Twelve (19 page)

The fact that he had done his work for the evening and was heading for home, however, did not deter him from keeping an eye out for any other opportunities to kill that might arise. We had been travelling for about half an hour, always in a roughly north-easterly direction, when Matfei suddenly pressed himself against a wall and vanished, much as I had seen Foma do. His hearing was clearly sharper than mine; it wasn't for several seconds that I heard the regular footfall of a patrol.

I ducked into an alleyway, watching the point at which Matfei had disappeared, hoping, if not to see him as he hid, at least to have my eyes focused on the right place when he eventually moved. The patrol marched past him, close enough to feel his breath on their cheeks, if he was in fact breathing at all, such was his stillness. And even now, just two days into their occupation of Moscow, I think 'marched' was too flattering a word for the French troops. Over the weeks that the French remained in Moscow, the behaviour of the average soldier was to deteriorate beyond all military decorum, but already their marching was slack and ragged. They chatted and laughed as they went by, and the last of them paused to light a cigar that he had, no doubt, stolen from some empty Muscovite home, part of the pillage that the French termed the '
Foire de Moscou
' – the Moscow Fair.

I held my breath, though in anticipation of what, I could not tell. Did I fear that the French would see Matfei, that the French would see me or that Matfei would see me? The actual outcome was, I think, the one that I had really been afraid of. The hindmost, straggling man, lighting his cigar, stood unwittingly at the very point in the street where Matfei had thrust himself, camouflaged against the wall. He had fallen ten, perhaps fifteen paces behind his companions.

Matfei pounced. In a single motion he stepped to the soldier's side and flung his tightly clenched fist back against the man's larynx. The blow itself could have caused fatal damage to the soldier – though not immediately fatal – but additionally, it bashed his head back against the wall behind him with a damp cracking sound. Matfei's action had exhibited enormous strength, but also an indolent casualness, like a child cuffing aside a ball as he runs in for his dinner. The soldier crumpled unconscious to his knees, dragging in scraping breaths through his shattered windpipe.

Before the man's comrades had even the first inkling of his disappearance, Matfei had found the street entrance to the cellar of a nearby tavern, and had slipped down inside, dragging the dying soldier with him.

I crept up to the trapdoor, which Matfei had left open, not daring to go too close, as though it were the entrance to a bear's cave. For all I knew, Matfei could be sitting there in the darkness, looking out at me, waiting until I had moved near enough for him to swoop upon me and drag me back inside. I stood a little way away from the open cellar, trying to make out any hint of movement from within and listening closely. I heard only the vaguest sounds of movement, and then a crash of breaking glass, followed by an exclamation that I took to be a curse.

Suddenly, a dim glow could be seen at the opening to the cellar. Clearly, Matfei was as blind as I was in the pitch-dark and needed additional light. I moved closer to the entrance, remaining standing so that I might be ready to run and also so that I wouldn't peek around the edge of the trapdoor to find myself face to face with Matfei. This way I could see deep into the cellar from some distance, and when I finally saw him, I would still be far enough for him not to reach me.

The first thing I saw was the sparkling remains of several broken vodka bottles, presumably those which Matfei had smashed in the darkness. Behind them was a small lantern which lit the room – Matfei had either been lucky in finding it there, or well prepared in bringing it along with him. A pool of spilled vodka was spreading out from the bottles and gradually soaking into the compacted earth of the cellar floor, but still I could not see Matfei or his victim. I took another step, to improve my line of sight, and a foot came into view – Matfei's from the look of it. He was kneeling or even on all fours and so the sole of his boot faced upwards. Beside it, the clear puddle of vodka was mingling with another, darker spillage, whose source I could not see.

With one more step towards the cellar door, the full picture was revealed. Matfei was on his knees, crouched over the body of the French soldier. One hand was on the man's chest, pressing him down in case he tried to struggle, although he appeared little capable of it. Matfei's other hand was under the soldier's chin, pushing back his head at a macabre angle so that his neck jutted enticingly outwards and upwards. At a first glance, one might have thought Matfei was kissing him, or trying to revive him, but it was not on the soldier's mouth that Matfei had placed his own lips, but on his neck.

The dark puddle that I had seen was a pool of blood, dribbling from the soldier's throat beneath Matfei's mouth. It was unthinkable, but it could only be that Matfei was drinking the man's blood. Even so, he was wasting an awful lot of it. This was not, however, I recalled with a shiver, his first meal of the evening.

Matfei adjusted his position slightly and the soldier's previously motionless legs began to thrash in a pathetic, strengthless, final attempt to resist the assault on his body. Matfei pressed down harder on the man's chest and began to raise his head, satisfied, I thought, with what he had drunk and pausing in his foul imbibement.

But as Matfei raised his head, so the neck and the head of the soldier began to move with it. Matfei pushed against the body beneath him and I saw that his teeth were still sunk deeply into the man's throat. As he strained upwards, the skin suddenly ruptured and gave way and Matfei's head rose rapidly, a lump of flesh trailing from his bloody mouth.

V
OORDALAK
!
'

The word had found its way from my deepest childhood memories to my vocal cords before my adult mind had time to pour scorn upon it. I heard the whispered sound and only then realized that it was I who had spoken it.

Voordalak
– the vampire. Now I remembered the word in the voice that had first spoken it to me. It was an instantly vivid memory: the old house in Petersburg that belonged to my grandmother and in which she had in her old age and her diminishing wealth retreated into just a few rooms; the taste and the texture of the sweet
pirozhki
of which she maintained a seemingly unending supply; the children gathered around her – myself and my two brothers and various cousins whom I could never quite keep track of – listening to her stories.

My grandmother was the dichotomy that lay at the heart of the Russian spirit made flesh. That at least, and using somewhat different words, was what my father, her son, had brought me up to believe and what I did believe. Despite the dilution of her family's capital over the generations, she maintained an unshakeable belief in etiquette, in the keeping up of a demeanour that fitted one's station and in the God-given order of society and of the world in general. And yet beneath that outward pride lay the intellect of a peasant. There was no stupidity to her, merely a complete lack of any useful education, and worse than that – far ' worse – a lack of any hunger to be educated. She had inherited her wealth from her parents and they from their parents and her knowledge of the world came to her, unamended, by the same route. Just as she, sitting in the few habitable rooms of her once grand house, with only one ageing maid to serve her, failed to realize that wealth did not last for ever but must be continually renewed, so she failed to understand that knowledge itself must be renewed, and not simply kept. The two concepts – in both success and failure – were inseparable. It was not for nothing that Christ had chosen the word 'talent' in His parable.

And so it was entirely in keeping with her own upbringing that my grandmother passed on her knowledge to her children and later to her grandchildren. From her I learned vast amounts of the history of the empire which I have never doubted, and even more about religion, which I constantly and fruitlessly have. But her greatest joy, her greatest expression of love for us, was in her attempts to terrify us. She told us stories, with the same personal confidence with which she described Tsar Pyetr or Jesus, of all the horrors – both natural and supernatural – that could ever be expected to keep a child awake at night. She told of witches, of wolves, of plagues of rats and, which scared me most of all, of the
voordalak
– the undead vampire.

My father quickly put me straight on the matter. Long before I was born – having seen the luxury in which some of his more distant cousins lived, while he had to work to maintain the most modest of households – he had realized the flaws in his mother's view of the world. He knew that his family would have to create its own wealth and that to do so, it would have to acquire an education. He had put the stories of vampires out of his mind, and when he discovered that I had heard them too, he put them out of mine. He found money to pay for some sort of education for me and each of my brothers, and I was the one who was lucky, or unlucky, enough for that education to be a military one. All thoughts of vampires, and witches, wolves and plagues of rats disappeared from my mind and I became a man.

My grandmother had died when I was seven, but it seemed she had been better read than I had given her credit for. 'Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.' St Ignatius had said it and, it seemed, my grandmother had known it. For in that instant when I had seen Matfei down in the cellar hunched over the soldier's body, everything that my grandmother had told me had flooded back into my mind like an invading army. Now I had seen it with my own eyes, the conviction I had had as a child, the conviction that my grandmother knew she had instilled into me, came back to me with renewed strength. These creatures truly existed. I had seen it. And with that knowledge came another certainty – again imbued in me by my grandmother as an indisputable truth – that such creatures were evil and must be destroyed.

And all that memory and all that knowledge returned to me in the moment it took me to listen to a single word, whispered on my own lips.

'
Voordalak!
'

Matfei heard it too. He raised himself from his grisly meal and looked towards the open trapdoor. I took a rapid step back into the shadows. I could still see the bottom half of Matfei's body, but not his face. He hesitated, wondering whether he truly had heard a noise and whether it posed any danger to him. He quickly chose the path of discretion and I saw his feet heading up the cellar steps and into the tavern above. He slammed the door behind him.

I dropped down into the cellar and examined the soldier's defiled body. He was most certainly dead. His wide eyes gazed unseeing at the ceiling above him and in the murky half-light of the lantern his skin was ashen, its colour drained from his body into the pool that stained the floor around him – and drained too into Matfei. The wounds to his throat were horrendous. Only gaping red caverns remained where there had once been flesh. His crushed voicebox remained
in situ
, but on either side the muscles of the neck had been wrenched away so deeply that the two cavities were joined together – I could, had I so desired, have placed two fingers in one wound and seen them emerge from the other.

I heard footsteps in the room above and remembered that the creature that had done this was still in the building. There was nothing that could be done to assist the dead man with whom I shared the cellar, but plenty I could do to avenge him, for vengeance was my immediate thought, driven into me by my departed grandmother, regardless of the fact that he was a Frenchman – my enemy. I climbed back out of the cellar and scampered across the street to hide. I watched the tavern and did not have to wait long to see Matfei emerge cautiously through the main door. He glanced from side to side and then took a few steps towards the open cellar, casting his eyes inside for a moment, but seeing only the remains of what he had left there. It might have been opportune to attack him there and then, but I could not see myself being victorious in such a battle. I was not armed with my sword – that would not have been compatible with my guise of being a butler – and only had a knife, which I had concealed in my coat. Besides, in all of my grandmother's stories, the
voordalak
rarely responded to the simplistic methods of killing that are so effective on humans.

He set off along the street, heading again to the north-east. He seemed to travel more warily than he had before, though not now concerned for anyone that he might run into ahead of him, but with an eye over his shoulder for fear that he was being followed. I don't think that he ever saw me or heard me, but he knew that there had been someone watching him in the tavern cellar. He also appeared now to be in more of a hurry – his pace was brisk, occasionally breaking into a stumbling run. At first I thought that this was in an effort to escape his pursuer, but as such it seemed ineffectual. Then I realized that it tied in with another piece of folklore that my superstitious grandmother – and how wrong I now knew I was to regard her in that way – had poured into me as a child. Dawn was approaching. The dull red light of the burning city which had filled the sky all night was now being replaced by the half-light of the as yet unrisen sun. Could it be that, as in legend, Matfei had to make his way to some dark resting place; that he would perish if as much as a glimmer of the sun's light fell upon him? 'We sleep by day and kill at night.' Those had been Pyetr's words at our first meeting, three weeks before; words that could easily have come from the lips of my grandmother or of any grandmother as she gave a description to her darling grandchildren of ancient encounters with the dreaded creatures of the night. As a military tactic, it had much to be said for it, imitating the lifestyle taken up by many predatory creatures in the wild. Now it seemed that Matfei and his friends chose that existence not in
imitation
of the wolves and the bats, but because they – the Oprichniki –
were
creatures of the wild, bound by nature itself to follow that nocturnal doctrine.

We were now in an area very familiar to me; only two blocks from the house on Degtyarny Lane where I had spent so many happy hours with Domnikiia. I thanked the Lord that she was no longer in the city. But Matfei carried on, through streets already consumed by the great fires, past others that were still ablaze. It was in Gruzinskaya Street, well outside the main sprawl of the city, that he finally showed signs of being home.

It was a small house, far more humble than most of those occupied by the French. From outside I could see the narrow, low windows that let some little light into a cellar for which there was no entrance from the street. Matfei flung himself over the fence into the back yard and, listening to his footfall, I could hear that his path was downwards to the cellar and not upwards to the house. I tried to look into the cellar through those small windows at the front, but could see nothing. They were painted over from the inside or covered with curtains.

I paused for a moment, for the first time since I had seen Matfei in the cellar. What I had seen him doing to that man – and I pushed the image from my mind immediately as I recalled it – was certainly abominable, inhuman even, but I had seen enough of the world to know that humans were quite capable of carrying out inhuman acts. I had witnessed that during those few hours I had spent as a captive of the Turks. But what they or I might be driven to
in extremis
was not the same as what I had seen Matfei do. And yet in the encroaching light of dawn, the memories of my grandmother's tales began to recede once again. My father's rationality reasserted itself. Perhaps my grandmother was right; there were creatures which drank the blood of men. Perhaps? It was now beyond question – I had witnessed it. But that did not mean that a special word like '
voordalak
' needed to be conjured up to describe them. Matfei was just a man – however warped and vile a breed of man he might be. A cannibal is no less of an abomination than a vampire, but it is a much easier concept to handle.

Whatever his nature, it would make no difference to his fate. He had to die, and I would kill him. It did not matter that he was my ally; this was now an issue beyond mere war. That much at least remained from what my grandmother had taught me – a certainty as to what was right and what was wrong, a sense shared by the whole of humanity that in whatever squabbles we have between each other, there are some boundaries that are not crossed. But Matfei's nature did affect the question of how easy he would be to despatch. If he was merely some degenerate specimen of humanity, I would have little trouble with him. If a vampire, then I would have to be more wary. I tried to remember more of the folklore, but I knew that even if I could recall my grandmother's words, I would have no way of separating the kernel of fact from generations of embellishment. I did not want to find myself Matfei's prey simply for believing in some storybook method for despatching a vampire. Nor did I want to hold back from a conventional attack which might in reality prove to be perfectly effective. As so often, I wondered what Maks would have done.

Maks! For him too it did not matter as to the nature of these creatures. I had left him with them, and having seen the way that Matfei had done his work in the cellar, I had no reason to suppose they would have treated Maks any differently. Be they vampires or men, they would have ripped the flesh from his body and devoured it while he still lived. But then another part of the folklore emerged from my memory, and I prayed to God that either my grandmother was wrong or that the Oprichniki were mere men.

I vaulted the fence. The dawn was becoming ever brighter and the birds sang their song of salutation to it with all their might, but it would still be a good five minutes before the sun actually rose. And yet, I wondered, how much reliance could I place in the old legends that these creatures must shrink throughout eternity from the sun? Ultimately, it did not matter. Matfei had to die. All nine of the Oprichniki that remained had to die. And to kill nine I first had to kill one, and Matfei now awaited me at the bottom of those cellar stairs. At least, I hoped it was only Matfei. Did these creatures sleep alone? Might I go down there to find all nine of them waiting to welcome me, aware after my inept attempts the previous night to follow Foma that I was pursuing them? Had Matfei's long journey of butchery across the city been simply a lure to get me to this point so that I might be removed once and for all as an obstacle to their activities?

Beyond the fence, inside a small courtyard, a flight of stone steps led down to the cellar. At the bottom, a closed door hid from me what lay inside. Matfei, for sure, but who else I did not know. I descended on tiptoe and listened at the door. All was silent. I turned the handle and stepped inside.

It was dark, but not pitch black. Some light shone through the open door and the roughly torn cloth that I could see draped across the small, high windows did not completely obliterate the glow of the day awakening outside. The atmosphere was stale and dank, and colder than the air in the street. Within moments my eyes had adjusted to the dim light and I saw what lay in the cellar.

There were two coffins. I call them coffins because of their present usage. They had not been built to be coffins, but simply as large packing cases of the sort often used to transport muskets and other armaments to the front lines. By virtue of their size and shape, however, they sufficed as resting places for these dead creatures. The one furthest from the door was empty. Its lid lay untidily across it, reminding me of an unmade bed and making it easy to see that its owner had not yet returned. The other was neatly closed and therein, I concluded in the absence of any other hiding place, lay Matfei.