Chapter Eight
TROUBLE HAD A WAY of finding Stefan Kamenov.
He seemed almost to thrive in the tangle of consequences that unfolded around him.
Kids at school had never quite decided whether to bully him because he was Romani or because he listened to dad-rock and painted his nails black.
In the end, they chose both: picked on him, made him stand out in the classroom and chased him down the corridors, until he grew tall and lanky, and dyed his hair blue and finally the kids got bored of the repetition.
They tired of Stefan shrugging off their insults and going to band practice with the rest of the losers.
Stefan wanted to be like Brandon Lee in The Crow: all black leather, torn, unstoppable even in death, ready to avenge his beloved.
It did not escape his notice how hysterical it was that he had beеn born and raised in Vratsa—a city known as the Eagles’ Nest—where, according to a local hearsay, even a crow would not dare fly.
It delighted him immensely when his friends, the other losers, agreed to name their band The Crows.
It was summer, but the band never rested.
When they were not off drinking and skipping study sessions for the entrance exams, the boys practised, destroying their fingers with calluses and making as much noise in the basement as the neighbours would tolerate.
That afternoon, before their meetup, Stefan decided to buy bleach and red dye.
The idea had been on his mind for a while, the thought of having fire in his hair made him almost giddy.
He had the complexion for it and the wicked faerie-like glow in his green eyes.
He might even put some colour in his wardrobe, replacing some of the black jeans and band T-shirts; make his mother sigh with relief that her son’s rebel phase had reached its zenith, and that now he would, at last, focus on his studies.
Stefan did not see how having dyed hair or leather spiked jackets could possibly prevent him from becoming an architect.
He already had his eyes set on Veliko Tarnovo University.
He dreamed of combining the modern with the ancient, leaving his mark on the world, setting his name in stone.
He was so enchanted by the idea of waking up one day as Architect Kamenov that he missed his bus stop.
The walk had taken him around and past the old neighbourhoods, with their small houses, the very same ones he pictured himself living in one day, renovating the whole estate.
All he needed was money... and a blessing from the city administration gods.
Just as Stefan was about to turn back and catch the first bus, he saw a group of men at the side of the road dragging something.
The object in their arms squirmed and slipped from their grip, collapsing onto the ground with a yell.
The form waved its arms and, as it unfolded its legs and tried to run, Stefan saw it for what it was.
The men were grabbing and shoving at a girl, no older than nineteen or twenty years, same age as Stefan, trying to force her into the back seat of a car.
Stefan froze, staring. His mind screamed at him to move, to call out and stop them, call the police, call anyone.
His body moved before he could form a plan and he ran to seize one of the men by the shoulders and yanked him back.
His hand was instantly coated in dirt and some wet substance.
A reek permeated the air and, when he opened his mouth to speak, he gagged.
“Get out of here!” the girl yelled, now trying to push Stefan away.
Stefan’s eyes burned and he grimaced both from the stench and the girl’s words. Was she telling him to run? That did not make sense.
“Girl, you get up and run!” he yelled back at her, and resumed his attempts at fighting off the men.
One of the attackers barked something, the words slurring out under spittle and foam, and he swiped a hand across Stefan’s face, nearly toppling him over.
“Leave him! You are here for me, mutt!” The girl snarled, desperate to put herself between Stefan and her assailants. It got her to stand dangerously close to the car, her body against the very door they had tried to shove her through.
“Are you trying to get kidnapped?!” Stefan wobbled on his feet and grabbed hold of her wrist. Her skin was burning hot; the heat of it almost made him flinch.
“Shut up and get out of here! I had this handled—”
Her eyes glistened with a shine that frightened Stefan. It mirrored the glow in the men’s eyes. The light caught their pupils and made them look too watery, too bright, too shiny.
Are they junkies? he thought and decided he was not allowing this girl to fulfil her drug-fuelled abduction fantasies. She could curse and hit him all she liked later, once they were far away and safe from these lunatics.
Having seen enough of the kidnapping fiasco, the car’s driver came out and swung at Stefan, his arm cutting through the air in a blurred arc.
A heavy object smashed into the back of Stefan’s head, and his knees threatened to buckle.
The girl was now cursing both him and the men.
His grip on her arm loosened and a fist rammed into his stomach, driving the air from his lungs.
Another blunt blow landed between his shoulder blades, and his legs finally gave way beneath him.
The last thing he remembered was the girl’s face twisting into a feral grimace, her mouth shaped in a snarl, a row of sharp teeth spitting insults at him, as hands pressed to her face and shoulders. The car doors slammed on Stefan’s consciousness.
When Stefan woke up in the basement, he at first thought he had somehow made it for the band practice and had fallen asleep on the mouldy couch.
It smelled like he was underground, the cellar so huge and covered in bare stone, some slabs prised loose to reveal the cold, damp earth beneath, flattened by many feet.
It reminded him of the place where the Bulgarian revolutionaries had once hidden from the Turkish authorities during the Ottoman Yoke.
Stefan had never wondered how the great revolutionary Vasil Levski[27] felt while he lay low in a stranger’s cellar, waiting to see if someone in the house would betray him.
Then again, the Apostle of Freedom was not in his underwear only, chained to a wall with a swollen ankle.
Swollen ankles, Stefan corrected himself. The moment he tried to move his legs and stand up, pain shot up his calves and he hissed, then cursed.
“Your legs might be broken,” a level-headed voice said in the dark. “They break your legs so that you can not escape.”
“Um… hello?”
Across from him a pile of rags shook like a dog shaking rain off its fur, and Stefan recognised the form as a man.
Dirt and sweat had drenched his hair turning it black; it lay matted across the man’s forehead and neck.
His face had a sickly sheen to it, as if he were running a fever, the sunken eyes weighted by a calmness that was almost unnerving.
The man appeared to be in his early thirties, a body chained to the wall by a cuff on the wrist, wearing a mischievous assortment of rags and garments.
His feet were bare, the soles as dark as the hair on his head.
Stefan focused on the man’s eyes. He did not like how calm, and how intelligent, they were. He could not tell whether the stranger’s composure came from optimism or insanity. If Stefan could not get up and fight, if he could not run, both were equally dangerous in his current state.
“Have they hurt you?” the man asked, tilting his head to the side so he could see better. “Other than your legs?”
Stefan wriggled his arms making the chains dangle and jingle.
“No,” he remembered being hit a couple of times. The back of his head hurt and if he moved too suddenly the room whooshed sideways, making him slightly nauseous.
They had chained him to the concrete wall; the chains were too short and they pulled his whole body upwards, forcing him to sit and arch his back at an odd angle.
It was as if they had thrown him down here, fastened him with the first set of manacles they found, and left him there. For later. Or never.
“Good. Do not let anything bite or scratch you.”
Stefan stopped trying to adjust the angle at which his arms hung and looked up, frowning.
“What do you mean?” Stefan’s mind shook off reason’s frail hold and spiralled towards the gruesome horror films he used to watch with his friends. “They are not going to fill the room with rats, are they?”
The man laughed, the sound raw and haggard, before it turned into a fit of coughing.
“Rats!” He barked, struggling for breath. “We are the rats, boy.”
The ragged man’s name was Vasili, a local from Vratsa, who did not know how long he had been kept here.
One could easily lose all sense of time in the dark, between the howling and the screaming.
Vasili did not know how many men were out there; a dozen, maybe five, maybe more.
Nor had he seen or heard of any women in the cellar; there was no trace of the girl Stefan had tried to save.
The men always came down to Vasili; they never brought him up.
Their leader made occasional appearances, but Vasili preferred the stinking solitude to facing that man.
They kept Stefan in the basement for days.
The silence and lack of attention frightened him as if they might have simply forgotten about him, a fate worse than outright killing him.
To be left to die here, alone, every memory of him obliterated, full of mould and hunger, buried under his own feces and despair.
The uncertainty gnawed at him, like rot on a fruit, his mind ripened with paranoia.
He grew mistrustful of his own thoughts and senses.