ISBN 978-5-0051-8265-4

      Created with Ridero smart publishing system

      THE FAIRY OF TAPESTRIES

      All that remained of my brother’s dead girlfriend was puzzles – a whole collection nailed to the walls.

      “They look like paintings covered with light cobwebs. And from them…” Anita felt cold, her tongue seemed to be frozen, and it was impossible to finish the thought.

      “I know you’re cold,” whispered a voice in her brain. Probably it was not in reality.

      Anita looked at the pieces of art collected by a caring hand like a museum mosaic. There are fantasy, landscapes, still lives, morinas, and group scenes. Mostly the emphasis is on magical details that are sometimes difficult to see in the most ordinary-looking paintings. All assembled puzzles are carefully glued and inserted inside graceful frames, matched to the size. It’s hard to be surprised here. Anyone who at least once in his life put together a jigsaw puzzle of a thousand or more details, knows what a painstaking work it is. Such toys are intended so that, having collected them once, then not to scatter them, but to nail them to the walls to decorate the interior. Anita herself never had the patience to complete a large puzzle to the end, so she respected the skill of another. The selection of paintings was especially good. My brother’s ex-girlfriend had great taste. All images are bright and iridescent, but darkness gathers in the house next to them. Perhaps the whole point is that the house is old and gloomy. It is gloomy here even during the day.

      “There’s a whole exhibition here!” Anita walked through the corridors looking at framed puzzles. In a gloomy house, bright pictures were supposed to create a good mood. And instead they brought in something scary. It is strange, looking at them, as if dancing on a rainbow, so where does the feeling of evil come from. The black door to hell cannot suddenly open inside a fabulous landscape.

      “Do not take them off under any circumstances!” warned the brother.

      “Good. Although strange…”

      “What?”

      “They seem to be alive”.

      “This is computer graphics, if you noticed, there is not a single classic picture. Aspazia loved only contemporary artists who create a picture based on a sketch or a photo processed graphically. And she compared the collection of puzzles to the weaving of tapestries”.

      “What kind of comparison? Was she a restorer at a museum?”

      But the brother had already left. The pictures of the dead girl looked at her with living eyes. Fairies, elves, mermaids and whole companies of magical creatures are all around, and they look as if from hell.

      Well, the needlewoman was Aspazia. Aspasia! What’s the name? What diligence does it take to collect all this with your own hands? Anita found one box and tried to put together the puzzle she had already started. It didn’t work. Since it was already started, it means that Aspazia died before she could collect it. Really reminiscent of painstaking knitting: loop into loop. All the details are so small. So you can go blind!

      Anita threw up a whole pile of parts and fell asleep among them without collecting anything. Outside, the rain pounded on the window. Singing in an incomprehensible unfamiliar language penetrated into sleep. This is neither English, nor French, nor German, not even exotic Arabic. He seems to be inhuman at all. Just a mixture of sounds and notes. This is probably the language spoken by the elves in the forest.

      In a dream, Anita was stirring up the details of an unassembled puzzle. She dreamed of a beautiful, golden-haired woman weaving a tapestry thread by thread. Her ears ached from her song. The sound echoed like blows in a cauldron.

      The woman is wearing a luxurious vintage dress in green. Behind the back is a sparkling cape. In curly hair, a cap with a veil. She herself resembles a picture from a medieval museum. She would rather be queen than work on a tapestry. For some reason she winds some of the threads from the tapestry on a spindle. Something is wrong here. Spindles were not used in the production of tapestries.

      Anita woke up the next morning. The puzzle has been completed. Gray mice swarmed around on the floor. No, some creatures, not mice! Anita screamed, and they ran to the corners.

      On the dusty floor, there are chains of footprints that resemble miniature human feet rather than mouse feet.

      You can go crazy in this house! What kind of creatures did not start in the basements during the period that the house was not repaired. Probably, it will soon crumble from decay. If not for the urgent need, Anita would never have agreed to spend the holidays here. It was better to leave for the whole summer somewhere to the sea on a sunny and hot coast. Here, in a gloomy old mansion, even summer looked like late autumn. The sky above the rooftops is always cloudy, the park behind the fence is almost devoid of foliage, mostly thorny bushes and thorny trees grow in it. Even nowhere to walk. The only pleasing to the eye that there is, these are bright puzzle pictures. But from them for some reason the frost sneaks through the skin. Moreover, the feeling of fear in front of the images of elves and fairies has become much stronger than it was on the first day of arrival.

      In the gloomy garden, under the thorny branches, there was a black headstone. It seems to be no surprise that there are burials on the territory of the mansion. Generations of one aristocratic family have lived here for centuries. Not her family. Anita’s father bought this estate from some ruined aristocrat. He died before he could leave here. He seems to have been buried here. Surely there is a crypt somewhere nearby.

      After a wonderful purchase, her father did not live long either. He caught some kind of infection, from which all the skin was covered with ulcers, similar to the marks of tiny hands, and died. Now Anita and her older brother Mark owned the estate. But what’s the use of such ownership? It will take a lot more money to renovate a mansion than you can get from selling it. And if you don’t repair it, it will soon fall apart. Cracks, like cobwebs, have already begun to appear along the walls and ceiling. They seemed to deliberately repeat the bends of the jigsaw puzzle. It feels like the whole house is assembled piece by piece by someone’s skillful hand.

      There was nothing to amuse herself with: no TV, no gym, not even a library. And the books in the old mansion certainly had to be stored somewhere. Naturally shabby. But what about without them? All aristocrats collected their own library. Why is it different in this house?

      Anita walked through the rooms all day, but she never found the library.

      At night she dreamed of a woman again. Her fingers quickly twisted the threads of the tapestry, the song flowing to the beat. Some strange creatures, like fabulous leprechauns, galloped around her hem and machine. And suddenly all the threads are in blood. They reach out for blood. From her blood! The tapestry is woven from Anita’s blood and veins.

      She woke up terrified.

      The dream was so real. She watched it like a film on the screen with her own participation, and in this film she was butchered as in a torture chamber. A sharp spindle stabbed into her chest with a knife, not allowing her to breathe or move. And the beautiful singing woman pulled the veins out of her one by one. The pain in the dream was also real.

      Even a murderer with a knife could not have scared her so much if he broke into an empty house, where there was not even a telephone to call the police. Even ordinary murder does not have the evil that was present in the dream.

      Anita went out to the park. You need to walk a little, otherwise she will go crazy from a long stay in stuffy gloomy rooms. Even the puzzles on the walls were no longer pleasing.

      Anita did not have her own car, but it was possible to try to get to the nearest village on foot. When Mark drove her here, on the way she noticed something like