In 1930 I celebrated my twenty-second birthday about the same time Renkassk cheerlessly opened the kabina. By then, a total of eight village men had fallen sick each winter, never to recover, and the kabina was a place to house them; a place to forget them. Except for Viktor Malenhov, who stayed at home with seventeen-year-old Aleksy. Not by choice, you must understand, as it was his frail, mousy-haired son who insisted Viktor remained in his care. As for my poor father, I visited him once a week to put my mother's mind at rest, for the news of his disease had nearly killed her. I wish I could speak of it figuratively, but she'd sunk into a depression so deep that she never fully roused from it, not in all the winters since.

Conversation with Papa was a fruitless effort, and my father would stare blindly as though I wasn't there, out the window, as I talked about people he might not even recall.

"Do remember Pyotr, Papa? He visits you too sometimes. He couldn't see you this week, in case you're wondering, because he got married to Yuliya." I heard his response in my head. "I know you don't like her much, but he sees something in that city-girl. We all went to the wedding. The Frantsevs brought him jellied veal. Have you ever tried veal, Papa?"

I heard nothing but his laboured breathing, and took it as my cue to leave.

The kabina, to me at least, was the second most dreaded place in this barren little village – pews of gaunt, catatonic men with no memory of how they came to be that way. But the place I dreaded most, by far, turned out to be the Malenhov household, and my daily visits there had not yet ceased.

"Aleksy!" I banged on the door with the butt of my axe. "It's Stefan! Open up!" After a few moments the boy opened the door a crack. Watery blue eyes peered up at me through a thick fringe of brown hair. The sour stench of rot and faeces escaped the house and my eyes began to water. I could almost taste the decay on my tongue.

"Da?" he said, barely even moving his cracked lips.

I presented him with a warm parcel of brown paper. "Mama's baked you a loaf."

"For ducks?"

"Sure, for ducks. Take it." I pressed it into his chest. "Anything else I can get you while I'm here? Have you got enough food?"

He turned away to look at his father, who hid in the dark depths of the room. "Papa, Stefan asks if you need anything." Aleksy cleared his throat and shook his head. "No thanks," he said in a gruff, deep voice that sounded nothing like his own. "Thanks for your concern, son."

He was a fucking weird kid, but I never said as much and continued as though nothing had happened. "So you've got firewood?"

"I can take care of that," he'd say in imitation of his father's voice. "My little lad gives me a hand, don't you, boy? – Yes, Papa – Oh, and thank Mariamna for the loaf for me, Stefan. I'll see to it that I repay her the favour one day. I noticed your sleds have woodworm. Tell her I'll see to them for nothing but a smile."

"Yes, Mr Malenhov."

I turned to leave the premises, waiting for Aleksy to reach out and grab my shoulder as he did every time.

"On second thoughts, perhaps you'd better give me a hand. Some of the logs in the yard need another strong man to help lift them."

"Come on, then," I told him, and he fetched his boots and scarf. I skirted around the right side of the cottage, kicked open his father's exhausted workshop, and retrieved another axe and a two-man felling saw. The teen would follow me out after a few moments and the weak daylight only accentuated how pale and waxen his skin had become. His attire served to bulk him out a little, so I never quite knew the extent of his frailty.

"Here's an axe," I prompted. He pulled a gloved hand from his pocket and took it from me by the handle, and let his arm fall limp. "Takes half the time to chop firewood if there are two of us."

"I can't leave Papa for long," he said, returning to his natural voice. "What if something happens to him?"

I gave him the same response I always gave. "Nothing will happen to him. There's only me and you up here."

"You can't be sure of that."

"Well, there's always the kabina if looking out for him gets too much for you." I kicked my heel into the pile of logs and a couple rolled off into the snow.

"He's never going to that place, Stefan, never. Have you seen who lives there now? Those men have all lost their minds and my father isn't like that. Sure, he's quiet sometimes ... a–and he doesn't do much, either, but he's not one of them. I know it. The men in the kabina have no minds left after they saw the Folveshch. Papa is sane. He still knows who he is."

I sunk my axe into a log and Aleksy flinched. "Your father and mine are no different," I reminded him, shortly. "The doctors all agree that it's some kind of disease. Like polio. Now get hacking."

And that, besides the shower of gratitude and farewells, would be our only daily exchange. Since Aleksy had finished school three years ago I'd not had to go inside the cottage and see Mr Malenhov at all. I thanked God for that, although a month later, on a bleak rainy day in early November, Aleksy acted more oddly than usual.

"Nothing will happen to him," I sighed after Aleksy had expressed his fears of leaving Viktor unattended. I took out my frustration in the swing of my axe. Thud.

"You can't be sure of that."

"Like I keep saying, there's always the kabina if you can't cope. There's no shame in admitting defeat, malysh. I helped build the kabina with you in mind, as it happens."

He let his axe sway at his side and said, "Da. I guess he could go there."

Had I heard him right in the rattling rain? I snapped my head in his direction and eyed him. "What's that?"

"I said yes."

"So ... you've thought about homing him there?"

The boy looked down at his soggy feet. "Mmhm."

"What's changed your mind, malysh? Every time I ask you about the kabina you won't hear any more of it. What about the part where you tell me your papa is still sane?"

He brought up his gloved hands, took a long look at the axe across his palms, and dropped it into the sodden grass. "Papa wants to go. He hates me."

"He does?"

"I don't know what I did wrong, Stefan. I washed his face as usual, I changed his shirt, I spooned some food into his mouth as always. The fire's still going, his pillows are plump, but he still won't talk to me. I–I asked him what was wrong but he just ignores me. It all happened after I drew those pictures. He wants to leave me and live in the kabina like the other men in this shithole village."

His blue eyes flickered with tears, and worry enveloped me like a black veil. Even in this spooky village, in the lonely cottage on the side of a hill, I knew something strange had happened. I marched towards the house, boots squelching in the mud.

"Stefan?" Aleksy called after me. "Where are you going?"

I threw my axe down on the porch. "To check on your father."

I lead the way inside and Aleksy followed, peeping over my shoulder. As I pushed the front door open the wall of stench greeted me as ever, worse, if anything, and I reeled. I unashamedly covered my nose, barring out the stink. By the woodstove I spotted the arched form of Viktor Malenhov sat in his chair. Just like Iakov and my father, he'd become hunched over as the years in his soulless state passed, but Viktor seemed beyond that. His spine had buckled so far that his chin hovered over his knees, and his neck had contorted back on itself so that his gaze remained forward out the window. I glanced to see what he might be looking at, and saw only wet woodland.

Aleksy grabbed the sleeve of my coat. "Don't go near him," he breathed. "He's angry."

I shrugged him off and circled Viktor ... And nowadays I wish I hadn't dared.

His eye sockets were bare.

"Aleksy," I whispered, swallowing down the sickness in my stomach, "what happened to his eyes?"

"I took them out," he said in a low voice. "Last month."

"Took ... them?"

"He told me he no longer needed them, and to put them out for the Folveshch."

I searched his face for any suggestion of a lie. " ... And did you?"

"Da. I had to. Next autumn he says to cut out his tongue."

At that point I think the stink finally got to me and I barged outside to heave. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Was Aleksy Malenhov really mutilating his disabled father? Sick fuck. Part of me felt like throwing him a punch across the jaw, but when the teen drew his hands up to his face and began to sob, I knew it would be insensitive.

"What is it?" I said through gritted teeth.

"He won't speak to me!" he wept from the doorway. "I can't bear it!"

I straightened, brushed my dark hair from my eyes and composed myself. Holding my breath, I ventured back inside the cottage, finally noticing just how still Viktor sat. Not even his ribcage moved, and I realised then that Death had stolen his final breath. Viktor was dead.

"Aleksy," I began, but how could I tell the boy that his father had passed away unnoticed while the boy had tried so hard for eight years to keep him alive? "Go outside," I said instead.

"Why?"

"Just go."

When he ambled away into the woodland, it dawned on me that I was alone in the room with Viktor Malenhov once more, just like three years ago. He was a corpse; a lifeless, deformed man with no pulse, no breath and no eyes. I rounded the room, trying my best to keep my chin up and be brave. It was the sight of his terrible face that had turned my stomach all those years ago, and terrible, I discovered, was no longer a substantial adjective. Aleksy's father, bowed and contorted beyond recognition, was little more than a brown, rotting carcass. A deep opening in his cheek leaked what I assumed were his gums and brain down his chin and onto his trousers. The stink of faeces had been his, but that was nothing compared to the reek of decay. Black liquid had seeped into the rugs and floorboards, and stained them. Aleksy had assembled a bed on the floor near his father's feet, and there, under his pillows, he'd stuffed a wad of paper torn from the children's books I'd given him when he was nine. Were those his drawings? I stooped and looked closer to find the pages covered in a collage of identical charcoal sketches. Faces. Screaming, frightened faces.

I didn't have much chance to look at what else he'd drawn, because it was then that Viktor Malenhov stood up from his chair, arm extended and mouth wide. His eyeless sockets bored into my soul.

And I bolted.

I didn't dare return to the cottage after that ever again, and nor did Aleksy. I broke it to him a few hours later in my home that I'd found his father dead, and that my older cousin Pyotr would be in touch with the grave keeper. He cried hard in our front room for a long while, still buried head to toe in his ill-fitting outdoor clothing. I had to assume Viktor had died of starvation and dehydration, despite his son's best efforts and enduring belief of his eventual recovery. Perhaps the rest of the brief visit had been my mind playing tricks; after all, the flickering firelight often does summon phantom figures and faces that are never truly there. How do dead men walk? They don't, and I knew it. Pyotr assured me he was dead, confirming that he had no pulse.

"So that's why he didn't speak to me?" Aleksy asked me after he'd swallowed the news and wiped away the tears rolling down his cheeks. "He couldn't."

"He couldn't for a long time, Aleksy," I told him, keeping to a gentle tenor. "He's been dead for weeks on end."

"You're wrong," he fired. He shook his head, long fringe swaying across his dirty brow. "He spoke to you only a few days ago; he told you to say thanks to your mama for the loaf, remember? He said he'd fix your sleds for a smile. He asked for help to carry the logs. I remember."

My mother appeared at the far side of the room, mouthing one word – don't. Don't what? Tell him that it was his imagination all along? My own father had not spoken a word since the day we found him collapsed on his back on Strange One's Pass. A long time alone with somebody so silent would have only wreaked havoc on Aleksy's mind, testing his capability to endure loneliness and finally succumbing to it. I heeded my mother and smiled. "I remember." Aleksy did not need the truth.

He lived with me from then on, having no other family to get in touch with, and the offers of adopting him having dried up a long time ago. Outside the company of his father, Aleksy became a lost lamb and followed me about whenever he could. He would watch me read the newspaper in Papa's chair, tag along when I visited my sweetheart ... Even accompanied me to the outhouse and sit in the snow until I'd finished relieving myself. My only true solitude was when I slept. His constant presence was harmless at first, though perhaps a little unnerving between you and me, but I couldn't find the heart to tell him to back off. It was when he tailed me around work, at the construction site of Darakyev's new Russian Orthodox church, that he became a problem. Six days a week I laboured at the site, hardening my palms and straining my young back for very little return. Aleksy sat no more than ten feet away from me, tossing a hammer from hand to hand for stimulation.

"You need to find your dog a new home," my employer grumbled one morning as I clocked in. I glanced at Aleksy behind me and sighed through my nose.

"Of course, Mr Shchurov," I said, picking up my quota of tools. "He'll be gone by tomorrow."

He jabbed a finger at me. "Today, Antonovich. Get him out of my sight within the hour or I'll see you off too."

I cursed under my breath as I walked back on myself, ushering Aleksy along with me.

My mother, who spent most of her time out the house volunteering at the kabina for the time being, offered to take the teen off my hands until I could find an occupation more suited for him. I hadn't thought that far ahead yet. It seemed that Aleksy's damaged sociability extended not only to his failure of forming relationships, but to acting appropriately around other people at all. And that, I thought, didn't matter where the men of the kabina were involved. He could help my mother wash them and feed them, and it wouldn't matter if Aleksy said something weird or not.

But how could I have been so senseless?

By the time autumn strolled in and stripped the trees of their foliage, catatonic polio survivor Iakov Yakunin had no eyes.

And, according to Irina Soldatov, she found Aleksy in the yard ... chewing them.