Victor Bacau - Russian Horror Book

© Victor Bacau, 2020

ISBN 978-5-0050-6524-7

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

For as long as I can remember, I always liked scary stories. I’ve always been a geek, I loved Lovecraft, Edgar Poe, and of course Stephen King. I always thought there was more life in horror stories than in ordinary stories. A couple of years ago I just collected stories of different people of the world, I collected many old legends, urban stories from around the world, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States. I was wondering what people from different countries are afraid of. I searched and studied them for several months, that was more than just interest. It was as if something was pushing me to that, and I soon found what I was subconsciously looking for all these terrible stories similarity. Each country has its own flavor, its own special monsters, and at the same time there is some terrible similarity.

I excitedly told my friends about such similarities, for me there was some discovery :

Spirits – owners of waters and forests

Child-eating witches, vampires

Werewolves – bears and so on

And a lot of monsters, similar to each other, even if they were from different countries.

All those similarities, all those stories from different parts of the world, in which there is something common, they seem to give hope to the crazy geek that in the world there really is something more remote, something more than our everyday life.

One day I decided to make my own list of scary stories and in this book I want to share our horror, as if I was telling these stories to a friend, perhaps from the other side of the world.

Here in Russia we are afraid of many things, perhaps, as lots of other people are.

Our history has long been divided into two periods, before and after the revolution. From ‘before’ we own numerous ancient legends of monsters living in cold forests and terrible swamps; stories about the human cruelty of merchants and landlords during serfdom.

The Soviet Union and its collapse brought some confusion to our thoughts and left us a lot of terrible tales about the military development programs of the time.

The first decade after the collapse of the USSR brought us pain and disappointment of new military conflicts and our hard lives.

While politicians and heads of states were arguing who was right and who was stronger, millions of people tried to survive on the brink of poverty, they learned to get used to a new life and, of course, they had something to fear.

The huge factories that had been accompanying us right from the Soviet Age had suddenly become awfully empty, staring at us with their black ‘eye-sockets’. The architecture that seemed pretentious, had became eerily creepy. The great and controversial era was then off, and its former extent remained a gray faceless houses, which nowadays we have a symbol of urban horror.

We have almost no haunted castles left, but something else.

Old high-rise buildings and dilapidated barracks, Soviet hospitals and factories, crumbling and rotting.

Russian horror was born in the hopelessness and despondency of old abandoned buildings; in tiny Soviet apartments with their old furniture. It hides in cold deep woods near our cities.

Our horrors are controversial just as our history.

The horror, the otherworldly, the inexplicable are every time a test to understand what you believe and to know who you are.

I can say that scary urban tales have been popular in Russia for a long time, and I can say why – even through fear, even through horror, people are ready to believe that there is something more in the world than their everyday life. And perhaps this is also true for people all over the world. Fear gives rise to terrible stories. And in every story, as you know, there must be a monster. And a hero.

So, that is not so bad, to feel fear, – for it’s an occasion to find a hero. Once, maybe, even in yourself.

A couple of my friends, like most of our local restless youth, were looking for quick money.

But don’t think badly of them. Quick money is not surely drugs or casinos or anything illegal or criminal.

There have always been traps for those who’d graduated from a university then found that can get only a place of a loader or a cashier in malls.

My friend, an economist, could not accept the fact that he has no prospects in our small town. He left for a big city and when had a fail there, he came back home unexpectedly and found some office, where he had been promised a lot of money. Well, who doesn’t want a lot of money, and quickly and legally?

The “job” was to lure people into a private pension fund. Nonsense, of course, but Max was excited. Most of the time he was just visiting people, where he offered and offered. He was being scolded, but he was a stubborn guy as well, so sometimes he managed even to earn some money.

I told him, I warned him: it’s a bad time to go peddling! Well, where could one find a dullard who would allow you to step in the apartment? Nobody would open the door, and if so, could you say for sure that there hadn’t been any maniac inside? One blow to your head, – and your face is now on milk cartons!

Max went missing three months later since he had been hired. Marina went missing the next month.

According to the official version, they were reported missing. Not dead, but gone… may still be alive. A vain hope of their families and friends, which is even worse than the truth, whatever it was.

It was strange and unpleasant, to feel that your friends were dead. It’s not like when you know that they’ve just disappeared for a work or went out somewhere – Marina with her boyfriend, and Max with his girlfriend.

That sense was unexpected; you could remember them and realize they weren’t alive anymore.

Something had happened.

***

“Their bodies were not found and will never be! Maybe some will emerge in five years, alive or dead,” said my friend over a beer. He was so cynical sometimes. For about three years he didn’t manage to sleep enough. He did not like his work of the district police officer. “Maybe they went out somewhere together. In love, they.”

“Nope, it’s bullshit,” I was trying to bring the conversation to what I had been thinking for the past two weeks.

I invited him to a cheap canteen, asking for help, and treated him to shawarma and beer. He slowly moved his jaws and he was looking not at me, but somewhere behind my back.

“I talked to the parents both of Max, and of Marina,” I went on. “The cops told, the last time at work, Max and Marina both visited the same house. You know, that three-storey building on ‘Prokhorov’? Near the shacks? Well, that very house…”

“Who told them?” my friend looked at me, and I stopped.

“Police. Well, your colleagues. You know.”

“Got it, got it,” the policeman said grimly, and looked pointedly at his empty beer mug.

I ordered more.

“The last time they were in this house, and then their trails are cut, you see! All that with a break of one month! Coincidence? I don’t think so!”

My friend laughed.

“Now tell me they disappeared at the full moon!”

He laughed even harder when he saw my face had changed. No, I didn’t check those things about the moon. But I was ready to test and believe anything, and it seemed to me that it was noticeable.

“Playing detective?” my friend concluded, having stopped laughing.

“I was just thinking…”

“Look, what do you want from me, huh?” the district police officer spoke quietly, but so sharply and roughly that it seemed to me as if he was yelling. “Why did you call me? I’m like a dog at work, you know. And here you are! and your uncertain affairs! That’s not the case for district police officers, but for the Criminal division.”