Guardian Angel. 2. 10. The Man in Black

"A GUARDIAN ANGEL"
a mistical novel
by Alexandra Kryuchkova

PART II. A DREAMS TRAP

2.10. A MAN in BLACK

January 1989, Moscow

At night, I tried to read as long as possible so that I could immediately fall asleep and not hear what was happening in the flat. I was reading Blok. I knew he had felt the same I did, and it seemed that some of the poems he had written to me.

I heard my grandparents softly snoring in the room opposite. I turned off the light and tried to fall asleep, but someone started walking in the living room. I heard footsteps slowly approaching my door and stopping in front of it. There, on the left, there were plastic bags piled on top of each other with my mother’s clothes, to be thrown away after 40 days. I heard rustles, as if someone was rummaging through them, looking for something for a long, long time.

«What are you looking for there, mom?»

One of the bags fell loudly on the floor, something metallic fell out of it, hitting the parquet floor. The rustling stopped. The floorboards creaked. She came to my door.

«Mom, no, don’t, don’t come in! I’m scared!»

That day, my grandmother stuck a needle in the doorway, saying it would protect me from ghosts, they couldn’t enter my room. But the door behind me, I slept already on my mother’s bed with my feet towards the window, not towards the door, opened. I could clearly hear a characteristic sound, since a magnetic latch had been installed on the top of the door, so that in order to open it, one had to make some effort, that, as my grandmother said, was beyond the power of ghosts. But my mother came up to me. I was in bed facing the wall with my eyes closed and I felt a sudden chilling flow of cold air.

«Mammy, I’m scared! Please, don’t scare me!»

She went to the window, at the table with my poems notebook on it, and sat down in the armchair. The notebook began to rustle slowly, as if being flipped through.

«Mom, I’m sorry. I really want you to be here, but I’m very scared!»

I forced myself to overcome my fear, turned on my back and… opened my eyes. Getting used to the darkness, I peered into what was there, by the window, behind the table, and I saw a ghostly hand holding the notebook with my poems! I squeezed my eyes shut in fear. My heart was racing.

«Sorry, mammy! I can’t defeat the fear, to face the truth!» But after a while I forced myself to turn to face to the wall and fell asleep.

I was standing at the Egyptian pyramid in the desert, although I had not yet been to Egypt in reality and had no interest in it at all. There was the entrance in front of me. A huge stone slab. Next to it, there was a mirror. I looked into it and saw my mother behind me. I turned around, but she was absent. In the mirror, she was still present.

«Mammy!» I exclaimed.

«You have to go inside.»

«I’m scared! There is the World of the Dead inside!»

«But if you don’t defeat your fear, you won’t be able to stay in the World of Living.»

I closed my eyes, took a step towards my fear and found myself in a multi-story misty building on one of the lower floors. There were gray-wax ghosts, zombie-like, roaming everywhere, without noticing me.

«Mom, who are these people?»

«Once they fell asleep, having died on Earth, but didn’t wake up here, therefore they can’t go higher.»

I slowly walked along the floor. I didn’t want to go back. It was still better there than on Earth. I turned around and saw the Mist creeping into the space. It came there for me.

«Alice, come back! Don’t go that far, it’s dangerous,» I heard my mother’s voice, but I didn’t feel like going back, and the Mist crawled up to me.

Suddenly, there was a terrible rumbling in my ears, and I woke up in the dark, in the middle of the night. Trying to understand what kind of sound it had been, I turned on the light and looked at the wall. At the head of the bed, there was an icon of the Virgin Mary hung the day before. Grandma had said that it would be calmer for me with the icon. I found the nail in the wall still in its place, but there was no icon there. It was on the floor, in the gap between the wardrobe and the bed. The door to the room opened. My grandma came in. She took the icon, hung it back on the nail and silently looked at me.

«Mom was looking for something in her things,» I said in a detached voice.

My grandma left my room, turned on the light in the hallway and gathered back into the plastic bags my mother’s clothes scattered on the floor. I heard her exclaiming, «Here it is!» My grandma came back to me and whispered, «Sleep, Alice, she won’t look for anything else!»

I looked at my grandmother with a silent question.

«You’ll know it later when the time comes. Sleep!»

I covered myself including my head with the blanket and turned to face the wall. Grandma turned off the light, and I found myself high in the mountains, at the entrance to a dark cave. I knew there was a giant maze inside.

«You have to enter it, Alice,» I heard my mother’s voice, but I didn’t see her, as if she was just watching me from behind the curtains.

I knew that I had to, but what for? Anyhow, I took a step towards my fear and walked for a long, long time in complete darkness along the winding corridors of the underground labyrinth. It seemed I would never find my way out of it. The air was running out. I had nothing to breathe.

«Mammy! I’m suffocating! Help me!»

«You have to find the exit yourself, Alice. And to do it in time. In order to get back.»

I ran into the distance as fast as I could. Suddenly, the corridor widened. I found myself in a huge cave with high vaults and froze from the picture I saw there. On the stone slabs, there were a lot of not ordinary people — giants! — and they all seemed to be dead. I knew they were alive, just sleeping, for a very, very long time, more than one night, not even two. Their souls were walking somewhere, just like mine, but there, in the cave, their bodies were resting, waiting for their souls to come back from the trip. Mesmerized, I slowly stepped between them, afraid to accidentally wake them up.

«Alice! You need to find the exit, otherwise you’ll never come back!» I heard my mother’s voice. But I didn’t want to go back! Mesmerized by the amazing power of the magical cave, I kept walking around the sleeping bodies and looking at their faces. Having found a free flat stone, I lay down on it, since I wanted to sleep like them.

The Mist slowly crept into the cave. It filled the space, enveloping all the sleepers, smoothly approaching me. I yawned. It was getting closer and closer. I wanted to sleep. I was tired.

«Alice,» my mother said reproachfully.

Suddenly, I heard a deafening roar. I woke up at night, got used to the darkness and slowly looked at the very nail sticking out of the wall with the icon. No, without the icon. The nail was still in its place! And then I realized, there was someone in the room! That someone stood at the window, staring at me intently. It was neither my mother, nor my grandmother, nor my grandfather. To defeat my fear, I forced myself to look at the person by the window and saw… the Man in Black! But he didn’t look like a ghost, his body seemed to have a density, like a living one. He was looking at me silently.

«Who is he?» I thought in horror, unable to shift my gaze or close my eyes, while the Man in Black kept staring at me silently. «Mammy, who is he? What does he want from me? I don’t know him! Why did he come?»

However, I was awake, so I didn’t hear my mother’s voice, and didn’t find an answer.

The alarm clock started ringing. Grandma woke up and went to the kitchen. The figure of the Man in Black slowly dissolved in the air. Why had the doctors brought me back then? If I had known what would happen afterwards, I wouldn’t have returned…

My every morning began with the question from my grandmother, «What have you dreamt, Alice?» And every evening ended with a panic fear of the night, since it opened the door to my dreams, in which I wandered in unknown spaces where the Mist always followed me. By morning, it gradually absorbed everything and everyone around and reached out to me. I knew one day it would get to me. And that night would never end. It would last forever, because I wouldn’t wake up on Earth anymore.


***
summer 2012, Moscow


For several years, since I had met R.A. Mansurova, it had been easier for me to get There while meditating (in a state of half-sleep, when the Consciousness was dozing, and the door to the Subconscious was slightly opened). It was more difficult for me to get into the desired dream. So I found myself in the blue black sky, like in a planetarium. Earth was a small ball somewhere on the right below. Suddenly, I was pulled into a Black Hole. I couldn’t resist and found myself inside a narrow gorge. High black mountains hid the sky from me. I was standing in a tiny boat that looked like a walnut shell. I had no oars, but even if I had had them, I wouldn’t have been able to use them, since my shoulders almost touched the rocks that surrounded me on both sides. The boat was sailing into the distance along the gorge. The deep sound of Eternity filled the space, and I realized I had to go through something terrible I couldn’t influence. Of course, the Astrologer had advised me to go somewhere far away for my birthday in order to change the unfavorable alignment of the planets, but I still didn’t believe in Astrology. Did it really matter much, when Saturn, the master of my Death, entered his own House of Death?

But on June 6, after another performance on TV, the bad feeling intensified, and in order to dispel it, I took out the Chinese «Book of Changes». It never deceived me, accurately indicating the current situation according to one of the 64 Options of Space described by it. I got hexagram number 29, «Crossing the double abyss», saying, «Loss and defeat await you. The only thing you can do is to reduce the number of blows of fate. Double abyss. You enter a cave in the abyss. Misfortune. Whether you come in or go away, there will be abyss after abyss. It’s dangerous, but there is support from Above. Inside the cave in the abyss, don’t act.»

On June 22, I was invited as a representative of the Union of Writers to a conference at the Center for Parliamentarism. In the evening, I was called by Ray, a magician, who had not thought about me for quite a long time, but used to appear only in hard moments. I was surprised by his call, because there was no reason to be worried in the earthly reality. At 23:30, I received a strange letter from an unknown man from the city of Gelendzhik. It had nothing but dates. He wrote that his birthday was on April 4, and his wife had died on June 22. I couldn’t understand who he was, why he had written to me and why exactly that text, but I answered with a neutral phrase, without deleting the automatic signature, my phone number included. At 23:45, a horoscope newsletter for the next day arrived. I used to send it to the trash without reading. But that day, I looked into the forecast, and it caught my eye, «Pay attention to the supposedly random coincidences of numbers and dates!»

At midnight, I got a call from that unknown man from Gelendzhik. He kept saying the same thing like a zombie: his wife had died on June 22, and his birthday was on April 4. I couldn’t understand anything. He was crazy. June 22 was already over, and I was alive. After listening to the stranger ten times in a circle, I apologized saying that it was time for me to sleep. I remembered that my birthday was one day later, on April 5. But I didn’t get the idea that June 22, respectively, should be shifted by one day, so the elementary mathematical equation would be solved instantly: April 4 was related to June 22 in the same way as April 5 to…

I took out the «Book of Changes» again, since two weeks had passed after my previous consultation, but I still got the same hexagram. I went to a website where people read quotes fortune-telling, «Sometimes it’s better not to know your Future.»

On June 23, instead of going to visit my godmother by metro, I decided to go by car to Nikolina Gora, my Place of Power, where we had had our cottage, to swim. I turned on the laptop to check the traffic, but it reported it couldn’t boot up and emitted the sound of a howling siren. A premonition of something inevitable and bound to happen, familiar from childhood, covered me from head to toe. But fear must be defeated, and I stepped forward to meet it, not yet aware of the magic word «Transits» and the interpretations of fatal combinations of celestial bodies, in addition to Saturn in VIII. The last call came from Svetlana, who had received a message from me consisting of solid unreadable characters, which I hadn’t actually sent to her or anyone else in reality. I swam, enjoying life, and left for the Moscow Ring Road around 19:20. The feeling of the inevitability of something terrible, along with the overtaking lead cloud, made me drive the car in in the center line of the flow instead of the usual extreme-left line. I naively believed that many years of my driving experience was a talisman against all sorts of adventures on the road, without thinking that someone could suddenly drive into me at a high speed at an angle of 90 degrees from the right. After the car crash at 19:30 on the 53rd kilometer of the Moscow Ring Road, I returned home only at about three in the morning. With a concussion, damage to the optic nerve, a half-sewn, half-darned right ear, a severe contusion of the chest, a bruised left kidney, all in bruises and abrasions, limping and completely unaware of the way I had survived. In the afternoon, barely able to get out of bed, as eyewitnesses had advised the day before, I crawled to the church. I put the largest candle to Nicholas the Wonderworker, ordered a prayer service to him and entered the church shop. I told them about my miracle. One of the sellers, who saw my Orthodox silver ring with prayers, said, «Would you like to see the ring of St. George the Victorious? We have one of a kind!»

On Monday, June 25, I received an automatic notification from a job search site. The Man in White had looked at my CV the day before, June 24. I couldn’t believe my eyes! I hadn’t yet told anyone about the accident and would post my memories on the Internet much later.

«Did he really feel that the energy bridge between us, invisible to the ordinary eye, was hanging by a thread? Or a part of his Subconscious, he is completely unaware of at the level of Consciousness, was afraid that the Man in White would no longer have time to play the role prescribed for him by Above in my destiny? Who are you? What significant event in my life do you relate to? What is so scary in that script that they don’t let me look into it in advance and don’t give me the opportunity to re-enter the most mysterious Venetian dream to make me understand, whether you are the Man in Black who buries me, or not?» I pondered but found no answer.

«Hello, Alice!» He called me in a month.

I erased his number from the memory of my phone, but his voice couldn’t be erased, destroyed, forgotten. I kept silent, thinking, «Why are you calling me? Have you read about the accident on the Internet?»

Assuming I didn’t recognize him, he added, «It’s Woland.»

I smiled and mentally said in response, «Glad to hear! Missed you. I want to see you, share the fragments I’ve been trying to put together for several years now, give you — finally! — the icon of St. George. Can you tell me at our meeting what binds you with the Saint?»

I left the building of the Union of Writers and turned right towards the Central House of Writers so that we wouldn’t be disturbed in our conversation.

Suddenly, he asked just as sharply, cynically, quickly juggling words like knives that were about to break out of his hands and pierce right into my heart — all at once, at the same time, «Alice, I urgently need the recipe for two-component nitrourethane varnishes!»

I stopped speechless in the middle of the road, «Are you so weak to call me without all that?!»

«You don’t remember, do you?» he asked.

«Do you think that after the concussion I lost my memory? Don’t hope! I remember everything very well. Especially what has to do with you!»

«I remember, why not? Take a solution of varnish colloxylin, a resin in a mixture of organic solvents and a polyisocyanate based monomeric diisocyanates of aliphatic structure. In proportion of one hundred to five. The viability of the mixture is eight hours at 20 degrees Celsius.»

«I see. Do you have a job now?»

«I can’t live without a job. I need to eat.»

«Do you want to know how much I survived? I went back to work on Monday right after that horror weekend. Of course, then, I looked like a…»

«Still there?»

«Are you going to offer me once again to work with you? I agree in advance!»

«Due to the lack of other job offers, yes.»

«And I’m still living here,» he meant, in another city.

«Well,» I didn’t know what to say to him, or rather, I wanted to ask, «Don’t you want to invite me to your place, to the city where you live now? Especially after what I’ve been through… It’s a right place to get healthy!»

«Well, okay… Call me then, if anything,» he barked.

«What does your anything mean?» flashed through my mind, but I said goodbye to him for some reason.

Again, I hadn’t said anything to him, and the backpack of karma over my shoulders gained some kilos more. I glanced at my silver ring with St. George defeating the dragon. Who was he?

I send my sunny greetings to your seas.
The Moon doesn’t sleep. It’s scanning holy globe.
The winds are rushing to the street we met,
considering my poetry a challenge.

That house dreamed of other sign on it…
It let us both, the lantern and my body,
outside the door, you left us there, but
your spirit waltzed with me in swirling blizzards.

I’m waiting for a call. The idols are still dumb.
My love, it happens, seems to be unwanted.
My fate is sadness over the bowl
of empty hopes for the ghosts of winter.

The Moon doesn’t sleep… My February is fierce.
The night is tender, waltzing in the blizzard
in spite of winds that rushed at breakneck speed
onto the lantern flickering still there.