Excerpts from
Ludmilla and the King of Clubs
By Kirsten Holst
The scream went straight through to your
marrow. It swelled up suddenly out of
the darkness and filled me with such terror that the hairs on my arms and the
back of my neck stood on end. It began
as a low moan or a wail that surrounded us from all sides, growing and growing
into a piercing scream that stopped abruptly, as though a knife had severed it.
Ludmilla’s
face was a pale oval in the darkness.
“Did
you hear that?” I asked.
How
dumb can you be? Of course, she heard
it. How could she help but hear
it? But, in a way, it seemed so unreal
and eerie that I almost believed I had dreamed it.
She
nodded.
“What
was it?” I asked.
“Somebody
screaming,” she said.
“Maybe,
it was just a cat,” I said, hoping she would agree. But I knew it was not a cat.
“It
was a person,” she said.
“There
are a lot of cats around here,” I continued stubbornly. “Sometimes, they sound just like a person,
like a baby screaming. I hear them a
lot at night. It sounds really creepy.”
But
not that creepy! That much I
knew.
Ludmilla
did not answer. We stood completely
still in the darkness.
There
was usually light here, but the streetlight was broken, I noticed.
I was noticing of a lot of things. It was as if the scream had ripped the
scales from my eyes and exposed all my nerves and senses, so that I heard, saw,
felt and smelled more than I normally did.
I
saw the white circles of light on the sidewalk beneath the lamps further down
the street, the frozen silhouettes of the houses, the dark winter sky above us
scattered with stars, and the bluish light from a TV screen from a window
behind us. I heard the faint whisper of
the wind, the sound of the TV inside the house, and the echo of the scream that
was still ringing in my ears. I could
smell myself and Ludmilla and the sharp odour of moped fuel and I felt the
cold, which made me shiver and made all my muscles contract.
Or
maybe it was not the cold that made me shiver. It was evil. I suddenly had a
feeling that the darkness surrounding us was filled with pure, unadulterated
evil. It was not a nice feeling. It made me frightened and sad at heart.
“What
should we do?” I asked Ludmilla.
“Ssssh!”
she whispered.
I
had heard it, too. Blended among or
beneath the other sounds, you could sense a rustling, a soft whimpering, and it
was not the wind, as I had thought. Was
it a cat, maybe, or could it be a hedgehog, wakened early from his winter nap?
Between
the house we were in front of and the next one, there was a narrow passage or
alleyway behind a narrow green gate or door that was almost invisible in the
darkness. Ludmilla walked soundlessly
toward the alleyway and I followed hesitantly after.
“What
are you doing?” I whispered.
“Ssssh!”
she whispered back. The whimpering
sound grew louder, as we approached the alley.
Ludmilla pressed down the latch. I heard the faint sound of metal against metal.
Then, she slowly pushed open the gate.
“What are we
doing here?” I whispered, as I faltered after her into the alley, which was
dark as the grave.
I
had expected another sssh, but this time she answered softly.
“Finding
out what happened.”
“How?”
“By
asking,” she whispered under her breath, as we walked into the yard.
Asking? There’s a fine how do you do. Who the heck should we ask?
But before I was able to say anything, I
caught sight of a crumpled shape on the stone steps in front of the back
door. How Ludmilla guessed somebody was
there, I have no idea. It was just
something she could do. Sometimes, it
Translated by Russell Dees
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