HORROR DIARY: CreepyPasta

CreepyPasta #9: WHERE POWER LIES (Part 1)

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Austin Williams (10/23/17)

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I watched my copper mailbox dangle from the door of my bar through the blurs of my windshield wipers. They made that tight squeeze against the glass, not a forgotten drop or streak. They were new. The car was new. The mailbox was old.

It was Sunday, I'd just gotten out of one of those fancy Catholic Cathedrals I'd found in inner city Moscow, and as I trudged through the rain I begged God that the mailbox be empty. It should've been empty, like everyone else's. It wasn't.

The envelope was green, like the rest. The color of money. And of poison. I poured myself a drink, Basil Hayden's and Dubonnet, and locked the door. I sat at the bar, the customers side, and ran my fingers along the edges, to the corners. They were sharp, hard. Paper knives.

There was nothing written on the outside. There never was, because that's exactly who'd sent it: no one.

The Kuntsevo District locals, the ones who believed the legends, called them Tikhiye Vory — Silent Thieves. Really they had no name. They didn't need one. They were ghosts. Shadows. Whispers. They communicated through typed letters. No stamps, no addresses. They didn't need the Russian Post. They employed Moscow's homeless to deliver their commands. Money meant nothing. It was a flimsy paper shovel to dig up what really mattered. Information.

They called us their svideteley — witnesses. That's what each letter donned as a heading. Dlya Svedetel — for the witness. We were information sponges. Secret peddlers. We could be your high school janitor, your barber, your pastor. Your bartender. They were Moscow's puppeteers, and we gave them the strings to bend anyone to their will, to make the city dance.

I'd gotten my first letter about a year after moving to Moscow and opening Frankie's Tavern in the Kuntsevo, and at the time I thought it was a stroke of luck. For a while I'd made an honest living. I had regulars, we'd share a drink early into the morning, talk about sports and guns and cars. I made friends. Hell, I even made enemies. I called them enemies anyway, the guys you shoot with empty threats and laugh when your friends call your bluff. The best type of enemy. The type that remind you in a backward way that you don't really have much to worry about at all.

Even with the thirsty Russians and rich tourists, I was barely making enough to keep Frankie's open that first year. Business was steady but I was already shin deep in bills when an electrical shortage scorched half my bar. I was a broken man. My insurance was useless. Never ending investigations and postponements. For months I was penniless, bankrupt. You never really know helplessness until you have to ask yourself what you can live without, what you can pawn off to pay for a meal. I sold my car, my appliances, most of my furniture. I never went to college, bartending was really all I knew, and Russians aren't quick to hire Americans on the spot. I had no family in Moscow. I remember crying after getting five hundred dollars for groceries from a former regular from Frankie's. I remember using what little whiskey I had left to get me to sleep at night.

Then about five months after the fire, my doorbell woke me up around 3 a.m. My head throbbed from the night before, and I opened the door to a blind man in rags holding an envelope. It was green. He never said a word, never smiled. His eyes were wrapped in white cloth. I asked who it was from, what the hell he was doing at my house at 3 a.m., but he just shook his head, waved the letter until I took it, then made his way back to the streets.