There were two of them – black and white. The white one quietly swayed on a rope, hanging deep in the basement. Soft red and blue oozed through the colorful glass of a small window near the ceiling. The white one seemed to have just parted with life, but still occasionally shrieked, disturbed by uninvited guests. The huge white eyes of the black apparition, which seemed to have popped out of their sockets even in life, looked eerie, but in them, you could read a longing for the living world. It smiled kindly and greeted the newly arrived with ominous howls and lecherously pestered the ladies.
An hour passed, and the two ghosts disappeared just as they had appeared in the gloomy Moscow basement. But the surprises didn’t end there – the dances of two vampires, mutual frightening with flaming pumpkins, the bridal rituals of the spirits of the mansion – and there were many of them – were enough for everyone. When midnight struck, they all howled menacingly, instilling fear in the onlookers who found themselves in the old cellar that night. They themselves feared us, the living, because only the living have a choice.
The goddess of snakes came to the aid of the living. Resembling a snake herself, she carried a huge reptile in her hands, at the sight of which even the bravest ghosts groaned. Even those who accidentally wandered into this abode of fear understood that the end of the unholy force was inevitable, and only the voluptuous flexible mermaids danced in a circle, intending to remain in the memory of mortals as the last dance. With the final step, they also dissolved into the air.
And the mortals, rejoicing in the opportunity to join the fashionable trend of following European culture, religion, and anti-religion, applauded their own childish bliss and pinched the disappearing lifeless flesh of the mermaids for the last time.
Halloween is a Celtic pagan holiday, and if one believes that on this day all evil can be driven away, one can assert with confidence that such evil will not linger in most Moscow nightclubs for a long time. To dispel the mystery, I will note that the described event is the result of the creative endeavors of the entertainers from the bar “Armadillo.” Mermaids, leaders of pythons, modest wandering troubadours – none of this surprises seasoned adventurers in our times. But almost real ghosts of their visitors that night could please not every establishment.
The theater of pantomime “Black Sky White” generously donated its ghosts. Plasticity and composition – these silly, meaningless words – are not able, will not, and should not express anything. Action needs to be watched. And this action – birth and death, the creation of the irreparable and the destruction of the sacred. The bend and break of hands and personalities. Only those two hanged individuals, who literally turned themselves inside out on the small stage in the basement of “Armadillo,” could move like that. “Black Sky White,” black light and white darkness intertwined consciousness and intertwined in consciousness. In this dance, one could read all the pain and blood of the living and all the emptiness of the long-dead. Death.
It was death that blew through the hour, which seemed like a moment. Beautiful words, which, however, also cannot plunge the human mind into the well of sensations of a stopped world.
Originally published in Echo of Moscow
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