the hallway, and wondered for a while what else I ought to pack. I had a few novel items of equipment that some friends had given me the previous week. But I settled on the usual selection anyway - it's fairly compact and gives pretty good all-round coverage.
Plus the mini-disc Walkman. I don't need my sense of hearing for anything, and boredom is an implacable enemy.
Before I went out I took a long look at the staircase through the spy-hole. Nobody there.
And that was the beginning of one more night.
I rode the metro for about six hours, switching aimlessly from line to line without any plan, sometimes dozing, letting my conscious mind take a break and my senses roam free. There was nothing going down. Well, I did see a few interesting things, but they were all ordinary incidents, tame beginners' stuff. It wasn't until about eleven, when the metro got less crowded, that the situation changed.
I was sitting there with my eyes closed, listening to Manfredini's Fifth Symphony for the third time that evening. The mini-disc in the player was totally eccentric; my personal selection, medieval Italian composers and Bach alternating with the rock group Alisa, Richie Blackmore, and Picnic. It's always interesting to see which melody coincides with which event. Today it was Manfredini.
I felt this sudden cramp - it ran all the way up from my toes to the back of my head. I even hissed as I opened my eyes and scanned the subway car.
I picked the woman out right away.
Very pretty, young. In a stylish fur coat, with a little purse and a book in her hands. And with a black vortex spinning above her head like I hadn't seen for at least three years!
I imagine I looked crazy, staring at her like that. The girl sensed it, took one look at me, back at me, and immediately turned away.
Try looking over your head instead!
No, of course, she's not able to see the twister anyway. The most she could possibly feel is a slight prickling of alarm. And out of the corner of her eye she can't get any more than the vaguest glimpse of that flickering above her head... like a swarm of midges swirling round and round, like the shimmering above the asphalt on a hot day...
She can't see a thing. Not a thing. And she'll go on living for another day or two, until she misses her step on the black ice, falls, and bangs her head so hard it kills her. Or ends up under a car. Or runs into a thug's knife in the hallway... a thug who has no real idea why he's killing this girl. And everyone will say: "She was so young, with her whole life ahead of her; everybody loved her..."
Yes. Of course. I believe it, she's a very good person, kind. There's weariness there, but no bitterness or spite. When you're with a girl like that you feel like a different person. You try to be better, and that's a strain. Men prefer to be friends with her kind, flirt a bit, share confidences. They don't often fall in love with girls like that, but everybody loves them.
Apart from one certain person, someone who has hired a Dark Magician.
A black vortex is actually a fairly ordinary phenomenon. If I looked closely, I could make out another five or six of them hanging above other passengers' heads. But they were all blurred and pale, barely even spinning. The results of perfectly ordinary, non-professional curses. Someone yelling after someone else: "I hope you die, you bastard." Someone had put it more simply and forcefully: "Go to hell, will you!" And a little black whirlwind had moved across from the Dark Side, draining good fortune and sucking in energy.
But an ordinary, amateurish, formless curse lasts no more than an hour or two, twenty-four hours at most. And its consequences may be unpleasant, but they're not fatal. That black twister hanging over the girl was the genuine article, stabilized and set in motion by an experienced magician. The girl didn't know it yet, but she was already dead.
I automatically reached for my pocket, then remembered where I was and frowned. Why don't cell phones work in the subway? Don't the people who have them ride underground?
Now I was torn between my principal assignment, which I had to carry through, even without any hope of success, and the doomed girl. I didn't know if she could still be helped, but