Before the man's comrades had even the first inkling of his disappearance, Matfei had found the street entrance to the cellar of a nearby tavern, and had slipped down inside, dragging the dying soldier with him.
I crept up to the trapdoor, which Matfei had left open, not daring to go too close, as though it were the entrance to a bear's cave. For all I knew, Matfei could be sitting there in the darkness, looking out at me, waiting until I had moved near enough for him to swoop upon me and drag me back inside. I stood a little way away from the open cellar, trying to make out any hint of movement from within and listening closely. I heard only the vaguest sounds of movement, and then a crash of breaking glass, followed by an exclamation that I took to be a curse.
Suddenly, a dim glow could be seen at the opening to the cellar. Clearly, Matfei was as blind as I was in the pitch-dark and needed additional light. I moved closer to the entrance, remaining standing so that I might be ready to run and also so that I wouldn't peek around the edge of the trapdoor to find myself face to face with Matfei. This way I could see deep into the cellar from some distance, and when I finally saw him, I would still be far enough for him not to reach me.
The first thing I saw was the sparkling remains of several broken vodka bottles, presumably those which Matfei had smashed in the darkness. Behind them was a small lantern which lit the room – Matfei had either been lucky in finding it there, or well prepared in bringing it along with him. A pool of spilled vodka was spreading out from the bottles and gradually soaking into the compacted earth of the cellar floor, but still I could not see Matfei or his victim. I took another step, to improve my line of sight, and a foot came into view – Matfei's from the look of it. He was kneeling or even on all fours and so the sole of his boot faced upwards. Beside it, the clear puddle of vodka was mingling with another, darker spillage, whose source I could not see.
With one more step towards the cellar door, the full picture was revealed. Matfei was on his knees, crouched over the body of the French soldier. One hand was on the man's chest, pressing him down in case he tried to struggle, although he appeared little capable of it. Matfei's other hand was under the soldier's chin, pushing back his head at a macabre angle so that his neck jutted enticingly outwards and upwards. At a first glance, one might have thought Matfei was kissing him, or trying to revive him, but it was not on the soldier's mouth that Matfei had placed his own lips, but on his neck.
The dark puddle that I had seen was a pool of blood, dribbling from the soldier's throat beneath Matfei's mouth. It was unthinkable, but it could only be that Matfei was drinking the man's blood. Even so, he was wasting an awful lot of it. This was not, however, I recalled with a shiver, his first meal of the evening.
Matfei adjusted his position slightly and the soldier's previously motionless legs began to thrash in a pathetic, strengthless, final attempt to resist the assault on his body. Matfei pressed down harder on the man's chest and began to raise his head, satisfied, I thought, with what he had drunk and pausing in his foul imbibement.
But as Matfei raised his head, so the neck and the head of the soldier began to move with it. Matfei pushed against the body beneath him and I saw that his teeth were still sunk deeply into the man's throat. As he strained upwards, the skin suddenly ruptured and gave way and Matfei's head rose rapidly, a lump of flesh trailing from his bloody mouth.
CHAPTER XIII
VOORDALAK!'
The word had found its way from my deepest childhood memories to my vocal cords before my adult mind had time to pour scorn upon it. I heard the whispered sound and only then realized that it was I who had spoken it.
Voordalak – the vampire. Now I remembered the word in the voice that had first spoken it to me. It was an instantly vivid memory: the old house in Petersburg that belonged to my grandmother and in which she had in her old age and her diminishing wealth retreated into just a few rooms; the taste and the texture of the sweet pirozhki of which she maintained a seemingly unending supply; the children gathered around her – myself and my two brothers and various cousins whom I could never quite keep track of – listening to her stories.
My grandmother was the dichotomy that lay at the heart of the Russian spirit made flesh. That at least, and using somewhat different words, was what my father, her son, had brought me up to believe and what I did believe. Despite the dilution of her family's capital over the generations, she maintained an unshakeable belief in etiquette, in the keeping up of a demeanour that fitted one's station and in the God-given order of society and of the world in general. And yet beneath that outward pride lay the intellect of a peasant. There was no stupidity to her, merely a complete lack of any useful education, and worse than that – far ' worse – a lack of any hunger to be educated. She had inherited her wealth from her parents and they from their parents and her knowledge of the world came to her, unamended, by the same route. Just as she, sitting in the few habitable rooms of her once grand house, with only one ageing maid to serve her, failed to realize that wealth did not last for ever but must be continually renewed, so she failed to understand that knowledge itself must be renewed, and not simply kept. The two concepts – in both success and failure – were inseparable. It was not for nothing that Christ had chosen the word 'talent' in His parable.
And so it was entirely in keeping with her own upbringing that my grandmother passed on her knowledge to her children and later to her grandchildren. From her I learned vast amounts of the history of the empire which I have never doubted, and even more about religion, which I constantly and fruitlessly have. But her greatest joy, her greatest expression of love for us, was in her attempts to terrify us. She told us stories, with the same personal confidence with which she described Tsar Pyetr or Jesus, of all the horrors – both natural and supernatural – that could ever be expected to keep a child awake at night. She told of witches, of wolves, of plagues of rats and, which scared me most of all, of the voordalak – the undead vampire.
My father quickly put me straight on the matter. Long before I was born – having seen the luxury in which some of his more distant cousins lived, while he had to work to maintain the most modest of households – he had realized the flaws in his mother's view of the world. He knew that his family would have to create its own wealth and that to do so, it would have to acquire an education. He had put the stories of vampires out of his mind, and when he discovered that I had heard them too, he put them out of mine. He found money to pay for some sort of education for me and each of my brothers, and I was the one who was lucky, or unlucky, enough for that education to be a military one. All thoughts of vampires, and witches, wolves and plagues of rats disappeared from my mind and I became a man.
My grandmother had died when I was seven, but it seemed she had been better read than I had given her credit for. 'Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.' St Ignatius had said it and, it seemed, my grandmother had known it. For in that instant when I had seen Matfei down in the cellar hunched over the soldier's body, everything that my grandmother had told me had flooded back into my mind like an invading army. Now I had seen it with my own eyes, the conviction I had had as a child, the conviction that my grandmother knew she had instilled into me, came back to me with renewed strength. These creatures truly existed. I had seen it. And with that knowledge came another certainty – again imbued in me by my grandmother as an indisputable truth – that such creatures were evil and must be destroyed.