Chapter 2: The Soviet Postmarks

Chapter 2: The Soviet Postmarks

The laptop screen remained a black mirror, but the story it held was burned onto the back of Tamara’s eyelids. Lucinda’s legs. The bruise-coloured socks. The images replayed, grotesque and vivid, a folk tale that had crawled out of the page and taken root in her mind. Sleep offered no escape; it was a landscape of tolling bells and the cloying, waxy scent of a plant that didn't exist.

For two days, Tamara was a ghost in her own life, haunted by a town named Solenvol. Her academic instincts kicked in, a familiar defense against overwhelming emotion. She scoured online databases, university archives, and digitized folklore collections. Nothing. She searched for variations: Solenval, Solenvil, Zolenvol. She cross-referenced folk tales involving sinister gift-givers or Yuletide entities from every corner of Northern and Eastern Europe. She found tales of Krampus, of the Gryla, of malevolent house spirits, but nothing matched the specific, systematic cruelty of the Merry Man.

The town of Solenvol did not exist.

The logical conclusion was that her grandmother, in her grief and final years, had been writing fiction. A dark, terrifying piece of fiction, but fiction nonetheless. It was a way to process some old-world trauma, perhaps, a metaphor for the oppressive conformity of the Soviet village she’d been born in.

But the logic felt hollow. It didn't account for the raw terror in Elena's prose, the abrupt, unfinished sentence that felt less like a stylistic choice and more like an interruption. It didn’t explain the name she’d never heard before: Lucinda.

Frustration gnawed at her. If the story wasn’t fiction, then there had to be a source, a piece of tangible evidence. Elena was a historian at heart, a keeper of records. She didn’t just create things from thin air.

Her gaze swept over the neatly labeled boxes destined for storage and charity, then landed on the narrow, pull-down ladder leading to the attic. It was the one place Tamara hadn't touched. A repository for the truly forgotten, the things too sentimental to discard but too cumbersome for daily life. With a surge of renewed purpose, she dragged a stool over, pulled the cord, and unfolded the creaking wooden steps.

The air that drifted down was thick with the scent of aged paper and cedar. Tamara climbed into the gloom, her phone’s flashlight cutting a nervous path through the darkness. The attic was a graveyard of abandoned hobbies and outdated technology. Stacks of vinyl records, a defunct sewing machine, a box of her own childhood drawings. And in the farthest corner, tucked beneath a heavy wool blanket reeking of mothballs, was a small, unassuming wooden box. It looked like an old footlocker, bound with rusted iron straps. Unlike everything else, it had no label.

Her heart began to pound a little faster. She dragged the heavy box into the center of the attic, the weak afternoon light from the single dormer window barely illuminating its surface. The latch was stiff, but it gave way with a groan of protest.

Inside, there was no treasure. Only letters. Dozens and dozens of them, bundled together with faded, brittle ribbons. They were written on thin, almost translucent airmail paper. Tamara gently lifted the first bundle. The letters were addressed to Elena Volkov, but at an address in West Berlin she only vaguely remembered from her grandmother’s stories of her escape.

She carefully unfolded the first letter. The handwriting was cramped, a spidery script in faded blue ink. Much of it was in Russian, a language Tamara could read, but haltingly. Yet certain phrases, written in clear, deliberate English, leapt out at her.

“…the daily gift was a particularly foul shade of ochre today. Papa said we must be grateful for the warmth.”

“…Olga’s boy from down the lane, he forgot to smile this morning. They took him. His mother keeps screaming. They’ll come for her too, if she isn’t careful.”

“I dream of your sun. Here, the sky is always the colour of an old bruise. We pray the plant stays healthy. It is a terrible thing to pray for.”

Tamara felt the air leave her lungs. The casual horror, tucked between mundane pleasantries about the weather and a dwindling potato harvest, was exactly the same as in the laptop story. The plant. The gift. The smile. It was all there. This was the source material.

Her hands trembling, she fumbled for the envelope the letter had come from. She angled it toward the light, her eyes searching for the one thing that would anchor this nightmare to reality. And then she saw it.

The postmark. It was faint, the ink bled into the paper over the decades, but it was unmistakable. A circular stamp, printed in Cyrillic. And a date: 1978.

CCCP.

And beneath it, the name of the town.

Соленвол.

Solenvol.

It was real. It wasn’t a story. It was a report from a cage. The letters were from someone trapped inside, writing to her grandmother who had somehow, miraculously, gotten out. All these years, Elena hadn't just been holding onto a memory; she had been receiving messages from hell.

Who had written them? An aunt? A cousin? The name Lucinda wasn’t on any of the envelopes.

She dug deeper into the box, her movements frantic now. Beneath the letters was a collection of ephemera. A faded photograph of two young girls with identical dark braids—Elena and, she now knew, Lucinda—standing before a forest of tall pines. Tucked behind it was a hand-drawn map on yellowed paper, depicting a small cluster of streets surrounded by dense, featureless forest. A few buildings were labeled: ‘Factory,’ ‘Town Hall,’ ‘Guesthouse.’ There were no roads leading in or out.

The last thing she found was a single, folded sheet of paper, Elena’s firm handwriting covering it. It was a list of names. Most were crossed out. Only one name remained, circled several times. Rory. Beside it, a short, cryptic phrase: ‘Elena sent me.’

Tamara sank back on her heels, the dusty floorboards creaking beneath her. The attic, moments before a place of forgotten memories, now felt like a command center. The unfinished story on the laptop was not an ending; it was a baton being passed. Elena hadn't been writing a memoir for strangers; she had been gathering her research, preparing for something. A final mission she never got to undertake.

The grief for her grandmother suddenly sharpened into a fierce, protective anger. All her life, Elena had carried this. The weight of Solenvol, the fate of her sister, the desperate letters she was powerless to answer. She had lived a quiet life in a world of sunshine and freedom, but her heart had remained a prisoner with her family.

In that moment, a reckless decision bloomed in Tamara’s chest, silencing the cautious, analytical voice of the academic. This was her legacy. This was her inheritance. The maps, the letters, the secret phrase—they weren't just clues. They were an invitation. An obligation.

She wouldn't let the story end with a blinking cursor. She wouldn’t let Lucinda be just a monster’s gift.

She was going to find Solenvol.