Egor chewed up the last two cloves, spat them out into his palm and started rubbing them on his neck. He could have laughed at himself for doing it, but he wasn’t going to stop now.
His neck started to sting too – it was good garlic. A single breath would be the end of any vampire.
The cat began howling restlessly in the hallway. Egor pricked up his ears and peered out of the kitchen. No, nothing there. The door was secured with three locks and a chain.
‘Stop that noise, Grey!’ he told the cat sternly. ‘Or I’ll make you eat garlic too.’
The cat took the threat seriously and raced into the parents’ bedroom. What else could he do? Silver was supposed to help. Egor frightened the cat again by going into the bedroom, opening the wardrobe and taking his mother’s jewellery box out from under the sheets and towels. He took out a silver chain and put it on. It would smell of garlic, and he’d have to take it off before evening. Maybe he should empty his moneybox and buy himself a chain. With a crucifix. And wear it all the time. Say he’d started believing in God. Didn’t it happen sometimes that people didn’t believe for a long, long time, and then suddenly started believing after all?
He walked across the sitting room, sat down with his feet up on the sofa and looked round the room thoughtfully. Did they have anything made of poplar wood? He didn’t think so. And what did poplar wood look like, anyway? Maybe he should go to the botanical gardens and cut himself a dagger from a branch.
That was all great, in theory, but what good would it do? If the music started playing again … that soft, alluring music …What if he took the chain off himself, broke the poplar-wood dagger and washed the garlic off his own neck?
Soft, gentle music … invisible enemies. Maybe they were already there with him. He simply couldn’t see them. He didn’t know how to look. And a vampire might be sitting right there, laughing at him, looking at this naïve kid preparing his defences. And he wasn’t afraid of any poplar stake, he wasn’t scared by the garlic. How could you fight against something invisible?
‘Grey!’ Egor called. The cat didn’t respond to the usual ‘kss-kss’, he was an awkward character. ‘Come here, Grey!’
The cat was standing in the doorway of the bedroom. His fur was standing on end and his eyes were blazing. He was looking past Egor, into the corner, at the armchair beside the coffee table. At an empty chair …
The boy felt the familiar chilly shiver run over his body. He jerked forward so violently that he went flying off the sofa and landed on the floor. The armchair was empty. The apartment was empty and locked. Everything turned dark, as if the sunlight outside the window had suddenly dimmed …
There was someone there with him.
‘No!’ Egor shouted, crawling away. ‘I know! I know you’re here!’
The cat gave a hoarse screech and darted under the bed.
‘I can see you,’ shouted Egor. ‘Don’t touch me!’
The entrance of the building looked gloomy and miserable enough. But viewed from inside the Twilight, it was a genuine catacomb. Concrete walls that were simply dirty in ordinary reality were overgrown with a dark blue moss in the Twilight. Disgusting. There clearly wasn’t a single Other living here to clean up … I passed my hand over a really thick growth – the moss stirred, trying to creep away from the warmth. ‘Burn!’ I ordered it.
I don’t like parasites. Not even if they don’t do any particular harm and only feed on other creatures’ emotions. No one’s ever proved the hypothesis that large colonies of blue moss are capable of unbalancing the human psyche and causing depression or mania. But I’ve always preferred to play safe.
‘Burn!’ I repeated, transmitting a small amount of power through my hand.
A hot, transparent flame spread across the layer of tangled blue felt. A moment later the entire entrance was ablaze. I stepped away towards the lift, pressed the button and got in. The cabin was a lot cleaner.
‘Ninth floor,’ Olga prompted. ‘Why waste your powers like that?’
‘That’s just small change …’
‘You might need everything you’ve got. Let it grow.’
I didn’t answer. The lift crawled slowly upwards – the Twilight lift, the double of the ordinary one that was still standing on the first floor.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Olga. ‘The uncompromising passion of youth …’
The doors opened. The fire had already reached the ninth floor and the blue moss was blazing wildly. It was warm, a lot warmer than it usually is in the Twilight. There was a slight smell of burning.
‘That door there,’ said Olga.
‘I can see.’
I could sense the boy’s aura behind the door. He hadn’t even taken the risk of coming out today. Excellent. The goat was tethered with a strong rope, all we had to do was wait for the tiger.
‘I suppose I’ll go in,’ I said. I pushed the door.
The door didn’t open.
That couldn’t happen!
In the real world all the locks on the door could be closed, but the Twilight has its own laws. Only vampires need an invitation to enter someone’s home, that’s the price they pay for their strength and their gastronomic approach to humans.
In order to lock a door in the Twilight, you had at least to know how to enter it.
‘Fear,’ said Olga. ‘Yesterday the boy was in a state of terror. And he’d just been in the Twilight world. He locked the door behind him, and without knowing it, he locked it in both worlds at the same time. Come deeper. Follow me.’
I looked at my shoulder – there was no one there. Summoning the Twilight while you’re in the Twilight is no simple trick. I had to raise my shadow from the floor several times before it acquired volume and hung there, quivering in front of me.
‘Come on, come on, you’re doing fine,’ whispered Olga.
I entered the shadow, and the Twilight grew thicker. Space was filled with a dense fog. Colours disappeared completely. The only sound left was the beating of my heart, slow and heavy, rumbling like a drum being beaten at the bottom of a ravine. And there was a whistling wind – that was the air seeping into my lungs, slowly stretching out the bronchi. The owl appeared on my shoulder.
‘I won’t be able to stand this for long,’ I whispered, opening the door. At this level, of course, it wasn’t locked.
A dark grey cat flitted past my feet. For cats there is no ordinary world or Twilight – they live in all the worlds at once. It’s a good thing they don’t have any real intelligence.
‘Kss-kss-kss,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t be afraid, puss …’
Mostly to test my own powers, I locked the door behind me. There, kid, now you’re a little bit better protected. But will it do any good when you hear the Call?
‘Move up,’ said Olga. ‘You’re losing strength very fast. This level of the Twilight is a strain even for an experienced magician. I think I’ll move up a level too.’
It was a relief to step out of it. No, I’m not an operational agent who can stroll around all three levels of the Twilight just as he likes. But I don’t normally need to do that kind of thing.
The world turned a little brighter. I glanced around. It was a cosy apartment, not too polluted by the products of the Twilight world. A few streaks of blue moss beside the door … nothing to worry about, they’d die, now that the main colony had been exterminated. I heard sounds too, from the direction of the kitchen. I glanced in.
The boy was standing by the table, eating garlic and washing it down with hot tea.