‘Why, the son of a bitch!’ I said, almost admiringly Even the people who stayed in the hotel would never suspect anything!
Unquestionably, Bruce had the same sense of humour as the vampire who had drained his victim at the Castle of the Vampires. He was an excellent candidate for the role of murderer.
The only trouble was that after the kind of shock he had suffered, Bruce couldn’t possibly have lied.
CHAPTER 3
TOURISTS ARE THE most terrible breed of human beings. Sometimes I feel a vague suspicion that every nation tries to send its most unpleasant representatives abroad – the loudest and most clueless, those with the worst manners. But it’s probably all much simpler than that. Probably it’s just that the secret ‘work/play’ switch everybody has hidden in their heads clicks and turns off eighty per cent of their brains.
But the remaining twenty per cent is more than enough for play anyway.
I was walking along in a crowd moving slowly towards 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 centre, 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 each other: for the time being they had set their cares aside.
Cars didn’t often come in here, and those that did 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 towards the gorge that separated the old and the 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 Loch Nor. The gorge had now passed through its final stage of evolution and had 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 about on 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 – 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 talking to each other – with Ukrainian accents, but still in my own native Russian. Although you might say they were using the secret version. In more or less printable form it went something like this.
‘Up yours!’ one pantomime Cossack dancer hissed 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-coloured 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 bollocks!’
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. Always, or just when they’re abroad? 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 each other.
Buses.
Tourists.
Pubs.
Shops.
A mime artist wandering round 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 realised 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 about 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 in the ‘entrance-to-ancient-dungeons’ style were open, but the opening was roped off at chest height. A handwritten notice on 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-mesh 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 light bulbs.
‘Is anyone alive down here?’ I called out in English, and then realised 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 Lambrozo’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, retorts 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 on them stretched out above my head – 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 grey 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 with a vengeance. 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 flock wallpaper.