The Third Section Part 32

'No, I won't try harder. No, I won't deal with her. Not until you keep your promise to me.'

'My promise?'

'You know.'

'Ah!' His promise that he would find a way for her to look upon her own reflection. He couldn't string her along for ever. He'd had the mirror for months, but had not dared show it to her, much as he was tempted to. He was eager desperate almost to discover how a voordalak would react to truly seeing its own image, but fearful as well; certainly too fearful to perform such an experiment on himself. But he was also afraid of losing Raisa at least, he had been. Now, if he were to move away from Moscow, then it would be safer not to take her with him. Perhaps this was the best time.

'Move,' he said, flicking his hand at her. She stood up from his desk and walked round to the other side of it. He took her place and opened the top right-hand drawer. Out of it he took his latest journal. He wrote down the date, 26 September 1856, and then a brief heading in antic.i.p.ation of the events he would so carefully note.

Effects of Iceland Spar mirror on voordalak subject Raisa Styepanovna.

Then he reached into the lower drawer, and took it out. It was still covered in the old, embroidered shawl an essential protection, not for the mirror but for Yudin. He did not want to catch sight of his own reflection in there. Raisa's eyes followed the shape beneath the cloth as he placed it on his desk.

'A few words of explanation first, I think,' he said.

'Very well.' Still she did not take her eyes from it.

'I've long known that a normal mirror does reflect the image of a vampire, but I believed that it does so in a way that somehow alters the image.'

'You've told me this before.'

'I have, and that was what I believed. But now I think I was wrong.'

'You?'

Yudin shrugged, happy to acknowledge his error. 'I'm now of the opinion that it is only by reflection that the true image of the voordalak is revealed. What you and I see in each other is the illusion, the shroud of humanity that allows us to pa.s.s among them undetected and among ourselves.'

'But we don't see our true selves in a mirror we see nothing.'

'Oh, we see it. We see it, but our minds cannot cope with it. They remove it censor it like a diligent and benign government. We see nothing because it is safer to see nothing.'

'But you have found a way to ... avoid the censor?'

Yudin nodded. 'It's essentially an ordinary mirror, but instead of gla.s.s we have a sheet of a mineral that is well known for allowing the viewer to see two images of whatever they look at through it. In the case of a vampire, the mind is caught unawares. The first image is removed, but the second gets through.'

'You tested it?'

'On a human; a human looking at my reflection in the gla.s.s.'

'What did they see?'

Yudin paused, careful to phrase his answer. 'They wouldn't say,' he replied eventually. The memory of a woman's laughter, echoing in the chambers beneath them, filled his mind. She had been laughing at him; laughing at what she saw of him in the mirror.

'But you've never looked at yourself.'

'I felt that would be unscientific. But if you don't want to be the first, I'm sure I can find another way.'

'No,' she said quickly. 'Let me see.'

Yudin put his hand under the shawl and felt the mirror beneath, checking that the gla.s.s was facing down on to the desktop, keeping all risks to a minimum. It was. He held it still while he pulled the cloth away, and then slid it over towards Raisa. She put her hand on it, but did not lift it immediately.

'You may not like what you see,' he said. The words seemed decisive for her. She grasped the handle and held the mirror before her face.

For a moment her expression was calm. She stared at her image, obscured from Yudin's sight, with an air of fascination. A smile almost crept to her lips. She glanced over at him with a look of amused excitement, but only for a moment, before returning to look into the gla.s.s.

'Also,' he said, 'bist du die Schonste im ganzen Land?'

She said nothing. She raised her hand to her face and touched her cheek with her fingertips. Then she moved her hand away and looked at it directly, then put it back to her face so that she could see its reflection. Now her expression was of ever-growing puzzlement. She looked at her fingers, flexed them, turned her hand around to see its palm. Her eyes flicked between the reality of her hand and its image in the gla.s.s, as if trying to find any difference between the two or perhaps any similarity.

'Tell me what you see,' he said.

A tiny sound escaped her throat, the closest thing she could manage to speech. She returned her hand to her face and now, rather than simply touching it, began to probe and explore it. Yudin could see tears form in her eyes, and wondered if she could see them herself. One or two began to trickle down her face. Now her probing had become a clawing. Her nails scratched down her cheek, drawing blood, whose droplets mingled with the salt.w.a.ter of her tears. She watched and waited and the marks on her cheek soon healed, but as soon as they had she began again, her nails digging deeper than before so that Yudin could see the skin hanging from her.

Now at last she found the power of speech. Her voice was mournful, deeper than Yudin had ever heard it. 'What have you done to me?'

'I don't know,' said Yudin, still hopeful of learning something from her. 'Tell me.'

She shook her head. Her nails continued to scratch at her face, creating new wounds faster than the old ones could heal. Her own blood caked her fingernails. Now she had them hooked into her lower eyelid. She began to pull mercilessly at it and the skin stretched and finally began to rupture. Her eye remained as beautiful as ever, its blue iris s.h.i.+ning even in the dim lamplight, but below it her cheek came away, gripped tightly in her hand. It was a deliberate attempt to destroy her own face, to remove it in reality so that whatever she saw of its reflection might vanish too. But as she watched herself, her hand fell down to her side. The effort was clearly futile.

'Tell me,' Yudin repeated.

She let her other hand, still holding the mirror, fall and placed the two together like a ballerina with her arms bras-bas. The mirror was at about the level of her crotch, its back facing out towards Yudin. Her eyes were still tearful. The flap of torn flesh that hung down from below her right eye was only just beginning to heal.

'Why should I tell you?' she asked, her voice numb and empty. 'Why should I tell you, when it's so much easier to show you?'

As she spoke she lifted both her hands, raising up the mirror to face Yudin. He caught the reflection of his office wall sliding quickly past as the gla.s.s moved into place, and then, as he held up his hands to block the image and turned away, he caught the briefest glimpse of something awful sitting at his desk.

'What's the matter, Richard?' she said, using the name by which she had known him so long before. 'Aren't you curious?'

Yudin kept his eyes averted. He felt his heart pump. His fear was visceral and he could not entirely account for it. It came from her, and however much Yudin might think of himself as different, he was one of them; a voordalak. Just as one terrified ox could spread its fear invisibly to the entire herd, so Raisa's terror seeped into him.

'Don't you want to see what you've become?' Raisa continued. 'I was beautiful and I've faced myself. What do you have to fear?'

He could sense she was approaching him, but still did not turn to look. He searched the shelf behind his desk the only place he could risk looking trying to find something that might be of help.

'I'm curious too,' she said. 'I've seen me, but I haven't seen you. All I need to do is tilt the mirror, then I'll see your face. And if you look, you'll see mine.' There was a pause and then she began to laugh, just as the old woman had. Yudin could only presume that she had done what she threatened and was now staring at his reflection instead of her own. 'Oh, Richard,' she said. 'You really should look. You make me look quite, quite plain. It's you who's the fairest in the whole land.' She continued to laugh but it was the forced, cold laughter of madness, the only possible reaction to a situation that was beyond sorrow, beyond tears and beyond hope.

Yudin turned and took the briefest glimpse at her, just enough to judge the position of the mirror. He was an inverted Perseus, daring only to gaze upon the gorgon in the flesh, not in her reflection. He fired the revolver that he had picked up from the shelf. The shot rang out and Yudin allowed himself another glimpse of what was going on. The bullet had missed the looking gla.s.s, but had hit Raisa in the wrist. Her thumb was bent at a peculiar angle, its tendon severed. Raisa herself did not seem to notice. She continued to laugh and gaze into the mirror even as it teetered and fell from her fingers.

It hit the stone floor and shattered, its fragments flying in all directions. The harsh sudden sound of its fracture brought an end to Raisa's laughter. She gasped and fell to her knees, then picked up one of the small fragments of the looking gla.s.s and tried to peer into it, gripping it so tightly that it cut into her flesh and drew blood.

'No,' she moaned softly, and then louder, 'no!' She put the fragment back on the ground and reached out for others near her, placing them beside the first in an attempt to re-create the whole. 'Not yet,' she said. 'One last look. Just one more.'

Yudin fired the gun again. This time there was no inaccuracy. He hit the shard of crystal that she had put down and it shattered to powder. Those around it were flung away. Raisa turned and looked at him.

'Pity me!' she said. She looked around the room as if not knowing where she was, as if Yudin was not even there, and then she was on her feet and running up the stairs to the world above. It was dark now and she would be safe outside, but if Yudin had possessed the ability to pity her, he would have prayed that it was still day and that her misery would have ended in an excruciating but mercifully brief inferno.

He took a few steps towards where the fragments of broken mirror still lay at least twenty of them preparing to clear them up. Then he froze. They had fallen randomly, facing in every direction. Those that lay flat on the floor were no problem, but some were raised up at just such an angle that they reflected Yudin's image back at him, following him like eyes as he moved. None was large enough to see himself in clearly, but with every step he took he caught a glimpse of some dark creature slithering across the room. He saw shapes that he could make some sense of, but not relate to any part of his own body.

He reached out to pick up one of the fragments and saw his hand reflected in it. He pulled back. That it was the image of his hand, he knew simply from the physics of the matter, but he would never have recognized it. And yet, as had been the case with Raisa, he yearned to see more. He reached out again and picked up the piece of crystal, curling his fingers around the edge so that he could just see them reflected, black and hard.

He almost raised it to look into his face, but then sanity prevailed. He threw the fragment to the ground and in the same movement flung himself back across the room. The temptation to see the truth still filled him, but he resisted. He grabbed the embroidered shawl from his desk and shook it out, opening it fully, then tossed it across the floor as though it were a tablecloth and it was his job to prepare for dinner. The shawl swirled and descended gently as the air caught it and tried to prevent it from falling, but eventually it settled, covering almost all of what remained of the mirror. Two shards of the Iceland Spar glinted in the light. Yudin stuck out his foot tentatively and kicked them under the cloth.

It was the best he could do. To clear it away properly he would need help human help. He strode to the bottom of the stairs.

'Gribov!' he bellowed. 'Gribov! Get down here!'

But Gribov did not respond.

CHAPTER XXIV.

IT WAS DMITRY'S first night back in Moscow. he had been forced to travel on horseback, riding along the chaussee by night and sleeping rough by day, burying himself beneath a light covering of earth. He knew from Raisa that she and Yudin travelled by train between Petersburg and Moscow, having themselves delivered as luggage to be loaded into one of the baggage wagons, but he did not feel sure enough of himself to risk it, nor did he know of anyone he could ask to help him. Every friend he had believed him to be dead.

He got into the city only just before dawn, and had found a churchyard with more than one tomb that was large enough for him to crawl into and sleep. It was the most comfortable night he had spent since slinking from his own grave. Physically he had lain upon the hard, stone floor of the vault, but that was hardly a matter of significance. What was good was to be lying among the dead. They could not communicate with him, they did not even know that he was there, but somehow they made him feel he was where he was meant to be.

Once darkness had fallen Dmitry emerged into the night, determining to sleep there again if at all possible. Partly through instinct, partly through the knowledge that Raisa shared with him, he understood it was necessary for a voordalak to have several places in a city where he could hide. This would be the first, and perhaps the favourite. He was not even sure if he would be staying in Moscow for very long. He might return to Petersburg or go somewhere else entirely. He wasn't sure of anything except for his hunger.

And that was why he had come to Moscow; to speak to Yudin. He knew enough from Raisa to understand that it was Yudin who had strung him along for all those years, that it was Yudin who had made the decision that he should at last become like them. Should Dmitry bear him any grudge? He did not regret the fact that he was no longer human, even though he knew he had been tricked into it. It was not now in Dmitry's nature to admire honesty in others, any more than to treasure it in himself. All he wanted from Yudin was advice on how to live his new life it had to be more than mere hunger which drove him. Surely Yudin would not have brought him to this state if he had not planned ultimately to explain that. And yet Dmitry did not relish an existence like Raisa's, serving only as Yudin's abetter.

But for now, an encounter with Yudin was not Dmitry's primary concern. He had eaten only once since leaving Petersburg; a coachman who had dismounted and stepped into the woods to relieve himself. Dmitry wondered if he should have stuck around and enjoyed the coach's pa.s.sengers too, but at the time one had seemed sufficient. He knew he would grow to better understand the cycles of his appet.i.te.

Another thing he had to get used to was pa.s.sing himself off as a human. Yudin, Raisa, Tyeplov, all of them seemed to do it so effortlessly. In reality there was little to it he had the physical appearance of a man and years of experience of being one. The problem was his own fear; his own sense of being an outsider who would easily be spotted. For the first days of his new existence he had truly been a creature of the night, hiding in darkness and stalking his prey. Now, in Moscow, he dared to be seen. He walked down the street towards Lubyanka Square as any gentleman about town would on a cool autumn evening. It had not snowed yet, but it would within the next days or weeks and the nights would grow longer. It was the perfect time to be here.

He had been tempted more than once to pop into a tavern or club; not one of his old haunts, for fear he might be recognized, but somewhere he could further test his ability to blend in. So far, though, he had resisted. He imagined the taste of alcohol of any liquid other than blood on his lips and of the feel of it slithering down his throat. It repelled him. It was a sensation he would have to overcome; Raisa and Yudin had managed it he had seen them drink. But for now he had no stomach for it.

Neither did he have the need for it, not tonight. Tonight he would easily find himself a victim without having to go to any effort of ingratiating himself with strangers. He turned on to Kuznetskiy Bridge Street, taking the route he had so often followed in life, towards his Moscow lodgings. The memories of his former life came to him through a strange filter. The emotions, the love, hate, excitement and boredom of it all, were mere echoes, as though described in a badly written novel, informing him that they existed but not conveying how they felt. But details such as the names, addresses, habits and tastes of all those he had known were still utterly clear to him. Sometimes the memories of those things were more lucid than when he had been alive.

He knocked on a door just a little way down from his own former rooms. Behind it he heard the sound of feet running downstairs. The last time he had been here it had been to ensure the safe delivery of two letters, one to Tamara and the other to Yudin, in the event of his death. That was nothing compared with what he came for today. The door opened.

'Milan Romanovich,' he said with a smile that he hoped was not too broad, not least so that it would not reveal his teeth. He could see the blood draining from Milan's face an unpleasant image considering the reason Dmitry had come here.

'Dmitry!' Milan exclaimed, his voice a mixture of shock and joy. 'They told me you were dead. What happened?'

'It's a long story,' said Dmitry, 'but well worth the hearing. May I come in?'

'My G.o.d, of course!' said Milan. 'And tell me everything.' He stepped back inside and indicated that Dmitry should enter. Dmitry took one glance up and down the street. It did not matter too much if he was seen, but it would be better if there were no witnesses.

He stepped inside and his friend closed the door behind them.

Tamara turned the doork.n.o.b and went into Raisa's room. It was dark outside now, but the curtains were still open and the moon shone in through the newly repaired window, augmenting the light from her lamp. All was as she remembered it: the bed, the two heavy wooden wardrobes; the doorway through to what had been Irina's room; the dressing table with no mirror.

That, of course, made sense now, if the folk stories were true. Raisa would not want the world to see that her image was not reflected in the gla.s.s. Tamara corrected herself. There had been no mirror in all the time she had known Raisa, not just in the weeks since Tyeplov had made her into a vampire. But it was oddly prescient that Raisa should avoid it even in antic.i.p.ation of what she would one day become. It did not matter. What mattered was Tamara's overwhelming urge to remove every trace of Raisa from the room and from the building. It was irrational, she knew Raisa had no further need of her worldly possessions but Tamara felt that action was necessary, and this was all that she could achieve. This place had always been Raisa's since before Tamara had even arrived. To clear it out would be one step towards erasing her memory.

She went over to the interconnecting door and unlocked it, and then the other just a little way beyond. It would be a shorter route to the stairs to carry things out through the other room the room that had once been Irina Karlovna's though why Tamara didn't just throw everything out of the window and into the street below, she did not know. Tamara pondered the details of the night of Irina's death. Irina had borrowed a set of keys to all the doors in the building from Nadia. Why would she have done that? She had her own key to the main door of her room, but not to these. Was it through here that she had let the vampire into her room? It seemed unnecessary.

Tamara couldn't doubt that it was a voordalak that had killed Irina. What would a year ago months ago have seemed a preposterous fantasy was now a rational, inescapable verdict. And yet there were still questions. Which of them had it been? Tyeplov? Ignatyev? Dmitry had spoken of his encounters with them in Sevastopol, but he hadn't been specific as to dates. He had travelled north in the autumn of 1855, but Irina was killed that spring. Could the vampires have left the city so long before he did?

Tamara paused before opening the second door. The s.p.a.ce between the two was as large as a small closet enough for someone to hide in. The wall between the rooms was of the same thickness. That meant that the wall was also wide enough for a person to hide in.

It was an inescapable possibility. From her position between the two doors, Tamara tapped on the painted wall. It certainly wasn't made of brick or stone. That meant little. In a house as old as this dating back to before the fires of 1812 much of the construction was wood rather than anything more substantial. But it didn't explain why the wall needed to be so wide.

Tamara went back into Raisa's room and looked around. Her eyes fell on the tools beside the fireplace. Autumn was heading for winter now, and the fire would soon be needed, but that was not Tamara's immediate concern. She grabbed the poker and went back into the tiny s.p.a.ce. It took only two determined blows for the iron tip to pierce the wooden panel beneath the paint. She pushed the poker deep into the hole it had created and encountered no resistance. She withdrew it and felt a light, cool breeze blowing at her through the gap, accompanied by a musty stench.

She hacked away again with the poker, making the hole bigger, and then used the hook on the end of it to pull away shards of the splintered wood. It wasn't thick, and Tamara soon realized that it would be easier to break through with her bare hands. Soon there was a large enough gap to peer through. She picked up the lamp and looked. Leading down within the thick wall was a staircase.

Within minutes, Tamara had created enough of a breach that she could squeeze through. She reached back to pick up the lamp and the poker. From inside she could see that the wooden panel had a latch and a handle with no corresponding partner on the other side. Instead, a length of cord was attached to it, feeding upwards before disappearing into the ceiling. Evidently this was a door rather than a wall, and was intended to be opened in a more civilized manner than the one that Tamara had come up with. Where the end of the cord secretly emerged, Tamara did not know but she could guess who did. She turned and went down the stairs.

They ended at the level of the ground floor. Tamara imagined the salon beyond her, through only a few inches of wooden wall. The s.p.a.ce was no larger than at the top of the stairs between the two doors. This, though, was not the end of the journey. Now a ladder descended through a small, round gap in the floor. Tamara threw the poker into it and heard a thud as it landed on what sounded like earth. She put the lamp on the floor and began to climb down the ladder, allowing her skirts to ride up so that her feet could find its rungs. Just before her head disappeared, she retrieved the lamp and ducked into the cellar below.

It was a small s.p.a.ce, barely high enough for Tamara to stand upright. The building had sizeable cellars Tamara had been in them but they did not fill quite all of its floor plan. This extra s.p.a.ce explained why. It was inaccessible from the main cellars, but as Tamara glanced at the wall, she guessed it was a temporary barrier and that when the building had first been erected all the s.p.a.ces beneath it had been interconnected. Both this area and the route down to it were relatively new.

There was only one object in the room a coffin. Tamara walked over. It was open and empty expensively made, with a silk lining. Its purpose the purpose of the whole room was obvious; it was the resting place of a voordalak. Raisa's job entailed that she work above during the night, but Tamara had never known where she lived during the day. She had said she had rooms across town, but now it was clear that it was into this cellar that she came each day as dawn broke, and in this coffin that she slept.

Tamara looked around again. Across the room, a dark tunnel led away to the north. Along there must have been some other exit, out into one of the gardens or perhaps the cellar of another house. It would explain how she had often seen Raisa arrive for work through the front door always after dark as if coming from her home. She had been, but her home was beneath that very building, and all she had done was depart through the tunnel and emerge elsewhere, disguising the fact that she could in reality have simply climbed the ladder and the steps back up to her room.

But the one striking realization that had come to Tamara as soon as her eyes had fallen upon the coffin, as soon, perhaps, as she had discovered the concealed stairway, was that all of this had been here for some time. It could not have been put together in the weeks since Raisa's encounter with Tyeplov, when she had supposedly become a vampire. It could never have been built without Tamara noticing: the wall had always been that thick; the cellar had always been missing this section. It must all have been there when Tamara had first arrived, over a year and a half before.

And that meant that from the moment Tamara had met her, from the moment that Raisa had first opened the door and invited her in, she had been a voordalak.

Did that really make much of a difference to things? For Raisa no. If she had been such a creature for two years, or for ten, or for a century, it was of little import compared with the fact of what she was. But for Dmitry, it made all the difference in the world. He had believed that Raisa had become a vampire out of her love of him; that she had become undead to save herself from the certain death that consumption would bring and to save herself from the separation from Dmitry which would ensue. She had persuaded him that once she had led the way down that path out of love for him, he should follow out of love for her. But while his love had been real, hers was a lie. She had been a voordalak since before Dmitry had ever met her, and all of the events with Tyeplov, her journey to Klin to be safe from him and Dmitry's race out there to save her so perfectly timed that he witnessed the very moment of her conversion were part of the same web of deceit, intended to entrap him and make him willingly become a creature like her. It made him no less of a fool for falling for it, but it was clear that the whole thing had been expertly planned.

Too expertly for Raisa. She would not have had the wit for it, and certainly would not have been able on her own to hide her coffin beneath the brothel in this way. Had she had Tyeplov's help? Certainly in the deception of Dmitry, but Tamara doubted he could have helped her construct this. That would have needed to be organized by whoever owned the building. And that was Yudin.

It was Yudin who had suggested that Raisa go to stay in Klin, Yudin who had miraculously discovered the correspondence between her and Tyeplov, Yudin who had conveniently managed to hire a horse so that Dmitry could chase after the train. Was Yudin a voordalak himself, or simply a human who had some kind of alliance with them? It did not really matter, though try as she might, Tamara could not recall ever seeing him in daylight, or seeing his shadow, or seeing his reflection. And Yudin, she already felt certain, was Makarov; and Makarov was very old. How well he hid it.

Tamara climbed the ladder and went back up the hidden stairs to Raisa's room, and then back down the main stairs to the salon to see Nadia about to knock on the door of her office.

'I'm here,' said Tamara.

Nadia turned. 'This was just delivered for you.' She held out a letter.

Tamara took it. 'Who by?' she asked, as she broke the wax seal.

'Just a messenger boy.'

Tamara read.

My dear Madame Komarova, I am informed by my agents that Raisa Styepanovna is heading for the railway station with the apparent intent of catching a train to the capital. I trust this information is of interest to you.

t.i.tular Councillor Gribov Tamara walked briskly over to her office. She returned a moment later having acquired two items: a pistol hidden in her bag and a cane held in her hand. The cane's tip was covered, but beneath it was still sharp enough for its purpose. It might have been Yudin, as part of his intricate deception of Dmitry, who had suggested using that combination of weapons against a voordalak, but it did not mean that they would be any less effective.