I express my appreciation to Tatyana Silchenko and Julia Zotkina

for their great contributions and support.

Picture on the cover is made by the author.

“The next station is Kievskaya…” Victoria closed her eyes, put the earphones back on her head and looked into the darkness. She had been using metro circle line for two hours already, trying to prepare for philosophy exam.

It was the beginning of summer, the middle of June. Graduation exam. Like most of the students Victoria didn’t want to learn anything. She wanted to hang out, drink, eat and sleep. Sleep a lot.

Why youths constantly want to sleep? Always and everywhere. Just sleep. It’s impossible to think about anything but soft pillow and warm blanket… okay, just pillow, not necessarily a soft one… Who cares about exams?

The lecture notebook was lying cosy on her knees, being untouched for a long time. Maybe knowledge would get into her brain solely because the notebook was lying on her knees. Later it dawned on her that none of it would crawl into her head willingly.

She went out at Komsomolskaya station and wandered. The weather was too perfect to pore over books. Victoria reached a café and bought a cup of cappuccino. Probably it would help her to cheer up and clean up her act.

It was Saturday. Mid-afternoon. What idiocy it was to drag around Moscow, hug a thick exam book, trying to prepare for philosophy… Fine.

‘Vic?’ friend’s voice on the phone slightly stirred up her sleepy head. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’

‘Me? Hanging around the centre. At the moment I’m drinking coffee. I wanted to learn Hegel’s basic concepts… and other ideas geniuses of the past. And you?’

‘I’ve just got up. Just got the hell up! Vic, I’ve slept through everything. Yesterday my boyfriend and I were going nuts and today I have no strength. And I have no idea how he’s out there!’

‘Then I’m not gonna wait for you, aren’t I?’ Vic smiled.

Vasilisa was a very active lady. She was not active in sports but in life. Her life was humming and in full swing: everyday parties, endless holidays, guys, friends. She had no clue what adulthood was, and she was supposed to grow up.

Every three months she got a new boyfriend just because the previous one annoyed her with his existence. He could annoy her with anything that other people would pay no attention to. For example, it could be a curl out of place, a mole on the back under the shoulder blade, how he smoked, the way he looked, the colour of his eyelashes… she was irritated by everything. Then Vasilisa would find a person who wouldn’t irritate her.

Every time when another “Bill” was at hand Vasilisa chirped and was insanely happy. She was sure she fell in love and that love would be till the last breath, that he was her Romeo, she’d been waiting for all her life and finally got him.

The most amazing thing was that the majority of her dates suffered terribly after she dumped them. She didn’t care but they did. They ran after her, begged to start over, forgave all her shenanigans, and Vasilisa said that she “heard some noise”.

It was impossible to wake Vasilisa up after party and make her go. More precisely it could be done, but around 6-7 pm.

‘Well, I'll probably come over tonight, okay’ the girl mumbled in a sleepy voice.

‘Yeah, I got you.’

Her answer usually meant that most likely she would not come. But some part of her character did not allow to say, "I’ll not come", Vasilisa tried to disguise her true intentions.

Victoria finished her coffee and went down the street to Okhotny Ryad. She didn’t actually care where to go and after a while she reached a massive bookshop at Lubyanka.

It was a multi-storey building full of books. All the books were carefully sorted by themes and sub-themes. That place was a real catch for bibliophiles. Victoria never thought that she was one of them. She could read some fiction or psychological thrillers. She didn’t like pulp fiction but sometimes she wanted to read heart-rending book about love or watch a beautiful modern fairy tale about a handsome guy about thirty who fell in love with a usual poor girl who wanted nothing from him but holy love and they both would savour it. She was fed up with it, but it was possible to enliven the environmental severity.

Victoria decided to enter the shop, having intention to find an absorbing book, which would touch her very rough soul by the very annotation and just make her want to read it in one breath.

Dear Lord, how many books were in that shop! Despite that some books seemed to be the same fiction type there were so many sub-styles that Victoria just lost herself in search of a suitable one.

A few hours later, streaming with perspiration Victoria finally came out having bought two books about some wenches and pucks.

The girl almost forgot about the thick middle age philosophy doorstopper. Oh, dear God, it was so hard to read what you had to. When Victoria was at school, she had a global problem: the reluctance to read what was assigned. She wanted to read what she wanted! Disagreements with her literature teachers often led to scandals of all sorts.

It couldn’t be helped. Studying at university Victoria got that reading was an important thing…too important. Surely after school graduating literature course was done and all the classical books were read. Yeah, nobody argued that some of the reading seemed to her to be nonsense, she disagreed with some, but there were interesting books too and the majority of them. Victoria realized that many books which were offered by the Department of Education, mustn’t be read by teenagers!

Vic remembered herself when she was 14. She was uncontrollable, hated to talk about love in any ways, knew nothing about respect and cared about nothing. She didn’t know what fear was! How could she understand the love in The Captain's Daughter or the most severe sense of Raskolnikov’s remorse? No, she couldn’t. She didn't care.

So being satisfied with the buying Victoria left the shop and went ahead towards Tverskaya street but she ran into an elderly woman who sold flabby, dilapidated books which were older than the woman herself.

The girl wanted to pass by, but her attention was drawn by a black book with fading yellowed pages, withered edges as if they were burnt with a lighter. There was nothing on the cover: no title, no author. There was just a black void. Nothing more.

As soon as Victoria took the book, she realized immediately that it was a rarity in her hands. It smelled of time. Here you can smell time when you open those old books.

The title was on the second page – Demonology. The girl’s heart began to rejoice. She loved supernatural stories and she wasn’t going to put the book back on any account. Although the price issue concerned her as well.

Her family wasn’t very rich. Her mum, Olga Vladimirovna, was a doctor at a city hospital. She got paid well because of her experience, years of employment, so life was liveable.

Her father lived separate from Victoria. He had a family but didn’t forget his daughter. He tried to help her on a moral and monetary level. He had a good thing going: he was an analyst of quite well-known company and the general manager’s right-hand man. You couldn’t say that he was a social animal, but he got paid enough to support Victoria and his new family. Vic never asked him to help. She had a chip on her shoulder because of her mother.

Olga Vladimirovna and Victoria’s father were in touch well. Ex-married couple managed to keep amity, but they screwed up the marriage.

Essentially Victoria was glad that there was no family feud. Despite that they lived separated they didn’t lose respect.

After having spent enough time turning and smelling the book’s pages, Victoria shifted her gaze at the elderly woman.