The murk held me only briefly: it crystallized me with an arctic cold and threw me onto a mirror-smooth surface. Ding-ching-tink!!! Clinking and clattering, I slid a hundred meters like a log and realized — not the end after all.
My eyes flew open! My arms, legs, head, all coated in frost, sent the signal — we’ve arrived!
I tried to analyze the sensations. Dead? Alive? Unclear.
I lay on a mirror, cold, flat, without end or edge. The mirror reflected a red plane of sky hanging over me and frozen beneath me. Hello, infinity!
This is probably what death looks like, or maybe life after death…
I turned my gaze to the side and... what? who?
Ten paces off stood a man in a gray suit, glittering and well-fitted. He watched with an indifferent gaze and looked like a lifeless, icy statue. His arms, crossed over his chest, displayed sculpted hands framed by the whitest of cuffs, hands that seemed not part of his body but a separate work of art. Wrinkle-free, small, elegant hands with long slender fingers adorned with two rings held the eye. It took effort to shift my gaze to his pale face, as if dusted with frost, looking like a continuation of the snow-white shirt, as though painted by a diligent academicist.
An aquiline nose with sharply defined nostrils and bridge rose above hollow cheeks. Straight brows, hanging low over deep eye sockets, were thick but narrow. Split by a crease, they gave him the look of a man lost in thought. Eyes the color of roasted coffee beans, deep-set and unblinking, made his gaze stern and detached. Black hair, combed back to perfection, created the illusion of a master plan laid across his skull, along which some unknown craftsman had set every single hair without deviating a micron. His ears, pressed flat to his skull, had nothing remarkable about them.
The suit was well-cut and expensive. The tie, an unremarkable gray strip at first glance, turned out to be fine silk, playing through shades from steel gray to Prussian blue and back to the color of a pigeon’s wing. A gold pin with a modest sapphire seemed to conduct the whole play of shades, like an orchestra leader.
That’s how diplomats from hostile foreign powers dressed and carried themselves, or so it seemed to me.
The gentleman said, in flawless Russian, in a flat Petersburg monotone: «Good afternoon. If it’s not too much trouble, try to get up and follow me.»
He turned and headed toward what looked like some furnished something in the distance.
Fighting through a tangle of confused thoughts and disobedient muscles, I got up and trudged after the gentleman. More devilry. More walking across a mirror under ruby flashes. Again that so-called sky bearing down on me from every side, its vastness crushing me.
I thawed out and, rubbing my stomach, shuffled after the gentleman, who was short, a bit shorter than me. I wasn’t thinking about anything, wasn’t hoping for anything. I was preoccupied with my own body, on the verge of collapse. I kept moving my stiff legs, repeating: «Don’t fall, keep going, hold on…»
A couple of minutes later, my muscles filled with confidence. The frost on my arms and legs evaporated, my limbs turned a living pink. My dizziness cleared, and I grew curious about the gentleman — or rather, about his limping gait. Hobbling along, I tried to work out which leg he favored.
The gentleman stopped, turned, and said, looking into my eyes without blinking:
— Everyone’s got one leg shorter than the other. Some more so, some less, and no one ever notices. My right leg is two centimeters shorter than my left, and it catches everyone’s eye. Strange creatures, people.
He commanded:
— Go to the table.
It hit me like a jolt of electricity. I’d heard this voice before. The speeches that had come from the sky hadn’t been hallucinations. Turned out this limping man had been the one speaking. It was a relief — one less mystery.
I walked toward a table carved from crimson granite streaked with gray.
As I got closer, I noticed the table came with two chairs, made of either glass or clear plastic. I looked at these seating devices, so transparent they were invisible from five meters off, and after «Have a seat, quiet one,» carefully settled my backside onto one. The fragile-looking construction turned out to be comfortable. I tried to relax my chilled body.
The tabletop, perfectly flat, reflected the gentleman’s face and then, with a flash of red light, turned matte black.
Astonishing.
— Well then, how do you like it here?
— A bit cold, — I answered, shivering.
— That can be fixed. Otherwise?
— Otherwise what?
— You’ll be warmed up shortly, — the gentleman said, clapping his hands.
A liveried attendant, materializing from nowhere, handed over brand-new jeans and a crisp, freshly pressed blue shirt. I focused on the attendant and gasped. It was the very same gentleman in the tailcoat, that same absurd character, who’d sized me up by eye and later gifted me the grenade!
