Thirteen Years Later (32 page)

It was no surprise. She was a beautiful woman. Domnikiia Semyonovna – that was her name. Dmitry had not known that much before. He’d known she worked for the Lavrovs, but not in what capacity. He wondered if they knew that the nanny to their little daughter was being fucked every night by one of their oldest friends. He doubted it. Anyway, it was their fault for taking a woman like that into the house.

Even so, she had been enchanting – that glint in her eyes. Could Dmitry have mistaken the way she looked at him? He didn’t think so. And that was the worst of it. He felt ashamed at any subconscious response he might have given her that could suggest there was any prospect of something happening between them. At her age, she flattered herself. That his father should betray his mother was one thing, but that the woman could even think of betraying Aleksei with his own son was madness.

Dmitry realized he had raised himself to his feet. His father did not appear to have noticed. He stepped back into the shadows and continued to watch. Did it matter that his father was fooling his mother, and was himself being taken for a ride? Until last Thursday – when what he had witnessed inside the cathedral had changed his view of the entire world – it had. But now Dmitry’s concerns for Aleksei were far more substantial. And his esteem for his father, which had been at such a low stock for so many years, had risen.

He sat and watched for another hour, during which Aleksei hardly moved, except to take the pipe to and from his lips, and once to refill it. Then, when it was almost half past ten, he dropped back inside the Lobnoye Mesto, and moments later could be seen emerging from it to head north. The shortest route to his hotel was in the opposite direction, but Dmitry had not expected him to go there. He had given up on Kyesha, and Dmitry suspected
he was right to. As promised, the
voordalak
had departed the city.

Dmitry waited until his father had disappeared from view, then made his own way home.

Today, Aleksei knew, he must stick to his work. The notebook and dictionary sat in front of him on his desk – the former open, the latter closed. It was early, scarcely nine o’clock, but Tamara had woken them long before. To sleep late was one of the benefits of his other home in Petersburg, but one which he gladly forwent.

He continued his random approach to the text, although he kept notes to make sure he did not go over the same section twice. It was an infuriating procedure. He had uncovered a number of consecutive sections on what the author – Cain – described as ‘the healing process’, which was a term Aleksei understood well enough, but the details of which made no sense. By Aleksei’s translation, one rat (he had settled, for now, on those being the poor creatures in question) that had the most minor of wounds would succumb to them, while another would struggle through and survive the most terrible ordeals. He doubted his own translation, and in many cases hoped he was wrong.

It was when he looked at the text for 22 August, only two days before the final entry, that the tone moved away from the scientific. Before that, there had been a gap of a week without anything being written. Aleksei felt comfortable in his translation of these more mundane matters.

I have contacted APR. He will prevaricate, but he will come. It may take time. I have returned to the peninsula and will wait. Word will be sent when APR departs.

The text then dissolved into another tract of scientific gibberish, which Aleksei shied away from. He moved to the following day’s entry.

I have looked over APR’s residence. It seems humble for him, but regardless of that, Taganrog is not the place to act against him.

Aleksei went back over the word again. There was no possibility of mistranslation, it was mere transliteration. Whatever alphabet was used, the word was the same.

Taganrog

It was the town where the tsar and tsaritsa were spending the winter. The letters APR suddenly made sense as well. Aleksandr Pavlovich Romanov – the tsar himself. Whatever the meaning of the text, it was clear that Cain had some intention to act against the tsar. The words in English could have unknown subtleties, but there was no doubt that something underhand was intended.

Aleksei grabbed the notebook, forgetting about the paper in which he usually wrapped it. He needed help. Dmitry was an obvious choice, but what interest would Dmitry have in the safety of the tsar? Most likely, this book revealed some sort of plot by the Southern Society. No member of the Northern Society was going to act against it. Perhaps they even knew already.

Who in Moscow could Aleksei trust? He couldn’t think, but he had to do something. He raced through the house, leaving each door open behind him. In the distance, he heard Valentin Valentinovich shouting at him, but he paid no heed. The next moment he was out on the street. In his mind he ran through the list of generals he knew in the city – men who would trust him, and whom he could trust.

As he stood there in the sunny street, he felt bile rising in his throat. At first he could not account for it, but he understood the cause moments after the sensation came over him. It wasn’t fear for the safety of the tsar that brought on that sense of nausea, but a smell – a devastatingly familiar smell, recalled from long ago.
Burning hair. Mould. A scent of decay. He had experienced it only once before, as he stamped down on the wrist of the Oprichnik Pyetr and forced his hand into a beam of sunlight, watching with pleasure as it blistered and burned to nothing, but horrified to see it regrow, as Kyesha’s fingers had regrown, before his eyes.

He looked around. The sun was not high but above the buildings and shining bright on this crisp autumn day. Any
voordalak
outside in these conditions would not simply burn, he would be obliterated. There was no sign of any such occurrence, yet still the smell persisted, strengthened.

Suddenly, Aleksei noticed a dampness against his arms, through his shirtsleeves. He was holding the notebook against his chest, with his arms crossed over it. He now pulled them away, and saw that the leather cover of the book had split open, and was curling at the edges, degrading to a yellow pus which blackened as it soaked into the linen of his clothes.

He stepped back inside the house.

‘What in Heaven are you doing, Aleksei?’ he heard Valentin Valentinovich’s voice say behind him. ‘What
is
that awful stench?’

‘Get back!’ shouted Aleksei, raising his hand and again clutching the book to him. He must have given off the aura of some mad starets – a preacher foretelling the end of the world. It did the job. Valentin disappeared back into the house.

Now that he was out of the sunlight, Aleksei looked again at the book. The leather was not completely destroyed; two wide stripes were missing across the front of it, plus most of the top edge of both front and back. The central strip of the front, where the Latin text was written, had been protected by Aleksei’s arms.

Even as he watched, and as he had expected, the leather began to repair itself. In parts, it was like a wave riding up a shallow beach in an advancing line which never receded. In other places, a thin tendril of the material would shoot across the cover, like the stem of a climbing plant accelerated a thousand times, and bind to a dangling fragment of leather on the other side. Then those
two slivers, reinvigorated by one another, would spread outwards in a thickening band, until, within less than a minute, the cover was as it had always been.

The stench was now no more than a forgotten hint on the breeze.

Aleksei took a step towards the door, holding a corner of the book in front of him. The smell returned, and he saw what he had known he would see. The shadow of the doorframe cut off the sun in a clear line. One small corner of the book was in light, the rest in relative darkness. The corner burned, briefly bursting into flame, and then subsiding as the same noxious fluid as before dribbled from it to the floor emitting its putrid scent. The remainder of the book was unaffected; the same light-brown leather it had been when he first looked at it. The line between what had survived and what had been destroyed was exact – it was the line along which sunlight had been cut off by shadow.

Aleksei stepped inside the hallway again, but he did not need to watch as the wound to the book once again healed over. He had seen all he needed to see.

It explained the strange, delicate texture of the leather that bound the book, so refined it was as if the tanner’s salts had never touched it.

It was not leather.

The book was bound in the skin of a vampire; a living vampire.

A
LEKSEI RETURNED TO HIS STUDY. DOMNIKIIA WAS STANDING
in the doorway to the bedroom, her hand clasping Tamara’s.

‘What’s happening?’ she asked.

Aleksei flicked his eyes towards their daughter, and Domnikiia understood. She led the little girl away. Even before she returned, Aleksei had begun rereading his translation notes. That same sun that had burned the skin that covered the book had shone a new light on the meaning of its contents – it had nothing to do with rats.

‘What is it?’ said Domnikiia, now alone, closing the door behind her.

‘The book,’ said Aleksei. ‘I understand it now.’

‘You understand it?’ Domnikiia did not see what he meant.

‘Not the detail – but I understand what it’s about.’

‘Which is?’

‘
Voordalaki
.’ The single word still held the power to shock Domnikiia, despite what she already knew. She said nothing and he continued. ‘This Englishman, Cain, who wrote the book; he’s been conducting experiments on vampires – horrible experiments. He cuts them open and watches them regrow.’ Fresh understanding was coming to Aleksei even as he spoke. Every bizarre translation of the English suddenly became clear once he had the knowledge of what Cain’s victims were.

‘So?’ said Domnikiia dismissively. ‘Let him. He can torture them till doomsday for all I care.’

Aleksei wondered if he could be so callous, even towards a vampire. But that was not the issue. ‘It’s not torture – it’s experimentation. He’s trying to find out how they function. The question is, why?’

‘The better to kill them.’ Again, Domnikiia spoke with a passion she had picked up from Aleksei over the years. ‘You’ve done the same – this Cain’s just being a bit more thorough.’

‘Perhaps, or perhaps to use them – to make them stronger.’ That was the impression Aleksei had got from the notebook, but there was no specific line he could point to that asserted it. It was simply a question of tone – and tone was the hardest thing even for an expert to translate.

‘So how will you find out? Translate the rest of the book?’

Aleksei didn’t answer her question. ‘There’s another thing,’ he said instead. ‘I know where Cain is. He’s in Taganrog.’

She looked blankly at him.

‘That’s where the tsar is,’ he explained, his voice dropping unnecessarily to a whisper. It was not common knowledge, and he didn’t recall ever having told her.

‘More than a coincidence,’ she said.

‘He’s even mentioned in the book. It can’t be coincidence.’ Aleksei had never discussed with Domnikiia her views on the tsar – not as an institution. She loved him as a distant hero just as almost every other loyal Russian did, but Aleksei had no idea whether she would fall in with or against the members of the Northern Society, or if she would care at all. She had no idea about his own ambivalence.

‘So—’ She did not have time to finish what she was about to say. Valentin Valentinovich stormed in.

‘How dare you make such a scene, Aleksei,’ he blustered, still unable to raise his voice to the shout he so evidently wished to produce. Aleksei and Domnikiia both stared at him blankly, unable to think how to respond to his petty complaints in the light
of what they had been discussing. ‘I should throw you both out of the house right now,’ continued Valentin. ‘All three of you.’

Aleksei stood, holding the French–English dictionary open in his hands. He slammed it shut just beneath Valentin’s nose. The loud clap of air silenced him, and a gust of wind blew his fringe out of place.

‘Don’t worry, I’m leaving,’ said Aleksei. He turned back to the desk and closed the notebook, wrapping it up in the paper in which it had first been delivered. He then tucked both it and the dictionary under his arm and headed for the door. Before leaving, he turned to Valentin Valentinovich. ‘But I still have friends in this town – from the highest and lowest echelons – and if I hear from anyone that your daughter and her nanny aren’t living in exactly the comfort which they would expect, then I think you know what the consequences will be.’