Song By Unreality

Chapter 9

"A metropolis or a provincial city?"

"A small village. Don't be surprised, sometimes I miss the silence and loneliness."

(from Rina's interview to "Zen With Celebrities" channel)

There was a cool breeze from the river, the wind blew through the hoodie, causing the skin to be covered with goosebumps. Hugging herself with her arms, Rina remained standing on the narrow bridge, where village boys had recently been fishing: a piece of scaffolding with a sinker caught on a blackened support, and a broken fishing rod lying on a trampled earthen bank spoke about this. And now there was nothing to fish in the river: the fish had gone, and the one that remained was floating belly up in the muddy water.

Rina was woken up at dawn by a call from a single number crammed into a simple mobile phone.

"Have you noticed what's going on?" the interlocutor asked, bypassing the greeting.

She noticed. And even combined oddities into one picture: a crack in the ground, a half-dried tree and scary entities.

"It's not me!" Rina exclaimed childishly, half asleep, deciding that she was being blamed for what was happening.

"Of course not you! It all started before your arrival," the interlocutor replied and gave the following instructions. At first, he said to come to the river and wait... for what exactly, he did not explain. "You'll understand,"the man said vaguely, and then ordered to find an overturned boat with a blue stripe on its side and take the package hidden under it.

And now Rina has been standing on the bridge for half an hour, waiting for something. She had wanted to leave for a long time, but something held her in place. She stared at the dead fish and the blackened, as if charred, water lilies for so long that at some point everything merged into a solid mass before her eyes. The mass swayed, moved, as if alive, and then began to take the shape of a silhouette and slowly moved towards the bridge. Rina screamed in fright, realizing that this was not really a dead fish, but an unknown something stretching out its hands from the water column. Before reaching the bridge, the monster suddenly disappeared in a sudden whirlpool, in which Rina noticed several more similar creatures. Whether they were being dragged into the abyss or, on the contrary, thrown to the surface, she didn't consider running away from the river that frightened her.

It didn't take long to find the right boat. Rina noticed her from a distance next to a fishing shack. The boat has not been used for a long time: the boards have cracked and a finger easily passed between them, the blue paint on the side has peeled off, turning a solid line into a dotted line. Rina put her hand into a small depression in the ground and felt for a cellophane bag. Carefully brushing it off from the stuck blades of grass, she looked inside and found a thick paper envelope. At the same moment, the mobile phone rang.

"Did you find it?" the man asked.

"Yes. Just."

"When you've seen everything, call me."

"Okay. I saw a whirlpool on the river, and there were some creatures in it."

"Has the funnel disappeared?"

"I don't know. I ran away," Rina confessed.

The silence that hung in the receiver made it clear more eloquently than words that she had screwed up. And when the phone rang, Rina got angry. These calls broke her life, but the caller still didn't give an explanation! Rina squeezed her eyes shut tightly, holding back tears, and then with a cry released some of the pain and slammed the phone against the edge of the boat.

"Go to hell! All!"

Tears still sprang from her eyes, but from annoyance when she saw that the phone was not damaged by the blow. These aren't modern fragile smartphones, but unkillable 'classics'! And how nice it would be to crack this damn phone! Then she would really disappear from everyone, absolutely from everyone!