Читать книгу The Secrets of Names. Snow Chronicles. Book 1 - Ар'лан ис'Дрекхэм - Страница 4

Domino slipped past Vera’s leg, stopped on the threshold, stretched out his neck, and stared hard into the empty stairwell. Then he gave a snort.

Not a frightened snort. An insulted one.

It was the sort of sound a cat makes when someone has rung his bell and then had the bad manners to disappear before he could decide whether they were worth seeing.

«All right,» said Vadim after a moment. In that pause, for some reason, they had all been listening not for sounds but for the place where sounds ought to be. «I have to get to school.»

«We all have to get to school,» Vera said.

«I mean I have to get to school urgently. As for the rest of you – manage somehow.»

«Very funny.»

«I am as serious as a physics textbook.»

After that they all began getting ready, with the particular kind of chaos found only in large groups of children: one person hunting for a hat already in their hand, another remembering a notebook only after putting their shoes on, and someone – Natan, naturally – asking whether he ought to bring a magnifying glass, just in case.

«To school?» said Vera, startled.

«It might be useful.»

«For what?»

«For the investigation.»

He said this with such complete seriousness that no one even argued.

At school, everything at first was offensively ordinary.

The cloakroom smelled of damp coats and mittens that had clearly lived difficult but interesting lives. Downstairs somebody was already running, although running was forbidden, and upstairs somebody was already shouting that running was forbidden, although this had never yet made the slightest difference. By the window, a cluster of girls were discussing something with the grave absorption seen only in people deciding the fate of the world during morning break. The world, if asked, generally knows nothing about these decisions, but that is its own affair.

Vera almost calmed down.

Almost.

That is to say, exactly until literature, when the maths teacher began taking the register.

She was one of those teachers who remembered everything. Not only surnames and first names, but who had forgotten a planner in October, who had lied about a dog eating homework despite never having owned any such dog, and who had once misspelled extraordinary and was probably still ashamed of it in private. In a person like that, memory was not simply memory. It was a branch of internal security.

So when she reached the K’s, Vera did not even look up. She was drawing a tiny crown over the word Domino in the margin of her exercise book and reflecting that the cat would certainly approve.

«Va – » said the teacher, and stopped.

Something in the classroom seemed to give a faint wobble. Nothing dramatic. It was simply that Vera realised she could no longer hear the scrape of the desk beside her.

«Varya Kotova?» the teacher said at last.

The whole class turned as one.

Vera blinked.

«I’m Vera,» she said.

The teacher looked up from the register. She looked at Vera as if seeing her for the first time. Not crossly. Not kindly either. Simply with the puzzled expression of someone who has found one small part of the world quietly replaced.

«Are you?» she said. «How odd.»

Then she looked back down at the page.

For a long time.

Far too long.

With the air of a person to whom the register itself had become suspicious, and the new version written in a language she had once known in another life and then, through sheer bad luck, forgotten.

«Hm,» she said. «Of course. Vera.»

And she made a note.

At that exact moment, something happened.

Nothing visible. The lights did not flicker. The floor did not vanish. The ceiling did not turn into a cloud, though that might at least have been clearer.

It was only that, for one dreadful instant, Vera’s own name felt strange to her.

As if someone had just tried it on.

Like a jumper in a shop changing room – pulled over a stranger’s head, inspected, then taken off again with a slight grimace.

Vera sat up so sharply that the girl next to her whispered, «What’s wrong with you?»

«Nothing.»

But there was no nothing left inside her. In its place sat a horrid feeling, as though someone had opened the door of her room, stood there quietly counting her things, and gone away again without touching anything.

Not yet.

The maths teacher went on with the register as if nothing had happened. By the next name her voice was perfectly normal again, even faintly annoyed in the usual way, as if half the class were absent not in body but only in mind.

Vera stared at the margin of her exercise book.

It said: Vera.

She went over it again quickly.

Vera.

Then once more.

Vera.

Until at least it looked like hers again.

At break she caught up with Vadim outside the biology room.

He was standing by the window with his hands in his pockets, staring at his phone with the expression people wear when they already suspect the news is bad but are still hoping it belongs to somebody else.

«Something strange happened to me,» Vera said at once.

«To me too,» he said, just as quickly.

That was almost comforting. Not comforting, exactly – nobody sensible is pleased by shared weirdness – but at least it made the thing look less like private madness.

«The maths teacher called me Varya,» said Vera. «Then stared at the register as if it had betrayed her.»

Vadim frowned.

«My signature disappeared off my test paper.»

«What do you mean, disappeared?»

He showed her the sheet. The corner where his name ought to have been was blank. Not accidentally blank either. Deliberately blank. The sort of blankness you got in snow when someone had clearly been standing there and had somehow managed to leave before you looked.

«I signed it,» said Vadim. «I remember exactly. I even crossed it out once because I wrote it crooked.»

«And?»

«And now there’s nothing.»

The same chill that had been sitting under Vera’s ribs all morning, pretending to be ordinary air, shifted properly into place.

«This isn’t coincidence any more, is it?»

«No,» said Vadim. «This is work.»

He said it quietly, but it made Vera feel much colder.

«What sort of work?»

Vadim slipped the paper back into his folder.

«I don’t know. But if someone’s doing it on purpose, they’ll start small.»

«Thank you,» said Vera. «As usual, you know exactly how to make a person feel better.»

«I’m not trying to make you feel better. I’m trying not to waste time.»

That was exactly like Vadim. Somebody else would have lowered their voice, glanced over their shoulder, or begun constructing theories on the spot. Vadim spoke as if they were discussing a leaking tap. Unpleasant, yes. But first you had to find out where the leak was.

At that moment Danya arrived at speed.

Ordinary people approached. Danya always seemed to spring into existence half a second before colliding with you.

«I’ve got news,» he announced. «Two bad bits and one interesting one.»

«Start with the interesting one,» said Vera.

«The interesting one is that the bad bits are the same.»

They stared at him.

Danya lowered his voice – not because he was frightened, but because he enjoyed mystery as a process.

«In history,» he said, «the teacher called Ilya Igor three times.»

«People get names wrong,» said Vera.

«Yes, but today Ilya said, „I’m not Igor,“ and she said, „Really?“ and looked at him as if he’d changed identity without submitting the proper forms.»

«And the second bad bit?»

«In the canteen Auntie Zina gave me the wrong tray.»

«That’s your tragedy of the century?»

«No. The tragedy is that on the tray it said not Danya but Boy.»

«What?» Vera actually laughed. «Just Boy?»

«Just Boy,» Danya said darkly. «I happen to be a person with a name.»

He sounded funny, but his eyes were too sharp. Much too sharp for someone who ordinarily said things first and considered them afterwards.

After lessons, their band assembled behind the school near the old sports ground, where the goal net was still hanging on by the memory of better times. It was a good place for important conversations. Adults passing by assumed children there were engaged in nonsense, and children, as everyone knows, do their most serious business under cover of nonsense.

Ilya turned up silently, as usual, as if he did not so much walk as materialise in places where he had already noticed everything. Natan came charging in a few minutes later, schoolbag over one shoulder and excitement all over his face.

«It happened to me too!» he burst out before he had quite reached them. «Teacher called me… that… little.»

«You are little,» said Danya.

«But not in the register!»

This was a strong point.

They went round in a circle telling everything, interrupting each other, arguing over details, doubling back to the important parts. And gradually something nastier than the strangeness itself began to emerge.

The glitches were happening at nearly the same time.

«Mine was at ten to three,» said Vadim.

«Half past two, more or less,» said Vera.

«In the canteen at two-forty,» said Danya. «I checked on purpose. After they turned me into Boy.»

«Ours in history was about then too,» said Ilya.

Natan, who had not thought to look at the time, said honestly, «Mine was after compote.»

«Exceptionally valuable scientific data,» said Vera.

«I do my best.»

They fell silent.

A car went by on the far side of the fence. Down on the river someone shouted something heartfelt and completely useless at the gulls. On an ordinary day all this would have been background. Today every stranger’s voice seemed to remind Vera that one might lose one’s own.

«Right,» she said, because somebody had to speak, and she had developed a particular dislike of silence. «Tomorrow, between two and three, everybody watches. We write everything down. What happened, where, when, and to whom.»

«An experiment!» said Danya, delighted.

«Yes.»

«A real one?»

«Almost.»

«Then I’m bringing a notebook.»

«I’ll bring a watch,» said Vadim.

«And I’ll bring a magnifying glass,» said Natan at once.

«What for?» Vera asked.

«In case somebody’s name goes small.»

No one had an answer to that, which was perhaps the worst thing of all.

The next day, the hour between two and three stretched like chewing gum stuck to the sole of a shoe. You went on moving, but all the while it felt as if something was quietly holding you back.

By second lesson Vera was looking at the clock more than at her exercise book. By third, more than at the teacher. By fourth she had begun to feel that the hands themselves were moving more slowly than usual. Though by then that may not have been magic at all, merely ordinary nerves, which are unpleasant enough on their own.

At two twenty-seven she was sent to carry the register to the staff room.

Of course she was.

The moment anything strange enters your life, fate immediately decides that for completeness you ought to be left alone in a long school corridor.

The corridor was empty. Not absolutely empty: somewhere far off a door banged, downstairs somebody laughed, and from the craft room came the smell of glue and wood shavings. But this stretch of it was still. Even Vera’s footsteps sounded wrong – duller than they ought to, as if the floor under her feet was listening and had no wish to answer back.

She walked past the timetable board, past the photographs of prize pupils, past a list pinned up for some school event.

Then she stopped.

The list had shifted.

No – not the sheet itself.

Her name.

Her name.

There it was in the middle: Vera Kotova, ordinary and black and flat, like all names on all school lists. Then the letters seemed to ripple. They did not vanish at once. First they faded, as though she were looking at them through water. Then they flickered.

And disappeared.

For one tiny, impossible, freezing second.

Everything inside Vera dropped, the way it does in a lift when it suddenly changes its mind about being reliable.

She stepped closer.

The name came back.

But something came with it.

Something was calling her.

Not in a voice.

Not in a whisper.

Not in any sound at all.

It was as if one small piece had been cut out of the silence of the world, and the hole left behind was exactly the shape of her name. And that hollow was reaching for her.

Ve—

No. Not even that. No letters. No breath. No sound. Only the absence of everything else, and somehow it knew perfectly well who she was.

Vera stood frozen, clutching the register against her chest.

The corridor seemed to lengthen. The light on the walls grew thinner and paler. At the far end, a door handle twitched, though nobody had touched it.

«No,» said Vera out loud, without any idea whom she was answering.

The word rang far too loudly.

At once the world came back together.

A cough sounded in the classroom to her left. Somewhere downstairs children thundered past. The list hung on the board, and her name was there exactly where it belonged, looking innocent enough to have been there all day.

But Vera’s fingers were trembling as if they had only just let go of the edge of something very deep.

She walked home quickly.

Not running – that would have looked too much like panic, and Vera was not prepared to admit to panic, if only on principle. But she walked in such a way that the wind kept tugging at her sleeves and only just managed to keep up.

At home Vadim and Danya were already there. Ilya arrived five minutes later. Natan seven minutes after that, with the expression of a person very much inclined to say everything at once.

Domino was stretched along the back of the sofa pretending to have no interest whatever in human affairs. But his left ear was tilted towards the door, which gave him away completely.

Vera told them everything in order.

The register. The list. The way her name had vanished. The call that was not a sound at all, only a hole where sound ought to be.

When she had finished, the room went quiet.

Not frighteningly quiet. Simply truly quiet – the sort of quiet that happens only when several people have all understood the same thing at the same time, and none of them likes it.

Vadim spoke first.

«It’s a test,» he said.

«Whose?» Danya asked.

«I don’t know. But if first teachers make mistakes, then signatures disappear, and then a name drops off a list…» He looked at Vera. «Something is learning. It’s trying at the edges.»

«Learning to erase?» Natan asked very softly.

Vadim looked at him and, to his credit, did not lie.

«Yes.»

Danya sat down cross-legged on the floor.

«Splendid,» he said. «So what we have is something practising how to make people… without the people.»

«That is a very crooked way of putting it,» said Vera.

«But accurate.»

Ilya, who had said nothing until then, spoke up.

«If it’s learning, then it can’t do it properly yet.»

They all looked at him.

He shrugged.

«Otherwise it wouldn’t miss. It wouldn’t muddle names. It wouldn’t only work for a second.»

It was sensible. And like most sensible thoughts, it was comforting.

A little.

«So we have time,» said Vera.

«Or it wants us to think we have time,» said Vadim.

«Thank you,» she said. «Anxiety absolutely flowers in your company.»

«I try to be useful.»

«You succeed.»

Domino jumped down from the back of the sofa, came over to Vera, and pressed his forehead firmly against her knee.

Not affectionately.

Definitively.

As if he were setting his seal on her there.

Vera stroked him without thinking.