Stories from Yakutia

Bottle People

Anohter Yakut story that frightened me in the childhood. According to stories, it happened in the Soviet time in Tattinsky district in a small village in broad daylight. The story-teller — let's call him Semyon — was a local farmer and was walking back home from a day of haymaking on a regular summer evening. The dirt road went through some barren grounds, it was sunny and hot (by the way, the summer heat in Yakutia is no less inhuman than the winter frost, the temperature seldom falls below 30°C, and sometimes reaches 40 — the absyulute difference of temperatures at differnt times around the year being around 100 degrees). Semyon's walking merrily, singing something quietly, and then spots three figures headed his way on the road ahead. The one who in the center is pretty tall, the others somewhat shorter. Semyon then pegged them as an adult and two of their children. He wondered who it could be and came to a conclusion that it must be a Nikitin with his sons from Semyon's village and didn't pay them much mind. But when the figures approached closer, he noticed that the figures at the sides weren't children at all, they were only a little bit shorter than the central figure. Then Semyon noticed that the outlines of the figures were very strange — they wore identical gray clothes, and the heavy figures hidden under these clothes widened closer to earth, looking something like a bottle. He did not see any legs and did not understand how they managed to move at all.

Semyon was not frightened right away. At first he kept going, until he noticed their big black eyes on white as snow faces, and his face got almost warped out of sheer horror. He then remembered that, according to the Yakut beliefs, when meeting "abakhy", that is various evil spirits, one must never just ran away run away, or they might give chase and even murder you right there and then (see the previous pasta, for example). In about twenty steps ahead there was a fork in the road, and Semoyon made it his plan reach a the fork before the "bottle" people and to just walk away from them. But the fear so held down it that it literally forced itself to go with a mouse speed forward. He was so afraid that he had to literally force himself to walk forward, towards the bottle people. Looking at the faces of those beings was almost too much for him, but every time he lowered his head it seemed to him that they were just about to snatch him up, and his eyes automatically came back up. As he remembered it, all three looked almost identical — plae, as if without a drop of blood, with big black eyes that were only ever looking forward, and with the heavyly deformed figures which became wider in the lower parts. They differed only in their height.

At last, Semyon reached the fork and curtailed on a footpath. At that time the distance between him and the beings was only about a dozen meters. Trying his best not to run, he followed the footpath, keeping a corner of his eye on the walkers. To his great relief, they passed him without even turning their heads. Having put some decent distance between them and himself, Semyon started to run and and ran all the way to his home. On his way he turned around a few times and noticed the silhouettes of the "bottle" people in the distance of the dark road.

As it turned out, he was not the only one who saw them. Several village peopl noticed this trinity top and got really spooked. They decided that the three had no interest in their village and were only passing by on their way to somewhere else...

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