“What the devil?” muttered Alexander Semionovich. “The windows are shut—they couldn’t have flown out through the roof!” He tilted his head back and looked up where there were several wide holes in the glass transom of the roof.
“What’s wrong with you, Alexander Semionovich,” Dunia cried extremely surprised. “All we need is flying chicks. They are here somewhere. Cheep … cheep … cheep,” she began to call, looking in the corners of greenhouse where there were dust flowerpots, boards, and other rubbish. But no chicks responded anywhere.
All of the personnel ran about the sovkhoz yard for two hours searching for the nimble chicks, but no one found anything anywhere. The day went by in extreme agitation. The guard over the chambers was increased by one watchman, and he had been given the strictest order to look through the windows of the chambers every fifteen minutes and call Alexander Semionovich the second anything happened. The guard sat by the door, sulking, holding his rifle between his knees. Alexander Semionovich was snowed under with chores, and he did not have his lunch until almost two in the afternoon. After lunch he took an hour-long nap in the cools shade on the former ottoman of Prince Sheremetiev, drank some sovkhoz kvass, dropped by the greenhouse and made sure that everything was in perfect order there now. The old watchman was sprawled on his belly on a piece of burlap and staring, blinking, into the observation window of the first chamber. The guard was sitting alertly without leaving the door.
But there was also something new: the eggs inloaded last of all began to make a gulping and clucking sound, as if someone were sobbing inside.
“Oh, they’re ripening, said Alexander Semionovich. “Getting ripe, I see it now. Did you see?” he addressed the watchman …
“Yes, it’s a marvel,” the latter replied in a completely ambiguous tone, shaking his head.
Alexander Semionovich sat by the chambers for a while, but nothing hatched in his presence; he got up, stretched, and declared that he would not leave the estate that day, he would just go down to the pond for a swim, and if anything started to happen, he was to be called immediately. He ran over to the palace to his bedroom, where two narrow spring beds with crumpled linen stood, and on the floor there was a pile of green apples and heaps of millet, prepared for the coming fledglings. He armed himself with a fluffy towel, and after a moment’s thought he picked up his flute, intending to play at leisure over the unruffled waters. He walked out of the palace briskly, cut cross the sovkhoz yard, and headed down the small willow avenue toward the pond. He strode along briskly, swinging the towel and carrying the flute under his arm. The sky was pouring down heat through the willows, and his body ached and begged for water. On his right hand began a thicket of burdocks, into which he spat as he passed by; and immediately there was a rustling in the tangle of broad leaves, as though someone had started dragging a log. Feeling an unpleasant fleeting twinge in his heart, Alexander Semionovich turned his head toward the thicket and looked at it with wonder. The pond had reverberated with no sounds of any kind for two days now. The rustling ceased; the unruffled surface of the pond and the gray roof of the bathhouse flashed invitingly beyond the burdocks. Several dragonflies darted past in front of Alexander Semionovich. He was just about to turn to the wooden planks leading down to the water when the rustle in the greenery was repeated, and it was accompanied by a short hiss, as if a locomotive were discharging steam and oil. Alexander Semionovich got on guard and peered into the dense wall of weeds.
“Alexander Semionovich,” his wife’s voice called at that moment, and her white blouse flashed, disappeared, and flashed again in the raspberry patch. “Wait, I’ll go for a swim too.”
His wife hastened toward the pond, but Alexander Semionovich made no answer, all attention was riveted on the burdocks. A grayish and olive-colored log began to rise from the thicket, growing before his eyes. The log, it seemed to Alexander Semionovich, was splotched with some sort of moist yellowish spots. It began to stretch, flexing and undulating, and it stretched so high that it was above the scrubby little willow … Then the top of the log broke, leaned over somewhat, and over Alexander Semionovich loomed something like a Moscow electric pole in height. But this something was about three times thicker than a pole and far more beautiful, thanks to the scaly tattoo. Still comprehending noting, but his blood running cold, Alexander Semionovich looked at the summit of the terrifying pole, and his heart stopped beating for several seconds. It seemed to him that a frost had suddenly struck the August day, and it turned dim, as though he were looking at the sun through a pair of summer pants.
There turned out to be a head on the upper end of the log. It was flat, pointed, and adorned with a spherical yellow spot on an olive-green background. Lidless, open, icy, narrow eyes sat on the top of the head, and in these eyes gleamed utterly infinite malice. The head made a movement, as though pecking the air, then the pole plunged back into the burdock, and only the eyes remained, staring unblinkingly at Alexander Semionovich. The latter, bathed in sticky sweat, uttered four completely incredulous words, evoked only by terror bordering on insanity. So beautiful were those eyes among the leaves!
“What sort of joke …”
Then he recalled that the fakirs … yes … yes … India … a woven basket and a picture … They charm …
The head arched up again, and the body began to emerge too. Alexander Semionovich lifted the flute to his lips, squeaked hoarsely, and gasping for breath every second, he began to play the waltz from Eugene Onegin. The eyes in the foliage instantly began to smolder with implacable hate for the opera.
“Have you lost your mind, playing in this heat?” Manya’s merry voice resounded, and out of the corner of his eye Alexander Semionovich caught sight of a white spot.
Then a sickening scream pierced through the whole sovkhoz, expanded and flew up into the sky, while the waltz hopped up and down as if it had a broken leg. The head in the thicket shot forward—its eyes left Alexander Semionovich, abandoning his soul to repentance. A snake approximately fifteen yards long and as thick as a man leaped out of the burdock like a steel spring. A cloud of dust whirled from the road and the waltz was over. The snake swept past the sovkhoz manager straight toward the white blouse down the road. Feit saw it all quite distinctly: Manya turned yellow-white, and her long hair stood up like wire a half-yard over her head. Before Feit’s eyes the snake opened its maw for a moment, something like a fork flicked out of it, and as she was sinking to the dust its teeth caught Manya by the shoulder and jerked her a yard above the earth. Manya repeated her piercing death scream. The snake coiled itself into a huge screw, its tail churning up a sandstorm, and it began to crush Manya. She did not utter another sound, and Feit just heard her bones snapping. Manya’s head swept up high over the earth, tenderly pressed to the snake’s cheek. Blood splashed from Manya’s mouth, a broken arm flipped out, and little fountains of blood spurted from under her fingernails. Then, dislocating its jaws, the snake opened its maw, slipped its head over Manya’s all at once, and began to pull itself over her like a glove over a finger. Such hot breath spread all around the snake that it touched Feit’s face, and its tail almost swept him off the road in the acrid dust. It was then that Feit turned gray. First the left, then the right half of his jet-black hair was covered with silver. In mortal nausea he finally tore away from the road, and seeing and hearing nothing, making the countryside resound with wild howls, he took off running …
IX. A LIVING MASS
Shchukin, the agent of the State Political Administration (GPU) at the Dugino Station, was a very brave man. He said thoughtfully to his assistant, redheaded Polaitis, “Oh, well, let’s go. Eh? Get the motorcycle.” Then he was silent for a moment, and added, turning to the man who was sitting on the bench, “Put down the flute.”
But the trembling, gray-haired man on the bench in the office of the Dugino GPU did not put his flute down—he began to cry and mumble. Then Shchukin and Polaitis realized that the flute would have to be taken from him. His fingers seemed froz
en to it. Shchukin, who possessed enormous strength, almost that of a circus performer, began to unbend one finger after the other, and he unbent them all. Then he put the flute on the table.
This was in the early, sunny morning the day following Manya’s death. “You will come with us,” said Shchukin, addressing Alexander Semionovich. “You will show us what happened where.” But Feit moved away from him in horror and covered his face with his hands in defense against a terrible vision.
“You must show us,” Polaitis added sternly.
“No, let him alone. Don’t you see, that man is not himself.”
“Send me to Moscow,” Alexander Semionovich begged, crying.
“You mean you won’t return to the sovkhoz at all?”
But instead of answering, Feit again put out his hands as if to ward them off, and horror poured from his eyes.
“Well, all right,” decided Shchukin. “You really aren’t up to it … I see. The express will be arriving soon, you go ahead and take it.”
Then, while the station guard was plying Alexander Semionovich with water, and the latter’s teeth chattered on the blue, cracked cup, Shchukin and Polaitis held a conference. Polaitis felt that, generally, none of this had happened, and that Feit was simply mentally ill and had had a terrifying hallucination. But Shchukin tended to think that a boa constrictor had escaped from the circus which was currently performing in the town of Grachevka. Hearing their skeptical whispers, Alexander Semionovich stood up. He came to his senses somewhat, and stretching out his arms like a Biblical prophet, he said, “Listen to me. Listen. Why don’t you believe me? It was there. Where do you think my wife is?”
Shchukin became silent and serious and immediately sent some sort of telegram to Grachevka. At Shchukin’s order a third agent was to stay with Alexander Semionovich constantly and was to accompany him to Moscow. Meanwhile, Shchukin and Polaitis started getting ready for the expedition. All they had was one electric revolver, but just that was quite good protection. The 1927 fifty-round model, the pride of French technology, for close-range fighting, had a range of only one hundred paces, but it covered a field two meters in diameter and killed everything alive in this field. It was hard to miss. Shchukin strapped on the shiny electric toy, and Polaitis armed himself with an ordinary, twenty-five-round submachine gun, took some cartridge belts, and on a single motorcycle they rolled off toward the sovkhoz through the morning dew and chill. The motorcycle clattered off the twenty versts between the station and the sovkhoz in fifteen minutes (Feit had walked all night, crouching now and then in the roadside shrubbery in spasms of mortal terror) and the sun was really beginning to bake when the sugar-white becolumned palace flashed through the greenery on the rise—at the bottom of which meandered the Top River. Dead silence reigned all around. Near the entrance to the sovkhoz the agents passed a peasant in a cart. He was ambling slowly along, loaded with sacks, and soon he was left behind. The motorcycle swept across the bridge, and Polaitis blew the horn to call someone out. But no one responded anywhere, except for the frenzied Kontsovka dogs in the distance. Slowing down, the motorcycle drove up to the gates with their green lions. The dust-covered agents in yellow leggings jumped off, fastened the machine to the iron railing with a chain lock, and entered the yard. They were struck by the silence.
“Hey, anyone here?” Shchukin called loudly.
No one responded to his bass. The agents walked around the yard, getting more and more astonished. Polaitis frowned. Shchukin began to look more and more serious, knitting his fair eyebrows more and more. They looked through the closed window into the kitchen and saw that no one was there, but that the entire floor was strewn with white fragments of broken china.
“You know, something really has happened here. I see that now. A catastrophe,” said Polaitis.
“Hey, anyone in there? Hey!” called Shchukin, but the only response was an echo from under the kitchen eaves. “What the hell,” grumbled Shchukin, “it couldn’t have gobbled all of them up at once. Unless they ran off. Let’s go into the house.”
The door to the palace with the columned porch was wide open, and inside it was completely empty. The agents even went up to the mezzanine, knocking on and opening all of the doors, but they found absolutely nothing, and they went back out to the courtyard across the deserted porch.
“Let’s walk around back. To the greenhouses,” decided Shchukin. “We’ll go over the whole place, and we can telephone from there.”
The agents walked down the brick path past the flowerbeds to the backyard, crossed it, and saw the gleaming windows of the greenhouse. “Wait just a minute,” Shchukin noted in a whisper, unsnapping the pistol from his belt. Polaitis got on his guard and unslung his submachine gun. A strange and very resonant sound came from the greenhouse and from behind it. It was like the hissing of a locomotive somewhere. “Z-zau-zau … z-zau-zau … ss-s-s-s-s,” the greenhouse hissed.
“Careful now,” whispered Shchukin, and trying not to make noise with their heels, the agents tiptoed right up to the windows and peered into the greenhouse.
Polaitis instantly jumped back, and his face turned pale. Shchukin opened his mouth and froze with the pistol in his hand. The whole greenhouse was alive like a pile of worms. Coiling and uncoiling in knots, hissing and stretching, slithering and swaying their heads, huge snakes were crawling all over the greenhouse floor. Broken eggshells were strewn across the floor, crunching under their bodies. Overhead burned an electric bulb of huge wattage, illuminating the entire interior of the greenhouse in an eerie cinematic light. On the floor lay three dark boxes that looked like huge cameras; two of them, leaning askew, had gone out, but in the third a small, densely scarlet spot of light was still burning. Snakes of all sizes were crawling along the cables, climbing up the window frames, and twisting out through the openings in the roof. From the electric bulb itself hung a jet-black spotted snake several yards long, its head swaying near the bulb like a pendulum. Some sort of rattling clicked through the hissing sound; the greenhouse diffused a weird and rotten smell, like a pond. And the agents could just barely make out the piles of white eggs scattered in the dusty corners, and the terrible, giant, long-legged bird lying motionless near the chambers, and the corpse of a man in gray near the door, beside a rifle.
“Get back,” cried Shchukin, and he started to retreat, pushing Polaitis back with his left hand and raising the pistol with his right. He managed to fire about nine times, his gun hissing and flicking greenish lightning around the greenhouse. The sounds within rose terribly in answer to Shchukin’s fire; the whole greenhouse became a mass of frenzied movement, and flat heads darted through every aperture. Thunderclaps immediately began to crash over the whole sovkhoz, flashes playing on the walls. “Chakhchakhchakh-takh,” Polaitis fired, backing away. A strange quadruped was heard behind him, and Polaitis suddenly gave a terrified scream and tumbled backwards. A creature with splayed paws, a brownish-green color, a massive pointed snout, and a ridged tail resembling a lizard of terrifying dimensions, had slithered around the corner of the barn, and viciously biting through Polaitis’ foot, it threw him to the ground.
“Help!” cried Polaitis, and immediately his left hand was crunched in the maw. Vainly attempting to raise his right hand, he dragged his gun along the ground. Shchukin whirled around and started dashing from side to side. He managed to fire once, but aimed wide of the mark, because he was afraid of killing his comrade. The second time he fired in the direction of the greenhouse, because a huge olive-colored snake head had appeared there among the small ones, and its body sprang straight in his direction. The shot killed the gigantic snake, and again, jumping and circling around Polaitis, already half-dead in the crocodile’s maw, Shchukin was trying to aim so as to kill the terrible reptile without hitting the agent. Finally he succeeded. The electric pistol fired twice, throwing a greenish light on everything around, and the crocodile leaped, stretched out, stiffened, and released Polaitis. Blood was flowing from his sleeve, flowing from his mo
uth, and leaning on his sound right arm, he dragged his broken left leg along. His eyes were going dim. “Run … Shchukin,” he murmured, sobbing.
Shchukin fired several times in the direction of the greenhouse, and several of its windows flew out. But a huge spring, olive-colored and sinuous, sprang from the basement window behind him, slithered across the yard, filling it with its enormous body, and in an instant coiled around Shchukin’s legs. He was knocked to the ground, and the shiny pistol bounced to one side. Shchukin cried out mightily, then gasped for air, and then the rings covered him completely except for his head. A coil passed over his head once, tearing off his scalp, and his head cracked. No more shots were heard in the sovkhoz. Everything was drowned out by an overlying hissing sound. And in reply to it, the wind brought in the distant howling from Kontsovka, but now it was no longer possible to tell what kind of howling it was—canine or human.
X. CATASTROPHE
Bulbs were burning brightly in the office of Izvestia, and the fat editor at the lead table was making up the second page, using dispatch-telegrams “Around the Union of Republics.” One galley caught his eye; he examined it through his pince-nez and burst out laughing. He called the proofreaders from the proof room and the makeup man and he showed them all the galley. On the narrow strip of paper was printed:
Grachevka, Smolensk province.
A hen which is as large as a
horse and kicks like a stallion
has been seen in the district.
Instead of a tail, it has a
bourgeois lady’s feathers.
The compositors roared with laughter.
“In my day,” said the editor, guffawing expansively, “when I was working for Vania Sytin on Russkoe Slovo,” some of the men would get so smashed they’d see elephants. That’s the truth. But now, it seems, they’re seeing ostriches.”
Worlds Apart Page 72
