The Dark Falling

In the seminary, in that glorious town where the ringing of bells mingled with the shouted curses of half-drunk deacons and the smell of incense mixed with the greasy smoke of burnt porridge, everyone knew the seminarian Ivan, nicknamed Little Bun. And mind you, the name didn't stick because of his girth –on the contrary, he was lanky, sinewy, and his face was as dark as a cockroach behind the stove. No, it was for a far stranger quality, almost supernatural: he got out of everything. Escaped whippings, escaped hunger, escaped debts and the rage of his superiors. The rector would order a flogging, and there was Ivan on the other side of town, sipping tea with bagels at some baker's widow's house, gazing at the overseer with such innocent eyes that the man's rod hand would drop all by itself. It was as if Fate herself, chuckling into her mustache, rolled him past every ditch and pothole. But there was something dark in this endless escaping, something Ivan himself felt but was afraid to name. He never stayed anywhere. Never attached himself to anyone. People were like mile markers on a post road – there for a second, gone the next. And he had a secret, shameful passion: spiritual gluttony. He devoured other people's fates. You know what he loved? To sneak into a corner of a tavern where some wandering pilgrim was telling stories about a dead man's apparition, and listen and listen until the chill ran down his spine. He loved reading church death registers, picturing how this or that servant of God lay in the earth and what was happening to him now. He was like a man standing at the edge of a bottomless pit, unable to look away –even as his feet slipped on the clay. Once, during the holidays, he and two comrades ended up in a remote village lost in the Pripet marshes. A miserable, joyless place. The cottages hunched there like old crows in the rain. The travelers asked for a night's lodging in the last hut on the edge – the home of an ancient crone the locals whispered about and crossed themselves whenever they mentioned. Ivan, as usual, paid it no mind. He'd gotten out of worse fixes, hadn't he? That night, though, came something that still, to this day, makes the hair stand up on the back of his neck whenever he remembers it. He woke because he couldn't breathe. Something sat on his chest – light as a bundle of dry grass, but pressing down with terrifying force. In the moonlight filtering through the grimy little window, he made out a face: the old woman's face, but not quite. It was shifting, changing, features flowing into one another like a reflection in water after a stone's been thrown in. The crone leaned close, right up to his face, and began to whisper, and that whisper was like the rustle of mouse feet on dry paper: "I scraped you from the bin.. I kneaded you. I put you in the oven. And still you roll and roll. Let me just take a little bite..." Ivan, without knowing how, threw up his hand with his brass body cross. It glinted dull in the darkness. A sound came – like a snap of an overripe pod and then everything went quiet. The old woman lay on the floor, lifeless, her face frozen in a grimace where spite and laughter mixed in a strange way. Ivan didn't wait for dawn. He walked out of that hut and left the village, into the night, into the woods. His comrades, waking and finding her dead, ran after him shouting – but in the forest they lost his trail. As if the earth had swallowed him up. Or rather, as if he'd rolled away. At midnight, the church came alive. First came a sound – low, a deep belly-hum rising from underground. It grew slowly, filling everything, and soon Ivan could hear nothing else. The walls vibrated. The pentagrams painted on them began to swell and darken, as if filling from within with some black liquid. And from every sign, every line, something began to seep. They were shadows. They poured down to the floor, gathered into shapes – tall, stooped, their outlines vague and blurred. No horns, no hooves, no tails. But there was something in their presence so ancient, so utterly hopeless, that Ivan's heart stopped. They surrounded his chalk circle in a tight ring. There were many of them – maybe a dozen, maybe more. They stood silent and watched him, and there was no malice in their gazes. Worse than that: there was patient, calm expectation. And then they spoke. It wasn't speech as you or I understand it. They didn't open their mouths, didn't move their lips. Their voices simply appeared in the air, weaving together into a horrible, many layered chorus. And in that chorus, every sound had its place – low bass rumbling in the floorboards, a high pitched shriek cutting the air just under the dome, and middle voices that wrapped around you, slipped under your ribs, turned your soul inside out. "Still standing?" whispered one voice, soft and insinuating. "Why bother? You've never stood still before. You've just rolled and rolled. Your whole life is nothing but a road." Ivan said nothing. The cross in his hands grew warm. "Your little circle won't last," a second voice cut in, rough and wheezing. "The chalk will wear away. Time's running. But we can wait. We've been waiting for you since the cradle." "Throw away the cross," a third voice – female, weeping – intertwined with the chorus. "What do you need it for? You're no saint. You wanted to know what's beyond the line, didn't you? So find out. Throw it away, and we'll show you everything. Everything you've been so hungry to see." Something inside Ivan stirred. That was true, wasn't it? He'd wanted to know his whole life. He'd absorbed other people's deaths, other people's fears, other people's fates, like a dry sponge. And now that knowing stood right in front of him, reaching out its hazy hands, he shrank back in terror. So he'd wanted to know – but he didn't want to be inside that knowing. He wanted to watch from the sidelines, stay clean and untouched. So he'd been lying to himself all along. "Throw away the cross," the voices merged into one, and that single voice shook the last shards of glass rattling in the window frames. "Throw it away, and it's over. No fear, no pain. Just the road. The eternal road. You'll become what you've always been: the one who rolls." And then the Leader stepped forward – a fox in a dirty, tattered cassock. He was taller than the rest. His figure seemed almost solid, almost real. But his face... His face was in constant, slow, unstoppable motion. His eyes drifted from his forehead down to his cheeks. His mouth stretched in a silent laugh and then pinched into a thin slit. His nose sharpened, then blurred. It was a face that could not stop changing – a face doomed to eternal transformation. He came right to the edge of the chalk circle. Ivan watched the chalk begin to smoke under his weightless step, sending up a thin wisp of acrid vapor. The Leader leaned forward – so close that Ivan felt his breath on his face. It was dry and smelled of dust, like the air over an old abandoned road. "Ivan," the Leader said. His voice was quiet, but every word stamped itself into Ivan's mind like a seal into hot wax. "You called us. You did it yourself. Your whole life. With every thought you had about someone else's death. With every look you took into someone else's grave. You wanted to know what it was like. I'll show you. Throw away the cross." Ivan wanted to answer, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He only shook his head – a desperate, jerky motion. "Throw it away," the Leader repeated, and there was something strange and horrible – almost tender – in his voice. "We won't touch you. We'll just… take you in. You'll be one of us. Everywhere and nowhere. In every shadow on the road. In every wheel's creak. In every dying man's last breath. Isn't that what you wanted? Throw it away." And then Ivan, gathering the last shred of his will, pried his dry lips apart and rasped: "I ran away from my grandfather. I ran away from my grandmother. And I'll run away from you too." Pathetic words, almost childish. But ringing inside them was that stubborn, pointless, blind will to live – the same will that makes a worm writhe on a hook. The Leader straightened. And in that same instant, his form began to warp. What a terrible sight. His head tilted back at an impossible angle. His shoulders pressed into his torso as if an unseen hand were squeezing him. His paws pulled into his chest, and his whole figure went wavy, like air over a hot stove. He didn't scream or groan. He simply dissolved. First the clear outlines disappeared. Then the silhouette faded. Only a trembling haze remained, with something still living and longing trapped inside. And then that too faded away. The chorus began to vanish with him. The voices of the unclean ones tangled, jumbled, lost their harmony. The pentagrams on the walls ran down in black streams, as if weeping pitch. The shadows darted about the corners, shrinking, dwindling, and finally retreated back into the walls, into the cracks, into the splinters. The church fell still. So still that Ivan could hear his own heart hammering – and that hammering seemed deafening. He stood in the circle until dawn, afraid to move. When the first sunbeam – gray, timid –seeped through a crack in the boarded – up window, he finally lowered the hand holding the cross. His fingers had gone stiff and wouldn't unclench. One by one, he forced them straight with his other hand. In the morning, peasants from a neighboring village found him. They'd come to the woods for firewood. He lay on the church porch, his eyes empty. Looked like someone had sucked the soul right out of them. They called out to him –no answer. So they came closer – and staggered back in horror. The seminarian's hair, light brown just yesterday, had turned completely white, like snow in January. His young, cocky face was now a web of tiny wrinkles, as if he'd lived thirty years in a single night. But that wasn't the worst part. There was the smell. A thick, cloying, sickly sweet smell – the smell of freshly baked bread.