Thea had thrown him out.
‘Get out of here, policeman,’ she said bitterly.
‘Thea — I want to help you — all of you.’
‘Don’t you see you’re one of them?’
‘But only for you… for him…’
‘That uniform makes me sick,’ she said. ‘Don’t come here again.’
He stayed away for a few days to let her calm down, but when he went back, Mrs Arensberg — distant, polite, formal — told him Thea had left Podchornok. She was going to live in Yagda. She had cousins there, or aunts, or something. She planned to study and become a doctor like her father.
That same week Lom saw Raku Vishnik off to the University. In one week he’d lost them both, and the Arensbergs’ house was gone for ever.
Lom had immersed himself in police work. As soon as he could, he called up the magistrate Arensberg’s file. The evidence against him was overwhelming. He’d been sent to Vig, and died there. No cause of death was recorded. There was nothing to be done.
Fifteen years.
It hadn’t been difficult. There was always someone to tell you what to do. Someone like Krogh. Krogh wasn’t a bad man. But he wasn’t a good man either. He wasn’t any sort of man.
Detectives make nothing happen. They do the opposite, repairing the damage done by events: desire, anger, accident and change. Stitching the surface of things back together. But events break the surface open anyway. Inside you. Transforming the way you feel and see things. Taking an axe to the frozen sea inside us. Detectives can’t clear up after that.
Sleep would not come. Lom lay there and listened to the rumble of the darkened city.
And then there was something else in the room. There had not been and now there was.
It was a dark and sour presence, a thing of blood and earth. No door had opened. No curtain had stirred. It had arrived. Somehow.
It was coming closer. Lom could see it now, at the edge of vision, soaked in the light of the moons. Standing, looking at him, sniffing the air. Lom dared not move his head to see it more clearly, but he knew what it was. He had seen such a thing before, once, laid out dead on the earth under a stand of silver birch. That one had been shaped like a man, or rather a child, short and slender, with a small head and a lean, wiry strength. But this one was different, and not only because it was alive, and stalking him. The body he had seen was naked and entirely white, with the whiteness of a thing that had never felt the light of the sun. This one wore clothes of a kind and the skin of its face and hands was oddly piebald. Large irregular blotches of blackness marked the pallor. It was a killer, an eater of blood.
Suddenly the thing was not where it had been, ten feet away between the window and the door. It was standing over him, leaning forward, opening its black mouth. Lom had not seen it cover the intervening space. He was certain it had not done so. It had simply… moved.
Such creatures cannot bear to be looked at. They hate the touch of the human gaze. When it saw that Lom was awake and staring into its eyes it flinched and staggered a step backwards. It recovered almost immediately, but it had given Lom the moment he needed to screw up all his fear and revulsion into a ball and cast it at the thing. In the same instant he threw off the blanket, leapt to his feet and lunged forward. But the thing was no longer where it had been. It was to his left, at his side, jumping up and gripping his shoulder, scrabbling at his neck. He felt the heat of its breath on his face. Smelled the cold wet smell of earth. In desperation Lom threw at his attacker all the air in the room. The creature staggered back and fell. Photographs scattered and a chair fell loudly sideways. A lamp crashed to the floor.
It was the surprise as much as the force of the attack that was effective. The piebald thing fell awkwardly. As it struggled to its feet, the back of its head was exposed. Wisps of thin hair across its surprisingly slender, conical skull. Lom stepped forward, the cosh from his sleeve gripped firmly. He wouldn’t get another chance.
But it was not there. It was gone. Lom whipped round, braced for an attack from behind that he was unlikely to survive, but the moonlit room was empty.
The door from the bedroom opened.
‘Vissarion? What the fuck are you doing?’
Vishnik lit the lamp. The study was in chaos. Heaps of books scattered everywhere. A picture fallen from the wall, its glass shattered.
‘What happened? What have you done?’ He saw the rips in Lom’s shirt, the smears of blood from deep scratches on his face and neck, the delicate nastiness of the small cosh in his fist.
‘It was a vyrdalak,’ said Lom. ‘A strange one.’ He sat down heavily on the couch. Now that it was over, his legs were trembling and he felt emptily sick. He knew what the bite of such a creature could do. ‘I guess the Commander wants her files back.’
34
Lakoba Petrov didn’t go home after leaving the Marmot’s. He no longer needed a place of his own. He hadn’t eaten for so long, he no longer felt hungry. He threw away what remained of his money and walked through the night, drinking sweet water copiously wherever he could find it. The clear coldness of it made his soul also clear and cold. His Mirgorod burned. It was awash with cool, glorious rain and the rain washed him clean.
Again and again the night city detonated for him, bursting into roses of truth. He was walking through paintings, truer and better than any he had painted. He could have painted them if had chosen to do it. But why should he? There was no need. He had a better idea. As he walked the streets in a pyrotechnical excitement of fizzing synapses, he developed in words his new principle of art. An art that would leave painting behind altogether and become something new and pure and clean. The art of the coming destruction.
He did carry one tube of paint with him, though, in his pocket. A beautiful lilac–turquoise. In the lamplight, looking at his reflection in the mirror in a barber’s shop window, he squeezed the paint onto his finger and wrote on his forehead. ‘I, Petrov.’ It wasn’t easy, mirror writing. He had to concentrate.
When he grew tired he lay down to sleep, and in the dawn when he woke his clothes crackled with the snapping of ice.
35
Maroussia Shaumian got out of bed in the chill grey of dawn. She lived in a one-room apartment with her mother out near the Oyster Bridge. There wasn’t much: a bed to share, some yellow furniture, a thin and faded rug on bare boards. Her mother was sitting upright on a chair in the centre of the carpet, wearing only her dressing gown. Her thin hair, unbrushed, stood up round her head in a scrappy, pathetic halo. It was icy cold in the room, though the windows were closed tight. Her small breaths and Maroussia’s own were tiny visible ghosts in the chill air.
‘Come on,’ said Maroussia, holding out her hand. ‘I’ll get the stove lit. Come and get dressed.’
Her mother flapped at her to be silent. Her hands were as soft and pale and strengthless as the empty eggshells of a small bird.
‘What is it?’ said Maroussia. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Come away from the window. They’ll see you. They’re watching.’
‘There’s nobody there. Just people in the street.’
‘They’re there, only you can’t see them.’