate agent, a sweet college-aged blonde girl, noticed my dumb question while I was reading the agreement, and said that the flat belonged to the very same women monastery next to the house.

“Don’t worry! The nuns won’t go to check whether you have removed the icons or not! And when you are about to leave, just hang them back!”

***

In the evening of my check-in, to celebrate not so much the relocation as the beginning of a new stage in my life, all in dreams of Leila, I invited to a bachelor party my ‘food brothers’, who had previously shared the dorm with me.

Already after midnight, the guys were dressing in the hallway before leaving, as one of them suddenly cried out, staring at the wall.

“This dude on the icon threatened me with his finger!” he whispered.

The ‘brothers’ laughed at the unfortunate guy. However, looking at the threatening icon, I froze in a daze! The Saint depicted on it put his finger to his lips, “Shh!!!”

After seeing the boys off, I returned to the apartment and decided to fall asleep, leaving the cleaning for the next day, but, going into the bedroom, adjacent to the neighbors’ apartment, I suddenly noticed… a nun at the window!

I instinctively crossed myself, however, the picture didn’t change.

“Don’t take the icons off, Stefan,” the Nun said in an icy voice and immediately disappeared.

***

The next day, on Sunday, I took the risk of inviting Leila to my place, and she agreed! Having thrown her luxury furs off, Leila looked around the apartment.

“Why didn’t you say that you’re an iconographer?!” she asked in surprise. “Or is this apartment a museum of Orthodox icons?”

“Well, uh…” I didn’t want to lose Leila at all. “Shall I put them away?”

“Of course! I’m a Muslim, we don’t do that! Anyway, I don’t want them to stare at me!”

I began to remove the icons frantically, stacking them in a dark corner like books, and, as bad luck, they fell apart. How many were there in the whole flat? More than a hundred, apparently…

Leila… Oh, Leila…

She left me at midnight. I sat in the kitchen for coffee with cognac and smoking, when suddenly I felt a stream of cold air behind my back. Turning around, I saw…

“Good night, Stefan,” the Nun said in the same icy voice. “They’ll be here soon. Put the icons back. And get out of here.”

I didn’t have time to answer, I heard a noise. The Nun retired to the bedroom and started reciting prayers, but who was there giggling and whispering?! I snapped out of my daze and cautiously crept up to the ajar door. What I saw was like a dream! Demons or devils peeked out of the wall that bordered the neighboring apartment, making faces and giggling at the Nun, who continued praying at the icons stacked by me in the dark corner.

Soon there was a terrible blow to the wall from the neighbors, as if someone had taken a giant sledgehammer and decided to break the partition between our flats.

“What are you waiting for? Hang the icons!” the Nun ordered in her icy voice, turning to me, but…

I ran out into the hallway, got dressed and left for my ‘brothers’.

***

I didn’t work at all on Monday. I couldn’t have imagined that I would be afraid of something that didn’t exist for me even the day before!

Returning ‘home’ from work, I decided to ask the concierge about my neighbors.

“Is she knocking again? Yes, she’s crazy!” the concierge said in a whisper, as if being afraid of someone listening to us. “Lonely, except for the black cat, but still young, and already like that, crazy! She seemed to be calmed down for a while, and now she’s doing it again! For several years in a row, she’s been knocking so that the whole house didn’t sleep at night! The tenants went to the cops, but what could they do? The cops won’t take her to the madhouse, they don’t catch even thieves, and here are demons!”

“Demons?” I got excited.

“Only a possessed person can knock like that! What a power in that knocks, huh? It would be better to go to a church to call some priest. Exorcist, I mean!”

I didn’t manage to find out anything more from the concierge, however, it was quite enough to calm down at least somehow, since I got known that the matter was clearly dark!

Back in the flat, I hung the icons on the walls. Of course, I didn’t remember exactly in what order they had been originally located, but it was better with them than without…

My thoughts were interrupted by a sudden knock on the door. I found Leila at the doorstep.

“Hey!” I said, being surprised, but at the same time delighted.

“Hey! I was just passing by, I thought … would you like to watch… a movie together tonight?”

“In the cinema?” I asked, letting her into the hallway.

“No, just on TV…”

Leila undressed and glanced into the bedroom.

“What's that?! Again?!” she exclaimed. “You took those pieces of wood off, didn’t you?!”

Probably, at that moment I thought for the first time about the struggle between the Forces of Light and Darkness for the human soul.

“Leila… You see… according to the rental agreement… I live here… but not quite alone… These icons…”

“Not alone?!” Leila stopped at the door to the bathroom and raised her eyebrows.

“Yes. There are also… demons… of the woman, my neighbor… That’s why the icons, they…”

“Demons?!” Leila came up to me. “At the neighbor’s? And what are they doing here?”

“They come here through the wall.”

“I see… From the neighbor?” Leila was getting angry.

“Yes… And the monastery asked…”

Leila twisted her finger at her temple, got dressed and left…

I banged my fist on the wall, and then took off all the icons, cursing myself, and them, and the demons, and the concierge, and the Nun for… Leila… as suddenly…

A scruffy devil’s head popped out of the wall.

“Any cognac?” he asked me.

“Do demons drink?” I asked stunned.

“Of course not! They sniff!” the devil broke into a smile of the Cheshire cat and, giggling, winked. “We are drawn to Earth! Don’t feed us with prana! We miss physical bodies, that’s why we settle into still alive ones!”

“What the hell!” I thought, not really trusting the horned creature, but I invited him to the kitchen and asked to tell me what was going on there, in exchange for a bottle of Remy Martin.

“What’s going on?” the devil chuckled. “War, bro!”

“For the neighbor’s soul?” I wondered.

“No, for everyone’s!”

“And my neighbor, who is she?”

“A witch! I’m telling you that! But she wasn’t the first, and I hope she won’t be the last one! The flat next door was cursed. About ten years ago, a man played with girls there. One of them got jealous of him to the others, signed a contract with the Forces of Darkness, and we were sent there to live with him! A man sheltered us and started drinking too much, as a result, drunkenly, he killed the girl who had bewitched him. The flat was opened in the presence of attesting witnesses, the corpse of the girl was carried out, but they didn’t have time to put him in prison, since he shot himself! So we stayed here to wait for the newcomers. Well, a family of old people arrived with their daughter, your neighbor. And we began to work on them! The old woman hanged herself when she found out that she had cancer, the old man slit his wrists in the bathroom, and the daughter fell into witchcraft and made an altar to the Devil right on all your common wall! From her side, of course. But one day she began to see us and got scared. She bought an ax and used to run after us at night all over the flat! Trying to chop us into pieces! Such a funny one! Sometimes we jump inside her and take up dumbbells with her hands! I was a boxer during my lifetime, but she doesn’t have a punching bag! And the dumbbells were left by her father, an athlete. Pour some cognac, don’t be greedy!”

I poured cognac into glasses, but at the same moment the Nun appeared. She blessed us with a huge cross, began to recite a prayer, and the devil, squealing, ran back to the neighbor.

“Who are you?” I asked the Nun.

“This is my flat,” she replied.

“Doesn’t the flat belong to the monastery?”

“I led an unworthy life, and God decided to enlighten me by my neighbors. I had to be baptized, learn prayers and sell almost all my property in order to buy alive icons, painted by the monks on Mount Athos. They protected me from Evil. I had been collected these three hundred icons for many years, reciting prayers more and more often, until one day my flat turned into a cell. Earthly life was left far behind. Three weeks ago I was admitted to the monastery in exchange for this flat.”

“Three weeks ago?!” I involuntarily exclaimed.

“Yes, exactly. Usually, the flats of those who get a haircut as a monk are to be sold, and the proceeds go to the monastery treasury. I was categorically against the sale, hardly anyone would be able to resist Evil here without God’s help. It was important for me to keep the revered alive icons in the flat. However, young man, neither monasteries nor monks are immune to Evil. One of the neighbor’s demons possessed the abbess. She killed my body with poison on the eve of your arrival in order to get the flat at her own disposal as quickly as possible and, of course, for sale. The money, as you understand, won’t go to the monastery. Anyhow, observing outward decency, the abbess decided not to touch the flat during 40 days after my death.”

“Do you still believe in God, who allowed the abbess to kill you?”

“Her plan succeeded for one reason only. God decided it the best way for my soul to leave. My soul had been maturing here, in this apartment, until making the final conscious choice of the Forces of Light.”

“But my rental agreement is signed for a year…”

“You won’t last more than 40 days here, Stefan. I advise you to return all the icons on the walls and leave the flat as soon as possible.”

Having said that, the Nun disappeared.

***

Everything that happened next seemed to me an endless nightmare.

I was tossing and turning between…

…Leila – I still managed to make peace with her and grief in half! – and the icons, taking them off every time Leila came in the evenings, but being too lazy to hang them back;

…between the instantly evaporating bottles of Remy Martin and the demons, that more and more often dropped in to sniff my cognac with soul-exhausting talks about their antics and tricks used during the exorcists’ rites;

…between the witch and the other neighbors, that were collecting signatures on regular petitions, calling the police in vain and taking the cursed flat under siege.

The infernal knocking at night turned into a real war: the witch tried to demolish our common wall, while the other neighbors answered her by knocking on the radiators, on the floor, the ceiling, on her door, and throwing endless curses from all the directions!

A month of sleepless nights on the battlefield, and I was squeezed like a lemon! I wanted to run away from there, but under the terms of the rental agreement, concluded for a year, it was impossible to terminate without paying for the entire period. Since I never became a millionaire, my finances like terrorists sang romances, holding me as a hostage within the framework of the concluded agreement.

That day Nun appeared to me in the morning.

“If you want your nightmare to end, go to church for Confession tonight, and take Communion tomorrow morning.”

Yes, I was baptized, but I had never gone to church in my conscious life. However, without thinking twice, I decided to follow the Nun’s advice.

The next day, leaving the church after Communion, I felt an incredible lightness of being, but just a few minutes later I heard a terrible explosion from the side where ‘my’ house was located. At the same time, I received a message from Leila… she decided to part with me.

Being in a state of shock, like a zombie, I turned the corner and habitually looked at ‘my’ house, but instead of windows and balconies on the 13th floor, I found … the fire-breathing mouth of a dragon!

Of course, the news said that there had been a banal gas explosion in the damned flat, which had destroyed also the one I rented. But, as I glanced at the calendar, I involuntarily began to make calculations: the explosion occurred exactly on the 40th day after the Nun’s death! Fortunately, none of the residents were injured. Only the black cat was mentioned in the list of the disappeared.

A week later, the news about the mysterious disappearance of both the abbess and the monastery treasury appeared in the media.

A month later, I was tonsured a monk in a distant hermitage not far from the village, where my mother still lives.

A year later, I began to bless houses and flats, and after another ten years, to paint icons and exorcise demons. Welcome!

2021