"Nothing will happen to him," I sighed after Aleksy had expressed his routine fears of leaving Viktor unattended. I took out my frustration in the swing of my axe. "The villagers aren't going to hurt him. It wouldn't even cross their minds."
"But how can you be so sure of that?"
"Because I'm not paranoid. Like I keep saying, there's always the kabina if you're finding it all too much. There's no shame in admitting you've had enough. As it happens, I helped build the kabina with you in mind."
He let his axe sway at his side and said, "Da. I-I guess he could go there for a while ..."
Had I heard him properly in the rattling downpour? I paused chopping and narrowed my eyes at him. "Say again?"
"I said I think you're right."
"Oh, so ... you have considered homing him there?"
The boy glanced down at his soggy feet. "Mm-hm."
"Huh. What's changed your mind, malysh? Every time I ask you about the kabina you dig your heels in and won't hear any more of it. What about the part where you tell me your papa's just a quiet man? That he's not a lost soul like mine?"
He brought up his gloved hands, took a long look at the axe across his palms and dropped it into the slush underfoot. "I-I think Papa wants to go," he sobbed. "He hates me."
"He does?"
"But I don't know what I did wrong, Stefan. I washed his face as usual, I changed his shirt, I fed him, same as every other day. The fire's still going, his pillows are plump, his breakfast oats were just how he likes them ... and he still won't talk to me. I-I asked him what was wrong, but he ignored me. I just don't know what to do ... I just don't know."
What could I say to comfort him? Of course Viktor had blanked him – he hadn't responded to anyone in years – but Aleksy was the only person in the village who didn't believe that.
"He changed after I drew those pictures," he continued, and a single tear tumbled down his cheek. "He wants to leave me and live in the kabina like the other men in this shithole village."
His blue eyes flickered as he looked up at me, pleading, and dread enveloped me like a black veil. Growing up in that spooky village you'd think I'd develop an immunity to ill changes in the wind, but in my gut I knew something had happened. Aleksy had never cried in all the years I'd known him, and it unnerved me something awful.
I marched towards the house with no time to waste, boots squelching in the slush.
"Stefan?" Aleksy called after me. "Where are you going?"
"In." I threw my axe down on the porch. "To check on your father."
I led the way inside and Aleksy jogged close at my heels, peeping over my shoulder. As I pushed the front door open the wall of stench greeted me worse than I'd ever known, and I battled the reflex to retch.
Viktor Malenhov's arched silhouette sat motionless in his rocking chair by the fire. He'd become hunched over as the years in his soulless state passed him by, like Iakov and my father had ... and yet Viktor seemed beyond that. His spine had buckled so drastically that his chin almost touched his knees, and his neck had contorted back on itself so that his gaze remained fixed forward, staring out the far-side window. Instinctively I glanced to see what might be out there to have warranted nearly a decade of observation, but saw only wet woodland.
Aleksy snatched at the hood of my coat. "D-Don't go near him," he breathed. "He's not himself."
I shrugged him off and circled Viktor, becoming more repulsed by the disfigured sight of him with each step closer I took.
Streams of blood dried black down his cheeks.
His spine looked fit to burst through his skin.
But worst of all ... his eye sockets were gaping. Hollow.
"Aleksy," I whispered, swallowing the sickness rising in my stomach, "what ... what happened to his eyes?"
"I took them," he replied in a low voice. "Last week."
"Took ... them?"
"Out. With my fingers. He told me he no longer needed them, a-and to put them outside for the Folveshch to eat."
I searched his face for any suggestion of a lie. "And did you?"
"Da. I had to. Next month he says to cut out his tongue."
I remember at that point the ordeal finally got the best of me and, while I'm not proud of recounting it, I barged outside to throw up on the porch. The rattle in my chest intensified from the shock, and before long I was shaking, unable to make sense of anything Aleksy had told me. Aleksy. That fragile little boy I'd once taken to school, now the same young man that had gauged out his father's eyes.
No ... Mutilated him. For his obsession with some folk tale. It was sick.
It was so fucking sick.
I felt like punching him across the jaw, but when he drew his hands up to his eyes and began to sob again, I knew it would be insensitive. As much as he deserved having the sense knocked into him, and I'm quite sure a weaker man would've succumbed, I asked myself how Papa would've handled a situation of this magnitude had he been around.
Papa was tough, but punching another man was not part of his conduct.
"What is it?" I said through gritted teeth. "What's the matter now?"
"He won't speak to me!" he wept from the doorway. "I can't bear this!"
I straightened and combed my dark hair from my eyes. Even to this day I'm uncertain from which well of courage I drew from in order to approach the house again, but I knew it had to be done. I strode back inside the cottage to reassure Aleksy everything was fine, when I noticed just how motionless Viktor sat. Not even his chest stirred, drawing that rasping breath, and I finally appreciated the phrase 'deathly still'.
I bit down hard on my knuckles.
"Stefan, are you okay?"
"I ... Aleksy ..." I began, but how could I tell him that his father had died unnoticed while the boy had tried so hard for eight years to keep him alive? "Stay outside," I said instead.
"Why?"
"I may not want you to see this."
When he ambled away into the woodland, it dawned on me that I was alone in the room with Viktor Malenhov once more, just like three years ago. Except now he was a lifeless, deformed man with no pulse, no breath and no eyes. I rounded the room, trying my best to keep my chin up and be brave around the dead. Years ago it was the sight of his terrible face that turned my stomach so fiercely, and terrible, I discovered, was no longer a substantial adjective.
Aleksy's father, bowed and contorted beyond recognition, had become a pale, rotting carcass. A deep opening in his cheek leaked the liquid remnants of his gums and brain down his chin. God Almighty, how long had the man been dead? Black blood seeped into the rugs and floorboards, soaked up by a heap of fur blankets at his feet.
It was Aleksy's bedding. No wonder the boy stank like a corpse. He'd assembled a nest on the floor space close to his father, and there, under his pillows, I noticed a wad of paper torn from the children's bible I'd given him when he was nine. I peered closer.
Were those his drawings?
Identical charcoal sketches filled the page. Faces. Over and over. Screaming, frightened faces.
I didn't have much chance to look at what else he'd drawn, because it was then that Viktor Malenhov stood up from his chair, mouth agape and full of decay. His eyeless sockets bored into my soul.
And I bolted.