going to change tomorrow?”
“There’s going to be a reshuffle. There will be a feast.”
“You mean a feast?”
“It is a sort of.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Have you ever attended a feast without a table? It is in the manner of eastern traditions or ancient Roman ones?”
The Romans ate on their beds, but in the East it was customary to sit on the floor among the cushions, but there had to be a table. Nikita could not understand his companion’s games.
“Are you talking about some scenery for a movie about the Ancient East, or about Ancient Rome, or even about the Stone Age?”
There was a pause.
“What is your profession?” Nikita said. “Are you an actress?”
“I am a former movie star.”
“What do you mean?” Nikita even got scared. Ambitious movie stars never call themselves exes, and she so easily admits that her career is behind her. She was probably badly injured on the set. If she was crippled or burned, that would explain why she won’t go on video chat.
The pretty picture remains, but the pretty face is gone. He is communicating with an illusion.
“Ex means dead,” Athenais dumbfounded him with the answer.
“What do you mean, dead?” She couldn’t be talking to him as a ghost, could she?
“Everyone thinks I’m dead,” Athenais confirmed. “You can read about it in the press.”
Nikita was stunned. This has got to be a practical joke! She’s either trying to scare him to death or she’s deliberately playing him for a fool.
“Are you dead?” He dared to ask her directly.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I’m talking to the computer, not you. Let’s meet and I’ll decide.”
“Dating is risky.”
“Why is it risky?”
Nikita had to take his mind off the conversation for a moment. Ex-girlfriends were calling him through a dating site. He had to reject several video calls. Only then did he manage to get back to chatting with Athenais.
“They say movie stars aren’t as beautiful in person as they are in pictures,” Nikita quipped. This is a proven way to get a girl on a date. She has to show up in person and prove that she’s as beautiful as in the picture.
“Well, I’m not in life now, I’m in the realm of death,” Athenais instantly retorted. “Beauty is frozen here, like in the pyramids of the pharaohs.”
“Is there a working computer in the realm of death?” Highly doubtful!
Athenais didn’t answer for a long time. Either she was communicating with other site users, or the insolent question offended her.
“I’m a dead movie star,” she typed again. Perhaps the answer had a metaphorical meaning: ex means dead. Not literally dead! Dead people don’t sit in chat rooms.
After that, she passed out. It was already four in the morning. Nikita had sat with her in the chat room for too long. Now he would sleep through class again. How was it that Athenais was taking up more of his time than even computer games? Talking to her was addictive.
Messages from Lada, Dasha, Dusya, Valya, and Mania went ignored. Nikita also received dozens of messages at once from the “red hood,” as he had already called the scary stranger to himself. His name was Aneh. That, at any rate, was how the nickname was printed. Naturally, the name might have been made up.
Aneh was creepy-looking, and he didn’t want to talk to him at all. He was probably one of Athenais’ acquaintances. Why else would he suddenly be interested in Nikita? His last message confirmed that:
“How do you like communicating with a dead star?”
Nikita ignored Aneh’s questions and deleted all correspondence with him. However, it resurfaced again. A few more attempts to delete it did nothing either. Okay, let it stay, Nikita gave up after the tenth attempt. The main thing is not to start multiplying, like a Trojan virus.
Apparently, he accidentally clicked again and answered the video-call, because on the screen again flashed a video with a black man in a red hood. On closer inspection, though, Aneh is not a Negro. It was like he was all burned up. Gold earring rings were threaded through his large nostrils. From the earrings stretched chains. For some reason they resembled fetters.
Did Aneh want to communicate or scare the hell out of Nikita?
“Sorry, but I prefer to communicate with girls,” Nikita waved him off and left the site.
The computer screen began to crack, as if someone had punched it from the inside. Something burst from behind Nikita. Splinters flew off. The plafond of a lamp shattered. The room went dark. And something rustled in the corners, like rats crawling around.
Press clippings
All night long someone’s claws had been scraping against the couch. Nikita was used to hearing his neighbors arguing through the ceiling at night, but he was not accustomed to animal wrangling. He even checked a couple of times to see if there were any mice in the apartment. Nothing seemed to be chewed off, so it was too early to put mousetraps in.
The lamp shade did break during the night. The shards of the lamp were lying all over the room. It took a lot of effort to collect them. Now he would have to wear slippers to prevent any small splinter from sticking in his foot. Nikita was used to walking barefoot at home. Finding homemade slippers turned out to be an impossible task. His mother told him to vacuum the carpets once a week, but the vacuum cleaner was broken. One week alone has passed. At the end of the month his mother would come back and probably make a big fuss. The house had not been cleaned, everything was dusty, the walls were scratched, the new wallpaper was irreparably ruined, and the lamp plafond was broken as well. What on earth was her son doing?
Answer his mother honestly, and she would raise her son with laughter. He sat in a chat room and made contact with a dead movie star. He could be called a modern day medium. He knows how to summon the souls of dead celebrities over the Internet. Or is the pretty girl just messing with him? Let’s say she really is a celebrity who decided to trick ordinary guys. Why does a monster in red appear in a chat room at the same time as her?
There was no way to call Aneh anything other than a monster. After a short video of him, there should have been cracks on the computer screen, but there weren’t any. They couldn’t have disappeared overnight, could they? A computer isn’t a living thing; injuries don’t heal on it like they do on human skin.
Nikita ran his fingers over the smooth screen. At night he dreamed that the cracks on the computer were bleeding.
He must have thought the computer had crashed yesterday. Good thing it was working properly. The power supply and monitor came on quickly. There were no alarm warnings from the system or demands to reboot.
Nikita got on the Internet urgently. He was interested in the press. The sites of Metro, Vechernaya Moskva, and Zvezdny Boulevard flashed before his eyes. There was only yesterday’s and today’s news. Not a word about Athenais. Probably have to look at last year’s articles.
It’s a good thing he thought of it. Yes, indeed, there was such a star. He read excerpts about her in last year’s press. She had once outshone all the stars. In addition to the glamour publications, serious magazines had written about her. A year ago the star was killed in a terrorist attack. The attack took place at the Blue Lotus Cinema, where the night premiere with Athenais film was taking place. No details of the terrorist attack were available.
Nikita