My copy

 It all started in December 2008. My best friend called me and said he had a surprise for me. When I arrived at his place, I saw a girl in his room and froze, falling into a stupor. The girl looked just like me—not a ghost, not a ghost, but a living person. Her name was the same as mine, and she was also 23 at the time. Same eyes, same hair, nose, lips, build... It felt like I was looking in a mirror. After that, my friend explained that he was riding the subway, saw her, thought it was me, caught up with her and started talking. When he found out that this girl had nothing to do with me, he became interested and dragged her to his house.

It's been a few months. Nastya (that girl) worked hard to become my friend and talked only with me. It bothered me a lot. I asked my parents if I had a twin sister, and then I introduced them to Nastya. My parents were shocked that we looked so much alike. They asked Nastya to introduce them to her parents. The meeting took place, and it turned out that there was nothing in common between us — we were just terribly similar, and that was it.

Six months later, everyone got used to it. Nastya talked freely with me and my friends, but when I saw her, I was still scared. In January 2010, I was hit by a car. Nothing serious—a concussion and a broken arm. On the same day, my friends reported that Nastya had also been hit by a car, and she had the same injuries as me. In March of the same year, I was hospitalized with poisoning — and what do you think happened next? That's right, Nastya was also admitted to the hospital on the same day with the same diagnosis. In general, there were many such coincidences. All this began to bother me, and I avoided communicating with Nastya.

In October of this year, she died after being hit by an electric train. Naturally, the thought immediately popped into my head — wouldn't this happen to me? As soon as we found out about her death, we immediately ran to her parents to offer help. No one opened the door for us. Five days have passed. I still couldn't contact Nastya's parents — they went to her apartment every day, but no one opened the door. Then the old lady from the next apartment reported that no one had lived here for three years: the owner of the apartment had died, and the children were abroad. We thought Grandma just had sclerosis.

40 days after her death, they decided to get her photo at the wake. It turned out that in all the photos her face seemed to be smeared with white paint. We ran to the office, where the photos were being developed, and they began to poke us in the face with pieces of paper: "We checked all the photos ourselves, your murals are there, we paid for the money ourselves, what are the claims against them?". We never found her parents. We went to the housing office, to the passport office, to no avail: the apartment belongs to the deceased grandfather, and no one else was registered or lived in it.

I'm still very scared if the same fate awaits me as hers. Fear turns into panic, and I walk around trains and railroad tracks a kilometer away...

Unfamiliar Reflection

 It was a long time ago, about 14-15 years ago. I was in the hospital with some kind of cold nonsense, I was 18 years old. One evening, a girl in serious condition with peritonitis was brought in, operated on and placed in the postoperative ward. We, walkers and curious from idleness, went to visit her. Her name was Ira, she was about 28-30 years old. Despite the successful operation, she looked somehow bad: pale, silent, reluctant to make contact. Well, okay, people can be different...

When she got better, she started talking to a girl from our department.: They were about the same age, so they became friends — they went to the cafeteria together, for walks. Sometimes they invited me with them, although we had no common interests: I was a teenager for them, but in order not to stay with boring women in the ward, I walked with them like a tail. The second girl was from western Ukraine — her name was Mariana, she worked as an assistant prosecutor. But this is by the way, so that it is clear that we are not talking about "downtrodden" rural workers.

Ira once told me that she lives with her husband and little son in a communal apartment, and her neighbor was an old woman who was as mean as hell, and she was just living with a young family. I won't go into the details of communal life, but it was all a real nightmare. When Ira's son was born, they began to think about expanding their housing. This grandmother died here, and Ira got her room. There was no limit to her happiness. That's where it all started. One morning, washing in the bathroom, raising her face to the mirror, Ira screamed in horror — an old woman with disheveled gray hair, a wrinkled face and a toothless mouth looked at her from the mirror.

I will not describe the horror of what is happening, but after finishing the story, Ira said: "Girls, I've already forgotten what I look like—in any mirror it's not me, but a scary old woman. I haven't looked in a mirror for about a month now, I don't tell my family — I don't want to scare them, and they might take me for a madwoman, but that's how I want to live!" Well, we had a little fun and went our separate ways.

A couple of days passed, Mariana looked into my room and said, "Olya, can we sit here with you? A relative from the village came to see me, but it's noisy in our ward, you can't really talk." And she came in with a woman in her forties. We sat down on the bed, and then Mariana said to me, "Come on, let's go out." I replied that I was reading a book and would not go anywhere. She then said, "Well, whatever you want, but then don't be surprised at anything and don't leave the ward." I thought let them talk, we're not bothering each other.

After a few minutes, I realized that something was wrong. Ira was sitting with her head bowed, and this woman was whispering some spells and yawning, tears began to flow from her eyes. I stopped reading and sat like a mouse, afraid to move. The woman was probably removing the damage. But what happened next shocked me. They went to the washbasin, turned on the water, the woman took Ira by the hair and began to wash her, pulling her hair and slapping her cheeks, saying: "Old witch, leave her alone, go to the realm of the dead, you have no place among the living!". From time to time, she lifted the crying Ira to the mirror by her hair and said: "Who do you see?" Ira was crying and saying, "The old woman." Then the woman would bend her over to the water again, wash her, beat her, and lift her by the hair to the mirror. I don't remember how long this nightmare lasted: I was just neither alive nor dead from fear. But when Ira lost consciousness, this woman shouted at me, "Come help me, what are you looking at?!"

We put her on the bed. After a couple of minutes, coming to her senses, Ira went to the mirror and cried: "Oh, there I am! I see my hair, you know, not gray locks and a toothless mouth!" I was so shocked that I would not have been surprised if I had discovered the graying hair on my head. When everyone left, I no longer stayed in this room for a minute and asked for another place that night. I was discharged the next day. I do not know anything more about the fate of this girl.

Over time, the story has been forgotten, but sometimes I think about it and think how much more there is in the world of the unidentified and unexplained. And very scary.

To shield yourself

In the winter of 2013, I fell into a real hell, the name of which is the child's illness. My two-year-old daughter and I were taken by ambulance to a children's hospital with a preliminary diagnosis of acute respiratory viral infections. What kind of acute respiratory viral infection is it for such a mother if my child was ill in a way that never happens with common diseases of this kind! Doctors, may they hiccup in the next world, did not listen to me, saying that they know better how to treat, and unbalanced mothers should not interfere.

Yes, it was hell, without a doubt. For three days, my daughter slept almost without waking up, just to take medicine or get an injection. She was slowly falling into a coma. I couldn't sleep or eat for three days. I just sat there, hugging the baby, crying and praying. During this time, I lost 8 kilograms, both temples turned gray; I looked like a not very fresh corpse. Then something happened, which is why I stormed into the resident's room, cursed all the doctors there and demanded to immediately take my daughter for an X-ray and finally start treating her normally. The diagnosis was disappointing: pneumonia on the right in the lower lobe. The most vile type of this disease is not monitored with a stethoscope and is practically not detected by a blood test. Thank God, everything worked out — the ivs and antibiotics did their job, my daughter got better and a week later she was already playing in the hospital corridors with other children, eating with an appetite and reluctantly going to bed.

What happened then, on the third day of our stay in the hospital, became my worst memory. Having not slept for more than two days, I fell into a strange stupor, half asleep, half awake. In this state, lying on the edge of the bed and habitually hugging my daughter, I saw a dark shadow waving near us, going up to the ceiling. It's strange, because I left the night light on, and now it was dark in the room. I felt a chill of fear, I couldn't move, looking at the dark anthropomorphic figure. She seemed to be wearing a hood, along which faces were constantly changing, flowing into one another. The many-faced trash stretched out its paws to my daughter! Dark, tentacle-like appendages were moving half a meter from the bed when rage replaced fear. "I won't give it back!I croaked, rolling over with an effort and covering the baby with myself. There was only one thing in my head: to hide her, to hide her, to prevent the demon who came from the darkness from taking her away from me. Something cold and burning touched my back, tracing paths on my shoulder blade. Unbearable pain twisted my body, I screamed and jerked...

The ward was flooded with the soft light of a bedside lamp. The dark essence is gone, dissolved. I won.

Two weeks later, we were discharged home. My daughter made a full recovery, but my condition was only getting worse. I was plagued by a constant, exhausting cough, and no medications helped. I've had a lot of tests, gone to all the doctors, to no avail. There was only one thing left: I went to an oncologist to donate blood for cancer markers. The result should come in a few days, although I probably already know what it will be...

I have no fear for the future. Lately, I've been looking at the thin, barely noticeable lines of scars on my shoulder blade in the mirror more and more often, and I'm thinking. I think that on that fateful night, I shielded my child from an unknown dark creature, saved the person most dear to me. It's probably worth my life.

Ghosts in the apartment

 Mom saved up for an apartment for a long time, and we finally moved in. Everything was fine at first, but then all the fun started! At first, our windows kept opening and closing, but we didn't react, we thought it was the wind. Later, the switch in the hallway started to turn on at random (especially often at night), and knives and forks began to disappear. It became really creepy when I was alone at home and in the bathroom: of course, the light turned off, I turned off the water, I wanted to go out, and then I heard shuffling footsteps. I was numb with fear and started crying. The footsteps stopped, and then the water turned on!

The numbness subsided, and I rushed out of the bathroom like a bullet! It went on like this for 4 months. Mom heard it too, but tried not to pay attention. But even she gave up when the following happened: by nightfall, I was scared again, and I went to sleep with my mom. For some reason, no one could sleep, and we heard shuffling footsteps, immediately after the lights began to turn on and off furiously, and suddenly deathly silence… We heard a metallic creak, as if something was rolling. At first I thought it was a bike, but I remembered that it was outside. Mom and I turned on the light and looked at each other. We barely slept that night.

In general, it "rolled" around our apartment for another week, we couldn't stand it and moved back to grandma. We bought the apartment through an agency, and we were told that the owners had gone abroad. When we moved out, we asked the neighbors why the owners had left. The neighbors were so surprised and told me that no one had left, but it was like this: an old woman and her disabled son lived here, who rode in a wheelchair (that's what was riding). This man was poisoned, and his mother died of grief. But most importantly, when we moved out, we found our personal knives and forks – they were behind the refrigerator in the damp ground, wrapped in a bag. Mom says that's how they wanted to damage us and get us out of this apartment.

Still haven't said hello.…

 I was on duty when my cell phone rang. My wife called. It's strange — she usually sleeps with the kids for a long time at this time (it was close to two in the morning).

On the phone, a frightened Natasha whispered, through sobs, asked to come home urgently, as the twins were behaving, to put it mildly, inadequately (the kids are 6 years old). I couldn't really explain anything, but I started crying harder. I had to take off from work, ask the shift worker to cover up for the boss and drive in the middle of the night to the other side of the city.

Natasha was met at the entrance in a bathrobe and barefoot. With sobs, she threw herself on her neck, barely agreed to offers to enter the apartment. When asked to explain what was going on, she burst into tears and started pointing at the children's room.

I went to the kids, but she didn't follow me. The children were in the room, they were happy to see me, but when I asked them what had happened, they didn't answer anything intelligible either, they just said that my mother was scared by the grandmother who climbed out of the window. I asked what kind of grandmother she was and why her mother was afraid of her. The son replied, saying that mom came in and didn't greet Grandma, but we wanted to introduce them; grandma held out her hand to mom, and she ran away...

"And where is this old lady now?"  I asked, perplexed.

"Over there, right above you." Dad, how funny you are, raise your head — she'll say hello to you!

I raised my head, not knowing what I was doing. There was a shadow on the ceiling. I quickly realized that she just had nowhere to go. He grabbed the children and ran out of the apartment on the verge of hysteria. My wife jumped out after me, and we drove to my parents' house in the middle of the night.

Natasha still hasn't told me what happened that night. But she refused to go home until the priest was brought. Our children still remember that we offended our grandmother, and she was funny, she even knew how to run around walls.

Summoned Horror

 The doorbell woke me up at night. I think: who can't sleep at 3 o'clock? I went to open it. It turned out to be my friend who lives next door. She was in tears, barefoot, in her pajamas, and babbling incoherently. Something must have happened. I poured her hot tea, gave her a sedative, a warm blanket, and began to question her. Nadia calmed down a bit and could speak normally.

- I came in late at night from my sister's, my husband is already sleeping on the bed, with his face turned to the wall, with his head in a blanket. I think: I won't wake you up, I'll lie down quietly. Then I woke up, my cell phone was ringing, and I thought my mom was in the hospital, maybe she felt sick and wanted to say goodbye.

There was a mobile phone on the bedside table in the hallway, so I had to get up. I pick up the phone, and this is my husband. He says he's staying with a friend, and he's coming tomorrow. Heat washed over me from head to toe. I hear the bed creak as if someone is getting up. I quickly opened the door and rushed to you in what she was wearing – she started crying again, and I was seriously scared.

- Maybe you imagined it? Tired, I came home after all.

- No! I even hugged him when I went to bed!

- Do you want me to go to your place and check it out?

- No, don't! Can I stay at your place?

"Sure, I'll make up a bed for you on the couch."

I couldn't sleep for a long time, thinking: Who could it be? But still, it seemed to me that her husband was joking.

In the morning, Nadia's phone rang. Her husband called, asking where she'd been while he was gone. I went with Nadia. When we entered her apartment, everything was turned upside down. Things are scattered around the apartment. My husband also pestered me with questions about what Nadia was doing at night in my pajamas and what we were doing there. They said I threw a party and invited her too, he wouldn't have believed that stuff about the unknown in bed. He also wondered why Nadia had hung up on him. And then she dialed it herself, laughing and hissing into the phone. My husband didn't leave tonight, and Nadia went to bed first to get to sleep.

A week has passed and then Nadia appears on my doorstep in the morning.

- Killed...

- Who was killed?

- My husband...

- So, tell me.

- My husband's scream from the kitchen woke me up last night. He was screaming: "Don't, go away! God help me!" - I did not dare to go to him, I was afraid. I hid in another room. I hear dishes breaking, growling, my husband screaming, I call the police. Then everything went quiet. I got down on my knees and looked through the crack under the door, she's not small with two cm somewhere.

I see: the legs are black, but human, and my husband's body stretches across the floor, leaving a trail of blood. It is clear that the intestines were pulled out. She drags him into the bedroom, which is just opposite the room. Then there's more growling and footsteps into the room where I'm sitting. I locked the door, jumped on the couch, and didn't move. And this knocks down the doors.

The doorbell rang, and the police arrived. I hear it go to the door and growl. I'm screaming for help. As a result, they kicked down the doors. I left the room horrified by what had happened. The police took me to the police station and interrogated me there, I explained to them until the morning. They thought it was a thief, but I know they're not thieves!

- Let's call the priest.

- So the apartment is consecrated. Crosses, icons everywhere.

- Let's set up the camera. As I understand it, it doesn't appear during the day.

I went to her house, set up a camera in the form of a bear toy, which my friends gave me to spy on the girls. In the morning, I took the camera and we sat down to watch Hopefully.

At first, everything was quiet for 2 hours. Then something started to come out from under the bed. Black, incomprehensible, eyes glowing, face white, mouth full of fangs and claws on his hands, in short, like in horror movies straight. I felt a little scared, and Nadia was going too. It came up to the camera and smiled, apparently it knew about her, and then the shooting stopped.

Nadia is hysterical, so I had to calm her down with cognac until she fell asleep. We decided to re-watch the video. The film stopped at the most interesting part, but resumed after five seconds. I didn't have time to turn it off. I see it pacing back and forth across the room, stopping, looking at the camera, smiling terribly and turning its head.

I was really scared. A sneaky thought flashed through my mind. Go to my brother in another city, and leave a note for Nadia: like, an urgent business trip. I had a very bad feeling about it. I packed my things quickly. Before leaving, I set up a camera, just in case, then went to the train station and bought the nearest train ticket to my brother.

We're sitting here drinking to a meeting at my brother's, and Nadia calls me. It's so quiet!

- Hello. Where are you? What kind of business trip is this?

- Urgent, I'm sorry for leaving you alone, but I would have been fired if I hadn't gone. Calm down, stay with me for now, okay?

"Do you know how scared I am?" How could you leave me alone?

- Well, you know, I'm not your babysitter, I have my own life! I'm sick of your hysteria, maybe you killed your husband yourself, and then you came up with all this heresy! Go back to sleep! Stupid neurotic, you need to drink less! - Nadia made me angry. I'm nobody to her, we studied together once and didn't even really communicate. I didn't even believe in the video! I thought it was a montage. And what? At night, while I was sleeping, I went back to my room and mounted it. Anyway, I called work and took a two-week vacation.

When I got home, I saw the police, the corpse was being carried out.

"What happened here?"

- Are you the owner of apartment number 17?

- A woman was found in your apartment. The hanged woman. The neighbors started complaining about the smell: it's been stinking for two weeks. And there's a corpse. Suicide is most likely.

What have I done? I felt guilty. I remembered about the camera, went home, picked it up and went to a cafe. I didn't want to be alone. I started watching.

Nadia's video message is on the recording.

"I can't do this anymore!" I can hear it coming for me! It's going to kill me! And the case of the seance is to blame for everything. I didn't want to tell you. But we called the priest immediately after the session. Drunkenly, they wanted to summon spirits. They called me names. My last request: Go to your mom's hospital number 48. Goodbye...

I went to see her mother that day; I didn't say anything, I lied that she was working. Later, I moved out of that apartment, and deleted the recording. Maybe if I had stayed then, it would have killed me too.

Snout in the window

 This story did not happen to me, but nevertheless, when it was told to me, I did not doubt its authenticity. It was like this: in the summer of 2009, I went on vacation to my grandmother in a Ukrainian village. And there, thanks to a lucky coincidence, I met a great girl Marina. She lived in a nearby village, and I had to go there all the time. Marina also had a brother the size of a closet — at first he looked at me like a wolf, there were even some threats, but in the end I found a common language with him. Alexey—that was his name—turned out to be a normal guy. And one day we agreed to go fishing together.

On the appointed morning, he and I went to the lake and cast our fishing rods. On this day, the fish pecked reluctantly, and the mosquitoes ate them alive. Thank God, Lech brought with him a cure for boredom — a bottle of pepper, which we immediately sentenced. After that, I didn't give a damn about the fish, and we started chatting about this and that. Suddenly, Lech became very serious and told me a story that happened to him even before he met me.

Lekha had a childhood friend, Tolik, and they sometimes visited abandoned houses in search of valuable artifacts. One night they decided to ice an uninhabited house, which was located on the other side of the village.

They approached the house, pulled the door — it was closed. We walked around the house and saw a window that had been removed along with the frame, and we climbed inside through it. Everything in the house was upside down: some scattered sheets, an overturned bed and a broken table. Suddenly, they began to hear some noise from the street. They thought it was a dog, but they decided to hide anyway. Lech says that for some reason, at that moment, he was struck by a chilling fear. But the noise did not subside, and you could hear the dry branches cracking under someone's feet. And suddenly it dawned on Lech that a dog could not be so huge that fallen branches cracked under its weight, and at that moment he became really scared.

Then Lech noticed that Tolik was staring at one point, and his face was distorted with horror. He looked at the same place and was stunned: a goat's face was looking at them through the window. It was scary to run away from home, because it was on the street. They stood there and didn't know what to do. Suddenly, the goat's face disappeared and silence fell, but Tolik and Lech continued to stand like statues. Five minutes passed, and nothing happened. They were already beginning to think that everything was fine. But suddenly, outside near the door, someone shouted in a sepulchral voice: "Open the door, otherwise it will be worse!". After that, someone started banging on the door with superhuman force. Tolik became hysterical. After about the third blow, the lock failed, and the door swung open. Lech didn't wait for IT to enter the house. Without remembering himself, he jumped out of the window without a frame, landed on his haunches and immediately heard Tolik's heart-rending scream coming from the hut (at that moment, Lekha's voice trembled, and it seemed to me that tears welled up in his eyes). He couldn't remember how he got home. I lay awake all night.

Morning came. Someone knocked on Lech's door - it was Tolik's mother. She said that her son came the next morning, dead or alive, and when asked what had happened, he mumbled something unintelligible. And then she asked, "Do you know what happened?" Lech lied that he didn't know, and anyway, he allegedly stayed at home all night.

From that day on, Tolik completely withdrew into himself and stopped communicating with anyone, including his mother. A week later, he was taken to a mental hospital and is still being held there.

The only person besides me to whom Lech dared to tell this story was his sister Marina, and thank God, she was one of those rare girls who know how to keep her mouth shut. I was the second and, most likely, the last person to whom Lech told this story, since two weeks later he crashed on a motorcycle. I don't know why he told this story to me, a guy he'd only known for two weeks. Probably, it boiled over, I wanted to share it with someone, and most likely, if he had told his friends, they would not have left a wet place from him (for abandoning Tolik), and the whole village would have immediately learned about what happened in the abandoned house. Lech knew that I hadn't spoken to anyone from his village, and therefore he probably wouldn't have told anyone about it. To believe or not to believe is a personal matter, but I do.

Nina Pavlovna

 This story happened in Leningrad in 1981. A woman, Nina Pavlovna, had been working at a pharmacy on Vasilyevsky Island for many years. By the time of the events, she was already an elderly woman. She had a family.: her husband is a disabled soldier and two adult sons. She lived happily by Soviet standards, had a light, funny personality, but she was very responsible about her work.

One summer day, finishing a lunch tea party, Nina Pavlovna suddenly changed her face. Her friend, the cashier, was scared: "Stroke?". Ripples ran across Nina Pavlovna's face, she twitched, and her eyes widened. The woman turned her head as if she didn't recognize anything around her. "Ning, Ning, what's wrong with you?!" the cashier grabbed her sleeve. Nina Pavlovna shouted in a low, trumpet-like voice. Suddenly, with a speed unprecedented for an elderly, heavy body, she jumped back and jumped onto the table, pulling her legs up to her chest: "It's burning, burning, burning, oh, mommies, the fire is all around!". She just sat there, swaying from side to side, hugging her knees and howling. Saliva flowed from his white lips.

The paramedics arrived quickly. When the eldest son finally got to the chief physician of psychiatric hospital No. 2, the doctor briefly told him that this was schizophrenia — the patient felt as if she had fallen into hell and hellfire was buzzing around her, her consciousness was twilight and she was unlikely to recognize him, her son. Refuses to eat, force-fed. The son stared for a long time through the barred window of the ward at his thin, insane mother, who was sitting on the bed in a hospital gown, her legs still tucked under her, and swaying steadily from side to side. Her hair was tousled, and her face was white, an expression of horror frozen on it.

Months passed, but nothing changed. After living in the house of sorrow for several years, Nina Pavlovna died one night. And the patient's case would have been closed, as is usually the case with cases of the mentally ill, if not for one "but". The orderly who came to feed Nina Pavlovna in the morning and found her dead screamed in a bad voice — her legs were lowered to the floor, her heels were charred and slightly smoking. After an emergency meeting, it was decided not to indicate this fact in the pathologist's report.

The midnight bell

 It happened about a year ago. My parents and I moved into a new house. He was very big and we really liked him. After putting things in their places and examining the house, we went to bed, because it was quite late... I went to bed in a small room, I think it was a nursery.

Having fallen asleep like a log, I was already watching the fifth dream. Suddenly... the phone rang. At first I thought it was me getting a call, but when I finally woke up, I realized that it wasn't my phone or my parents' phone. I got out of bed and turned on the light. Trying to figure out where the sound was coming from, Mom ran into the room. We started looking for this phone together. But eventually he went quiet... I sighed, lay down on the bed and instantly fell asleep.

The next day, I decided to find that phone, but it was all in vain. Mom said it was possible the old owners had forgotten him and would come for him soon. A day passed, but the owners did not arrive. We tried to reach them, but in vain. I slept peacefully that night, just like the other 5.

But as soon as Friday came (we moved that day), the phone started ringing at midnight. We searched for a phone for two weeks in a row and waited for midnight to hear it and find it, but it was useless.

- But how can a phone work for so many days? And why is he calling at midnight on Friday?  I asked my mom.

"Maybe it's an alarm clock or someone is making fun..." she replied.

It was only six months later that we found this phone. It was hidden on the top shelf of the closet on the side of the wall. Where there used to be a hiding place. When we took out the phone, we found neither a SIM card nor a battery in it... And the screen wasn't working at all.

The next Friday came... And the bell rang again... It was unbearable and terrifying in its own way.

On Saturday, I interviewed all the neighbors, to which they all answered the same way...

- Yes, children are dying all the time in this house. At night, they say, it sounds like someone is calling... But we consider this nonsense, we advise you only to call the police and get out of this house.

We called the police. They've searched the whole house! And the metal detector started going off scale on the ceiling of my room. The police trashed it and there was a walled-up girl wrapped in iron sheets! And in her hand she had a phone held to her ear... It seemed like she was calling someone or she was getting a call...

we escaped from this house... And since then, I've been startled when I hear a call and see an unknown number there...

Restless duty

 As I promised somewhere, this is a story from my life that happened when I was a "consulting watchman" at a stone processing organization. Stone processing refers to the creation of vases, bowls, simple sculptures, fences, tiles and, in addition to all of the above, tombstones. I went to work there shortly before graduation (I'm generally drawn to adventures in my life), because the place is quiet, in the private sector, not far from my house. There are tram tracks nearby, and behind them is a park with a parking lot. I was on duty there from 21:00 to 8:00, every other night. There wasn't much to protect the products—even if you lifted the stove, you couldn't run far with it. Equipment and tools were guarded, and drunks and teenagers were chased away once a year.

This office is called "Stone Flower", and, by the way, it still exists, it is a guardhouse, a doghouse, a trailer where artists work, and a courtyard in which blanks, simpler product samples and ready-made orders are placed, mainly tombstones. During the busiest months, which happened more often in summer than ever before, the courtyard looked like a cemetery: gravestones with and without portraits, vases of black granite and marble were placed in neat rows in front of the guard booth. The window of the gatehouse, illuminated only by a desk lamp and a video surveillance monitor, overlooked this idyll, and I soon got tired of contemplating it all night long. On the advice of my shift supervisor, I began to spend the night in the artists' trailer, where there was a lot of light and there was often someone to talk to.

Almost every night, one of the artists stayed working until morning. The fact is that people, as you know, tend to die without stopping, and our office was located 300 meters from one of the largest city morgues, and our business cards were in the reception desk there, so there was no shortage of work for artists. Sometimes, 3-4 tombstones were knocked out per night. In the evening, the movers will bring a polished slab, unload it, and the girls will work on it all night.

That night, I went on duty as usual. I called my superiors, identified myself, and said that I had accepted a shift. I watched the closed gate in the camera, made my rounds, fiddled with the shepherd Jim, my permanent colleague, and went to the trailer to the artists. It was 22:40 on the clock.

Oksana, a girl about 4 years older than me, was sitting in the trailer. She usually did not stay overnight, as she had a small child at home, whom she raised herself. After questioning her, I found out that my son went to the sea with his grandmother, so Oksana is trying to earn some extra money. We sat and chatted. She captures some kind of granny in granite, checking the photo from time to time, and I look out the window, listening to Jim. Oksana finished some big stage of her grandmother's portrait, and we sat down to drink tea and cookies. We talk about this and that, we tell jokes.

At midnight, as usual, I decided to go around the territory. The fact is that customers still happened before midnight: either crying relatives waited for the autopsy to end but stayed too late, or some guy in an expensive car on the way from work would look in. After midnight, as a rule, only drunks and hooligans from the park wandered in, so we always let Jim loose at that time. It was enough to cool the ardor of all sorts of midnight adventurers.

I lowered Jim down and returned to the trailer. Oksana continued to work on the portrait of her grandmother, and I sat on a chair by the open door of the trailer and began to watch the street, chatting with the artist and listening to the measured tapping of her hammer, sometimes interspersed with the buzzing of a doormat.

At first, Jim caught my attention. The dog just ran in circles around the yard, but I, who did not remember a time when I did not have a dog in my house, knew that healthy, and most importantly, calm dogs do not behave like that. Jim went round and round, and I called him over. The dog came up, ears flattened and tail wagging, and I heard our brave guard dog whining thinly.

I patted Jim, said something soothing to him, took out of my pocket a Duchess lollipop with a soft filling, which he loved very much, unwrapped the wrapper and handed it to him. Jim sniffed the candy, opened his mouth to take it, but suddenly, pricking up his ears, he looked towards the dark bulk of the park across the street. The dog whined even louder, and, flattening his ears again, hid in the booth.

Getting up from my chair and muttering to Oksana something like "I'm on my rounds," I went out into the courtyard, illuminated by a single lantern hanging on the wall of the gatehouse. Movement in the park caught my attention. A well-dressed guy came out of a dark alley, looked left and right, and jogged across the roadway. The young man was heading towards our gate, and I was standing in the middle of the courtyard as if rooted to the spot. It was only when he opened our gate and walked towards me with a friendly smile that I realized that both the baton and the pepper spray had been left in the artists' trailer.

— Hello, — the guy extended his hand to me. "They make stone products here, don't they?"

—With us,— was all I could say. I was taken aback and didn't shake his hand.

—Can I watch it for now?" — the night guest asked, and I noticed in his gaze some kind of subtle "glazing", which I immediately attributed to the alcohol he had drunk or the substances he had consumed.

"Look, please,— I replied. — Just don't touch it with your hands.

The young man raised his hands, palms facing me, in a protective, almost comical gesture. Jim never came out of the booth, and I didn't warn the guy that we had a dog in the yard. He was kind of weird, it seemed to me. And, as they say, "it turned out, it didn't seem."

I carefully walked into the trailer, trying not to lose sight of this guy. He walked between the rows of products, examining the stones, tombstones and vases. Once he even reached out to touch it, but pulled his hand back with a smile, as if he remembered that I had asked him not to touch anything. I took a baton and a pepper spray, hanging them from my belt. He took a heavy, powerful flashlight in his hand, which could both dazzle and "dim" if necessary. Oksana was passionate about her work, and I wanted to warn her to call the police if I didn't come back, but at the last moment I relied on my own strength and went out into the night.

The guy was squatting by two polished slabs of red and black granite. When he heard me, he turned around and, giving me a smile, asked:

— What do you personally think, which monument is better? Black or red?

The question caught me off guard. I didn't expect such a question from a young guy barely older than me.

"I've always liked black,— I finally replied. — And the portrait is more clearly visible on it, and the image will last longer. But black ones are more expensive.

At these words, the guy waved away:

"Oh, come on! I just want the quality. To be remembered. To look like a living face.

— It will be! "He said it wasn't me." It came out somehow unintelligibly.

The guy laughed, got up from his crouch, and, taking a business card and pen out of his breast pocket, asked him to write our phone number on it. I replied that I would bring him our business card now, but the guy, looking at his expensive watch, said that he didn't have much time, so he asked me to dictate. I dictated it, and he wrote it down and put the card back in his pocket. I managed to make out the name printed on the business card.: Paramonov V. V.

The young man said goodbye to me and turned around, taking another look at his watch. Jim barked, so loudly that I turned to his booth and shouted at the dog not to scare the customer. When I turned around again to say goodbye to the overnight guest, he was gone.

I returned to the trailer, boiled a kettle and poured boiling water into a cup, sending three tea bags to the same place.

— Who have you been chatting with for three hours? I already thought you'd left me here completely," Oksana's voice sounded deliberately offended. — The girl is sitting alone in the middle of the night, and there is no one around to talk to.

I once laughed it off, surprised that I had been away for so long. Oksana finished the portrait of granny a long time ago and has already filled in most of the image of some shaven-headed chubby man. So I've been away for a really long time. It was beginning to get light outside…

In the morning, the shift worker and I watched the surveillance camera footage. So I get out of the trailer and give Jim a piece of candy. The dog runs into the booth, and I turn my back to the camera and look towards the gate.

So I point at the products and go to the trailer.… From one in the morning until four in the morning, I walk around the courtyard alone with a lantern in my hand, pausing at two empty slabs of red and black granite. My lips are moving, as if I'm talking to someone, but no one is there.

I returned home in a depressed state and fell asleep. Then I took two days off and spent the whole week walking like a somnambulist. In the end, blaming everything on overwork, he returned to work and took over the shift.

The evening rounds went as usual. Dima, another of our artists, was working in the trailer. I didn't talk to him much, he was introverted, meticulous and uninteresting. All the topics boiled down to how badly he was living in the world. Anyway, I sat in the gatehouse until morning, and at 6:40, as usual, I looked into the trailer where Dimon was sitting and dozing. Having shaken Dmitry awake and exchanged a few words with him, I went out into the courtyard and ran my gaze over the finished slabs and suddenly was stunned: the same guy was looking at me from the tombstone, and under his smiling face an inscription was carved in smooth letters that read: "Paramonov Vyacheslav Viktorovich, / some date, I don't remember already / 1985 — 07/14/2009".

My legs gave out, and I barely made it to the gatehouse, staring blankly at the wall calendar. The night of July 13-14 came just when he came to our yard. I rolled my eyes and poured half a bottle of cold mineral water on my head.…

Later, sometime during the next shift, I found out that Paramonov was either a businessman or a candidate for deputy, and that night he died in a fight in the park across the street. The guy was stabbed in the neck, and before his death he managed to run 40 meters further down the alley. When his wife came to order the monument in tears, she asked our staff which one was better — red or black. Without waiting for an answer, she chose black. Just as he wanted.