The Last Meeting

You may not believe me, but I once met a witch. Young, beautiful—a real Margarita, like something out of a Bulgakov novel. She usually kept it a secret, but she told me because she fell in love with me. We had a fairly long romantic relationship. Actually, it all happened when we broke up. No, she didn't curse me, didn't take revenge on me, nothing. She did much worse. She died. Cardiac arrest, I was told. Died in her sleep. I couldn't recover from the shock for several days—I simply couldn't understand how it had happened. She had become that unchanging part of the real world, one that, it seemed, nothing could harm. But she died. And then she came to me.

Five days after her death, I was sitting at the computer late at night, drinking tea, trying to distract myself. At some point, I got up to go to the kitchen and pour myself some tea. And then I saw her. She was sitting on the couch behind me. She just sat there, silent, looking at me sadly. I froze—I couldn't move, couldn't cry out. Nothing. I don't know how long we stared at each other like that, but suddenly she spoke. She said she hadn't died for nothing, but to save my life, at the cost of a pact with the devil. That I should have died, but she sacrificed herself so that I could live the years that were destined for her. I don't think I understood what she was saying then. Only then did I realize she was sitting there completely naked, and her hair was wet with blood (I didn't realize it at first, but I realized it later). And there were bleeding marks carved into her body.

It seems crazy now, but I fell to my knees before her and burst into tears. It was all-consuming hysteria, a wild howl. I don't remember what happened next. I must have lost consciousness. I woke up lying on the floor in the fetal position. I don't know if it was hallucinations, psychosis, or schizophrenia. But in my hand I was clutching the medallion she had once given me, the one I had thrown out the window in a rage a couple of days earlier.