Unlimited

‘Have I understood you right, dear?’ the demon repeated his question again, gently touching her chin, trying to catch her ashamed eyes.

She silently nodded and her eyes were dim with tears. She didn’t want Kharon to see her crying again.

‘Can I buy it for you?’ he asked, without letting the girl turn away.

He was important to look at her eyes to understand how her emotions were shown. He needed her real emotions. The demon recognized, however, rather rapidly that without reading minds he could just look at the eyes and get all the necessary information out of there.

‘No, Kharon, it’s too expensive. As all the other art books. I’ll get paid and…’

‘I’ve put it in a wrong way,’ the man interrupted her, taking back the massive book, ‘I’ll buy it. No objections can be accepted.’

He turned away and went to the checkout lane. Victoria was open-mouthed staying near the bookshelves, understanding nothing how that could happen.

‘I can hear your pulse accelerating,’ Kharon said in a low voice with the smile on his lips when Victoria came up to him in the queue.

‘Kharon…’

‘I know the reason. You’re waiting for this book! You’re glad! These are emotions of happiness and joy. I’ve rather well known these because they are the brightest, strongest and purest you can ever have.’

‘Thank you!’ Vic put her head on his shoulder, hiding her the most pleased smile.

‘What for? We’re still in the queue.’

‘For what’s gonna happen in two minutes.’

As the book was bought Vic was happy. She had tried to buy it when she was a student, she graduated and even when she got a job. She madly wanted it but every time something prevented her from buying.

They were walking down the street from Kuznetsky most metro station. Kharon was carrying the massive book packed for all of life’s emergencies. Victoria’s arm linked in his and she didn’t even try to hide her happiness and smiling like a brewer’s horse. What could go wrong but she suddenly felt woozy. A waltz. A villainous loathful waltz. There were no things static before. The building started floating down like escaped from surrealistical pictures. Concrete, brick and iron objects turned into a ductile elastic band who knows who starched it. In a flash the sky and the earth switched places. Vic sorted out the darkened cumulus and the stars awaking in the distance. The earth sprinkled with the pellets of dirty from above, the asphalt threw back lumps in people. Upside down the raced giving its light to all around, blinding the eyes. The eyes what they did! Cars like sturdy immortal bacteria divided like cells. Vic saw right before her eyes the world gathered its double-ganger and they both were so disgusting! They were too damned painful look! It was possible. With its diploid abnormality it drove the girl crazy. Her eyes couldn’t focus on. They didn’t belong to her. Everything was at sixes and seven!

Victoria couldn’t take a step forward. She just didn’t understand what was going on, where the asphalt was, where to put step. She was like an astronaut tirelessly worked on the ISS, having completely forgotten what gravity and Newtonian constant of gravitation were. There was no coordination. It absented. There was confusion and surging up fear.

The girl tried to say something, to ask the standing near demon in catatonic way for help. He only heard her like as a lonely cow in the field of thistles weakly bellowing.

Her heart was beating faster and faster. It was getting scarier and scarier. The half of the body was getting heavier as if came off and flew into the abyss. No, it didn’t hurt. It scared. The body was getting covered with a layer of something soft and disgusting, something that made you remember the true belonging of the body and didn’t allow to feel more and more.

The face. It wasn’t a face it was a mask. A cold, rubbery mask made of her own skin…muscles. Repulsive. And it scared again. Victoria fell and Kharon hardly had time to catch the girl not to let her fall. He held her, the book and got through everything inside that Victoria felt.

‘What’s it, dear?’ coming aside from people, Kharon tried to find out what was going on.

The girl mumbled something unclear and incomprehensible in return. Suddenly a smell of illness clogged his nostrils. Why? Why did that young girl, who absolutely had been healthy until now, had an illness? If it had a smell it meant something serious not just ARVI…

‘I feel ache in my heart… Pain and fear. What am I supposed to do? Vic!’ Kharon called the girl. ‘Don’t close your eyes, can you hear me? It’s too dangerous! Don’t close your eyes!’

People turned, stared, were curious, someone disapproved, others had pity and wanted to help but hesitated, some just looked away.

Kharon fell on the nearest bench, holding the sick girl. The book fell near on the dirty and trampled road. Victoria couldn’t say a single word, the man was sitting near, understood nothing and what he had to do. But he clearly understood that it shouldn’t have been what was going on to Victoria. That wasn’t neither her illness nor her disease.

Her head was lying on his knees. Her eyes were closed. No moves. The breathing was quiet. The inner pain kept on its attacking. The man was stroking over her cheek, looking at her face, at her red hair awry over his knees. Her quiet but heavy sighs sounded like moans of a drug addict who was getting through terrible withdrawals. He didn’t know what to do that he could call an ambulance, to find a doctor. He didn’t know. He was just sitting and trying to calm down and taking pity on the girl.

More than an hour had passed. Then Victoria went silent. The moans suddenly ceased. The attempts to move were gone. Silence. The sepulchral silence. Something gave a shiver in the chest of the demon, it pricked in his heart more likely. It was unpleasantly and unexpectedly. The thing that had pricked him in the heart made the man bended over her face to understand if actually she breathed and her heart beat.

Hardly had he bended over her as Vic opened her eyes. Her eyes were wide-opened. She had a scared and understanding nothing stare. She didn’t still move. The demon looked at her eyes, but Victoria seemed not to see him. She just gazed at the sky covered with the black veil.

‘Hey, dear?’ Kharon called her quiet.

The silence was the answer. Victoria didn’t hear his voice. She could hear nothing at all. She just gazed at the sky. There was the same silence but more ominous. These eyes of olive colour scared him more than when they had been closed. Then she started speaking. It was as sudden as she seemed to have been numb and speechless before.

‘It’s been a sort of horror…’ she whispered getting up from the knees of the demon who understood nothing.

He was confused. Kharon had clearly felt the smell of some incurable malady. That was Victoria who smelled of it and no one else. He had heard her heart lose the beat, running down, by whisper counting the last beats and speeding up with scream “I won’t give up”. He had heard her breath come faster but weak and hopeless. But now the absolutely healthy girl, active and strong, was sitting near him. No malady threatened her now.

‘What’s going on? What’s it with me, Kharon?’ she asked the man, carefully studying his face.