THE MYSTERY CITY

CHAPTER 2

I don't know how much I actually remember myself, but how much they remember.

People don't read new books. Only those that were read the day before. I think I'm starting to go crazy. I have already seen letters written with suspicion in my own hand, but I do not remember how I wrote them. I don't remember how I hid it. What else did I remember and forget?!

There are no animals.

No children.

There are no holidays.

There are no seasons.

No friends.

No memories.

There are no changes.

There is no truth.

Everything in this city is false!

I'm scared. At night I have nightmares. In these nightmares, someone haunts me, calling me by name, but it was not the name that I remember, but in a dream I knew that the call was meant for me. But when I wake up, I can't remember my name.

Who am I?

How did I get here?

How did we all get here?

What's wrong with this city?!

Tonight, local herbalist Hope promised to come and help me sort things out over a cup of tea. I think she shares my doubts.

I'll leave this letter in case I forget something again.

Everything that I managed to take from the archive of the history of the city is in the attic in a chest in the pantry. It appears to be locked, but there is no key. The door must be pulled up and then opened again. My name is not Thomas, I hope tomorrow I will find more answers .”

The roar of the pulse in the ears drowns out the whole world. Grave cold passes along the spine. The letter is written by Thomas.

“I already tried… and more than once… I was bullied. They erased my memory!”

So the witch's junior assistant became an enemy in the eyes of the librarian.

***

The ringing of the bell announced that Hope had left the library with a small collection of German poetry.

Thomas wearily folded his arms on the table and laid his head on them. Despite the behavior corresponding to a living person, and not a dummy living in the strict scenario of the city, she scared him the most. The rest of the townspeople in the eyes of the librarian were exactly the same hostages as he was. hostages of the city. hostages of the situation. And she… perhaps a puppeteer?!

Is there a way out of this city? he thought languidly, realizing that the answer was most likely no.

Hopelessness. And a lot of questions. Following the instructions from his own letter, in the attic he actually found a whole chest filled with yellowed and even decayed sheets. Parsing the archive only added fuel to the fire, since only the sorting of documents took a week. Too much "superfluous" information, which only confuses. Accounts, accounting, meaningless without context, correspondence between the libraries of the city of Nightingale, and some other (addresses and names of cities were "quite accidentally" spoiled). Making his way through the thorns, Thomas built a thin and brittle path to understanding the city.

The simplest item was information about the Circus. No suspicious news. Only a few correspondence between the townspeople, a couple of very old notes in the local newspaper and a working copy of the agreement on the mutual coexistence of the city and the Circus.

The territory of the Circus is not the territory of the city, the laws of the city do not apply to the territory of the Circus. At the same time, the rules of the Circus do not apply to everything that happens on the territory of the city. Circus artists are allowed to cross the border only during the procession along the perimeter of the city, inviting spectators, and spectators only with the permission of the Director of the Circus can visit the territory of the Circus. The circus, alas, did not contain any gymnasts or animals, only freaks. Actually, that's why he was everywhere in the records and was listed as the "Circus of Freaks."

In the faded photographs found among the archive papers, Thomas could barely make out some of the broken, angular figures of the Circus performers, as well as the Director himself. However, he was dressed in a Victorian suit with a bow tie and a long cloak, his face was completely hidden by a mask, and shoulder-length hair was also guessed. The low quality of the photographs and the image of the Director only made it possible to conclude that he seemed to be a tall man. The name of the Director remained unnamed both in articles and in correspondence. For some unknown reason, he was referred to everywhere as the Masked Man.

The biggest hitch arose with the history of the founding of the city. Thomas found about a dozen documents referring to the date of the founding of the city, but the dates varied, as did the names of the founders, not to mention the events that led to the founding of the town. Somewhere the city was mentioned as a port, somewhere as a convenient transit point for railways, and somewhere as a source of some very useful minerals. The number and "quality" of the settlers were also described differently from document to document. Either they were Puritan families, then, on the contrary, families expelled from other settlements by Puritans, then criminals, or even refugees after the civil war. Whether there was truth somewhere in the middle, the librarian did not dare to guess.

The most interesting among the paper confusion were hand-restored ancient sheets with half-erased Celtic letters. Time has worked mercilessly on the sheets, making all records unreadable. A rare letter has been preserved in its entirety, not to mention words or sentences. However, the illustrations miraculously survived. Rough drawings, revealing the secrets of the sheets in two or three strokes, ambiguously described certain rituals of witches. It was witches, sorceresses or soothsayers, there could be no doubt. Sabbats, sacrificing something small, but the most detailed was a drawing showing how the witches coven mix something in a bowl, using either chopsticks or knives, and then present this bowl to a strange something depicted as a gray cloud.

Thomas never believed in witches or magic, but he did not dismiss the theory of their existence, taught by bitter experience. Tea that causes memory loss can still be explained scientifically, but retroactively recorded memories of strangers as people you have known all your life are already breaking this coherent theory. The figures of Lovecraft's monsters, seen in the fog at night, completely beat off doubts about the supernatural filling of this City of Nightmares.

After the beginning of the paranoid observation of the city, the librarian, drowning in terrible dreams, woke up now not in his bed. Sleepwalking was added to the strange call in a dream of some monsters, which the guy could neither see nor realize even their approximate dimensions. It got worse every night. Nightmares became more realistic, instilling a sense of doom that something terrifying was about to take Thomas, and the sleeper himself woke up farther and farther from home.

The first such frightening experience occurred a week after the burn. A dense, suffocating nightmare, and then an even more frightening awakening on a city street. A dense fog spread over the ground, distorting the image of the town. Familiar nice streets under the cover of night and fog turned into something repulsive, inhospitable and even hostile. The fog, which had an anomalous density, showed portions of the silhouettes hidden in it. There was not a drop of humanity in these figures. The movement of these silhouettes inspired a primitive animal horror and a thoughtless desire to run as fast as possible. Hide. Tremble and pray that the house will be a safe haven.

A wave of grinding sounded along the stone road, echoing its terrible song in the librarian's ears. Something scratched these roads, fast approaching. Something howled very close by, raising the hair on its head, moving in the distance with the sound of twisting joints. Many of these “somethings” walked around Thomas, and the guy did not doubt their hostility for a moment. Shaking off his numbness, he realized that on this night's walk he could become someone's food.

Fortunately, the street was still well known. Just one block from the library. Squeezing all unconscious urges to scream in horror, Thomas silently crept to the library, locked all the doors, rushed to his room and, trembling like a leaf in the wind, dived under the covers. It was there that the childlike impulse to hide from the Scarecrow managed to drive away the panic for a brief moment.

“From this city you need to run! Run at all costs! Feet, swim ... whatever! This city will devour me on one of these nights!”

Many arms, tentacles, tails or leathery wings, and perhaps all together, were present on the bodies of these same silhouettes. It was scary to even think about them. Even with a barely glanced glance, they caused rejection at the animal level, horror and a blind desire to escape. Not an ounce of doubt, not metaphorical monsters were hiding in the fog, but real, real ones, not invented by blockbuster directors or authors of exciting books. They were there, in the most authentic reality, and drove you crazy, from the need to acknowledge their existence, ending with questions about survival in the city, where they walk quietly at night.

He was unable to fall asleep. He perceived every rustle, creak, knock or other sound only as the steps of monsters that follow him into his library. At dawn, he hardly forced himself to look out from under the covers. The mind, marinating in panic, demanded to stay in the room and not go out. Thomas almost succumbed to this demand, but at the last moment, the thought “What if they come for me as soon as I stop acting according to the scenario of this city?” forced him to obediently begin his daily routine.

He was afraid of the city. I was afraid of the nightfall. He was afraid of the younger witch Hope. I was afraid to make a wrong move and be pulverized. He was afraid that, without doing anything, he, like a banderlog, would helplessly approach his own death under the bewitchingly frightening dance of Kaa. Who will play the role of Kaa himself in this case, Thomas did not want to decide. Each of the applicants did not suit at all.