The Observer Effect. November 3

In the evening, the entire village gathered in the elder’s house.

In the center of the room, on a low bench, sat Tashi-Tobgyal himself. He didn’t look sick or insane. He looked like an object. A statue made of gray dust, with eyes staring through the walls, through the mountains, through reality itself.

For the tourists, this was a pure, unadulterated ethnographic spectacle. Sergey took out his phone, hoping to shoot a good video for YouTube. Dmitry Stanislavovich and Natalya Sergeevna sat in the corner, adopting the postures of respectful observers at a scientific symposium. Polina, as a sociologist, felt an almost professional thrill. A classic exorcism ritual, apotropaic magic, a community’s attempt to restore disrupted order through symbolic action. She made mental notes.

The shaman appeared. Not a majestic elder from the movies, but a small, withered man resembling a ginger root, with restless eyes. He moved without fuss, laying out his implements: a bronze bowl of murky water, bundles of dried herbs, a small drum made of tautly stretched leather.

And the ritual began.

At first, it felt like theater. The shaman walked in circles, muttering something guttural and rhythmic. He fumigated the elder with smoke that smelled bitter and sweet all at once. Then he took up the drum.

The initial beats were sparse, muffled. Like a slow heartbeat.

Thrum… thrum… thrum…

And with each new strike, the air seemed to grow thicker, the space tighter. The villagers, seated along the walls, picked up this rhythm, beginning to sway, emitting a low, droning sound in unison — softly at first, then louder and louder, until the drone resembled the humming of a hive. Polina continued to analyze. The creation of a unified acoustic field, inducing a state of mild trance in the participants…

But the rhythm accelerated.

Thrum-thrum. Thrum-thrum-thrum.

The voices grew louder, more insistent. The shaman began to move faster, his movements turning sharp, jagged. He was no longer walking; he was dancing — a wild, fractured fight dance, a dance of combat. He flicked water at the elder, threw herbs at him, shouting words that no longer sounded like a prayer, but like commands, like curses, sending a chill down Polina’s spine.

Polina’s analytical barrier began to crack. The sound was everywhere. It penetrated beneath the skin, vibrated in the bones, made her teeth ache. This was no longer a ritual. This was an attack. An attack of sound, smell, and movement against the gray silence that had settled within the elder. Sergey lowered his phone. Natalya Sergeevna clutched her husband’s arm. Intellectual curiosity gave way to primal, irrational involvement. They were no longer spectators. They were inside it.

The shaman reached a crescendo. He froze before the elder, raising both hands, and let out one final, piercing cry — a cry that seemed intended to shatter the very fabric of existence.

And in that moment, everything broke.

It wasn’t like the lights being turned off. It was like the soul being drained from the world. The red coals in the hearth didn’t go out — they turned ashen gray, retaining their shape but losing their fire. The vibrant patterns on the blankets upon the walls devolved into shades of dirt. The golden threads on the shaman’s garments ended up looking like dull straw. And the sound. The sound didn’t vanish; it thinned out. The drumbeats that had just been shaking their ribcages now sounded like a dry twig tapping against a cardboard box. The droning choir of villagers turned into an emotionless, flat hum, like a malfunctioning transformer.

The shaman lowered his hands. His dance broke off. He looked at the elder, and there was no longer any power in his eyes. Only terror. He had tried to exorcise the grayness, but instead had merely proven that it was stronger.

In the ensuing dead silence, the elder sat just as motionless as before. Nothing had changed.

The villagers, slowly, as if in a dream, began to disperse. No one looked at each other. They stood up in silence and walked out into the gray night.

Polina sat there, unable to move. Her sociological theories had crumbled to dust.

This wasn’t an exorcism. It was an act of diagnosis.

November 4 →
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River