The Twilight Watch:

'I can't sense any magic . . .' I said, turning the flask over in my hands.

  'That's the point,' Edgar said smugly. 'A simple and reliable test.'

  I nodded.

  'And here's a simple snack to go with it.' Edgar reached into the inside pocket of his raincoat and took out a triangular bar of Toblerone. 'Right, get on with it. Wait. Which compartment is it?'

  'The sleeper car, compartment two.'

  'We'll keep an eye on it,' Edgar promised. He got halfway to his feet and switched off the light in the compartment. 'Kostya, get under the blanket, we're already asleep.'

  So a couple of seconds later, when I went out into the corridor with the flask and the chocolate, my companions really were lying peacefully under their blankets.

  But in any case, Las was considerate enough not to try to peep in through the open door – he must have genuinely got the wrong idea.

  'Cognac?' Las asked, with a glance at the flask I was holding.

  'Better. Twenty-year-old armagnac.'

  'Good stuff,' Las agreed. 'There are lots of folk who don't even know that word.'

  'Maybe,' I agreed, following Las into the next carriage.

  'Uhuh. Serious types, wheeler-dealers, they handle millions, but apart from White Horse whisky and Napoleon brandy they haven't got a clue about civilised drinking. I've always found the narrow cultural outlook of the political and economic elite astonishing. Tell me, why did the Mercedes six hundred become our symbol of affluence? You're talking to this serious, intelligent guy and he suddenly comes out with: "They dented my Merc, I had to drive a five hundred for a week!" And he has this expression in his eyes, the submission of the ascetic who's been reduced to a five hundred, and the pride of the big-shot who owns a six hundred! I used to think that until the New Russians switched to the Bentleys and Jaguars that they ought to drive, the country would never come to anything. But then they did change, and it made no difference. You can still see the red club jackets under the Versace shirts . . . And there's another example . . . A fine designer they chose to turn into a cult . . .'

  I followed Las into the cosy compartment. There were only two bunk beds, plus a little corner table with its top covering a triangular washbasin, and a little fold-down seat.

  'There's actually less space than in a normal compartment,' I observed.

  'Yes, but then the air conditioning works. And there's a washbasin . . . which comes in handy in many circumstances . . .'

  Las pulled an aluminium suitcase out from under one bunk and started rummaging in it. A moment later a one-litre plastic bottle appeared on the table. I picked it up and looked at the label. It really was kumis.

  'Did you think I was joking?' my 'neighbour' chuckled. 'It's a really great drink. Is that the kind you were thinking of selling?'

  'Yes, that's the stuff,' I blurted out without thinking.

  'Then you won't be able to, that's from Kirghizstan. The place you ought to have gone to is Ufa. It's nearer, and there's less trouble with the customs. They make kumis there, and buza. Have you ever tried buza? It's a mixture of kumis and oat jelly. Horrible stuff but it completely sorts you out if you've got a hangover.'

  Meanwhile, other items had appeared on the table: salami, braised meat, sliced bread and a litre bottle of Polignac French cognac, a brand I didn't know.

  I gulped and added my modest offering to the provisions, then I said:

  'Let's try the armagnac first.'

  'Okay,' Las agreed, taking out two plastic cups for water and two cupro-nickel shot-glasses for the armagnac.

  'Open it.'

  'It's your armagnac, you open it,' Las countered casually.

  There was definitely something fishy here.

  'No, you do it,' I blurted out. 'I can never pour the drinks evenly.'

  Las looked at me as if I was a total idiot. He said:

  'I can see you must be a serious drinker. Do you often share a bottle of vodka three ways out in the street?'

  But he picked up the flask and started twisting the top.

  I waited.

  Las huffed and puffed, then frowned. He stopped trying to unscrew the top and took a close look at it. He muttered:

  'Looks like it's stuck . . .'

  Surely he had to be a disguised Other . . .

  He lifted up the edge of his T-shirt, took a tight grip on the top and turned it sharply with all his strength. He exclaimed excitedly:

  'It's moving, it's moving!'

  There was a crunching sound.

  'That's got it . . .' Las said tentatively. 'Oh . . .'

  He held his hands out to me, embarrassed. One was holding the glass flask, the other was holding its broken-off neck, with the lid still firmly screwed onto it.

  'Sorry . . . oh shit . . .'

  But a moment later a glint of pride appeared in Las's eyes.

  'That's some strength I've got! I'd never have thought . . .'

  I didn't say a word, just pictured Edgar's face when he realised he'd lost his useful artefact.

  'Valuable, was it?' Las asked guiltily. 'An antique flask, right?'

  'It's nothing,' I muttered. 'It's the armagnac I'm upset about. Some glass got into it.'

  'That's no problem,' Las said cheerfully. He went looking in the suitcase again, leaving the mutilated flask on the table. Taking out a handkerchief, he demonstratively stripped the label off it: 'Clean. Never even washed. And not Chinese, but Czech, so you don't need to worry about pneumonia.'

  He folded the handkerchief in two, wound it round the broken neck of the flask and calmly poured the armagnac through it into the two shot-glasses. He raised his own:

  'To our journey!'

  'To our journey,' I repeated.

  The armagnac was soft, fragrant and sweetish, like warm grape juice. It went down easily, without even inspiring the idea of some kind of snack to go with it, and then somewhere deep inside it exploded – humanely and precisely enough to make any American missile jealous.

  'Wonderful stuff,' Las commented, breathing out. 'But very high in sugar, I'm telling you! That's why I like the Armenian cognacs – the sugar content right down at the minimum, but the full flavour's all still there . . . Let's have another.'

  The glasses were filled a second time. Las looked at me expectantly.

  'Here's to health?' I suggested uncertainly.

  'To health,' Las agreed. He drank and then sniffed at the handkerchief. He looked out the window, shuddered and muttered: 'That's some stuff . . . it doesn't mess around.'

  'What's wrong?'

  'You'll never believe it, but I thought I just saw a bat fly past the train!' Las exclaimed. 'Huge, the size of a sheepdog. Br-rr-rr . . .'

  I realised I'd have to give Kostya a couple of words of friendly advice. Out loud I just joked:

  'It probably wasn't a bat, more likely a squirrel.'

  'A flying squirrel,' Las said mournfully. 'God help us all . . . No, honestly, a huge bat!'

  'Maybe it was just flying very close to the glass?' I suggested. 'And you only caught a glimpse of it, so you couldn't judge how far away it was – so you thought it was bigger than it really was.'

  'Maybe so . . .' Las said thoughtfully. 'But what was it doing here? Why would it want to fly alongside the train?'

  'That's elementary,' I said, taking the broken flask and pouring us a third glass. 'A train moves at such great speed that it creates a shield of air in front of it. The shield stuns mosquitoes and butterflies and all sorts of other flying creatures and tosses them into turbulent streams of air running along both sides of the train. So at night bats like to fly alongside a moving train and eat the stunned flies.'

  Las thought about it. He asked:

  'Then why don't birds fly around moving trains in the daytime?'

  'Well, that's elementary too!' I said, handing him his glass. 'Birds are much more stupid than mammals. Bats have already guessed how to use trains to get food, but birds haven't figured it out yet. In a hundred or two hundred years the birds will discov
er how to exploit trains too.'

  'How come I didn't realise all that for myself?' Las asked in amazement. 'It's really all so simple. Okay, then . . .here's to common sense!'

  We drank.

  'Animals are amazing,' Las said profoundly. 'Cleverer than Darwin thought. I used to have . . .'

  I never got to hear what it was Las used to have – a dog, a hamster or a fish in an aquarium. He glanced out of the window again and turned green.

  'It's there again . . . the bat!'

  'Catching the mosquitoes,' I reminded him.

  'What mosquitoes? It swerved round a lamp-post like it wasn't even there! The size of a sheepdog, I tell you!'

  Las stood up and resolutely pulled the blind down. He said in a determined voice:

  'To hell with it . . . I knew I shouldn't be reading Stephen King just before bed . . .The size of that bat! Like a pterodactyl. It could catch owls and eagles, not mosquitoes!'

  That freak Kostya! I realised that in his animal form a vampire, like a werewolf, became completely brainless and had little control over his own actions. He was probably getting a kick out of hurtling along beside the train in the night, glancing into the windows, taking a breather on the lamp-posts. But he should at least take basic precautions.

  'It's a mutation,' Las mused. 'Nuclear tests, leaks from reactors, electromagnetic waves, mobile phones . . . and we just carry on laughing at it all, think it's all science fiction. And the gutter press keeps feeding us lies. So who can I tell – they'll just think I was drunk or I'm lying!'

  He opened his bottle of cognac with a determined expression and asked:

  'What do you think of the supernatural?'

  'I respect it,' I said with dignity.

  'Me too,' Las admitted. 'Now I do. I never even thought about it before . . .' He cast a wary glance at the blind over the window. 'You live all those years, and then somewhere out in the Pskov peat bogs you suddenly meet a live yeti – and you go right off your rocker! Or you see a rat a metre long Or . . .' He waved his hand and poured brandy into the glasses. 'What if it turns out there really are witches and vampires and werewolves living right here alongside us? After all, what better disguise could there be than to get your image enshrined in the culture of the mass media? Anything that's described in artistic terms and shown in the movies stops being frightening and mysterious. For real horror you need the spoken word, you need an old grandpa sitting on a bench, scaring his grandkids in the evening: "And then the master of the house came to him and said: I won't let you go, I'll tie you up and bind you tight and you'll rot under the fallen branches!" That's the way to make people wary of strange happenings. Kids sense that, you know, it's no wonder they love telling stories about the Black Hand and the Coffin on Wheels. But modern literature, and especially the movies, it all just dilutes that instinctive horror. How can you feel afraid of Dracula if he's been killed a hundred times? How can you be afraid of aliens if our guys always squelch them? Hollywood is the great suppressor of human vigilance. A toast – to the death of Hollywood, for depriving us of a healthy fear of the unknown!'

  'I'll always drink to that,' I said warmly. 'Tell me, Las, what made you decide to go to Kazakhstan? Is it really a good place for a holiday?'

  Las shrugged and said:

  'I don't even know. I suddenly got a yen for something exotic – kumis in milking pails, camel races, ram-fights, beautiful girls with unfamiliar kinds of faces, arboraceous cannabis in the town squares . . .'

  'What kind of cannabis?' I asked, puzzled.

  'Arboraceous. It's a tree, only it never gets a chance to grow,' Las explained, with the same kind of serious expression I'd used for my stories about bats and swallows. 'But what do I care, I'm ruining my health with tobacco. I just fancy something exotic . . .'

  He took out a pack of Belomor and lit up.

  'The conductor will be here in a minute,' I remarked.

  'No he won't, I put a condom over the smoke detector.' Las nodded upwards. There was a half-inflated condom stretched over the smoke detector projecting from the wall. Delicate pink, with plastic studs.

  'I think you probably have the wrong idea about the exotic fun that Kazakhstan has to offer,' I said.

  'Too late to worry about that – I'm on my way now,' Las muttered. 'The idea just came to me out of nowhere this morning: Why don't I go to Kazakhstan? I just dropped everything, gave my assistant his instructions, and went to catch the train.'

  I pricked my ears up at that.

  'Just upped and left? Are you always so footloose and fancy-free?'

  Las thought about it and shook his head.

  'Not really. But this was like something just clicked . . . It's no big deal. Let's have one more for the road . . .'

  He started pouring – and I took another look at him through the Twilight.

  Even though I knew what to look for, I could barely even sense the vestigial trace, the unknown Other's touch had been so light and elegant. It was already fading, almost cold already.

  Simple suggestion, the kind that even the weakest Other could manage. But how neatly it had been done!

  'One more for the road,' I agreed. 'I can't keep my eyes open either . . . we'll have plenty of time to talk.'

  But I wasn't going to get any sleep in the next hour. I had a conversation with Edgar coming up – and possibly one with Gesar too.

  CHAPTER 4

  EDGAR LOOKED SADLY at the broken pieces of the flask. Unfortunately he wasn't dressed appropriately for expressing profound sorrow – loose shorts with a jolly pattern and a baggy undershirt, with his paunch oozing out between the two of them. Inquisitors obviously didn't take great care to keep in good shape; they relied more on the power of their magic.

  'This isn't Prague,' I said, trying to comfort him. 'This is Russia. When bottles don't surrender here, they're exterminated.'

  'I'll have to write an explanatory note,' Edgar said gloomily. 'Czech bureaucracy is a match for the Russian version any day.'

  'At least we know now that Las isn't an Other.'

  'We still don't know anything,' the Inquisitor muttered irritably. 'A positive result would have been unambiguous. With a negative one, there's still a chance he's such a powerful Other that he sensed the trap. And decided to have a little joke with us.'

  I didn't try to object. It was a possibility that we really couldn't exclude.

  'He doesn't seem like an Other to me,' Kostya said in a low voice. He was sitting on his bunk in just his shorts, streaming with sweat and breathing heavily. It looked like he'd spent too long flitting about as a bat. 'I checked him out back at the Assol. Every way I could. And just now too . . . Doesn't look it.'

  'I have something else to say to you,' Edgar snapped. 'Why did you have to fly right outside the window?'

  'I was observing.'

  'Couldn't you just sit on the roof and lean down?'

  'At a hundred kilometres an hour? I might be an Other, but the laws of physics still apply. I'd have been blown off!'