I remember clearly the moment when our teacher asked me to read aloud the text in the book. I was already fully aware that I was reading with constant speech stutters. My tongue refused to obey me, and I could not do anything about it – no matter how hard I tried. All the time that I was reading, I held the sheet of the book with my finger so that it would not close, and when my torment came to an end, I removed my finger from the page to find in its place a pronounced wet spot from sweat.
Chapter 2. School Years and New Mysteries
I began to be afraid to speak. In school, every time a teacher was about to ask someone to answer a question, my heart would begin to pound quickly. The pulse immediately calmed down if someone else was asked.
In the following school years, I began to worry about whether I would have to answer or not on the way to school.
Chatting with friends was also difficult for me. I remember clearly the moments when a friend or acquaintance was mistaken in some question, and I knew the exact answer to the topic being discussed, an answer that could help another person, but I was so afraid that I would stumble on one word that I just could not allow myself to open my mouth. I just stayed silent.
One such moment happened in the village during the summer holidays. I walked then with friends in the evening. We walked a long circle around the village, and our conversation touched on unexplained phenomena. My experience with the bright yellow entity was ideal for our conversation… If only I could force myself to overcome the fear of speaking. The thought of all the negative that could have happened if I had started to stutter blocked all desire to share my unusual experience.
In school years I once thought about the fact that I was speaking absolutely normally in my imagination, to myself, and also when I was alone and was talking aloud to myself – it was simply impossible to stutter. It is a pity that at that time I did not give much importance to my remark – after all, the solution was so close!
When I spent short school holidays in Moscow, I went to visit my grandmother and grandfather on the paternal side – my mother’s parents died before I was born. They lived on the outskirts of Moscow, near the MKAD. Their two-room apartment was on the top floor of a seventeen-story building. The windows overlooked a ravine and a stream below, and the forests beyond the ring road. As a child, I liked to look far ahead into the distance from their windows, as well as at what was happening right under the house.
My parents gave me the Dendy game console, and I constantly took it with me to my grandmother, so that I had something to do when I did not walk with my grandfather and grandmother outside – I usually sledded down the hills in front of the house.
Grandma was very pious. She had several icons hanging in the red corner of the room and in the bathroom. She often read various prayers.
At one time, my mother and I came to grandparents on March 8th. Then my grandfather wanted to teach me singing in order to try to help me this way with my speech stutters.
Alas, in the early morning when my mother and I returned home, and I was going to go to school, my grandmother called to report the death of my grandfather. I cried that morning very hard because of his death. I think this was the first time when I thought deeply about death. Does anything happen when we die?
In subsequent years I sometimes had this question again. For example, I remember thinking about life and death when I learned about the death of Steve Irwin.
At another time, on May holidays, my mother and I were going to go to Malye Gorki, but our alarm clock broke, and father could not take us in his car. Back then I really liked to spend time in the village. There had never been a single case that I did not spend the summer months there. That evening, before falling asleep, I wished to wake up at five o’clock in the morning – the time when we needed to get up to catch a train. What surprised me was that when I woke up and looked at the digital clock of the VCR, I saw “5:00” on it.
Thus, we were able to go to the village.
I talked about this interesting case with Lena, a village friend, when we burned a fire in the dugout in my backyard.
Then I became more confident in the environment of my old village friends, as a result of which I stopped being afraid to speak and spoke almost without hesitation in the summer in the village.
I think that it was that same day when I had the following dream: “Night. I walk through the grass to the backyards in the direction of the dugout, from the chimney of which smoke is coming out. I do not know why, but instead of going to the front door, I go to the dug hole of our fireplace’s chimney. I look down and see how a thin hand, completely covered with black short hair, moves around firewood with a stick in our fireplace. Then I had a clear thought in my mind that it was – a werewolf.”
I woke up. It was a gray, cloudy day.
We had breakfast in the kitchen of the Big House when Uncle Vitya came to visit us at eleven o'clock. He briefly said that he saw a smoke coming from our dugout as he walked past it through the backyards, walking from a bus stop, which is one and a half kilometers from our house. I thought then that Lena was there, who was the only one who, except me, came to the village on that rainy weekend.
Having finished eating, I went to the dugout. I calmly went to its entrance and opened the door. There was no one inside. I immediately noticed how coals were smoldering in the fireplace of the dugout, and a barely visible smoke was coming from them. It was at that moment that I for the first time remembered the dream that I had that night…
I immediately went to collect Lena, but she was still sleeping. It was about twelve o’clock, and she often slept for a very long time.
Of course, now I understand that the girl most likely would not go to burn a fire in a dugout in the backyard on a cloudy day – and on any other. I asked another friend if he was in the dugout that day, to which he answered negatively. In addition, he would not leave the coals not extinguished. Each time we burned bonfires, he always extinguished them to the end, being a responsible person. The question of who made the fire that day in our dugout remains unanswered, as well as why I had a dream about it, and why in it I saw someone completely covered in black fur…
It is worth saying that almost all the unusual cases that happened to me before my eighteenth birthday took place in the village.
There was a moment when I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard floorboards bend in the kitchen of our house. The frequency of steps indicated that someone was walking in a slow, calm step. I thought that my mother was returning home from the toilet, but when I turned my head towards the door, I realized that my mother was sleeping in her bed. Nobody else could walk in the kitchen that night – my father was in Moscow, and aunt Liza very rarely went to our Little House during the day, and she certainly would not have walked in our kitchen in the middle of the night in the dark. The Big House has its own exit to the garden.
Another incident occurred when I was sitting on the porch of the Little House while repairing my bike. I remember clearly how I felt then that someone was looking at me from behind. I turned around, but there was nobody – neither in the kitchen, nor on the terrace. But I could feel someone's presence.
Many years later, when I began to sleep on the terrace, something hit twice very hard on the door of the terrace. A couple of seconds before that, my mother went outside, but she never slammed the doors like that, on the contrary, she always closed them very quietly and calmly.
And the other night, when I was lying in the bed of the terrace, preparing to sleep, I felt a cool clot fly slowly over my face.