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The Cat-Man of the Old Apple Tree In the village of Maly Sychi, where the last streetlamp went out back in Soviet times, lived an old woman named Agafya. And in the apple tree behind her house lived Him. Nobody remembered when he first appeared. Agafya said one morning she simply found two yellow eyes in the hollow of the trunk and a smell of wet fur. She set a bowl of sour cream under the tree. By dawn the bowl was licked clean, and beside it lay a strangled fox. That was how they came to an understanding. The Cat-Man was half cat and half man, which is the worst of both halves. From the cat he took the silent step, the sharp ears, and the habit of staring at you without blinking. From the man he took cunning, a beard, and the ability to open door bolts. He never touched Agafya. Everyone else, though, he touched. The local policeman, who once stopped by to “check on the old lady,” flew out of her yard without his cap and couldn’t speak for three days. One night, thieves broke into neighbor Petrovich’s chicken coop. By morning they were found sitting on the fence, gray-haired and silent. One of them kept whispering, “He was standing on his hind legs and smiling.” The villagers avoided the apple tree. The children argued about who would dare touch the trunk, and none of them did. Only a boy named Vanya once peeked into the hollow and saw two eyes looking back. The Cat-Man put a finger to his lips like a man and winked like a cat. Vanya has stuttered ever since, but he swears it wasn’t scary. It was very scary. On the night of Ivan Kupala, city men arrived with a bulldozer, planning to tear down Agafya’s house to build cottages. That night the bulldozer started by itself and drove into the swamp. The foreman woke to find a fresh fish head in his bedroom and a note clawed into his pillow: “Leave.”