by David Bishop
"How does it feel?" I asked nervously.
Eisenstein smiled and I could see his fangs had diminished, closer in size to normal teeth. "Like hell has set fire to my neck, but better than it was. Thanks." He staggered a little, but stayed upright, resting a hand on my shoulder. "Don't tell Yatsko or Brodsky what's happened to me. I doubt they'd understand."
"What about Sophia? She can't keep giving blood to you like that."
"I know," he said. "I restrict the amount I take, to stop her becoming tainted like me, but eventually my bloodlust will get the better of me. The sooner we can find Constanta and end this, the better for all of us. I'll go and talk to Sophia, explain what we've done. Hopefully it will give her a respite from my hunger."
Eisenstein strode from the bunker, leaving me behind to contemplate what I had seen. In truth it was a miracle he had not already become a vampyr, but the transformation was getting closer by the day. The man I had come to trust and respect was dying, a little at a time.
On January the eleventh Brodsky and the other squad commanders returned from Red Army field headquarters with confirmation of what we had all known was coming. At dawn we were to begin an all-out assault on the German front line, crossing the frozen surface of the river to attack the enemy trenches. If we broke through those the stronghold of Shlissel'burg lay beyond, a forbidding maze of bombed-out buildings and basements. How many Germans were waiting for us on the other side of no-man's-land was not known, nor how many might be secreted inside Shlissel'burg. I watched as Brodsky consulted with the leader of the NKVD troops about the best place to position his men and their machine guns.
"We'll be lucky to make it across the Neva," Yatsko commented sourly, "let alone into Shlissel'burg. That bastard will have us gunned down in a moment if we hesitate."
"We know," Sophia said. "You did the same to us, remember?"
"Brodsky was pointing a pistol at my head!"
"What's passed is passed," Eisenstein cut in, stepping between the two of them. "We have to depend on each other if we're going to get through this. Let's concentrate on getting ready for tomorrow; that should be our priority."
The captain noticed the four of us watching him and strode towards us, his face more haggard than ever. "I have good news. My true talents have finally been recognised, so I am being redeployed elsewhere. Should you survive the next twenty-four hours, you will have a new captain by this time tomorrow."
"What's their name?" Yatsko asked.
Brodsky sneered. "I neither know nor care. If I never set eyes on you scum again, it would still be too soon for my liking. In the meantime, I have volunteered you for patrol along the shoreline of Lake Ladoga. The others need to rest before tomorrow's attack. Convicts like you deserve no such respite." He stalked off, scratching distractedly at his grey, pallid face.
"And they say leadership is a dying art in the Red Army," Eisenstein joked, but nobody smiled. Patrolling the frozen surface in sub-zero temperatures was no laughing matter, especially when the cold fell to minus forty degrees. We all put on extra layers of clothing before marching to the nearby edge of Lake Ladoga. With the sun already setting, the vast blue expanse of frozen water resembled a mirror reflecting the dark blue sky. To our right we could see the German-occupied shoreline, emerging from a transparent, silvery mist. Eisenstein and Sophia offered to head in that direction, while Yatsko and I turned north.
The two of us trudged across the undulating ice, the shoreline marked by dense clumps of silver birch trees in the distance that vanished and reappeared beyond the contours of the frozen lake. Ladoga was full of deep furrows and high ridges, some as hard and sharp as glass. Variations in temperature meant that the appearance of the ice changed from one day to the next. At times it was cloudy, almost opaque, too dense to see anything inside. On other occasions the ice was nearly transparent, allowing us to see whole families of fish that were caught inside it as if imprisoned in some vast freezer. It was such a section that Yatsko and I found as we reached the most northerly edge of our patrol area. I looked down and was startled by the clarity of the ice. It gave me a curious feeling of giddiness, like I was suspended on a glass roof that could crack and shatter from underneath me at any moment. I pointed this out to Yatsko, who grunted, unimpressed.
"Let's get back, there's nothing out here," he said gruffly.
I moved to follow him but something trapped within the ice caught my eye. A blast of bitterly cold wind blew a dusting of translucent crystals across the ice, so I crouched down to wipe them away. As I did, I got a better look at what had glinted beneath the surface. A row of human faces were gazing up at me, their lips thin and shrivelled, their eyes shining, almost alive. I jumped backwards in shock and promptly fell over, crying out in surprise.
Yatsko came back to see what was the matter. He was less startled by the collection of corpses caught in the ice, but it still gave him pause. "They must have fallen through when the ice was forming," he said quietly.
I felt something hard and cold digging into one of my gloved hands. I lifted it away and saw a thin slither of metal protruding from the ice. "This looks like somebody's identity tag." I tried to pull it free but the tag was frozen in place. The tip of my bayonet made short work of the ice. Within a minute I could read what was imprinted on the metal: BRODKSY, A. If I had felt cold before, this discovery chilled me to the marrow.
Yatsko came to see what I was looking at. "Bojemoi," he whispered after reading the tags. "These can't belong to the captain, can they?"
I shook my head, not wanting to believe it possible. "There must be dozens of men called Brodsky inside the blockade. It can't be him. We saw the captain less than an hour ago."
Yatsko pulled on the metal chain that looped through the tags, but the rest of the chain was still buried within the frozen ice. It was more opaque there, and it was harder to see what was below the immediate surface, but I could make out a shape that resembled a human head.
"We'll have to dig this out," Yatsko decided, "see whose neck the chain goes around." He stabbed the ice with his bayonet.
I joined in, attacking from the other side. It was nearly dark by the time we'd chipped away enough ice to expose the top of the body. It wore the uniform of a Red Army captain, but the corpse's skin had been removed.
"That's Brodsky," Yatsko said fearfully, sitting back on his haunches.
"How can you tell?"
"Ignore what's missing and look at what's left: his profile, the shape of his nose, the colour of his eyes. That's Brodsky or else it must be his identical twin."
I didn't want to admit it but Yatsko was right. In a drunken rant one night the captain had told me bitterly how he was an only child. This frozen body was Captain Alexandr Brodsky, formerly in command of our shtrafroty unit.
"How long has he been here?" I wondered out loud. "Weeks? Months?"
Yatsko shrugged. "That's the least of our worries. If this is Brodsky, who has taken his place? Who's been giving us orders and putting us through hell?" He tried to pull the corpse from the ice, but it remained frozen in place.
I struggled to my feet and set off, hurrying as fast as I could across the ice towards our front line positions.
"Where are you going?" Yatsko called.
"We've got to get back," I shouted over my shoulder. "We've got to warn the others. If there's an impostor in charge tomorrow, it'll be a bloodbath!"
I reached the northern edge of the Neva as Eisenstein and Sophia returned from their patrol. At first neither of them believed what I was saying, until Yatsko caught up with us and showed them a grisly trophy he was carrying in his knapsack: Brodsky's skinless, decapitated head. Yatsko had cut it off with his bayonet, enabling him to remove the identity tags. Sophia was sickened by what she saw but Eisenstein said nothing at first, the muscles along his jawline rippling as he contemplated the remains of our dead commander.
"Brodsky's been acting strange for months," he eventually commented. "Now I guess we know why..."
&nbs
p; "Then who...?" Sophia began.
Eisenstein smiled grimly. "Let's find out."
He marched towards the captain's tent, the rest of us following close behind. Sophia and I drew our pistols, both of them loaded with silver bullets. Eisenstein pulled his sickle from its sheath, while Yatsko fixed a bayonet to his rifle. As we approached the tent, I noticed a faint mist dissipating in the freezing air outside, a cold breeze carrying it away towards the German positions. I didn't think anything of it at the time since my mind was still turning over the grisly discovery we had made on the ice. I was trying to deduce when the real Brodsky might have been killed. How did his body end up in Lake Ladoga? Why had it become trapped in the ice? How had the impostor tricked us into believing he was Brodsky? Had he used some vampyr mind control to convince us he spoke with the captain's voice? I decided such questions did not matter now. I have to concentrate on the here and now, I told myself.
Eisenstein paused outside the tent and cleared his throat. "Captain Brodsky, we need to speak to you. We found something... disturbing on patrol." No reply came from inside, but I could see the flame of a kerosene lamp throwing shadows against the canvas walls.
"Captain, we need you to come out and see this, sir."
Still nothing: no words, no sounds from within.
"Captain, if you don't come outside now, we will be forced to come in," Eisenstein warned. Again, all was silent inside. "Very well, you leave us no choice." He turned back to make sure we were ready before entering the tent.
I was last in, ready to shoot if the impostor fought back or attacked the others. The interior was all but empty. The captain's uniform was folded neatly on the ground, next to the kerosene lamp and a pile of burning ashes. A cot lay to one side, unused and undisturbed. Eisenstein crouched to study the embers of the small fires.
"Somebody was burning documents here until a few minutes ago. This ground is still hot to the touch," he said.
Sophia sifted through the charred remains, attempting to piece together some unburned fragments of paper. Most were corners or edges without anything useful left on them. She did, however, find some numerals and three words underlined in red ink.
"Victor, can you translate these?" she asked.
I glanced at the text: Dämmerung, Tod and Aufstieg.
"Twilight, Dead and Rise. Or Growth: the last one could mean Growth."
"What does that mean, twilight of the dead? If the dead rise, it brings twilight for the living?" Sophia asked, confusion evidence on her face.
"I don't know," I had to admit. "There's not enough here to decipher."
"He's already gone," Eisenstein decided. "The impostor - whoever or whatever he was - told us he was leaving. We've come too late to stop him."
"Well, the impostor must have left in a hurry," Yatsko said quietly, pulling something from the shadows beneath the empty cot, "because he left this behind."
He stood up and slowly unrolled a long coil of wet, pink fabric that dripped blood on the ground. I realised it was not made of fabric. It was made of skin... Brodsky's skin. The captain's skin had been removed from his body and was worn by the impostor as a soldier wears a uniform. I retched but did not vomit, while Sophia went pale and quiet. Eisenstein ignored our distress and retrieved a single sheet of paper that had gotten adhered to the sticky, moist skin.
"They must have missed this when burning the other documents," Eisenstein said quietly.
I looked over his shoulder at the page. Much of the writing had been smeared with blood, making the ink run, but a few German words and phrases were still legible. Eisenstein handed the page to me for translation. "What does it say?"
"There's a lot missing," I replied, skimming over what did remain to see if I could make sense of it. "But this looks like a recall order, telling the impostor to return to base. The others are withdrawing soon. Their master says they are needed elsewhere on the Eastern Front. And there's a time and a place for a rendezvous: a small log cabin on the shore of Lake Ladoga, three kilometres east of Shlissel'burg, at the first midnight after the Red Army launches its counter-strike." I smiled, knowing the end of the document would please Eisenstein. "Constanta says he looks forward to meeting Maga again."
"That must have been the impostor's real name: Maga," Yatsko realised. "Doesn't sound very German, does it?"
"He was Rumanian," Eisenstein said angrily. "We had one of those bloodsucking bastards in our midst all this time and didn't realise it."
"Bojemoi," Sophia whispered. "He must be the one who had the NKVD brought in, to make sure nobody tried to retreat. I was wondering why all the other captains obeyed his orders without question when before they treated him like scum... He even helped the NKVD men find the best positions to set up their machine guns. It'll be a slaughter."
"We don't even know if the orders to advance tomorrow are real," Yatsko added. "This Maga could have falsified them to send our troops into a trap."
"We have to stop the advance," I said.
"It's too late for that," Eisenstein replied. "We can't prove Brodsky was an impostor. We're convicts and nobody would believe us."
Yatsko shook the discarded skin in his grasp. "What about this? Isn't this proof enough? I've got his head and his identity tags too."
Eisenstein smiled wryly. "Ivan, why were you sentenced to this shtrafroty?"
"I attacked a senior officer; nearly beat him to death."
"What do you think will happen if you present the skin and decapitated head of your current commander to another officer? You'll be in front of a firing squad within minutes, if not sooner. No, we can't tell anyone our suspicions. Even if we did, they'd never believe us. I wouldn't."
"So what can we do?" Sophia asked.
"The only way to stop this madness is to attack the source. We have to find Constanta. Either we kill him, or else bring him back to Leningrad to stand trial for war crimes. The people deserve to know what kind of monsters the fascists have unleashed against us."
I felt my stomach lurch at the prospect of invading German-held territory again. "Last time we went behind enemy lines, many of us didn't make it back," I muttered.
"Last time they knew we were coming," Eisenstein replied. "Brodsky - Maga - sent us into a trap. The vampyr infiltrated our ranks and put one of their own in charge of the Smert Krofpeet. What better way to stop a squad called Death to Blood-Drinkers? But now we have the element of surprise on our side."
I crumpled the blood-stained document in my hand. "This could be another trap, another trick. Maga might have left this piece of paper here deliberately, to lure us into another confrontation with the vampyr."
"Perhaps, but I doubt it. He couldn't know you and Ivan would find Brodsky's body. He was expecting us to die with the others when we advance on the Germans at dawn. Even if this rendezvous is a trap, I'm going to be there. I want to finish this, once and for all. Who's coming with me?"
"I will," Yatsko volunteered. "Better to die fighting for a cause you believe in than getting machine-gunned down by your own side."
Eisenstein nodded. "Sophia?"
"You believe killing Constanta will lift the curse he has put upon us all?"
"Yes, I do," he replied.
She smiled at him for a moment. "Then I will stand beside you." The three of them all looked at me expectantly.
"I can't."
"Can't, or won't?" Yatsko demanded.
Eisenstein stepped between us. "No, Ivan. This has to be Zunetov's choice. We shouldn't force him to come with us; that would make us little better than those we would defeat." Eisenstein rested a hand on my left shoulder. "We must leave soon. To avoid alerting the Germans, we'll skirt their front line by going out on the lake and then come back in to shore after we've bypassed Shlissel'burg. If you change your mind, you'll know where to find us."
"I won't, I'm sorry."
"Do what you think is best. We all understand." Yatsko snorted derisively behind Eisenstein. "But some of us understand better than others."
I left them inside Brodsky's tent to plan their attack on the vampyr rendezvous. I had survived one suicide mission into enemy territory, and I had no intention of going on another. As I walked away, an officer with a captain's insignia hurried past me, his face hidden from view by a peaked cap. I did not recognise him, but as he passed a familiar scent lingered in the air for a moment: hot and metallic, like freshly spilled blood. I looked over my shoulder and saw the officer making for Brodsky's tent.
"Captain, could I ask you something?" I called after him, but the officer kept walking. "Captain, is something wrong?"
He stopped, realising I was calling after him.
"What is it? I'm busy making preparations for the advance," he snapped.
I strode towards him, one hand resting on the butt of my pistol. "I'm looking for Captain Brodsky. I haven't seen him for several hours and I need to check some important details about the advance." I kept talking as long as I could, giving myself time to get close to the officer. "Do you know where he is, sir?"
"No. Why should I?"
"Because you were walking straight towards his tent," I said.
"I didn't realise that was his," the officer replied, his face betraying unease. "I was in there earlier, talking with another captain, but I didn't catch his name."
"Brodsky, Alexandr Brodsky."
"Indeed. Well, I left an important document in Captain Brodsky's tent and I need to retrieve it," the officer said quickly. "So, if you'll excuse me..."
I pressed my pistol into his ribs as he tried to leave. "Each of the bullets in this weapon is tipped with silver. Maybe one will be enough to kill you, maybe not. Maybe silver only kills your kind if it makes a wound that would be fatal to normal people. Try to escape or call for help, and we'll soon learn the truth."