I stood at the window and looked at the night street, I again saw this dream: the black bulk of some unknown plant, surrounded by a concrete wall. Four hefty pipes towered high above the plant, giant cooling towers in the distance and an abandoned cluttered industrial area, some strange, rusted cars and equipment I did not understand.
A gust of warm May wind blowing through the window brought me back to reality. I have had this dream for the last three weeks almost every night. It's all for a reason. Dreams I usually have or frankly stupid, or very intrusive, repeated night after night and always come true exactly. I had a severe headache and, going up to the mirror, I saw that my nose was bleeding.
The next morning I went to my friend Vyacheslav, I could only call him a friend, the others: comrades, friends, etc. He was not at home, of course, he is at the institute. After wandering around the area, I went to the park and sat down on a bench: if a few years ago I wanted to walk more and swear, now I wanted to sit more. I must be getting old, although twenty-one still seems to be not old. After sitting on the bench for about six hours (and as soon as I could sit that much!), I got up and again went to Slavka, this time he was at home.
Lunch was fried in a frying pan, I sat on a chair and watched the cooking of Slava's food. A friend put scrambled eggs and fried mushrooms and sausages on a plate.
After lunch, I began to fulfill the purpose of my visit:
- Could you look for something on the Internet?
Slavka, almost choked on cola:
- You haven't learned to use a computer in twenty-one years?
Promotional video:
- Well, Slava, you know I don't have it.
- What are we looking for?
- Factories, abandoned factories throughout Central Russia, photos, names, everything.
Slavka barely blinked:
- Why in this region? Just don't say that you've soaped yourself up somewhere again.
- Slav, come on. I have been dreaming about this damn plant for the third week already, he has already bothered.
- Seryozha, why did you decide that he exists.
- He exists, Slava, come on, show all the photos, I must recognize him.
After eight hours of searching, I saw in one of the photographs four pipes and cooling towers in the background.
- It's him. This is the plant from my dream. He exists.
- Damn you, Seryoga, have you got clairvoyance, or what?
- Hardly, Slava. I have to go there.
- Seryozha, I beg you, he is not close and it is more than four hundred kilometers to him.
- I have to go there, he calls me, he attracts me.
- It is useless to convince you, Sergey.
- Absolutely.
- God bless you, - said Slava. I spent the night with him that night.
The bulk of the plant floats out of the morning fog, I crawl through the hole in the fence and walk through the territory of the plant. It is not completely abandoned yet, I feel I was here once. When? It seems like a thousand years ago, maybe ten years ago. There is no time here in the world of sleep. Behind one of the unfinished workshops, there is a huge pit, over which a mountain of sand hangs dangerously. Two teenage boys dressed in shirts and pants play on the edge of this eerie pit. I feel that something is going to happen, something bad. I woke up. And already waking up, the words were born in my head: “You will die here. This is your death. It didn't go out of my head that I knew these boys.
- Not sleeping? - Slava came up to me.
- As you see. The plant was dreaming again.
The friend did not know what to say to me, turned around and left. The next day I bought bus tickets. At lunchtime, my elder brother came to me, to whom I also told about dreams and that something would happen to me.
- Why do you think so? - Asked my brother.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I can feel it and that's it. I feel death.
- Just be careful, - said Lesha.
I started getting dressed.
- Where are you going? - Alexei got up.
- I'll go, brother, I'll pay Evgenia a visit.
When I came to my girlfriend, I did not find her at home. He picked up the phone: “Call her? Not.
“Zhenya, I have to leave for a short while to another city on business. I love you, your Sergey. I threw the note into the mailbox.
Having come to Slava, I handed him a sealed envelope and said:
- If I don't come back.
I went home and began to pack: a rope, a stun gun, a knife, a lighter with air freshener, fires and a first aid kit - my standard set. Gathering up, I went to the bus station. Sitting on the bus and driving some distance, I fell asleep, I dreamed about the plant again.
In the morning I got off the bus and, having traveled by tram to the eastern outskirts of the city, with the help of local residents, I went to the plant. It was an old metallurgical plant, where iron was smelted, it began to fall into desolation, oddly enough, long before the nineties, in the early eighties. First, for reasons unknown to me, one workshop was closed, then another, and today only ten percent of this plant was working, the rest of it was dark and abandoned and was gradually destroyed.
Time is a great power, time wears away a stone, time mercilessly destroys this huge gray colossus bristling with pipes. Wind and frost destroy concrete and corrode metal, every fall the walls of the plant freeze, every spring they thaw, and trees try to grow right through the asphalt. I climbed over the fence and, once on the territory of the plant, went to the destroyed workshops. On the way I came across tractors. Why weren't they taken out earlier? The equipment was in a miserable state, everything that could be unscrewed had already been unscrewed and sold, for the most part it was not equipment, but skeletons, its steel skeletons. There were piles of broken bricks and even concrete slabs under the walls, and some parts of the industrial area were so dirty that they looked more like a trash heap.
I went into one of the shops. There was nothing interesting there - a huge empty building, blown through by all the drafts. I took out my phone and started taking pictures. After taking a dozen shots from different angles, I left the shop and went to a nearby six-story building.
The walls of this building were covered with graffiti here and there. "Artists - from the word" bad ", I thought. Doors in this building simply did not exist in nature, and I calmly entered there. The inside is the same: desolation, dust, graffiti on the walls. Behind the bend is a door, it is metal and it is closed. I turned, and there really was a door around the corner. Damn, as soon as I entered the territory of the plant, I was haunted by the feeling of deja vu and the feeling that I had really been here, and on the fifth floor I heard voices.
Several people were talking, looking around the corner, I saw four "artists" painting the wall. One of them noticed me.
- Guys! - He shouted, and turning to me, - who are you?
The guy pulled out a knife from behind. I pulled the freshener out of my bag and a lighter out of my pocket.
Striking a lighter, I asked:
- Do you know what it is? Therefore, do not be stupid, otherwise I am a cook, I can cook a roast.
- Who are you? - The guy asked again.
- Yes, I wanted to ask you the same thing.
“We're stalkers,” one of the guys replied.
- What kind of subculture is this? - I asked.
“I'll explain later, but for now, put your weapon down.
“Put it down yourself,” I said.
“Let's count three,” said the guy with the knife. Apparently, he was in charge here.
- One, two, three, - we did it at the same time, he threw the knife, and I put out the lighter.
“Relax,” the guy told me. - My name is Denis, and this is Dima, Stanislav, and Konstantin.
I began to slowly relax, I have the ability at first glance at a person to understand who he is, decent or not, and I can smell gopniks a mile away, but these guys created the impression of normal guys: an open, direct look, a complete absence of thugs, no expressions at all signs that they belong to the criminal world, and as for the knife, I also have one, but this does not mean that I am Jack the Ripper.
- Sergey, - I introduced myself.
- Well, Sergei, I propose to combine our efforts to research this plant, - said Denis. - Only here I am the hillock.
- You are a hillock, - I said to the guy, - and I am a mountain, and the mountain is higher than a hillock. Joke.
I had something in common with these guys, they did the same thing as me, only I went everywhere alone, and they were four. But I was still on my guard. The youngest of them, Dima, was seventeen, the oldest, Denis, nineteen.
Together for a couple of hours we examined several shops. I was haunted by the feeling that I had already been here. I photographed everyone except the guys, Denis asked them not to take pictures. Going into one of the buildings, the three guys flooded up the stairs. Are you completely crazy?
- Where? Stand! - I growled in such a terrible voice that the guys stood rooted to the spot.
- Do you know how old this staircase is and in what condition? - I looked at this trio. - Until one person has passed the flight of stairs, the next should not climb, otherwise you will fall down, and then you will not collect bones. Go up one by one.
After examining the building, we went out into the street. Kostya stepped aside, and then returned with a shout:
- Guys, get out! Security!
The five of us scrambled out of there so that our heels flashed, several private security officers appeared from around the corner. We dashed, jumping over rusty iron and broken bricks.
Dimka pulled out something from his bosom, and then shouted:
- Smoke!
I didn’t let him bring the smoke bomb into action, grabbed him by the collar and dragged him aside. Oddly enough, I knew where to go. How did I know? Ask something easier. After running some distance, I noticed that I was still dragging Dima by the collar.
- Two to the right, two straight, I to the left, - the guys understood me perfectly and rushed in all directions.
The guard who jumped out from around the corner knocked Denis down. Lord God, why are these security guards not going to stop, huh? Denis ducked out from under the guard with a snake, and then, standing up, kicked the guard under the kneecap, after which he kicked him in the chest, so that the guard just flew away. Denis ran in one direction, and I in the other.
Everything seemed to come off, I jumped out from behind the shop and saw the very foundation pit, the foundation pit from my dream.
- Slava, do you know where Seryoga went this time? - Zhenya was in my friend's apartment. “Yesterday I found this note in my drawer. She handed it to Vyacheslav. - I tried to get through to him, but he turned off the phone.
- Don't worry, - said Vyacheslav. - Seryoga, he is a boomerang, he will definitely return. Serega was again drawn to exploits, he left to investigate an abandoned plant in a neighboring region, and, by the way, he has two phones. One for talking and one for taking pictures. And he gave me this, - Slavka pulled out the envelope.
- What is it? - asked the girl.
- I don’t know, he usually leaves me maps with routes.
Slavik tore open the envelope, there was not a map, and read what was written in large letters - "Testament".
Despite the middle of May, the sun warmed up and heated everything around. I walked along the edge of a huge pit, at the bottom of which there was an impressive puddle of liquid mud, one of its slopes looked as if there was a landslide many years ago. I felt, I could not understand what, this is beyond words, some kind of connection between the foundation pit and myself. The ground slipped under my feet, and I drove down. Clutching the ground with my fingers, I managed to catch on the slope of this pit and now, fumbling with my arms and legs, I tried to get out of this trap, but only slid on the clay. Turning out a piece of soil with my hand, I saw something incredible - human bones, a leg and ribs nearby. They were almost at the top.
- The Passion of the Lord! - I jerked and slid down smoothly, finding myself waist-deep in liquid mud, in a quagmire. I made ten attempts to get out of there, it was not easy, the mud sucked in my feet no worse than a swamp, and then I was covered.
A terrible headache so much that multi-colored circles flashed before my eyes, and blood began to flow from my nose.
And I sat down in this buzzing, at first all thoughts were knocked out of my head, and then I remembered:
- “You will die here. This is your death”, - a crazy thought suddenly managed to visit me. - It's a stroke, grandfather Kondraty hit you.
The mud sucked in, and I could not resist because of a severe headache and a build-up of weakness. Was it scary to die? I don't, I felt a kind of peace, as if it had to be so, as if it was already with me.
“Give me your hand,” came a voice from above.
I stretched out my hand, and they grabbed it like iron tongs. Oddly enough, I immediately had a desire to live. Denis was dragging me by the hand, and the guy had extraordinary strength, Denis himself was held by Stas and Kostya. Somehow they pulled me out of there.
“There are bones, there are bones below,” I said.
- Yes, damn it, bones, let's move, or now the cops will come.
The guys pushed me into a hole in the fence, and then they got out themselves.
- Did you come back for me?
- Yes! Let's move.
Denis took me by the hand, and I dragged myself like a ram on a string. Wildly had a headache. I don't really remember how I ended up in the front seat of the old Niva. As we drove onto the road, we missed a police car heading towards the plant.
“Now I have become a criminal,” Denis told me. “I think I broke something for that guard.
Denis constantly looked around and because of this, at full speed, he almost crashed into a tractor driving in the opposite lane. It was saved by the fact that by that time I had already recovered enough and managed to turn the steering wheel, which he held.
- Now we are quits, - Denis told me.
I was sitting in an armchair in Denis's apartment. The rest have already gone home.
- Denis, - I said, - are you not afraid to drag strangers into the apartment? What if I'm a maniac?
- No, I am not afraid. And you are not a maniac, I can see you in your eyes.
- We have to go back there. There are bones below. Human bones.
- I know, I saw.
“We need to report the police,” I said.
- Well, yes, of course, and at the same time hand me over there, and you, this is a protected area, and we entered it. Only now it is not clear what to guard there.
“Not what, but from whom,” I said, “so that fools like us do not climb there and die there. And you called yourself a stalker?
- This is the name of the people involved in industrial tourism, - the guy answered me.
I got up and started to leave.
- Are you going far? - Asked the landlord - Will you go without pants?
- In pants, - I went out onto the balcony and took off the freshly washed pants from the rope.
- Stay with me for the night, it's late, in the morning everything will be decided.
I checked my phone. The one that didn't work for photography, but the second was in the ranks, and on it, my God, forty-one calls from my girlfriend. I immediately called her back and, after listening to everything, from the declaration of love and joy and ending with what she thinks about me, I said that he was alive and well.
Denis made a bed for me on the floor. I tried not to sleep in someone else's house with a friend for only a few hours of a person, you never know. But by morning he passed out anyway. I never dreamed of the plant.
I woke up by lunchtime, and Denis handed me a pack of photographs with the words:
- If you have more than one gyrus, you know what to do with them. I went there early in the morning while you were sleeping.
- You left a stranger alone in your apartment and were not afraid? You're crazy!
“Madness is the only thing worth living for,” Denis told me.
A few hours later I was driving home and thought, thought about Denis. He is an amazing person, not embittered, like some of our peers, with a pure, open soul. So, disinterestedly help a complete stranger, leave him to spend the night in his house. I always tried to be a good guy, but I am not capable of such generosity, yet I did not fully understand him. He behaves as if he was transferred to us from the Soviet era. Arriving in my city, I handed over the photographs showing the bones to a familiar policeman, who, in turn, handed them over to the Investigative Committee.
Eight months later
I walked along the corridor of the institute, institute, in which I studied for only a year, and then moved on to another. I was looking for my former teacher. Seeing him, he called out.
- Leonid Petrovich, can I have you for a minute? - I ran up to him, the senior counselor of justice.
- What did you want? - He asked.
I told him about the bones at the factory and the pictures I gave to the police. I asked to make inquiries.
- You think I have nothing else to do? Come back in three weeks.
And I came. And I learned everything or almost everything. Two teenagers, ten and thirteen years old, went missing in the area, they were looking for, but in vain. There was a landslide, a sandy collapse, and they were covered, buried alive, at the bottom of this pit.
- When did it happen? - I asked.
- Thirty-two years ago.
- But why hasn't the foundation pit disappeared during this time, hasn't it leveled off?
- Ask something easier, - answered the teacher. - They were flooded, but the water gradually deepened the foundation pit, it is actually drainage, in one part it deepened, in the other it fell asleep, so the bones came out almost to the top. We managed to find their relatives.
The bones of the children are now in the cemetery. I never saw the plant again, neither in reality nor in my dreams. Here's a story. I do not consider myself a clairvoyant, but what was it?