The Last Watch:

by Sergei Lukyanenko

  The woman seized the girl by the hand and skipped in through the doorway, with a frightened backward glance at us.

  ‘What is it that makes people the way they are?’ Olga asked thoughtfully as she looked at the mother and daughter.

  As she closed the door, the woman yapped:

  ‘And don’t you … pee in the lift any more! I’ll call the militia!’

  The word ‘pee’, softened for the daughter, somehow seemed especially horrible. As if there were switches inside the woman’s head, clicking away as they tried to return her thoughts to normal.

  ‘Is she sick?’ I asked Olga.

  ‘That’s just it, she isn’t,’ Olga said in annoyance. ‘She’s psychologically healthy! Let’s go on through the Twilight …’

  I glanced down, found my shadow and stepped into it.

  Olga appeared beside me.

  We looked round and I couldn’t help whistling.

  The entire stairway was overgrown with lumpy blue garbage. The moss was dangling from the ceiling and the banisters like an ultramarine beard, it was spread out across the floor in a cerulean carpet, and around the light bulbs it was woven into honeycombed sky-blue balls that could have inspired any designer to invent a new style of lampshade.

  ‘The staircase has been neglected,’ Olga said, vaguely surprised. ‘But then, a rabid vampire and a hysterical woman …’

  We walked up to the door. I pushed on it – it was locked, of course. Even weak Others know how to lock their doors on the first level of the Twilight. I asked:

  ‘Shall we go deeper?’

  Instead of answering, Olga took a step back, twisted round and kicked the door hard just beside the lock. It swung open.

  ‘Why do things the hard way?’ Olga laughed. ‘I’ve been wanting to try out that kick for a long time.’

  I didn’t ask who had taught her to break down doors like that. Despite Olga’s confidence, I was by no means certain that the apartment was empty. We went into the entrance hall (the blue moss was still there all around us) and both of us spontaneously left the Twilight.

  It was such a long time since I had been here …

  And it was a long time since anyone else had been here. The apartment was full of that heavy, musty smell that you only find in rooms that have been closed up and abandoned. You’d think that even though no one had been breathing there, fresh air would at least have entered through the ventilation system and the small cracks, but no. The air had died anyway, turning sour, like yesterday’s tea.

  ‘There’s no smell,’ Olga said with relief.

  I understood what she meant. There were smells, of course – smells of musty damp and accumulated dust. But there wasn’t that particular smell we had been expecting, the one we had been afraid to find – the sickly-sweet smell of bodies that had been drained of blood by a vampire. Like that time in Mytishchi, where the serial killer Alexei Sapozhnikov had been arrested in his apartment. He was a petty vampire, and weak-minded too, which was precisely why he had evaded the attention of the Watches for so long …

  ‘Nobody’s lived here for at least a month,’ I agreed. I looked at the coat rack – a winter jacket, a fur cap … a pair of dirty heavy fur-lined boots on the floor. It wasn’t just a month, it was a lot longer than that. The owner of the flat had been missing since winter at least. I didn’t remove the defensive spells that I had applied to myself in the car, but I relaxed. ‘Right then, let’s see how he lived … so to speak.’

  We started our inspection in the kitchen. Like the rest of the apartment, the windows in here were covered with heavy curtains. The tulle that was now grey with dust was no doubt supposed to have given the apartment a cosy atmosphere. It hadn’t been washed for perhaps two years, not since Polina had died.

  Behind my back Olga clicked a light switch, making me start. She said:

  ‘Why are we walking around in the dark, like Scully and Mulder? Check the refrigerator.’

  I was already opening the door of the Korean refrigerator that was churring away smugly to itself. Kitchen technology is the kind that gets along best without any human supervision. But a computer left unattended for six months will very often start to malfunction. I don’t know what the reason for that is, but it isn’t magic, that’s for sure. There isn’t any magic in hardware.

  There was nothing horrible in the refrigerator, either. That was something I had hardly dared to hope for. A suspicious-looking three-litre glass jar covered with white mould contained sour tomato juice – you could have made home brew out of it. Of course, it wasn’t good that the tomatoes had been allowed to go to waste, but the Tomato Watch from Greenpeace could deal with that particular crime. There were two-hundred- and five-hundred-gram thick glass bottles standing in the door of the refrigerator. Each bottle had a Night Watch mark that glowed feebly through the Twilight – it was licensed donor blood.

  ‘He didn’t even drink his allowance,’ I said.

  There were also sausages, eggs and salami in the fridge, and in the freezer compartment there was a piece of meat (beef) and pelmeni (mostly soya). Basically the usual range of foods for a man living on his own. Only the vodka was missing, but that was inevitable. All vampires are non-drinkers by necessity: alcohol immediately disrupts their strange metabolism – it’s a powerful poison for them.

  After the kitchen I glanced into the toilet. The water in the toilet bowl had almost competely evaporated and there was quite a smell from the drains. I flushed the toilet and walked out.

  ‘A good time to choose,’ said Olga. I stared at her in confusion, until I realised that she was joking. The Great Enchantress was smiling. She had been expecting to see something terrible too, but now she had relaxed.

  ‘Any time’s good for that,’ I replied. ‘It stank in there, so I flushed the toilet.’

  ‘Yes, I realised.’

  When I opened the bathroom door I discovered that the light bulb had burned out. Maybe he had left it switched on when he’d left. I couldn’t be bothered to search my pockets for a flashlight, so I called on the Primordial Power and lit up a magical light above my head. What I saw made me shudder.

  No, it wasn’t any kind of horror. A bath, a sink, a tap slowly dripping, towels, soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste …

  ‘Look,’ I said, making the light brighter.

  Olga walked up and glanced over my shoulder. She said thoughtfully:

  ‘That is curious.’

  There was writing on the mirror. Not in blood, but in three-coloured toothpaste, so that the words naturally reminded me of the Russian flag. Someone’s finger – and somehow I was sure that it was Gennady Saushkin’s – had traced out three words in large capital letters on the glass surface of the mirror:

  THE LAST WATCH

  ‘No mystery story ever manages without words on the walls or the mirror,’ said Olga. ‘Although the writing ought to be in blood, of course …’

  ‘This toothpaste suits the purpose too,’ I replied. ‘Red, blue and white. The traditional colours of the Inquisition are grey and blue.’

  ‘I know,’ Olga said thoughtfully. ‘Do you think it was deliberate? Vampire, Inquisitor, Healer?’

  ‘I can’t see the line between deliberate intention and coincidence,’ I admitted.

  I walked along the short corridor and glanced into the sitting room. The light worked there.

  ‘It’s very nice,’ said Olga. ‘The house is so run-down, but they did a nice repair job in here.’

  ‘Gennady’s a builder by profession,’ I explained. ‘He did everything at home himself, and he helped me out once … well, I didn’t know who he was then. He was very well thought of at work.’

  ‘Of course he was, as a non-drinker,’ Olga agreed and walked into the bedroom.

  ‘He’s a perfectionist too,’ I said, continuing to praise Gennady as if we hadn’t come here to lay the vampire to rest, and as though I was recommending him to Olga to refurbish her apartment.

  I heard a muffled sound behind my bac
k and turned round.

  Olga was being sick. She was slumped against the doorpost, with her face turned away from the bedroom, and was puking straight onto the wall. Then she looked up at me, wiped her mouth with her hand and said:

  ‘A perfectionist … Yes, so I just saw.’

  I definitely didn’t want to see what Olga had taken such a violent dislike to. But I walked to the door of the bedroom anyway, on legs that had turned to rubber in advance.

  ‘Wait, I’ll get out of the way,’ Olga muttered, moving aside for me.

  I glanced into the bedroom. It took me several seconds to make sense of what I saw.

  Olga needn’t have bothered to move. I didn’t even have time to turn round, I just puked up my lunch straight into the bedroom, through the doorway. If shaking hands through a doorway is bad luck, then what about puking through one?

  1 This story is told in the first part of the book The Night Watch.

  CHAPTER 2

  GESAR WAS STANDING at the window, watching the city deck itself out in its evening lights. Standing there silently, with only his hands, which were clasped behind his back, moving – as if he were weaving some kind of cunning spell.

  Olga and I didn’t say anything either. Anyone might have thought that it was all our fault …

  Garik came in and lingered just inside the door.

  ‘Well?’ Gesar asked without turning round.

  ‘Fifty-two,’ Garik said.

  ‘What do the specialists say?’

  ‘They’ve examined three. They all have the same injuries. The throat has been bitten and the blood has been drunk. Boris Ignatievich, can we carry on with this somewhere else? The stench is so terrible that the spells can’t handle it … And it’s all around the house already … as if a sewer had burst …’

  ‘Have you called a truck?’

  ‘A van.’

  ‘All right, take them away,’ said Gesar. ‘To some waste ground, well away from the city. Let them be inspected there.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then …’ Gesar said pensively. ‘Then bury them.’

  ‘Are we not going to send them back to their families?’

  Gesar thought it over. Then suddenly he turned to me.

  ‘Anton, what do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied honestly. ‘Disappeared without trace or killed … I don’t know which is better for the families.’

  ‘Bury them,’ Gesar ordered. ‘When the time comes we’ll think about it. Perhaps we’ll start quietly exhuming them and sending them back to their families. Invent a story for each one. Do they all have documents?’

  ‘Yes, they were lying in a separate pile. All neat and tidy, the work of a perfectionist.’

  Yes, Gennady had always been neat and tidy. He used to lay down polythene sheeting when he drilled holes in the wall, and then carefully cleaned the floor after himself …

  ‘How could we have failed to notice him?’ Gesar asked in a voice filled with pain. ‘How did we fluff it? A vampire killed more than fifty people right under our very noses!’

  ‘Well, none of them are Moscow locals,’ Garik said. ‘They’re from Tajikistan, Moldova, Ukraine …’ He sighed. ‘Working men who came to Moscow looking for a job. Not registered in Moscow, of course. They lived here illegally. They have places along the main roads, where they stand for a day or two, waiting to be hired. And he’s a builder, right? He knew everyone and they knew him. He just drove up and said he needed five men for a job. And he chose them himself, too, the bastard. Then he drove them away. And a week later he came back for some more …’

  ‘Are people really still so sloppy?’ Gesar asked. ‘Even now? Fifty men died, and nobody missed them?’

  ‘Nobody,’ Garik said, with a sigh. ‘That dead piece of filth … he probably didn’t kill them all straight away … he killed one and the others waited for their turn – for a day, two, three. In this room. And he put the ones he’d drunk in two polythene bags so they wouldn’t stink and stacked them in the corner. The radiators on that side are even switched off. He must have started in the winter …’

  ‘I really feel like killing someone,’ Gesar hissed through his teeth. ‘Preferably a vampire. But any Dark One would do.’

  ‘Then try me,’ said Zabulon, casually moving Garik aside as he entered the Saushkin family’s sitting room. He yawned and sat down on the divan.

  ‘Don’t provoke me,’ Gesar said quietly. ‘I might just take it as an official challenge to a duel.’

  A deadly silence fell in the apartment. Zabulon screwed up his eyes and gathered himself. As usual, he was wearing a suit, but without a tie. And for some reason I got the idea that he had chosen the black suit and white shirt deliberately, as a sign of mourning.

  Olga and I waited, watching these two Others who were responsible for what happened on a sixth of the world’s land surface.

  ‘Gesar, it was a figure of speech,’ Zabulon said in a conciliatory tone of voice. He leaned back on the divan. ‘You don’t think I was aware of this … excess, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gesar snapped. But from the tone of his voice it was clear that he knew perfectly well that Zabulon had nothing to do with this business.

  ‘Well, let me tell you,’ Zabulon said just as peaceably, ‘that I am every bit as outraged as you are, or perhaps even more so. And the entire community of Moscow vampires is outraged and demands the execution of this criminal.’

  Gesar snorted. And Zabulon finally couldn’t resist making a jibe.

  ‘You know, they don’t like the idea of their food base being undermined …’

  ‘I’ll give them a food base,’ Gesar declared in a low, grave voice. ‘I’ll keep a lid on the conserved blood for five years.’

  ‘Do you think the Inquisition will support you?’ Zabulon asked.

  ‘I think so,’ said Gesar, finally turning round and looking him in the eye. ‘I think so. And you will support my request.’

  Zabulon lost the game of stare-me-down. The Dark One sighed, turned away, looked at me and shrugged, as if to say: ‘What am I to do with him, eh?’ He took out a long, frivolous pink cigarette and lit it. Then he said:

  ‘They’ve gone completely wild …’

  ‘Then you make sure they don’t go wild.’

  ‘Their children can’t grow up without this, you know that. Without fresh blood they never reach sexual maturity.’

  Naturally, Zabulon was not in the least concerned for the fate of vampire children. He just wanted to make fun of Gesar. As far as that was at all possible.

  ‘Children? We’ll allow the children fresh blood,’ Gesar said after thinking for a moment. ‘We wouldn’t want thirty … er … Anton?’

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘We wouldn’t want thirty-two bloodsucking teenagers. Fresh blood. But donor blood! We are suspending the issue of licences for five years.’

  Zabulon sighed and said, ‘All right. I’ve been thinking it was time to tighten their rein myself. I asked the secretary of the community to keep an eye on the Saushkins … they proved to be a rotten little family.’

  ‘I ought to have insisted on seven years,’ said Gesar. ‘You agreed to five too easily.’

  ‘But what’s to be done now? We’ve already agreed,’ said Zabulon, puffing out a cloud of smoke. He turned to me. ‘Anton, did you come to see Gennady after Kostya was killed?’

  ‘No,’ I answered.

  ‘But why didn’t you? As an old friend and neighbour … ai-ai-ai …’

  I didn’t answer. Eight years earlier I would have blown my top.

  ‘We’ve decided this matter,’ said Gesar. He frowned as he looked out into the corridor, where they had started carrying out the bodies. The whole entrance and stairway had been put under a light spell that completely removed any desire the inhabitants of the building might have had to glance out of their doors or look out of their windows. But then, in view of the fact that no one had come to see what the woman from my o
ld apartment had been screeching about, people around here must all have been exceptionally incurious anyway.

  It kept getting harder and harder for me to love them. I had to do something about that.

  ‘What else?’ Zabulon asked. ‘As far as help in catching Saushkin is concerned, there’s no problem. My watchmen are already out hunting for him. Only I’m afraid they might not deliver him in one piece …’

  ‘You’re not looking too good, Zabulon,’ Gesar suddenly said. ‘Why don’t you go to the bathroom and wash your hands and face?’

  ‘Really?’ Zabulon asked curiously. ‘Well, since you ask …’

  He got up and then halted in the doorway for a moment to make way for two watchmen who were carrying a half-decomposed corpse in a plastic sack. Apart from blood, there’s a lot of water in a human body. If you leave a bloodless body to rot inside a plastic cocoon, the result is extremely unpleasant.

  Zabulon, however, was not appalled by the sight.

  ‘I beg your pardon, madam,’ he said, letting the remains past. Then he strode cheerfully off to the bathroom.

  ‘Were there women as well?’ Gesar asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Olga replied briefly.

  Gesar didn’t ask any more questions. Apparently even our iron boss’s nerves had given way.

  That night the lads who were carrying out the bodies would get totally juiced. And although it was a breach of the rules, I wouldn’t try to stop them. I’d sooner go out on patrol duty myself.

  Zabulon came back a minute later. His face was wet.

  ‘The towel’s dirty, I’ll dry off like this,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Well?’

  ‘Your opinion?’ Gesar asked.

  ‘I had this friend once, she liked to draw a New Year’s tree on the mirror with toothpaste for the festive season. And the words “Happy New Year”, and little numbers.’

  ‘Very funny,’ Gesar said fastidiously. ‘Have you heard anything about such an organisation?’