Читать книгу Chat with a Demon. Daughter of the Dawn - Natalie Yacobson - Страница 7

Athenais had to wait an unbearably long time, but eventually she returned to chatting.

“Are you bored without me too?” Nikita teased her.

“I’m not bored at all. I’m in a really depressing place.”

“Are you making another movie there?”

“Movies aren’t the most important thing in my life right now, so I started going out to chat.”

“Are you looking for friends or one friend?”

“I’ve already found one so far.”

Nikita felt involuntary joy. Responses from Athenais were coming very quickly. That meant she was really communicating with him alone. If she had been distracted by someone else, the answers would have come very slowly.

“I’m looking for a girl, not just a girlfriend to chat with.”

“I know.”

“So what do you say? Do I even get one date?”

“We’ll see in time.”

Athenais’ answer wasn’t particularly encouraging, but it’s a good start. She doesn’t say no right away.

“Are you available?”

“It is not really.”

“You mean you’re married? Or engaged? Or have a boyfriend…”

“That’s what you mean.”

“What were you thinking?” Nikita couldn’t understand her. When a woman is asked if she is available, it means that they want to ask her to marry her. The words “free” or “not free” are synonymous with married – not married. Slaves and serfdom do not exist now. In what other sense could Athenais have understood the word “free”? Her mentality can’t really be shaped from the era of the pharaohs, when slavery was in vogue.

“There’s one place I can’t leave yet,” Athenais typed. “It makes me feel not completely free.”

“So do you have some kind of contract?”

A star can only be kept in a particular shooting location by some kind of contract that can’t be terminated without paying a hefty penalty.

“Did your friends help you to make a career in film? Or do you really edit films with your own hands?”

“I prefer to do everything myself.”

“And you do everything yourself?”

“I am guided by the principle: if you want to do something well, do it yourself.”

The phrase flashed through his mind again: “how you fell from heaven, Dennitsa, son of the dawn, to become the king of the cinema and the earth.

Stop! This is some kind of modernization of a biblical saying. Nikita frowned. He felt as if someone’s black claw was writing this phrase in red paint right on the keyboard.

“Do you like horror movies?” The question came out of nowhere.

Nikita didn’t even know what to answer. He decided to come clean.

“When I was a kid, I loved them.”

“Why did you love them?”

“I don’t even know.”

“Do you like to tickle your nerves? Do you like to be scared?”

“It was sometimes.”

“Does the horror genre help you get through a storm of thrills?”

“Like that?”

“Would you like to be in a horror movie yourself?”

“Not as a victim.”

“What part?”

“I don’t know. I prefer to watch. I liked your movie a lot, too.”

“Would you like to be inside it?

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Would you like to join the legions of demons fighting against the Almighty?”

“I don’t know… maybe… yes!”

“Aren’t you afraid of being burned alive so that you can gain immortality later?”

The eerie questions poured out of a leaky sack. Athenais was testing her partner’s strength. Nikita almost gave up. Each line is one scarier than the next, the mouse moves like a wind-up. This is no longer a chat room, but a duel. Who will drive who crazy first?

There was definitely someone in the room behind Nikita’s back. Someone’s claws were scraping the linoleum. The sound was quiet, but unpleasant.

Nikita didn’t risk turning around, though a low growl could be heard behind him. His nerves gave out.

“Let’s not discuss horror movies anymore,” he asked his chat companion.

“Don’t tell me you’re more attracted to magazines with lecherous pictures than to classic horror,” Athenais said.

Nikita had a few pornographic magazines lying around, but how would she know that? You can’t look into his desk drawers through the chat room and check what’s in them.

While Nikita was thinking about what to answer, Athenais had already received the next question:

“Which is safer: pornography or horror movies?”

“Pornography molests,” Nikita typed diplomatically.

“And horror movies can make you go crazy,” Athenais parried.

“They are not mystical ones, thrillers about maniacs. For some reason, they’ve started calling them horror movies in modern distribution, even though the genre is more of a criminal one. There are no ghosts, no vampires, no demons, just violence and carnage. These films used to be called thrillers. They could make you sick. And beautiful demons are romance. Like Lermontov’s poem of the same name.

“Called “The Demon”?

“Yes, it is!” Nikita was pleasantly surprised that Athenais knew Russian classics. For a star, she is unusually educated and literate. Her text comes out without a single mistake and a typo. Miracles in a sieve! Or rather, miracles in the chat room!

“And do you want me to prove to you that mystical movies about demons can make it worse than violent thrillers?” Athenais asked a question that sounded like a trick.

“In what case is it?”

“It is in case the demons come off the screen.”

“Like you did?”

“Yes, it is”

“Is it only in the chat room? It’s safe. Even if you are a demon, you can’t hurt me through chat.”

Nikita remembered a sadistic movie where the victim’s ghost killed through a chat room. Athenais died in a terrorist attack, too, after all. What if her soul had mastered the same technique as in the movie? What if mystical movies are just a cast of reality?

There you go! She’s confused him. How can you believe that a star has become a ghost or a demon. No matter what the star says. When have actors ever been sincere? And why is he so eager to believe in Athenais’ honesty? All she does is play with him at night. In a chat room!

“Where are you now?” He typed out the question.

“I am on the Internet.”

“Isn’t that what I mean? What country are you in? America? Europe? Russia?”

“Is the fan interested in my geographic location?”

The question sounded like a joke.

“I am not a fan!”

“Then what are you?”

She roused his conscience.

“I’m a fan of your beautiful pictures,” Nikita confessed.

“I need an interlocutor, not a fan.”

There you go! She’s got him stumped again. They go around and around. But the chat is interesting, you don’t want to turn off. Even if an ugly picture of a monster popped up instead of Athenais’ face, it wouldn’t cool him off. He’s communicating with a mystery.

“I’ll be your interlocutor, your friend, your personal free psychologist… whatever you want.”

“Even a victim?” Athenais teased him.

And that’s for his sincere confession! When you tell a pretty girl what’s in your heart, she’s bound to spit in it.

“So you want to be my victim?”

Nikita fell into a stupor. A noose tightened around his throat.

“You’d make a wonderful victim,” Athenais continued.

What a joke! Or is it?

“What really happened at the Blue Lotus Cinema?” Nikita typed.

There wasn’t an answer for a long time.

“Tell me about the terrorist attack. Or what happened there? How did you survive? And why were your fans burning temples? I mean, you played a deity. Aren’t deity worshippers supposed to respect temples?”

“Gods come in all kinds of ways.”

Over the top of the chat room, the message about the call buzzed. Athenais called. Nikita responded instantly. The video chat opened. Athenais appeared to be looking at the laptop that lay in her lap. The image was slightly shifted upward. The winged beauty looked down at Nikita. The dark wings, interwoven with glittering chains, were most likely held on those chains. They couldn’t have been real!

Behind Athenais loomed the same walls painted with hieroglyphs. The room she was in was very dark. The only light came from the laptop.

“You have nice watercolors on the walls,” Athenais remarked.

“They’ve been here since high school,” Nikita muttered. He was embarrassed by his drawings. How come Athenais noticed them and didn’t notice the large claw scratches on the wallpaper next to them. Or had she deliberately missed them? After all, they had strangely appeared in the apartment at the same time Nikita had engaged in a chat with her.

Is it possible to hurt her physically through a chat room? He guesses he can, if there’s a real angel or demon sitting on the other side of the chat room. Can you kill through chat? It’s definitely possible to seduce. Nikita gazed greedily at the gentle angelic face in the video window. Athenais had golden eyebrows and eyelashes, graceful cheekbones, a regular facial oval, lips as delicate as rose petals, and lingering blue eyes. Or were they emerald eyes? They seem to change color from time to time.

“You don’t have any icons in your room,” Athenais pointed out.

“No, I don’t. They were left by my grandmother, but I gave them away to the needy.”

“Did they make you feel negative?”

“No, I’m just an atheist. I don’t like to keep religious symbols at home just as a souvenir. My mom brought a statue of goddess Kali from her business trip to India. She must still have it in her bedroom.”

“I knew Kali.”

“So you’ve seen her statuettes, too?”

Athenais suddenly laughed softly.

“You’re funny.”

“What do you mean?”

“You are very naive.”

“And you are very beautiful.”

“I know!”

Athenais had a rigid self-esteem with no pluses and no minuses. Compliments couldn’t buy her off. How would she feel about a bouquet of roses?

You couldn’t buy roses on a student scholarship, but Nikita worked as a courier during the summer and saved up some money. He would gladly spend it on a lavish bouquet and a box of chocolates for Athenais, if she would agree to a date.

She went out on video chat. That’s already progress. Probably the next step will be a date. All we have to do is get her talking, and maybe she’ll set a date herself.

Athenais looked about sixteen or eighteen. He wouldn’t want to get a felony conviction for seduction of a minor. Nowadays a lot of people look out of their age. Judging by the biography posted on the Internet, Athenais had already managed to act in dozens of movies, where she played not a child, but an adult heroine. So she is definitely twenty to twenty-five years old.

“I wish I were a poet, or I would have written poems about your beauty.”

“Many have been dedicated to me: sonnets, odes, madrigals, ballads, even chants and prayers… More valuable than odes to me is communion with you, a living person. Thank you for your friendship.”

Athenais put her hand to her lips and sent him an airy kiss. Her fingers slid right across the screen.

That’s how the Orientals, like the Arabs, thank you for your friendship on Facebook. Nikita was told about their way of communicating by her neighbor, who learned foreign languages well. She conversed with people from the Emirates, Indians, Turks, and guys from Sri Lanka. It was all for an opportunity to practice linguistics. She was the one who told Nikita that he could find a girlfriend on international sites.

Athenais looked something like a character from an Oriental fairy tale. She looked like an angel, but she reeked of the luxury of exotic palaces, golden deserts, and magical oases.

It seems that in fairy tales, the beautiful djinn are usually called peri.

“Athenais…” Nikita addressed her by name.

She grinned as if he were calling someone who didn’t exist, and suddenly she beckoned him toward her, into the darkness of the room painted with hieroglyphics. As if he could walk through a computer screen and get straight to her!

“Living people are rare here,” Athenais suddenly admitted. “It’s a very desolate place around here.”

“Don’t tell me you’re in the Valley of the Kings, surrounded by the Sahara.”

After all, a room with walls painted with hieroglyphs could be the inside of a pyramid. Few actors or archaeologists could have been stranded in the desert by unforeseen circumstances.

“I’m not far from Moscow. You could say, in the far suburbs of Moscow. But there are no dacha plots here, just wastelands all around.”

“Can I get to you by train?”

“No, the railway line is too far. But sometimes I hear trains rumbling on the tracks.”

“So it’s not too far. Otherwise you wouldn’t hear it.”

“I have better hearing than people.”

There she goes again, flaunting her oddities! How hard it is to communicate with actresses!

“So you’re an angel?” Looking at her, it was hard not to believe it. Even Athenais’ skin was as delicate as lily petals. Only angels could have such delicate skin.

Nikita smiled at her through the chat. A smile helps smooth out any awkwardness.

“Don’t get excited! Angels really are creepy creatures.”

There was someone behind Athenais’ back. Or was that her wing moving? Nikita squinted, trying to see. He needed to get up from the table and light the chandelier. Then it would be brighter and he could see it. Only by the time he reaches the switch, Athenais will have left the video chat. She’s nervous enough as it is, like she’s going to end the dialogue.

“Swipe your finger across the screen,” Nikita guessed to ask.

“Why?” Athenais was surprised.

“Just do as I ask.”

She leaned over and traced some kind of hieroglyph on the screen with her finger.

“Shall I wave my hand at you too?”

“Don’t do that! I’ve already made sure the video of you wasn’t pre-recorded. Otherwise you wouldn’t have fulfilled my request.”

“Are all Moscow guys so suspicious?”

“Are all angels so mysterious?”

Nikita could have admitted to the fact that he’d already picked up a few jokes in the chat room, but it wasn’t comfortable. Athenais was looking at him with serious, wise eyes that changed color every minute. She must have special color lenses with a chameleon effect.

“You’re alive! You didn’t die in the terrorist attack! I’m glad.”

“What if you’re glad for nothing?”

Athenais waved her hand, which was studded with fancy rings.

“Good night!”

“But it would soon be morning.”

But Athénais had already passed out, moving her winged shoulder smoothly one last time, as if in flight. The chat went out, but the feeling that the angel was still around remained.