by Jasper Kent
‘Come on! The palace has fallen. It’s a free-for-all!’
He turned again and raced away from me. I wondered what he could mean. There must have been two dozen palaces in the city, but in the absence of any qualification, and based on the direction he was heading, I could only guess he meant the Winter Palace. And if it had fallen, then surely Russia was in the midst of an invasion, or even a revolution. Was the tsar in residence? Had he been captured? I broke into a run, following the direction the man had gone. Within a minute I was at Nevsky Prospekt. I came to a halt, breathing heavily. I should have been able to cover that distance without even raising a sweat, but I felt an aching in my lungs, along with an unfamiliar sensation in my chest. It was the pounding of my heart – whatever this fanciful world was that I had awoken into, it was not only the city that had been altered by it. So too had my own body.
The prospekt was busy, considering the time of night. The general flow was towards the Winter Palace. Individuals, couples and small groups – many of them carrying rifles. A few came from the other direction. Two soldiers – a sergeant and a lieutenant – passed me carrying a huge painting between them, horizontal like a table. The canvas was face down so I could not see what it was of, but the gilt of the frame hinted at its value. It was obvious where they had taken it from, and it only served to prove what I’d already been told. The Winter Palace was open to all comers, to take what they wanted.
I had no interest in such booty, but I was fascinated to discover what was happening. Whatever circumstances had led to me being here in this strange yet familiar city, I was privileged to have arrived at just this moment – a turning point in history. Perhaps I’d even be lucky enough to witness the tsar – whoever that might be – emerge from his former home in chains. Whether the extinction of the Romanov line would prove to be to my advantage or otherwise, I was unsure, but if it was to happen, I would delight in being there to see it. I set off along the pavement, walking now, wary of the apparent limitations of my body.
Then, from behind me, I heard the most bewildering of sounds. It was a low growl – as if from some great dog – steadily rising in pitch, lasting longer than a dog or any animal could have maintained without drawing breath. Then at last there was the slightest break in the sound, only for it to begin again back at its lower frequency, smoothly rising once more. It was getting closer. No one else on the street seemed even to have heard it. I stopped and turned.
It was, as far as I could suppose, a carriage, but unlike any other I had ever seen. Its shape was unusual, but its purpose was clear from the fact that it carried seven people, some standing, others sitting. Two of the men had rifles, which they fired without aim into the air. There was no roof to the vehicle, but it had windows at the sides. The wheels were smaller than I would have expected to see on a coach of that size, allowing it to sit closer to the road, but that was not the strangest thing about it. What marked it out from any carriage I had seen on Nevsky Prospekt before, or on any road, was that it had no horses.
I realized now that decades must have passed to which I had been quite insensible. Whether I had been in some way unconscious or had actually been transported through time, I could not guess. The concept of a horseless carriage was not new to me, but for more than a century – according to my perception – such things had been confined to run on rails. Building a steam locomotive that could travel along an ordinary road was not impossible, but had been determined quite impractical. And yet this thing was not like any steam engine that I had ever seen. Where was its funnel? Where was its firebox or its boiler? And that sound that had first drawn the vehicle to my attention was nothing like what I would expect from a steam engine.
The carriage sped past. I turned my head to follow it and soon it was receding into the distance. It left in its wake a strange smell, a smell which I realized had been hanging about the city since I had awoken, but was stronger closer to its source. It was the smell of burning, but not of either coal or wood, more like paraffin, but even that was not quite right. It was another thing I would have to investigate.
I walked onwards, trying to work out how much time must have passed – with me oblivious to it – for such changes to have taken place. The position of the Romanovs had always been precarious and for the people to turn against them might have taken only months. To build the church in which I had found myself would have been the matter of a decade or so. But for that carriage to have been invented – and to have become so commonplace that no one but me had even turned to marvel at it – would have taken far longer. Was this 1920? 1930? 1940? I couldn’t guess. I could only lick my lips in anticipation of what further wonders were to be revealed to me.
Before long I was at the end of Nevsky Prospekt. Ahead of me was something else new – a bridge that I had not known before stretching out across the Neva – but it was of no immediate concern. I looked across Palace Square and saw a scene of chaos. There were fires blazing, men, women and children drinking and singing, soldiers standing doing nothing. I walked over towards the palace. At the main entrance there had been some sort of barricade built, but it had long since been breached. A chain of men – like ants who had found a basket of food – went back and forth from it, taking pieces of wood and furniture to use on the fires. Others went through the gap and into the palace, while still more came out of the building carrying what loot they could find.
I stood and looked up at the higher windows. Many of them were broken. Inside I could see figures running back and forth. A face thrust itself out through one of the broken panes and shouted across the square, but I couldn’t make out the words. A little closer to the building I saw a figure standing like me with his head raised, gawping at the sight before him. I went over and stood near by, close enough to note the stench of alcohol that hung about him. My hope was that he might offer some information of his own accord; any question I asked risked my being regarded as a madman. I waited a few minutes, but he said nothing. In the end I had to speak.
‘Did they put up much of a fight?’ I said. It was as neutral a question as I could think of.
‘Hardly,’ he grunted. ‘Kerensky had already made a run for it. The rest of them didn’t have much stomach.’
The name meant nothing to me. I could only presume that Kerensky was some kind of senior minister – the tsar’s right hand, much like Speransky or Arakcheyev had been. But I wasn’t concerned with bit players.
‘And what about … the tsar?’ I asked, managing to suppress my instinct to say ‘His Majesty’ in time. If this was, as it seemed, a revolution, then I didn’t want to appear part of the old guard. At the same time, I wondered why I cared. It was becoming ever clearer to me that I wasn’t myself.
‘Nikolai? Why should he give a fuck? He’s lucky to have got out when he did.’
The man walked away. In his hand he carried a bottle of cognac, of a quality and price that would more usually find itself drunk at a table than in the street. From his coat pocket I caught a glint of gold. It wasn’t just brandy he’d taken from the palace. Evidently the emperor had already fled, but now I knew his name. My memory was quite clear on matters of history; there had been a Nikolai in direct line to the throne – Nikolai Aleksandrovich. If he was now tsar then I could make a guess at the year. If he had lived into his eighties, it could already be 1950. If his father had died at, say, sixty it could be as early as 1905. It was an enormous timespan; the method was less helpful than I’d anticipated.
Then I saw something that might be of far better use: a sheet of paper blowing across the square, quite possibly a newspaper. I chased after it. The wind dropped and the paper settled down on to the cobbles. I reached out, but it was off again. I ran, but found myself unable to keep going for any longer than I had before. Eventually the paper caught against one of the pillars at the foot of the Aleksandr Monument. I managed to grab it.
It was the front page. The title was Pravda. I hadn’t heard of it, but that hardly mattered. The first thing I read w
as the date: 23 October 1917. It couldn’t have been more than a few days old. That meant a gap of decades since my last memories – vague though they were. I could recall emotion more clearly than events, and the one emotion that seemed to overwhelm me was fear; fear that I was about to die. No, more even than that. I hadn’t been afraid that I was going to die – I knew it. My fear had been at the punishment to come. And if I had died, then there was only one explanation for my current state. I had been resurrected. I had not merely slept, like those creatures once entombed beneath Chufut Kalye, nor had I travelled in time. I had died and had been recalled to life.
But then another thought occurred to me, bringing a smile to my lips. In facing death I had feared what was to come, feared that the stories of a vengeful God and a just Hell were more than fables taught to frighten children into obeying their parents, and men into obeying their kings. I had feared, like so many, that the innumerable sins of my earthly existence would be weighed in the scale and that I would be found wanting. It was for that reason that so many chose the immortality of the vampire, not because they wanted to live for ever, but simply so that they might put off the day of judgement. But now I knew better. I had visited that undiscovered country and returned, but while there had found it to be an empty place – a place of oblivion, not punishment, and as such it was nothing to fear. I did not plan to return there quickly, but I knew now that no action of mine on Earth would ever need to be accounted for in another place. I could live an existence untrammelled by fear of reprisal. I doubted it would make much difference to my behaviour.
There was more than that, though, to be gleaned from the newspaper. I quickly read the articles and began to make some sense of what was going on. The tsar had fallen some time ago – months at the very least – and had been replaced by a Provisional Government of which this Kerensky was the head. The nation was at war with an alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and, inevitably, the Ottomans. The war had been going on for years, starving Russia, but Kerensky had insisted on continuing with it. His main rival was a party called the Bolsheviks, who now accused Kerensky of being about to allow the Germans to occupy the city of Petrograd in hope of propping him up in power. It took me a moment to realize that this Petrograd was just a new name for the very city in which I was standing – Saint Petersburg. By the time I’d finished reading the four pages of newspaper I had in my possession, I felt somewhat confident that I could pass myself off as informed. I knew, though, that I had to be wary. The paper made no attempt to disguise the fact that it held a particular viewpoint, one that chimed with the opinions of the Bolsheviks. I did not want to appear to be throwing in my lot with either side until I was sure which had been victorious.
There was nothing more to be done here. I crumpled the paper and cast it aside, leaving Palace Square to the east, along Millionaire’s Street. Here too there were signs that a barricade had been built and destroyed. I pressed on. I still wasn’t sure how long it would be till dawn, and in that time I needed to find a safe, dark place to sleep. And there was something else I needed. I had begun to feel the pangs of hunger. It was a sensation not quite as I remembered it, but compelling none the less. It had been decades since I had last fed, but that was hardly relevant. It was an interesting question to ponder: when a man was resurrected from the dead, was it with a full belly or an empty one? But then hunger wasn’t the only reason to feed – there was the pleasure of it too. I would find some quiet street or sleepy household, and there I would indulge myself.
I turned on to the Moika embankment, looking all the time I walked for a place where I might find the blood I was beginning to crave. I was doubling back on myself, but perhaps that was for the best. I needed to return to the church; if anywhere held clues to how it had come about that I was alive at all, then it would be there. Even so, memories sent scurrying by the trauma of the event were beginning to creep back into my mind. Regarding the question of how I had come to be resurrected a simple and intriguing answer occurred to me: because I had planned it. That in itself didn’t get me very far. For any man to embark on so audacious a scheme would require a quite uncommon degree of both intelligence and fastidiousness. It sounded entirely the sort of thing that I would have attempted. I tried to imagine how I might have achieved it; if I could not remember the events then perhaps trying to recreate them in my imagination would be of some help.
Behind me came the sound of running footsteps; some looter, no doubt, fleeing the palace with his spoils – probably drunk too. Perhaps that would make him incautious. I would let him pass me and then follow. I could almost taste his blood on my lips. He was close to me now, but it was still wisest to let him go by. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, turning me.
‘My God! You’re alive!’
I looked at his face and the most unusual sensation swept over me: a sense of relief at no longer being alone. I had lived longer than the span of any human life and had adapted to the changing world with ease. But with this sudden leap into the future I found myself in a state of utter isolation. I sought neither friends nor companionship, but as I realized now, any creature will from time to time seek comfort in the familiar. And this face was familiar – he had once been a friend, though I had no reason to suppose he was any such thing now. He did not appear a day older than when I had last seen him, but why should he? He was, like me, a vampire.
‘Yes, Dmitry, I’m alive.’
He stood uncomfortably for a moment, as if considering whether to embrace me, but in the end he decided against it. I desperately tried to assess him. His tone of voice expressed both less surprise and more pleasure than I might have expected. We had been friends once – allies even – but he decided long ago to turn away from me. Why then should he be so happy at my resurrection? More than that, though, he had not seen me for almost forty years; ‘My God! You’re alive!’ could only be regarded as understatement. And yet I was not foolish enough to suppose that my new-born comprehension of our circumstances was in any way better than his.
‘One of the Red Guards shouted out you were dead. I should have checked for myself, but I wanted to get after Anastasia.’
I could only relish the challenge of having to process so much information, and yet respond as if it all made sense to me. Clearly he was describing events of which I had no memory, and yet which he seemed convinced we had shared. Perhaps this was not a case of time travel or resurrection, but of simple memory loss; but not that simple – it would have to have been over a period of decades. And yet my memory was certainly hazy, even as to events before that. The term ‘Red Guards’ I understood from my brief look at the newspaper. But they had been formed for less than a year, so clearly Dmitry was referring to something relatively recent. The name Anastasia meant nothing to me, though it evidently should have.
‘Did you catch up with her?’ I asked. It seemed like the most obvious response.
He shook his head. ‘She was fast, and the streets are busy. They all went in different directions, but I tried to stick with her.’
‘I’m sure you did your best.’
‘Do you think she’ll be able to try again?’
‘Who can say?’ I despised myself to hear such platitudes on my lips, but I knew I had to remain noncommittal.
‘There must be more of Zmyeevich’s blood – somewhere.’
And that was when it all began to make sense to me. Now my mind began to race. Vague memories became more substantial. A sense of pride began to fill me – pride at my own ingenuity. I fell silent, deep in thought.
‘Mihail? Are you all right?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine. I was just thinking – about the blood.’ I hadn’t missed the name by which he’d called me.
‘You think Iuda might have hidden away other bottles of it in London?’
‘Let’s hope not.’
‘We’re assuming, of course, that it did fail.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve been thinking. They were looking around for som
e kind of apparition – for Zmyeevich to materialize somewhere. We all were. But no one knew where to look. They were expecting something spectacular, but what did they know? Who’s to say he didn’t appear in some dark corner. Or even just outside the church, rather than just inside it. It’s only a few feet to the embankment – what do stone walls matter with something like this?’
‘Wouldn’t you know if he’d returned?’ I asked. ‘Wouldn’t you sense it?’ It was a pleasure to toy with him.
Dmitry breathed in deeply again, as if scenting the air. ‘No,’ he said, but with little conviction. ‘I don’t sense him. But if he is newly born – possessed of a new body – then perhaps I can’t feel his presence. Perhaps I wouldn’t even recognize him if we stood face to face.’
I was forced to suppress my laughter. ‘ “But their eyes were holden that they should not know him,” ’ I said. He looked at me, puzzled. ‘When the disciples first saw Christ after his resurrection,’ I explained.
His expression didn’t change. I realized my mistake – the more I spoke, the less likely it was that I sounded like who I was supposed to be: Mihail, whoever he was. I knew I should say as little as possible. Thankfully Dmitry let it pass.
‘If he has returned, he’ll reveal himself soon enough.’ He paused, contemplating the prospect. I hoped I would be there to witness it when he finally discovered what had happened. He looked up at the sky. ‘It’ll be dawn soon. I have to go. We’ll meet tomorrow – usual time and place.’
I had no idea what he meant, but I wasn’t going to shatter the illusion he had about me, not just yet. I felt sure I’d be able to track him down when the time came.
‘I’ll try my best,’ I said.
He gave me a brief pat on the arm, then departed. I set off in the other direction. I too needed to find a place to sleep before dawn came. But I also needed to feed. I turned away from the river and on to Moshkov Lane. It was quiet here. I looked up at the windows on either side, wondering which I should climb up to, but then by chance hit upon a far more convenient way to slake my thirst. I tripped over something on the pavement.