I was astounded. Not by the car, but by the building, which had looked so ordinary in the ordinary world.
In the Twilight the building had grown by three whole floors. And one of them was inserted between the ordinary first and second floors, while the other two were on top, making the already substantial building even larger. The Twilight floors were made of polished black granite. Almost all the windows were curtained and dark, but the first weak rays of sunlight were already glinting on the white boxes of the modern air-conditioning.
I forgot about the protective spells immediately.
There was a small entrance leading straight out onto Tverskaya Street; behind the glass door I could sense, rather than see, the silhouette of an Other.
‘Well, well, well!’ I said. My voice sounded hollow, like all sound in the Twilight. My colleagues all turned their heads as if by command.
‘What? Haven’t you seen it before?’
‘No.’
‘It impresses everybody the first time. Come on, you’ll have plenty of time to admire it.’
We went up a few steps and found ourselves in a tiny duty office. The vague figure behind the door had materialised into a skinny, miserable-looking young guy – I think he was a shape-shifter. He was laughing delightedly as he read Victor Pelevin’s story ‘The Werewolf Problem in Central Russia’.
But the moment Edgar entered the duty office, the young guy was transformed. His eyes flashed and the book dropped onto the desk.
‘Hi, Oleg,’ Edgar greeted him in a Baltic accent that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
Shagron simply nodded.
I decided to say hello too:
‘Good morning.’
‘This is a colleague of ours from Ukraine,’ Edgar said, introducing me. ‘When he wants, let him through into the guest area without any checks.’
‘Understood,’ Oleg confirmed. ‘Shall I enter him in the database?’
‘Yes.’
Oleg glanced into my eyes and bared his teeth in a friendly grin, read my registration mark with some effort, sat down at the desk and took a notebook PC out of one of the drawers.
‘And where’s your partner?’ Edgar asked.
Oleg’s face took on a guilty expression.
‘He went out for cigarettes … Just for a moment.’
‘Let’s go,’ Edgar said with a sigh, taking me by the sleeve and drawing me towards the lifts. Shagron had already pressed the call button.
We seemed to be in the lift for a long time. Certainly longer than I’d been expecting. But then I remembered the additional floors and everything fell into place.
‘The guest area is on the ninth floor,’ Edgar explained. ‘Basically it’s just like a hotel, only it’s free. I don’t think there’s anyone staying there at the moment.’
The lift doors parted soundlessly and we found ourselves in a square foyer, decorated with a rational combination of luxury and economical practicality Leather sofas and armchairs, a live palm tree in a tub, engravings on the walls, a carpet on the parquet floor. A counter like the ones in hotels, but there was no sign of any table and chair for an attendant. Just a locked secretaire, with an elegant metal key in the lock.
Edgar opened the secretaire to reveal neat rows of horizontal wooden pegs, a key hanging on each one. And beside the pegs there were numbers.
But I was being too hasty – there were no keys on two of the pegs: numbers two and four.
‘Take your pick. If the key’s here, it means the apartment’s free.’
He said ‘apartment’, and not ‘suite’, as if the fact that this accommodation for Others was free distinguished it from anonymous hotel suites and put it in the category of places that could be called home.
I took number eight. From the right-hand end of the second row.
‘You can look the place over later,’ Edgar told me. ‘Leave your things and come straight back.’
I nodded, wondering what my Dark colleagues were planning. No doubt a polite but thorough interrogation.
That was okay. I’d survive. They were my kind, after all.
The apartment really was an apartment, with a kitchen, a separate toilet and three spacious rooms – and a huge hall. A typical Stalin-era apartment refurbished to ‘European’ standards. The ceilings were three and a half metres high, if not four.
I hung my jacket on the coat rack and dropped my bag in the middle of the hall. Then I went out into the corridor and pulled the door shut.
I could faintly hear music coming from apartment number four: a minute earlier, as I was walking past, it had been something light and foreign. But now the song had changed. The words were almost drowned out by the harsh rhythm and the hard rock accompaniment – I guessed at them rather than heard them:
I don’t know why, but I froze outside the door. These were more than just words. I absorbed them through my skin, with my entire body. I had forgotten who I used to be, but how could I remember who I’d become? And hadn’t I entered a new circle now, running with a herd that I still didn’t know?
No, I clearly wouldn’t get any chance to listen to silence in the immediate future. Too many others had taken an interest in me. Light Ones and Dark Ones …
Meanwhile the singer’s voice had grown stronger and taken on a triumphant, challenging note: