Before the funeral, Ilya had not been to Zarechensk for nine years.
He had left straight after his military service and worked as a sound engineer at other people's venues, hauling stands, hunting down feedback in the speakers, arguing with performers who asked him to make 'the soul louder'. Then the venue closed, the studio fell apart, and his last client paid for the mix with a promise. By autumn, all Ilya had left was a rucksack, a laptop with a cracked corner and his grandfather's telegram from the hospital, which he had read too late.
The town greeted him with the same smell of wet iron, cheap bread and leaves no one cleared from the bus stops. Only the signs had grown brighter. The household-appliance shop was now a payday lender. The children's café had become a window showroom. The bus from the station went past the old factory, where banners had been stretched across the broken windows: 'A new neighbourhood is coming soon.'
The First of May Park stood behind the factory, beside the old pond.
Once, it had been repainted every season. Now the paint held only where no one touched it. The big wheel had stopped with one carriage higher than the rest. The Daisy carousel listed as though its back hurt. The shooting gallery had been boarded up with plywood, but someone had drawn a target on it in marker and written: 'shoot your debts'.
The Room of Fear stood in the far corner, by the poplars. A low pavilion with a black façade, a toothy maw for an entrance and faded letters above the roof. As a child, Ilya had been afraid not of the Room itself, but of his grandfather staying there alone every night. Semyon Ilyich used to say that a proper keeper had to be the last to shut fear away.
Back then, little Ilya would slip notes and old tickets into his grandfather's till drawer, as though an adult could be led out of fear the same way a visitor was led out of the pavilion.
"Fear has to let a person back out," his grandfather said once, when little Ilya got stuck in the pavilion and burst into tears in front of the rubber witch. "Otherwise it isn't a ride. Otherwise it's a pit."
Ilya had not understood then. Later, he decided his grandfather merely had a gift for making poverty sound noble.
After the funeral, people said the same thing, only in different words.
At the gates, a woman from the council approached him with a folder and a dry smile. She said the park was unsafe, the debts were mounting and the town was tired of waiting. Then Roman Zuev appeared.
Roman Zuev did not look like a man who had come to take away an inheritance. He looked like a man who had come to spare you unnecessary pain. Dark coat, calm voice, unhurried hands. He did not call the park a dump. He called it 'a difficult property'. He did not say 'demolish'. He said 'clear the site for decent living'.
"Ilya, you don't have to carry this alone," Roman Zuev said as they stood by the ticket booth beneath the wet awning. "Your grandfather kept the park going out of stubbornness. I respect stubbornness when it doesn't put people at risk. But now there are rotten cables here, an unfenced pond, old structures and debts. We settle the debts, you get the money, and the town gets a neighbourhood without ruins."
"What neighbourhood?" Ilya asked.
"The Quiet Quarter," Roman Zuev replied. "Low-rise buildings, a car-free courtyard, a children's playground. It'll be beautiful."
He spoke so evenly that it was difficult to argue. Not because he was applying pressure. Quite the opposite: he left Ilya the option of looking like a reasonable man.
Ilya would almost have signed everything that same day.
What stopped him was a woman in a grey jacket who came out of the Room of Fear with a coil of wire over her shoulder. She walked through the puddles as though she knew every pothole and did not even look at Roman Zuev.
"If you're going to sell, give me back my tools first," she said.
Roman Zuev introduced her without irritation:
"Varya Gordeeva. Electrician, mechanic, watchman, sometimes ticket seller, sometimes fire brigade. Your grandfather used her for everything the walls couldn't hold up on their own."
One corner of Varya Gordeeva's mouth twitched.
"And you hold the town up with the word 'unsafe'. That's a profession too."
That was when Ilya first noticed her hands. Not beautiful in the usual sense. Bruised knuckles, short nails, traces of insulating tape on her fingers. The hands of someone who did not argue with machinery until she understood where it was lying.
"Is the Room of Fear officially closed?" he asked.
Varya Gordeeva looked at him.
"Since 1998. Officially."
"And in practice?"
She took an old seal on copper wire from her pocket. It had been carefully removed and carefully put back.
"In practice, your grandfather opened it every night, then put the seal back on in the morning. Guarded this sideshow for forty years as though there were a safe full of gold inside, not a papier-mâché witch."
"Why?"
"I thought you might tell me."
Ilya wanted to say he knew nothing himself. That he had come to settle a matter, not open a new one. That his grandfather was no mystery, just an old man with a bad ride and good handwriting. But at that moment a thin ring came from inside the ticket booth.
Not the night bell that would come later.
The daytime bell. A test ring. As though the old till had coughed to remind them it could speak.
Roman Zuev looked at his watch.
"Think about it until tomorrow," he said. "The papers are ready. I'm not rushing you, Ilya. But the town will rush us both."
He went back to his car. Varya Gordeeva stayed.
"Do you really want to sell?" she asked.
"I really don't want to spend my life in a park that fell apart before I was born."
"It didn't fall apart before," Varya said. "It fell apart in front of everyone. Those are different things."
After that, she showed Ilya the switch room.
The switch room was behind the Room of Fear, in a windowless brick extension. It smelt of dust, mice and warm insulation. Varya raised the main switch, and a dry click travelled along the wall. Something stirred in the pavilion beyond it: an old chain, a motor, a plywood curtain.
"This is the main supply. This is the lighting. This is the sound. This line goes to the ticket booth. And this…" She tapped an empty place on the panel. "This is the shift bell."
"Why would a park have a shift bell?"
"No idea. Your grandfather said it was 'for the first room'. I thought he just liked factory horror. You know, frightening things scare children more when they look like their parents' work."
Ilya bent closer. The wire to the shift bell had been cut. Cut long ago, cleanly, right at the base.
"It can't work," Ilya said.
"That's right," Varya said.
The bell struck once.
Short.
Metallic.
That was not how bells rang on a ride. That was how people were called to their shift.
Varya went pale but did not step back. She only removed her hand slowly from the main switch.
"There we are," she said, too drily. "Now at least you know why I don't like this place at night."
Ilya listened.
Beyond the wall of the Room of Fear there was no music, no mechanical clanking, no hiss from the speakers. Silence stood there. But in that silence, someone was waiting for them to come in.
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