The Return of the Living Delia

The sweat was pouring off him, and his legs were shaking from the effort; besides, the old man he was carrying had such a nasty way of shuffling his feet on the steps of the stairs that the young man had to use all his strength every time he took another step.

But finally they found themselves near apartment number eighty-two. Pierre sighed heavily and leaned the old man against the wall, but he suddenly slid down to the floor, which made the young man reluctantly lift him up again.

"Gaffer," the young man whispered through his teeth, almost with hatred, "please open the door to your apartment!"

The old man, whose legs could barely support his body, shook his head.

"Then at least tell me which pocket you keep your keys in!" Pierre hissed angrily.

"In the right breast pocket," the old man whispered barely audibly.

Pierre immediately stuck his hand in there and pulled out a bunch of keys with a strange keychain in the shape of a scallop, in Pornuguese "vieira". Anyway, no matter.

The young man began to pick the right key, which took him a couple of minutes, until finally the lock clicked and the heavy door opened by itself under the action of some mechanism hidden in the beam.

Pierre grabbed the old man under the arms and pulled him through the threshold, after which he closed the door to the apartment behind him. The old man fell right next to the door like a sack of potatoes or rotten cabbage, while his unexpected young guest stood in the middle of the narrow corridor and, breathing heavily, began to look around the place where he had been brought by the will of fate.

The corridor was dark and a foul odor was clearly coming from the walls, which were some kind of murky color. Pierre didn't immediately realize what the smell was, but then he realized it was dampness and mold from the old wallpaper.

He looked around. Not far from him stood a secretary, opposite which he could see a passage into some room. Pierre suppressed the desire to look in there without the permission of the owner of the apartment, who at that very moment was gradually coming to his senses, sitting on the linoleum floor.

The old man opened his eyes and looked at Pierre with a cloudy gaze for a while, after which he said:

"Take me to the kitchen, sonnie, I'll treat you to some tea."

Having said this, he tried to get up, but immediately fell to the floor, and Pierre had to lift him onto his shoulders for the umpteenth time. He dragged the old man into that very room, the entrance to which was just opposite the secretary that had attracted his attention.

The old man seemed to be able to walk on his own, but for some reason he wanted to be carried by strong young hands. Pierre didn't like it, but he understood that if the old man fell and crashed to his death, his death would be blamed on him, so he decided not to give in to his first desire and courageously supported his grandfather.

When they crossed the threshold of the kitchen, Pierre, with great relief, sat his companion down on a stool standing right against the wall.

At the same time, he again had the desire, as he had then in the office with the "professor" and the "director," to read Yesenin's immortal lines "You remember, you all, of course, remember, how I stood, approaching the wall," but he decided that now was not the time for such exercises.

He simply sat down on another stool and gave himself a little rest. His grey-haired neighbour stared silently into the distance with a motionless face, making it seem unclear whether he was breathing or not.

But then his eyes slowly turned to the right. First his gaze stopped on Pierre, and then slid along the wall behind the young Flenchman.

The young man could not stand it and broke the oppressive silence:

"Gaffer, you said something about tea, am I right?"

Hearing these words, the owner of the apartment noticeably perked up - he slowly rose from his chair, trying not to fall to the floor.

Pierre, who had been too tired for the last hour, was not eager to support the old man, so he continued to watch the latter's actions indifferently from his stool.

However, he still had to get up from his seat, because the old man, looking around the space in front of him, said:

"Sonnie, take the kettle that's on the sink and fill it in the bathroom."

Pierre, reading to himself all the conceivable and inconceivable curses, rose from his stool and immediately stared at the sink like a ram at a new gate.

The thing is, it was a mess - the hole was plugged, there were some kind of embers lying around in the sink itself, everything was smoked and stained with soot, and on top of it there was a metal mesh like those that should usually be in the oven. Although common sense told the young man that this thing had been pulled out of the oven.

The old man, noticing the bewilderment of his young guest, hastened to explain:

"I can't pay for gas, I have to heat food with improvised means," he mumbled, looking impatiently at Pierre. "First I burned newspapers, and now I've gotten around to books..."

The young man had no choice but to take the blackened teapot that was standing on the mesh from the sink and go into the bathroom with it. Having filled it to the brim, Pierre carried it back and placed it on the mesh, and then stood next to the old man, who with practiced movements tore a couple of pages out of the book lying on the countertop and, throwing them into the sink, reached for a lighter.

Pierre suddenly became curious about what kind of book the owner of the apartment used for kindling, so he couldn't resist picking it up and opening it to the first page he came across.

"As soon as the little man saw the marchioness, he began to sing loudly and play the lute, and soon to the sound of his music from lodges started coming out other inhabitants of the heavenly town. As soon as they gathered in full force on the street, the oldest looking little man approached Zelandyne and began to interrogate her, who is she and how did she end up in their magical town. Young marchioness did not lie and answered honestly, that this day she turned eighteen years old, and that her mother kicked her out of the home, not even allowing to celebrate this wonderful red-letter day. The inhabitants of the heavenly city were imbued with sympathy for Zelandyne and decided to let her stay with them. The Mayor immediately gave the order to build a. dwelling for the marchioness, which Mason managed in just ten minutes, because he was always ready all necessary tools and..."

The text then broke off, but what Pierre managed to read was enough to make him think something like, what kind of idiot came up with the idea to write such nonsense.

He put the book down next to the sink in bewilderment and sighed. How could anyone, he thought, write children's stories so ineptly? All this nonsense about a marquis with the idiotic name of Zelandyne seemed to him not only frivolous but also completely illogical.

Well, it doesn't happen that when their children reach eighteen, parents just take them and throw them out the door! This is some kind of clinical nonsense! And the fact that the mason built the house in just ten minutes looked like an outright mockery of the construction business.

If this wasn't written by a teenage idiot, Pierre thought, then it was probably a psycho who had lost all sense of reality. The young man immediately imagined the image of a drooling fat asshole and faggot, whose entire face was covered in pimples and whose nose was dangling glasses with huge lenses.

The young man's fantasy brought this image to life and now this freak, masturbating with his left hand to his dirty thoughts, nervously typed the text of his new masterpiece on his old, like mammoth shit, laptop. Pierre shuddered when this image appeared in his head.

To get rid of the monster that his own subconscious had created, he shook his head furiously, and at that moment the image of the pimply wanker disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

Pierre suddenly found himself back in the kitchen, where an old man stood in front of the sink, looking with a dull expression at the kettle, the sides of which were licked by tongues of flame escaping from under the mesh placed on top of the soot-stained sink.

Pierre leaned against the tabletop, feeling relieved at last. He looked at the old man, who seemed oblivious to his presence, completely absorbed in his thoughts.

"Gaffer, are we going to have tea soon?" Pierre finally squeezed out, trying to defuse the situation with such a childishly naive question.

The old man slowly looked up at his young guest and, apparently not knowing what to say, shrugged his shoulders. Then the young man decided to change tactics.

"Gaffer, why is everything here so... Strange?" he asked, trying to put on a surprised look.

It seemed that the owner of the apartment was just waiting for a question of this kind, because suddenly a spark flashed in his cloudy eyes, and he sat down on a stool and began to tell the story in his mumbling and muffled voice.

"It's all because my life is in total ass, sonnie," he began with a barely noticeable smile on his wrinkled face. "I was under investigation, I lost my job, I lost people's respect. I LOST A FRIEND!" he suddenly said a little louder than usual.

"And all this because I managed to invite one little faggot to my place. If I had known what kind of ass this would lead me into, I wouldn't have let that bitch within a kilometer of me, instead of treating her and reading her fairy tales at my place!

Pierre was seriously surprised by how, before his eyes, the old man, who had previously looked like a dead fish, suddenly, for no apparent reason, became filled with hatred, which threatened to spill out right onto the guest!

"Do you see that book on the tabletop?" the old man asked him angrily, throwing his hand forward. "That's what I read to that little faggot back then! I still remember how that cunt had the audacity to criticize what was written by a storyteller unknown to her!"

The young man felt a little awkward, because, having read an excerpt from that fairy tale, he had the same opinion about its author as the "cunt" mentioned by the owner of the apartment, but he thought it best not to answer, besides, the old man was not going to listen to him anyway, continuing to spit out words full of hatred.

"And then this undergrown bitch of hers had the audacity to take offense when I wrote down in my notebook the words that her tiny and incompetent brain managed to shit out while I was telling her why her mother was an old and stupid slutty cunt!"

Pierre, listening to this stream of senile dementia, thought to himself that the old man was clearly developing a mania of grandeur, but he said nothing, because the old man would not have let his guest get a word in anyway.

"And when the cops showed up two days later and charged me with raping that faggot, I was ready to slaughter her entire family and all their pets, if they had any! And my friend Jordan Thur..."

Hearing these words, Pierre was seriously frightened by his proximity to this crazy old man. He turned pale and jumped up from his stool.

The old man, noticing this maneuver, suddenly stopped his angry speech and looked at him with a helpless look.

The young man's eyes widened, and the owner of the apartment - he was absorbing the guest's horror like a mirror - stopped mid-sentence.

"What? Did you really think that I... Huh?" he said in a sharply lowered voice.

Pierre didn't remember how he rushed from the kitchen into the hallway, but soon he was already yanking the handle of the front door.

"Sonnie! What are you doing? Where are you going, sonnie? SONNIE?!" the old man screamed desperately, rising from the table with difficulty.

The door gave way, and at that moment there was a terrible crash - the owner of the apartment, having lost his balance from movements that were too abrupt for such an old man, collapsed and began to flounder on the floor like a fish thrown ashore, scratching the dirty linoleum like claws.

Pierre could not forget this: the old man's piercing scream, the thin fingers scraping the linoleum with their long nails, the bulging eyes spinning madly in their sockets. Pierre rushed down the stairs as if the furies were chasing him.

The reason he had rushed out of the apartment so quickly was because Pierre remembered how the old witch, moments before her inglorious death, had told him that his dear uncle had allegedly raped a certain minor named Delia along with his friend, whose name was Japhet Byrnes.

At that moment he considered the words of the old hag as slander, but now they seemed to the young man like the truth of Cassandra, which pricked his eyes and caused pain to his heart. He still did not believe that his uncle could do such a thing, but that Japhet - who, as Pierre was sure, was the same old man - could shamelessly abuse a defenseless little girl, he did not doubt for a moment.

And that is why, having heard from the old man's lips the confirmation of the old witch's words, Pierre immediately rushed out of the apartment, because he understood that he could not calmly be near a man who rapes small children.

The lair of the monster in human form had to be left as quickly as possible, and so Pierre no longer thought about where exactly he was going to go - he only knew that he had to run as fast as possible, as far away from the pedophile's apartment as possible. And he ran forward, not paying attention to the fact that his legs were buckling and his heart was beating so hard that it was about to jump out of his chest.

He ran without looking where he was going, when suddenly a light appeared ahead, and the sound of a helicopter's blades spinning madly reached his ears. The young man looked up at the sky and saw with horror a Bell 407 hovering above him, equipped with two mortars - apparently so that if something happened, it would be possible to quickly deal with the fleeing criminal.

And Pierre had no doubt that the people sitting in the helicopter mistook him for the criminal, because he immediately heard a voice amplified by a megaphone:

"This is Officer Mark Bell! Stop moving immediately or we will shoot!"

Pierre wasn't going to obey the Pornland cops, because his ass was filled with cheap Flench pride. He ignored the officer's words and kept running.

And orders to stop continued to fly from the helicopter.

"I repeat, either you stop and raise your hands up, or I will order the pilot to fire a salvo at you!"

But the young man continued to run forward with a dull expression on his face. The next second, suddenly, everything around was illuminated by a bright flash - this was Officer Mark Bell keeping his promise.

Pierre could already hear the whistling sound of two shells flying towards him behind him, but he was not going to give up and continued to run forward like an idiot.

The first rocket exploded somewhere behind him, and the second hit him right in the back of the head. Falling to the ground with his head turned into a bloody mess, Pierre had time to think about what would happen to his unborn child, who was carried under the heart of his beautiful cousin Markesse.

And a moment before his soul left his body forever, the young man made a terrible vow that he would visit his heir during his nightmares - so that the blockhead would not forget his poor daddy!

The old man could not know what had happened to his young guest, for he was busy trying to get up from the floor. When he finally managed to do so, he immediately collapsed on a stool and stared straight ahead with unseeing eyes that, against his will, were watering from nervous tension.

He tried to collect all his thoughts, but the blood in his temples was roaring so loudly that it was very difficult for him to concentrate.

Memories of a recent conversation with a young guest, his look full of despair when he suddenly rushed away from his apartment, did not give the poor invalid any peace.

He felt anxiety for the young man flaring up inside him. He clasped his head in his hands and began to rock rhythmically on the stool, risking falling to the floor again.

"What did I say to him?" he whispered under his breath, recalling again and again the wide-open eyes of the young guest, full of horror and disgust. "Could he really have thought THAT about me?"

The old man froze, trying to remember every word of his speech, which was born in him under the influence of the hardships he had experienced in the past.

"Perhaps I was too harsh," he muttered, staring into space. "Or perhaps he simply didn't understand me?"

The owner of the apartment recalled how a couple of minutes ago he had tried to convey his emotional pain to the young guest, how he had wanted to let him know about his experiences, about how the fatal meeting with that girl had turned his life into hell.

He hoped that his frankness would help the young man understand that he, Japhet Byrnes, was only a victim of circumstances. But perhaps in this desire he himself did not notice how he said something wrong?

"I wanted to cry on his shoulder," he muttered, trying to calm himself. "But maybe instead I just caused horror in his heart?"

His heart sank as he realized how easy it was to hurt someone without even meaning to. He remembered the way the boy had looked at him with fear, and then, a second later, he had suddenly rushed out of the kitchen as if the Furies were chasing him.

At that moment, the old man clutched his temples tighter, trying to drive away the memories of that nightmarish scene.

"What, what did I say to him?" he thought, remembering how he had tried to open his soul, but instead had only scared the young man half to death.

The old man took a deep breath, trying to stop his hands from shaking. He knew he couldn't allow himself to be tormented by these thoughts any longer, that he needed to get back to his daily routine, but the knowledge that he had done something reprehensible wouldn't let him calm down.

Suddenly the old man heard a faint rustling sound coming from the front door. He became wary, and anxiety began to grow in his heart. It seemed that someone was in his apartment. But who? The old man stood up, trying to suppress the trembling in his knees, and carefully walked out of the kitchen.

When he found himself in the corridor, he immediately recoiled in horror - a little girl was standing right in front of him. Her appearance caused the old man disgust, mixed with panic fear. The face of the terrible guest was pale, with deep shadows under her eyes, which in the semi-darkness of the apartment seemed to him like black holes.

Her chapped and parched bloodless lips seemed to be frozen forever in a strange expression of contempt and indifference to all living things. Her once beautiful black hair was tangled into disgusting clumps and seemed to be soaked in something wet and sticky.

She was dressed in a hospital pajama, once white, stained with grave soil, which had come apart in some places and revealed pale and bluish skin to its sole viewer.

Looking down in horror, the old man noticed that the bottom of her shirt and almost all the fabric of her pants were soaked in blood, as if before her death someone had inflicted numerous cutting wounds on her thighs.

And the remains of rotten gauze bandages that hung like scabs on her bare ankles indicated that the cause of her death was the cruel abuse of her body at the hands of some mad surgeon.

The terrible stench of death that came from her body made the poor old man hold his nose, but he did not forget to back away, because he did not want to be left alone with her.

Meanwhile, the dead little girl continued to advance inexorably straight towards him, her face still retaining the same expression of a person who has smelled shit and wants to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

The poor invalid took this personally and could not help but cry out:

"What, you little dead cunt, it's not enough for you to let my friend Jo rot in prison, you also want to settle scores with ajussi Japh?" the old man screamed hysterically. "THEN FUCK YOU, YOU STINKY SLUT!"

With these words, the owner of the apartment, turning his back to the dead little girl, strained all his strength and rushed to a small window visible at the end of the corridor.

He no longer cared whether the ghost was haunting him or not, he knew only one thing - HE MUST NOT LET HIMSELF BE GIVEN INTO THE HALF-ROTTEN HANDS OF THIS STINKING BITCH FROM A GRAVE! An idea had already been born in his old brain - to break the glass with his head and fall out into the embrace of the night ether. And he did it.

None of the residents of house number one hundred and fifty-four saw old Japhet Byrnes, dressed in an old, time-worn tracksuit, jump out of the window of apartment eighty-two.

Nobody cared that, after doing a couple of somersaults in flight, the aforementioned citizen crashed down on the asphalt with all his might, spreading his arms out to both sides.

A stream of black blood gushed from his shattered skull, immediately mixing with the dust and debris that the hapless suicide had landed in.

And of course no one could see how, a few moments after the old man's death, a small figure of a black-haired girl in hospital pajamas appeared in the window opening of his apartment, who, with a frozen smile on her lips, looked down, straight at the motionless body of Japhet Byrnes - the only person who knew this stranger by sight and, if not for his death, could confidently tell the witnesses of his scene that HER NAME WAS DELIA!!!

"Are you tired, baby? Should I put you to bed?"

"No, ajussi Jo, no. Ajussi, please bring me an invention."

"Why do you need an invention?"

"The most interesting thing in the world, that's it!"

"Who said?"

"Jerome said."

"Next time, answer him: the most interesting thing in the world is the truth. And invention... It just makes the truth even more truthful!"