Сергей Лукьяненков - Last Watch

There was nothing horrible in the refrigerator, either. Well, nothing criminal. That was something I had hardly dared to hope for. A suspicious-looking three-liter glass jar covered with white mold contained sour tomato juice-you could have made moonshine out of it. Of course, it wasn’t good that the tomatoes had been allowed to go to waste, but the Tomato Watch from Greenpeace could deal with that particular crime. There were two-hundred-and five-hundred-gram bottles of thick glass standing in the door of the refrigerator. Each bottle had a Night Watch mark that glowed feebly through the Twilight-it was licensed donor blood.

“He didn’t even drink his allowance,” I said.

There were also sausages, eggs, and salami in the fridge, and in the freezer compartment there was a piece of meat (beef) and pelmeni (mostly soya). Basically the usual range of foods for a man living on his own. Only the vodka was missing, but that was inevitable. All vampires are nondrinkers by necessity: Alcohol immediately disrupts their strange metabolism-it’s a powerful poison for them.

After the kitchen I glanced into the toilet. The water in the toilet bowl had almost completely evaporated and there was quite a smell from the drains. I flushed the toilet and walked out.

“A good time to choose for that,” said Olga. I stared at her in confusion, then I realized that she was joking. The Great Enchantress was smiling. She had been expecting to see something terrible too, but now she had relaxed.

“Anytime’s good for that,” I replied. “It stank in there, so I flushed the toilet.”

“Yes, I realized.”

When I opened the bathroom door, I discovered that the lightbulb had burned out. Maybe he had left it switched on when he left. I couldn’t be bothered to search my pockets for a flashlight, so I called on the Primordial Power and lit up a magical light above my head. What I saw made me shudder.

No, it wasn’t any kind of horror scene. There was a bath, a sink, a tap slowly dripping, towels, soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste…

“Look,” I said, making the light brighter.

Olga walked up and glanced over my shoulder. She said thoughtfully, “That is curious.”

There was writing on the mirror. Not in blood, but in tri-colored toothpaste, so that the words actually reminded me of the Russian flag. Someone’s finger-and somehow I was sure it was Gennady Saushkin’s-had traced out three words in large capital letters on the glass surface of the mirror:

“No mystery story ever manages without words on the walls or the mirror,” said Olga. “Although, the writing ought to be in blood, of course…”

“This toothpaste suits the purpose too,” I replied. “Red, blue, and white. The traditional colors of the Inquisition are gray and blue.”

“I know,” Olga said thoughtfully. “Do you think it was deliberate? Vampire, Inquisitor, Healer?”

“I can’t see the line between deliberate intention and coincidence,” I admitted.

I walked along the short corridor and glanced into the sitting room. The light worked there.

“It’s very nice,” said Olga. “The house is so run-down, but they did a nice repair job in here.”

“Gennady’s a builder by profession,” I explained. “He did everything at home himself, and he helped me out once…Well, I didn’t know who he was then. He was very well thought of at work.”

“Of course he was, as a nondrinker,” Olga agreed, and walked into the bedroom.

“He’s a perfectionist too,” I said, continuing to praise Gennady as if we hadn’t come here to lay the vampire to rest, as if I was recommending him to Olga to refurbish her apartment.

I heard a muffled sound behind me and turned around.

Olga was being sick. She was slumped against the doorpost, with her face turned away from the bedroom, and puking straight onto the wall. Then she looked up at me, wiped her mouth with her hand, and said, “A perfectionist…Yes, so I just saw.”

I definitely didn’t want to see what Olga had taken such a violent dislike to. But I walked over to the door of the bedroom anyway, on legs that had turned to rubber in advance.

“Wait, I’ll get out of the way,” Olga muttered, moving aside for me.

I glanced into the bedroom. It took me several seconds to make sense of what I saw.

Olga needn’t have bothered to move. I didn’t even have time to turn around, I just puked up my lunch straight into the bedroom, through the doorway. If shaking hands through a doorway is bad luck, then what about puking through one?

GESAR WAS STANDING AT THE WINDOW, WATCHING THE CITY DECK itself out in its evening lights. He was standing there silently, hands clasped behind his back, shuffling his fingers as if he were weaving some kind of cunning spell.

Olga and I didn’t say anything either. Anyone might have thought that it was all our fault…

Garik came in and lingered just inside the door.

“Well?” Gesar asked without turning around.

“Fifty-two,” Garik said.

“What do the specialists say?”

“They’ve examined three. They all have the same injuries. The throat has been bitten and the blood has been drunk. Boris Ignatievich, can we carry on with this somewhere else? The stench is so terrible that the spells can’t handle it… And it’s all around the house already…as if a sewer had burst…”

“Have you called a truck?”

“A van.”

“All right, take them away,” said Gesar. “To some waste ground, well away from the city. Let them be inspected there.”

“And then?”

“And then…,” Gesar said pensively. “Then bury them.”

“Are we not going to send them back to their families?”

Gesar thought it over. Then suddenly he turned to me. “Anton, what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “Disappeared without a trace or murdered…I don’t know which is better for the families.”

“Bury them,” Gesar ordered. “When the time comes, we’ll think about it. Perhaps we’ll start quietly exhuming them and sending them back to their families. Invent a story for each one. Do they all have documents?”

“Yes. They were lying in a separate pile. All neat and tidy, the work of a perfectionist.”

Yes, he had always been neat and tidy. He used to lay down plastic sheeting when he drilled holes in the wall and carefully cleaned the floor after himself.

“How could we have failed to notice him?” Gesar asked in a voice filled with pain. “How did we botch it? A vampire killed more than fifty people right under our very noses!”

“Well, none of them are Moscow locals,” Garik said. “They’re from Tajikistan, Moldova, Ukraine…” He sighed. “Working men who came to Moscow looking for a job. Not registered in Moscow, of course. They lived here illegally. They have places along the main roads where they stand for a day or two, waiting to be hired. And he’s a builder, right? He knew everyone and they knew him. He just drove up and said he needed five men for a job. And he chose them himself, too, the bastard. Then he drove them away. And a week later he came back for some more…”

“Are people really still so sloppy?” Gesar asked. “Even now? Fifty men died, and nobody missed them?”

“Nobody,” Garik said with a sigh. “That dead piece of filth…he probably didn’t kill them all straightaway… He killed one, and the others waited for their turn-for a day, two, three. In this room. And he put the ones he’d drunk in two garbage bags so they wouldn’t stink, and stacked them in the corner. The radiators on that side are even switched off. He must have started in the winter…”

“I really feel like killing someone,” Gesar spat through his teeth. “Preferably a vampire. But any Dark One would do.”