Chapter Text
Someone is leaving him gifts. Strange, odd, bloody offerings that take terrible forms. Disembodied hands and feet, a trail of red leading from his window into the brush. Burnt remains of things that were once alive. Alexei ignores them. Doesn’t leave his house to check, and anyway, they’re typically gone by morning. What other choice does he have? The world is ending. The night is everlasting. He has beer and little else, and now, a child to look after.
Nadia tells him over breakfast, “My daddy said anyone who leaves you presents must want to be your friend.” Her mouth is full of cereal. She’s smiling despite the horror, sweet and clueless as most children are.
Alexei tries to smile back. “We have enough friends, don’t you think?”
They do. The house is full. Alexei can’t move from room to room at night without feeling the wall shake with sobs, the air salted with tears. He wishes he’d stayed alone most days. Wishes everyone had left him alone.
“But daddy said we have to let them all in. Anyone who asks,” Nadia says. “Especially friends.”
His neighbor had said a lot of things. Alexei doesn’t like thinking of him now. His mind wanders to the home across the field, the charred skeleton that used to hold a family in its ribs, and winces.
“This might not be a friend,” he tells her, his hands reaching for the cigarettes on the table because he can not help himself. “Those types of gifts…they’re not welcome.”
Nadia makes a confused face. Alexei prepares for a question he does not have an answer to, but the girl stays quiet. The fortune teller, who had been sitting in silence until that moment, chuckles under her breath. She collects the cards before her and shuffles them. Her too-wide mouth pulls at the corners into a grin. She does not look up when Alexei shoots her a glare.
“When it comes to offerings, one must look at the intention to understand the true meaning,” she says.
Her voice makes Alexei’s skin prickle. He has not gotten used to her presence, prefers to ignore her when he can. She so often speaks in riddles that he had forgone attempting to speak to her at all.
“What intention can be behind corpses?” He asks, and doesn't bother to hide his annoyance.
The fortune teller shrugs. She pulls a card and lays it in front of Alexei facing down.
“Death could mean a lot of things to many different people.”
“A person didn’t leave those bodies.” Alexei sighs. He inhales. Holds the smoke in like a secret before letting it seep out between his lips in slow curls. “It was that thing.”
“The thing,” Nadia repeats to herself, whisper soft.
“The pale man.” Alexei glances at her before looking back at the fortune teller. “I’m not letting it in.”
The woman laughs openly, then. She shrugs, collecting her other cards and stuffing them into the pocket of her dress before rising and making her way out the kitchen. “Don’t be ridiculous, no one is telling you to let it in!” She calls over her shoulder, closes the door shut behind her before he can answer.
Alexei hears her giggling all the way down the hall. He stubs out his cigarette into his can of coffee. Doesn’t hesitate to turn over the card she left behind.
“That man looks happy,” Nadia says.
“He does.”
The word ‘fool’ is a the bottom of the card, big red letters that imprint into Alexei’s eyelids for the rest of the afternoon.
When night comes, he finds himself looking out the window toward the footpath. He half expects to see it, see him, his inhuman shape like a scarecrow among the weeds.
But he doesn’t.
Instead, a woman and a child come to his door.
He lets them in.
“There’s a body outside.”
“Where?”
The man from the bar—Sacha, he thinks his name is—points toward the window nearest to the front door. “Over there. I saw it just before dawn.”
Alexei would be shaken by the flippant way the man spoke of it, describing it as one would describe seeing a bird fly outside. But it's the end of all things. He feels nothing but emptiness.
“There are a lot of bodies these days.”
“This one was fresh,” Sacha says. His voice lowers. “If it helps, it didn’t look human.”
Alexei stares at him for a long while before asking, “Why are you telling me?”
Sacha shrugs. “It’s your house. Thought you should know.”
He doesn’t go outside at night if he can help it, but the curiosity wins out.
He finds it by the fence. Or, what’s left of it. A doe, it’s long legs bent at impossible angles, throat cut clean. Its eyes are gone. The skin around them is smooth, seared shut. Inside the hollow of its chest lies a bouquet of things that should not be there: wilted flowers, a child’s shoe, a photograph of a church. He bends closer. He exhales. The breath trembles in the stagnant air.
When he turns back, Nadia is standing on the porch. Barefoot, pale. The makeshift nightgown Alexei had found for her among his grandmother’s things flutters like a ghost’s skin.
“Did it bring another present?” she calls out.
He can’t bring himself to answer. The fool’s card burns in his pocket, edges damp with sweat. “Go back inside,” he barks. He’s shaking, Alexei realizes. “It’s dangerous out here, you know that.”
Nadia huffs but she listens. Mutters to herself as she marches back, loud enough for him to catch the words ‘daddy’ and ‘play.’ He’s about to follow her when he hears a rustling coming from behind the fence. The noise of an animal making its way through long, dried grass.
He ignores it. Tells himself it was the wind.
That night, he dreams of footsteps circling the house. Not one pair, but many. Light, deliberate, moth wings against the glass. An audience gathering around the perimeter of his home. To watch what, exactly? They swirl around and around. They surround him. Corners him above the basement.
By the time Alexei wakes, he’s forgotten the dream completely, but his nailbeds hurt from digging into his palms.
The house is restless. Alexei’s days are spent inspecting teeth and eyes, the state of his guests’ skin. When he’d been a child, he’d thought he might become a doctor one day. But doctors save people’s lives. They don’t kill them. Don’t aim guns at people’s heads and watch on idly as they beg for their lives.
“Finally, peace and quiet... No one's going to badger me anymore,” the mother says.
How sad.
Alexei pulls the trigger. Sometimes, he feels no better than the creature leaving bodies at his doorstep.
“Can I go outside tonight?”
“Hm?” Alexei looks up from the stove, beer half drunk in his hand. The cat he’d just fed curls around his feet for more. He isn’t sure if he heard Nadia correctly.
“I asked if I could go outside,” she says. “Please?”
He wants to say no. The word trembles at the back of his throat. It’s the right thing to say. His neighbor would kill him if he said anything else. But the house has begun to feel like a coffin, and the air inside is thick with everyone else’s breathing. The boy he’d left an orphan, the fortune teller, Sacha, the widow. They’re all ghosts haunting this place. Nadia deserves some respite from that.
“Only for a little while,” he says finally. “You have to stay where I can see you.”
Her smile cracks the room open. Alexei can’t help but feel as though he’s made a grave mistake.
She wants to find frogs. They’re all dead, of course, but Alexei humors her. The shotgun in his hand is a welcome weight. Let’s him relax if even for a moment. They dig through the dried dirt, places where there used to be puddles, and find little else but bones.
“Where are they?”
“I think they’re hibernating,” Alexei lies.
“Daddy used to be good at finding them,” she says, voice getting thick in a way that meant she was close to crying.
Alexei opens his mouth to comfort her, but the words die. The line of the forest behind her is wrong. Something moves through the branches. Tall. Pale. A figure unspooling from the trees like mist taking form.
“Nadia,” he says, too softly. Then louder, “Nadia, run for the door.”
She turns, following his gaze. Her face tilts forward. Her breath catches.
The thing stands at the edge of the property. He’s staying so very still. It reminds Alexei of watching the cat hunt for bugs.
“Go!” Alexei yells, all but pushing her little body back toward the house. He takes his eyes off the pale man just long enough to see her make it to the safety of the door. It’s only when she closes it behind her that Alexei deems it alright to look back toward the edges of the dark. He’s close enough now for Alexei to see his smile, stark under the moonlight.
“Hiiii.”
“Fuck off.” Alexei lifts the gun. He cocks it, trying to keep his fingers from shaking. “Get back or I’ll kill you.”
The pale man’s smile only seems to grow. “Not alone tonight, are you?”
I never am anymore, Alexei wants to say with some disdain. Not since this whole mess started.
Says instead, “You’ve been watching me. You know the answer to that.”
The pale man tilts his head. “You lift the curtains just enough to let me peek.” He steps forward, and Alexei steps back. The air around him smells faintly of copper and decay. “You don’t sleep,” it says. “You drink too much.”
“Stop killing things and leaving them outside my house,” Alexei yells, ignoring him.
“Did you like them?” The pale man’s voice is almost fond. “I left flowers, last.” He lifts one long hand, traces the air just beside Alexei’s face, not touching. The space between them hums, warm and cold all at once. When did he get so close? “Your skin remembers light,” the thing whispers. “I could give you that again. A sun that never burns out. A world that never ends.”
Alexei opens his mouth. He can not speak.
The creature smiles wider. “What’s wrong?” For a moment, it leans closer, close enough that Alexei can see the faint movement beneath its translucent skin, as if something is moving under the surface, controlling it. “Next time I come knocking, you should be alone,” it murmurs. “So I can come inside.”
His breath comes out in labored pants. Alexei’s fingers tighten on the trigger. The mouth of the gun is pressed against the pale man’s chest. With just a little touch, he can—
But, he’s moving away. It’s unnerving how he does it. Like he’s walking forward, but he’s only getting further. “Until next time.”
“Don’t come back,” Alexei rasps. “Or I will kill you.”
The pale man hums. Suddenly, his face becomes very serious.
“We’ll see.”
Later, when he’s back inside, Alexei will wonder why he did not just shoot him. Nauseous, he’ll lay down on his bed, a nagging voice in his head whispering things he doesn’t want to hear.