This Cold Empty House Full of Secrets - Soviet Union Short

Epilogue - All

Five Years Later

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Toris was alone.

It had taken him a year to write the letter, then another to muster up the courage to journey back to the place he'd promised himself he'd never look back to. Yet here he was, in the small town where he'd made the biggest mistake of his life. It was no longer snowing. The sun shone brightly, only a few puffy white clouds in the sky, and the sunflowers bloomed by the dozens. Fields, streets, yards, filled with the yellow flowers. Toris felt they meant something, but he didn't know what.

He sucked in a breath and turned to face the bakery again. His hands shook, so much so that he almost dropped his letter. And slowly, he opened the glass door. The bell jangled, startling him so much that he actually did drop his letter, and he knelt down to pick it up so quickly that he hit his head on a shelf.

"Hey, are you okay?" a voice asked behind him.

Toris startled, then turned around to find a girl a few years older staring at him, concerned. She  had shoulder-length blond hair and green eyes. Just like Feliks. In a momentary lapse of reason, he thought she actually was Feliks, and he almost fainted. "Uh, ye...s. I'm fine. Sorry." his own voice was quiet and cracked, because he rarely used it.

"Alright. So, what would you like?" she smiled brightly, gesturing to the filled shelves of the store. Toris' stomach growled, but he shook his head.

"Actually, I'm looking for... for Feliks." He said slowly. The name felt foreign on his tongue, for he had spent all of these years thinking it yet never actually saying it.

"Oh. In that case, you just missed him. You'll find him up at that house on the hill. He goes up there every week."

Toris' eyes widened. Okay, it was safe to admit that he was not at all ready for this. He felt the year he'd spent mentally preparing for the journey seeping away, replaced by raw terror. Not back there. Never back there. No amount of time would make Toris strong enough to return to the site of his nightmares.

"... that place, you know, it's the center of a lot of rumors. I assume you know what happened there a couple of years ago? It was all the rage for gossip for, like, a year. Even now, you'll be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't want to talk about it. There's, like, still a lot of mystery abound. The police are trying to find out what happened, but it's not really working. The office, where all the papers were stored, they think, was burned to the ground. And no one knows where the people who lived there went, except one of them. She stayed. But it was a tragic end, like everyone says." The girl continued matter-of-factly, waving a hand.

That was quite enough for Toris, but no, the girl chatted on, breaching territories Toris had spent years burying away in the depths of his mind. She didn't seem to notice Toris' distress, his shaking, or his terror. "One dead, got hit by a truck, you know. The younger girl, she was practically sick with grief, she ran off with a boy - I think they're living somewhere in Norway right now, if I'm not mistaken. The other three, no one knows exactly what happened to them. Everyone says they just packed up and left. Which leaves the older girl, poor soul, she's the only one who's living there now. Still tends to the farm, you know. Feliks brings her bread every Sunday."

Toris noticed his breaths getting shallower dully. This was too much. The memories were too much, too fast. He could not keep afloat. The world was a murky black wave, and he was falling further and further beneath -

"Anyway, I hope you find what you're looking for! Have a nice day!"

Toris took a deep breath, then offered the girl a weak, cracked smile. He could do nothing else.