The Village at the Edge of Noon

by Darya Bobyleva

Genres: Fantasy; Dark Fantasy; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; General Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

Everything you were afraid to find out about the heat of noon and grandma’s old tales comes together in this English language debut of an award-winning and bestselling young Russian writer.

What if summer never ends?

Residents of a Russian village wake up one morning to find that everything has changed. The road to the motorway has disappeared. The paths into woods all lead back to the village. If you enter the woods, your fate is either to vanish into thin air, or to return as a different version of yourself.

Normality becomes a thing of the past as objects mutate, devices emit odd sounds, no one knows who the next victim to disappear will be. Without the internet and modern technology, the residents are stuck in a seemingly never ending summer, punctuated by strange noises and stranger visitations. As the forest grows closer, villagers must try to differentiate between ally and foe.

In the midst of the chaos, there’s Katya, the only one who seems to understand what’s happening…

Translated by Ilona Chavasse

Release date: December 2, 2025

Publisher: Angry Robot

Print pages: 384

Sample

1THE EXODUS OF VALERYCH

Nikita Pavlov trailed Valerych down the street and wouldn’t leave him alone until they got to the missing turning. Trying to talk Valerych out of it, waving his skinny arms, his bloated face sweating with a hangover and the gravity of his mission.

“Why don’t you fuck right off, lad,” Valerych said, not unkindly, and patted him on the back in a fatherly way.

Very few people in the village knew him as anything but Valerych; it might have been a shortening of his real patronymic, Valerievich, but just as easily a corruption of the given name Valery, or even Valerian; there was no way of telling and he never volunteered it. He was middle-aged and pigeon-toed, the steady, reliable sort. He had inherited his plot from his father, who had been something big in the military, but the family had not used the dacha much – only to grow potatoes, and not on anything like a regular basis. The father had preferred sanatorium vacations at Soviet medical resorts, and for Valerych that word still brought up childhood memories of wavering shadows thrown by floppy potted palms, and a grand marble staircase jutting out of a yellow background. Times changed; the faded grandeur of these relics of pre-revolutionary times requisitioned for the health of the common man had to be given up. It was soon thereafter that Valerych found himself in possession of the family plot, comprised at that moment of a fenced-in wasteland, and decided that it would henceforth be a haven of summer rest and relaxation. A family seat, so to say. There wasn’t nearly enough ready cash to turn the dream into reality, but Valerych was handy as well as obstinate, and had a genius for repurposing and utilizing old junk in unexpected ways. Up went his architecturally heterogenous but perfectly sound dacha, which he built from odds and sods including, of all things, discarded railway sleepers. Valerych had lined the gravel path from his front gate with shards of old bricks and constructed a pergola out of some random assortment of metal ribs and rods that soon enough were festooned with grape vines and looking perfectly elegant. Valerych marked out and built his raised vegetable beds with military precision and, obedient to his design, his crops always came up in orderly rows: no beetroot would have dared sprout up through the ranks of parsley, nor a pumpkin have the audacity to lounge among the cabbages.

The family seat idea did not work out. Other luxuries became available, and his children preferred gallivanting on foreign beaches. Valerych’s only grandchild, for whom he toiled over his best “Queen Elizabeth” strawberries, always seemed to go with her parents. Nevertheless, each spring Valerych decamped to his dacha, building, fixing, sowing, and waiting – above all, waiting – for his children to realize that a dacha was a better proposition than sitting cooped up all day in the “all-inclusive” – which was not much different, by his reckoning, to a prison.

Beyond the missing turning the street ran along one bank of the Sushka, the small local river, and it was this proximity, rather than being sent packing, that caused Nikita to hang back. Valerych carried on walking. His face was crimson from the heat and exertion, but the calm determination written there lent him the air of a handsome old sea dog.

He kept his eyes away from the river, focusing with deliberation on the dandelions beneath his feet, and the snails wending their slow, slimy way forth. Spotting a brown birch bolete poking out a sandy bit of ground – not the right place for it at all – Valerych wondered at its lilliputian size and bent down for a closer look, quite without thinking. That was when he saw a hunched dark figure on the riverbank, just out of the corner of his eye. His stomach lurched, and for the briefest

moment Valerych was physically unable to look away, as though the thing was drawing him in, demanding that he look and see, wanting to frighten him entirely. There was something else, something surplus and inhuman, in that bent and motionless figure. Valerych imagined it about to break in half, turn inside out, and lunge at him, pumping its spindly over-articulated limbs…

The silhouette vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, or rather it broke apart into a slab of driftwood and a shadow flickering off a weeping willow, with a droopy bunch of waterlilies that someone had draped over the willow giving it a weird range of motion. Valerych swore and lobbed the mushroom at the false scarecrow. The bolete landed in the water with a soft splash.

Who had he to fear, after all? What could those who called from the river tell Valerych that he didn’t already know? Valerych got out the specially prepared earplugs from his pocket – the special, noise-canceling kind worn by builders – scrunched them into his ears, and strode on. It was only a short way along the river, this stretch of the path.

As he walked, Valerych ruminated on the day it had all begun – which was at the end of June, on the twenty-first, right at midsummer. There had been no forewarning, nor presentiment of any kind: no anomalous signs in nature, no premonitions, no pets behaving badly. Nothing out of the ordinary, except perhaps the way that Sveta Beroeva, who occupied the biggest dacha in the village, had a shouting match with her kids’ nanny, Narghiz, in the street for all to hear. The Beroev family always assembled to dine at the chiming of a large wind-up clock, but that day Narghiz had forgotten to wind it, and so the Beroev children, two swarthy twin boys, had had their dinner late. Everything remotely connected with the twins was run according to a strict schedule of their mother’s devising, though Narghiz protested that she had wound up the clock as usual, and who could tell why the old clock had stopped, for all she knew it was broken. She was careless enough to add offhandedly that eating dinner half an hour late was not the end of the world, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

creamed back, managing even in the heat of passion to pointedly remain polite. Then she slammed her gate shut and all the neighbors in earshot furled their ears back in and returned to their gardening.

Narghiz emerged to take the children for their evening walk as usual, and though her egg-smooth face was blank, her lips moved as she mumbled something inaudibly in her own language.

Valerych had been listening to the quarrel like everyone else, but without any particular interest; he was busy watering his zucchinis. Truth be told, most of the neighbors – although they were all post-Soviets, raised to abhor servitude and the oppression of the proletariat – didn’t entirely disapprove of Sveta’s shrieking. It was Narghiz that made them uncomfortable, because really, there were just too many of them all of a sudden, these people from the faraway “stans”, who couldn’t be relied on to understand what you told them and garbled the most commonplace words into shapeless noise. Strange as it was, what they felt for Sveta was pity. The solid, unforthcoming Beroev, her husband, whom everyone suspected of being the shady kind of businessman, well… Beroev who had caused a giant brick villa to be built in their midst and who bought Sveta all manner of amazing consumer goods, they regarded as something of a Bluebeard. His first wife had simply vanished; that is to say, one summer Beroev arrived without her and obviously no one was going to ask him about it. There were confirmed rumors that he had divorced his second wife, the one who had borne him a daughter, and that he had left her with very little by way of a settlement. So on the whole, the villagers felt that Sveta was unwise to go around all stuck-up, so satisfied to have secured a provider. One never knew how things would pan out. And Sveta really did swan about, constantly fingering her delicate gold-rimmed glasses and tripping about ever so lightly on her slim glossy legs.

But Sveta made it up with Narghiz, and even gave the nanny a moderately large banknote to indicate that she was forgiven. Valerych had gotten this update from two old ladies who seemed to be best friends and were always together. The pair walked up and down the path along his fence for some time, discussing the episode in the absence of anything else to discuss. He finished watering and went inside for something to eat, noticing as he finished his repast that his own wind-up clock had also stopped, as if following the Beroev clock’s example. He wound it up but it was no use. The inside of the dial sweated with beads of condensation. Valerych put the clock by his wood-burner stove in the hope that it would dry out and revive. And anyway, it was time to start getting ready for bed. It always took a while to set up the outdoor shower, and he liked to read a little before going to sleep…

Afterward, as Valerych sifted through the immediately preceding events and broke them down into fragments, searching for some sign – the broken clock and the trouble at the Beroevs were hardly credible as any kind of warning – he did recall waking in the night to a strange sound outside. It was loud but also weirdly thick, and it clogged Valerych’s ears. Or maybe his ears were clogged to start with, and that was why he dreamed that sound before waking. Of course, it was equally possible that Valerych hadn’t woken up in the night at all, and all of that was a dream too.

The path finally meandered away from the river, popping Valerych out by the long perimeter fence that once upon a time had existed simply to guard the village from outside disturbance. Valerych scanned the environs, but there was little to see except the long bobbing grass around him and the willows weeping tears of dew on the riverbank behind him. A faint knocking – someone was hoeing diligently – emanated from the dacha at the village’s furthest edge, almost entirely concealed behind an overgrown palisade. Valerych cleared his throat and began to undress, folding and stacking his trousers, rough buttonless top, and boxer shorts neatly on the grass. His own private theory, which was not exactly comprehensive and yet necessitated a definite course of action, held that anything that had been part of the cursed village would detract from his endeavor. He himself had spent quite a while in the village, of course, but he was not an inanimate object and therefore had qualities more resistant to being suborned, the chief of these being his will and reason. Valerych considered divesting himself of the earplugs too, then thought better of it. They were small and insignificant; besides he could throw them away at any time. 

ruised ruddy purple. He no longer looked brave and seafaring but rather tenderly squishy and vulnerable, like a snail prized out of its shell by a nasty young naturalist. Valerych gave in to a strong unexpected urge to make the sign of the cross over himself, then slid the bolt free, pushed through the gate and stepped outside.

Outside was the normal suburban landscape: a field yellow with winter-cress, the riverbank on his right, and the thin wood copses straight ahead. To Valerych’s left, quite some way off across the field, was the sprinkling of neat concrete cottages for a new-style outer-burbs development that had roused the solitude-loving dachniks’ ire from the moment it was first approved.

Valerych broke himself a walking stick from a little tree and headed left, to the cottages.

That first morning, he had awakened to the sound of a woman’s screaming. Valerych’s first half-awake thought was that Sveta Beroeva finally got round to murdering her nanny. And indeed, it was Narghiz who screamed, as Valerych quickly ascertained from the reedy, Asiatic shrieking:

“The road has gone away!”

Oh dear, thought Valerych, she’s finally lost it. Though he couldn’t quite think why it felt like a “finally”.

He breakfasted unhurriedly and did his morning calisthenics before venturing out to find most of his neighbors milling outside his gate. The Beroevs were there, and also Nikita Pavlov, the quiet young alcoholic, and the implacable pensioner Kozhebatkin, looking ready as ever to lash out at some unwitting offender. And of course, the dacha cooperative’s committee chairwoman, stately and regal Claudia Il’yinichna Petukhova, and with her many of the others.

“Did they bring the milk, then?” Valerych addressed himself to Kozhebatkin, who was nearest to hand.

“You think I know?” Kozhebatkin always found a way to wind himself up. “They’re saying the turning for the gate and beltway is blocked!”

“There isn’t any turning. At all,” Nikita said quietly.

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” scowled Kozhebatkin.

Small delegations kept splintering off from the main crowd to essay the village gates. Each returned in a state of extreme confusion, the young people were making an excited racket, and the combined sound of so many raised voices soon escalated into an alarming din. Something had happened – was happening – and it was very strange.

Valerych wavered for a moment between going to open his tomato greenhouse up for the day and having a look at whatever had brought out such a crowd, and chose the latter.

Like any other dacha cooperative, the village was laid out along several pleasantly named lanes: Forest Street, Rowan Street, Cherry Street, and so on. The lanes all joined into one and swerved toward the main village gate – beyond that was a dirt track leading out to the asphalt beltway that in turn led back to the city and civilization. The village itself was situated in a lovely bit of unspoiled nature – there was a small tidy wood, and a river whose middling size and muddy waters were balanced out by a bevy of beautiful weeping willows, with a wooden mooring right out of someone’s idyllic rural childhood, and even a little abandoned chapel on a mound above the far bank. Better still, the river teemed with rudd, roach, and bream, and Valerych enjoyed bottom fishing there, rich hauls that gave one a warm manly feeling. He made a mental note to get his rig ready for some bream fishing.

Still thinking about his fishing gear, Valerych went right past the turning. That is to say, past the place where the turning used to be.

It had simply ceased to exist.

Valerych backtracked a dozen or so steps and proceeded up the lane once more, looking around him attentively.

Here was the house of Tamara Yakovlevna, the inveterate old cat lady. Hers was the dacha immediately next to the water-pumping station

and so whenever she forgot to open up the valve – which was always – the street ended up without running water. Here was the water pump itself, and then the turning for the exit gate, and then the next street, Forest Street… called that because it ran parallel to the common fence, beyond which was the forest, more of a sparse wood really, itself…

Forest Street now began directly after the water pump, with no sign of a turning or anything else. It looked so normal and natural that it was hard to believe a turning had ever been there at all. Tamara Yakovlevna’s dacha – water pump – little blue dacha at the top of Forest Street… Valerych didn’t know the couple who lived there, not even their names or anything. They always kept Alsatians though, a new one quietly replacing its predecessor each time, and every one of them called Naida.

Enough with the bleeping dogs! Crossly, Valerych marshalled his slow and sleepy wits. He returned to Tamara Yakovlevna’s house, and walked up the lane again, with a kind of dogged insistence that the turning stop fucking around and reappear. But the turning did no such thing. It was as though a slice had been excised from the fabric of reality, and the hole pinched shut and stitched together again so cleverly there was no seam, no wrinkle. As though the main gate that you could previously see from the turning here – it was right here – had been no more than a collective hallucination.

Valerych stopped to draw his breath. The day was only getting hotter, as if to spite him. Although Valerych had slathered himself in sunblock before he set foot outside his dacha that morning, already he could feel his shoulders burning, the skin tightening painfully. Naked apart from his makeshift walking staff, he hadn’t brought a hat or a bottle of water, either, in deference to his theory that nothing should be carried out of the blighted village. Had he unwittingly rubbed the curse into his own skin? Was the layer of sunblock the reason Valerych had been striding across the modest field of winter-cress toward the cottages for the last four hours? 

o be wearing, or even drove out, before anyone could formulate any theory at all. Like that laborer whose name no one knew, a swarthy man never seen without his woolen beanie, who spent the days hammering and sawing alongside two or three of his equally anonymous countrymen. He said something unintelligible, then he simply swung over the low chain-link fence and there he was, up against the forest. The dachniks watched him through the wire somberly and silently, as he took a couple of steps over the springy pine needles and dead leaves of the forest floor, and then crunched an unseen beer can underfoot: over the years, the sparse little wood had become something of a common dump. Up ahead was a wide patch of overgrown raspberry cane, and beyond it the woods, all unexpectedly tall pines, swaying in the breeze. The laborer turned back to give the villagers a baffled little smile.

Their rubbish-strewn, unremarkable woods seemed darker and denser than ever, and the place the man had chosen particularly inhospitable, with not even a trace of a path.

“Hey, get back, will you?” Nikita Pavlov was hungover as usual, and therefore on edge. “Who knows what’s in there? Come back!”

It was clear from the way the swarthy man nodded happily that he hadn’t understood a word. Crashing forward through the wild raspberries, he was snared at once by roots and branches. His beanie flashed briefly in the pine-blue gloom, then disappeared behind a tree trunk, gray with lichen. The man winked out suddenly and noiselessly, the way people do in the forest: one minute he was walking an arm’s-length away from them, snapping twigs and beating back raspberry branches, the next he was gone, and the wood stood silent.

No one was going to wait by the fence for his return. Also, just then Antoshka Aksenov shot past on his bike, raising a cloud of dust. He shouted excitedly at them as he rode that some others had decided against trying the back of Tamara Yakovlevna’s plot, because the forest was there too, and you couldn’t see anything beyond it, but the second village gate, the old one, was still where it should have been and seemed to be perfectly normal.

This was the gate through which Valerych would eventually effect his egress; it had once been the main gate, in the old days before the asphalt road finally caught up with the village.

Never before had the view of the field, river, and irritating new development seemed so cheering. While the gathering crowd chattered with relief and tossed about what scant bits of information there were, the Aksenov family was busy kitting out their bespattered Jeep. They were a shouty, athletic and cheerful bunch, always going off camping and hiking, or else taking the Jeep motor-touring across Russia and even abroad.

“We’ll get to the bottom of this!” Natalya Aksenova, heavy-bottomed like a pear, assured them all in her deep, carrying voice. “We’ll figure out what’s what!”

The villagers hollered various pieces of advice over one another: the Aksenovs should drive straight to the new development and ask around there – no, they ought to go to the village further away, because the new place was only half-built and the migrant laborers wouldn’t know a thing. They should drive all the way round the village until they found the turnoff for the beltway, and flag down a car, or find someone with a cell, and phone and ask… No one could verbalize exactly what it was the Aksenovs should ask, and no one attempted to think this through. The very idea of questions like “Where has the turning gone?” and “What exactly is happening here?” was still wild and rather uncomfortable.

Valerych didn’t have much use for his cell phone, which was one of those bricks for oldies, with push buttons and large digits. He hadn’t even thought to take it when he left the house to join the others. It was only later that he discovered from the young people, who were all staring hungrily at their gadgets with genuine alarm, that no one had any web or internet or anything. The youngsters seemed unable to leave their cell phones even when going to the outhouse – perhaps they couldn’t manage in there without internet advice – and now all the phones were blind and deaf. This wasn’t the first time, though; internet access did waft in and out of the village, rather. There were no telephone lines of course, which had at one time added to the secluded charm of the place.

Chop-chop and shipshape, the Aksenovs with their Antoshka in tow soon piled into the mud-spattered, brightly stickered Jeep. 

Aksenov revved the engine loudly – purely for show – and they were off. Everyone watched the large WW2 anniversary sticker proclaiming “All the way to Berlin!” on the Jeep’s blacked-out back window judder with every pothole, but soon all that remained was a dissipating swirl of dust. It was barely a minute’s drive to the new-builds; someone especially keen-eyed asserted that they could see something moving among the toy cottages in the distance.

The next to leave was a taciturn guy named Sanya, who climbed the fence adjacent to the spot where the missing turning used to be, and into the murky woods. Then the quiet couple from the top of Forest Street, taking with them the current Naida; they felt sure that if they lost their way, the dog would lead them out again. Beroev was the next to drive up to the old gate, but then Sveta raised a ruckus worse than the day before, shrieking and pummeling his large white SUV with her little fists, until Beroev, cursing like a trooper, gave in and agreed to wait for the Aksenovs to come back.

As for who was the first to return… The sun tolled inside Valerych’s skull like a crimson tocsin. He sat down in the prickly grass and hoped that dredging up the details would distract him from his terrible thirst and incipient heatstroke. Now who was the first to return? And did they behave suspiciously, oddly? It was probably the dog lovers; they had been proven right on the subject of their animal’s abilities. Yes, it was definitely those two, and they came back shaken and frightened, but on the whole, normal.

They appeared on the evening of the day after, just when the villagers’ initial bewilderment had turned to apprehension. They reported having tried to leave through the forest, as getting Naida to step foot into the field had proved impossible; something in the field had spooked her badly. The couple was uniformly filthy, scratched, swollen with mosquito bites, and oddly lethargic – probably from exhaustion. They ate and drank ravenously, barely lifting their faces from their plates, and seemed unwilling and slow to answer questions. Only the dog was delighted, wagging her tail across the table leg – she had not failed, she had led them back out again. Her owners explained, though it had to be prized out of them, that they had gotten lost in the forest, never finding any path at all; they ended up in an impassable wilderness, which after a day of walking was not surprising. So they circled round and round, always coming back to the same spot somehow, then ordered the dog to find home, which she did. They had slept the night under a tree, lucky that it was still summer. They

listened out for traffic or the river, and occasionally heard snatches of sound, but never saw anything except forest. This was what the husband, bearded and melancholy, told them. The wife only bobbed her head wordlessly, as she wolfed down bowlfuls of buckwheat and tinned meat. Valerych realized that this silent purposeful eating was what had been quietly bugging him since then, and he was sorry that he hadn’t had time to tell anyone before he left.

The return of the dog couple, though fortunate, had a depressing effect on the villagers. Especially when you considered that they had not gone off-piste, but in a straight line for the road, compass in hand. The day before, Nikita Pavlov got on top of the guardhouse roof but couldn’t see anything, so climbed as far as he was able up the highest pine and declared from above that everything was the same as it had ever been – river, wood, fields, and plantings on the far side of the river. He shimmied down dejected, saying it was hard to see very far. It was then that they triangulated the rough location of the road and sent the dog lovers off with the compass. The melancholy husband later explained that they’d lost it in their wanderings.

The migrant laborer briefly returned too, although it was hard to say whether this was that first one to go, or one of his countrymen. He eluded any attempt at questioning by blinking at them perplexedly without saying a word. Nikita Pavlov came back – in a state of mounting anxiety, he finally decided to simply cross the field, having first tied some twine to the gatepost. Ball of twine in hand, Nikita wandered out to the end of the tether and immediately returned. He was soaked in sweat and completely unshakeable in his conviction that he’d not gotten an inch closer to the cottages. Also that the twine in his hand had quivered weirdly as he spooled it out.

Valerych’s mate Vityok came back too, though it would have been better if he hadn’t…

The Aksenovs, on the contrary, were gone without a trace, and so were the group of college students who’d come for just the weekend to camp out and barbeque. Their timing was unlucky; they had to get back to their course or be expelled, and so there was no talking to them. Sanya never came back, never mind that he owed Valerych a deal of money. It was after Sanya left, Valerych figured, that people got desperate and started to vanish pretty regularly. People tried the field and the forest, hoping that the true road back to the world, having been hidden by the 

mysteriously localized anomaly, would reveal itself spontaneously to them. They still had regular village assemblies, and for a time the chairwoman attempted to keep a tally, but it made things all the more confusing – trying to decipher who had actually vanished, and who left before the road winked out of existence, and who hadn’t come this year at all – and not a little dreary, shouting surnames out like a prison roll call.

Narghiz disappeared too. But that was different.

None of the strange proceedings had any bearing at all on the Beroev boys’ daily routine. Narghiz, looking even more dejected than usual, continued to take them on their morning and evening walks, which consisted of circling once round the perimeter, then to the river and rudimentary playground, then back home.

One evening Narghiz and the children failed to return. Sveta Beroeva hunted through the village, her flip-flops thudding severely down the lanes, and found the boys by the riverbank, swaying contemplatively on a bench swing.

“Where’s Narghiz?” asked Sveta, hugging them tightly with relief.

The older boy pointed to the water.

Sveta looked down, puzzled. The murky river wended lazily past clumps of sedge. It was speckled with water skimmers, and there were a couple of ducks. A clumsy garland of yellow water daisies hung down from a nearby bush – the kids must have been playing. There was no sign of Narghiz.

“Has she gone for a swim?”

The boys shook their heads no, vehemently, and pressed up against their mother.

Sveta called Narghiz once, and again. Then she hurried away with the children. No one ever saw Narghiz again after that. Or imagined that it was all just beginning.

It was lucky perhaps that after the disappearances of the Aksenovs, the college students and Sanya – and oh, all the glum migrant laborers, who stubbornly kept on going in search of one another – no one attempted to leave by

river, either swimming or in a boat. The villagers tended to view the river as too much of an obstacle, given the way that other escape routes had turned strange and thorny, even before they realized that the river too had changed. Not outwardly, no – the mosquitoes and the slap of fish against the water was the same, much as the wood and the field appeared, at first glance, the same. But the little river too bloomed strange and otherworldly. After this was discovered, the villagers kept well away and it was only much later that a couple of deaf old anglers and that odd spinster Katya came back to fish at the bank. Valerych couldn’t quite put his finger on what the matter was with Katya, from the way she spent all her summer fishing alone, to the way she spent her summers at the village altogether.

The two bosom friends, Tamara Yakovlevna and Zinaida Ivanovna, meanwhile, had tried to put their fingers on what the matter was with Narghiz. This was before the nanny disappeared. They were used to long summer evenings at Tamara Yakovlevna’s, bingeing television programs about folk remedies, ghost hunters and cursed bloodlines. So when the turning disappeared and the beloved TV set showed only gray fuzz in place of their favorite channel, the disconsolate old ladies talked it over and decided that it was Narghiz’s doing. To revenge herself on bossy Sveta, Narghiz had placed some sort of oriental curse on the village. This theory was no more ludicrous than anything going on at the time, and the pair of them even went to visit Narghiz to see if they could sound her out. After she vanished, protest as they might that they’d been nothing but tactful and friendly, Sveta Beroeva was of the firm and vigorously voiced opinion that they’d sounded – hounded – the nanny straight into the river with fright, and who was going to look after the children now. Maybe she just decided to swim the hell away from Sveta and the Beroev pups, when it started to look like she’d be chained to them forever, reflected Valerych. He looked up, half-hoping for just a single cloud to blot out the blazing sun, and saw something curious.

There was no sun. The whole of the sky, end to end, was veiled in a pearlescent substance, like the insides of the freshwater mussels that bunched in the river. Valerych was overjoyed to see so much cloud until it dawned on him that this was no cloudbank. The vault of the sky itself had gone bleached, and gleaming waves of white-hot aurorae arced liquidly above his head. He felt the blistering

 breath of a furnace on his face – then molten sand slashed across his eyes – his throat burned. A roiling, churning haze was spreading fast atop the drooping dry grass stalks all around him.

They’re not letting me through, Valerych thought. Trying to scare me off.

He gripped his walking stick tightly, eyes closed against the spinning world, waited a little. Then stumbled on, picking at the vague threads of his previous thoughts, anything at all, to keep his mind from the unbearable crackling heat, and from that white-hot sky. Whenever you walked on your own like this, not in the city where every passerby was talking and every shopfront yelled for your attention, but really on your own, didn’t your brain always find something to mutter idly to itself? Go on then, brain, mutter away…

…thought that she’d be chained to them forever. Bullshit, no one thought of it as forever back then. What normal person would assume that anything was forever, especially given all the crazy that was going on?

The chairwoman Claudia Il’yinichna, unusually pale but majestic as ever, called a general assembly beside the guardhouse, near the spot where the turning had been. She alerted all present to the need for keeping calm and carrying on, lending a helping hand, and so forth. She also informed them that they were not to leave the village until the situation became clear. This was met with the kind of learned communal inertia that expressed itself in generalized moaning – who was going to make it clear and when would they make it clear – that was normally reserved for rising utility rates and chronic late-payers. Claudia Il’yinichna made the dignified reply that since such a thing, pardon my saying, such a terrible catastrophe, the forced sequestration of so many people, had occurred, the relevant branches were certain to be working on a rescue, matters were surely in hand and they would surely come…

“What, from the outside?” The teenager who insisted on being called Yuki instead of Yulia, her God-given name, called out from a little way off, where she balanced carefully on her bike.

Claudia Il’yinichna gave the inky-haired girl a stern teacherly look and said nothing. The assembly had quietened too, each person

privately alarmed by the new set of what-ifs dashing about inside their heads.

“Comrades, we still have electricity, and that means that the outside is…” she shot a warning glance at Yuki, “… absolutely fine. We just have to sit tight. I’m sure a rescue is already underway, and all we have to do is wait.” With that, Claudia Il’yinichna seemed to recover her equanimity, like someone navigating at last to a familiar road after a painful spell of being lost.

Overhead, the air crackled with the fury of live electricity and grew more scorching still. Valerych could feel his skin blister. His lips were glued together, while his thick, rough tongue seemed to fill his mouth entirely. Even his eyes were parched, so he only lifted his eyelids now and then, just to get a sense of where he was going. The endless, boundless field and the roasting sky flickered before him and were both subsumed in the ruddy, veined, pulsating gloom.

It was during one of these flickers that Valerych spotted the river. Mysteriously elsewhere once again, the rippling river was now behind him – right behind him. Its glistening, sunlit surface burned into his retinas and carried on shining from the inside of his eyelids. The fleeting scent of water was like a promise of sweet coolness in his nose and mouth. As always in the heat, the river smelled of cold watermelon.

Valerych dropped his stick and stumbled to the water, growling hoarsely through clenched teeth. He had his earplugs in, after all.

It was easier to breathe by the river. Valerych got himself clumsily down the mudbank, swearing out loud when a shard of beer-bottle glass bit him in the heel. There were people here not long ago, normal everyday people, drinking and breaking bottles. And there used to be rubbish all along the bank – disposable barbeque trays, scraps of paper, plastic bags, cigarette butts. Where did you take all the rubbish, you fucking monsters? Valerych was furious, and close to tears. You bloody neat freaks, you goddamn tidiers, you want to erase all traces of the old life, is that

 it? The shard of glass seemed like a small miracle, and Valerych was willing to forbear his own sliced foot, reminder of a time when you could leave the village if you wanted to, when people came to the riverbank to have fun, eat shish kebabs, listen to the smarmy songs that spilled like warm oily vodka from car radios…

Valerych lapped at the river water thirstily. It left an aftertaste of peat and manure in his mouth. He sprinkled some on his blistering skin and didn’t even feel the drops; they evaporated like water on a scorching-hot pan. In a last attempt to cool down, Valerych lowered his feet into the water. The top of the river was yucky and warm, full of debris and tightly shut mussels that floated past him, tickling his steaming shins. He had to limp in further, to the knees. His toes gummed up with silt, the throbbing in his foot subsided, and such blessed coolness shivered up from below, that Valerych nearly began to cry again, face crumpling in a grimace of mute bodily joy. He splashed his palms in the water, ducklike, knowing all the while that this was dangerous, forbidden, that he was probably already halfway to perishing. I have every right to cool down in this heat, why should I be forbidden something so innocent, he raged to himself with a rising, vicious desperation. He cast his eyes around, as though summoning a witness to this injustice from the ranks of the weeping willows and the skimmer-bugs, and the blessed bottle shard…

He saw instead a wall of blinding white flame roll silently across the field toward him, engulfing the grass as it went past. In the heart of the flame was not fire but the plasma of the very sun. It had the shape of a gigantic woman.

Momentarily stupefied, Valerych twigged at last in that still moment that the sky had fallen in. That the end of the world had come in a blaze of pale fire, the opium of the masses was at hand, and the archangel had sounded his horn – Valerych just hadn’t heard him through his earplugs. The village was no more. The new cottages, the field were no more, and there was nowhere to go now, and he would never leave, because all that was left of the world was this little river, reeking of peat and manure. And there was one more thing that Valerych, a committed materialist, instinctively knew straight away: only merciful water would give refuge against the cleansing, chastening flame.

Mud slippery and silky beneath his feet, further

and further in he went.

“Tolya!” The sound of her voice cut right through the earplugs. “Tolya, you idiot, what’s all this for, honestly!”

Antonina. His wife. His very own fishwife, born into grinding rural poverty but straining all her married life to make out like a city lady, she had relieved Valerych of her earsplitting presence more than a decade before. Once upon a time he had answered to Tolya – Anatoly Valerievich, Tolya for short – though very few people remembered it now.

“Tolya, where in the world are you going? Don’t be so dim, use your nut for once. Get on over here, hurry up. I know what you need, I’ll look after you.” She was not haranguing now, but caressing, his dead wife.

“You’re the last thing I need, you old bag!” Valerych roared, and he struck out for the other riverbank – away from the incinerating flame and the village and his dead goddamned wife – toward the other world, the other shore. It was so close and so normal, muddy and crumbling and wall-to-wall with nettles, not fire.

Something raced underwater and broke upon a piece of driftwood – only the wind. Valerych windmilled his arms as he swam, spluttering and sniveling, but the river, endless and redolent of peat and watermelons, clung to him, plastered his sides and belly with chills, poured into his nostrils. He knew he was waiting for it all to be over, but also felt compelled to keep swimming, eyes fixed on the jagged lacework of nettles that framed the other shore. His arms and legs throbbed; he snatched up air but it could barely get through the viscous saliva filling his mouth before whistling painfully out again. Valerych felt something akin to relief when something finally grabbed him and tugged him sharply down. He couldn’t see anymore, but he knew it was her, Antonina – bloated and corpse-blue, with bulging eyes like hardboiled eggs, her face glittering with thin trails of riverweed and a pike-cheek coyly gleaming from one earlobe. He didn’t need to see; he knew her by the unmistakable feel of her soft, creased skin, like the peel of a rotting peach. With a flourish of fish breath over

 the suddenly struggling, kicking Valerych, Antonina took him gently by the shoulders and drew him under, where it was cool and dark.

A soft breeze riffled through the winter-cress as though nothing was the matter at all, and the woods shivered on their horizon. The little concrete cottages, each with an identical rusty-brown roof, dotted their fenced hillside like field mushrooms after rain. A sudden gust of wind cut across the still surface of the river, spoiling the ripples that still radiated from its center, and gliding down the grass, knocked at the dingy green gate bearing the dacha cooperative’s official name, as though checking it was well-barred. The gate squeaked, but only quietly. 

2VITYOK

Vityok, the sinewy, sturdy kind of guy whose age is impossible to guess at, lived in the last house on Rowan Street, just over the fence from Valerych. His dacha was an old-fashioned, timber one, handed down from his granddad, but still robust. Vityok’s otherwise inconspicuous wife could usually be seen bustling in and out from the veg patch, and in and out of the house. Everyone called her Auntie Zhenya: she was always sweeping, weeding, scraping, even hammering and painting sometimes, balanced on the top of a rickety stepladder. Vityok spent his time mainly in the lean-to annex, which was the site of the dacha’s kitchenette. Everything he needed was right there: the fridge, the radio, a pile of old magazines and a little couch. On occasion, the range was topped triumphantly with the very joy of his heart and apple of his eye: this was a factory-made distilling apparatus, a birthday present from Vityok’s enterprising work mates one year. It was the single time they got it exactly right. Vityok tooled around with the thing no less lovingly than classic car enthusiasts kit out and polish their big toys; with his own hands he washed it and dried it, loaded it with unexpectedly imaginative ingredient combinations, observed keenly every stage of the brewing process, and personally sampled the first skim. Something hefty and intense would wake inside Vityok after that first taste, something that moved inside him seeking escape, pushed him out from the lean-to and blew him this way and that up and down his plot: to the outhouse, out of toilet paper as usual, or else to the apple trees, whose heavily laden branches had not been propped up in time, also as usual. And all roads led to Auntie Zhenya, who just then would seem endlessly busy with inessential errands, but never getting round to the things that really needed doing. It was much more urgent, of course, to sort out her plastic bags or make yet another rag floor mat for the veranda, than make sure there was something to wipe your ass with. Flushed and huffy, Vityok would follow her balefully around, while she pretended not to notice his agitation. She’d dash between the various flashpoints of her frenetic activity, but eventually give in:

“Full to the brim again, are you?”

And Vityok could finally rear up at her. His murky sense of ill will toward his scraggy, irritating wife, with her bland smell and the way she always had that moony, concerned expression on her face, ejecting and exploding out of him. He would point at her, with a biblical gesture of rage, and growl:

“You…!”

Auntie Zhenya always tried to scurry away, but Vityok would catch her, shake her, grab her by the hands again: “You… you…!”

Finally, Valerych – who could hear them perfectly well from his plot – would pop up over the fence. Chiding and conciliating in his reverberating low mutter, Valerych would then disappear and pop out again through the gate. Auntie Zhenya would clutch her bosom with her red, roughened hands, apologetic and mortified, as Valerych put his arm about the subsiding Vityok, and drew him inside the lean-to. There they’d do a second sampling, and a third, or however many could be managed. They’d put the radio on and chase the moonshine down with whatever bits of food Auntie Zhenya quickly flung on the table for them, then go promenading round the village, arguing hotly and singing songs, existential suffering writ large on their brows.

This is all to say that Vityok and Valerych were mates, and old ones at that.

In the early days after the way out of the village mysteriously vanished, Vityok took it all on the chin. Naturally he was as astonished as anyone, but for him it was somehow more congenial than for the others. While the dachniks wandered around in baffled clumps, Vityok examined all aspects of the pumping station that still remained immediately before the missing turning, as though 

looking for a seam in the fabric of reality, slapped his thigh, and said: “That’s something else, that is!” Auntie Zhenya confided to her girlfriends, quietly, that her spouse believed it all to be a supernatural event, a miracle even, and expected hordes of scientists and journalists to descend on the village once everything went back to normal. With this many witnesses to hand, and the fact of the disappearing road and gate personally documented by Valerych and his little camera, they would never get away with the usual blah-blah-blah. They would all have to admit that there was an anomaly, right here in the commonplace Soviet-era dacha village. Right here on the banks of their little Sushka, and not down in some cactus-ridden foreign desert, which regular people had only ever seen on TV.

Nor did the disappearance of the Aksenovs, who drove to the next village over, distress him unduly. They weren’t fools, he told Valerych stoutly; they’d figure it out. Maybe their car stalled, or something weird was going on in the neighboring village too, so they had to keep going. None of the village phones were working, so they could hardly let anyone know, could they?

Several days after the road out disappeared, Auntie Zhenya heard hissing and stifled moans from the lean-to. It was evening, and the village goings-on had a rather more depressing effect on her than on her spouse, so she felt some alarm; she peeked inside the kitchenette gingerly, holding out a short broom, which was the nearest thing to hand.

Heady gusts of moonshine vapor streamed forth from the open door. She saw Vityok at the table, furiously winding the radio handle. Instead of the usual songs and news bulletins, the radio emitted a steady hiss, enlivened occasionally with eerie, unearthly yelps.

Vityok took another swig, gave Auntie Zhenya a look of pure despair and moaned: “It’s not working!”

“Well, of course it’s not working. None of the cell phones have got a signal, and the TV over at Tamara Yakovlevna’s...”

Vityok plonked his glass onto the table heavily and aimed his index finger at his wife:

“You…”

Auntie Zhenya gasped, shut the door smartly, and beat a prudent retreat to the house. She knew from experience that when Vityok was in a raging mood, the main thing was to steer clear for a while, and he might forget about her entirely.

neasy night, waking from sudden tremors to sit up in bed and blink at the inky darkness, and turn on the bedside lamp. She thought she could hear footsteps, or else strange voices. She dreamed that her bedroom door had vanished too, gone the way of the missing turning. When someone rapped sharply on her windowpane at dawn, she nearly vaulted out of her bed in fright.

It was Vityok, bloated and pickled with the mother of all hangovers. He was wearing a dark, overlarge jacket, an old pair of trousers, and a flat cap – his special “forest” gear. He even had with him his particular walking stick, a rowan branch he’d planed down to a smooth finish.

“Where… where are you…” Auntie Zhenya whispered.

“Mushrooming,” he answered hoarsely. “Be back before lunch.”

Auntie Zhenya ran out in her nightgown, and chased after him, wailing: what did he mean mushrooms, how could he be thinking about going into those woods, people were disappearing, the Aksenovs, the laborers, others, the devil only knew what was going on, the chairwoman had told them to bar their gates and not step foot outside the village, and she was right, they had to wait it out, sit tight until it all resolved itself… Auntie Zhenya’s voice gradually took on a remarkable, desperate pitch; even Vityok seemed surprised enough to slow down a little, enough to remind her of the old saying about those who helped themselves. The way out had not reappeared, therefore someone had to go and look for it, and here was Vityok who had to get back to work on Monday, because his boss was an asshole who wouldn’t take “couldn’t leave the dacha” for an excuse. And besides, maybe something serious did happen out there, but they couldn’t get any wind of it, with all communication fried. If everybody just sat tight and waited for things to resolve, they’d never have won the war or gone into space, just sat there waiting for someone to come and do it for them.

Auntie Zhenya gave Vityok a look of pure confusion – she was a simple soul, and had not caught the connection with the war and with space – then carried on:

“But why go now, it’s only Saturday… You could hang on, wait a bit…”

But Vityok had had enough. “Wait a bit? Sit around with you, you mean?”

The gate in the perimeter fence that opened straight into the woods was only a few steps away now. Having run out of arguments, Auntie Zhenya simply gripped Vityok’s sleeve. He spat irritably, and pushed on, but Auntie Zhenya doggedly hung on, sliding down the path after him, her slippers swishing across the grass. Vityok’s jacket twisted around him, the worn cloth close to ripping. Vityok attempted to prize his sleeve out of his wife’s grip, but she only tightened it, pinching him painfully through the fabric. They struggled silently for a moment, not even looking at one another. Finally, Auntie Zhenya capitulated and let go, rubbing her blotchy palms together. Vityok righted his clothing with one fierce jerk and swung open the gate.

He loved going for mushrooms almost as passionately as he loved his distilling apparatus. And he inevitably felt better – fresher, you might say – each time he stepped over the boundary between village and wood. No matter that the wood was sparse and rife with human trash; even so, it was a place where Vityok was hunter, provider, tracker.

He rolled his shoulders and flung his arms wide, breathed in a deep lungful of the grassy-piney scent and set off unhurriedly down the forest path.

“Back before lunch,” came his wife’s tremulous voice behind him.

“Go get cooking,” said Vityok without turning, and gathered pace. Auntie Zhenya stared after him until the jacket vanished completely in the dense forest shadows.

He was not back before lunch. Not by evening, nor on the second day. While her neighbors ran through the stages of astonishment, denial, resignation, and then a flaring of hope again, to get back to the world, Auntie Zhenya spent that first week of the village’s seclusion simply awaiting her husband’s return.

No one noticed her devoted, dogged heroism. Vityok’s lunch stayed in the fridge, untouched. Auntie Zhenya did not eat any, just checked from time to time that the sorrel soup had not gone off. Even Valerych had no idea – he spent his days investigating, conferring with the other dachniks, and was generally busy. Auntie Zhenya, meanwhile, stalked up and down the fence, scrutinizing the hostile-seeming, preternaturally quiet forest. She crossed paths with Valerych at some point, when each had the idea of getting down to their respective veg patch for a bit: no point in letting the cucumbers rot, whatever else was going on. Auntie Zhenya said

hello and asked for his advice, blandly – did he think she should report Vityok to the police as missing. Valerych gave her a long, baffled look, after which they both fell silent for a long while.

On the seventh day, toward evening, a cloud gray as cast iron belly-flopped over the village and began to pour down. Everyone scurried indoors to shut up the windows, and only Auntie Zhenya remained at her sentry post by the gate. In her raincoat she resembled a squat, shiny mushroom. Her rubber boots left neat, small footprints in the very muddy path.

When it grew dark, Auntie Zhenya was finally forced to retreat to the dacha, but she carried on watching, now peeking out from her porch, now peeping through the window. And then, when she poked her face through the door once more and pointed her flashlight into the gloom, she caught sight of another, bigger set of footprints beside her own. She followed them, stepping into the blurry, slippery footprints first down to the yard gate, then to the shed, and finally down to the lean-to kitchenette.

Auntie Zhenya opened the door a crack. In the unlit room she could clearly hear strange noises, the kind of squelching and rustling you had with a quagmire or bog. Auntie Zhenya shut her eyes and fought hard against the impulse to run back to her safe, warm dacha. She slunk along the wall, felt for the light switch, and…

There was a dark and conical shape in the middle of the kitchen. This was Vityok, extraordinarily dirty, and covered in wet pine needles that stuck to him like bark. Motionless, he stared straight ahead intensely, like someone struggling to process something his mind was barely capable of grasping at all. In his hand was a piece of cloth, knotted like a purse. Squinting hard at Auntie Zhenya, as though identifying her in a lineup, Vityok hesitated, then held out the purse to her. It was the hood of his rain jacket, torn clean off; in it lay some squashed, slimy mushrooms.

Auntie Zhenya spoke quietly.

“Well, you’re home at last.”

he outhouse. Once he got over the shock, Valerych rallied and waved his arms in the air, calling out to his pal in a just-woke-up voice not quite his own. Vityok, paying him no mind, wandered up to the peeling wooden hut, and tried to walk into the door. He seemed to have forgotten the idea of the handle, and pushed at the door with his whole body, again and again, unhurriedly but with determination. Valerych stopped hollering and watched him in great puzzlement. Finally, Vityok triumphed over the door, his sleeve catching the handle by accident, and got inside.

Soon the entire village came along to get a look at the returnee. Before Vityok, the only people to come back were that couple from Forest Street whose dog led them out again, but they hadn’t related anything useful. A few of the migrant laborers seemed to have come back too but, truth be told, they all looked the same to the dachniks, and so a man who had never left might well have been mistaken for one who returned. Also, none of them spoke Russian properly. Vityok, on the other hand, had spent an entire week in the woods, which would have been extraordinary even in the carefree days when one could drive or walk out of the village at will.

Naturally, they had so many questions for him, the chief of which was, what’s it like out there, on the outside? But no matter how they pressed him, Vityok remained silent. He sat at the kitchen table, still in his “forest” jacket, hunched and swaying slightly from side to side. According to the flushed and voluble Auntie Zhenya, he was refusing to get changed – actually pushing her away when she attempted to unzip the jacket – and would neither wash nor sleep, though he looked tired to death. The one thing Vityok did willingly, constantly, intently, was eat. The table before him was stacked with plates, licked clean, and under the table were heaps of empty pickle jars and tin cans: Vityok carried on eating, hoovering up sorrel soup, mushrooms, jam, corned beef, things from the vegetable beds. Auntie Zhenya busied herself by the little range, using both gas rings, and more than once had to prize raw potatoes out of her husband’s grip.

By the time Katya looked in on them, the outbuilding was crammed full of people and chairwoman Claudia Il’yinichna had taken over the interrogation, with no great success.

“Listen here, Vitaly…” she said again and again, in a futile bid for his attention. He simply carried on chewing.

“It’s Victor, actually…” his wife interjected meekly, but the chairwoman either did not hear, or perhaps was just used to ignoring mousy little Auntie Zhenya, and bent down to him again after a time:

“Listen here, Vitaly…”

The swollen tick attached to Vityok’s neck jogged up and down in rhythm with his moving jaws. The room was close and rank with the smells of earth, rotting moss, and unwashed flesh. But by far the worst, most revolting thing was the way that Vityok ate, gurgling and snorting, guzzling food down with frantic little sobs. His face was blank, glum, and terribly focused.

“Well, this is impossible!” With that, Claudia Il’yinichna finally turned back to the large audience.

“It’s all right,” Valerych faltered. “He’ll come to, then he’ll talk.”

Just then Vityok shoveled in the last spoonful of millet porridge. He bent his face to the empty bowl, then looked stonily at the table and saw the plump, resting arm of the chairwoman upon it. Vityok grabbed her hand and pulled it toward his mouth. Claudia Il’yinichna gasped and tried to free herself, but Vityok would not let go. His gaze was trained on her index finger, which did rather resemble a sausage.

Beroev bounded up the table and punched Vityok in the eye, with enough force to pitch him off his stool. The women squealed. Vityok gathered himself together, jerked his head sideways and, still on his hands and knees, rushed at the door. When strapping and bearded Stepanov went down, headbutted in the knee by the escaping Vityok, everyone else backed out of the way: there was something awful in the way that Vityok scurried so easily on all fours, like a gargantuan bedbug…

Vityok crashed out of the lean-to, sprang to his feet, and ran toward the woods, to the fence. It was almost by the gate that Valerych managed to collar him. Vityok pushed him aside roughly, knocking him off his feet, and made to climb up the rickety old fence. It was as though he had forgotten about the existence of the gate altogether. When Valerych grabbed his feral drinking buddy by the pants leg, the worn material tore, revealing a pale and hairy leg. Valerych leapt up, hooked Vityok, 

who was still trying to crawl up the fence like an insect, by his belt, and pulled him down to the ground. Vityok resisted, snarling.

“Is that how it is, now,” Valerych said reproachfully, as he sat on Vityok and held him firmly to the ground. “Filled your belly and back you go?”

Auntie Zhenya arrived, wheezing, bringing with her a coiled washing line. Valerych spent a good old while making complicated knots, then finally lifted the hobbled Vityok to his feet, dusted him off, and dragged him bodily back to the kitchenette.

They sat Vityok back on the stool again, but no one felt like asking him anything now. Despite their burning curiosity, the villagers perceived in him something alien and frightening; however, this was difficult to put to words without sounding stupid. They began to disperse, carefully keeping their eyes away from Vityok and from Auntie Zhenya too, who could have used some friends and some help, this was obvious, except that how was she to be helped?

Claudia Il’yinichna departed but promised to return as soon as Vityok had come back to his senses. Finally, only Valerych was left.

“Well then… you just, you know…” He gave Vityok a pat on the shoulder. Vityok slowly turned and looked at him sideways. His very ordinary, pale eyes expressed nothing at all. Valerych had seen that look before, but only on a dead fish.

“Here, have some pea soup,” Auntie Zhenya said, setting a bowl before Valerych. “It’s gone lunchtime already, what with all the fuss.”

She slid the second bowl toward herself, dipped the spoon in, and brought it to her mouth, blowing, then passed it to Vityok’s lips, already smacking with anticipation. Vityok slurped greedily, leaning forward over the table.

“Easy, easy now, you’ll overturn everything. Look at you,” crooned Auntie Zhenya. “Hungry, aren’t you? Running around in the forest, nothing but pinecones to eat, sure you’re hungry. Don’t rush, don’t rush. Go on, eat as much as you like.”

To Valerych, this idyllic feeding tableau seemed horrid and creepy. Disquieted, he spooned a bit of soup, for politeness’ sake, then edged out of the tight space sideways, like a crab.

Auntie Zhenya seemed not to notice him at all. Valerych stalled for a moment on the porch, wondering whether it would be rude to leave just

 like that, without saying a word, then thought to hell with it – spat out a peapod shred that had lodged itself in his back teeth – and made for the gate.

Nikita Pavlov – the youngest “real dachnik” of the village – was perhaps more disturbed than most by the state of the returned Vityok. Tall and lanky, Nikita had a boyish face for someone pushing thirty. His was the generation that almost never graced their large family dachas, the proper old-time ones of mature veg beds and lilacs, with an appearance. This irritated the old-timers immensely. The days of school breaks obligatorily spent watering, harvesting and turning over the rows were at an end, today’s young people were rooted in city asphalt. They didn’t just go on vacation, they flew to places, risking their lives – to those incomprehensible scorching countries where there were terrorists and sharks and tsunamis – while the dachas stood empty, dried-up orchards choking with labyrinthine thorn, fences collapsing, wood pigeons roosting under the rafters…

No one could complain of Nikita Pavlov, however. He visited his parents’ dacha regularly, including in the off-season. His parents never seemed to have the time, and also in their old age they developed a fondness for abroad. But Nikita kept one room habitable – the rest were filled to the brim with perpetual dacha odds and ends, and locked – and did minor repairs, and bits of repainting, and even started up a simple vegetable plot with easy-grow greens. Everything he did was a bit clumsy, and almost shy, but the villagers approved of his adherence to dacha traditions. He wanted to be closer to nature, to his birthright of birches and the little river Sushka – good for him.

But really, Nikita was a drunk. He was ashamed, and suffered from the way his highly educated, well-mannered family treated him, with a reproachful sort of kindliness. The family genuinely pitied him as a poor, sick boy, and let him sponge off them, as he could never hold down a job. Nikita accepted that he was a loser, but he couldn’t give up the sole pleasure at his disposal – getting wasted and almost happy. He was a quiet drunk, solitary and somewhat furtive. And you could do that

at the dacha, drink yourself into a stupor with a nearly clean conscience. In the fresh air, so to say. You always had a chaser right there too, in your own veg patch.

After the village shut in on itself, Nikita found that he required a bigger hit to achieve a state of relative tranquility. Although his stocks were plentiful, he did panic a little when he imagined his supplies running out before the magic faded and you could walk out of the village again. He wanted out, to be among people and liquor stores.

But of course, it was all just beginning.

The place reeked of stale alcohol fumes. Like that village drunk Uncle Vasya used to smell, long ago, going about knocking on doors, hungover, barging in to ask “if there was anything.” Nikita’s mom would hand him a little bottle of cheap eau de cologne, or some medicinal spirit distillation, and wrinkle her nose as she watched him down it.

Now it was Nikita who smelled like that. The thing that had calmed him and helped him sleep now flared up inside him, shot a bolt of agony into his skull, and spilled shiveringly into his legs. Nikita could feel his skin blistering and turning blue, turning into Uncle Vasya’s jogging bottoms that always had a rip in the groin. Lucky Uncle Vasya, he’d copped it and left the village. Nikita was afraid of death, mostly because of the thoughts that would undoubtedly drill into his skull in those final moments: I was given a life, but I didn’t live, I wasted it all. I didn’t manage anything, just rushed through it, and now this life is being taken from me, and there’s no trying again, even though I’ve only just started to understand how life should be lived. I’ve turned into Uncle Vasya. Except he didn’t get it, and so he died happy, but I do, I understand everything… It was too hard, when you did understand, the knowledge only scraped away at you, it made you frantic and ran cold beneath your ribs, the horror of seeing everything clearly. So you had to numb yourself, to skate along the shallowest surface of what you knew. Nikita also knew that as soon as his cognac ran out, he would have to face that clarity of understanding once more. He would know absolutely that he was locked in forever among these little houses and apple trees, with the old women and the hoarse roosters, and there would be no more life at all ever, only the

allotted time of lucid horror. They would never even find out who had locked the villagers in, or why – nobody, for no reason, just because…

A loud bang knocked Nikita out of his doze, and he gave a startled scream, almost in reply. His blanket had fallen to the floor. A numbing horror – he felt it physically, like a lump lodged in his throat – superseded both his headache and the cold he felt. Alcohol was a depressant, nothing anti about it, said Nikita to himself, feeling hungover and repentant, much as usual. Belatedly he noticed that someone was rapping at the window. Counting the room’s corners to get his bearings in the gloom, Nikita leaned heavily on the windowsill and pulled the curtain aside. His first thought was that someone else went nuts the way that Vityok had and was trying to get inside.

But in the predawn twilight he saw that it was his neighbor. Katya, that was her name, wasn’t it? Abruptly he realized that he wasn’t wearing any trousers, and crouched down a bit, so that his lower parts could not be seen through the open window.

Katya, to be fair, was also not exactly dressed. She wore only a raggedy old nightie, but this didn’t seem to bother her in the least. Her eyes were sunken. She stared searchingly at Nikita, then asked:

“Can you hear?”

“I’m not deaf,” said Nikita, and promptly winced with self-loathing; here was a woman, who had come to him in the night, distressed and practically naked, and the only thing he could think of was to be rude to her. No, he would never have a real life, it was all useless. He’d been given a little span of time, but it was just to tease him with what might have been possible…

But then he did hear it, the strange sound that came seemingly from nowhere and was almost impossible to describe, except as simultaneously dreary and languishing. It wasn’t loud exactly, but it filled the world and drowned out birdsong and the clicking of the grasshoppers, and even the mighty frog chorus down at the river. It soaked the village like cold gloop, seeped into every crack and crevice, oozed into your brain and enveloped your heart, all-pervasive, unbearable… Nikita stood agog, more and more certain with each passing moment that it was that sound that lurched about inside his mind, spinning dreary, self-hating thoughts. The bitter lump in his throat was that sound, too.

“Can you hear it?” Katya said again.

 find the source of that noise and silence it forever. As they staggered through the dark – Nikita had put on his trousers but forgot about shoes – they discovered that they were not alone in that state of mind. Up and down the village, paths flickered with the figures of awakened dachniks, as they clicked gates open and shut, and rustled the grass.

“Is it wolves?” some shawled woman asked Nikita, pressing her large bosom close. “Do you hear it? Could they get in? My brother was taken by wolves, back in our home village. He was so young… Are they coming now?”

Nikita couldn’t think of a thing to say. The woman moved off into the gloom, without a pause in her weepy querying. She continued asking the same questions into the gloom.

They turned into Forest Street, and then the sound abruptly changed. It was now a very distinct, clotted hissing that didn’t flood the world but rather emanated, like a beam, from a specific place. This hissing, unlike the cosmic draught that had drawn them out of doors, did not provoke in him the same vast dreariness and cold, and Nikita even perked up a little. Quickening his pace, he was soon at the fence which marked the beginning of Vityok’s plot.

“Wait, come on, wait for me,” Katya whispered hotly behind him, but he was already swinging open the gate.

The lean-to window shone brightly in the gloom. Peering inside, Nikita saw Vityok, Auntie Zhenya, and Valerych. The latter was sitting at the table, talking, while Vityok rocked slowly on his stool. He was tied up. Auntie Zhenya stood by the window, at the stove. Nikita pressed his face to the glass, the better to see, and Auntie Zhenya, glancing vaguely at the window in passing, shrieked when she saw the ghostly imprint of his face on the other side. Nikita smiled at her ruefully and waved, to demonstrate to the best of his ability that he was not the one to be scared of.

Auntie Zhenya flung open the door, letting out a new wave of the hissing at Nikita and Katya, and chattered at them feverishly:

“Why would you give a person such a fright, you ought to have knocked at least or come straight inside, why the window, give me a heart attack or something, don’t just stand there, come, come inside, it’s open, we’re having some breakfast…”

As he stepped inside, Nikita glanced at the kitchen clock – it seemed that breakfast started at four a.m. And then he saw the source of the ear-scraping, rough hissing. There was a radio on the kitchen table. It was on. Vityok was studying it intently and seemed to be tuning in.

“Oh, that’s so he doesn’t get lonely,” Auntie Zhenya rushed to explain. “As soon as I go out of the room, he’s pining for me straight away. You’re just messing around, aren’t you, to keep me with you the whole time? But look, look how many guests we have. All the neighbors came to visit you, see how jolly. And it’s time to have some kasha now, isn’t it? You want to have some nice kasha, don’t you?”

All this she said in a high, playful voice, like talking to an infant. Vityok was utterly absorbed by the hissing radio, listening with the grave and somber look of someone getting reports from the front line. Nikita felt his left arm break out in goosebumps.

“You know, there’s this sound,” Katya said, suddenly, sounding unexpectedly businesslike. “This… strange sort of sound, did you hear it?”

“Oh, that’s just the radio, playing for him. He was so bored otherwise, he just bashed everything in sight. Bashed his own head at the wall, do you see the bump there?”

Auntie Zhenya turned to her husband.

“Who was hitting their head at the wall, eh, Vitya dear? Who is it won’t let me sleep? I’d only just dozed off, too… But maybe you two would like some breakfast?”

Valerych, who hadn’t said a word yet, looked at her from the corner, and the look was of disbelief and disapproval.

In the morning there wasn’t much talk of the strange nocturnal sound. Only that a few of the women complained to one another that something was humming in the night, making it hard to sleep. The dachniks worked on their plots and helped their more improvident neighbors out with salt and matches; some of the younger people were already running out. Sveta Beroeva promenaded her children round the village as always, strictly according to schedule.

spouse were up to, but saw nothing of them apart from a couple of times that Auntie Zhenya accompanied Vityok, walking sedately with his arms tied behind him like a prisoner, to the outhouse. Valerych didn’t call out to them though; on the contrary, each time he crouched low in the bushes.

In the night, it was the chairwoman Claudia Il’yinichna Petukhova who awoke with a drear longing and a hitherto unknown stirring in her breast. She thought on how she was an old woman already, and how she’d soon die of causes that were natural but hardly any less unfair for all that. Wondering at this turn of mind, Claudia Il’yinichna laid a palm over her droopy bosom. Time was, when she was young, she had a bosom like ripe apples, and her first – who was not in fact Petukhov – well, he went wild with delight when he liberated them – another first for her – from her stiff and modest brassiere. ...