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T. Trubnikova, “An UnScary/Scary Fairy Tale”

In January 2022, in honor of the 190^th anniversary of the English writer Lewis Carroll (1832—1898), the head of the Open Literary Club (Moscow), Lyudmila Vyacheslavovna Koroleva, member of the Union of Writers of Russia, established the literary public award “The Looking-Glass”, the first winner of which became the book “A Trap for a Thought-Form” by Alexandra Kryuchkova⁸.

The “Trap” is a real fairy tale for adults! Fearless scary! However, it’s known to everybody that adults need fairy tales more than children, and love them stronger. In general, people tend to strive for the unknown, mystery, secrets. Such aspiration is as archaic as stories after hunting, around the campfire in prehistoric times. The entire text of the “Trap” is riddled with mystery.

The main character Alice – a lady, but in fact still a girl, because all people are children – holds literary parties in M.A. Bulgakov’s “bad flat”, recreated in the museum-theater Bulgakov House (Moscow, B. Sadovaya street, 10, 302 Bis), where a Portal to the Other Reality is located. Next door to the studio of the artist Georges Yakulov, where Sergey Yesenin and the brilliant dancer Isadora Duncan got acquainted. A well courtyard, a slice of the Moscow sky above. Loud steps. That air preserved the voices of all those who lived there, and who simply passed by, because nothing disappears without a trace!

Alice associates writers, heroes of the parties, with fairy-tale characters and various “impure souls” (let’s quote the Guardian of the Portal, “the Impurities, are they from not pure writing or not pure hearing?”): Witch, Kikimora, Flower Fairy, Syrinx Bird, Waterman, Werewolf, Arachne; and some are named in accordance with the Tarot cards: the King of Swords, the Page of Cups. No wonder the last night in the Mansion is advertised as the Ball of Impurities. Or… of Death?

Death lives in all scary fairy tales. Alice tries to talk Death off, distract it, recode herself towards Life. It’s like the Last Dance, the Last Fight of the Master. Every Master is entitled to the final triumph. If the Master is real, he can prolong his last fight. Not forever, alas. Bulgakov continued it for more than ten years, Yesenin had been tearing the “Black Man” poem from himself for two and a half.

The literary parties in the book are strung one on top of the other, like beads of bloody and frozen – in the Blizzard! – rowan berries on a thread. Does the thread really break at the end by the inevitability of Death? Do the 40 literary nights end up in a passage to the Other Reality? The souls spend the same number of days after Death on Earth. Is it a sacred number? The author constantly refers to numbers. Everything around is permeated by them. But can you play with numbers? Why does Alice have 44 dresses? It would be logical to mirror 40, however, “In numerology 4 means ‘Death’, but 44 is 4 plus 4, or 8, and this is already a sign of infinity, that for me personally means ‘Love’…”

So if the parties are like beads, should the reader be bored? No! To the monotony of the Blizzard’s songs, lulling the mind, mysterious events occur both in the Mansion and in the reader’s soul.

We get to the School of Magicians for the seminar “How to become the Magician”. Forty wise and feasible tasks that Alice presents during the breaks of each chapter are a true wish-fulfillment marathon and a step-by-step guide to create your Happy Universe! The “breaking the pattern” technique seems to me very interesting! Therefore… aren’t you the Magician yet? This book is for you! In general, the whole “Trap” is Alchemy = Practicum of Secret Knowledge + Love in the mystical context of a puzzle plot on the verge of a detective story and even madness that keeps you in suspense until the last line…

Alice is reflecting, trying to understand: why does she seem not to live indeed? Isn’t she already dead? It is an interesting trick of the author to turn reality over, presenting the illusory one neither like a dream, nor like death, but vice versa…

Does any creation of the Creator have freedom of choice, or is the scenario rigidly fixed? Where do the glitches in the Matrix come from and how to surprise it? Does Love always defeat Death? And an almost rhetorical question with a reference to the World of Ideas of the philosopher Plato… Can a thought-form die? Can it be the Co-Creator of all things? Isn’t the independent life of a thought-form a heresy, a rebellion against the Creator?

In the mysterious interweaving of realities, Alexandra Kryuchkova, as usual, in an accessible and concise way talks about the complex, but each reader will find in the book exactly what he is ready to discover…

Any fairy tale pays tribute to reality. In the “Trap” there is a mysterious, quite thinking, huge talkative Cat, a kind of Bulgakov’s one. I saw him in the Bulgakov House, and I confirm, the Honorable Mister the Puss is really huge! And the Portal to the Other World, which is the fireplace, awakened in me the image of a Russian stove! Maybe the Guardian of the Portal is the Baba Yaga?

The final scene on the bridge of Eternity with the possibility of choosing the future is associated with a fork in the road, “If you go to the left, you will lose your horse; if you go to the right, you will lose your life; if you go straight, you will be alive and forget yourself.”

However, the scary fairy tale is actually non-scary – no matter how much I tried to get frightened in the course of the story, I couldn’t! And not just because the book is in the “Playing (!) Another Reality” series. The very flow of the narrative screamed with every letter in every line: everything is going to be okay!

There is also a smell of Cinderella: dresses, the anticipation of a miracle at the Ball, etc. However, Alice is in search not so much of a prince as of answers to everybody’s basic questions.

And yet, “A Trap for a Thought-Form” is closer to “Alice in Wonderland” by L. Carroll. Alice and the Cheshire Cat, also speaking and fabulous, like Bulgakov’s Cat, wise in his madness and uttering, “Life is serious. But not much…”

If to be very serious, the “Trap”, the winner of the competitions “Master” after M. Bulgakov (the Moscow City Organization of the Union of Writers of Russia, 2020)⁹ and “The Looking Glass” after L. Carroll (Open Literary Club, 2022), is hunting for those who lack magic in their lives. It is light, kind, fabulous. Written by the Master of the Word. It’s so nice to spend time with this book over a cup of tea, wrapped in a cozy blanket and smiling at the Cat, that always smiles you back!

Tatyana Trubnikova,

member of the Union of Writers of Russia,

laureate of literary awards

The magazine “ZINZIVER” No.1 (127), 2022

Magazines’ Hall “Gorky media”

https://magazines.gorky.media/zin/2022/1/vzglyad-2.html

https://reading-hall.ru/publication.php?id=30244

http://www.zinziver.ru/contents.php?id=2900

I. Antonova, “The Looking-Glass” 2022

Unique book! I confess I’ve never read anything like that! An exciting plot of this amazing story, the end of which is unpredictable, reminded me of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass”. Alice, the main character of the “Trap”, being unreflected in the Giant Mirror of a mysterious Mansion, is looking for a Portal to Other Reality in order to find mutual love. However, instead of a rabbit, the “Trap” contains the Honorable Mister the Puss, because the action takes place in the museum-theater Bulgakov House (in Moscow), and the Cat in the “Trap” is precisely Bulgakov’s, not a Cheshire one. The funny and the scary are both in one bottle there, and that’s a joy! I was wandering inside a crystal with multifaceted mirrors, which reflected dreams and reality, good and evil, people and puppets, and, by the way, not so much the characters as myself. It’s an exciting feeling of touching Another Reality, an opportunity to look at life from unusual angles and to recode the future. The book is so concise and multifaceted! All the characters are perfectly visualizing by the reader, each has its own inimitable way of speaking. Just listen to the lovesick Pasha with his incorrigible accent! To recreate such a phantasmagoria requires great skill of a real Master, the hand of the Magician, and Alexandra once again brilliantly demonstrated her talent. The grateful reader fearlessly follows her into the Looking Glass – through the labyrinth of fantasy into the Other Reality.

Irina Antonova,

member of the Union of Writers of Russia,

Vice Chief Editor of the “Istoki” almanac

The magazine “LITERARY MOSCOW” / “Moskva literaturnaya” No.2, 2022 (ISBN 978-5-7949-0970-8)

G. Arshinov, “Labyrinth of Mysteries”

The literary work of Alexandra Andreevna Kryuchkova is a separate phenomenon that will make itself known more than once and has long been waiting for a grateful researcher. I think that followers will certainly be found as well, and they will move along the already beaten path, some of them will discover their own Rabbit Hole, but not every Alice will have the courage to dive into it recklessly!

Tsvetaeva’s tragic intensity, Akhmatova’s Attic style and Alexandra’s inimitable handwriting are woven into one inseparable pattern of words, rhythms, reminiscent of a Labyrinth.

“Follow me, reader!” I want to exclaim after Mikhail Bulgakov. Enter the world of this book! Try to pass its Labyrinth! There, on the way, amazing secrets are hidden, which you still have to get to. However, it’s not as easy as it seems. A mystery, even the one, having slightly shown up to you, for some reason slips away again, but it irresistibly attracts you farther and deeper… Try to catch up and unravel it! Then, after the seemingly revealed secret, another one arises. New meanings and associations are woven into another intricate pattern. And your soul becomes involved in an amazing and exciting Game. You involuntarily become a part of the Game. And magical events begin to happen in your life…

Alexandra’s Moon Cat, which lives in her poetry (“The Moon Cat” book) and prose (the novel “Confession of a Ghost” and the thriller “A Trap for a Thought-Form” in the “Playing Another Reality” series), in my opinion, will take its place in the line and cavalcade of the famous mysterious cats of world literature! I am sure, the feline worlds of Hoffmann, Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, Bulgakov, Natsume Soseki and the world of the aforementioned Moon Cat are by no means alien to each other. “You and I are so different,” but all the listed above literary cats are one warm bunch. And the charming Trickster with a browning and primus, and the mocking Cheshire, and the impudent Yamato, and the clever Pluto, and the philistine Murr, who has his own views on life, and “our one, our” the Moon Cat, according to Bulgakov’s apt statement, “will certainly make agreement with each other.”

And, perhaps, by prior agreement, they deign to “lift the curtain by the edge” (Vladimir Vysotsky, songs for the audio performance “Alice in Wonderland”), that is, lift the veil of Mystery, for you personally as well. Just turn the first page of Alexandra Kryuchkova’s book and… start reading.

You want your life to become an exciting Game, don’t you?

Gunnar Arshinov,

member of the Union of Writers of Russia,

laureate of literary awards

The newspaper “POETOGRAD” No. 1 (397), 2022, G. Arshinov, “Phenomena of Alexandra Kryuchkova’s literary work is Labyrinth of mysteries!”

http://www.poetograd.ru/arch.html

https://reading-hall.ru/publication.php?id=30302

Thanks!

The author expresses her great gratitude

to all the characters and prototypes of the novel,

including:

as well as:

Ray, Pasha, Wanderer,

my son Andrey, our cat Josephine

and everybody else!

A TRAP for a THOUGHT-FORM

Chapter 0. PROLOGUE. The GLOVES

A few years before

I stood by the sea, with my back pressed against the Dark Tower, looking up into the black starry sky. In August, the stars used to fall there. I wanted to catch one of them to make a wish (the most common one, for mutual love), when suddenly the phone rang.

“Hello, Alice,” Ray called me, as usual, from an unidentified number.

“Hi,” I said softly, being afraid he was only a dream.

“How are you? Where are you now?”

“I’m catching stars at the Dark Tower. It looks like your Tower. I wish you were here with me now…”

“Don’t forget I am a ghost…”

And I woke up…

“You remind me of that man, so…”

“The sorcerer?” Roman asked.

“The Magician,” I clarified, being mentally in the Other Reality in search of my gloves. “We are going to give a performance on the 14^th of February. I want you to play him.”

“Whatever you want,” Roman smiled.

Probably he admired me in some field and somehow, silently and somewhere in the depths of his soul. However, there was an invisible inner connection between us, which he probably did not feel. Roman reminded me of Ray…

“What is the role?”

“You will come to me out of the Mirror every night. Until you take me away from here…”

“As usual? Seafood salad or chicken?” asked Pasha smiling. He was a good-natured boy, waiter in a restaurant on the seashore by the Dark Tower, and he spoke my language a little bit.

“Yesterday I had chicken, so today bring me salad, please.”

I glanced at my watch – “Almost midnight!” – but I wasn’t alone in the restaurant. However, it was always calm there, and I’d never got afraid to return home late. Or rather, to the house where I used to live in summer.

“Okay. And coffee from me. Want, my girl?”

I didn’t scold Pasha for addressing me as “his girl”, and I left one euro for tea. How many years had I been coming there? And always, with the exception of joint evenings with Dimitra, my friend, a local resident, I dined at that restaurant.

Gloves… the black ones…

“Where did they come from?”

The Guardian of the Portal recorded their appearance in his diary. He loved numbers, dates. They were symbols. As well as the gloves.

The Guardian sighed, carefully took the ladies’ gloves in one hand and the antique lantern in the other, left the Portal for the room, and then descended into the Dungeon to hide his find in the gloomy dressing table of the pantry.

“Has she come back?”

Some boxes of shoes… I opened them one by one and took out three pairs of brand-new orange sandals. A man approached me. I could clearly see his figure, but his face was foggy… I embraced the stranger and… I woke up.

“A man with a small belly appeared in my dream last night…”

“I’m losing weight! Review the dream! Probably he is already without a belly!”

“When are you coming back?”

“All flights are cancelled! The borders are closed! I’ve got tickets for August, but I’m not sure. Thank God I’m alive and okay…”

“How long have you believed in God?” I thought sarcastically and involuntarily remembered Ray, and then, for some reason, Roman. So stealthily the Autumn used to creep up on me and, as usual, caused bouts of nostalgia.

“Where does Your Majesty wish to stroll?” asked the King of Swords.

Like all “Kings”, he was married, as for the suit of “Swords”, he was a military man, and for some reason the military men were fond of me. Sometimes he walked me culturally in the city.

“Take me to the Mansion,” I answered suddenly.

“Maybe it’s better…”

“To the Mansion!” I kept insisting.

The rain was mixed with the evening mist. We turned into the courtyard, and I was ready to open the desired Door to my left, but the King of Swords didn’t allow me that.

“It’s the wrong door. You need the Right one.”

I needed the Left Door! I no longer had the strength to stay in our Reality… completely alone… useless…

However, I obediently opened the Right one.

“Not now. Or not with him?”

I slowly climbed the stairs, went inside and floated along the corridor to the kitchen and then into the room, absorbing not sounds, but memories, kept by the walls of any space.

My grandmother, my father’s mother, with her sister and father, my great-grandfather, often visited his friend, the Writer, in that flat.

There were two museums in the Mansion. One was behind the Right door, the other was behind the Left door.

I didn’t hear a word of what the obviously superfluous tour guide was saying. I fell there – to my grannies – in their Time, to drown out the pain and to suppress another bout of nostalgia…

Six months before

The Guardian of the Portal exhaled – finally, his diary was published in a human way. In every sense of the word. He opened the book to a random page and landed on “The Gloves”.

“She will be back! Yes! Yes! She’s about to show up here!”

May holidays

The magic name popped up on the phone.

“If you knew how glad I am to hear from you…”

He reminded me too much of Ray, and I smiled – something warm and fluffy touched my heart. Roman was an invisible (and perhaps the only) thread connecting me with the already irrevocable.

“I recalled my Soviet past today,” it sounded like a sudden insertion into a business conversation on an off-business day.

“Did you have it?” I smiled again and reached for the Tarot cards.

“I’ve read your book ‘Confession of a Ghost’ about the Matrix, as I promised. Remember?”

“Really?!” I took out my cards.

“Back then, yes… I went on vacation and took the book with me.”

I got “The Knight of Cups” and…

“How do you like it?”

“I recognized everyone! ‘The Emperor’ and ‘The Sorcerer’. Sorry, ‘The Magician’! You write in such a way that…”

“But you are not there, are you?” I asked with a sad smile, looking at the cards: “The Knight of Cups” and… “The Magician”!

“In your book or in your Matrix?” Roman chuckled and confessed, “To be honest, in magic I feel like quite a child!”

“Would you like to become Him?..”

The Guardian of the Portal should have taken that important step a long time ago, leaving the old Mansion and walking only a few houses to the House of Literature, where… Where what? Or who? He was called to bring his book. The Guardian didn’t know why. It would be worth clarifying, although he understood that it was necessary. However, was he waiting for… the right date? A number? A symbol? What was he waiting for?

August

Since last autumn, when the King of Swords allowed me to open the Right Door of the Mansion, I had been forcing myself to go back to open the Left one, because the main city Portal of transition to Another Reality was hidden right behind it. I was too tired, bored and tormented by a premonition of something that must definitely happen as soon as I opened THAT DOOR. What exactly?

“Alice, you shouldn’t enter that Mansion. It’s dangerous! Do you want me to show you the place where…” а familiar poet, once the Page of Cups, offered suddenly.

“I need to go to the Mansion. I have to open the Door on the Left,” I pleaded, looking into his eyes pitifully.

“Well, then… tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow, please!”

At the same moment the poet cried out and turned me around to face the house, on the facade of which there was a gigantic portrait of the Writer from that Mansion.

“Nearby Alice there is only mysticism… It’s a sign!”

However, it started to rain “tomorrow”, and the trip to the Mansion was postponed indefinitely.

Meanwhile, the Left Door was attracting me stronger and stronger. From time to time, I was sent strange people – writers who asked me to arrange literary parties in the Mansion, as a great opportunity to combine the desired with my direct work, but because of the epidemic, the Mansion was closed for a long time…

Repeatedly I tried to return to that sweet dream about three pairs of orange sandals, to find there the man with a small belly and a foggy face, with whom I felt happy.

In vain, I always found myself in the past, where Roman appeared sitting next to me on my right. There were a lot of people there.

“If not for the age difference,” I looked at him almost jokingly and sighed.

“What’s the difference?” he immediately interrupted me. “There is no difference!”

“I would have fallen head over heels in love with you,” I finished my sentence.

How many times did I say goodbye to him? Even in my dreams I could not allow myself anything… I didn’t want to hurt, maybe. One or both of us?

However, in a little while my Sun would have set in the last, the 12^th sector of the Astrological Clock of life. The sector of all the Secret and Unrevealed, symbolically called the Mystical Mansion or the Mysterious Island, the Portal to Another Reality. It would barely get out of there, my Sun…

September

“Who are you?” I asked when another Autumn crept up on me with another strange man who had come to the Union of Writers to submit his book for a competition.

The man introduced himself, whispering something in addition as quietly as passwords.

I glanced at him briefly without remembering either his first or last name, and I didn’t even catch what he whispered, because he reminded me of Roman and Ray at the same time.

“A glitch in the Matrix!” the thought flashed through my mind.

“Did you bring us the book?” I decided to clarify.

“No… Yes… But…”

“Alice, haven’t you heard?” my colleague suddenly interrupted my thoughts, tugging at the sleeve of my dress and adding distinctly in a mysterious voice, “This man is from your Old Mansion!!!”

“Are you… really from that Mansion!?” I asked, not believing my ears.

“Yes,” the man nodded calmly. “I’ve been working there, behind the Left Door, since the very beginning. Come to visit us this Sunday! And I will give you my book for the competition. I forgot to take it with me.”

The day before

It was very cold. I was already leaving the store when the saleswoman ran up to me, holding out the package.

“This is a gift for you!” she said mysteriously.

I opened the package and saw a gray scarf. I took it out and twisted it in my hands. A noose… I was too tired, and my Sun was already on the threshold of the 12^th…

I put the scarf back.

Having arrived home, I opened the package again, but along with the scarf I found…

…GLOVES…

the black ones…

Yes, there was a Word in the Beginning, and that Word was “Gloves”, and also it was very cold, the right time for them to appear. Though, all I wanted to do that day was to stay at home and bask under a plaid by the fireplace with the Moon Cat and a book about ghosts, because the idea of going to the Mansion suddenly made me scared. Yes, I was scared of what would finally happen.

However, with a heavy sigh, I forced myself out of bed, grabbed the 9^thedition of my “Book of Secret Knowledge” alias “The Book of White and Black Magic”, the first novel in the “Playing Another Reality” series, and resolutely headed for the Portal.

With a sinking heart, I pulled the Left Door towards me and took a step inside.

There were many people there, pacing back and forth without noticing me. No one asked my entrance ticket, although the entrance wasn’t free of charge.

I floated to the coffee shop and sat down at a table next to a sprawling giant black cat. The Cat scanned me carefully and greeted me, meanwhile people came and went away, paying no attention to us at all in the place where the Past and the Present – and the Future? – were merging together.

“Do I no longer exist among all these people?”

Suddenly, the man, who had invited me to come in, appeared next to me.

I stood up and touched his hand. He turned around. I silently looked into his eyes. Unlike other people, he noticed me (as, indeed, the Cat) and said hello. I held out my book. The man read the title and shuddered involuntarily.

“This is my gift for the Museum,” I explained. “And the book of poems, ‘The Moon Cat’, is for you.”

I was in a hurry to leave my mark before everyone, including that man, would stop noticing me.

He disappeared and reappeared with his book, handing it to me. I opened the book to a random page, and the title of the story caught my eye, “The GLOVES that fell from the Sky”. I shuddered, too.

We sat at a table across from each other. In silence. He got my “Magic” and “The Moon Cat”, and I got his “Gloves”. He worked in the Mansion as Guardian of the Portal. Definitely, all these people around existed in some other dimension, where there were neither me nor the Guardian, who still reminded me of Roman and Ray.

I returned “the Gloves” to the author, asking him to sign it for me.

“Hmm… today is a magical date,” writing it under the dedication, the Guardian said either to me or to himself. Dates and numbers had some meaning to him.

“Has SHE come back?!” the Guardian’s mind raced.

“Show me the Mansion, please!” I asked him mentally.

The Guardian stood up from the table and held out his hand to me. Having grabbed an antique lantern along the way, we slowly descended into the Dungeon, and I felt more and more strongly that the Portal was there, and I would find it for sure!

“To the right is the Theater, where our performances take place,” the Guardian looked at me with genuine interest, “but I prefer to show you something… unusual. You see, extremely strange stories constantly happen in this Mansion. Perhaps you help me to reveal the meaning of one of them!”

The Guardian took out a bunch of keys, opened the door to the secret pantry on the left side of the corridor and put the lantern on a small antique dressing table with a mirror and some drawers.

“In the left one…” the Guardian whispered mysteriously, letting me know with a look that I could open the box myself, which I did, but it turned out to be absolutely… empty, and for some reason that fact alarmed the Guardian.

He rummaged through the pantry for a long time, scanning it up and down with the lantern, his eyes, and hands. In vain.

Then I took out of my bag and silently handed to him…

…the GLOVES…

8.The newspaper “Poetograd” No. 1 (397), 2022, “The results of the Open Literary Club” by Ludmila Koroleva, https://reading-hall.ru/publication.php?id=30303, http://www.poetograd.ru/arch.html

9.The newspaper “Literary News” (“Literaturnye Izvestia”) No. 7 (193), 2021, “The results of the literary awards 2021” by the press-secratary of the Moscow City Organization of the Union of Writers of Russia. http://www.litiz.ru/arch.html, https://reading-hall.ru/publication.php?id=30044