Unlimited
Шрифт:
The girl wanted to pass by, but her attention was drawn by a black book with fading yellowed pages, withered edges as if they were burnt with a lighter. There was nothing on the cover: no title, no author. There was just a black void. Nothing more.
As soon as Victoria took the book, she realized immediately that it was a rarity in her hands. It smelled of time. Here you can smell time when you open those old books.
The title was on the second page – Demonology. The girl’s heart began to rejoice. She loved supernatural stories and she wasn’t going to put the book back on any account. Although the price issue concerned her as well.
Her family wasn’t very rich. Her mum, Olga Vladimirovna, was a doctor at a city hospital. She got paid well because of her experience, years of employment, so life was liveable.
Her father lived separate from Victoria. He had a family but didn’t forget his daughter. He tried to help her on a moral and monetary level. He had a good thing going: he was an analyst of quite well-known company and the general manager’s right-hand man. You couldn’t say that he was a social animal, but he got paid enough to support Victoria and his new family. Vic never asked him to help. She had a chip on her shoulder because of her mother.
Olga Vladimirovna and Victoria’s father were in touch well. Ex-married couple managed to keep amity, but they screwed up the marriage.
Essentially Victoria was glad that there was no family feud. Despite that they lived separated they didn’t lose respect.
After having spent enough time turning and smelling the book’s pages, Victoria shifted her gaze at the elderly woman.
‘How much?’
‘One hundred roubles, dear’ the woman smiled.
‘One hundred roubles?’ her amazement was unlimited.
What is one hundred roubles in our time? You can say that this piece of paper is equal to toilet paper. It is two metro tickets or two bus ones, and you can have either metro or bus, not both. These are two loafs of bread and a milk. So, by the evening there would have been neither money nor a full stomach and the girl, surely, didn’t look twice at every penny.
Victoria was confused that the book was written in Cyrillic characters looked like modern Russian. Actually, you could get the general idea of the sentences, but some words were foreign gibberish.
Victoria wanted the rarity to be obligatory at her home, not to be sold for a song in the streets. The girl felt sorry for the elderly woman. She was under necessity of selling such rare things for trifling sum to keep on living out her remaining days. Victoria felt sorry that no one cared for old people at those moments when they really needed help financially and emotionally. Nobody cared for them: children were interested in their own lives, government was involved in infighting, assured that the whole country was well-off, and everybody was living their lives to the fullest.
Victoria paid 500 roubles for the book. She would have given more but she didn’t have more cash. The elderly woman was protesting, speaking that the sum was too much… Finally, Victoria got her to take money because the book should have cost thousands!
In an hour Victoria got to Krasnopresnensky park which was near her house. She didn’t want to go home. No one was there. Her mother was in the country, did gardening.
Victoria never understood a joy of exhausting oneself with work and then going hell knows where to pound away. Was there any rest?
The girl was sitting on a bench. She had hardly found the vacant bench which had been still warm after a couple with the baby carriage. It was good Victoria was passing by. To find a free bench in such a perfect day was likely not to happen.
The girl wanted to look the book through carefully. The book consisted of different articles describing evil creatures. There were pictures, words scratched by a dip pen on pages. There were lots of symbols and seals, some mysterious signs. All of them seemed to be freehand writing. But what was so special about it? When the book had been written there was no photoshop and designer program stuff.
It was a full encyclopaedia of demons, angels, monsters and other supernatural creatures, their complete performance, appearance description, activities. You can imagine how terrifying the book was at the time when Malleus maleficarum tractate was one of the most popular reading.
The book was funny: very thick, full of information, a perfect thriller could be made out of it! But despite all the jokes you could feel a kind of greatness.
Suddenly Victoria noticed a two-fold blotter-like paper between 800 pages. There was a drawn circled triangle. Some symbols were depicted at each corner of the triangle. Inside the triangle there were three circles intersecting in the middle. Each of them had a picture of a sign inside. The numerals were placed around the circle framed the triangle in shape of a pentacle. Those weren’t just ordinary numerals. It was just a set of numbers which made no sense for Victoria. But she had a funny feeling that for a person who had drawn that geometry, every comma and dot had a vital meaning.
There was an inscription above the circle – Kharon. The girl had no idea what a curse that was and whom to put it on and why. Text in a shape of a verse, written in Latin didn’t clarify the situation.
Turning the note in her hands, the girl put it back into the book and decided to keep on preparing for philosophy.
Victoria dedicated that day for philosophy, she left home as it was impossible to be focus there: there was a constant wish to walk.
Then she was outside, trying to get into the basis of philosophy, having left only a week and a half before final examination. That was no big deal! Victoria was just like most students: I wanna do nothing, learn nothing, read nothing, just give me my diploma and leave me alone this beautiful summer.
The girl was sitting in the park for a long time, surfing through logic of luminous intellects. Then she sorrowfully went home: she couldn’t remember anything! Should she panic? There was a week and a half left…before the exam. No. It was too early to panic.
Her boyfriend – Daniel came to Victoria in the evening and drew her attention away from thinking of studying.
They’d been dating for two years already. They met when Vic was a third-year student and he was a final-year one. They walked together twice, drank, woke up in the same bed couple of times without destroying friendship with passion. Then they thought that couple of times could be turned into a horizontal eight and allowed passion and love to crawl under their wing.