The Man in the Back Alley

While communicating with her charge, Dorothy learns many things about events that happened fifty thousand years ago, when the Real People suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Not-real people. The cause of the failure was the theft of a sacred cap—a helmet of the Old King. Since then, many years have passed. The surviving remnants of the tribe scattered, mixed with people, but some continued to preserve the purity of their blood and, lingering on the margins of life, kept searching for the lost King’s cap.
Wanting to help Old Pelly deal with his complexes, Dorothy orders a taxidermist to make the Old King’s cap—whose description she knew almost perfectly from Pelly’s stories. The staged “discovery” of the hat filled Pelly with extraordinary optimism. Under the influence of this feeling, he somehow takes Dorothy to a place he had never shown anyone before. In the dense bushes behind the derelict house, Pelly created a flower oasis. Roses, peonies, and violets filled the air with scent and made this corner astonishingly beautiful. Shocked by the fact that behind the garbage collector’s rough appearance there were secret hiding places in Pelly’s soul inaccessible to her, Dorothy gives in to his advances…
Meeting Dorothy and finding the cap shake Old Pelly out of his usual life, and it doesn’t do him any good—literally within a few days, after a quarrel with one of the two women living with him, he dies tragically.