She found dust, old leaves, the smell of decay, and chill weary damp. It was no warmer than outside, though at least there was not the cold wind off the lake. Most of the house was taken up by a crumbling brick oven, its mouth a maw in the blackness. Across the room, where the icon-corner should be, there were no icons, only a big dark thing shoved against the wall.
Vasya groped her way cautiously to that corner and found a wooden chest: bronze-bound and securely locked.
She turned shivering back toward the oven. Mostly she just wanted to sink down on the floor in the dark and let unconsciousness take her; never mind the cold.
Gritting her teeth, she heaved herself atop the oven-bench and gingerly touched the rough brick, where a person might have breathed her last. But there was nothing; no blanket, certainly no bones. What tragedy had left this strange ruin deserted? The night outside cradled the house with a silent menace.
Her groping fingers found a few dusty sticks beside the oven.
Enough for a fire, though she didn’t want fire. Her memory was full of flames, the choking smell of smoke. The heat would hurt her blistered face.
But it was certainly cold enough for a wounded girl wearing only a cloak and shift to freeze to death. She meant to live.
So, moved only by the cold embers of will, Vasya set about making a fire. Her lips and fingertips were quite numb. She bruised her shins on things she could not see, scrabbling for the sticks and pine-needles for kindling.
After a half-blind effort that left her trembling, she had made a heap of sticks that she could barely see in the mouth of the oven. She felt over the entire house for flint and steel and charred cloth, but there were none.
She could make a fire with a flat piece of wood and patience, and strength in the forearms. But both her strength and patience were at an end.
Well, do it, or freeze. She took the stick between her hands. When she was a child, in the autumn woods, it had been a game. The stick, the board, the swift strong movement. Deftly handled, the smoke would turn into fire, and Vasya still remembered her brother Alyosha’s grin of delight, the first time she did it unaided.
But this time, though she labored and sweated, not a single curl of smoke rose from the board between her knees; no ember glowed in the groove. At last Vasya let the stick fall, shivering, defeated.
Useless. She was going to die after all, with only the dust of someone else’s life for company.
She did not know how long she sat in the sour-smelling silence, not crying, not feeling anything, just hovering on the edge of unconsciousness.
She never knew what spurred her to raise her head once more, teeth sunk in her lower lip. She must have fire. She must. In her head, in her heart, was the terrible presence of fire, memory as strong as anything in her life, as though her soul were full of flames.
Ridiculous that fire burned so bright in hated memory but there was no scrap of light here, where it could do some good.
Why should it be only in her mind? She shut her eyes, and for an instant, memory was so strong that she forgot it wasn’t.
Vasya smelled smoke first, and her eyes opened, just as her sticks burst into flame.
Shocked, almost frightened of her success, Vasya hurried to add wood. The room filled with light; the shadows retreated.
The hut looked even worse by firelight: ankle-deep in leaves, crumbling, mildewed, thick with dust. But there was a little woodpile she hadn’t seen: a few dry logs. And it was warmer now. The fire drove back the night and the chill. She was going to live. Vasya stretched out trembling hands to the fire.
A hand shot out of the oven and grasped her wrist.
10.
The Devil in the Oven
VASYA DREW A SINGLE, STARTLED breath, but she did not pull away.
The hand was as small as a child’s, long-fingered, traced in red and gold from the firelight. It did not let her go. Instead, Vasya found herself pulling a tiny person into the room.
She was a woman no taller than Vasya’s knee, with eyes the color of earth. She was licking embers hungrily off the end of a stick, but she paused to look up at Vasilisa and say, “Well, I have overslept and no mistake. Who are you?” Then the chyert caught sight of the decay all around them and her voice rose in sudden alarm. “Where is my mistress? What are you doing here?”
Vasya sank down onto the crumbling oven-bench in exhausted surprise. Domoviye did not live in ruins; they did not live on in houses at all when their families had gone. “There is no one here,”
Vasya said. “Only me. This place—it is dead. What are you doing here?”
The domovoi—no, a female—a domovaya—stared. “I do not understand. The house cannot be dead. I am the house, and I am alive. You must be lying. What have you done to them? What have you done to this place? Stand and answer me!” Her voice was shrill with fright.
“I cannot stand,” Vasya whispered. That was true. The fire had taken the last of her strength. “I am only a traveler. I thought only to make a fire and stay here for the night.”
“But you—” The domovoi—domovaya—peered again about the house, took in the extent of the rot. Her eyes widened in horror.
“Overslept indeed! Just look at this filth. I cannot just let vagabonds stay without my mistress’s leave. You will have to go. I must set things to rights, against her return.”
“I do not think your mistress is coming back,” said Vasya. “This house is abandoned. I do not know how you managed to survive, in that cold oven.” Her voice broke. “Please. Please let me stay. I cannot bear any more.”
A small silence. Vasya could feel the domovaya’s narrow regard.
“Very well then,” she said. “You will stay here tonight. Poor child. My mistress would want it.”
“Thank you,” Vasya whispered.
The domovaya, still muttering to herself, went at once to the chest shoved against the wall. She had a key hanging at her throat; she unlocked the iron hasp of the chest. It gave with a rusty click.
Before Vasya’s astonished eyes, the domovaya produced linen and a clay bowl, laid them on the hearth. Then she took a bucket and went outside for snow, which she set at once to heating, and a branch of young pine-needles, which she scattered in the water.
Vasya watched the steam rise through the hole in the roof, only half-aware of the domovaya’s deft movements as she peeled away the shift that had so nearly been Vasya’s shroud, briskly sponged off the worst of the fear-sweat, the soot, and the blood, washed away the scum about Vasya’s injured eye. The latter hurt, but when the crust was wiped away, Vasya could see through a slit. She was not blinded.
She was too tired to care even for that.
