A night watchman discovers a man where he should not be, in the church graveyard. The stranger has a odd, antic, vaguely menacing aspect. At one point he even claims to be the ghost of a locksmith who died recently.
Who is this stranger? Well, it seems evident to the reader that he is up to no good, but the nightwatchman is a simple soul, and offers to help the stranger out the gate, even if he is vaguely frightened by him.
And then he returns to the church to discover that the stranger was in fact a robber.
This story is more a fragment than a complete story but it’s well done. The menacing stranger is really quite frightening, with an oozing, smarmy manner that has a weirdly modern cast to it, like a Martin McDonagh or Quentin Tarantino villain.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
When Chekhov writes about criminals, he seems slightly uncertain as to how to manage the narrative. His nefarious characters are obviously nefarious, and yet the people they interact with can’t seem to figure this out for themselves. In “The Horse-Stealers,” we meet a man who is shady and, most importantly, comes from a village known as being populated by people who steal horses… guess what happens!
A Chekhov Circus 