“I remember,” I put in as innocently as I could.
“In that case, permit us to take our leave. Colleague Vitaly, pack your things…”
I shoved all my bits and pieces into the first plastic bags that came to hand, put the plastic bags into the large bag, picked up my jacket from where I had dropped it on the armchair, and stood up. Edgar pointed to the door in invitation.
We went out into the corridor and took the elevator down to the vestibule, where Edgar suddenly turned to the Light One with us.
“Anton! Our colleague is not going to stay in this hotel any longer. We’re taking him with us. If you need him, you can inquire at the Day Watch office.”
The Light One seemed to have been taken by surprise, he glanced uncertainly at the hotel administrator sleeping behind his counter, then nodded indecisively. And we set off toward the exit.
I didn’t put my jacket on because I’d already spotted the familiar BMW standing outside the door of the hotel-I’d only been able to see it because I was an Other.
It was warm and cozy inside the car. And spacious too-my knees didn’t press against the back of the front seat. I made myself comfortable and asked, “And where am I going to stay now?”
“At the Day Watch office, colleague’? Or, rather, in the office hotel. You should have gone there straightaway.”
“If only I’d known where to go…” I muttered.
The BMW went darting off, turned smartly out of the parking lot toward the entrance, dived under the boom almost before it had time to rise high enough, and eased into the sparse flow of traffic on Peace Prospect.
Shagron might not be the strongest of magicians, but he could drive a car superbly. Peace Prospect flashed by and disappeared, followed by the arc of the Garden Ring Road. And all I saw of Tverskaya Street was an endless row of shop windows with tinted glass… but then, it wasn’t really endless after all.
We got out of the car very close to the Kremlin. The magicians left their BMW at the curb, without even bothering to lock it. I decided to take a look at it through the Twilight, simply out of curiosity and a desire to assess the quality of the protective spells so that I wouldn’t overdo things again.
I was astounded. Not by the sight of the car, but by the sight of the building, which had looked so ordinary in the ordinary world.
In the Twilight the building had grown by three whole floors. One of them was inserted between the ordinary first and second floors, while the other two were on top, making the already big building even taller. The Twilight floors were made of polished black granite. Almost all the windows were curtained and dark, but the first weak rays of sunlight were already glinting on the white boxes of modern air-conditioners.
I forgot about the protective spells in an instant.
There was a small portal leading straight out onto Tverskaya Street; behind the glass door I could sense, rather than see, the silhouette of an Other.
“Well, well, well!” I said. My voice sounded hollow, like all sound in the Twilight. My colleagues all turned their heads as if by command.
“What? Haven’t you seen it before?”
“No.”
“It impresses everybody the first time. Come on, you’ll have plenty of time to admire it.”
We went up a few steps and found ourselves in a tiny duty office. The vague figure behind the door had materialized into a skinny, dismal-looking young guy-I think he was a shape-shifter. But he was laughing in joyful delight as he read Victor Pelevin’s story, “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia.”
But the moment Edgar entered the duty office, the young guy was transformed. His eyes flashed and the book dropped onto the desk.
“Hi, Oleg.” Edgar greeted him in a Baltic accent that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
Shagron simply nodded.
I decided to say hello too: “Good morning.”
“This is a colleague of ours from Ukraine,” Edgar said, introducing me. “When he wants, let him through into the guest sector without any checks.”
“Understood,” Oleg agreed immediately. “Shall I enter him in the database?”
“Yes.”
Oleg glanced into my eyes and bared his teeth in a friendly grin, read my registration mark with some effort, sat down at the desk, and took a notebook PC out of one of the drawers.
“And where’s your partner?” Edgar asked.
Oleg’s face took on a guilty expression.
“He went out for cigarettes… Just for a moment.”
“Let’s go,” Edgar said with a sigh, taking me by the sleeve and drawing me toward the elevators. Shagron had already pressed the call button.
We seemed to be in the elevator for a long time. At least longer that I’d been expecting. But then I remembered the additional floors and everything fell into place.
“The guest sector is on the ninth floor,” Edgar explained. “Basically it’s just like a hotel, only it’s free. I don’t think there’s anyone staying there at the moment.”
The elevator doors parted soundlessly and we found ourselves in a square foyer, decorated with a rational combination of luxury and economical functionality. Leather divans and armchairs, a live palm tree in a tub, engravings on the walls, a carpet on the parquet floor. A counter like the ones in hotels, but there was no sign at all of any table and chair for a bellhop. Just a locked secretaire, with an elegant metal key protruding from the lock.
Edgar opened the secretaire to reveal neat rows of horizontal wooden pegs, with a key hanging on each one. And beside the pegs there were numbers.
But I was being too hasty-there were no keys on two of the pegs: numbers two and four.
“Take your pick. If the key’s here, it means the apartment’s free.”
He said “apartment,” and not “suite,” as if the fact that this accommodation for Others was free distinguished it from faceless hotel suites and put it in the category of places that could be called home.
I took key number eight. From the right end of the second row.
“You can look the place over later,” Edgar told me. “Leave your things and come straight back.”
I nodded, wondering what my Dark colleagues were planning. No doubt a polite but thorough interrogation.
That was okay. I’d survive. They were my kind, after all.
The apartment really was an apartment. With a kitchen, a separate toilet, and three spacious rooms-and a huge hallway. It was a typical Stalin-period apartment refurbished to “European” standards. The ceilings were three and a half meters high, if not four.
I hung my jacket on the coatrack and dropped my bag in the middle of the hallway. Then I went out into the corridor and pulled the door shut.
I could hear faint music coming from apartment number four: A minute earlier, as I was walking past, it had been something light and foreign. But now the song had changed. The words were almost drowned out by the harsh rhythm and the background of hard rock-I guessed at them rather than heard them: Cast down by the power of fate,
You are humiliated and crushed.
It’s time to forget who you were,
And remember who you’ve become!
Cast into the depths, where it doesn’t matter
Why fame used to court you before—
Villains set a brand of fire on you,
And your soul is empty.
People in the depths prowl through the darkness,
Ready to eat each other up.
Anything to prolong this wild life,
And snatch something for themselves…
Angry like them, all angry and pitiful,
You rush round and round in the same herd,
With them you crawl for food at knifepoint,
Like a slave or a prophet.
I don’t know why, but I froze outside that other person’s door. These were more than just simple words. I absorbed them through my skin, with my entire body. I had forgotten who I used to be, but how could I remember who I’d become? And hadn’t I entered a new circle now, running with a herd that I still didn’t know?
Oh, if I could listen just to silence.
Not lies, or flattery, not the midday or the darkness.
Be like snow melting in the sun,
And love, knowing no betrayal,
Then you would die of anguish and anger!
No, I clearly wouldn’t get any chance to listen to silence in the immediate future. Too many others had taken an interest in my modest person. Light Ones and Dark Ones…
Meanwhile the singer’s voice had grown stronger and taken on a triumphant, challenging note:
Hey, you inhabitants of the skies!
Which of you has not plumbed the depths?
Without passing through hell,
You can never build heaven!
Hey, you inhabitants of the depths!
The thunder is laughing at you.
To be on equal terms with them—
There is only one way upward!
There is only one way upward…
So that was it… The way upward. And you couldn’t get to heaven unless you’d already done your time rattling around in hell. Except that heaven and hell were different for everyone-but then that was what Kipelov was really singing about anyway.
Strange. I’d heard the song before, and the singer’s name had stuck in my memory. I’d even included it in the mini-disk I put together for my player. But now it sounded completely new; it had suddenly slashed across my mind like an invisible shard of broken glass.
“Colleague! Please hurry!” Edgar called to me.
I stepped regretfully away from the door.
I’ll have to listen to it later… Buy the whole album and listen to it…
The singer’s voice faded away behind me:
But if the light flares up in your brain
And dislodges all the submission,
The old days will come alive in your soul,
And a new sin will be committed.
Blood on your hands, blood on the stones,
And over the bodies and the pitiful backs
Of those willing to die as slaves,
You strive upward once again.
It somehow seemed to me that Kipelov knew only too well what he was singing about. About blood. About the lower depths. About the sky. This long-haired idol of the Russian heavy metal set could easily turn out to be an Other. At least, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.
I went up to the next floor with Edgar and Shagron, and we found ourselves in a genuine office space, with a large hall divided into little booths separated off by screens, individual offices at one side and an open area overlooking Tverskaya Street through a huge window of lightly tinted glass. I noticed that the Dark Ones used hardly any desktop PCs: at least the three Watch staff members who were there-they must have been either very late owls or very early larks-were all sitting with their noses stuck in the screens of their notebooks.
“Hellemar!” Edgar called, and one of the three-a werewolf, like the guard on duty downstairs-reluctantly tore himself away from some game on the screen.
“Yes, chief?”
“I want an urgent news update! All movements of reagents or artifacts of great Power. Lost, disappeared, smuggled. All the latest events!”
“What’s happened?” the werewolf Hellemar asked. “Is there something dangerous going on?”
“The Light Ones have information that someone’s trying to smuggle an artifact into Moscow. Move it, Hellemar!”
Hellemar turned to the other players:
“Hey, you blockheads! Get to work!”
The blockheads instantly dropped what they’d been doing and seconds later I could hear the quiet rustling of keyboards, and on the screens the endless corridors filled with monsters had been replaced by the bright windows of Netscape.
Edgar took me into an office separated off from the large hall by a glass wall and blinds. Shagron went off somewhere for a moment, but he soon came back with a jar of Tchibo and a carton of Finnish glacier water. He poured the water into an electric kettle and pressed the appropriate switch. The kettle started murmuring industriously almost immediately.
“I hope you have sugar here?” Shagron muttered.
“I’ll find some.” Edgar lowered himself into one armchair and offered me the other: “Have a seat, colleague. You don’t mind if I call you simply Vitaly, do you?”
“Of course not. Feel free.”
“Excellent. Well, then, Vitaly, I’ll do the talking, and you correct me if I get something wrong. Agreed?”
“Certainly” I said readily. Because I had almost no
i.e.
what weird stories would surface out of my subconscious for me to tell to these intent agents of the Day Watch.
“Have I understood correctly that you possess no information about the aforementioned artifact?”
“You have,” I confirmed.
“A pity,” Edgar said with genuine disappointment. “It would have greatly simplified matters…”
As a matter of fact, not only didn’t I possess any information about the aforementioned artifact, I didn’t possess any information at all about any artifacts that Edgar might be interested in. This was no doubt an area where experienced Others felt like connoisseurs, but I still understood less about it than a pig does about oranges.
“Then let’s move on to the next point. You arrived in Moscow from Ukraine, if I understand correctly?”
“Yes. From Nikolaev.”
“For what purpose?”
I pondered for about half a minute. Nobody tried to hurry me.
“It’s hard to say,” I confessed honestly. “Clearly without any particular purpose. I just got fed up sitting at home doing nothing.”
“You were only initiated very recently, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Did you just get the urge to see a bit of the world?”
“Probably.”
“Then why Moscow, and not the Bahamas, for instance?”
I shrugged. But really-why? Surely not just because I didn’t have a passport for foreign travel yet?
“I don’t know. The Bahamas are a place to go in summer.”
“It’s summer now in the Southern Hemisphere. And there are plenty of places to go.”
Yes, that was true. I hadn’t thought about that.
“All the same, I don’t know,” I answered. “Later, maybe…”
I had the feeling that Edgar wanted to ask about something else, but at this point Hellemar entered the office without knocking. His eyes were as wide as the cartoon mouse Jerry’s when he suddenly spots his eternal pursuer, Tom, just behind him.