The creature looked fixedly into my eyes for a few seconds and then turned away and continued his journey. I stood in shocked immobility for a moment, considering the prospect of the number of vampires that I might have to face; considering that I had helped to introduce them into a city where they might now stay for ever, neither noticing nor caring that the language spoken by their food supply had changed from French to Russian. The monster that I had been following might be just one of dozens of innocent Muscovites, picked at random, who had not only been denied life, but subsequently denied a true death as the hideous plague spread.
And yet somewhere at the back of my mind, I recognized the face into which I had just been staring. It was certainly not one of the Oprichniki, nor anyone that I knew very well. It was someone that I had previously seen in Moscow. Then it hit me; a corpse that did not decay. Weeks before, when the dead and wounded of Borodino had been arriving in the city, I had looked briefly into those same dark eyes to verify that the grenadier was indeed dead. The priest had declared it to be a miracle that the body did not putrefy, but I knew now it was no such thing. The corpse did not decay because the body had survived the death of the soul. Presumably one of the Oprichniki, during our first foray out to the west, had transformed him into one of their own. The process must take some time. When I had seen him, he was somewhere between the two states of existence – dead as a human but not yet alive as a vampire. But now he was fully a voordalak.
I continued my pursuit of him, but now more stealthily, reenacting how I had pursued Foma, Matfei and then Ioann. This vampire displayed little of their discretion, walking openly down the streets without any show of fear. Indeed, what was there to fear? The city was free again. He had no need to worry about being stopped by French patrols and he could walk about without obstruction, as free as any other Russian. I, too, was in a better position for the French having left. I could once again wear my sword which, though it gave me some comfort, I knew was not the best weapon at my disposal. Tucked inside my coat was the wooden dagger that I trusted would be of far greater use. I reached in and grasped it firmly, reassured and emboldened by the texture of the chiselled wood.
His indirect meanderings about the city might have been put down to his unfamiliarity with its geography, but it seemed to me more that he was merely trying to pass the time. It wasn't until the early hours of the morning that he finally reached his destination and went up to the doorway of a particularly grand house, certainly owned by one of the wealthier families in the city. It was not far from the cellar where I had left Iuda and Ioann to burn so many weeks before. This residence appeared strangely unravaged in comparison with those around it. The area had not been molested by the fires, but no street in Moscow had been left unmolested by looters, be they native or invader. All along the street, windows were smashed and doors kicked in. Rejected booty – and times were harsh enough that only the most impractical of items (books, paintings and so forth) were counted so valueless as to be rejected – lay strewn outside. But this house had its windows intact, its door still a barrier. Even the street outside, though not clean, was at least clear of the debris that lay outside its neighbours. It was as though some faithful servant had remained behind in the house and had – out of habit and oblivious to the tumult around him – kept the building in the tidiness that befitted it. And yet in the chaos that had befallen Moscow, no amount of diligence alone could have maintained such order. A terrifying strength would have been required. The absence of refuse around the house was reminiscent of the absence of insects around the dark corner of a room in which a spider lurks.
The soldier unlocked the door and went inside without fear of encountering the true owner of the residence. Although the rich and the powerful had not yet begun to return to Moscow in any great numbers, many had at least sent servants ahead to reoccupy their property. Perhaps the owners of this place had done so too. Any servant arriving to open up the house would be little expecting to find it infested with vampires and would be quickly dealt with.
Despite the sanitary atmosphere that hung around the building – for which the explanation was all too easy to imagine – I could not in all certainty be sure that this was where the creature planned to sleep. It was still some time until dawn and so I waited a while to see if he re-emerged. After about an hour, no one had come out of the house and no one else had entered. Despite knowing what I might encounter within, there was little debate in my mind that I had to go inside.
I went up to the door and tried the handle. He had not locked it behind him. Inside, the hallway was dark, but on a table I found an oil lamp, which I lit and carried with me. It was a large house of many rooms – the vampire could be hidden in any one of them. I drew out my wooden dagger and grasped it firmly, knowing that at any moment I might be called upon to use it.
I went first into the cellar, having learned from experience that that was where a voordalak would make its nest, but I found nothing untoward. The only thing of note was that the cellar wall had been roughly knocked down, so that it connected to the cellar of the next building. I glanced briefly in there, but saw nothing. A faint smell of sewage greeted my nostrils. I realized that the street outside must be close to the Neglinnaya, the tributary of the Moskva into which many of the city's sewers flowed. In Moscow's good times – when people were plentiful enough and nourished enough to make the sewers full to overflowing – the stench would have been far stronger, but still somewhere beyond the broken-down wall was an underground path to that public drain.
The rooms on the ground floor too were empty, though they were surprisingly well furnished; surprising in contrast with other houses I had seen in the city. Those houses that had not been cleared out by their departing owners had been cleaned out by the invading French, but this place remained disquietingly habitable; almost homely. It all fitted in with the image that the building was somehow 'blessed' – protected from any who would dare to despoil it. Indeed some of the rooms seemed to have too much furniture, as if it had been shifted here to make space in other rooms elsewhere in the house. The only sign of serious upheaval – somewhat incongruous – was that in a number of rooms the floorboards had been removed, adding a challenge for me to pick my way between the joists.
I was suddenly reminded again of my grandmother's house. These rooms, like many of hers, were unlived in, but no serious attempt had been made to close them up or to either protect or remove their contents. For my grandmother, it would have been an admission of her decline to formally abandon the unused rooms of her home. For the occupants of this house, it was probably more a case of laziness than pride. Here, I guessed, as in my grandmother's house, there would be one or two rooms at the heart of the building where its residents dwelt. But unlike another visitor to another grandmother's house – from a story which my own grandmother had told me – it would not be a wolf that I would find living there, but something far worse.