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.
I began to climb the stairs. The shadows cast by my lamp through the balustrade made strange shapes on the walls of the upper hallway as I ascended. Suddenly I heard a rustling noise and something scuttled across the hall into a corner. I held up the lamp and peered in the direction it had gone. It was a rat, frozen in the corner, looking almost pitifully scared, its beadlike eyes reflecting the lamp's flame. Glancing around, I could see by similar reflections that there were dozens of rats up here, each marked out by the same two tiny points of light. This struck me as odd. I had seen no rats on the ground floor, or even in the cellar. Why should they all have chosen to congregate here on the first floor? What, I wondered, had those staring, shining eyes struck upon up here that they could not find down below?
It was then, as I continued to climb the stairs and my head rose above the level of the floor, that I noticed the smell. It was the smell of a charnelhouse. I thought instantly of the stench of Zmyeevich's breath, which I now knew to be the stink of the raw, decaying human flesh and blood that rose from his stomach. Holding back the rising need to vomit, I followed the smell into a room to the left of the stairs. I heard the scampering of the rats as they fled out of my way. As I stepped into the room, the stench was stronger and its source was immediately revealed to me. On the floor were laid out ten corpses – all in assorted French uniforms, or those of their allies. They were in various stages of decay. On some, no human features remained recognizable. On others, the telltale throat wounds that betrayed both the manner and the motivation of their deaths were still clear. In between, the wounds had begun to vanish into a formless sponge of decomposing flesh.
I didn't inspect any of the bodies very closely. The light of the lamp was faint, and bending down close was not a pleasant experience. I looked around the rest of the room. In addition to the door through which I had entered, there was another that led to an adjacent room. Before I went through, I glanced back and noticed how, in contrast to the careless way in which the bodies had been desecrated by the vampire's fangs, their actual positioning was rather orderly. The ten bodies were neatly placed across the room in two rows, as though they were in a hospital ward. It was no different from a dining table in a grand house such as the one in which I stood. The crockery and wine glasses and cutlery are laid out with punctilious consideration, but little attention is given by the diner to the messy carcass of the chicken left on his plate once he has eaten.
Here I could see why some of the downstairs rooms had been over-furnished. Space had to be made up here to store these mementos, much as a man might overcrowd one room with paintings to leave room in another for the stuffed heads of wolves and bears that he has hunted, oblivious to the protestations of his wife about having such ugly things in the house. Those stuffed beasts would always be placed in poses so much more terrifying and aggressive than the true state of the creature when it was killed. The same could not be said of the bodies laid out here in so orderly a fashion. If anything, it was their defencelessness, not their majesty, that was emphasized in the display. The Oprichniki saw no nobility in their prey, nor did they have wives to moderate their sense of décor.
The orderliness of the layout revealed something else to me. There were only ten corpses in the room because it had reached its capacity. The doorway to the next room beckoned. As I stepped through I heard behind me a rustling sound as the rats returned to the activity from which I had disturbed them.
The next room was larger and had a few vestiges of furniture left in it. In one corner was a high-backed armchair and near it a folding screen of oriental appearance. Elsewhere a table, chairs and a stool all made this room appear a little more 'lived' in, though the very word brought a grimace to my lips. A second door led back out on to the landing. The windows, like the windows in all the rooms I had been in, were hidden behind thick, heavy curtains. Again there were bodies in here, but the room was not yet full. Only two of them were in French uniforms and both were less decayed than any in the other room. The bodies next to these were very different. They were shabbily dressed in ordinary clothes. By this and simply by their faces, I could tell that these were Russian. Like an archaeologist, I had found a division between strata which I could use to mark a precise date; the date when the French had left and the Oprichniki had chosen not to follow them, but to remain and enjoy an alternative, plentiful food supply.