Sergey paused at the doorway to his home, hunting rifle in hand, to see that he'd had his first visitor in months. The stranger sat at his kitchen table, chatting amiably with his wife, a cup of something steaming in her hands. She looked up at him as he entered and smiled as if she'd known him all her life.

  "Hello, Sergey," she said. The woman looked to be in her mid-thirties, but her voice had an odd, stilted quality to it. Something about it put Sergey off, but he couldn't put words to the feeling. "Your wife has been telling me all about you."

  Sergey stepped inside, propping his gun against a wall. "Dear, who is this?"

  "My name is Yelena," the woman said. "How do you do."

  Mila looked up at her husband, only slightly less bewildered than he was. "She got lost in the woods. She knocked on our door looking for directions to Tomsk. The poor thing looked like she needed some warming up, so I invited her in."

  Sergey frowned, bemused. The woman sitting in front of him was dressed in nothing more than what looked like some sort of sundress. It was long and flowing, its sunflower-yellow hem dusted with soil. It was far from the coldest part of the season, but it was late in the day, and the woods were chilly already. "I mean no offense, but how’d you wind up out here without knowing the way to Tomsk? Where were you heading from?"

  "The power plant," Yelena said. She smiled, as if that answer made any sense.

  Mila widened her eyes at Sergey, as if to privately tell him that she also thought this woman might be a little crazy. He made a note to tease her about letting a madwoman in for tea, later.

  "The… the power plant? Twenty kilometers north of here?"

  "Exactly right," she nodded. "That's where I was coming from. Thank you again for the tea, all this walking is thirsty work."

  Sergey finally placed what had been bothering him about her voice. Her Russian was perfect; there wasn't anything wrong with her vocabulary, her grammar. But her accent was wrong. Not foreign. Old. The kind of affectation he'd only ever heard in old movies, dubbed films from the Soviet era.

  "Your wife tells me you're a man of science?" Yelena smiled up at him.

  "That might be an exaggeration," Sergey said.

  "He's helping research the tigers," Mila said.

  "There are actual scientists doing the real research," he said. "I'm more like a tracker. A game warden."

  "To follow on the trail of something so ferocious," the woman said, nodding, "it must be quite exciting. Do you ever worry one might attack you? It would be an awful way to die, I'm sure."

  Sergey frowned. He was an atheist, ostensibly, but he had a superstitious streak, and talking about the tigers like this out loud put him on edge. "They don't bother you if you don't bother them."

  "Then why the rifle?" The woman nodded toward his gun.

  "I wasn't working just now. I was looking for boar. Just for recreation." Sergey shrugged, uncomfortable. "Besides, that gun wouldn't stop a tiger."

  The woman laughed, a paper-thin sound, dead leaves on the wind. "They are fickle things, guns. Fine for killing squirrels and soldiers, but useless against anything actually worth fearing."

  Sergey half-nodded, a little lost. A quiet, awkward moment passed. Sergey half-noticed that he, oddly, couldn't hear any birds singing outside. Mila coughed, brought her cup up to her mouth to take a sip, too quickly. She clinked the rim against her teeth and gasped.

  Yelena frowned. “Are you quite alright? You seem hurt.”

  Mila hissed, massaging her mouth. “It’s fine, thank you. I’ve had a nasty toothache.”

  “How long has this afflicted you?”

  Mila shrugged. “Maybe a year now, but I’ve had them all my life. They come and go.”

  “And there is no… no barber? No doctor around to remedy this?”

  Sergey chuckled. “Not unless one of the boars decides to get his degree. This isn’t exactly Moscow.”

  “We make do.”

  There was a sudden banging sound from the kitchen and Mila jumped. “Dear, the window.”

  Sergey cursed. “I could’ve sworn I fixed it this last time. Excuse me, ladies.”

  Sergey walked around the corner, a little relieved to be hidden out from under the strange woman’s attention. He shivered at the sudden draft wafting in from behind the now-ajar wooden hatch carved into the wall. It was less a window and more a shoulder-height, hinged door that Mila had cobbled together, something to throw open to get fresh air and let out smoke. The hinge had been giving out suddenly on windy days, and it hung open now, creaking slowly in the breeze. Sergey fetched a screwdriver from a low cupboard, half-listening to the women in the other room.

  “Thank you again, for the tea. It was a great kindness.” Yelena said.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “It was nothing. I’m the only one in the house that drinks any, so we always have plenty.”

  “No. Not plenty. To give to a stranger, when you yourself have so little, it is a mark of high character.”

  Sergey worked the screwdriver into the already very stripped screw holding the hinge together, tried not to feel irked by the woman. She probably meant well, but he’d had a long day, and wasn’t in the mood to be pitied, much less by some vagrant.

  “We aren’t rich, no, but it could be worse.”

  “It could also be better. It could be much, much better.”

  “Well.” By the clumsy pause that followed, Sergey could tell his wife felt much the same as he did. He hoped she’d find an excuse to send the stranger on her way soon. “Sure. Things could always be improved. That’s easier said than done, though.”

  “Not so,” the woman said. There was a queer brightness to her voice. The draft coming from the window intensified, making Sergey shiver. Without the normal accompaniment of birdsong and insects outside, the growing wind had a ghostly quality. “You are in pain, dear, and you and your lovely husband so cramped in this tiny, lonely house. Don’t feel judged, that is not what I intend. I was once much like you. But I found a way to make things better. Better to a degree that most people can scarcely comprehend without experiencing it firsthand.”

  Sergey finished tightening the hinge and forced the window closed, cutting off the distant wail of the wind. In the quiet of the house, he heard a chair scrape backward. He tensed, suddenly afraid to turn the corner.

  “Sorry, I don’t quite know what you mean.”

  “It is probably best to just show you.”

  “Oh, don’t- we don’t need any gifts.”

  A deathly, nameless dread settled on Sergey, the kind he’s only experienced in nightmares. The knowledge that something awful was happening, inevitable, without the first clue as to what this awfulness actually was. A sinking sensation that a monster lurked around a corner, behind a door that one was going to be forced to open anyway. His breath quickened, and he felt himself rooted to the floor.

  “No, that will not do. Not after the hospitality I’ve been shown. Stay still, dear, please, it will only take me a moment to bestow.”

  “Bestow? I don’t think I-”

  “You’ll understand soon. You’ll see how much better things can be.”

  There was a shuffle, a silence. Sergey’s breath hitched. Something had happened. The air had shifted.

  In the living room, there was a shifting, sliding noise. Then a dull thud.

  The idea of waiting for the woman’s face to peer around the corner became suddenly intolerable. In a flash of adrenaline, Sergey forced himself into the living room.

  Mila had fallen out of her chair and was lying on the ground, limp.

  Yelena was standing. He stumbled back a step, surprised. The woman was probably a head taller than he was.

  Sergey paced over to the wall, eyes flitting between the crumpled form of his wife and the woman towering over him. More of that nightmare-certainty had settled into his chest, a bleak conviction, completely inexplicable but totally believed: that his wife was dead and this woman had killed her.

  The woman’s smile wilted a little, weary. “I know that it’s a cliche, to say that your wife is in a better place. But she really is.”

  Sergey reached the far wall. He began to feel very distant, as if he were spectating the scene from somewhere far and above. His hands were numb, the woman’s voice muffled in his ears.

  “I’m not speaking of some sunday school heaven full of clouds and harps,” the woman continued. “She’s not with God, or Allah, or any of the others. It’s far, far better than those old stories ever hinted at. I know this, Sergey, because I was just there. I was wrapped in such comfort, filled with such infinite joy, for so long, and it took every ounce of willpower I had to leave it behind. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I have been made to do some very hard things.” The woman’s voice quavered, and tears were spilling down her pale cheeks now.

  “You’re insane,” Sergey croaked.

  “Yes, I suppose I probably am,” the woman chuckled, still crying. “The delights I’m describing, as wonderful as they are, probably aren’t bound to make anybody more sane. But they’re wonderful nonetheless. Your wife, she’s discovering this as we speak. She’s-”

  The woman’s rambling was cut short by the thunderclap of Sergey’s rifle. He’d swung it up from the wall and fired, scarcely aiming, and hit the woman directly in the face. Her head snapped back, flecks of skull and brain and blood dusting the wall behind her. She swayed for a moment, hands grasping at nothing, and collapsed to the ground.

  Sergey stood for a moment, swaying in the eerie quiet, half-expecting to wake up. He blinked, hard, over and over again, trying to clear the scene, trying to wipe it away.

  When that failed, he finally tottered over to his wife and dropped to his knees at her side. He touched her wrist gingerly: it was cold.

  He turned her over. She was unblemished, not clearly wounded, but very obviously dead. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open in a small circle, her face a frozen mask of mild surprise.

  Sergey held her to his chest and shivered violently, racked by trembling, too choked and dazed to produce any tears. He rocked back and forth, blinking hard all the while, waiting to wake up. His blood roared in his ears, drowning out the quiet, sucking noises that were now coming from somewhere just behind him.

  “I go to the trouble of explaining how much I struggled to leave the dead,” Yelena’s voice chided. “And you go and send me right back? Anyone would find that a bit rude.”

  Sergey’s shivering stopped, banished by a wave of adrenaline. He turned, glanced over his shoulder, as if his face had been guided, as if he had no say in the matter, and he looked.

  The woman was back on her feet. She was smiling, still, her patient, weary expression marred by streaks of drying blood stemming from a ragged hole gaping on her forehead. The hole was making an odd hissing sound, and Sergey watched as, before his eyes, its edges shuddered and jumped, growing inward. Within a few seconds it had knitted itself entirely shut, leaving only a fresh-looking patch of pink skin behind.

  Another, louder hissing was still issuing from somewhere behind the woman’s head, where the exit wound’s messy regeneration was muffled by hair. Yelena reached up and brushed the fresh skin on her forehead with a fingertip.

  “I have too many gifts yet to give, Sergey,” she explained. “I can’t go back yet.”

  Sergey nodded as if this made any sense. Then, driven by an impulse so sudden that he scarcely even felt it, he lunged for his rifle again. Yelena tutted and snatched it from his hands effortlessly, throwing him to the ground. She snapped the rifle in half in a single halfhearted motion and tossed the two parts behind her.

  “I told myself,” she continued, “that I wouldn’t get distracted, that if I paused to help usher every stranger I met to their good fortune, I’d scarcely make it halfway through my travels before it grew too late. But your wife’s kindness moved me, and I’ve no money to pay you all back, and I am not the kind to suffer a debt left unpaid.”

  She reached down and picked Sergey up from the floor by his shoulders, stood him on his feet, brushed some dust from his shirt. She cupped his face with one hand, her fingers too smooth, too cool, more like silk than skin. “Sergey, don’t despair, and don’t fear. You’ll thank me.”

  “Please,” Sergey pleaded. “Don’t-”

  “It won’t hurt, my poor, misled child.” Yelena promised, tears welling back into her eyes. “You won’t feel a thing.”

  And she was right. He didn’t.