Sixth Watch Page 4

  “Why do you walk around the archive with a flashlight?” I asked.

  “Some of the documents don’t like the light,” Helen replied. “They can take fright and disappear for a few days . . . or years.”

  She stepped out of the cone of light and disappeared. A moment later her voice reached me from a distance—she was walking across the hall without switching on the flashlight.

  “And, it’s less frightening here in the dark, Anton. It means you don’t see lots of things . . .”

  CHAPTER 2

  EARLY IN THE MORNING, AT A QUARTER PAST SEVEN, I WAS standing in the kitchen whisking up an omelette in a little old enamel saucepan with a fork. The skill I had acquired a long, long time ago, in a little one-room apartment, allowed me to do this practically without a sound; I only clattered the fork against the bottom of the little saucepan once.

  As I whisked the omelette I tried to recall where this saucepan came from, with the enamel cracked off in places and the cheerful little yellow duckling on the side. After all, it wasn’t part of Svetlana’s dowry. I used to cook with this saucepan back in my student days. And it wasn’t new then either; my mum gave it to me when I rented my first apartment . . .

  Yes, it’s at least fifty years old . . . If not more. This little saucepan remembers the USSR and Comrade Brezhnev. Now that’s something I don’t remember, but it definitely does. And maybe even Khrushchev? And the Cuban Missile Crisis? And the Great Fatherland War . . .

  No, that’s going a bit too far. That’s not possible.

  I couldn’t resist it any longer though. I looked at the little saucepan through the Twilight.

  The contents glinted with a reproachful yellowish shimmer, reminding me that eggs and milk are foodstuffs of animal origin. Well, I’m sorry, all you unhatched chicks and calves deprived of milk, but we humans are predators.

  I moved on from the aura of the food and tried to read the saucepan’s aura. That’s a difficult trick, probably impossible in principle for a Second- or Third-Level Other.

  But I managed it—by compensating for my lack of experience with force and zapping as much energy into the memory of the metal as I sometimes expended in a week.

  People had eaten out of this saucepan. Good food and plenty of it, as they say. For some reason (maybe because of the jolly duckling on the side?) a lot of food for children had been cooked in it. Including for me.

  It wasn’t made during the war years of course, but right at the beginning of the fifties. And the remelted metal included the iron of smashed tanks; even now there was still something black and orange blazing, something smoky roaring and shuddering, melting and groaning . . .

  It’s a good thing the aura of objects is invisible not only to humans but to most Others . . .

  “Dad?”

  I looked up. Nadya was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, watching me curiously. To judge from the school uniform (she goes to a lycée, and they’re strict about that there), she was all set to go to her lessons.

  “What, my love?” I asked, and tried to keep mixing the omelette, but for some reason the fork was stuck.

  “What are you doing? There was such a bright flash, I thought you were opening a portal.”

  “I’m cooking an omelette,” I said.

  Nadya demonstratively sniffed at the air.

  “I think you’ve already cooked it. And it got burned.”

  I looked into the little saucepan.

  “Yes, looks like it.”

  My daughter smiled for a few moments, looking at me. Then she turned serious.

  “Dad, has something happened?”

  “No. I wanted to read the saucepan’s history. I overdid the Power a bit.”

  “But apart from that, everything’s all right?”

  I sighed. Trying to hide something from Nadya was pointless. Ever since she was about seven, I suppose.

  “Well, not absolutely. I’m concerned about this vampiress . . . Stop, where are you going?”

  “To school. Is that okay?”

  “Mum’s still in the shower. Wait!”

  Nadya started getting nervous.

  “Oh, Dad! I only have to go through three courtyards! I’m fifteen years old!”

  “Not three, but four. Not fifteen, but fourteen. And a little bit.”

  “I’m rounding up!”

  “That’s the wrong direction.”

  Nadya stamped her foot.

  “Dad, stop that, I’m an Absolute . . .”

  “An absolute who?” I asked.

  “Enchantress,” Nadya growled. Naturally, she realized there was no way she could win this argument.

  “That’s good then, an enchantress, and not a fool. You might be boundlessly powerful, but an ordinary rock, if they hit you from behind . . .”

  “Dad!”

  “Or an ordinary vampire call, when you’re not prepared for it . . .”

  Nadya walked over without saying a word and took the saucepan from me. She sat down at the table and started eating with the fork that had been used for beating the eggs.

  “Nadya, I’m not a tyrant,” I said. “Wait for Mum. Or let’s go now, I’ll take you.”

  “Dad, when I walk along the street, three Others keep an eye on me.”

  “Two,” I corrected her. “From the Night Watch and the Day Watch.”

  “And a third one from the Inquisition. He has a powerful artifact, you don’t notice him.”

  So that’s how it is . . .

  “Well, are they going to let a demented vampiress attack their beloved Absolute Enchantress?”

  “I know about all that,” I agreed.

  “Dad, I wear seven amulets. Three of them are specially targeted against vampires.”

  “I know.”

  Nadya sighed and started poking at the omelette and muttering.

  “There’s not enough salt.”

  “Salt’s bad for your health.”

  “And it’s burned.”

  “Activated charcoal is very good for your health.”

  Nadya spluttered in laughter and put the saucepan down.

  “All right, I surrender. Mum can take me, only she mustn’t let anyone see her. If my class sees that my parents bring me to school . . .”

  “You’re worried about what they think?” I asked, taking out a frying pan. I didn’t feel like messing about with an omelette any more. “I’ll make fried eggs . . .”

  “Yes!”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Lots of Others who realize who they are as children very quickly stop paying any attention to ordinary people. It’s good that you’re not like that.”

  “Dad, that girl, the last one who was bitten . . .”

  “Well?”

  “Did she ask to have her memory wiped clean herself?”

  I nodded and broke an egg over the frying pan.

  “Yes, she did. Smart girl. Even if she had persuaded us to leave her the memories, it would have been hard for her to live with them.”

  “I suppose so,” Nadya agreed. “But I couldn’t have done that. It’s like killing yourself.”

  “What a clever daughter I have.”

  “She takes after your wife,” Svetlana said, walking in. “Not quarreling in here, are you?”

  “No,” Nadya and I chorused.

  “Some kind of . . . residual energies.” Svetlana gestured vaguely with her hand.

  “Dad was cooking an omelette,” Nadya said, and giggled.

  Naturally, I’d told my girls everything the day before. About the attacks. And about the riddles. And about the contents of the cardboard box from a Note 202 reel-to-reel stereophonic tape recorder, which Helen had kindly packed to the hilt with the documents that I needed.

  Unfortunately, my story hadn’t provoked even the slightest unease. And if it had only been Nadya—I understand that youth is heedless and foolish . . .

  But Sveta also took a skeptical view of my story.

  She accepted that a message to me was encoded in t
he names of the victims. But at the same time, she flatly refused to take the threat seriously. “Those who truly wish to do evil do not inform others of their plans.”

  And Sveta rejected my hypothesis that the people had been attacked by a vampiress who had once been laid to rest following our encounter. First, although I don’t work the streets all the time, I had managed to offend quite a few vampires and vampiresses. Second, the ones I had offended could have friends, “sisters in blood”—that’s quite a serious business with vampires, though not as serious as in the Hollywood fantasies. And third, in most cases bloodsuckers don’t bear grudges for years and years, they don’t take revenge in the style of the Count of Monte Cristo. They’re rather earthbound creatures. Practical.

  Otherwise, with their mode of life—or more precisely, afterlife—they couldn’t exist for long.

  All in all, my unease of the previous day had been put down to “the caveman mentality of the household patriarch.” I took offense at such blatant feminism, went to the kitchen, and sat down to go through the documents. Then Sveta and Nadya, having watched some soap opera or other of theirs, came to the kitchen to drink tea, and I moved to the “study.” Unfortunately, spacious as our apartment is, it’s not spacious enough for me to have a separate room for working at home, so I’d set up a study for myself in the glassed-in loggia. And everything would have been fine—it was warm in there and there was plenty of space—but it turned out that I can’t really work properly with a view of the courtyard, and the people, and the cars. I can’t concentrate—I keep turning my head toward the glass wall, like a lethargic schoolboy in a boring lesson.

  Nonetheless, I dutifully sat through the remainder of the evening with the documents and sorted them out into several groups. Then I used a laborious and complicated spell to force myself to understand Hungarian and Danish—although I wouldn’t exactly say the result was that I “learned” them. I sorted out the documents again and read Amanda Kaspersen’s article “On the Resilience of Vampires and Its Limits.” I realized that either when it was written the Day Watch in Denmark was very weak, or in the early twentieth century moral attitudes were far simpler. Miss Kaspersen crudely tortured the vampires who were taken prisoner by the Night Watch, subjecting them to vivisection (if that term can be applied to the living dead, of course) and keeping scrupulous minutes of the whole procedure. Even I, with my total lack of affection for bloodsuckers, started feeling queasy.

  Burning, freezing, cutting into pieces, removal of organs, poisoning . . . even radiation, which was still so exotic in those times—Amanda stuffed radium into the captive vampires in massive doses!

  I looked into the biographical note on Miss Kaspersen and discovered that she worked in the Night Watch from the age of fifteen, that is, from the end of the nineteenth century. That was all it said, but possibly she had personal reasons to hate vampires?

  Anyway, after everything I had read, I didn’t feel like working anymore and I went to bed.

  But today, after sending my daughter off to school, accompanied by my wife, I calmly went back to my documents. Everything that clearly had nothing to do with the case or had already been read I put back into the box that once held an ancient tape recorder (how on earth had those boxes survived in our archive? Did someone put a spell on them, or what?).

  Unfortunately, Amanda Kaspersen’s documents, for all their exhaustive savagery, had not given me any help at all. The assiduous young Danish woman had ascertained that vampires are very, very, very durable, that killing them is hard, and they repair any injuries quickly. Amanda considered the most reliable means (not counting magical laying to rest) to be severing the head and burying it at least two and half yards away from the body (I didn’t even try to figure out how the distance was chosen), or total and complete incineration (“to ashes”), with the ashes being scattered to the wind and “immersion in a barrel of vodka, gin, homebrew liquor, or other alcoholic beverage of sufficient strength to support combustion.”

  Well, even children know that vampires can’t tolerate alcohol.

  I gathered all of Amanda’s documents and put them into the box (by the way, there weren’t just copies, but even some originals—how did they find their way in there?) and crossed her name off the printout. Amanda had convincingly demonstrated that if you take a vampire and torture it good and hard, it will die conclusively and not bother anyone again. I had discovered lots of new things about the female character and Danish national customs, and I now realized why the Danes cut that poor little giraffe, Marius, to pieces in front of children. And I suspected that I would never be able to look at Legos in the same way again.

  But there wasn’t anything I needed in the documents.

  Well, there was still Csaba Orosz.

  Hungary has never been renowned as a place where vampirism is especially rampant. The legendary Count Dracula, who, as it happens, was not a vampire but simply a cruel human being, lived next door, in Rumania. The Hungarians themselves, on the whole a good-natured people who are fond of wine, meat, and scrumptious sweet stuff, have always been rather intolerant of vampires eating them. And in addition, unlike the English and the Americans, they have always been uncivilized enough to believe in vampires.

  So in Hungarian territory vampires have always dragged out a miserable and secretive existence.

  Even without the intervention of the Night Watch.

  After the young maiden’s entertaining notes on vivisecting vampires, I didn’t immediately understand the tone of Csaba Orosz’s text.

  But a fact is a fact—Csaba Orosz was an enthusiastic admirer of vampires!

  I looked up the biographical note on Orosz. He was a Light One, Seventh Level. He was initiated rather late, at the age of sixty. Orosz, who was working as a provincial apothecary at the time, was delighted at the prospects that had opened up to him—he traveled around the world, even getting as far as Australia and Central America. Then he settled in Budapest and started working in the Night Watch, in some minor office position.

  A Light One, no doubt about that. But a vampire lover!

  After reading all of Orosz’s articles and several later publications about him (the funny thing is that it was mostly Dark Ones who wrote about Orosz), I thought I understood his motives.

  He became an Other too late. You can’t wind back age—he could give himself the appearance of a young man, he could boost his health, he could look forward to many decades, or even centuries, of fulfilling life. But youth—genuine youth—had already gone forever.

  And he wanted youth.

  Vampires and witches—these are two extremes. Vampires are always young, even if it is the youth of the undead. Witches are always old, although not many folk are as full of life as witches are.

  Orosz admired the youthfulness of vampires. Their polish. Their manners. All the false brilliance and glamour that vampires have developed as camouflage, as a way of luring their victims. And the former apothecary from the town of Székesfehérvár apparently understood all about this—but he admired it.

  Well, there’s no accounting for taste.

  Csaba Orosz, of course, didn’t drink blood, and he didn’t try to whitewash vampires. He understood their nature perfectly well. But his admiration for the physical capabilities of vampires, their strength and stamina, their magic that was so different from the magic of other kinds of Others—all this soon turned him into a very strange person. Although he was a Light One who worked in the Night Watch, Orosz constantly wrote about vampires, collected information about them, and studied them. Apparently the vampires were flattered by this. He spent time with them (well, and why shouldn’t a law-abiding vampire who observed the provisions of the Great Treaty consort with a law-abiding Light Other?). They told him about themselves, they even allowed him to perform experiments of some kind (far gentler than the Danish girl’s, of course).

  Everyone likes to be the focus of attention. They say that the most spine-chilling psychos, when they are finally caught, are ab
solutely delighted to start reciting the story of their atrocities. Vampires are no exception.

  Basically, Csaba Orosz became a collector of vampire folklore. He was awarded some kind of “Badge of the Guild of Vampires” and set off to travel around the world with it. This was the first thing that astonished me, for I knew of several attempts that vampires had made to set up a unifying structure, but they had never really come to anything—vampires are individualists, they only acknowledge . . . hmm . . . blood kinship. Either family ties, or the ties of initiation . . .

  But with his Guild Badge, Orosz gathered folklore everywhere. He roamed the world again. Came back to Budapest. And, book by book, he published a five-volume encyclopedia called Everything About the Others Known as Vampires.

  This was when everything went askew (you couldn’t call it a scandal, there were too many belly laughs).

  Others—both Light Ones and Dark Ones—read the encyclopedia and discovered that it was chock-full of balderdash. A number of well-known facts were embedded in a string of wild yarns preposterous enough to make the paper blush in shame.

  Csaba Orosz wrote in all seriousness that vampires were the very first Others, who later gave rise to the werewolves and other shape-shifters (“corrupted vampires” in his terminology) and the Light and Dark magicians.

  Orosz painted a vivid picture of how, long, long ago at the dawn of mankind, the Two-in-One—the God of Light and Darkness—appeared to the first Other (a vampire, naturally) and allowed him to taste of his divine blood, thereby bestowing upon him the powers of the Twilight.

  Csaba Orosz related the biblical legend of the flood, except that in his version the flood occurred because in their pride the vampires decided to turn all the people in the world into vampires (Csaba didn’t pass over the delicate question of how, meaning on whom they would feed—in his legend the vampires decided to drink the blood of animals and of their own children, that is, first feed on them, and then transform them into vampires—a kind of waste-free cycle). And it was for this pride that the God of Light and Darkness punished the vampires with the flood, and only Noah and his family were saved . . . and one vampire, a little infant whose vampire parents had put him in a wooden box and launched him upon the waters, and then the box was picked up by Noah’s wife . . . Well, now do you see what can be made out of the Bible if you have no inhibitions, but you do have a distinctive sense of humor and an urge to explain everything from the vampire point of view?