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.
I took hold of the lid. It was not locked or restrained in any way and it lifted easily to reveal Matfei's recumbent body. To anyone who did not know the nature of this creature he would have appeared as though dead. Even a physician, who might test his heartbeat or his breathing, would have found no conventional sign of life. Any doubts I might have had now fled. This was no man, however depraved. This was the voordalak. This was the terror of my childhood become real. He lay quite still, his eyelids closed, his arms by his side. He was in many ways much like the soldier whose body he had left in another cellar less than an hour before, but the one difference was in his complexion. Whereas the soldier had been pale – deathly white as is fitting in the dead – Matfei had a warm and ruddy hue. All the colour that had been taken from the soldier had been transferred, through his blood, into the creature that lay dormant before me. And with the colour, the life was also transferred. In nature, one animal may feed on another's flesh; the taking of life is an inevitable consequence. But here in Matfei was a creature that fed directly on the life of others. The eating of flesh and drinking of blood may have been a necessary mechanism – a repugnant mimicry of the Eucharist – but the nutrient that was required was life itself.