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“Aha! I can’t even try it out! It’s simply a monumental dirty trick!” Methodius growled and, not giving himself a chance to change his mind, quickly traced the rune on the kitchen floor. This was doubly complicated, since the stone left no trace on the linoleum. It was necessary to draw blindly. Sweat appeared on Methodius’ forehead. Mentally he was already ashes scattered all over the kitchen, soiling Eddy Khavron’s dried shirt, which quivered on the chandelier like a white spectre, chained by a hanger to a bend in the wire.

Methodius drew the last line and stepped back, just like an artist attempting to survey his creation. The stone gradually cooled in his hand, and then suddenly – without any warning or sign – shattered into a fine glass powder in his palm. In the same moment, the rune flared up. A particularly bright flame was on its bent legs. But the centre, where Methodius with foresight drew a big circle, was much paler. Without waiting until the rune faded, Methodius carefully took a step into its centre. He expected tingling, flash, pain – anything, but what took place. Methodius suddenly understood that the kitchen with the dark-blue photo-wallpaper had disappeared, and he was standing in a completely different place.

Small puddles scattered on the asphalt. The wind, playing, chased the plastic from cigarette packages. The red eyes of traffic lights smashed into pieces in windows and shop windows. The sky, interlaced with cables and billboards, was dusted with stars. Methodius turned around and immediately leaping into his view was a plaque “Bolshaya Dmitrovka, 13,” fastened at the corner of a long grey house, a large part of which was enclosed in safety construction netting for repairs. “Skomoroshya Cemetery my foot!” Methodius thought.

***

House № 13 on Bolshaya Dmitrovka, solidly but boringly built, had already been staring with its small windows for almost two centuries at the opposite side of the street. House № 13 is so dull and cheerless that even with one accidental look at it, the mood barometer would come to rest on the “melancholy” point.

At one time, on the same space – possibly the foundation was still preserved – was the Church of Resurrection in Skomoroshkakh. And here, up to the church, solidly buried over the centuries, stretched the naughty Skomoroshya Settlement with saloons, fiery dances, and tamed bears. They led these last ones by a ring in the nose, forced them to dance, and soldiers brought them home-brewed beer in a pail. Robbers played pranks almost every night here, with knives gleaming, clubs brandishing, undressed down to the waist, and even beat to death those who overindulged in drinks.

During the immense fire of 1812, engulfing Moscow from three sides, the Church of Resurrection in Skomoroshkakh burned down, and soon on its foundation the priest Belyaev built a dwelling. But the clerical estate could not be supported at the cursed place – as if the bones of the skomorokhi chased it away. And two decades had not yet passed, when the Versailles Furnished Rooms appeared here, with the sooty tunnel of a corridor, bug spots on the walls, and an eternal smell of cheap tobacco from the rooms. Every evening there were drinking bouts and card games in the furnished rooms, and in the corner room lived a cardsharper, a Pole with dyed moustaches, who played the clarinet well. He lived here for about five years and would have lived longer, had his marked deck not been put on the spot once and a juiced-up artillery major not turned up with a charged revolver.

The Versailles Furnished Rooms were located on the second floor. Setting up shop on the lower floor of house № 13 was the optometrist Milka, from whom Chekhov ordered a pince-nez for himself. From the alley, finding a spot for itself was the little store Foreign News, where high school students bought cigarettes with powder, firecrackers, and frivolous pictures from under the counter. In secret, as if to justify the exorbitant prices, it was reported that the cards were from Paris, although in actuality the thread stretched to Gazetnyi Pereulok, to the photographer Goldenveizer – a sentimental Bavarian and a splendid artistic painter of animals.

In the Soviet times, house № 13 first turned into the Hotel Mebelprom, and then the united archive of Moscow Waterworks Management moved into it. Brisk archivists in sleeve guards made excerpts, and the first chief of the archive Gorobets, a former midshipman of the Baltic Fleet, cut liver sausage on the varnished desk of Milka, who had died of typhus in Kharkov in ’21.

This way – with furnished rooms, store bustling, and glossy sleeve guards – day after day and year after year the forgotten altar of the Church of Resurrection in Skomoroshkakh was defiled, until once at dawn two people walked out from a secluded wall of the neighbouring wing of a former military school. One was an ugly hunchback. Traffic lights reflected off his silvery armour, which for some reason seemed splashed with blood. On his belt, passing through a ring, hung a sword without scabbard. The sword was of a strange shape. It ended in a hook with notches. The blade was covered with cabalistic symbols. The other, a stocky man moody and stern like a pagan idol, was black-moustachioed, with grey streaks glistening like silver in his beard. A red loose garment with black inserts flowed exactly from his shoulders.

The guards of Gloom, emerging so unceremoniously, looked around. The fog, reeking like a damp blanket, was lying in pieces on the asphalt. The black-moustachioed man raised his eyebrows interrogatively and glanced back at the hunchback. “Well, and? I’m waiting, Ligul!” he said, breathing with effort through a broken nose.

“Yes, Ares. This is that same house. A rare place, all energy flows necessary to us converge here. Everything necessary is ready. I have seen to it. Shielding magic, fifth dimension… Agents and succubae have been notified. Tomorrow you’ll begin the work: the movement of reports, the sending of eide, and so on. Usual routine work of Gloom. It goes without saying, in the given situation it’ll be more distracting; however, it’s not worthwhile to ignore it. Eide aren’t scattered all over the road. What your primary task will be is known to you,” said the hunchback patronizingly.

“Excellent. Well, titan of spirit and prisoner of body, what else do you have to say? What else have you hit upon in those centuries that we did not meet?” Ares asked ironically. The pretentious tone of the hunchback clearly irritated him.

“That traitors don’t exist, instead there are only morally adjusted people,” the hunchback answered in a thin throaty voice.

“Not badly said, my cemetery genius! You’re a poet and a philosopher, cultivated on the sickly soil of the Chancellery of Gloom. In that case, Judas is nothing but an intellectual, acutely in need of a handful of silver coins, deciding to earn extra money… But enough feeding each other a stew of paradoxes. Let’s return to business. You’re sure that the time has come?”

The hunchback jerked his head up. His voice sounded fanatical, “Yes. The day has come increasingly closer when Light and Gloom will again join in battle! And Gloom will prevail! The wizards of Light will cease to interfere with us, will hide in their burrows beyond the clouds, and the eide of moronoids, which we now rip out of them with such difficulty, will gush out to us in an endless stream… Everything that we need – this is the last effort!”

Ares looked at him with badly hidden mockery. “I’m well posted. Very nice that you reminded me…” he said.

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