The Last Rite (Danilov Quintet 5)

by Jasper Kent

  I went through to the kitchen and to the other side of that same section of wall. It was thick here, more than the width of a mere few bricks. There was a good reason for it. Nadya joined me, sensing my urgency, but Polkan was too concerned with what he had smelled to follow us. There was a large wooden cupboard against the wall. I opened the door so as to get a better grip on the side, then started trying to move it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Nadya.

  ‘You remember when we moved in? What was behind here?’

  She took a moment to think, then began to help me. Thankfully the paucity of food supplies in the city meant that the cupboard was almost bare. We couldn’t lift it completely, but managed to walk it a few feet away from the wall. I looked at the space behind.

  It was just as I remembered it: a rectangular frame, much like a picture frame, a little wider than my shoulders and at the level of my chest. But within there was neither a portrait nor a landscape, just a pair of wooden panels, meeting in a tight seam halfway down, with tarnished brass handles on each. It was a dumb waiter, installed long before we took up occupancy of the house. We’d known we’d never be hosting the grand dinner parties for which such a device might be useful. We’d not even bothered to see if it worked.

  I grasped the two handles and tried to pull them apart, but they wouldn’t budge. I looked around to see if there was some kind of catch, but found nothing. I felt Nadya return to my side, though I hadn’t noticed she’d gone. She handed me a big, solid kitchen knife. I slipped it into the ridge between the two shutters, forcing them apart enough to allow it to enter. I pushed it in up to the hilt and then began to lever the handle up and down. I was reminded for a moment of my vision of Zmyeevich’s death, the twin blades prising my coffin lid gradually open. With each motion the doors parted a little further, until I could at last get my fingers between them. Now I was able to grip properly, and with only a little more effort they began to slide open. I could feel the effects of the hidden gears which linked them together, whereby in moving one upwards the other was pushed down.

  Now that same frame bounded merely a dark, open, empty space. I could smell whatever it was that had caught Polkan’s sensitive nose. I glanced at Nadya and saw that she had noticed it too. She blanched and held her curled fingers to her nostrils, stepping back. It was undoubtedly the smell of decay. I’d known it more than once on the battlefield. But it was surprisingly weak, and therein lay some slight hope. A dead body would have produced a far stronger stench, certainly after two days. Perhaps it was merely a rat.

  I could see that the cart was not on this floor. The back wall was dark and stained. I peered forwards tentatively, in part out of fear of what I might see, but also a little out of the knowledge that somewhere in the shaft above me hung the cart, unused for years, perhaps ready to fall. It wasn’t far to look down, only to the level of the floor. It was too dark to see much. At the bottom there was a crack of flickering light, from the same direction that I heard Polkan’s snuffling as he pushed against the skirting board and revealed its shoddy construction.

  ‘Fetch me the torch, would you?’ I’m not sure why I whispered the instruction. Nadya went away and returned to me seconds later, handing me the heavy yellow cylinder. It lay somewhere between a novelty and a practicality. A paraffin lamp would have provided better light, but not as quickly, and within the space of a few years the new technology would have utterly surpassed the older. I liked to be among the first to try such things out. And besides, I had good reasons for my penchant for electric light.

  I twisted its brass end, pushing the contact of the bulb against the connection to the battery. I was pleasantly surprised to see the clear, yellow light that shone from it. It had been months since I’d last used it, and the batteries had a tendency to decay. I shone it down into the base of the lift shaft, then looked, fearing what might be revealed.

  There was nothing – not the crumpled, pathetic human body that I had expected, nor even the squalid remains of a starved rodent. I heard Polkan whine, louder through the thin wall between us than via the kitchen door. I scanned the torch beam over the small rectangle that marked the bottom of the shaft. There were cobwebs and a few vague, tiny shapes that might have been dead flies or woodlice, but nothing else; just the flat, uncarpeted floorboards, much the same as those beneath my feet.

  Except for the dark, grim stain that seemed to spread from the centre of them.

  There wasn’t enough light for me to be able to tell, and if it had been there any length of time it would have faded, but I felt for sure that the stain was red. I twisted and tried to look in the other direction, up the shaft, but it proved impossible. I could shine the light up there, or direct my gaze up there, but not both at the same time. If I’d been younger it would have been no problem. Even so, I caught a glimpse of something.

  I handed the torch back to Nadya and at the same time gave her a simple instruction. ‘Get out!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please. You don’t want to see this.’

  ‘You’ve found something?’

  ‘No, but I’m going to. And you’re not going to like it. Leave it to me, please.’

  She moved away. I didn’t check to see where she’d gone, but I knew it wouldn’t be far. I’d done my duty in warning her. She couldn’t blame me for what she saw. I reached to the side of the shaft and found the two thin ropes I’d been expecting – one to go up, the other down. I tried the nearer one, but it wouldn’t budge. The other rope moved with surprising ease, and the cart began to descend, the squeak of its motion with each pull signalling its approach. It didn’t have far to come, but I stopped before it even reached the hatch in the kitchen.

  Syeva’s hair stood on end. His eyebrows were raised, his eyes gazing up towards them. His nostrils were wide, like a pig’s snout. A few teeth were revealed between his parted lips. It was a bizarre expression, but easily explained by the fact that Syeva was hanging upside down; every feature of his face was distorted by the gravity that pulled at it from quite the opposite direction to what was normal. It also meant that the wound to his neck gaped open as a wide bloody mess, like an additional smile above his own pallid, lifeless lips.

  I heard a gasp from behind me. Nadya had not done as I told her. I hadn’t expected her to.

  ‘Help me get him out, for God’s sake.’

  She came closer again. Her hands moved towards Syeva’s dangling body, but dared not touch him.

  ‘Pull the rope,’ I said. ‘Lower him.’

  She went around to the other side. I put her hand on the same rope that I’d been holding, then I reached inside and grasped Syeva by the shoulders. Guiding him outwards, his forehead caught on the lip of the hatchway, bending his head back. I tugged it free, but could move him no further.

  ‘Now,’ I said, and Nadya began to pull on the rope, lowering his body and allowing me to draw it out through the hatch. Eventually only his shins and feet remained inside. I was supporting his whole weight, cradling him with my arms beneath his shoulders and knees. He wasn’t stiff – rigor mortis had begun to fade – but he wouldn’t move any further. I looked over and could easily see the reason. His bootlaces had been tied together and hung from a hook which was screwed into the bottom of the cart. It must have been there for years, for carrying extra loads, but it had never been intended for this use.

  ‘Get him free,’ I said.

  Nadya looked at me and then at the dumb waiter. She swallowed, but reached forward and unhooked the laces. Now I was able to move him. I laid his body out on the kitchen floor. I heard the sound of Polkan trotting into the room, but Nadya pushed him out and closed the door.

  ‘So that’s what it looks like then?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The bite of a vampire.’

  I’d only once before seen such a wound close to – in a mirror when looking at my own neck, at the bite marks left by Iuda. But it was not a good example – death had prevented him from doing the damag
e of which his kind was truly capable. The wounds at Syeva’s throat were certainly too ragged to have been caused by any knife, and the flesh had been eaten away in precisely the manner that Mama had told me, and that I’d read about for myself. The pallor of his skin showed just how little blood there was left in him. It might easily be explained by the fact that he’d been hanging upside down, except that the stain at the bottom of the shaft was too small for that to make sense. Even so, while it might have been a reasonable conclusion for me to draw, it was a leap of intuition for Nadya.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ I asked.

  ‘You deny it?’

  ‘No. It seems pretty clear to me.’

  ‘You knew before you even found the body,’ she said. It was not a question.

  ‘I didn’t know for sure,’ I protested feebly.

  ‘We’re both sure now.’ She went to a drawer and fetched a table cloth which we laid over Syeva’s body. I closed his eyes before covering his face. ‘You’d better tell me everything,’ she said.

  ‘One thing first. We need to go upstairs.’

  She looked at me, puzzled.

  ‘There’s two of them missing,’ I said.

  Her hand went to her mouth as she realized what I meant; the shaft ran the entire height of the building, and if one body hung beneath the cart, another could easily be resting on top of it. She dashed out of the room. I followed, but remembered to close the door so that Polkan could not go and investigate what we had found. She was in Anastasia’s room before I was even halfway up the stairs. We were directly above the kitchen. Here nothing covered the doors to the dumb waiter. Nadya already had them open and was peering down into the darkness. Her body was very still. Then suddenly she stood upright.

  ‘Give me the torch,’ she said.

  I handed it to her and she bent back through the hatchway. She scanned it beneath her, then twisted to look upwards. Finally she emerged once again.

  ‘Thank God,’ she whispered.

  ‘Nothing?’ I asked.

  She shook her head, then went over to sit on the bed. ‘I think you’d better tell me what this is all about.’

  I sat beside her and took a breath. ‘It’s Dmitry Alekseevich, my uncle. He’s in Petrograd.’

  At the sound of his name she blanched. It was understandable; however much she was reconciled to the idea of vampires as creatures from my past, it was another thing for such creatures to become a reality of our present. I told her how I’d met Dmitry, about the other voordalaki with him, about his ambitions to aid the revolution and my assistance to him. I missed out the fact that one of those other vampires was her brother. There was no need.

  ‘You’re a fool, Mihail Konstantinovich,’ she said when I’d finished. ‘How could you have trusted him?’

  ‘You think Dmitry did this?’

  ‘Does it matter? Him, one of the others. They probably followed you here and saw something they couldn’t resist. Two young innocents. God knows where we’ll find Anastasia’s body.’

  I laughed harshly and saw the tear that it caused in Nadya’s eye. ‘That’s not what’s happened,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘I haven’t told you everything. You remember I said I saw Anastasia selling herself in the street. Well I did see her, but not with a man. She was with one of Dmitry’s vampires. For a while I wondered how she survived, but now it’s obvious. He wasn’t trying to drink her blood, any more than he was trying to screw her. They were just together because they’re the same type of vile creature.’

  A sudden further realization flashed before me as to what might have been happening when I saw them together. I’d not had time to look properly, but who was I to say that behind them in that archway, under those sacks, there didn’t lie the body of their shared victim, some other child, as innocent as Anastasia had once appeared, fallen victim to the same life that she pretended?

  ‘It can’t be,’ whispered Nadya.

  ‘What if we find others?’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘She’s been bringing men here, you said so yourself. What if some of them don’t leave. There’s more places than the dumb waiter to hide a body in here.’

  ‘Then find them and ask me again.’

  I didn’t relish the idea, and I wasn’t convinced Anastasia would be so foolish as to hide too many bodies so close to one another. I changed tack.

  ‘Have you ever seen her in daylight?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I couldn’t swear to it, but that doesn’t prove anything. I don’t see you that often until well after dark.’

  I turned to her and looked into her beautiful brown eyes. ‘You know it’s true, Nadya.’

  ‘Do I? Do I really? I know it enough to do what? To kill her? To drive a stake through her heart? To cut off her head?’

  It would have sounded like the voice of reason but for the edge of desperate panic. I understood her well enough to see through the façade. It was hope, not reason, that made her reject what seemed so obvious. Even so she was right; I couldn’t be certain. I didn’t need to be.

  ‘It doesn’t have to come to that,’ I explained. ‘There’s a way to prove it and deal with her, all in one.’

  ‘A witch trial? If she floats she’s guilty; if she drowns she’s innocent?’

  ‘Quite the reverse,’ I said. ‘But first we’ve got to deal with Syeva.’

  ‘You mean—’ Her face contorted in horror.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You think he might … end up as one of them?’

  The prospect hadn’t even occurred to me. If he were to be transformed into a voordalak, the process would take weeks. And I knew of no sure method to prevent it. Perhaps the corpse should be dealt with in the same way as a living vampire: beheaded, or a stake driven through its heart. I had no idea, and doubted I’d be able to bring myself to do it. But it seemed unlikely. The fact of his death was one thing, but the way that Anastasia had left his body, hidden, dangling, gave no hint that one day she hoped to have him stand by her side as a fellow creature of the night.

  ‘No. I think she killed him purely to feed.’

  ‘She?’ Nadya asked pointedly. I didn’t bother to respond.

  I got hold of some sheets, then went downstairs and wrapped Syeva’s body in them. I went to a drawer in the kitchen to get some string to tie it in place, but couldn’t find any. Bizarrely I almost shouted for Syeva, feeling sure that he’d know where it was kept. I looked around the kitchen and could see him everywhere, preparing food, washing, carrying out all the tasks he’d so happily done for us over the years. I could hear his voice calling me colonel. I sat down at the table and buried my face in my hands.

  It can’t have been many minutes before Nadya roused me. She didn’t comment on the tears on my cheeks, and neither did I say anything about those on hers. She was dressed to go out. ‘We’ll take him to the mortuary at the military hospital,’ she said.

  ‘I need string.’ It was an everyday item, but the words came from my lips as a desperate plea.

  Nadya remained calmer. She looked through the drawers and found some and we made a reasonable job of tying the shroud so that it didn’t fall away.

  ‘You want me to carry him?’ I asked.

  ‘Only to the street. I’ll ask Vera Glebovna if we can use her cart.’

  She went ahead of me. I carried the body out to the hall and put it down, then shut Polkan in the kitchen. Syeva had never been a big lad, but I felt exhausted from just that short walk. Even so, I determined to carry him with dignity. I opened the front door and lifted him up again, then walked out on to the street. Nadya was just returning from the gate to our neighbours’ yard, dragging a two-wheeled trolley behind her. It was an old-fashioned-looking thing in a city of so many motor cars, but it would suffice.

  We walked down the snow-covered streets pulling Syeva’s body behind us. Few of those we passed bothered to cross themselves, though there could be no doubt as to what the shape laid out on the wooden platform was. It was only to b
e expected. These people had troubles of their own, and there’d been enough death in the city to tire the arms of even the most devout. But I couldn’t help feeling there was more to it. Everything that was happening, this whole revolution, was about people getting what they needed here and now. It was understandable that that would lead to some forgetfulness regarding the world to come. Some of the more outspoken figures – in exile, mostly – insisted upon it. And how could we complain? We were breaking every taboo by bringing him through the streets like this.

  We went over to Liteiny Prospekt and across the bridge to where the hospital stood, overlooking the river. It was busy, both as a hospital and as a mortuary, but a combination of my papers and the generosity of my donation to their funds meant that we could find a place for him. The doctor took a glance at his wounds and drew breath through his teeth.

  ‘We’ve seen a few of these,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ I tried not to sound too interested. Nadya scowled at me, reminding me of my connivance in Dmitry’s activities.

  ‘What do you expect?’ the doctor continued. ‘They’ve let everyone out of the prisons. I’m not saying there weren’t people in there who shouldn’t have been, but there were enough of them that were thugs and murderers. It’s not enough for them just to kill, they have to mutilate the body – leave their mark. There was a case in London, thirty years ago. It was women then, but—’ He looked at Nadya and saw the expression on her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘We’ll have a funeral arranged in a day or two,’ I said, though I wasn’t convinced we could achieve anything so quickly, if at all.

  We went back the way we had come, but at the corner of Solyanoy Lane Nadya turned off to go into Saint Panteleimon’s. It was where we worshipped, when we bothered. She went more often than I.

  ‘I’ll see if I can arrange something,’ she said.

  ‘Do you want me to …?’

  She shook her head. ‘You have other things to do.’

  She was right. I hurried home and went straight up the stairs to the top floor. I was exhausted by the climb, but had no time to waste. It would be dusk in less than two hours. I went to the door at the end of the corridor, then froze in horror.