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.
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.