Сергей Лукьяненков - Last Watch

I was walking along in a crowd that was moving slowly toward the castle on the hill. No, I wasn’t planning to study the austere dwelling of the proud kings of Scotland. I just wanted to get a feel for the atmosphere of the city.

I liked it. Like any tourist center, its festive atmosphere was a little bit forced and feverish, encouraged by alcohol. But even so, the people around me were enjoying life and smiling at one another. For the time being they had set their cares aside.

Cars didn’t often come this way, and they were mostly taxis. Most of the people were walking. The streams moving in the direction of the castle and back intermingled, swirling together in quiet whirlpools around the performers doing their thing in the middle of the street; thin rivulets trickled into the pubs, filtered in through the doorways of the shops. The boundless river of humanity.

A wonderful place for a Light Other. But a tiring one too.

I turned off into a side street and strolled gently downhill toward the gorge that separated the old and new parts of the city. There were pubs here, too, and souvenir shops. But there weren’t so many tourists, and the frantic carnival rhythm slowed down a bit. I checked my map-it was simpler than using magic-and moved in the direction of a bridge over the broad gorge that had once been Nor Loch. The gorge had now passed through its final stage of evolution and been transformed into a park, a place where local people and tourists who were sick of noise and bustle could take a relaxed stroll.

There were more tourists eddying onto the bridge-boarding the double-decker tour buses, watching the street artists, eating ice cream, pensively studying the old castle on the hill.

And on the grassy lawn there were Cossacks, dancing and waving their swords about.

I gave way to that shamefaced curiosity with which tourists regard their compatriots who are working abroad and moved closer.

Bright red shirts. Broad pants like jodhpurs. Titanium alloy swords, presumably so that they would give off pretty sparks during swordplay and be easier to wave around. Stiff, frozen smiles.

There were four men squatting down and dancing.

And they were talking to one another-with Ukrainian accents, but still in my own native Russian. Although you might say they were using the underground version. In more or less printable form it went something like this:

“Up yours!” one pantomime Cossack dancer spat merrily through his teeth. “Move it, you louse! Keep the rhythm going, you tattered condom!”

“Go to hell!” another man in fancy dress answered. “Quit grousing. Wave those arms about. We’re losing money!”

“Tanka, you bitch!” the third man joined in. “Get out here!”

A girl in a bright-colored dress started dancing, letting the Cossacks take a short break. But she still found time for a dignified reply with no serious obscenity:

“Bastards, I’m sweating like a pig, and you sit there scratching your balls!”

I started making my way back out of the crowd of whirring and clicking cameras. Close beside me I heard a girl speaking to her companion in clear Russian.

“How awful!…Do you think they always swear like that?”

An interesting question, that. Always, or just when they’re abroad? Does everybody? Or just ours, the Russians, in the strangely naive belief that nobody outside Russia knows Russian?

I’d rather believe that’s the way all street artists talk to one another.

Buses.

Tourists.

Pubs.

Shops.

A mime artist wandering around a small square, feeling at nonexistent walls-a sad man in an invisible maze.

A cool black dude in a kilt, playing a saxophone.

I realized why I was in no hurry to get to the Dungeons of Scotland. I had to breathe this city into my lungs. Feel it with my skin, my body…with the blood in my veins.

I decided to wander around in the crowd for a bit longer. And then buy a ticket for the “room of horror.”

The tourist attraction was closed. The huge sign was still there on the pillars of the bridge. The double doors fashioned in the entrance-to-ancient-dungeons style were open, but the gap was roped off at chest height. A sheet of cardboard hanging on the rope politely informed me that the Dungeons were closed for technical reasons.

To be quite honest, I was surprised. It was five days since Victor had been killed. Long enough for any police investigation. The Edinburgh Night Watch would have examined everything they needed to without advising the human police about it.

But the place was closed.

I shrugged, lifted up the rope, ducked under it, and set off down the narrow stairway. The metal-grid steps echoed hollowly under my feet. Two flights down there were toilets, then a narrow little corridor with ticket offices that were closed. A few lamps were lit here and there, but they were only intended to create a lurid atmosphere for the customers. Standard, dim energy-saving lightbulbs.

“Is anyone alive down here?” I called out in English, and then realized with a start how ambiguous that was. “Hey…are there any Others here?”

Silence.

I walked through a few rooms. The walls were hung with portraits of people with brutal faces, the kind that would have delighted Lombroso’s heart. Framed texts told the stories of criminals, maniacs, cannibals, and sorcerers. There were display cases with crude models of severed arms and legs, vessels full of dark liquids, instruments of torture. Out of curiosity I took a look at them through the Twilight. All newly made-no one had ever been tortured with them; they didn’t carry the slightest trace of suffering.

I yawned.

There were strings with rags dangling from them stretched out above my head. I guessed they were supposed to represent cobwebs. Higher up I caught glimpses of a metal ceiling with rather unromantic rivets the size of saucers. The tourist attraction had been built in a strictly utilitarian, technical space.

There was something bothering me.

“Is there anyone there? Alive or dead, answer me!” I called out again. And again there was no answer. But what was it that had alarmed me like that? It was something that wasn’t right…when I looked through the Twilight.

I looked around again, using my Twilight vision.

There it was! That was what was so odd!

There was no blue moss-that harmless but unpleasant parasite that grows on the first level of the Twilight, the only permanent inhabitant of the gray reverse side of the world. In a place like this, where people constantly experienced fear, even if it was only circus fear and not the real thing, the blue moss ought to have flourished like crazy. It ought to have been dangling from the ceiling in shaggy stalactites, spread out across the floor in a repulsive, wriggling carpet, covering the walls like thick flocked wallpaper.

But there wasn’t any moss.

Was someone cleaning the premises regularly? Burning the moss off (if he was a Light One) or freezing it off (if he was a Dark One)?

Well, if there was an Other on the staff here, that would be a help to me.

As if in response to my thoughts, I heard the sound of footsteps. They were quite fast, as if someone had heard me shout and was hurrying toward me from a long way away, through the maze of plasterboard partition walls. A few seconds later the black-painted door from this room into the next one opened.

And in walked a vampire.

Not a real one, of course. He had a normal human aura.

A man in costume.

A black cloak, rubber fangs in his mouth, pale makeup on his face. A good-quality makeup job. Only, all this didn’t fit too well with the curly red hair. He probably had to wear a black wig when he was working. And another thing that didn’t fit was the plastic bottle of mineral water that my visitor was just about to drink from.