Roman smiled involuntarily at her concerns. Mom asked him not to come on the last passing bus. It was not safe to walk in the dark night through the deep deserted steppe. Different stories were told, and not always people made up.
This spring someone had a habit of accosting people arriving late at night, riding up on horseback, knocking them down and carrying off their belongings. Really, it was only with people who weren't met by a car. They could never find who was doing it. Only there was a little oddity – sometimes stolen things were found then abandoned in the steppe, and in the neighboring village, there were rumors of a missing girl who came late at night, but never made it home. She just disappeared and that was it.
Roman remembered all those conversations and a cold shiver ran down his spine. He did not consider himself a coward, but from these stories involuntarily became frightening. And then…
In the night steppe noise is always heard at a great distance. And the boy could not understand whether his imagination had played a cruel trick on him or whether he had really heard the sound of iron clinking against stone. Roman stopped and listened.
The steppe always, even now, had a life of its own at night. Its deafening stillness seemed ghostly. If he listened, he could hear the wind howling in the grass, the cracking of the ground from the cold, the splash of waves on the nearby river.