to you that mystical movies about demons can make it worse than violent thrillers?” Athenais asked a question that sounded like a trick.
“In what case is it?”
“It is in case the demons come off the screen.”
“Like you did?”
“Yes, it is”
“Is it only in the chat room? It’s safe. Even if you are a demon, you can’t hurt me through chat.”
Nikita remembered a sadistic movie where the victim’s ghost killed through a chat room. Athenais died in a terrorist attack, too, after all. What if her soul had mastered the same technique as in the movie? What if mystical movies are just a cast of reality?
There you go! She’s confused him. How can you believe that a star has become a ghost or a demon. No matter what the star says. When have actors ever been sincere? And why is he so eager to believe in Athenais’ honesty? All she does is play with him at night. In a chat room!
“Where are you now?” He typed out the question.
“I am on the Internet.”
“Isn’t that what I mean? What country are you in? America? Europe? Russia?”
“Is the fan interested in my geographic location?”
The question sounded like a joke.
“I am not a fan!”
“Then what are you?”
She roused his conscience.
“I’m a fan of your beautiful pictures,” Nikita confessed.
“I need an interlocutor, not a fan.”
There you go! She’s got him stumped again. They go around and around. But the chat is interesting, you don’t want to turn off. Even if an ugly picture of a monster popped up instead of Athenais’ face, it wouldn’t cool him off. He’s communicating with a mystery.
“I’ll be your interlocutor, your friend, your personal free psychologist… whatever you want.”
“Even a victim?” Athenais teased him.
And that’s for his sincere confession! When you tell a pretty girl what’s in your heart, she’s bound to spit in it.
“So you want to be my victim?”
Nikita fell into a stupor. A noose tightened around his throat.
“You’d make a wonderful victim,” Athenais continued.
What a joke! Or is it?
“What really happened at the Blue Lotus Cinema?” Nikita typed.
There wasn’t an answer for a long time.
“Tell me about the terrorist attack. Or what happened there? How did you survive? And why were your fans burning temples? I mean, you played a deity. Aren’t deity worshippers supposed to respect temples?”
“Gods come in all kinds of ways.”
Over the top of the chat room, the message about the call buzzed. Athenais called. Nikita responded instantly. The video chat opened. Athenais appeared to be looking at the laptop that lay in her lap. The image was slightly shifted upward. The winged beauty looked down at Nikita. The dark wings, interwoven with glittering chains, were most likely held on those chains. They couldn’t have been real!
Behind Athenais loomed the same walls painted with hieroglyphs. The room she was in was very dark. The only light came from the laptop.
“You have nice watercolors on the walls,” Athenais remarked.
“They’ve been here since high school,” Nikita muttered. He was embarrassed by his drawings. How come Athenais noticed them and didn’t notice the large claw scratches on the wallpaper next to them. Or had she deliberately missed them? After all, they had strangely appeared in the apartment at the same time Nikita had engaged in a chat with her.
Is it possible to hurt her physically through a chat room? He guesses he can, if there’s a real angel or demon sitting on the other side of the chat room. Can you kill through chat? It’s definitely possible to seduce. Nikita gazed greedily at the gentle angelic face in the video window. Athenais had golden eyebrows and eyelashes, graceful cheekbones, a regular facial oval, lips as delicate as rose petals, and lingering blue eyes. Or were they emerald eyes? They seem to change color from time to time.
“You don’t have any icons in your room,” Athenais pointed out.
“No, I don’t. They were left by my grandmother, but I gave them away to the needy.”
“Did they make you feel negative?”
“No, I’m just an atheist. I don’t like to keep religious symbols at home just as a souvenir. My mom brought a statue of goddess Kali from her business trip to India. She must still have it in her bedroom.”
“I knew Kali.”
“So you’ve seen her statuettes, too?”
Athenais suddenly laughed softly.
“You’re funny.”
“What do you mean?”
“You are very naive.”
“And you are very beautiful.”
“I know!”
Athenais had a rigid self-esteem with no pluses and no minuses. Compliments couldn’t buy her off. How would she feel about a bouquet of roses?
You couldn’t buy roses on a student scholarship, but Nikita worked as a courier during the summer and saved up some money. He would gladly spend it on a lavish bouquet and a box of chocolates for Athenais, if she would agree to a date.
She went out on video chat. That’s already progress. Probably the next step will be a date. All we have to do is get her talking, and maybe she’ll set a date herself.
Athenais looked about sixteen or eighteen. He wouldn’t want to get a felony conviction for seduction of a minor. Nowadays a lot of people look out of their age. Judging by the biography posted on the Internet, Athenais had already managed to act in dozens of movies, where she played not a child, but an adult heroine. So she is definitely twenty to twenty-five years old.
“I wish I were a poet, or I would have written poems about your beauty.”
“Many have been dedicated to me: sonnets, odes, madrigals, ballads, even chants and prayers… More valuable than odes to me is communion with you, a living person. Thank you for your friendship.”
Athenais put her hand to her lips and sent him an airy kiss. Her fingers slid right across the screen.
That’s how the Orientals, like the Arabs, thank you for your friendship on Facebook. Nikita was told about their way of communicating by her neighbor, who learned foreign languages well. She conversed with people from the Emirates, Indians, Turks, and guys from Sri Lanka. It was all for an opportunity to practice linguistics. She was the one who told Nikita that he could find a girlfriend on international sites.
Athenais looked something like a character from an Oriental fairy tale. She looked like an angel, but she reeked of the luxury of exotic palaces, golden deserts, and magical oases.
It seems that in fairy tales, the beautiful djinn are usually called peri.
“Athenais…” Nikita addressed her by name.
She grinned as if he were calling someone who didn’t exist, and suddenly she beckoned him toward her, into the darkness of the room painted with hieroglyphics. As if he could walk through a computer screen and get straight to her!
“Living people are rare here,” Athenais suddenly admitted. “It’s a very desolate place around here.”
“Don’t