At midnight his grandfather's booth opened by itself.
At the window stood a man the town had buried without a name, though the body was never found.
It took Ilya Lazarev a moment to understand that he was looking at a living face. In the old First of May Park everything knew how to pretend to be alive: the rubber hand behind the booth glass, the clown with the flaking cheek, the mechanical witch who had been lifting her head on the same creak for forty years. Even the lamp above the window flickered as though it were breathing.
But this man was not a prop.
He stood outside in the thin autumn rain, in a padded work jacket with a dark collar. Water ran down from his hair onto his forehead, but the drops never fell to the ground. They hung at the edge of his chin, grew heavy, darkened and vanished, as though someone were rubbing them out of the air.
A clock card hung on his chest. White, swollen with damp, with a number on it that should have faded long ago.
Ilya was sitting inside the booth on a broken chair. In front of him lay a folder with the contract of sale, his passport, his grandfather's bunch of keys and a thick ledger in a brown cover. He had opened the ledger only because he could not get to sleep after the funeral.
The left half of the pages was ordinary. Date, tickets, the day's takings, the signature of Semyon Ilyich Lazarev. The even, small hand that Ilya had hated since childhood for its neatness. Even poverty his grandfather set down as though that too had been ruled out with a straightedge.
The right half was something else.
There were no sums there. There were names, sometimes nicknames, sometimes a single line with no surname. After every entry stood just one of two words: "paid" or "unpaid".
Ilya had time to think that his grandfather had gone properly mad towards the end. Then the old till rang. Not a bell off a speaker, not a recording, not a tinny effect out of the Room of Fear. A real till bell, short and spiteful, like a flick against the teeth.
There was a man at the window.
Ilya said the first thing anyone says when he is not ready to believe his own eyes:
"The park's closed."
The man in the padded jacket looked at him calmly. His eyes were grey, tired, with no dead shine to them. That was the worst of it. He did not look like a ghost. He looked like a workman who had stood an extra shift and come to the booth for what he had been promised.
"I'm not here for a ticket," he said. "I'm here for the envelope."
Ilya dropped his eyes to the ledger.
On the right-hand page, where a minute before there had been an empty line, ink came through. It was not being written with a pen. It swelled up out of the paper the way a bruise comes up under skin.
Tolik Zharov. Last shift. Unpaid.
Below it a new line was coming through.
Ilya Lazarev. Taken on.
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