The Third Section (24 page)

Dmitry paused. He did not even know for sure that Ignatyev was a vampire; there might be some entirely different explanation. He might break into the building and chase through the rooms,
searching
in one after another, only to find the three men quietly playing cards. Tyeplov would regard him as obsessed – a jealous lover who could not stand for a moment to see the object of his affection happy in the company of others. Worse still, Dmitry might find the three men in a situation that genuinely could be a cause for jealousy. He would rather live in ignorance.

But none of that would serve as an excuse. Were Tyeplov to die, he would be unable to listen to Dmitry’s reasons for not coming to his aid, but Dmitry would hear them all, over and over again, becoming less convincing with each repetition. He could not live with it. He thrust his heel backwards and heard the glass shatter. He turned and slipped through the broken window into the house.

The room was unremarkable – a study of some kind, but Dmitry did not linger to examine it. His only useful observation was that it was empty. There was a door in the far left-hand corner. Dmitry reached into his knapsack and drew out his wooden sword and his pistol. He knew that a bullet could not kill a vampire, but he had witnessed how effective it could be in disabling one, if only temporarily.

The door led back to the hallway. It was darker here. Dmitry glanced and saw the locked front door. More doors led off the hall as it disappeared into the gloom at the back of the house. A flight of stairs ascended just opposite the point where Dmitry had entered.

‘Tolya!’ he shouted again, and then listened. There was no response. He proceeded along the hall, glancing at the bottom of each door he passed, but seeing no sign of light. The sound of cannon firing and shells landing was quieter in here, but still the building shook every minute or so as another explosion brought the fall of the city a step closer. Soon the corridor ended in a door from beneath which shone the faintest glimmer. Dmitry stood and listened, his hand resting on the doorknob.

‘Tolya!’ Still silence. He opened the door swiftly. It was a kitchen. On a shelf stood a candle, burned almost to nothing. He was at the back of the house now. The windows looked on to a small yard and beyond it other houses, some with lights in their windows.

There was a sound – muffled as it penetrated from a different
room
. It could have been a scream; it could have been a cat. Immediately following came a heavy thud, directly above. Dmitry turned and dashed to the stairs, climbing them three at a time, his arms, still clutching sword and pistol, swinging wildly to speed his ascent. The stairway turned twice and at the top he momentarily lost his bearings. The landing was long and narrow, matching the hall below. Dmitry ran along it, but soon found himself at a window. He looked out and saw the street by which he had come. He turned and ran back down the corridor, ignoring the doors on either side, imagining the layout of the rooms below so that he could place himself directly above the kitchen.

At the far end he came to a door, in exactly the position he had expected. There was light coming from this one – not just from beneath it, but along one side and through the keyhole. Dmitry scarcely broke his run as he opened it and burst into the room beyond. Then he froze.

The scene was composed like a painting – a crystallization of domestic ennui as if captured by de Hooch. All three men were in the room. Tyeplov was at the washstand, his wet hands half covering his face as he gazed between his fingers at himself in the mirror on the wall. On the other side of the room, on the floor, on a striped rug just beside the bed though not quite parallel to it, lay the body of the unknown civilian. His head was closer to Dmitry than his feet and it lolled backwards, so that the man’s eyes stared upwards, as if pleading with Dmitry to help him.

He was beyond help. The gash to his neck was vivid and red. A streak of blood across the carpet revealed the exact spot at which his throat had been severed, where it continued to ooze from the man’s veins, not smoothly but in pulses, as his fading heart struggled foolishly to do its duty to the last. It was a moot point whether the man could yet be regarded as dead.

Between the body and Tyeplov, still seemingly frozen in the moment of Dmitry’s arrival, was Ignatyev. He was on one knee, halfway through the process of moving on from the first victim of the night to the second. Moments before he must have been kneeling over the dying man, inflicting that fatal wound and enjoying the flavour of the blood that spilled from it. Now he had turned. His left leg was bent, its foot tensed against the floor, ready to
launch
him across the room at the ingenuous, unseeing Tyeplov. It meant that Ignatyev’s face was turned directly towards Dmitry, and Dmitry could see in every detail the residue of the abomination he had just committed. His chin was red with blood. His mouth – half open – showed tendrils of ruddy saliva that clung and stretched between his teeth. His moustache, normally blond, was fringed by a dark band where blood had soaked into it. Other matter was caught up among the bushy whiskers, whose exact nature Dmitry didn’t care to consider.

‘Tolya!’ Dmitry hissed.

Tyeplov stood upright and turned, looking first at Dmitry and then at Ignatyev. His face was the epitome of consternation. Ignatyev was on his feet now, changing his direction to move towards Dmitry. Dmitry’s pistol fired, this time with none of the chance and indecision of the fight in the casemate. The bullet went into Ignatyev’s neck and emerged the other side. Behind him, on the mantelpiece, a vase shattered and its fragments fell to the floor. Dmitry could see the wound, just below Ignatyev’s Adam’s apple.

The vampire took a step backwards, but the effect was nothing like as devastating as when Wieczorek’s face had been just inches from the muzzle. Dmitry held his wooden sword tightly, low and out to his right, ready to stab upwards into the creature’s chest, but still he noticed how his hand shook. He tried to speak – to warn Tyeplov – but found that his throat could produce no sound. He sidestepped into the room, placing himself between Ignatyev and his unarmed friend. Ignatyev turned, always keeping his face towards Dmitry. His mouth was closed now, but the blood on his moustache and chin was a constant reminder of the vile entity that he was. It hardened Dmitry’s resolve as he readied himself for a fight to the death.

But Ignatyev did not attack. He raised his hands, open-palmed in a gesture of pacification. The expression on his face was one of confusion, as if he was asking Dmitry what it was that he should do next. Dmitry did not care to fathom the
voordalak
’s motivations. It might be a ruse or it might be a sign of weakness. Dmitry guessed it was the latter and took a step forward.

The room vanished in an instant. The rear and side walls were
gone
, along with the bed, the mantelpiece, the fireplace and half of the floor. Ignatyev was gone too. Dmitry felt the floorboards beneath his feet shifting, and suddenly he was falling, only to be saved by firm hands that he knew to be Tyeplov’s grabbing him under the arms and pulling him back.

The shell had exploded just outside, its noise filling the air, but insignificant compared with its more concrete effects. Dmitry gazed out into the starry night and saw in front of him the rooms of other houses, much like this one, their walls ripped away to reveal what lay within. The gun had been way off target for it to have hit here, and in at least one of the buildings the occupants had been taken completely by surprise: a woman stood in her nightdress, her back against her bedroom wall with only just enough floor remaining for her to stand on. She was looking down, looking to where her husband – so Dmitry presumed – lay in the remains of the room beneath. He reached up towards her with his hand, then fell back and moved no more.

Dmitry looked down into the crater beneath him. Two bodies lay there, in the rubble that was the amalgamation of a bedroom and a kitchen. One had been dead even before the shell hit. It lay on a wooden table, standing strangely undamaged in the chaos around it, partly shrouded by the striped rug. Ignatyev was almost directly beneath Dmitry, writhing as if he were a pinned insect. The floor beneath him had opened like a trapdoor, the end closest to Dmitry remaining in situ as though hinged there. Ignatyev had slid down until his leg penetrated a gap in the surface. At that point he must have swung round, for now he hung almost upside down, his leg still trapped against the floorboard, the femur clearly shattered. His fingers clawed upwards, though they could do nothing to free him.

Dmitry knew that he would escape in time. He must finish the monster now, while it was vulnerable. He looked for a way down into the shattered kitchen and realized the fastest, or at least the safest, would be the most traditional. He half turned and gave a shout of ‘Stay there!’ though Tyeplov displayed no intention of doing otherwise, remaining frozen – pressed up against the wall. Dmitry raced out of the room back to the stairs and was down them in a moment. Soon he was in the kitchen, face to face with
Ignatyev
, except that from the view of each of them, the other’s face was upside down.

Dmitry considered what to do. Ignatyev lay back on the sloping floor, watching him, waiting. There were two options. He could stab the creature with his wooden sword, or attempt to behead it with his steel one. The former seemed the more reliable option, except that Ignatyev’s chest was too high for Dmitry to reach, certainly not with the ability to apply any force. Dmitry looked around him. Nearby stood the kitchen table, the body of Ignatyev’s last – and thankfully final – victim still sprawled on it. If Dmitry could pull it just a little way across the room, then he could climb on it and plunge his wooden blade into the monstrous heart.

He grabbed the table with his left hand and gave it a heave. It wouldn’t budge. He glanced over at Ignatyev again and saw that he was still unable to move. He put the wooden sword on the table within easy reach, and then tugged at it again, this time with both hands. He pulled again, and again.

On the third attempt, it yielded, as did the remainder of the ceiling above. Somehow the table had been supporting the fragile remnants of the wall, but with Dmitry’s help that support had gone, and the collapse of that part of the building was complete. Dmitry was thrown backwards, but managed to roll under the table itself, which saved him from being hit by any of the debris.

It was quiet again within seconds, and Dmitry slid himself out of his protective refuge. He regained his feet as quickly as he could and looked around the room. The sloping floor had fallen in completely, and Ignatyev was no longer trapped. He was standing upright, his weight clearly on only one leg – his broken bones causing the other to bend at an impossible and unusable angle. In his hand, he held Dmitry’s wooden sword. He approached, hopping at first, but even as Dmitry watched, his left leg began to straighten and he dared to place increasing amounts of weight on it. He looked down at the wooden sword in his hand and then grinned, snapping it in two like a twig and casting it aside into the rubble. His grin became broader, so that Dmitry could see his still-bloody fangs. Whatever indecision might have come upon him in the room above had been forgotten in the fall. Now
he
approached Dmitry with only hunger and hatred in his eyes. Dmitry drew his sabre and prepared to defend himself, but he knew he could do little to stave off what fate had decreed for him.

‘No!’

The voice came from above. Both Dmitry and Ignatyev looked up and saw that it was Tyeplov, still managing to find some small patch of solid floor in the ruined bedroom. Ignatyev looked at him for a few seconds, then turned his attention back to Dmitry. His leg seemed fully healed now, and his gait was quite normal.

‘No!’ came Tyeplov’s voice again.

Ignatyev gave one last contemptuous look at Dmitry and turned away. He scrambled over the collapsed masonry of the walls and was soon out in the yard at the back of the house. The wall that divided it from the next property had vanished, and soon so had Ignatyev. Dmitry felt no urge to pursue him. Instead he looked up to see Tyeplov’s face just disappearing behind the edge of the jagged hole in the ceiling above. He heard footsteps going across the landing and raced to catch him, clambering over the table and the body that still lay upon it and making his way out into the hall.

He was halfway up the stairs when he heard the sound of breaking glass, and at the top he quickly saw that the window overlooking the street had been shattered – not simply broken, as Dmitry had the window below, but utterly smashed. Tyeplov had thrown himself through it. Dmitry stood and looked out of its splintered remains, just able to catch a glimpse of a tall figure sprinting away down the street.

‘You will have heard of Sheshkovsky’s Room.’

Yudin asked the question as they reached the bottom of the stone staircase. They were in a short cramped corridor. The brick walls curled over to form an arched roof which only just failed to brush the top of Yudin’s head. The walls themselves were only a little wider than his shoulders. If they wanted to pass each other they would have had to turn sideways, and it would even then have been an intimate operation. The only light came from the lamp in his hand, which made the damp walls glisten. The floor, again brick, was dotted with shallow puddles. Along each side of
the
passageway were three small wooden doors, with another one at the far end.

‘A myth,’ Tamara replied dismissively.

‘Possibly – but a useful one. Some say that the room still exists, in the building beside the chain bridge.’