Page 17 of Pioneer Summer

Without a word, Sasha slid under his blanket and rolled onto his side with his back to them.

“He wanted some currants,” said Yurka, betraying Sasha. “Listen, what are you doing here so late? Junior lights-out was ages ago.”

“I can’t get these knuckleheads to go to bed! The girls fell asleep quick as a wink—they’re well away to slumberland by now—but these guys ... it’s like somebody spiked their dinner with caffeine.”

Yurka swiveled his head, surveying the even rows of beds. The boys weren’t whispering anymore. Everyone was listening with rapt trepidation not to the adults but to tousle-headed, r-mangling Olezhka, who was intoning in a voice from beyond the grave: “In a dawk, dawk town, in a dawk, dawk house, lived a dawk, dawk—”

“Kitten!” shouted Yurka. The boys convulsed with laughter. “If you’re gonna tell scary stories, pick one that’s actually scary.”

“I know the one with the floating gwavestone, too. That one’s the scawy stowy to beat all scawy stowies!”

“Nah, that one’s not scary, either. What, can’t Volodya tell you stories that are scary for real?”

“No, no. You got it backwawds: he yells at us because we listen to scawy stowies instead of sleeping. But to tell the twuth, we keep telling them anyway ...”

The troop leader gave a little laugh: “You think I don’t know that?” He took a breath to continue but stopped short and frowned as he caught sight of the jokester Pcholkin furtively tucking something under his blanket. In a whisper, Olezhka launched into the tired old story about the toenails in the meat pie.

Yurka listened to Olezhka with half an ear, thinking to himself that he had to extricate Volodya and that, no matter what, he and Volodya had to show up at today’s dance. First of all, because Ksyusha’d have to pay her bet: fair’s fair! Secondly, because he was looking pretty fair himself, actually, since he’d put on his best—also his only—pair of jeans and his favorite brown polo, the one from East Germany that his uncle had brought him that spring.

His thoughts were interrupted by Volodya suddenly ripping Pcholkin’s blanket off and grabbing something small and wooden out from under it. Volodya shouted triumphantly: “Aha! A slingshot! So that’s who took out the ceiling light!”

Yurka’s thoughts returned to the issue at hand:What do I do to get Volodya out of here? Make these squirts go to sleep. How do I make these squirts go to sleep?

It took less than a minute for the answer to come to him.

“So do you all know why Volodya doesn’t tell you scary stories? So you sleep better. And he’s right. Because Volodya, of all people, knows what happens to anyone who doesn’t go to sleep at lights-out ...”

“What happens?” said Sasha, eyes wide.

“Is it bad?” asked another little boy with curly hair who’d frozen where he sat.

Olezhka quaked. “Is it scawy?”

“I won’t use my slingshot anymore. Please don’t take it,” Pcholkin begged.

Just then, from behind the door into the main hallway, they all heard a rush of movement and a girl’s stifled giggle.

Volodya bolted for the door to catch the little truant and take her back to the girls’ room. From the way Pcholkin groaned, Yurka could tell that the strict troop leader had taken the little boy’s slingshot with him.

Yurka took a spot on a free bed and assumed a very serious demeanor: “I’m going to share a big secret with you now. But don’t breathe a word toanyone: it’s categorically forbidden to tell Little Octoberists about this, since you’re supposedly too young for it. So I’ll get my you-know-what handed back to me on a platter if anyone finds out ...”

He was interrupted by a cacophony of voices ardently swearing never to betray him. Yurka cleared his throat and, in a scary voice, began his story: “At night the camp is haunted by a genuine ghost! A long time ago, back before the Great October Revolution, there was a nobleman’s estate not far from here where a young count lived with his countess. They were happy together, even though theirs was an arranged marriage—”

“What is that, Yuwka? What kind of mawwiage is that?”

“Don’t interrupt, Olezha,” Yurka said, and explained as best he could. “An arranged marriage is when two sets of parents agree to have their children marry, and the kids might not only be very young still, they might not even know each other. People did it that way for money.”

Volodya came back into the boys’ room so pleased, his eyes all but sparkled. He sat down next to Yurka, who continued: “So. The count and the countess really did love each other. They had a large manor, and about a hundred peasants, and a whole lot of friends: counts and countesses, and princes and princesses, and even a grand prince—one of the tsar’s relatives—who was like a sort of comrade to the count. But then the Russo-Japanese War started, and the grand prince called on the count to serve in the navy with him. And the count couldn’t refuse. So he gave his countess a gorgeous diamond brooch to remember him by and went off to fight. But he never, ever came back ...”

The little boys had gone silent. As one, they all huddled under their blankets and stared at Yurka, goggle-eyed and bursting from suspense. Volodya was cleaning his glasses with the corner of his shirt while, squinting, he surveyed the boys sternly. Yurka, satisfied with the results he’d produced—the kids were interested—continued in a sibilant whisper: “They say the cruiser he served on was sunk by the Japanese. The countess was informed that her husband had been killed, but she loved him so much that she couldn’t believe or accept it. The countess had no children and waited for him, all alone, for many, many years. She never wore her pretty dresses or jewelry again, and she went around dressed all in black. But the one thing she always kept with her—the one thing she always had pinned to her chest or fastened inher hair—was the diamond brooch. The last gift her husband ever gave her. Time passed. The countess was very sad and soon grew sick. She didn’t want to see anybody, not even the doctor, and a year later she was dead. They say she was buried in that same black widow’s dress, but that the diamond brooch wasn’t on her when she went to her grave. The diamond brooch was lost! And ever since, there have been some kind of mysterious goings-on in the manor house. First the furniture would move all by itself ... then the doors would open and close ... and then, after the Bolsheviks came to power and made the place into a sanatorium, people who stayed in the old manor house started dying!”

Someone stifled a gasp in the shadowed darkness, and in the nearby bed there was a sudden motion as Sasha pulled the covers up over his head. Volodya elbowed Yurka in the ribs, whispering almost inaudibly directly into his ear: “Yurka, take it easy, they’re never going to fall asleep now!”

But Yurka was already letting it rip: “Every night it’d be calm in the mansion. Well, maybe a few dresser drawers would open and close by themselves, but there was no crashing or banging or noise. Yet every morning—uh-oh! Somebody’d end up dead! And this happened every single morning: a person lying dead in their bed. It was terrible: their eyes were all bugged out, and their mouths were frozen wide in a scream, and their tongues were sticking out, and their necks were black-and-blue! Everyone searched and searched for the perpetrator. But whoever did it was never found. And so that sanatorium was abandoned. The villagers who lived nearby, in Horetivka, stole everything out of the manor and stripped it down, not leaving even a single brick. They carried everything away to build their own homes. And now there’s nothing there to remind anyone that a count’s mansion once stood on that spot, except for this: to this day, hidden deep in a bird cherry thicket, you can find a bas-relief with the countess’s profile carved into it. And on her dress is pinned a diamond brooch.” Yurka lowered his voice even more. “And now I am going to reveal a big secret to you, but you can’t say a word about it to anybody, okay?”

“Okay! Okay! Okay!” came the whispered promise from all sides.

“Are you sure? Do you all swear on your honor as Little Octoberists?”

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