Ruslan gulped.
It had been so long since he’d had a conversation with someone his age that his head was spinning. After licking his parched lips once to barely moisten them, Ruslan gripped the window frame tightly and carefully chose his words.
“I… sometimes think. If that were true… if there was a vampire who survived next to me… what would it be like?”
At the end of his words, gently lifting his gaze, Ruslan looked at Sarka.
Sarka was now leaning lazily against the backrest with a gaze that found this truly amusing, staring intently at Ruslan.
Feeling his pounding heartbeat intensify under the gaze that excitedly anticipated an answer, Ruslan continued in a trembling voice, slowly.
The words he had curled up repeating during countless nights of pain and days of humiliation for eight years.
“I want to… become friends with that child.”
One of Sarka’s eyebrows gently lifted and then lowered.
“…<Friends?>”
Sarka repeated Ruslan’s words. In a tone tinged with slight puzzlement, as if it was an unexpected answer.
Ruslan gulped and, in a tone so forceful it was hard to believe it came from his small, thin body, declared each word separately.
“…I think humans and vampires are equal beings, no different from each other at all.”
Sarka slightly curved one eyebrow again, as if surprised by words he’d never heard in his life.
As the words continued, Ruslan’s eyes began to change into an increasingly serious and intense light. His dark blue eyes sparkled darkly with conviction and belief.
“Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean one side has to kill or dominate the other. They… might not have to be enemies.”
“……”
“Vampires and humans are the same intelligent life forms. If they can share the same language and emotions… there’s no reason they can’t become friends or… family.”
In the scattered room where the voice had changed surprisingly fiercely, as if he’d never stammered or been cautious, Sarka was silently gazing at Ruslan with eyes observing something seen for the first time in his life.
“……”
After a very strange and odd silence ended, Sarka snickered.
Helplessly, like someone who had heard a very funny story.
“Why… why are you laughing?”
Ruslan asked, observing Sarka with a wavering gaze.
Sarka quietly looked at Ruslan, then slowly turned his head.
Ruslan watched as Sarka’s head, lost in thought, tilted gently.
Sarka, who always sat in an upright posture, leaned faintly to sit obliquely and exhaled a sigh mixed with a strange laugh.
Sarka turned a page with a flutter, then asked in a whisper in a very soft tone.
“…Could you trust a vampire?”
The hand movements of Sarka fiddling with the pages were languid. It was clear to anyone that he was no longer reading the book. Rather, he seemed lost in thought. Slowly scratching up the side of the book with his fingernail, Sarka added in a gentle tone.
“…Even if they’re pretending to be your friend today, smiling, you never know when they might slit your throat and drink your blood?”
At the end of his words, Sarka’s green eyes, which gently lifted to look at Ruslan, sparkled with a strange light.
After silently meeting that gaze for a moment, Ruslan answered in a low voice.
“…If I don’t trust them, I’d have to kill them.”
Sarka’s finger, which had been subtly scraping down the side of the book, stopped. A chilling light flashed through Sarka’s green eyes, though only for a moment.
Ruslan clenched his hands as if trying to stop the trembling, closed his eyes tightly, then opened them. His low voice flowed out slowly, crushed by heavy pain.
“…I don’t want to kill. There’s so much you can do together if you’re alive. Love each other, hate each other, play pranks… and support each other too.”
“……”
Sarka was staring blankly at Ruslan like someone who wasn’t even breathing. The air in the room didn’t move at all, as if frozen.
Feeling Kanya’s memory slowly rising from below like water seeping into a marsh, Ruslan slowly whispered in a voice beginning to submerge.
“…Everyone has moments of weakness. Situations arise… that you can’t overcome without someone else’s help. Last week… that was me.”
Ruslan looked down at the wall visible outside the window. Recalling the scattered books and pocket watch below it, Ruslan laboriously connected each word.
“Bruce’s gang cornered me down there and beat me to death. It was a secluded place so I missed the timing to run away, and there was no other way to avoid it. I’d given up everything and closed my eyes to take the beating… when suddenly a dog ran over and chased them away.”
Turning his gaze at the end of his words, Ruslan caught Sarka flinching minutely.
Ruslan’s thought was correct. That day, his face wasn’t visible from the fourth floor. Sarka probably couldn’t confirm until the end the face of Ruslan, who had been lying down and immediately pressed flat against the library wall.
Only when he discovered the blue bruise on Ruslan’s face when he rushed in asking to do the group project together, would he have vaguely guessed who that hunted prey had been.
So it must have been a trivial kindness bestowed. A favor casually granted because he had no idea what that prey had seen.
Ruslan sensitively observed Sarka’s shoulders beginning to subtly stiffen as he continued speaking.
“…You know the black dog the forest keeper raises? It’s a gentle dog that’s never barked at students even once, but that day it strangely charged at them half-crazed. Just like… it was being controlled by someone.”
“……”
A brief silence flowed.
Ruslan noticed the smile that had been hanging on Sarka’s face had faded slightly. Sarka was looking at Ruslan with a strange expression.
Ruslan swallowed his dry saliva.
“In the village where I used to live… something similar happened. From when that dog was small, whenever it saw children it would see them as easy targets and charge to bite them. It was the dog raised by the son of our village’s landlord, so no one could do anything about it, but one day I unluckily got caught by that dog. It chased me all over town barking like crazy. That crazy young master bastard just watched with a smirk while I cried and screamed for help.”
“……”
“After barely escaping, I was so frustrated and sad that I cried my eyes out in my grandmother’s arms. But when winter passed and I went back down to the village following my grandmother, that dog had become gentle like a lie. That crazy dog strangely wagged its tail and rolled over on its back whenever it saw only me. The crazy young master was displeased seeing that, but I felt good.”
“……”
“One day, I went out to play with friends taking that dog along. There was talk that vampire hunters had come to the village, so we wanted to go see them directly.”
“……”
Sarka’s eyes narrowed.
Trying to steady his breath that kept getting rough from rising memories, Ruslan laboriously pushed the words out one by one.
“We happened to see the dog reflected in a silver mirror the hunters had… and in that moment the dog’s pupils looked bright red. Back then… I thought I’d seen it wrong. That the sunlight hit it wrong, or something like that… I thought.”
“……”
Ruslan’s voice gradually sank darker and became ominous.
Sarka didn’t open his mouth, didn’t even blink, just stared blankly at Ruslan.
“I found out that day. That dog… was being controlled by a vampire.”
“……”
“<If there’s an animal behaving unusually, try reflecting it in a silver mirror…>
Until a few hundred years ago, that was common knowledge. Parish priests all carried silver mirrors, and it was their duty to go wherever there were suspicious animals and check by reflecting them. After the new religion spread believing vampires were extinct, such traditions mostly disappeared, but the fact that church relics are still made of silver is carrying on that tradition.
…People have just almost forgotten that history now.”
The smile had now almost disappeared from Sarka’s lips, with only a slight trace remaining.
A very strange and heavy silence was descending on the rare book storage room.
His green eyes were looking at Ruslan without a single waver, eerily calm, like a picture someone had drawn there.
Ruslan whispered in a murky voice while looking out the window, his increasingly trembling arms resting on the window frame.
“Back then down there… there was a silver pocket watch lying on the ground. …Between the black dog and me.”
“……”
The silence pressed down on his shoulders and heavily crushed even his breathing. Sarka’s eyes narrowed.
Ruslan steadied his roughening breath and slowly lifted his gaze to look at Sarka.
“…I saw clearly. What color that dog’s pupils reflected in the silver were.”
“……”
Their eyes met. Both boys’ breathing had strangely shallowed and their voices were quiet, almost like whispers. Like people observing a dam right before bursting.
Toward Sarka’s expressionless face, still looking at Ruslan without moving with eyes like preserved glass orbs, Ruslan whispered as if lighting fire to his last arrow.
“From the fourth floor where you were… you probably couldn’t see it.”
The corner of Sarka’s mouth twitched minutely.
Ruslan felt cold sweat running down his spine. The silence had now suffocated all air and descended to his feet.
It was hard to breathe as if the oxygen concentration had lowered. Sarka was still not moving at all, just staring blankly at Ruslan with his green eyes.
Ruslan stuck out his tongue to barely moisten his lips. The trembling had now moved beyond his hands to subtly reach his arms and shoulders, but Ruslan steadied his voice to the end and whispered pleadingly with stubborn conviction.
“I think I… received help from you. So I’m going to try trusting once. That we… can become friends.”
When the declaration dyed with strange conviction ended, the silence finally passed his feet and sank to the floor. It was a silence that sank clinging without leaving any gaps.
Finally, when the heavy silence touched the floor and stopped, Sarka broke the quiet and whispered.
“…I thought you were annoyingly clingy for some reason.”
That voice was chilly. Sarka, who muttered lowly, smiled faintly while looking at Ruslan as if everything was now understood.
“…Was that why? That you went on about that ridiculous <friends> talk?”
Ruslan tried to put strength into his trembling legs to endure while meeting Sarka’s smiling face with a trembling gaze.
Sarka laughed very strangely. With eyes that were interested and pitying, as if looking at someone about to die.
The next moment,
Ruslan witnessed the scene of red light suddenly spreading as if thick paint had been dissolved in Sarka’s green eyes.
Bang!
Ruslan’s body jumped at the suddenly ringing sound. When he turned his head, Ruslan discovered that the door to the rare book storage room had locked itself and the bolt had been fastened. Before he could react to that fact, a chain of sounds continued like falling dominoes.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Cha-reureuk! Cha-reureureuреук!
Ruslan’s body jumped as if having a seizure.
At tremendous speed, the windows closed and the bolts turned by themselves. The curtains that had been rolled up to the ceiling all poured down at once and unfurled, and the rare book storage room was instantly submerged in darkness.
His breath was choked off. After the curtains swayed from the recoil of suddenly moving, they slowly became quiet.
When he came to his senses, in the darkness of the completely sealed room, Sarka and Ruslan, just the two of them, were facing each other.
“……”
“……”
A hair-raising silence descended between the two boys.
Sarka was still sitting leaning against the chair back, gazing at Ruslan with a languid attitude.
His obliquely tilted chin, not a single finger resting on the book, remained exactly as they were without moving.
However, Sarka’s eyes were a complete red color, like when Kanya had her eyeballs gouged out.
