The Nightwatch

  "Just who are you?" I muttered as I threw open the window, ripping off the paper strips glued over the cracks. The boss had really saddled me with this new partner…

  The owl flapped its wings once and flew into the room. It landed on the wardrobe and closed its eyes, as though it had always lived here. Maybe it got cold on the way over? But then again, it was a polar owl…

  I started closing the window, trying to think what to do now. How would I communicate with her, what would I feed her, and how, in God's name, could this feathered creature possibly help me?

  "Is your name Olga?" I asked, when I'd finished with the window. There was a draft from the cracks now, but I could fix that later. "Hey, bird!"

  The owl half-opened one eye, taking no more notice of me than of the fussy, chattering sparrows.

  I was feeling more awkward with every moment. In the first place I had a partner I couldn't even talk to. And in the second place my partner was a woman!

  Even if she were an owl.

  Maybe I ought to put my pants on? I wasn't really awake yet, standing there in just my crumpled shorts, I hadn't shaved…

  Feeling like a total idiot, I grabbed my clothes and dashed out of the room. I muttered to the owl, "Excuse me, I'll just be a moment."

  If this bird really were what I thought it was, I couldn't have made the best of impressions.

  What I really wanted was to take a shower, but I couldn't afford to waste that much time. I made do with a shave and sticking my buzzing head under the cold faucet. On the little shelf, between the shampoo and the deodorant, I found some eau de cologne, which I don't normally use.

  "Olga?" I called as I stuck my head out into the corridor.

  I found the owl in the kitchen, on the refrigerator. Just sitting there looking dead, like a stuffed dummy stuck up there as a joke. Almost the way it had looked on the boss's shelves.

  "Are you alive?" I asked.

  One amber-yellow eye peered at me.

  "All right," I said, spreading my hands. "Why don't we start from the beginning? I realize I haven't made a very good impression. And I'll be honest about it, I do that all the time."

  The owl was listening.

  "I don't know who you are," I said, straddling a stool and facing the refrigerator. "And you can't tell me either. But I can introduce myself. My name's Anton. Five years ago I discovered that I was one of the Others."

  The owl made a sound that was more like a muffled laugh than anything else.

  "Yes," I agreed. "Only five years ago. That was just the way things went. I had a very high level of resistance. I didn't want to see the Twilight world. So I didn't, until the boss found me."

  The owl seemed to be getting interested.

  "He was doing a practical exercise, briefing agents on how to identify secret Others. When he came across me…" I laughed as I remembered. "He broke through my resistance, of course. After that it was very simple… I did the adaptation course and started working in the analytical section… Nothing much really changed in my life. I became one of the Others, but I didn't notice any big difference in my life. The boss wasn't too pleased, but he didn't say anything. I was good at my job, and he had no right to interfere in anything else. But a week ago this vampire maniac turned up in town, and they gave me the job of neutralizing him. Supposedly because all the agents were busy. But really to get me out there in the firing line. Maybe they were right. But during the week another three people were killed. A professional would have caught that vampire duo in a day…"

  I really wanted to know what Olga thought about all this. But the owl didn't make a sound.

  "What's more important for maintaining the balance?" I asked anyway. "Giving me some operational experience or saving the lives of three innocent people?"

  The owl said nothing.

  "I couldn't sense the vampires with the usual methods," I went on. "I had to attune myself to them. I didn't drink human blood though, I made do with pig's blood. And all those drugs… but then, you know all about those anyway…"

  When I mentioned the drugs, I got up, opened the little cupboard above the stove, and took out a glass jar with a tight-fitting ground-glass stopper. There was only a little bit of the lumpy brown powder left; it made no sense to hand it back in to the department. I tipped the powder into the sink and rinsed it away—the kitchen was filled with a pungent, dizzying odor. I rinsed out the jar and dropped it into the garbage pail.

  "I almost went over the edge," I said. "I was well on the way. Yesterday morning, on my way back from the hunt… I ran into the little girl from next door. I didn't even dare say hello; my fangs had already sprouted. And last night, when I felt the Call summoning the boy… I almost joined the vampires."

  The owl was looking into my eyes.

  "Why do you think the boss gave me the job?"

  A stuffed dummy. Clumps of dusty feathers stuffed with cotton wool.

  "So I could see things through their eyes?"

  The doorbell rang in the hallway. I sighed and shrugged: It was her own fault, after all; anyone would be better to talk to than this boring bird. I flipped the light on as I walked to the door and opened it.

  Standing there in the doorway was a vampire.

  "Come in, Kostya," I said, "come in."

  He hesitated at the door, but then came in. He ran his hand through his hair—I noticed that his palms were sweaty and his eyes were restless.

  Kostya was only seventeen. He was born a vampire, a perfectly ordinary city vampire. It's really tough: With vampire parents a child has almost no chance of growing up human.

  "I've brought back the CDs," Kostya muttered. "Here."

  I took the pile of compact discs from the boy, not surprised there were so many. I usually had to nag him for ages to bring them back: He was terribly absentminded.

  "Did you listen to them all?" I asked. "Did you copy any?"

  "Well, um… I'll be going…"

  "Wait." I grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him into the room. "What's going on?"

  He didn't answer.

  "You already know?" I asked, beginning to catch on.

  "There aren't many of us, Anton," said Kostya, looking me in the eye. "When one of us passes away, we sense it immediately."

  "Okay. Take your shoes off; let's go into the kitchen and have a serious talk."

  Kostya didn't argue. But I was desperately trying to figure out what to do. Five years earlier, when I became an Other and the Twilight side of the world was revealed to me, I'd made plenty of surprising discoveries. And one of the most shocking was the fact that a family of vampires was living right over my head.

  I remember it clearly. I was on my way home from classes that seemed so ordinary, they reminded me of my old college. Three double class periods, a lecturer, heat that glued the white coats to our bodies—we rented the lecture hall from a medical college. I was fooling around as I walked home, dropping into the Twilight in short bursts—I couldn't manage it for any longer back then. Then I began feeling out the people walking down the street, and at the entrance I ran into my neighbors.

  They're really nice people. I wanted to borrow a drill from them once, and Kostya's father, Gennady, a contractor, just came around and had some fun helping out with the concrete walls, demonstrating conclusively that the intelligentsia can't survive without the proletariat…

  And now suddenly I could see they weren't human beings at all.

  It was terrifying. The brownish-gray auras, the hideous pressure. I stopped dead, staring at them in horror. Polina, Kostya's mother, looked surprised; the boy froze and turned his face away. But the head of the family walked toward me, moving deeper into the Twilight as he came, walking with the elegant stride that only vampires, alive and dead at the same time, have. The Twilight is their natural habitat.

  "Hello, Anton," he said.

  The world around me was gray and dead. I'd dived into the Twilight after him without even noticing it.

  "I knew you'd cross the b
arrier some day," he said. "Everything's okay."

  I took a step back—and Gennady's face quivered.

  "Everything's okay," he said. He opened his shirt and I saw the registration tag, a blue imprint on the gray skin. "We're all registered. Polina! Kostya!"

  His wife also crossed into the Twilight and unfastened her blouse. The boy didn't move, and it took a stern glance from his father to get him to show his blue seal.

  "I have to check," I whispered. My passes were clumsy; I lost track twice and had to start again. Finally the seal responded. Permanent registration, no known violations…

  "Is everything okay?" asked Gennady. "Can we go now?"

  "Don't worry about it. We knew you'd become an Other someday."

  "Go on," I said. It was against the rules, but that was the last thing I was bothered about.

  "Yes…" Gennady paused for a moment before he left the Twilight. "I've been in your home… Anton, I return to you your invitation to enter…"

  Everything was just as it should be.

  They walked away, and I sat down on a bench, beside an old granny warming herself in the sunshine. I lit a cigarette, trying to sort out my thoughts. The granny looked at me and said:

  "Nice people, aren't they, Arkasha?"

  She was always getting my name wrong. She only had two or three months left to live, I could see that quite clearly now.

  "Not exactly…" I said. I smoked three cigarettes, then trudged off into the house. I stood in the doorway for a moment, watching the gray "vampire's trail" fade away. I'd just learned how to see it that very day…

  I moped into the evening. I leafed through my notes, which meant I had to withdraw into the Twilight. For the ordinary world, the pages of those standard exercise books were a pure, unsullied white. I wanted to call our group's supervisor or the boss himself—I was his personal responsibility. But I felt I had to make the decision myself.

  When it was dark already I couldn't stand it any longer. I went up to the next floor and rang the bell. When Kostya opened the door, he shuddered. But he actually looked perfectly ordinary, like all of his family…

  "Call your folks, will you," I asked.

  "What for?" he muttered.

  "I want to invite you all for tea."

  Gennady appeared behind his son's back, appeared out of nowhere; he was far more skillful than me, the newly fledged adept of the Light.

  "Are you sure, Anton?" he asked doubtfully. "There's no need. Everything's okay."

  "I'm sure."

  He paused and then shrugged.

  "We'll come around tomorrow. If you invite us. Don't rush things."

  By midnight I was feeling absolutely delighted they'd refused. At three I tried to get to sleep, reassured in the knowledge that they couldn't enter my home and never would be able to.

  In the morning, still not having slept a wink, I stood at the window, looking out at the city. There weren't many vampires. Very few, in fact. There wasn't another within a radius of two or three kilometers.

  How did it feel to be an outcast? To be punished, not for committing a crime, but for the potential ability to commit it? And how did it feel for them to live… well, not live, some other word was required here… alongside their own guard?

  On the way back from classes I bought a cake for tea.

  And now here was Kostya, a fine, intelligent young man, a student at the physics faculty of Moscow University, who had the misfortune to have been born a living corpse, sitting beside me and raking the spoon around in the sugar bowl like he was too shy to take any. What could have made him so bashful?

  At first he used to come around almost every day. I was his direct opposite; I was on the side of the Light. But I let him into my home, and he didn't have to pretend with me. He could simply sit and talk, or he could plunge into the Twilight and boast about the new abilities he'd developed. "Anton, I actually transformed!"—"And now my fangs have started to grow, r-r-r-r!"

  And the strange thing was, it was all quite normal. I laughed as I watched the young vampire's attempts to transform himself into a bat—that's a trick for a top-flight vampire, but he's not one of them and, may the Light grant, he never will be. Just sometimes I would scold him: "Kostya… you mustn't ever do that. Do you understand?" And that was quite normal too.

  "Kostya, I was doing my job."

  "You shouldn't have."

  "They were breaking the law. Do you understand? Not just our law, mind you. It's not just the Light Ones who have accepted it, all the Others have. That young guy…"

  "I knew him," Kostya suddenly said. "He was fun to be around."

  Damn.

  "Did he suffer?"

  "No." I shook my head. "The seal kills instantaneously."

  Kostya shuddered and squinted down at his own chest for a second. If you enter the Twilight, you can see the seal even through a vampire's clothes, and if you don't, you'll never find it. I don't think he actually moved across. But how should I know what the seal feels like to a vampire?

  "What was I supposed to do?" I asked. "He'd already killed. Killed entirely innocent people, who had absolutely no defenses against him. He initiated a girl… by crude force; she should never have become a vampire. Yesterday he almost killed a boy. Just for the sake of it. Not because he was hungry."

  "Do you know what our hunger's like?" Kostya asked after a pause.

  He was growing up. Right in front of my eyes…

  "Yes. Yesterday I… almost became a vampire."

  Just a moment's silence.

  "I know. I could feel it… I was hoping."

  Hell and damnation! While I was conducting my hunt, they'd been hunting me too. Or rather, lying in ambush for me, hoping the hunter would turn into the hunted beast.

  "No," I said. "Sorry, no way."

  "Okay, so he was guilty," Kostya went on stubbornly. "But why did you have to kill him? He should have been tried. A tribunal, an attorney, a proper charge, the way the law says things should be done…"

  "The law says that human beings must not be involved in our business!" I roared. And for the first time that tone of voice failed to make any impression on Kostya.

  "You were a human being for too long!"

  "And I don't regret it for a moment!"

  "Why did you kill him?"

  "If I hadn't, he would have killed me!"

  "Initiated you!"

  "That's even worse!"

  Kostya didn't answer that. He put down his tea and stood up. A perfectly ordinary, rather insolent, and morally pained young man.

  Except that he was a vampire.

  "Wait." I stepped across to the refrigerator. "Take this; they issued it to me, but I didn't need it."

  I pulled out the two-hundred-gram bottles of donor's blood from between the bottles of Borzhomi mineral water.

  "No thanks."

  "Kostya, I know this is a constant problem for you. It's of no use to me. Take it."

  "Are you trying to bribe me?"

  I started getting angry.

  "Why would I need to bribe you? It's just stupid to throw it out, that's all. It's blood. People gave it to help someone."

  Kostya suddenly laughed. He reached out, took one of the bottles, and opened it, tearing off the tinfoil cap with practiced ease. He raised the bottle to his lips, laughed again, and took a swallow.

  I'd never seen them feed. And never really wanted to.

  "Stop that," I said. "Don't be ridiculous."

  Kostya's lips were covered with blood, and there was a fine trickle of it running down his neck. Not just running down, but soaking into the skin.

  "Do you find the way we feed ourselves disagreeable?"

  "Yes."

  "So you find me disagreeable as well? All of us?"

  I shook my head. We'd never talked about this before. It had been easier that way.

  "Kostya, in order to live, you need blood. And, sometimes at least, human blood."

  "We don't live."

  "I meant in th
e more general sense. In order to move, think, speak, dream."

  "What do you care about a vampire's dreams?"

  "Listen, son. There are plenty of people living in the world who need regular blood transfusions. There are at least as many of them as there are of you. And then there are all the emergencies. That's why people give blood, that's why it's such an honorable and respected thing to do… I know about your kind's contributions to the development of medicine and the way you promoted the giving of blood. Kostya, if someone needs blood in order to live… to exist—that's no big deal. And whether it goes in through the veins or the stomach is irrelevant too. The important thing is how you get hold of it."

  "Empty words," Kostya snorted. I got the feeling he'd crossed over into the Twilight for an instant and then popped straight back out. The boy was growing up, all right. And he was getting really strong.

  "You showed the way you really feel about us yesterday."

  "You're wrong."

  "Ah, drop it…" He put the bottle down, then changed his mind and turned it upside down over the sink. "We don't need your…"

  I heard a hoot behind me and swung around. I'd completely forgotten about the owl, but now it had turned its head toward Kostya and spread its wings.

  "Agh…" he said. "Agh…"

  The owl folded its wings and closed its eyes.

  "Olga, we're talking," I growled. "Just give us a moment…"

  The bird didn't respond. Kostya glanced from me to the owl and back again. Then he sat down and folded his hands on his knees.

  "What's wrong with you?" I asked.

  "Can I go now?"

  He wasn't just surprised or frightened; he was in shock.

  "Okay. But take this, will you…"

  Kostya began hastily grabbing up the bottles and putting them in his pockets.

  "Take a plastic bag, you idiot! What if there's someone in the hallway?"

  The vampire obediently packed all the bottles into a plastic bag bearing the noble inscription "For the resurrection of Russian culture!" He gave the owl a sideways glance, went out into the hallway, and began hastily putting on his shoes.

  "Come around again," I said. "I'm not your enemy. Not until you cross that line, I'm not."