***
Dedicated to Alexey - "chemuser".
******
“Here’s the promised surprise!” Dima pulled a small packet of deep maroon granules from his pocket. “My latest creation. Pure chemistry!” he declared proudly.
Everyone curiously stared at his raised hand.
“Well, Nikolai, wanna try? While I was cooking it up, I couldn’t stop thinking about you for some reason. You’ve always wanted something special. Well, here it is—tailor-made for you. It’s called «Lucifer Ridetis»!”
Vera and Nadya hummed in approval.
Nikolai rolled the substance’s fragments across his palm.
“What’s in it?”
“What’s in it?” Dima beamed with pride. “It’s all clean! The formula won’t mean a thing to you, and honestly, I don’t know what’s behind it either—I’ve never tried it myself. But it should be something extraordinary. Just don’t gulp it all down at once. Try it, then tell us… what he’s laughing at.”
“Who?”
“Lucifer, who else.”
Nadya said nervously, “Oh, I wouldn’t try something unknown. What if I die? Nikolai, aren’t you afraid of dying so stupidly?”
Fear of death isn’t typical for someone in their early twenties. Besides, he’d known Dima since school, back when he’d gotten seriously into chemistry. Now, in their fourth year, Dima was already known at the institute as the author of several unconventional solutions and a promising science specialist. And secretly cooked up interesting powders for his friends.
“Don’t be afraid, Nikolai,” he interrupted his train of thought with a clap on the shoulder. “You’ll shoot down the slipway like a corvette—smooth and graceful! I promise.”
“How?”
“Put a couple on your tongue and don’t fidget.”
The granules dissolved in his mouth with a sweetish taste, the syrup filling his throat. He had to swallow.
Three pairs of eyes locked onto Nikolai’s face. After a minute of silence, Dima asked,
“Well?”
“Nothing,” Nikolai honestly felt nothing out of the ordinary. He washed down Dima’s creation with juice. “Nothing. Like I swallowed a spoonful of sugar—that’s all.”
“Strange…” Dima frowned. “It should’ve kicked in by now. Oh well, stuff happens. C’mon, let’s step out for a smoke.”
In the smoky kitchen, as the ashtray filled up with three more cigarette butts and Vera was telling another medical anecdote, Nikolai found himself staring at the smoke. A bluish haze enveloped the group, as if wrapping them in vast, smoky arms. When everyone laughed, those smoke-laden tendrils coiled together—and Nikolai saw it smiling silently, contentedly, right there in the haze. At that inhuman smirk, promising nothing good, a tremor seized him. He forced his gaze toward the window.
Outside the window, it was dark, with only a few distant lights flickering in the distance. The trembling stopped. The sound of opening doors reached him, and a rough female voice spoke directly into his ear:
“Get out, dude. How long are you gonna ride around?! I don't need you to puke here. You asked for Sukhorukovo—well, here it is.”
Some hands guided Nikolai toward the exit. A minute later, he stood on the nighttime highway, struck by the utter insignificance of a human being before the grandeur of the cosmos. Forty minutes later, in response to his fifth plea, the headlights of a car finally appeared in the distance.
The driver—a man from the Caucasus—glanced cheerfully at the unexpected hitchhiker through the lowered window of his beat-up sedan and said,
“Whoa! Let’s roll!”
There was nothing to buckle up with. The threadbare seat poked Nikolai in the left side, while a plastic skeleton—the kind once woven from hospital IV tubes in Soviet times—danced a wild jig in front of his eyes. Through his drowsiness, fragments of conversation drifted to Nikolai: “…she studied in Moscow…what happens in the clubs…they found out back in the village…straight into the abyss, where else would she go…Vakha and his brother tracked him down…Aaa, shahur!!!…”
The bright light yanked Nikolai from his half-sleep, piercing through his body and illuminating its darkest corners. In the light’s wake—a massive cold bumper with a military plate dead-center, clanking engine parts, and five tons of diesel fuel in a tanker—hurtled through him.
Honestly, car fumes were the only thing that ever irritated Nikolai. If he didn’t let the nearby highway distract him, he could fully revel in his existence. By day, the sun warmed him; by night, coolness soothed him; in the rain, strength renewed him. A sense of oneness with everything around him was his primary, all-consuming joy. In his memory lingered the recollection of someone large, fluffy, and softly humming—someone he longed to embrace, to hold as tightly as possible, and never let go.
The coolness of the nights unexpectedly gave way to cold, and the sun grew increasingly rare. One day, Nikolai found himself facing two black eyes studying him. Before he could wonder whose they might be, the blackened sky pressed down on him—and he realized he was sinking into a horribly cramped, squelching darkness.
It was hot. Something sticky enveloped him completely, clinging to every inch of his skin. Mud squelched under his feet and inside his right Wellington boot. Each step felt like wading through tar. Nikolai yanked at the quilted jacket—a Soviet-era padded coat— clinging to his sweat-drenched sides. From the public address system, a commanding male voice blared across the street:
“Through honest labor, we shall multiply… Еvery ton of harvested grain… Not a single capitalist vermin…”
An unbearable drowsiness seized him. Brushing off clumps of mud that clung stubbornly to his Wellingtons, he stumbled toward the unharvested edge of the field and collapsed.
The rustle of the grain stalks lulled him. But soon it turned ominous, swelling into a mechanical drone. Before Nikolai could grasp what was happening, the combine’s reel struck mercilessly, crushing him, while the spinning rollers dragged his limp body into their grip.
Nikolai couldn’t move. Couldn’t see or speak either. Yet he perceived every detail of what unfolded around him. The light flicked on. A mother and her son stepped into the bathroom. Mother said,
“Honey, you’re big enough to do this on your own. Come on, give it a try!”
“No, Mommy, I’m scared,” the child replied.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” she asked gently.
“Someone’s watching me from in there!” he cried.
“Who could possibly be watching you, silly?” she said, rolling her eyes. “We use this thing every day, and nothing ever happens. Sit down, be brave.”
“I can’t. I’m scared.” he sobbed.
“There’s no one there. Go on!” she urged.
“I’m scared!”
After prolonged coaxing—ending in the child’s hysterics—the light flicked off, and Nikolai realized with a jolt that he had been the subject of their conversation. As he processed this, the boy reappeared in the dim bathroom light, a crooked smirk twisting his face, and sneered:
“Eee…”
Nikolai immediately felt a light thud against his left side—then another, and another. The child’s dumbbell punched a hole in his porcelain flank and kept widening it until screams erupted, the light flared on, and the boy was dragged away.
The glare blinded him. To Nikolai’s right, a tall man in a green gown and rubber apron—his back turned—was working methodically on something on the high table.
His whole body ached. Nikolai managed a groan. The man turned around. The eyes above the medical mask crinkled in a smile.
“Ah, eight legs and two horns!” the stranger exclaimed cheerfully. “Looks like I’ll have someone to chat with today! Come on, snap out of it—my shift’s just started, and everyone else around here is so tight-lipped.”
With that, he patted Nikolai’s cheeks, leaving something cold and sticky on them. Nikolai immediately felt a surge of strength and realized he was lying naked on a cold metal table in a small, tiled room with no windows.
“God, where am I?”
“You’re talking to the wrong one,” his companion replied without turning around. He continued, “You, pal, got caught in the trap. You died like a damn fool.”
A cold sweat broke out on Nikolai.
“But I’m alive!”
“Alive or dead…” The man shrugged, not turning around. “No difference to you now, unclaimed little corpse. There’s a line for your organs. Once I wrap this up, you’ll meet… Well, whoever you believe in?”
“I don’t believe in anyone,” Nikolai’s head spinning, too weak to stand.
The stranger laughed so loudly and sincerely that it even seemed to Nikolai as if the light dimmed for a moment. And when he stopped, the echo kept laughing in the corners for a while, as if retelling a good joke to someone else.
“You’re right,” the mask reappeared before Nikolai’s face. “That’s how it should be! There’s nothing there. Bang! And emptiness, right? Ha-ha-ha.”
At the word “Bang!”, the speaker smacked Nikolai’s forehead with a sticky glove.
“For whoever believes in nothing, there is nothing!” he continued laughing.
“Whoever shall believe in Him, the same shall be saved,” Nikolai whispered—words he had heard, but could not recall when or where.
The laughter cut off abruptly. Eyes brimming with hatred locked onto his very soul, and a massive fist slammed into the bridge of his nose. The light dimmed. A ringing filled his ears. His head spun as if the entire world were spiraling into the neck of a bottle.
The blows to his face kept coming, but instead of pain, they brought clarity and warmth. Nikolai opened his eyes. Dima’s hand froze mid-swing.
“Well, what’s up, man? We thought you’d actually kicked the bucket! Thank Vera—she breathed life back into you proper. C’mon, how was it? Spill it already!”
“Nothing. I’ll punch your face in for that ‘masterpiece’.”
Dima broke into a grin.
“No, seriously—what was it like? Was it good?”
“You try it yourself and find out. It’s not funny. Not at all.”
