Translator Natalie Lilienthal

© Natalie Yacobson, 2020

© Natalie Lilienthal, translation, 2020

ISBN 978-5-0051-8265-4

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

THE FAIRY OF TAPESTRIES

All that remained of my brother’s dead girlfriend was puzzles – a whole collection nailed to the walls.

“They look like paintings covered with light cobwebs. And from them…” Anita felt cold, her tongue seemed to be frozen, and it was impossible to finish the thought.

“I know you’re cold,” whispered a voice in her brain. Probably it was not in reality.

Anita looked at the pieces of art collected by a caring hand like a museum mosaic. There are fantasy, landscapes, still lives, morinas, and group scenes. Mostly the emphasis is on magical details that are sometimes difficult to see in the most ordinary-looking paintings. All assembled puzzles are carefully glued and inserted inside graceful frames, matched to the size. It’s hard to be surprised here. Anyone who at least once in his life put together a jigsaw puzzle of a thousand or more details, knows what a painstaking work it is. Such toys are intended so that, having collected them once, then not to scatter them, but to nail them to the walls to decorate the interior. Anita herself never had the patience to complete a large puzzle to the end, so she respected the skill of another. The selection of paintings was especially good. My brother’s ex-girlfriend had great taste. All images are bright and iridescent, but darkness gathers in the house next to them. Perhaps the whole point is that the house is old and gloomy. It is gloomy here even during the day.

“There’s a whole exhibition here!” Anita walked through the corridors looking at framed puzzles. In a gloomy house, bright pictures were supposed to create a good mood. And instead they brought in something scary. It is strange, looking at them, as if dancing on a rainbow, so where does the feeling of evil come from. The black door to hell cannot suddenly open inside a fabulous landscape.

“Do not take them off under any circumstances!” warned the brother.

“Good. Although strange…”

“What?”

“They seem to be alive”.

“This is computer graphics, if you noticed, there is not a single classic picture. Aspazia loved only contemporary artists who create a picture based on a sketch or a photo processed graphically. And she compared the collection of puzzles to the weaving of tapestries”.

“What kind of comparison? Was she a restorer at a museum?”

But the brother had already left. The pictures of the dead girl looked at her with living eyes. Fairies, elves, mermaids and whole companies of magical creatures are all around, and they look as if from hell.

Well, the needlewoman was Aspazia. Aspasia! What’s the name? What diligence does it take to collect all this with your own hands? Anita found one box and tried to put together the puzzle she had already started. It didn’t work. Since it was already started, it means that Aspazia died before she could collect it. Really reminiscent of painstaking knitting: loop into loop. All the details are so small. So you can go blind!

Anita threw up a whole pile of parts and fell asleep among them without collecting anything. Outside, the rain pounded on the window. Singing in an incomprehensible unfamiliar language penetrated into sleep. This is neither English, nor French, nor German, not even exotic Arabic. He seems to be inhuman at all. Just a mixture of sounds and notes. This is probably the language spoken by the elves in the forest.

In a dream, Anita was stirring up the details of an unassembled puzzle. She dreamed of a beautiful, golden-haired woman weaving a tapestry thread by thread. Her ears ached from her song. The sound echoed like blows in a cauldron.

The woman is wearing a luxurious vintage dress in green. Behind the back is a sparkling cape. In curly hair, a cap with a veil. She herself resembles a picture from a medieval museum. She would rather be queen than work on a tapestry. For some reason she winds some of the threads from the tapestry on a spindle. Something is wrong here. Spindles were not used in the production of tapestries.

Anita woke up the next morning. The puzzle has been completed. Gray mice swarmed around on the floor. No, some creatures, not mice! Anita screamed, and they ran to the corners.

On the dusty floor, there are chains of footprints that resemble miniature human feet rather than mouse feet.

You can go crazy in this house! What kind of creatures did not start in the basements during the period that the house was not repaired. Probably, it will soon crumble from decay. If not for the urgent need, Anita would never have agreed to spend the holidays here. It was better to leave for the whole summer somewhere to the sea on a sunny and hot coast. Here, in a gloomy old mansion, even summer looked like late autumn. The sky above the rooftops is always cloudy, the park behind the fence is almost devoid of foliage, mostly thorny bushes and thorny trees grow in it. Even nowhere to walk. The only pleasing to the eye that there is, these are bright puzzle pictures. But from them for some reason the frost sneaks through the skin. Moreover, the feeling of fear in front of the images of elves and fairies has become much stronger than it was on the first day of arrival.

In the gloomy garden, under the thorny branches, there was a black headstone. It seems to be no surprise that there are burials on the territory of the mansion. Generations of one aristocratic family have lived here for centuries. Not her family. Anita’s father bought this estate from some ruined aristocrat. He died before he could leave here. He seems to have been buried here. Surely there is a crypt somewhere nearby.

After a wonderful purchase, her father did not live long either. He caught some kind of infection, from which all the skin was covered with ulcers, similar to the marks of tiny hands, and died. Now Anita and her older brother Mark owned the estate. But what’s the use of such ownership? It will take a lot more money to renovate a mansion than you can get from selling it. And if you don’t repair it, it will soon fall apart. Cracks, like cobwebs, have already begun to appear along the walls and ceiling. They seemed to deliberately repeat the bends of the jigsaw puzzle. It feels like the whole house is assembled piece by piece by someone’s skillful hand.

There was nothing to amuse herself with: no TV, no gym, not even a library. And the books in the old mansion certainly had to be stored somewhere. Naturally shabby. But what about without them? All aristocrats collected their own library. Why is it different in this house?

Anita walked through the rooms all day, but she never found the library.

At night she dreamed of a woman again. Her fingers quickly twisted the threads of the tapestry, the song flowing to the beat. Some strange creatures, like fabulous leprechauns, galloped around her hem and machine. And suddenly all the threads are in blood. They reach out for blood. From her blood! The tapestry is woven from Anita’s blood and veins.

She woke up terrified.

The dream was so real. She watched it like a film on the screen with her own participation, and in this film she was butchered as in a torture chamber. A sharp spindle stabbed into her chest with a knife, not allowing her to breathe or move. And the beautiful singing woman pulled the veins out of her one by one. The pain in the dream was also real.

Even a murderer with a knife could not have scared her so much if he broke into an empty house, where there was not even a telephone to call the police. Even ordinary murder does not have the evil that was present in the dream.

Anita went out to the park. You need to walk a little, otherwise she will go crazy from a long stay in stuffy gloomy rooms. Even the puzzles on the walls were no longer pleasing.

Anita did not have her own car, but it was possible to try to get to the nearest village on foot. When Mark drove her here, on the way she noticed something like a tiny town. There should be a bar or pub. Now she needs to sit in a crowded place and talk to someone, but as luck would have it, she could not find a way out of the park. The estate was too large. It’s easy to get lost on paths that diverge in a maze.

Anita almost tripped over the grave under the trees. This is the one she saw from the window. The headstone is black. The piled mound of earth is quite fresh. It was recently loosened with a shovel. Mark said something about the fact that his girlfriend had to be buried nearby. This is probably her. There is no one else to be. Who else has lived and died on the estate in the last ten years? Only her father, that old aristocrat and brother’s friend. But for some reason the inscription on the stone read Etna, not Aspazia. The brother’s beloved was definitely called Aspazia. He even composed a madrigal in her honor, just like a knight from the old days. The poems were dedicated to Aspazia. Anita found them in an album that Mark had forgotten in the house when he left. Or maybe he just didn’t want to take it with him. And who, then, is Etna? Aspazia’s body is definitely buried somewhere nearby. And the thorny garden is an excellent setting for the burial site.

It’s unpleasant to live next to the grave. Anita almost ran away from it. For some reason, something as oppressive with fear emanated from the damp earth as from bright puzzles in the house. But Anita returned to the collection of puzzles. It was already evening, and she did not want to spend the night in the open air.

The house was even darker than usual. Anita had to make an effort to turn on the lamp. The electric light snatched the inscription under the puzzle, hanging in the frame in the hallway: Etna. Isn’t that the very name that is inscribed on the tombstone.

The puzzle depicts a pretty young blonde who has fallen into the clutches of some mythical creature with horns, wings and claws.

It feels like this plot is a warning. Anita turned away quickly. In many other paintings, where elves danced under the moon or fairies played pranks, one could also find scenes of violence against mortals, which for some reason she had not noticed before. And now she looked at them, and the floor trembled under her feet. Has an earthquake started? Anita was frightened. It seemed that the walls were shaking, and the puzzles were striving to fall out of the frames and again crumble into pieces. The living creatures inside them seemed to demand to be released. The sound of the thunderstorm that had begun outside the windows reminded of a hundred voices screaming for vengeance.

What will not seem when you are left alone for a long time with the gloomy gray walls of an abandoned house. It was time to go to bed. And it was scary to fall asleep. Dreams, like a door, led to something that she did not want to see. Anita wandered around the house for a long time, delaying the moment when she had to go to bed. We need to get out of here. But where? Where else would she be given a free overnight stay? The hotels are expensive and uncomfortable. And here is an old bed under dusty canopies, as if made for a princess. But lying on it, Anita stubbornly felt like a victim, not a princess.

In the third dream, she came close to the woman. Up close, she no longer seemed so beautiful. On the contrary, she hunched over, hunched over, shriveled like an old woman, and the romantic cape behind her turned out to be two sagging black wings.

“Why are you torturing me?” The question arose by itself, as if Anita’s tortured soul had asked her with her lips.

The woman looked up. Not a woman – a fairy. And she had no eyes. A gnarled, strong hand grabbed Anita’s hair and made her bend over the unfinished tapestry.

The fairy’s whisper seemed meaningless.

“I gave my eyes to them to follow you humans from the tapestries. And you will give me your eyes for this. You’ve always loved reading fairy tales. Time to pay!”

The pain was burning. Blood dripped onto the tapestry, and the fairy looked prettier.

The awakening was painful. The sunlight burned. The eyes of the spies looked from the puzzles. Now she knew for sure that they were spies.

“Everything, as in the case of Etna,” Mark whispers over her deathbed. “I shouldn’t have brought people close to me here. There must be some kind of infection in the house”.

– She won’t live long!”

These are the words of the doctor. And the sigh of a brother. The latter smiled maliciously. It seems…

And then there was a dark space in the rainbow picture. You can’t get out of here. Either threads are twisting around, or parts of a puzzle. Is she inside the puzzle? It looks like it! Only here it is not as rosy as it seems from the outside. It’s cramped and cold here, and it hurts the eyes to look into the outside world. And it is possible to make out only the house, through which Aspazia is again walking, for some reason wearing her dresses. In any case, Mark and his few guests call this woman Aspasia. She’s alive again, and no one finds it strange. The brother, as if hypnotized, follows her, and even serves as a knight to his lady. His mother could not expect such tact from him, but this fragile woman, like a medieval fairy, conquered him. Or maybe she was a fairy to whom stupid charmed guys sacrifice their sisters and girlfriends. A workshop for either restoration or weaving of tapestries appeared in the corner room of the house. And in the garden under the thickets of juniper now lies a tombstone with the name Anita carved on it. It seems that Etna had the same before. In the same place. Two graves cannot fit in one place at once. But the inscription can be the same under the tapestry in the museum, and on the gravestone in the garden. Anita is also written under one puzzle in the house. And inside this puzzle is cramped and dark. Anita herself knows that for sure.