movie!
And what if this is a frame from the movie?
No, it wasn’t. Athenais stared at him point-blank. Behind her, he could see the wall, littered with hieroglyphics. Maybe it was some kind of fancy wallpaper, obviously custom-made.
Nikita shuddered when he noticed the razor blade in Athenais’ hand, dipped in blood. She held it close to the screen and smiled for some reason.
And then the continuous power source hummed nervously. The power supply was running low and the computer went down.
Angel in the chat room
One razor did disappear from the bathroom cabinet. It was the sharpest. It wasn’t found on the floor. But there were deep scratches on the tiles, like some kind of animal had been in here. This animal was definitely not hiding in the apartment. Nikita searched the place. There were scratches everywhere, but no animals.
But the atmosphere in the apartment became ominous, as if a horror movie was about to start on the screen of a long-broken TV set in the living room.
For the first time in his life, Nikita felt as if he were living not in an apartment, but in a funeral home. Loneliness probably had a bad effect on him. He needed to go to class regularly, not just sit inside the four walls. The emptiness of home was beginning to frighten him. Clawed monsters seemed to lurk even on the coat racks in the hallway.
Before, when his parents came home from work in the evenings, he didn’t feel isolated. Plates clattered in the kitchen, his mother’s phone was ringing off the hook. Chatting with girlfriends and going to the theater were her favorite pastimes. Then my parents divorced. My father left me for a younger woman, and my mother became nervous and hysterical, but she remained an incorrigible theatergoer. While she was at home, the phone was bursting with calls from her girlfriends, with whom she discussed dress rehearsals and rehearsals before the premieres. No one was calling now. Everyone knew his mother was on a business trip. The phone bill for the month could be considered paid for nothing. Probably his mother forgot to pay it. Nikita himself never used the old-fashioned phone in his mother’s room. A cell phone was enough for him, but a vintage phone with a roll of numbers instead of buttons was worthy of a museum display case. A stray thought flashed through his mind that Athenaïs would have liked it. It wasn’t hard to imagine her putting the old-fashioned curved handset to her ear, pulling the golden curl away from her lobe to hear better.
As the monster’s black claws stretched from the telephone receiver, caressing her ear…
Stop! That’s not his thought anymore! This is a frame from some horror movie. Nikita suddenly regretted his childhood fascination with horror movies. Athenais was provoking him to return to his former fascination with horror.
He was looking to meet a nice girl, and he found a sinister hobby. Now you can chat about horror for a long time. He really wanted to meet her. What a miracle it would be if she were there, if he could touch her, give her signs of attention, invite her to tea. In the modest surroundings of the city apartment, the beautiful Athenais would have looked like a fairy from a fairy tale.
It was chilly outside now. It was already cold in Moscow in the fall. You couldn’t go outside without a warm jacket. Nikita tried to imagine what Athenais would look like in a half-coat or quilted jacket. For some reason Athenais’ image did not fit with his thoughts of casual clothing. It was hard to imagine her without wings, a top that exposed her shoulders, and massive Egyptian jewelry.
Athenais had the role of an angel. There was nothing to be done about it. Nikita spent a long time surfing the Internet looking for pictures of Athenais in plain clothes. Everywhere there were only pictures of her in the role of an angel. Most likely, they were not even pictures, but pictures from the movie.
Athenais only played angels and only the fallen. It wasn’t hard to click the link again and review the movie with her in it. Nikita acted like an investigator – adding up the details of the mosaic. That’s how his life became a detective. If you watch the movie several times, you start to understand more of the meaning behind it.
Athenais played the most beautiful angel in heaven, who once, at the dawn of time, rebelled against God. The angel’s name was Dennitsa, which meant dawn.
It seems that in Slavic mythology there was also a goddess of the morning dawn with the same name – Dennitsa. He had studied mythology, just as he had studied history. Now that knowledge of history would come in handy for him now. After all, from the fires of the Battle of Heaven, the action took him to the deserts of Egypt, and then to the palaces of the pharaohs. Athenais became a personal angel under the Egyptian kings. At all the ceremonies she was present near their thrones and whispered her advice to them.
It seems that the advice of an angel is goodness. The pharaohs were lucky. Nevertheless, Athenais’ advice awakened evil. All sorts of horrible things began to happen around them. The dead rose from their graves, monsters went to war with people, crops rotted in the fields, poisonous black rye grew on the cold fields of battle and gave birth to evil spirits. The terrible epidemics began. The Pharaohs’ power grew stronger thanks to Athénaïs, but it cost the people their blood.
Athenais, in the footage, drank the blood of the condemned, like a vampire. She didn’t need blood to survive, unlike vampires. He guessed drinking blood from precious goblets is purely symbolic and means victory over her enemies.
By the way, Athenais had an unusual name in the movies, consonant with her own acting pseudonym. For some reason she was not called Dennitsa, as she was supposed to be, but the goddess Alais.
Nikita had to rewind the film to the beginning to understand where the second name came from. It turns out that Alais had given it to herself. Under her first name, Dennitsa, she had lost the war in heaven, so the name was considered tainted.
“The name you lost by once will bring you further defeat,” whispered one of her supporters. “Change it! You can only win with a new name. The name is your banner.”
The main character heeded this advice and wrote the letters of the first names of her fallen standard-bearers in the sand. It was a new name – Alais. It had to become a magical talisman, because the power of the dead heroes lay in it.
Somehow, after the fall, Alais herself remained beautiful, but her armies became burnt monsters. Instead of tearing her apart for leading them to defeat, they continued to serve her. Indeed, Alais is a goddess, since she knew how to keep them all in subjection.
Nikita paused on the film. He thought he heard someone call his name.
“Nikita Goncharov!”
That was how his professors usually shouted at him at lectures if they noticed he was looking sleepy. But now they were not around. Who could call him? He was probably just imagining things.
Perhaps his conscience should have been awakened in him. After all, he was skipping lectures and seminars again. He should be commended this time. He is self-educating.
Nikita goes back to watching the movie. The play icon suddenly froze. The movie switched from moment to moment on its own.
The desert, where legions of monsters dwelt among the golden sands, had disappeared. Alais negotiated something with the first pharaoh of Egypt. It seems that both he and all his descendants were obliged to obey her for helping him win some battle.
“You
