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Prologue
On the day when the body of chief engineer Viktor Startsev was found in the abandoned boiler room of the Krasny Oktyabr plant, wet, annoying snow was falling from the sky. It did not decorate the city, but turned it into a gray, soggy porridge. The police wrote in their report: "an accident, he slipped, hit his temple on a cast-iron valve." But in the city of N they whispered: "The devils have gotten to us. Completely to us."
The devils were blamed for everything here. For a burst pipe, for a burnt-out wiring, for an accident on the power line, for milk going sour or vodka being tainted. They were the universal explanation for all evil, small and large. No one saw them, but everyone knew they were there. Somewhere here. Right next door.

Part One. THE COMING
Chapter 1
Alexey Gorchakov returned to the city of N after fifteen years. He had fled from here, having barely finished school, with only a backpack and a wild thirst to become someone else. Now he was someone else - a successful journalist from the capital, who had come to write about the closure of the plant that had once fed the entire city.
The city greeted him with the same stale air, smelling of coal dust, sulfur and melancholy. The factory, a giant of rusty iron and broken glass, froze like a dying animal. The streets were deserted, and the faces of the rare passersby read the same thought: “It’s over. It’s all over.”
Alexei was put up in the Metallurg Hotel, that same squalid six-story building with sticky carpets and the smell of an old buffet. He couldn't sleep the first night. Standing by the window and looking at the lights of the dying factory, he heard a strange sound. Not a grinding, not a knocking. A scraping, scurrying hiss. It was coming from the ventilation grille.
“Rats,” he thought with disgust and went to bed.
The next morning he went to the factory, having arranged a meeting with the former shop foreman and now watchman, Uncle Misha. The old man, whose face resembled crumpled parchment paper, led him through the endless shops.
"Here they smelted steel," Uncle Misha's voice echoed loudly under the vaults, "and here they rolled rails. Now there's silence. Like in a coffin."
And again Alexey heard it. Not silence. That same hissing, barely perceptible, as if someone was quickly and finely scratching metal with their claws.
“Don’t you hear?” he interrupted the old man.
Uncle Misha stopped and looked at him with steely, faded eyes.
- I hear you. It's them. The factory devils. They're left without work, so they're going crazy.
Alexey grinned. A village myth. A superstition. He took out a dictaphone.
— Tell us more. For the article.
The old man shook his head.
- This is not for the article. They don't like it when people talk about them. Especially in vain.
“But you don’t believe this nonsense?” Alexey couldn’t help but ask.
Uncle Misha sighed heavily.
— In 1945, in Germany, I didn't believe in ghosts. Until one of them shot me with a Panzerfaust. Faith has nothing to do with it. There are things that just are.

Chapter 2
That evening, Alexey was drinking whiskey and editing his notes in the hotel bar. A slurring man of about fifty sat down next to him and introduced himself as Nikolai Petrovich, the former club manager.
"Are you writing about us?" he asked in a tone that mixed hope and cynicism. "Write about how everything died here. How the devils are taking the last souls."
The word was spoken again. Alexey poured his interlocutor a drink.
- Who are these devils? Where does this legend come from?
Nikolai Petrovich drank greedily.
— A legend? They've been here since the very foundation of the plant. Under Peter, they say, the first masters were called from Germany, and they brought their own, German devils, with them. And ours mixed with them. An unclean force. What does it feed on? Malice, envy, drunkenness, discord. And where is there more of all this than at a large plant? They multiplied and multiplied here. They helped, by the way.
- Did they help? - Alexey was genuinely surprised.
- Of course! The stove won't light - a prayer to the devil, and it flares up. The plan isn't fulfilled - the bosses will greet the devils in the office, and suddenly the defects disappear. They were part of the system. The grease in the gears. And now the system has collapsed. The gears have stopped. And they are left. Hungry, angry. And they don't know what to do with themselves. So they do nasty things. Petty, nasty. They'll chew through the wiring in the house, or drop an icicle from the roof on your head, or... - he lowered his voice - they'll get to a person.
— How to Startsev?
Nikolai Petrovich turned pale and moved away.
- It's better for you not to know about this. And don't write. They don't like this.

Part Two. LIQUIDATION
Chapter 3
Alexey's article was published under the catchy title "Rusty Paradise: How Russia's Single-Industry Towns Live and Die." He ironically mentioned local folklore about devils, presenting it as a curiosity, a symptom of collective depression.
The reaction in the city of N was immediate and furious. People began to recognize him on the streets. One old woman spat in his direction. Uncle Misha, seeing him, simply turned around and left. Alexey felt like a traitor. He had come to gawk at the agony and made a laughing stock of it.
And at night, something strange began to happen in the room. The power went out. The water from the tap was rusty, with a nasty metallic smell. And then shadows began to creep along the walls. Not from cars, not from street lamps. Independent, gnarled, with horns and tails. They came together and parted, danced on the ceiling and disappeared into the cracks.
Alexei, a sober pragmatist, felt icy horror for the first time. It was not a trick of the light. It was something.

Chapter 4
He found Nikolai Petrovich at home, in a wreck with broken windows. He was drunk and gloomy.
“Have you read it?” asked Alexey.
— The city has read it. You made us look like the last fools. And you hurt them. They won't forgive that.
- Who are THEY? Show me them! - Alexey exploded.
- You won't be happy when you see them, - the club manager muttered. - They're not from the biblical hell. They're from here. From our malice. From our laziness. From our "maybe". They are our reflection, lousy, ugly. Before, they were kept in check by the system. Strict, iron. They had order. And now it's chaos. They have free rein.
Suddenly something crashed in the corridor. Nikolai Petrovich perked up, and sobriety instantly returned to his eyes.
- Go away. Quickly. They don't need you. You'll leave, and we'll have to live here with them.

Chapter 5
Alexey did not leave. Journalistic stubbornness overcame fear. He decided to dig deep. He found old plant plans, reports, memoirs in the regional archive. And they were everywhere, between the lines.
Entry from 1897: “…a mug with horns was seen in blast furnace No. 3, after which the furnace stopped for three days.”
1923: "... workers complain about "evil spirits" in the rolling shop, which disrupt labor discipline. A party meeting was held on the need to strengthen atheistic propaganda."
1957: “…in connection with frequent equipment breakdowns that have no technical explanation, the plant administration decides to carry out an unofficial “appeasement ritual” (allocating a liter of alcohol monthly for draining into the technical well of workshop No. 4).”
There were no official mentions, but the shadow of invisible "helpers" was clearly visible. They were part of the production process. Its dark, unofficial component.

Part Three. EXILE
Chapter 6
He came to the boiler room. The place where Startsev died was cordoned off with police tape, but it had broken and was dangling from the ceiling. It was cold and damp.
Alexei sat down on a rusty box and took out a flask of whiskey. He felt like an idiot.
"Well?" he said out loud, and his voice was lost in the echoing space. "I'm here. Show yourself. Let's talk."
The pipes hissed in response. Metal creaked somewhere. The air thickened and became heavy, like fuel oil. And then he saw them.
They crawled out of cracks in the floor, slid down pipes, materialized from clouds of steam. There were about a dozen of them. Small, waist-high, covered in slime and machine oil soot. Their horns were broken off, their tails looked like frayed electrical cables. Their eyes, tiny as pinheads, glowed a dull red. They smelled of ozone, fumes, and decay.
It wasn't scary. It was disgusting and pathetic. Like mutant cockroaches.
One of them, larger than the others, with a piece of copper wire around his neck instead of a necklace, stepped forward. He did not speak, but the thought crashed into Alexei's consciousness, rough and alien.
WHY DID YOU COME?
- I want to understand.
UNDERSTAND? YOU DARE. YOU ARE A STRANGER.
— Did you kill Startsev?
The creature made a sound like screeching brakes.
WE DON'T KILL. WE... PUSH. HE WAS WEAK. HE WAS AFRAID. HE WAS AFRAID OF IDLENESS, OF POVERTY. WE FEED HIS FEAR. HE FELL ON HIS OWN. WE SIMPLY HELPED HIS FEAR TO RELEASE.
Alexey looked at these freaks, born of the collective unconscious of the giant factory. They were not demons, but parasites. Emotional leeches. And they were dying along with their breadwinner.
- What will you do?
WE WILL DIE. WE CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT HERE. WITHOUT THE ROAR, THE ANGER, THE HEAT OF METAL. WE WILL DISAPPEAR. LIKE YOU. LIKE THIS CITY. EVERYONE WILL DIE. EVERYONE WILL GO INTO THE VOID.
There was no malice in his "voice". There was an endless, universal melancholy. The melancholy of a creature that knows that no one needs it.

Chapter 7
Alexey was leaving the city of N on the morning bus. The snow had stopped, and a pale, helpless sun hung over the ruins of the plant.
He looked out the window and thought about them. About the devils. They were not evil. They were a symptom. A disease that afflicts an organism devoid of purpose, meaning, future. They were born of fear, anger, and despair, and they fed on them.
The bus started moving. And then Alexey saw it. On a rusty water tower sat that same creature with the copper wire around its neck. It sat with its thin legs tucked under it and looked at the departing bus. And waved goodbye to it with its skinny, skinned paw.
It was not a gesture of hostility, but of strange, almost human understanding. They were prisoners of this place, just like everyone else. And their end was sealed.

Epilogue
Five years passed. Alexey Gorchakov no longer wrote articles about single-industry towns. He sat in his Moscow office, editing a text about new investments in small businesses, and the life of the metropolis was seething outside the window.
Suddenly the lights went out. The computers froze. A slight, barely perceptible crackling sound was heard in the server's cooling system.
Alexey froze. He sniffed. The air was clean, smelling only of coffee and ozone from the overloaded network.
But for a second he thought he smelled a familiar scent. The smell of fuel oil, rust, and melancholy.
He walked to the window and looked at the city - huge, alive, full of new ambitions, new fears and new, previously unknown anger.
He yanked the blender cord out of the socket and the office lights came on again.
“No,” he whispered to himself. “I imagined it.”
oh, somewhere very deep, in the cellars of his memory, something hissed and creaked.