I couldn't return that life, or the countless others that Matfei had taken in his time, but in ending his I could at least ensure that there would be no more deaths at his hand. I had with me still, in my pocket, a large folding knife. I took it out and opened it. The blade was easily long enough and strong enough to pierce his heart as he lay there, unaware of my presence, but I hesitated. I had no compunction about taking his life – if it could be so called – but I remembered again the stories of how difficult such monsters could be to kill. A metal blade was useless; every story I had ever heard agreed on that. Or would silver perhaps work? It didn't matter; my blade was made of steel. It had to be a blade of wood – a wooden stake.
I looked around me and my eyes fell upon the lid that I had moments earlier removed from Matfei's coffin and leaned against the wall. Would that do? Didn't I recall that it couldn't be just any wood, but had to be hawthorn? The packing-case lid was certainly not made from hawthorn. And how could I get a usable stake from the flat lid? And where should I stab Matfei? My grandmother's words began to come back clearly – too clearly. I could remember with certainty that in some stories the voordalak had to be impaled through the heart, in others through the mouth. Could both be right? Was either?
I looked down again at the knife in my hands. It felt solid and comforting. I had used it to kill in the past. Surely, whatever manner of creature Matfei was, he was subject to nature's laws. To have his heart pierced, whatever the material that did it might be, must destroy him. I raised the blade and turned back towards my quarry.
Matfei's fist came down sharply on my hand, knocking the knife to the ground. He was standing beside his coffin, just inches from me, evidently awakened by my presence. He shoved my chest with both hands, exerting a herculean strength which flung me across the room and into the coffin lid, smashing it into pieces. I struggled to my feet and stood, leaning against the wall, gasping to recover the wind that had been knocked out of me.
'So,' he said in his thickly accented French, 'the Russian commander has decided he's had enough of his underling, has he?' He strode towards me menacingly as he spoke, imbued with a new self-confidence that I had not seen in any of them before. His eyes were filled with a fire of sneering hatred which was directed solely at me. 'I'm surprised you'd stoop to getting your hands dirty.' He was in front of me again now and grabbed my lapels, hurling me across the room and into another wall. 'Why not just hire somebody else to kill us once we've killed the French for you? I saw the way you and your friends sniggered at the master when he spoke to you – like he was some old fool – some foreigner who didn't deserve to be in your beautiful city.'
He had crossed the room to me again and this time he struck me across the jaw with the back of his hand. The blow had the same casual might that I had seen him display earlier. It knocked me back into the corner, amongst the shattered remains of his coffin lid. In the face of his strength, I was helpless. At the farmhouse near Borodino, I had witnessed the Oprichniki use speed to capture their prey. In the streets and houses of Moscow it had been stealth. Here I found that Matfei needed neither; his physical power alone was more than enough for him to subdue me. But as if to prove that even this would not be the ultimate instrument of my death, he bared his teeth, still stained with the blood he had drawn at the throats of his earlier victims. His canines, as folklore tells, were bigger than those of a human, but were not, as I had imagined in my childhood, the sharp, precise tools of a surgeon. They were the teeth of a dog, designed more to tear than to pierce.
'You people think you are so refined, with your beauty and your love,' he continued as he approached me once again. I was surprised by this unsuspected feeling of pent-up loathing he had for me. 'But Dmitry Fetyukovich was right; you don't have the stomach to do what we do and you don't have the guts to stop us.'
A tiny part of me wanted to hear him out, not out of politeness, but out of a desperate hunger to discover what could be in the mind of a creature such as this. The struggle for my life, however, was of a greater importance, and now seemed to be my best opportunity. My aim was no longer to kill, but simply to survive; and survival meant flight, for which I needed to get him as far away from the door as possible.
I picked up the broken half of the coffin lid and held it in front of me with both hands, as if intending to use it as a shield. Then I dropped it downwards so that its jagged broken edge pointed towards Matfei as a single row of sharp, wooden teeth. At the same instant I launched myself up off the floor and out of the corner towards him. The upward impact of the serrated edge of the heavy lid into his chest caught him off balance and actually lifted him from the floor momentarily. I carried on running, gathering momentum and pushing him across the room. Had he once found a foothold, he might have been able to use his huge strength against me, but with his feet trailing along the ground, unable to find a purchase, there was nothing he could do.
His back hit the opposite wall and he came to a sudden halt. The coffin lid, and myself with it, came to a halt a fraction of a second later, but in that fraction, the heavy wooden board had travelled far enough to crush his chest. Splinters of wood had penetrated between his shattered ribs and into the organs beneath. Every sense told me to flee, but instead I stood there panting, leaning against the lid with all my weight to pin him against the wall. His head was slumped on to his chest and for a moment I thought he was dead. Then with a swift movement his head snapped upward and I again saw the glare of his hate-filled eyes. He pressed his arms against the wall behind him and, despite all the force I could summon against him, began to push his body away from it. Then, with a look of sudden surprise, he weakened and fell back. The wooden shards that permeated his chest embedded themselves just a little further as the heavy lid followed the motion of his body. I wasn't sure whether his final spasm had been the writhing of a dying animal or that as a result of his movement some tiny splinter had penetrated that vital fraction further into his heart, but now he hung limply and moved no more.
I held my breath, fearing that he might once again revive and avenge himself, and unsure of how to determine if he was truly dead. My uncertainty was unnecessary. Proof of his death soon came in an unexpected but unmistakable fashion. His whole body underwent an almost imperceptibly gradual transformation. One could more easily have captured the movement of the hands of a clock than to have noted any specific event of change in him. And yet within two minutes, the corpse had dehydrated before my eyes. The texture of his skin altered from marble to chalk; his hair from silk to cotton; his eyes from glass to ice. Every physical quality became an unconvincing imitation of what it had once been, just as in his undead life, his whole existence was an imitation of the man he had once been. At the moment of his death the creature before me, however gruesome and horrific, had displayed the richness and vibrancy of an oil painting. But now, though it was of the same scene, it was as though the oil had been replaced by watercolour. The subject was identical, but the medium had changed.