But the owl didn’t react at all. She couldn’t give a damn about the sparrows, or the crows.
‘Just who are you?’ I said as I threw open the window, ripping away the paper strips glued over the cracks. The boss really had lumbered 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 if it had always lived here. Maybe it had got cold on the way over. But then it was a snowy owl …
I started to close the window, trying to think what to do next. How would I communicate with her, what would I feed her and how could this feathered creature possibly help me?
‘Is your name Olga?’ I asked, when I’d finished with the window. There was a draught 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 was an owl.
Maybe I ought to put my trousers 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 hurried from the room. The phrase I muttered to the owl as I left added a finishing touch: ‘Excuse me, I’ll just be a moment.’
If this bird really was what I thought it was, I couldn’t have made the best impression.
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 tap. On the 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 fridge. 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 realise I haven’t come across very well. 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 fridge. ‘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 in my life really changed that much. I became one of the Others, but it was like I hadn’t really noticed. 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 neutralising 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 couple 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, I expect …’
When I mentioned the drugs I got up, opened the little cupboard above the cooker 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 odour. I rinsed out the jar and dropped it into the rubbish bin.
‘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 in the entrance. 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 switched 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 restless.
Kostya’s 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 from the boy, not even 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?’
‘No … I’ll be going …’
‘Wait.’ I grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed 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 above my head.
I remember it like it was yesterday I was on my way home from classes that seemed so ordinary they reminded me of my old college. Three double lectures, a lecturer, heat that had the white coats glued 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 any longer back then. Then I began feeling out the people walking down the street, and at the entrance I ran into my neighbours.
They’re really nice people. I wanted to borrow a drill from them once, and Kostya’s father, Gennady, he’s a builder, just came round and had some fun helping out with the concrete walls, demonstrating conclusively that the intelligentsia can’t survive without the proletariat …