By evening the park was truly empty.
Not closed. A closed park still expects the cleaner, the watchman, a stray boy looking for his ball, lovers by the fence, a dog squeezing under the wire. An empty park expects no one. It already knows who is coming.
Ilya entered through the staff gate.
Maya was waiting by the ticket booth.
"Varya isn't answering," she said.
"I know."
"Zuev has applied for emergency demolition of two structures. Officially, because they pose a threat to life. If the judge signs off tomorrow morning, they can start with the Room."
She took a copy of the application from her folder.
"One more thing. Rudnoy's Fund is clean on paper. Zuev signed off on the risks. If the demolition turns up old bodies, documents or children from the line-up, the man responsible for safety becomes the man who ordered the site torn down before it was examined."
Ilya looked at Roman Zuev's signature.
The last link in the chain was a line too.
"He won't have time."
Maya looked at him.
"I don't like the sound of that."
Ilya was so tired he almost smiled.
"Neither do I."
Nina was not at the ticket booth. The stool stood empty. Her headscarf lay on it, folded into a triangle. Beside it was a note:
The old ticket seller is more use to the living than the dead. Gone to Klava's. If the ledger asks, tell it I'll be back.
Maya read it and put the note in her pocket.
"At least she writes better than any of us."
Zuev's floodlights were still on. Their light flattened the paths like lines on an evacuation plan. But another darkness was already gathering between the structures. Not the darkness that came with night, but the kind left behind after a voice was switched off.
The Room of Fear was silent.
Ilya realised it frightened him more than the bell.
On the previous nights it had demanded. Called. Scratched, rung its bells, switched on other people's rooms, returned wet tickets, shown them names. Tonight it asked for nothing.
It was waiting for him.
"Don't go in," said Maya.
"I have a ticket."
"That isn't an argument. That's precisely why you shouldn't go in."
He took out the white ticket. A new line had now appeared on it:
Ilya Lazarev. Admission after midnight.
Price: sell or close.
Maya read it and swore under her breath, almost soundlessly.
"Sell what?"
"The park."
"And close?"
He looked at the Room.
"Probably everything."
Maya took the radio from her belt and set it on the ticket booth counter.
"Listen to me. Officially, I can't help you. I've already gone too far. If I go in with you now, Zuev will bury me in paperwork within the hour. Rudnoy will probably do it faster."
"I'm not asking you to."
"And I haven't finished."
She took a small voice recorder from her pocket.
"Not a phone. No network. Records to a card. Old, stupid and reliable. Switch it on when you go in. If you come out, give it to me. If you don't…"
She did not finish.
Ilya took the recorder.
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. I'm trying to leave myself some proof that I haven't gone completely mad."
It was the same dry line after the fear, the one that let you breathe until the next fear came.
At eleven fifty-eight, the floodlights went out.
All at once.
The park did not sink into the darkness. It surfaced in it.
The outlines of rooms that had not appeared on the daytime plan became visible: THE SHOP FLOOR WITH NO SHIFT, THE TICKET BOOTH WITH NO CHANGE, THE LINE-UP WITH NO UNIT, THE POND WITH NO DROWNED MAN, THE DODGEMS IN THE ONCOMING LANE. They stood around the Room of Fear not like structures, but like witnesses at the door.
Maya whispered:
"It isn't accepting other people's debts any more."
Ilya nodded.
"Because it's waiting for mine."
Suddenly he said aloud what he had been unable to say all day:
"Grandfather was guilty."
The Room did not ring.
"And Grandfather was alone."
This time a quiet, almost human sigh passed through somewhere inside.
Ilya understood: it was not an excuse. They were two truths that could not be added together in any way that made them easier to bear. Grandfather took money. Grandfather saved people. Grandfather kept silent. Grandfather built a road for the Room. Grandfather left people as lines in a ledger because he ran out of time or could not do more and sometimes, perhaps, because he chose others instead.
And now the Room wanted an heir who would make the choice in his place.
Maya caught hold of his sleeve.
"Ilya. One last time. Don't go in alone."
He looked at the empty works gate, the dark switch room, the fence with no one standing beyond it now. At the town that wanted to wake in the morning and learn that the frightening old park was finally going to be demolished, and all the old debts would become inconvenient rumours again.
"Varya took the keys," he said.
"Don't turn that into fate. It's just bad logistics."
He smiled after all.
For a second.
Then the ticket in his hand grew warm.
The door of the Room of Fear opened. Beyond it there was no shop floor, no line-up, no pond. Only an empty corridor with a ticket window at the far end.
A sign hung on the glass:
Closed Debts for Sale.
Ilya switched on the recorder.
"Ilya Lazarev. Entering after midnight. Alone. If I come out, don't let me sell this as a ride."
Maya drew a sharp breath.
"Ilya…"
He went in.
The door closed softly behind him, without a creak.
Outside, the machine in the ticket booth immediately printed a second ticket.
Maya picked it up with trembling fingers.
The ticket read:
Varya Gordeeva. Admission without queuing.
But Varya was not in the park.
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