by Jasper Kent
I looked back. It was a soldier – just a ryadovoy – he was stretched out, his head propped up against the wall. Beside him was a bottle of sherry, almost empty, held lightly in his hand. He was dead to the world. There would be little pleasure in it, but at least his blood would sustain me. And it might be wiser to pick a safe target until I was more familiar with my new state of existence. I looked around, but there was no one else about. I knelt down at his side and shook him. He groaned, but did not come to. I pulled aside his collar and lifted his chin so that the pale flesh of his neck was exposed to me. Despite my hunger I felt no appetite for the blood that flowed through him, but I was wise enough to understand that I needed sustenance. I leaned forward, letting my lips touch his skin. The smell was foul. He hadn’t bathed for days, and there was the hint of vomit about him – presumably his own. Even so, I opened my jaws wide and bit.
I did not experience, as I had anticipated, the warm, revitalizing gush of blood running over my tongue. I tasted nothing but the rancid tang of his filthy skin. I bit harder, but still his flesh did not yield. I might as well have been sinking my teeth into a dirty leather boot. I simply did not have the strength that was required, nor did my teeth have the sharpness. I pressed my jaws together harder still, and the man screamed, pushing me away from him. At that moment I did taste blood, but it was not the rush I would have expected – merely a few drops. Even they brought me no pleasure. I knelt upright. The man turned on his side; the pain had not been enough to bring him fully to consciousness. I could feel fragments of his skin between my teeth and on my tongue, and was revolted by them. A distant memory returned of a time before I had become a vampire, when I had tasted the blood of a fellow human and had been revolted at the very concept.
I stood and ran, spitting the morsels of flesh from my mouth as I did. All that had once seemed natural to me was now alien. I was not the creature I had been. If I could not drink the blood of a human, then how was I supposed to live? I raced onwards, past doorways and shop windows, then suddenly I came to a halt. I had sensed a movement beside me, as if someone were running next to me. I went back and understood what I had seen.
In one of the windows there was a mirror. It wasn’t for sale, but was positioned so that customers could see the back of a particularly fine frock coat. I had caught a glimpse of my own reflection as I ran past. I hesitated. On the one hand, this was my opportunity to find out who this Mihail was that Dmitry had recognized in me. On the other, I was well aware that the only way that the image of a voordalak could be reflected was in a special kind of glass that would reveal his true form – and perhaps send him mad in the process. I had seen it once myself, though only briefly. But I was hardly a voordalak any more. My inability even to drink the blood of an insensible drunk proved that. What other characteristics had I lost?
I stretched my hand out to one side and saw its reflection. It appeared perfectly normal. I took a step sideways and saw the whole length of my arm. One further step, and I could see my face.
It was certainly not the face I had seen staring back at me the last time I had looked into a normal mirror, when I was still a man. Years had passed, but as a vampire my appearance should not have changed. This was simply not me. I was looking into the eyes of a man of about sixty years. He was clean shaven. His hairline was receding, but it had not gone far. His hair was grey and tightly curled, with sideboards well down his jaws. It was difficult to tell in the dim streetlight, but his eyes were dark, probably brown. He was tall, but not as tall as I had been in my own body.
I touched his face – my face. Earlier I had wondered if this entire city might be an illusion designed in some way to bewilder me. This too could be some conjuror’s trick, but every movement that I made was copied by the figure that stood before me in the mirror. There could be no mistake.
I peered closer at the face and some stirring of recognition began to move within me. If I had known him, then it must have been when he was a young man – in his twenties or thirties. I considered the name that Dmitry had used to address me – Mihail – and realization came to me in a flood.
I recognized the face before me, not just for itself, but for other faces I knew – relatives of the man whose physical body I had usurped. There was his grandfather, even his uncle with whom I’d only minutes before been speaking. This was Mihail Konstantinovich Danilov; a man in whose veins ran both the blood of the Danilovs and that of the Romanovs. And that blood ran in my veins too. I’d heard tell of the possibility, of the existence of a ceremony, but I’d had little idea of the steps that must be taken, or whether they would really work. But evidently this Anastasia had discovered more. She had taken my blood from the house in London, and found in Danilov an appropriate sacrifice – one whose blood I had imbibed, but who had not tasted mine. And it had worked. She had given me new life – taken Danilov’s body and handed it to me. I tried to imagine who she might be. It was not a name I recognized, but it was most likely an alias. Dmitry had given no description, and there were many women over the ages who had been happy to assist me – even to lay down their lives for me.
And yet Anastasia was quite unaware of what she had achieved. She had been expecting – as they all had, based no doubt on biblical obsession – a bodily resurrection; a new being created from nothing to accommodate a soul which fluttered helplessly in the void. Why, though, go to the effort of creating new flesh where flesh existed already? Despite her ignorance I would have to find her and thank her. There was still much of what she had done that she didn’t understand.
High on one of the rooftops above me a bird began to sing. Others immediately joined it. Dawn was almost upon us. Clearly my new body was very different from that of a normal vampire, but I wasn’t about to take risks. I needed to find a dark place to rest. I looked around me and saw peeking over the top of a building the colourful onion domes of the church in which I had first awoken. It would make a good enough place to sleep, for one day at any rate.
It took me only moments to get there. Inside, all was as I had left it. The bodies remained unmoved. I chuckled to myself, pretending to look around as they must have done for the dark moustached figure that they had been expecting. What they had got was something quite different. I considered where it was best to lie down and sleep. There were more windows in this building than in the older churches which it mimicked. I remembered Saint Isaac’s, remembered the fight I’d had there and the way that its windows allowed in so much of the sun during the day. It would not be safe for me to sleep in the nave. I found a door that led down into some kind of cellar – it could hardly be described as a crypt. It would do to keep me in darkness, and gave me a chance of being undiscovered if anyone came in. Soon I would find somewhere better.
I lay down on the hard floor and closed my eyes, but sleep would not come. I was too thrilled by the possibilities that this new life presented me. Memories of my death were beginning to come back to me. Though painful, it had been swift and I’d had no opportunity to regret. Now I was in a privileged position. I had died and I had returned. True, the same could be said of any vampire, but what I had achieved was different – was unique. I could only marvel at it, which meant I could not sleep.
I must have been lying there for about an hour when it happened. It began very slightly with me wiggling the fingers of my left hand. I raised it to my face and watched them flexing in the dim light. Then I stood up. It was a perfectly normal thing for me to do. The only remarkable feature of the action was that it took place completely without my intent. I walked back to the stairs and up once again into the nave, all without any volition on my part. Indeed, I made every attempt to stop myself, but there was no struggle to be had. My mind was not connected to my limbs. I was a passenger in my own body – in the body I had purloined.
Inside the church, daylight was shining through the windows, though none of it as yet reached down to the floor. But I did not linger. I strode over to the door and stood there momentarily. I knew full well
what I was about to do, but could conceive of no way of stopping myself. I grasped the handle and opened the door. Then I stepped outside and allowed my body to be swathed in the light of the bright morning sun.
CHAPTER XIV
I COULD SCARCELY feel the rays of light upon my skin. It was late October and in Petrograd in the early morning the sun had little intensity. My most powerful sensation was one of disappointment – disappointment that I was still alive and not reduced to a billion fragments of dust to be blown through the city streets on the breeze. The one consolation to be drawn from my survival was to confirm what I’d already learned from my inability to drink human blood and the fact that I could see my reflection in a mirror: physically I was not a vampire.
I had been conscious since the moment I had awoken in the early hours in the Church on Spilled Blood. I had been able to perceive every incident that occurred as I walked through the night. I had heard every word that was spoken to me and every reply that I offered. But more than that, I had been able to perceive every thought that passed through the mind that had taken possession of my physical being. Every vile notion had been as clear to me as if it had been the product of my own consciousness. But I was no more than an observer. I could not shape those thoughts, nor could I delve into the memories that undoubtedly must belong to the spirit that possessed me. If he chose to recall a past event, then I would share the act of reminiscence, but the decision was not mine. And in his shocked state of rebirth, his memory was nebulous – but it was enough for me to know him.
As little as I had control over what thoughts he brought into my head, neither could I participate in the choice of what he did with my body. More than once in my life I have awoken from a dream and found myself for seconds or even minutes quite incapable of movement. It’s a not uncommon experience – though a frightening one, especially the first time. There are stories that put it down to evil spirits sitting on the victim’s chest, but I favour the more modern explanation – that whatever bodily function it is that keeps us from thrashing about and physically enacting our dreams hangs over for a few moments into wakefulness. But this was far worse. Not only could I not move; another mind could move me. As we had walked through Petrograd I had been able to conceive of stopping, or running, or raising a hand in the air, just as I have done every day of my life. But none of it had any effect. The other will was ascendant. When we had been talking to Dmitry I had shouted and screamed at him, trying to warn him, trying to tell him the truth, but none of it had any more effect on the world than a passing whim which idly crosses the brain and is then forgotten. I don’t know if my thoughts made any impact on that other mind, but it did not seem distracted by them.
When I finally saw my own face in the mirror it was something of a relief to know that this was still my body and that the other mind was the invader – the cuckoo’s egg laid in the nest so many years before which now had hatched. Had my consciousness been transferred to the body of another, then what would have been my prospects? Dmitry’s reaction to me had given me some hope, but it was a joy to see in the mirror that I was physically the man I had always been.
And then I had lain down beneath the church. I’d felt a sense of sleepiness that I hoped affected both of us, but I tried to resist it. It was a desperate hope but I wondered whether, as he slept, I might gain control once more. I don’t know how long it took, but I continually tapped my fingers against the ground, or attempted to; at first it was no more successful than any other motion I had tried. Then I’d felt it – my fingertips touching and releasing the cold stone. Soon I’d discovered that I was in complete control of my body once more. For a heady moment I hoped that the possession had left me completely, but I searched my mind and soon found it.
As far as I could make out it was not fully asleep but dormant, in much the same state as I had been for the last few hours, I supposed. I couldn’t perceive its thoughts but sensed only its presence. It lurked there, waiting its moment. It reminded me of the Petrograd Soviet, sitting there for all those months in the opposite wing of the Tavricheskiy Palace. Now the Soviet had taken over completely – I’d learned that much from our wanderings of the previous night. I would not allow the same to happen to me.
I knew the one thing that he feared, though I worked out as easily as he had that, this being my body, it was unlikely to react to sunlight in the same way as that of a vampire. But if it did, then that was a sacrifice I would happily make. Even if my body was unharmed there was the chance that the light might simply purge me – destroy that part of me that was vampire and leave the remainder cleansed. Even if it had no effect, the impression of terror that I sensed lurking in a dark corner of my brain was a pleasure to experience.
I walked out of the church and headed north towards the Moika. When I reached it I stopped and leaned on the railing, looking down into the water. I was pleased once again to see my own reflection staring back at me, however fractured and distorted by the rippling waves. I examined my mind again, wondering if that other possibility had come true and the light of day had chased away the monster within me. For a moment I felt hope, but I soon found my lodger – the same quiet presence I had recognized before. The terror it had felt when I first stepped into the light had been piercing, but now it had calmed to almost nothing. We both knew that sunlight could not harm us.
I’d realized who he was some time before he had understood whose body it was he now occupied. But then I had two advantages over him; I could listen to his musings as they ran through my head and I knew what had taken place in the hours and minutes leading up to his awakening. Even so, to know his thoughts did not immediately reveal his identity; people do not continually repeat their own name at the front of their mind.
At first I’d been quite bewildered, but it took me only minutes to come to the most obvious conclusion. Anastasia’s intent had been to raise Zmyeevich from the dead; what could be more likely than that she had succeeded? I was in no doubt that the mind which controlled me was that of a vampire. By virtue of my Romanov descent, Zmyeevich possessed my blood and now Anastasia had forced me once again to drink his. It was just the situation that Iuda’s notes had described.
But as the night wore on I’d become less and less convinced that it was Zmyeevich. I knew Zmyeevich. For twelve years I had shared his mind – albeit occasionally. I had witnessed his death through his eyes. While the personality that sat beside mine shared some of Zmyeevich’s characteristics – the arrogance, the lust for blood, the contempt for humanity – it had none of the haughty pomposity of a minor European noble who liked to style himself as ‘Count’. This creature’s arrogance – his belief in his own superiority – came to him not as a right with which he was endowed by virtue of his lineage, but as a prize he had fought for every day of his existence using the one gift that he had been born with and which he had cultivated at every opportunity: his intelligence. I knew him better than I knew Zmyeevich, though I had never shared his mind, not for more than a moment. I knew him because I had studied him from birth; I had been brought up to hate him, brought up to kill him. And I’d succeeded, though it seemed now that even death was not enough to overcome him. Moreover, he was the only other vampire, apart from Zmyeevich, who had carried my blood in his veins, which he had drunk from me in his very death throes. He had died just a few minutes’ walk from here, but through luck or, so he seemed to think, his own design, he had come back, using my body. I ought to have recognized him from the first instant, but I did recognize him now, and with absolute certainty.
It was Iuda.
Anastasia’s rite had gone perfectly, just as she had planned, but there were a few things she could not know. One was that Iuda had drunk my blood. It had seemed such a futile thing to do on his part, as the Yablochkov Candle burned into him, but I’d been in no doubt he did it with precise intent. It seemed like a ridiculous longshot, but Iuda knew how to play the odds. The other side of things was even easier to comprehend. The blood that Anastasia had mixed wit
h mine and then burned was supposed to have been Zmyeevich’s. Why did she believe it to be his? Because Iuda had said it was. He had written the name Zmyeevich on the side of the vial, a vial which in truth contained Iuda’s own blood. It was so simple. I’d been taught the lesson at my mother’s knee: never trust a word Iuda says, nor what he writes, nor even what he thinks. I’d do well to remember that last one. Anastasia should have been aware of them all, but evidently had little experience of Iuda.
I looked along the Moika. It was only a few minutes’ walk home to where Nadya would be waiting for me, worried. I’d been away all night, and she knew there were vampires out there after me. But I couldn’t go to her for fear I lose control of myself once again. At the very least I should send her a note saying that I was safe, but if I even went to the door I might suddenly be gripped by the impulse to go inside. I shouldn’t even be thinking about our home – to do so would reveal its location. Who could guess what Iuda might do with the knowledge?
I turned in the opposite direction, back towards the Winter Palace. My personal concerns were not the only matters of interest today. Last night the Provisional Government had fallen. The most likely outcome was that the Soviet would take over, controlled by the Bolsheviks, but I couldn’t be certain. I needed to find out more.
Palace Square was quieter than it had been. There were Red Guards on duty at the palace gate, but they seemed more disciplined than those I had encountered before. There was no flow of looters in and out of the building, though that might have been down simply to there being nothing further to loot. On the corner of the square a man in a leather coat was handing out leaflets to passers-by. I went over for one. It took only moments to read: