The water gets bubbling and foaming again, and a Russian submarine comes up, swaying heavily.

A boatswain climbs out on all fours, feeling no pain, and shouts down the hatch, “C’mon, thaz not a problem – we donneed no compass ta figure it out! We ‘ad two liters o’ spirit that woulda gone to waste otherwise!” Then he looks at the Eskimo and, trying to focus his eyes on him, cries in a hoarse bass voice, “Hey, Chukchi, which way do we take to Murmansk?” The Chukchi replies, “South-west-west, 560 kilometers, but be careful not to tip that submarine over when you go down.” And the boatswain yells at him angrily, “Doncha get smart with me, you snip – show me with ya finger where it is!”

So, what’s stalking at a glance?

It’s evening… Yet another Hero, as crazy about reading fantasy novels as all morons and losers are, staggers back to his little cozy den in the five-story condo he likes so much, to fall into anabiosis until the pure, good, and just event – the publication of a new remake that depicts him as the Great and Powerful throughout – happens.

In the meantime, the powers of darkness in the persons of a budding criminal nicknamed Lisper (sentenced for rowdy behavior to three years suspended) and a couple of other young and gifted good-for-nothings, stopped by the condo’s entrance hall, looking for something soft and pliant to train their adolescent psyche.

Scenarios:

1. Hero didn’t spot Lisper until he was all in Hero’s face. Hero’s right hand hurriedly went searching for the mouse and hurriedly clicked the left button that wasn’t there, and the absence of a screen sight to aim through made talking to these people a tad harder for the powerful magician.

The day’s last thing saved on the hard drive was a blurry, dirty 50 Hz palm closing the world shut before turning it upside down. So he couldn’t see the young yet promising judo champion who ran up the stairs behind him and confidently set about knotting the young and gifted good-for-nothings into a macramé pattern.

2. Hero got so blown away he slipped and dropped all his fantasy books at the entrance door. While he picked them up, a young yet promising champion boxer named Gavrila burst into the hall, ran up the stairs, and tripped over Lisper. A short, if informative, discussion followed.

Over the course of that discussion, the advantage of the left hook over bluff and thief-argot bluff was elucidated. Gavrila helped Lisper get better at lisping by giving him an unassuming professional kick in the teeth.

Drenched in cold sweat and stepping with disgust over the bloody spit and puke, Hero ran fast to his den to leave it all behind by diving into the second level of the book about Him, the Great.

3. Hero went home, sweating gallons.

All day long, signs kept shouting to him that a white furry beastie would be coming for him soon. The world’s hints were getting more insistent by the hour – the cats squealed by his ear louder and the passersby, saying something seemingly irrelevant, looked at him more and more meaningfully, making the matrix bulge so much they seemed out to pounce out of the RAM at him.

The last sign was the scrap of a newspaper he saw at the condo’s entrance door, with the headline “Gazprom Gives Last Warning to Ukraine,” torn so that only the words “last warning” remained visible.

“I wonder what Castaneda would have said about that,” Hero thought, squatting with his feet on the bench at the entrance door.

The answer came as usual in the form of the young yet gifted good-for-nothings, headed by Lisper, cussing and yawping heartily, slagging off Gavrila, the young yet promising champ of you’re-in-deep-shit do, who had brushed past into the hall while Hero pondered the “to be or not to be” of his situation.

4. Offscreen voice: Hero was asleep but he knew that in five minutes he’d wake up in his bed, remembering all he’d been dreaming about. That’s why today he let the champ of what-did-you-say-it-was and Gavrila enter the hall first.

5. “And thith thime we’ll leth the king of spades come firthst, come firtht,” Hero mumbled malignantly under his breath, lisping as the result of his last encounter with Lisper, getting deeper into his role of the local lunatic, as he looked after Gavrila, who had no idea he was about to meet Lisper in a way that would be fateful for Hero, hurrying in to meet Lisper all the same…

6. “Let the Kings of Swords come first please,” Hero thought calmly, looking Gavrila in the eye, exchanging meaningless phrases with him before Gavrila rushed, in a businesslike manner, to smash Lisper’s face in as any patience card was supposed to do.

7. “Nnnoooo, I don’t like the way the cards have fallen,” Hero thought, and he jumbled his cards laid out to show Gavrila give Lisper’s head a kick with his strong foot, freeing the condo once and for all from that bold-faced asshole. And, all things considered, Lisper wasn’t worth laying out a patience for.

Gavrila, on the other hand, was a cool guy, ready to beat the hell out of Lisper for the asking. Svetka from apartment 54, however, didn’t see what she was missing, the hoity-toity fool.

Better lay out a patience for the two. So that they could move in together and live happily. Then there’d be more descent people living in the condo in some – teen years, by the way.

For those in doubt, here’s the classification in brief:

1. Stalking version zero.

2. Unconscious stalking, or where the guardian angel strikes is your home.

3. “Ooooww enemies, they shut me in, that’s an ambush, how d’ya like that, bro?” Semiconscious stalking that often transforms smoothly into madhouse stalking, directed by the kind and sympathetic men in white coats.

4. Stalking by a dream-seer… or, to be precise, a stalker’s dreams… maybe… or dream stalking… or in-stalking dreaming… or perhaps in-dream stalking… Damned if I can get my head around those dreams without a panel of stalkers to help me out…

5. Stalking by a not-yet card sharp who already cheats a little with cards… and events…

6. Stalking by a stalker, or so he thinks…

7. “It’s high time the stalker became a stalker,” the world thought…

So, what’s a stalker under a magnifying glass?

Take necromancers, for instance. A necromancer needs no description since you can imagine them easily, surrounded by the dead they evoked from their graves, howling terribly, jealous of everyone around over the necromancer and out to tear down anyone whodoesn’t have a life insurance policy.

Or, say, vampires – they’re no rocket science as you can’t mistake them for anyone else. At least, before you die.

The bogatyr’s distinguishing feature is, say, his strength. The magician’s, the ability to do magic. The witch’s, to do witchcraft. The sorcerer’s, to do sorcery.

But what’s a stalker and what does a stalker do anyway?

Those who’ve read the previous chapters may have noticed that any event has lots of potential scenarios. And, strange as it may seem, any scenario has an end, happy or otherwise. And if you look at some five scenarios, it turns out that despite the many possible combinations, they each have a distinguishing feature, the possibility of a happy ending that somehow keeps plummeting terrifyingly as you go.

And the possibility of finding yourself ten feet under tends toward one hundred percent in any scenario. If the scenario is not something you might see in a kids’ comic, coming instead from the hard, true life, then the happy end vanishes out of sight almost as fast as you can say soulfully, “We’re screwed.”