«The key»
(except from book)

Foghas gobbled the Lavra belfry entirely and only then began to creep slowly through the city.

It gazed into the dark windows, clubbing between chimeras on Bankova Street, wrapped up the bronze Hetman on Sophia Square, and hugged the hunched prince with a cross on Saint Volodymyr Hill.

Kyiv, a sullen and moody city, froze in a daze, looking indifferently with its unseeing eyes into the murky Dnipro waters. All the sounds faded away and disappeared, having dissolved in the viscid dove-colored mass of dense fog. Leaves plucked by the nervous wind gathered in dead flocks and flew down the hills into the dark waters, wherein small evil waves, fussing and pushing each other, rushed to god-knows-where.

The dull autumn rain already began to whisper something malicious at night; it only intensified when the gloomy sky brightened a bit in the morning. Rain was scrambling into the windows, creeping across the rooftops, rumbling and squealing inside the rusty Podil gutters.

The old houses with apartments for lease, proud of their once beautiful light façades, built as the regular rows running down to the Dnipro, have now become dilapidated and darkened. Their roofs got all rotten through, so the rainwater gushed straight onto the walls from their piped gutters. Autumn has covered Kyiv with a dark, damp kerchief; the city became bent somehow and grew dim, breathing heavily and trying to preserve its remnants of summer warmth in vain.

The Underground

The poor humpbacked old woman-beggar tried to drag unsuccessfully a creaking wheelbarrow loaded with all sorts of junk onto the high curb of the sidewalk. The old woman's efforts attracted the attention of a long-haired student with light-green eyes. He stood on the opposite side, at a bus stop strewn with wet crumpled leaves. His umbrella hysterically wobbled from side to side due to the wild gusts of wind, resembling a kite. The young man was watching the moves of the beggar indifferently, but when the old woman elevated her eyes full of tears and despair, he felt guilty.

He rushed across the street, deftly lifted the wheelbarrow over the curb, and put it on the sidewalk. The old woman spilled out something and, without turning around, slowly rolled the whining trolley away. The student was already going to cross the road back, but at that moment, a quiet sound came to his ears – a jingle – apparently something fell out of the baggage of the beggar. He came closer: at the bottom of the puddle, covered with fallen red leaves, there lay an old door key with a beautiful wrought-iron head. The young man pulled the key out of the puddle and wanted to call the old woman back, but she seemed to disappear totally.

The autumn sun emerged from frowning clouds, smiling helpfully, lit up Lavra Street all along, but the old woman beggar wasn't seen anywhere …

The student's name was Denys Leshchenko; he studied at the Faculty of History at Taras Shevchenko National University, and, in theory, he should have completed a month's work on the structure of the Lavra caves. To his shame, Denys, an indigenous citizen of Kyiv, has never been to the Lavra caves. Of course, Denys was in the Pechersk Lavra several times and knew perfectly well the location of all the main churches of this monastery.

The net was full of information about these ancient catacombs, but Denys thought it no good to describe them without visiting them in person. He has been postponing this hike for several weeks, imagining crowds of tourists, and pilgrims, their rushing and crushing in the narrow underground galleries.

On Monday morning, there began a drizzling, endless cold rain, and, assuming that the autumn weather should disperse the crowds and play into his hands, Denys decided to skip classes and went to the Lavra.

Sudden gusts of wind and rain joyfully whipped directly into his face, trying persistently to rip out the umbrella, but he, ignoring the schemes of Nature, passed through the Western Gate and moved to the caves. A massive wall with narrow embrasures, darkened by moisture, erected by Hetman Mazepa, embraced the ancient monastery. Denys went down the slippery cobblestone pavement carefully, thinking about how many pilgrims for many hundreds of years came up here, overcoming thousands of kilometers to walk along this road and touch the main Orthodox shrines…

Denys lit a thin candle and bent down to descend into the Near Caves of the Lavra Catacombs. There were practically no people as he walked slowly along the narrow corridors, looking with surprise at the glass coffins with holy elders dressed in lush clothes; their faces could not be seen, they were hiding behind the embroidered golden threads capes, and Denys felt as if they were alive and feeling his approach.

Sometimes along the way, he came across wrinkled old women wearing gray scarves, kneeling, and barely audible endless prayers like fairy tales. The saints were everywhere: in niches cut down many centuries ago in loess, behind ancient semicircular windows cluttered on both sides of the winding galleries, in small underground halls and churches. Denys moved slowly at random, trying to remember the names on the dead color signs: Anthony; Pimen, the fasting man; Agapit, the doctor; Theophilus, the tearful; Alipius, the icon painter; Mark, the Caveman, and the Tomb Digger; Matthew, the seer; Gregory, the Miracle-Worker…

He walked on and on; the heavy, stale air slowly enveloped his body, and the young man imagined that the swirls of coffins were slowly floating towards him in an endless stream: Kuksha the Holy Martyr, Spiridon the prosphornik, Isaiah the Miracle-worker, Onufry the Silent, John the Faster, Theophilus the reclusive ...

Sometimes along the way, some dim lamps were encountered; they illuminated the way a little and immediately disappeared in the dark. Denys was not afraid at all. Instead, he was enveloped by a warm veil of calm and pacification. Rain, mud, bad weather, everything remained somewhere very far on the surface, whereas here, in the dungeon, there was a totally different world, quiet and mysterious. Sometimes he had to bend his head when the low ceiling seemed to drop on his shoulders, then the gallery looped a bit in the dark again, and he could straighten up to his full height.

In one of the deep niches, a figure of a strange monk in a black ragged cassock emerged from the darkness. The right half of his face was mutilated by a terrible deep scar. The monk scratched the young man with his prickly gaze and asked sternly in a rude low voice:

– Where's the key?

Denys got dumbstruck. Unexpectedly, he lost his speech, shaken and frightened by this grim figure, caught by the dim flame of a candle from a dark maze in the middle of a huge realm of the dead. He opened his mouth, but only some barely audible, hissing sounds began to crawl out of his throat instead of words. The monk waited patiently. As if under hypnosis, Denys began to twist his pockets with trembling hands, trying to demonstrate that, obviously, there was some misunderstanding and he did not have any key.

Finally, the student came to his senses a little and barely pronounced:

– I don't have any keys.

In support of his words, he put his hand into the back pocket of his trousers and suddenly pulled out the antique forged key with a beautiful polished head.

The monk nodded his head in satisfaction, pushed away the black grid blocking the way to the side gallery, and moved resolutely into the darkness. Denys, as in a dream, followed him obediently. The monk did not have a candle, they were surrounded by impenetrable haze, but he confidently led Denys through the narrow passages cut down a thousand years ago by the cave monks.

There were no more lamps, and the air became somehow heavy and viscous. They walked downhill for quite a long time, constantly looping in the dark. Denys struggled to catch his breath while he had to wipe the sweat off his face with the sleeve of his jacket. He barely kept up with the strange guide, who never even turned around, as if he had no doubt that the young man would not go anywhere else. At last, they were forced to duck down quite strongly: the gallery came to a dead end, ending with a tightly fitted wooden door upholstered with dull metal plates.

Denys's eyes were already accustomed to the darkness, so he managed to notice a keyhole in the corner of the door. The monk stepped aside and nodded his head, obviously inviting Denys to open the door. Denys, trying his best to remain calm, put the old woman's key into the keyhole and turned it several times around.

To his great surprise, a heavy door slowly opened with a strained creak. Denys pulled a candle out of his pocket and lit it again. It was a small room with damp walls on which numerous dark snails hung in clusters. From the low ceiling, reinforced with powerful wooden beams, something was dripping, and there hung a piece of broken rusty chain on one of the beams.

In the middle of the room, right out of the wall, a door handle made of the dull yellow metal was protruding. The handle resembled a small starfish that appeared on a wet wall incomprehensibly. However, the door itself, which could be opened by pulling this strange handle, was missing from the wall. The dull handle was just sticking out of a dead stone block.

Denys quickly turned around and looked behind the door. His companion has disappeared.

The entire course of the gallery was clearly visible, but the monk evaporated or passed through the wall, bringing himself into a different dimension.

Denys returned to the room and bent over the strange door handle. It was dotted with some numbers and symbols; they were completely indistinguishable in such semi-darkness. Close up, the handle looked like an opened brass flower. Denys touched it gently – the handle was very smooth and cold. The fingers felt comfortably between its metal petals. He felt that the cold flower was rotating surprisingly smoothly around its axis, under some complex inner mechanism.

Denys first tried to slowly twist the mysterious handle to the left and right and then suddenly spun it counterclockwise sharply. So immediately, the dark room swayed terribly, and sand sprinkled directly onto his head from under the soaked logs of the ceiling; the rusted chain twitched and creaked. A heavy sound, like a groan, crawled along the wet walls. Denys got very dizzy, and it became dark in his eyes; he felt difficult to breathe. The candle fell out of his hands and instantly went out; he, as if drunk, began to cling his hands to the slippery wobbling walls, then fell and fainted.