And there was something wrong about it.
Not because people were laughing. Laughter after a fright was honest, if the fear let go. What was wrong was that Ilya caught himself counting the takings.
By lunchtime the queue stretched as far as the old shooting gallery. The Daisy carousel was switched on for something other than a test run for the first time in a month. Varya Gordeeva ran back and forth between the switch room and the entrance, swearing at the fuses, the teenagers, the peeling wires and Ilya, who knew nothing about selling tickets.
By day, the Room of Fear operated as a ride. There was no real shop floor inside. There was a pavilion, plywood, lamps, rusty pipes, the clock-card rack and a bell that went off at just the right moment. People screamed. Then they came out, laughed and told one another how 'it felt like someone was breathing right beside you in there'.
Ilya listened to the laughter and checked each time: it lets them out.
It lets them out.
So it wasn't a pit.
By three in the afternoon he could already tell what kind of visitors they were from the sound, before they even came out. The ones who were genuinely frightened did not laugh at once. First they fell silent at the final turn, then breathed out at the exit, then swore at their friends, and only then did they laugh. The ones who came to make a video had their laughter ready in advance, loud and hollow. They were frightened not in the Room, but on their phones.
Ilya took down two old speakers from the ceiling, though Varya said the effect would be weaker without them.
"There's enough sound in there already," he said.
"So now you're an expert on fear?"
"On fakes."
She snorted, but carried the speakers away herself. After that the shop floor grew quieter, and for some reason the queue grew longer. People came out with a different look on their faces: not as though they had heard a cheap scream, but as though someone else's working day had become their own for a minute.
Ilya saw it and did not know whether he was pleased or afraid.
Towards evening Maya Kraeva, the local police officer, arrived. She was short, composed, with the face of someone tired of explaining the obvious to adults.
"Lazarev?"
"Ilya."
"I don't care what your name is as long as nobody breaks their neck here. Do you have permission for a public event?"
"We're a park."
"You have a queue, videos in the town chat and a pavilion that's been officially closed for twenty years. Don't make me choose between the law and common sense. The law's more alert today."
She spoke without anger. With a degree of sympathy, even. But when she looked at the sign reading "THE CURSED WORKERS' SHOP FLOOR", the sympathy vanished.
"Whose idea was this?"
Ilya turned round.
The sign really was hanging by the entrance. Not the one that had appeared that morning. A new, brightly coloured one, printed by one of the kids behind the neighbouring pavilion. "THE CURSED WORKERS' SHOP FLOOR. TODAY ONLY."
The word "CURSED" hit him harder than it should have.
Varya saw his face and fell silent too.
"Take it down," said Maya Kraeva. "Not because of the law. Just don't be disgusting."
Ilya tore the sign down himself.
At that very moment the ticket booth stopped taking money.
The woman at the window held out a banknote. The till drawer slid open, then shut again by itself. Ilya tried once more. The drawer slammed so sharply that the woman snatched her hand back.
Varya said quietly:
"Looks like the Room didn't like it either."
Ilya took a sheet of card and a thick marker and wrote a new sign:
"THE SHOP FLOOR WITH NO SHIFT".
He thought for a moment and added underneath:
"If you know whose name disappeared from the factory records, leave a note at the ticket booth."
Maya Kraeva read it, said nothing and walked towards the exit. But she did not put her phone back in her pocket. From that moment on, the park was no longer just a ride. It was a case that nobody was calling a case yet.
The ticket booth opened again.
By evening there was more money in the drawer than his grandfather had perhaps seen on any single day in the last few years. Ilya counted the banknotes slowly, with the unpleasant feeling that he was handling someone else's letters. Varya sat on the threshold of the booth, sorting through the old keys.
"You don't have to carry on with all this," she said.
"What about you?"
"I work here."
"Why?"
Varya was silent for a long time. Then she shrugged one shoulder.
"My father used to repair the wiring here when I was little. Then he disappeared. Everyone said he'd gone on a bender, run off, only had himself to blame. Semyon Ilyich gave me a job when everyone else said these weren't a woman's hands. I stayed. Stupid, isn't it?"
"No."
She looked at him warily, as though the word might be a trap.
"No," Ilya repeated. "It isn't stupid."
It was a small moment. Not an admission. Not trust. More like the first plank laid across a puddle that neither of them yet dared to cross. But Varya did not look away at once, and that was enough.
Just then Roman Zuev appeared at the gates again.
He did not look angry. Only a little tired, like a man who disliked spoiling someone else's happiness with a reasonable warning.
"Ilya, I saw the queue," he said. "Congratulations. I mean it. But you do understand: the more people you have, the greater the responsibility."
He laid a copy of the report on the counter.
"The inspectors are coming tomorrow. They'll check the electrics, the fire exit and the pavilion's structure. If the breaches are serious, the park will be closed. But if Varya confirms in the report that the pavilion has been unsafe for years and Semyon Ilyich concealed it, the inspection will be over more quickly. No fines and no criminal proceedings. The park will simply be closed on paper."
Varya rose slowly.
"So you've come to ask me to sign a paper against the place where I work?"
"I've come to suggest that you don't take the blame for someone else."
Roman Zuev said it calmly. And there was more danger in that calm than in a threat. He could already see how they would look from the outside: an inexperienced heir, an electrician without certification for a site this size, a crowd of people in an unsafe pavilion and an old park that had suddenly begun to make money.
"Think about it until morning," he said. "Both of you."
He left without slamming the door.
Varya watched him go.
"Now that's frightening," she said.
"The inspection?"
"The fact that he's just right enough for people to believe him."
They closed the park after ten. They counted the money twice. The notes from the ticket booth were put in a separate pile. They contained surnames, nicknames, requests to find a missing brother, check the old works gate, discover why someone's mother had been afraid of the word "pond" all her life. Most of it might have been town gossip. But after Tolik Zharov, the word "gossip" had become too convenient.
Varya went to check the switch room. Ilya stayed alone in the booth.
He put the day's takings on the left-hand side of the ledger. The ticket booth accepted the money. Then he touched the right-hand page.
Tolik Zharov's entry was closed.
Below it the words "not all of them" stood dark on the page.
Ilya caught himself waiting for midnight with more than fear. He was ashamed of it. Part of him wanted the bell to ring again, because another ring meant an answer. And an answer might save the park. It might explain his grandfather. It might turn his own failure into something he could not walk away from.
That was why he was more afraid of himself than of the Room.
At five to midnight Varya returned.
"It's quiet in the switch room," she said. "Too quiet."
The booth clock clicked.
Midnight.
The drawer slid open by itself.
Inside lay a key. Old, brass, with a round tag. One name had been scratched into the tag:
Nina Pakhomova.
And beneath the key, on the bottom of the drawer, a new line appeared in the ledger.
Ticket booth with no change. Unpaid.
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