I know what you will say. You will say to me, Arseny, there are enough real monsters in this world—why do you make your own? But before I begin, before you make your judgments, like the others, before you tsk-tsk-tsk our failures and tell me what you would have done, there are some things that you should know.
You should know, first, that things were very bad in Starosibirsk.
You should know, also: We were once a small village of simple people on a wide, calm river. Not less, not more. We could spell the first name, father’s name, and surname of everyone we knew. The homes and church and the shed for storing forest berries, we all built ourselves from strong larch wood.
The river came from the north and brought clear, cold water and many fish, among them an uncommon sturgeon known for the saltiness of its eggs. The people of Starosibirsk knew not to catch this sturgeon, nor eat its eggs, as doing so would bring a lifetime of bad luck upon the village. We heard the warning songs as children, learned to recognize it quickly and cast our lines elsewhere.
The same was not true for others in the region. For them, this caviar was beaded gold. Okay, it was not like the Ossetra you get in the western cities. But at their local markets, ten tins sold for more than a berry forager could earn in a season. So people traveled from great distances to fish in our river and eat in our cafes, to sleep in the modest guesthouses we had erected for them, or lie sleepless, fantasizing about their wealth.
The sturgeon was longer than a man and fat around the middle. On the shore, proud rybakov posed for photographs with their prizes before carrying them away. It was understood that the sturgeon was not to be slaughtered within Starosibirsk limits. In their own villages—or, in times of impatience, just outside ours—they hacked dull knives through the pale bellies and harvested the eggs inside.
Returning fishermen visiting our tavern spoke freely, so we knew: Each fish contained millions of brown-black eggs in a mass so dense, they came up in whole slabs without crumbling. Fishermen lifted handfuls over their heads and hurrahed, saying “Here is Pavel’s university education!” and “Here is Masha’s extravagant wedding in the Balkans!” Later, they dragged the gutted fish to their kitchens on plastic sleds to be made into soup.
Then everything changed.
The accident at the nickel factory in Rabotograd. It took only a broken pipe, a careless eye. The chemical waste leaked downstream and turned the length of the river a muddy red, the color of blood in American monster movies.
The followers of the church were the first to respond—they fell to their knees at the river of blood and covered their eyes and wept and prayed. It took the rest of us more time to understand our misfortune. We waited three weeks for the river to run clear. By then, the fish were open-mouthed and drifting. The undersides of the sturgeon were a sour yellow and rotated to face the sun.
It smelled like death, and it was. There was no debate: the eggs would not be good to eat.
For weeks after the accident, people came to see our section of the devil-touched river. Once it ran clear, they came no more.
The fish population did not recover, and those who had once traveled for the sturgeon stopped coming as well. Our guesthouses and cafes stood empty, and our tavern became among villagers the most popular place to be. Even the Starosibirsk train station closed for lack of interest, and we knew that there was no hope for us then.
What was left for us to believe? We had obeyed the warnings—we had not touched the sturgeon. And still bad luck had found us where we slept in our cottages, surrounded by purple berries in the summers and otherwise in snow, and it behaved as any monster would. It was thorough and unjust.
Here is another thing you should know: we were very desperate.
And also this: we were very drunk.
Finally: It was Mikhail’s idea, and do not let him tell you differently. That would be classic Mikhail. When it happened, it was, “I am Mikhail, prince of the good ideas, deserving of all the credit, tell them Mikhail did it.” And now it is, “I am a humble man, it was a group effort, I was merely an observer, I was only taking notes.”
It happened at the tavern, six months after the accident. A night of cheap vodka and not enough zakuski to line our stomachs against the drunkenness toward which we marched. Borya and Dima fought over the little pickles and the herring on toast, while Dima’s beloved mutt, the undersized borzoi, laid at his feet, waiting for scraps. Yuri, the gentleman, poured drinks and passed them around, and Maksim and I did our best to win the favor of glorious Varvara, who sat at a table nearby. And Mikhail, as you know, he came up with the idea.
Recalling our time as classmates in the physics program at Novgorod, we decided to approach the matter in a scientific way. Previously, we had approached it in a number of unscientific ways, based primarily in rage and despair and the pounding of glasses on tables.
The scientific approach was as follows:
Our observation: No one was coming to Starosibirsk, because there was no reason to come. No one was booking rooms in our guesthouses, or purchasing mushroom-stuffed piroshki or refreshing beet salads or kotleti fried to a golden brown.
Our question: What would it take for people to come to Starosibirsk, a small village no different from any other, save for its location on the river, which was now too toxic to fish or swim in, and perhaps too toxic even to sunbathe beside?
Our hypothesis: If Starosibirsk had something that no other village had, as it once did with the river sturgeon, people would come again. We agreed unanimously that, certainly, they would. And life would return to the way it was.
It would have to be quick. It would have to be compatible with our stubborn, unproductive land.
Now, Mikhail’s idea.
The monster.
From the movies we watched on the tavern’s old television, we knew people everywhere had a love of monsters. The experience of fear without the loss of control. The experiment of courage with the option to retreat to safety. Beautiful Hollywood actors running in the dark.
Or did meeting evil in this way convince us that we were better than we were? If a fierce creature with fanged teeth waited in the shadows, it meant little when we were rude to strangers. Cheap with our neighbors. Dishonest to our wives. Silly things in comparison.
The challenge was not only to create a dreadful monster, but one that people had not heard of before—one specific to Starosibirsk, and worth coming to see.
On a napkin between us, we drew monstrous bodies, but found it difficult to forget those we already knew. Ugly animal heads on frail human forms. A mountain monster with spiraling horns and stiff brown fur. A forest monster with arms made of branches and hands made of leaves. We were so discouraged by our lack of imagination, we almost put a stop to it then.
Then glorious Varvara shouted over from her table: “Zdravstvuyte, duraki! It is not as difficult as you make it. Think about what you are afraid of. In your lives. Today.”
She pulled her chair over to us and called for others to join. Soon, everyone in the tavern was shouting ideas while Yuri, with the steadiest hand, poured continuous servings of vodka, and Mikhail and I, with the neatest writing, used napkins to take down notes. As soon as we filled one napkin, another appeared before us. Some were half-wet with drink and others torn and crumpled. Others were orange with grease and we, writing manically, filled them all.
“Death!” someone yelled from the back, to a room full of nods.
“Dying alone!” the bartender contributed.
“Dying poor!” said someone I could not see.
“Bears!” “Drowning!” “Ticks!” “Failure!” “Wild boars!” “Senselessness!” “My mother-in-law when she is in a bad mood!”
“Chaos,” one said.
“Children,” echoed another.
“Dentistry without anesthesia.” A groan moved through the tavern.
“Being trapped in the banya and overheating to death.” A quiet admission from the corner, met by laughter at the unlikelihood of this.
“And you?” I asked Yuri as he refilled my glass, taking care not to spill on the notes. “What are you afraid of?”
He contemplated the bottle, then set it down and sighed. “Arseny Sergeevich.” His eyes turned toward the river. “My greatest worry is that what has already happened will not be the worst that can.”
We worked until the early morning, drinking steadily and combining our fears, rearranging them until they fit into one body, one history, one set of behaviors.
When the sun rose over the church’s onion domes, we had a monster we could call our own.
Our monster stole the axes of woodcutters and threw the blades into the river and the shafts into the treetops where they would never be found. It lured its victims into groves and tickled them to death, or held their heads underwater and pulled out their teeth one by one. In its human form, our monster wore its shoes backwards and carried a staff, and its belly was yellow and engorged with eggs and blood. In its beast form, it had tusks protruding from both corners of its mouth and eyes the color of toxic runoff.
If you encountered our monster in the forest, you would be instructed to turn your clothing inside out, wear your shoes on opposite feet, and beg until your throat grew raw. If the monster was appeased, it would let you go free. If not, ah—you have seen the movies.
Our monster was constructed from parts of all of us. In that way, what Mikhail says about it being a group effort, a collaborative process, he is telling the truth. The next part required contributions from everyone, too.
Because the monster lived in our minds for only a short time before we released it into Starosibirsk, and then the world.
We carved claw marks into the trees with the knives from our kitchens. We used soup ladles and potato mashers to dig footprints into the soil. We dipped our fingers into varenye jam and smudged misshapen handprints onto shop windows. We trampled through bushes to create the monster’s paths, roaring from the bottoms of our stomachs as we went. We collected long silver hairs from the babuskhi and scattered them everywhere—onto the sides of buildings, where we imagined our monster would scratch itself when shedding in warm weather, and onto piles of dried leaves, beneath which we imagined our monster would sleep.
We wanted, too, for the monster to appear intelligent. So we carved furniture from larch wood scraps and placed it in clearings near the edge of the forest, in places villagers did not often go. Rocking chairs and tables, a grand bed with four twisted posts. Clumsy, unsophisticated things, but strange enough to provoke unease.
Then we captured the footage using borrowed camera equipment and posted it to the online message boards. Above each photograph and video, we wrote: Come See for Yourself the Dreadful and Specific Monster of Starosibirsk!
The story flowed easily, like water. We counted the responses. We watched the curiosity go up, up, up.
And when the tourists began to come, we were ready for them.
I am willing to admit—that is, you should know, if it is not obvious already—that I was not innocent in all of this. It would not have become what it was without the efforts of the Sighters. I was one of them: the appointed Sighter of Starosibirsk-Between-the-Bakery-and-the-Lightpost-That-Does-Not-Work. We divided the village into small, manageable parcels, and each Sighter had their own domain.
It was part of the tour experience we had agreed on. A guided tour felt too forced, not authentic. Instead, as visitors arrived, they were greeted by a series of hints: the footprints; two competing smells in the air, one like a wet dog, the other industrial, metallic. Next—and this was important—they encountered their first Sighter.
The Sighters entertained tourists with tales of our monster. We played the role of the believers, the ones who had seen. There was a Sighter of Starosibirsk-Between-the-Primary-
School-and-the-Produce-Shop and another of Starosibirsk-Where-the-Hills-Flatten-to-Meet-the-Shore. Everything we said was based on a script we had written that long night-turned-to-morning in the tavern. Though we had a certain amount of freedom in telling the stories, we knew consistency was essential to the lie.
We took our jobs seriously. We rehearsed.
“I am a hunter,” one Sighter would say, pointing to a footprint in the soil. “I have tracked animals all my life, and I know without a doubt this cannot be the mark of a bear.”
“I am a mushroom picker,” another would say, pointing to the stripped-away bark of a tree. “I have foraged fungi my whole life, and I know without a doubt they could not have caused this decay.”
Or: “I am a carpenter. I have made furniture my whole life. No village in this region would produce something so rudimentary. Without a doubt, I know it to be the monster’s nest.”
And it worked just as we hoped it would. Slowly at first, mostly thrill seekers who appreciated this kind of thing more than most. Who had already seen all the monster movies. Who had already been buried alive at that novelty tourist attraction several days away from Starosibirsk on the Trans-Siberian Railway, the one that had been featured on the British travel show. These groups were eager to believe. They made it easy. They came to stalk, to kill.
Gradually, the village filled. The guesthouses were at least half-booked and the cafes felt warmer now that the ovens were on, browning meat pastries, while garlic-rich solyanka stew bubbled on the stove. Some visitors knew the history of Starosibirsk, knew of the exquisite saltiness of the sturgeon eggs and the breadth and stillness of the once-giving river. But others did not, and to them, we were a small village, not spectacular, one of many affected by the accident at the nickel factory, which appeared only briefly in the national news.
Now, we can look at our plan and see the errors. But we were too close to it then. We had already printed T-shirts with images of the monster, displayed them next to matching wood carvings in the abandoned building we had converted to a souvenir shop.
We did not look around us or above us—only at the coins that once again, thankfully, necessarily, found their way into our tills.
So when the chickens turned up dead, feathers bloody and necks mangled, set at odd angles and bitten through, and the tourists looked at one another with gleeful terror, we thought: wolves. Until one of Varvara’s brothers took responsibility.
Yes, we were attracting enough tourists now, he said, but how long would it be until they lost interest? They were desensitized, skuchayushchiy, like all of us. They saw worse on their televisions every day. How long would false footprints and claw marks on trees convince them?
And it made sense well enough. We applauded him for taking initiative. We toasted him at the tavern and piled on his plate all of our extra pickles and herring.
When the howls rang through the village and the tourists screamed in delight, we thought: a mother brown bear defending her young. But this time, it was the baker who took credit. He said when he watched the American movies, he was most fascinated by the sound effects.
When the sounds of claws scraping the outsides of buildings, too close to our pillows, woke us from our sleep, and the next morning we looked for an answer, the bartender’s wife raised her hand with satisfaction.
When we felt hot breath on the backs of our necks, we did not even give it a second thought. We assumed it was one of us, practicing a stunt that would later be used on the tourists. We gave each other knowing looks. We stopped asking, supposed everything was of our own making.
It became a competition. A matter of pride. Even Yuri, the gentlest among us, spent long hours in the tavern’s dark corners, inventing new ways to make our monster more terrifying than before.
Borya had been bragging about a big plan that would outdo all the rest. And we knew his family owned a herd of cattle. So when one tour group found the bony, spotted bodies lined up on the shore, flies buzzing, tongues hanging from mouths, we thought: okay, Borya, a little dramatic, but nice touch. The cows were clearly the sickest and weakest of the herd. Their eyes were half-lidded and their sides heaved from the effort of staying alive.
And as we played our foolish games, the stories traveled and the visitors came in greater numbers. They said they had heard the monster of Starosibirsk was extreme. When the guesthouses were full, we housed them in our own cottages, giving up our beds to them while we slept on spare blankets on splintered wood floors.
We were already overcrowded, already beyond capacity, when the famous interview aired and we completely lost control.
The interview was with an influential politician who had been criticized consistently for the brutality of his decisions, and the coldness and swiftness with which he made them. Probably you know it. Probably you watched it, more than once, and probably this is how you heard of Starosibirsk in the first place. This particular interview had to do with the politician’s involvement in the nickel and copper industries, and those industries’ effects on the natural environment.
If you have seen the interview, you know what he said. In case you have not, I will repeat it:
“The people of this country have no gratitude. They call me a monster. But look at the good I have done—would you call this the work of a monster? You know, if you want a monster, go to the village of Starosibirsk. Do you know this place? Strashno! Go, and you will learn the meaning of the word.”
We did not know how the politician had heard about us. But it was at this point that we knew we were doomed.
The politician was a controversial figure, and the interview was the most watched television broadcast that year. Within a week, the cars that had been coming to Starosibirsk were replaced by bright-colored multi-deck buses organized by travel agents in the western cities. Tourists came from farther and farther away. The buses had chains around their wheels and snowplows attached in front to ensure no number of traditional Siberian obstacles could stop them.
Remember: Once, Starosibirsk was all wet soil and sharp-grassed meadows, the smell of wood smoke rising from chimneys, empty spaces between A-frame structures, the occasional flutter of a floral apron when glorious Varvara came into the room. After the interview, it was packed tight with bodies. Bare arms in the summer months, and chalky sun cream, and perfumed sweat. Then in the winter, hats and boots and furs, and still that awful stench beneath those as the tourists flooded in.
We tried to keep up with the demand. The Sighters stayed true to our scripts, for the most part, shouting the fabrications louder and louder so the groups, larger and larger, could hear them. Some listened intently, others half-listened, others not at all, instead peering around for signs of the local monster.
The bartender expanded the tavern into the building across the street. The bakery opened earlier and closed later, and the baker hired more of his cousins to work shifts producing the farmer’s-cheese vatrushka, a popular snack among the tourists, who liked to eat it as they walked, exploring the village, looking for blood.
Then, hell.
Dima’s loyal mutt, the undersized borzoi, was found gutted at the edge of the water, his ribs cracked open and the cavity filled with maggots and opportunistic birds.
The tourist who found the borzoi wore heeled boots into the forest and took a disposable camera roll’s worth of photographs of the scene. She shook with excitement. She said she felt lucky to have had such an authentic experience, to be the one among her friends to uncover another piece of the mystery that day.
Dima was in ruins.
We called a meeting.
More and more, our horrific acts had convinced the tourists of the monster’s existence. More and more, we were unconvinced that we had done the right thing.
At the tavern, closed off to tourists that night only, we questioned everyone: If Borya had killed the cattle, what would stop him from taking the next step? Or Varvara’s brother, with the chickens, could he have gone too far? Or Mikhail, who had put this whole wretched idea on the table and then left it there, like so many fish, to rot?
Who showed the most hunger for the money the new tourism had brought us? Who was the most competitive? Who had the most to lose, to gain? The air between us was thick with distrust and every person, declining Yuri’s offers, would consume only the drinks they poured themselves.
Then the confessions came, spilling faster than vodka.
“The chickens. I lied,” said Varvara’s brother.
“The scraping noises. I lied,” added the bartender’s wife.
“The cattle. I lied,” admitted Borya finally, dropping his head to his chest. Refusing to meet Dima’s eyes.
We had been so willing to take ownership when we thought the only thing we were stealing was credit from some bashful party. But Dima’s eyes, the empty bottle before him. This could never have been part of our game.
You know the rest, it is safe to say. The deep scratches in the paint of the multi-deck buses. The missing tourists and the parts of them that, eventually, we recovered. An ear, a finger, a heeled boot, the manicured foot still inside. The missing villagers, too.
And a small village on a wide, calm river that, despite it all, remains overrun. The more mutilated bodies appear swollen in the water or bent around the branches of trees, the more living, sweating bodies appear at the train station—always in high spirits, ready to hunt. Yes, they have even reopened the station. In fact, Starosibirsk is the busiest stop on the eastbound line. Everyone is a suspect, and the number of suspects grows each day.
As for us, we again take a scientific approach.
Our observation: Fiction is believable. The truth is not. We have all done terrible things, sought them out for amusement, been ignorant and short-sighted when thinking about our own survival.
Our question: Who is responsible for the deaths? Man or monster? One of us, or one of them, or something else entirely?
Our hypothesis:
This is where I come in. I am still Arseny, the Sighter of Starosibirsk-Between-the-Bakery-and-the-Lightpost-That-Does-Not-Work; at least when the tourists are out, during the day. The rest of the time, I have appointed myself Arseny the detective. There is a task force. The original six, the ones who started it all.
We work furiously in the tavern, drawing timelines and circling, then crossing out, names. We think fondly of the uncommon sturgeon and the warning songs we learned as children, when we still saw a clear line between what was wrong and right, a line moving in one direction between the eaters and the eaten.
We circle names. We cross them out. Yuri distributes the vodka. Dima raps his knuckles against the table but is otherwise silent.
Something howls in the near distance.
We huddle together, praying we can find again some logic in this world.
Originally published in Weird Horror, Issue 2, May 2021.
