Island Has Ghosts

Chapter 9

The quiet humming, like a monotonous ritual chant, was as annoying as a fly buzzing in his ear, only it was in his head, not outside. Vsevolod opened his eyes and squeezed his eyes shut again from the too bright light. Where he had been before, the darkness had thickened to impenetrable blackness, where he didn't need sight, where everything was felt by skin, hearing and smell.

"He's coming around," someone exhaled with relief and patted him lightly on the cheek.

"Vsevolod, can you hear us?!"

"Yes, I can. Why are you yelling like that?" He grumbled more out of habit, smiled weakly, and opened his eyes. Right above him, blocking the sky, hovered Elvira, frowned anxiously and stroked his face with her palms, as if it could bring him to his senses.

"You frightened us, redhead!" she said, deliberately angry, but then smiled.

He looked for Violet and saw that she was sitting on the ground, his right leg with his pant leg rolled up to his knee resting in her lap. That's it! He had fainted like a subdued young lady, even though he thought he was quite robust.

"No wonder you fainted," Violet sighed, "you were bleeding so much that I don't know how you survived."

Vsevolod lifted up a little and noticed that she had pulled a shoelace out of his sneaker and made a kind of a tourniquet out of it. How long had he been unconscious? His leg was numb below the knee, like a thousand needles were sticking into his foot. But Violet seemed to have stopped the bleeding. With Elvira's help, he sat up and rested his palm on the ground. He felt dizzy, his eyes shaking and blurring. He desperately wanted to lie down again... But he couldn't give in to that desire.

Vsevolod remembered what had preceded the fainting. He had realized that the wound had reopened long before the fall. It was bleeding so badly that perhaps there would have been footprints behind him if the blood had not been absorbed into the black earth. Each step made it harder to walk, but not because of the pain, but because of the weakness binding in his arms and legs. Ankles felt as if weights were suspended from my ankles, and shoulders felt heavy, as if an invisible giant had placed huge palms on them. Vsevolod resisted with all his might, and in this resistance he lost all his senses - he couldn't see the girls ahead of him, couldn't hear if they were calling him. It was as if he had fallen into another, parallel reality, where he found himself squeezed between the sky pressing on him and the earth attracting him. Somehow Vsevolod realized that he could not, absolutely could not give in to the temptation to lie down, that he had to leave this scorched territory as soon as possible, which was draining him of all his strength along with blood. But the moment the green strip of meadow showed ahead, he lost. Heaven and earth suddenly changed places, and for the first moment it seemed to him that he was not falling, but flying up to the sun covered by a smoky veil. His head rumbled, but not from the blood pulsing in his temples, but from a multitude of voices, the chaotic cacophony of which then merged into a monotonous chant. Vsevolod plunged into the darkness, but it was not dead, but filled with voices, whispers, rustles and movements elusive to his vision.

Only now he realized that he had returned to Elvira and Violet, who were looking at him fearfully, precisely because he was a hardy man and not a subdued young lady, because he had resisted and won. However, the victory was given hard and took the rest of the strength.

"We have to go back now. I do not know how we bring it," Violet whispered to Elvira, who understood everything without words.

"Slowly," she sighed.

"How are you?" Violet turned to him.

"I'll be fine," Vsevolod muttered, and with Elvira's help he stood up. He had overestimated his strength - he was able to stand on his feet, but when he took the first step, he almost fell again. Such weakness Vsevolod experienced only once, when he also lost a lot of blood.