CHAPTER XXIII

THEY FOUND THE body beside the river, a little way out of town, downstream, two days after the coronation. He hadn’t been that difficult to identify – he was wearing the uniform of a cavalry major, and the word was already out that Major Dmitry Alekseevich Danilov had failed to report for duty on the morning of His Majesty’s great day. There was no clear idea of precisely when he had died, but the speculation was that it had occurred the night before the coronation. No one knew why Major Danilov might have wandered into a rough part of town, but there seemed little doubt that vagabonds had fallen upon him and had cut his throat – quite brutally, as reports were keen to point out.

Tamara knew differently. Nadia had told her that Dmitry had called on Raisa, and that she had seen neither of them leave – a puzzle in itself. But both were gone. The reason for Dmitry’s absence was soon revealed, but of Raisa there had been no further sign. Until Tamara heard the news, she had suspected they might have eloped – hoped it at least. After she learned about the state of Dmitry’s body her first guess was that the one remaining vampire, Mihailov, must have come upon the two of them in Raisa’s room and slain them both. She had no doubt that before very long on some other riverbank or remote spot Raisa’s body would be found, and that the newspapers would linger with similar glee over the details of the wound to her neck – though few would be smart enough to make a connection with Dmitry.

Then the letter had arrived.

Yudin had made most of the arrangements for the funeral. It was to be in Petersburg, on Vasilievskiy Island. Then, on the evening before they were due to travel up, Yudin had announced to Tamara that he would not be attending the ceremony. He told her that he felt responsible for Dmitry’s death, and that he could not put Svetlana Nikitichna through the agony of seeing him and blaming him. It seemed more like a way to assuage his own conscience than to save Svetlana pain, but there was nothing Tamara could do about it.

That morning, as she had been about to set out to catch the train, she had found the letter. It had been slipped under the door by an unknown messenger some time in the small hours. She picked it up, but did not have time to look at it until she was on the train to Petersburg. The text was not long.

My dear Tamara Valentinovna,

By the time you receive this, I shall be gone. Whether I shall be dead is a matter for fate to decide. And on this occasion, fate will take the form of our mutual friend, Raisa Styepanovna. I will not bore you with detailed explanations. Suffice it to say that I did not make it to Klin in time, and before I could reach Raisa, Tyeplov had converted her into a creature like himself. The fact that I was fully aware that such a transformation could only be enacted upon a willing supplicant made her actions all the more a betrayal. I was destroyed.

And yet out of my misery came hope. I learned of her consumptive state, and her plan to defeat it by allowing, more than that, by asking Tyeplov to make her into a vampire. I also learned of her hope, so I choose to see it, that I too would follow her down that path. I suspect that I will. I shall call on her and ask her what it is she wants from me. If I am right, then we shall be together. If I am wrong, then who knows? I cannot ask you to pray that I am right, but I do ask that you will pray for God to guide me.

You may ask why I should choose to reveal all this to you, an acquaintance whom I have known for less than a year, and who in that time I have met but rarely. As I think you guess, my dear Toma, I know your secret, even though you do not. I know who your parents are. I would dearly love to reveal it to you here and now, but it is not my decision to take and even if it were, I would not commit it to the same pages upon which I have revealed an intention which, I have no doubt, will make you despise me.

Suffice it to say that, as you guessed, Domnikiia Semyonovna knows the truth, as does Papa. They will be returning soon, thanks to His Majesty’s pardon. Ask them to tell you. Let them know that I insisted they hold nothing back from you. But please, Toma, tell my father nothing of what has become of me. He would no more accept it than you do.

To have at last met you has been one of the greatest joys of my life.

Yours eternally,

Dmitry Alekseevich Danilov

It was a bizarre letter, from a man, Tamara deduced, with only a tenuous grip on his wits. But his message was clear, the first part of it at least. Raisa had become a voordalak. When Tamara had met her on her return to Degtyarny Lane, when she had said that Dmitry had saved her from Tyeplov, it had been a lie. Tyeplov had made her into one of his own. Tamara had seen no change in her, but what should she see? It was only by daylight that her altered nature would be revealed.

But worse than that, she had tricked Dmitry. Where was the need for such cruelty? Perhaps that was the tell-tale sign of her new nature. But she could feed on anyone. Why pretend to him that she would make him like her? Dmitry was right; Tamara was revolted by the idea, and if she’d had the chance she would have screamed at him to be revolted too. But Raisa had not allowed Dmitry to live on by her side. She had waited until he had come willingly to her, and then devoured him. Did that make his blood taste all the sweeter, the fact that she’d played him for a fool in order to get it?

The most generous light it could be seen in was that something had gone wrong – that Raisa had tried to make Dmitry like her, but had failed. Either way, Dmitry’s corpse, drained of blood, lying on the bank of the Moskva was ample proof that for him there was no life after death. Out there, somewhere, Raisa still roamed, still feasted upon the blood of the living, but for Dmitry there was nothing.

But it was the second part of Dmitry’s letter that thrilled her. The knowledge he had of her parents. He had given her hope; hope that was more substantial than anything she had encountered on her long quest. The news of the pardon would have reached Siberia by now. Aleksei and Domnikiia might travel quickly or slowly, but they would come, Tamara felt sure of it. And when they did, they would know the truth. That had been Dmitry’s promise.

The burial took place the day Tamara arrived in Petersburg. Dmitry’s coffin had travelled by the same modern means as Tamara – the railway – a few days before. It had been carried over to Vasilievskiy Island by another example of Russia’s surge into the nineteenth century, the Nikolaievsky Bridge. Konstantin had told her that his father had ordered it to be erected so far downstream so that the imperial family would not be able to see the endless funeral cortèges crossing it from the window of the Winter Palace. She thought he had been joking, but now was less sure.

It was a reasonable turnout; a good military presence, a large contingent of Svetlana’s family, and even a few from Dmitry’s – cousins with whom, she discovered, he rarely communicated. A few months before she would have had so many questions for them, but now there was little she did not know about the deaths in 1812 and 1825 and Aleksei’s involvement in them. She could have told his family that, despite his exile, he was a hero, but soon she would have the honour of telling Aleksei himself, face to face.

Svetlana had been polite, almost effusive towards Tamara, considering how icy their last encounter had been. At least Tamara had bothered to come. There were few other representatives of Dmitry’s friends in Moscow.

‘Actual State Councillor Yudin asked me personally to send his apologies,’ Tamara said, by way of explanation. ‘He has so much to do with all the reforms His Majesty is putting into place.’

‘I know. I know,’ said Svetlana. ‘He organized all this; paid for it. It’s so like Vasiliy Denisovich to hide away from the occasion itself.’

It was a simple mistake over the patronymic – Denisovich for Innokyentievich. Svetlana had clearly been thinking of another absentee: Vasiliy Denisovich Makarov. One had organized this funeral; the other managed the rental of her former home. And yet neither had made it here.

The most surprising face Tamara saw was that of her brother, Rodion Valentinovich.

‘You knew Dmitry?’ she asked.

‘Very slightly. Years ago, when he was young and I was younger – before you were born. He used to visit with his parents. Mama insisted I come here. To honour Grandpapa. He and Aleksei Ivanovich were so close.’

Rodion left soon after, saying he had to be back on duty. Tamara didn’t even have a chance to thank him for giving her the name of her nanny.

She left Petersburg on the train the following morning. Konstantin was not in the city, but she would not have tried to contact him even if he had been. That could wait. For now there was only one thought on her mind: the return of the Decembrists.

There was no music. There was no light. There was neither cold nor warmth, neither pain nor comfort, neither pleasure nor sorrow. The only sound was that of a sudden, laboured breathing; of lungs that had lain empty for days at last filling. The only knowledge was the understanding of the mind of another.

The breathing was Dmitry’s own. This had been no gradual restoration to life, no transition from death to slumber and from slumber to wakefulness. His body’s need for air had arisen in the same instant as his mind’s awareness of it. The first few breaths were desperate and deep, accentuated by the emerging sense of enclosure. An early thought was that there was little air for him to breathe; a later one that he had little need for it.

His next perception was Raisa’s mind. A human child might look forward to a decade and a half in which his parents would pass down the knowledge learned from their own parents, plus a little more that had been accumulated during their lives. They might even employ others to assist in the process. A voordalak could not risk such a slow transference of information so vital to survival; it was like a newborn foal that must learn to stand on its own feet within hours, or perish. Thus the mind of the parent vampire was shared with that of the child.

Like him, Raisa was awake – newly awake as night had just fallen. She was in a dark place, as was he. She knew he was there. She was in a coffin. She hungered. The wood of the lid above her face meant that she could feel the warmth of her breath blowing back on her. Dmitry could feel the same. She pushed at it and it yielded. Dmitry pushed, but there was no movement. He tried again, but still his coffin remained a prison. He prepared for that awful sense of being trapped to come upon him – the claustrophobia he always felt when his sizeable frame could not stretch to its fullest. But the sensation did not come. Instead he felt … safe. He searched Raisa’s mind for help, back to the time when she had first awoken as a vampire, after Tyeplov had made her into one. In understanding her first moments of this new life – her rebirth – he hoped to better make sense of his own.

Raisa was walking now, down a flight of stone steps and into a dark, low corridor. She offered no resistance to his mind, as she had done when last they had been together. Even that, she revealed to him, had been longer ago than he would have guessed. He had been dead for three weeks – buried for two. But his curiosity was directed towards the past, not the present. He searched her mind for the memory of her own rebirth.

Weeks turned into months and months into years, and yet still he could not locate the moment of her resurrection. He quickly found the cemetery in Klin where he had seen her dead. She remembered waiting there, standing beside Tyeplov as they both watched. Then she had seen him – Dmitry – and they had moved swiftly. Tyeplov had bitten at her throat and she had cut his chest. Each had smeared the other’s blood across their mouths, steeling themselves against the repugnant taste of the blood of another vampire. Then Raisa had lain down on the grave, in desperate concentration to prevent her wounds from healing, waiting for Dmitry to arrive. She had heard noises, but could not make sense of them. It was only when Tyeplov had kicked at her prone body that she had opened her eyes and seen Dmitry unconscious beside her. She and Tyeplov had fled.

She had been a voordalak even then. She had been a voordalak when Tyeplov and Mihailov had confronted her at the brothel, when she had first met Dmitry, when she had first met Tamara, when she had come to Degtyarny Lane.

Years rolled back. 1848 – the cholera – the famine – the foreign revolutions. 1831 – the Polish uprising – a revolution against the Turks. 1826 – Nikolai’s coronation. Even 1825 and the Decembrist Revolt; she remembered it, though she had not been there. And soon before that deep in a cave – a chain around her neck – his father’s face! And then at last he found the moment: her sense of the new, her search for the mind of the one who had created her. Dmitry recognized him – Kyesha, the vampire he and his father had hunted in Moscow; the one who had transformed Raisa into a creature like himself.

And then knowledge poured in. Everything had been intended to deceive him. It was no lie that she was a vampire, but not for a matter of mere months; her transformation had occurred thirty years before. Everything that had taken place between her and Dmitry had been to that one end: to persuade him to become like her – persuade him because he could not be forced; only the willing would receive that which they desired. And yet, the prime motivation had not been hers. It had come from a man who had watched even as Kyesha had drunk her blood and she his; a man she had known as Cain. But now he was no longer a man. He was a voordalak too. And his name was no longer Cain; it was Yudin.

Dmitry had been deceived; tricked, seduced and exploited. Raisa had been the primary agent of it, but its cause and its motivation had been Yudin. His reasons were a closed book to Dmitry; Raisa did not know them, and Dmitry had no power to perceive what she could not. And yet he felt no sense of betrayal at any of it. He was not happy to be in his present state, but neither was he disturbed by it. It was what he was, and to reject it would be to reject himself. He knew with utter certainty that the Dmitry of before would have been sickened to know what had become of him, but that was not enough to make him care. The Dmitry of old was like a former friend; a friend who had been close, but for whom one little cared. If he despised the new Dmitry then it only demonstrated what a fool he had been.

Raisa had now come to a wooden door. She had a key to it, which she hesitated to use. Her hunger overwhelmed her, but she knew how wonderful the cessation of that hunger would be. She did not want to rush into it. Dmitry felt the same hunger, but had none of the desire to delay its sating. He kicked hard at the wooden lid above him, again and again, and eventually it splintered. He revelled in his new-found strength, and began to beat against the wooden lid with his feet and knees. Soon it was a mess of shards. Some of the earth above fell into the coffin, but it did not matter. In moments he was digging his way through it, ever upwards to the surface, pushing earth aside like a mole, unconcerned as to the lasting integrity of his tunnel.

At last he was breathing the cool night air. That it was cool was of no greater cheer to him than that it had been warm below – it merely gave him a greater sense of where he was, and of where his prey was. The scent of human blood wafted to him on the breeze. It was everywhere – a hundred odours merged into a single melange. He knew that he must learn to distinguish them.

In his hunger he had forgotten his exploration of Raisa’s mind, but now it forced itself upon him in a single image – one that was both surprising and familiar. That Raisa should have held in her memory the distant image of Dmitry’s father from years ago made some sense. They must have met. Dmitry felt confident that he would, on further reflection, understand it fully. But that his mother’s aged face should at this moment be in the forefront of Raisa’s mind was a matter of complete puzzlement.

It was of little concern. Hunger was an issue of greater immediacy. Through the tangled mixture of scents, the blood of one now stood out. Dmitry could only determine that it was human; male or female, young or old, he could not tell. He felt sure that such discrimination would come to him with practice, but for now the scent only told him that the body which carried that blood was close. And he was oh, so hungry. He paused, listening for the sound of any music that his mind might generate to accompany the sensation, but none came. It was unnerving, but he would get used to it. Hunger was a more beguiling seductress than any music he could conjure.

He scuttled across the graveyard, his nostrils leading him where they would.

‘Did you have to kill him?’

Tamara remained on the stairway, fearful and ready to run. There was still some daylight up above, though whether it would be enough to protect her, Tamara could only guess. It was only a guess that Raisa could not throw herself across the room in the time it took for Tamara to climb but a few steps. Then there would be nothing to save her from the same fate that had already befallen Dmitry.

‘Who?’ asked Raisa. She was sitting in Yudin’s chair, her feet up on his desk, reading some document she had picked from it. She didn’t even look at Tamara.

‘Who do you think?’

‘I’ve killed so many,’ replied Raisa.

How many was that, Tamara wondered. It had been only a month since Tyeplov had made her a voordalak. How many souls could she have consumed? One a day? It was conceivable. She had gone through men at a higher rate in Degtyarny Lane – though Tamara could hardly censure her for that. But it might hint at how Dmitry could be so easily forgotten among them – among either group.

Tamara had not come to see Raisa; finding her here in Yudin’s office was as surprising as it was inexplicable. Tamara had come to see Yudin – or perhaps to see Makarov. She had little doubt now that the two men were one and the same. Svetlana’s faux pas at the funeral had set off the train of thought. The fact that Yudin and Makarov shared the same Christian name could be mere coincidence, but the fact that they seemed to fulfil similar roles in Dmitry’s life was more suspicious. Makarov had disappeared from the official record soon after the Decembrist revolt – just as Yudin had appeared. Yudin could be the same age as Makarov. He looked younger, but that merely went to show that he hid it well.

‘Did all of them love you quite so much?’ she asked.

‘Love me?’ Raisa’s confusion would have fooled most. ‘Do you mean Mitka?’

‘Are you suggesting he didn’t love you?’

Raisa shrugged. ‘He thinks he did, but it’s hard for him to know for sure. But I didn’t kill him – not really.’

‘Not really? I watched them bury him.’

‘These things take time,’ said Raisa. ‘Or didn’t you know that?’

‘Time?’

‘He’s been reborn for a week.’

Tamara felt a sickness in her stomach – greater than she had been experiencing already. In the belief that Dmitry was dead she had been able to pray for mercy on his soul, and to pour her hatred upon Raisa. From somewhere she had convinced herself of the idea that the transformation from human to voordalak would be a rapid one, virtually instantaneous. So it had been with Raisa herself.

‘You’ve spoken to him?’ asked Tamara.

Raisa swung her feet down from the desk and stood up. Tamara tensed. Raisa began to walk across the room, not towards Tamara, but putting herself within easy reach. ‘Spoken?’ she said. ‘There’s no need for speech between us. We know one another’s minds.’

‘Then I pity him,’ said Tamara.

Raisa cocked her head towards Tamara, but didn’t rise to the bait. ‘He used to pity you,’ she said. ‘But not any more.’

‘Me?’

Raisa now spoke in a singsong voice, like a child. ‘Poor lost little girl, looking for her mama and papa, all alone in the woods.’

She knew, thought Tamara. Of course she knew; she knew Dmitry’s mind and Dmitry had written to Tamara that he knew who her parents were. That was if any of it were true. Even the fact that Dmitry had risen as a voordalak came only from Raisa’s lips, and was therefore best treated with contempt; but that did not make it false.

‘You know who my parents are?’ she asked.

‘Of course I do. Would you like to hear?’

Tamara considered. What value could anything that Raisa said have? She could throw out two names at random and Tamara would be in no position to judge whether they truly were her parents – the knowledge of them plucked from Dmitry’s mind – or simply Raisa’s invention, intended purely to tease. But whatever she said would at least be a starting point. If it were true, it might easily be verified; if false it might still contain some shadow of the truth.

‘Tell me,’ said Tamara before she had finished considering the possibilities.

‘Come over here,’ said Raisa, beckoning. ‘I’ll whisper it to you.’

In spite of herself, Tamara took a step forward. There was something entrancing about Raisa, almost hypnotic. It seemed that it would be so very simple and very natural to go over there and bend towards Raisa’s lips. She saw the image in her mind: her own head tilted to one side, offering up her ear to Raisa and at the same time exposing the snow-white skin of her neck; Raisa’s red lips opening, ready to impart the knowledge that Tamara had for so long desired. But that would not be the outcome. Raisa’s lips would descend not towards Tamara’s ear, but towards her throat. She could see the image of white teeth rupturing her skin, of her own red blood spurting forth.

Even as Tamara hesitated, Raisa had taken two steps across the room towards her, and was moving fast now. Tamara turned and fled up the stairs. She heard Raisa’s feet behind her, catching up with her. The bright rectangle of the doorway above, filled with late afternoon sunshine, was only a few steps away. She could almost feel its warmth. A second more and she would be basking in its safety.

She fell forward. For a moment she couldn’t understand why, but then she felt Raisa’s grip around her ankle, tight as a vice, trying to pull her back down the stairs. At the same time, Raisa still managed to climb, her face closing in on Tamara, her teeth bared. Tamara twisted and managed to get on to her back. She kicked out and her heel caught Raisa squarely on the nose. Tamara saw blood, but the blow had little effect in deterring Raisa. Tamara reached out behind her, trying to find anything to grip on to before Raisa could pull her back down into the darkness and do to her what she had already done to Dmitry. Her hand found something and for a moment she felt hope; an instant later despair. It was the edge of the door. It yielded as she pulled, and offered her no anchor against Raisa’s remorseless strength.

Then there was a scream. From Tamara’s ankle – from Raisa’s hand – smoke began to rise. Despite her yelp of pain, Raisa was determined not to let go. Tamara felt her grip, still pulling, but her hand was disintegrating as Tamara watched. The slight movement of the door had allowed the daylight to shine a little further down the stairs, and it had caught Raisa’s fingers.

The skin had blackened and split, allowing blood and a thick, yellow pus to ooze out. The smell was repellent. Tamara even thought she saw a glimpse of bone. It lasted only moments. Soon Raisa could resist the pain no longer and snatched back her hand. She gazed at Tamara sullenly from the shade and seemed about to speak, but Tamara did not give her the opportunity. Instead she turned and scrambled up the last few remaining stairs to the door. She stood in the corridor for a moment, safe in the sunlight, though still indoors. To her left she saw the faded tapestry in which the unicorn gazed at its reflection in the mirror, covering the door to the archives.

Then the unicorn itself began to move, turning its head as if about to speak to her. Doubts of her own sanity were banished as she realized that someone was emerging from behind the hanging cloth. Before she could wonder who it might be, the bald head and bushy eyebrows of her friend Gribov appeared.

She glanced back down the dark stairway to Yudin’s office. Down there she could still see a vague movement which she knew to be Raisa; the smell of her charred skin still filled Tamara’s nostrils.

‘Don’t go down there,’ she said, turning back to Gribov, her voice croaking. ‘Just don’t.’

It was all she could do. She knew he deserved a better warning, but her fear for herself was overpowering. She turned and fled, running out into the fading daylight of the Kremlin, knowing that Raisa would not dare venture after her. But daylight would not last for long – already evening was drawing in. Tamara turned and headed away towards the Nikolai Gate; she had no idea where she would hide once night fell.

* * *

‘Are you hurt?’

Raisa looked up. Yudin had been in the cellars below his office and returned to find her sitting at his desk, cradling her hand. He could see no sign of injury, but a slight hint of something unpleasant in the air suggested that her flesh might briefly have been caught in the rays of the sun.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s Tamara Valentinovna’s fault.’

‘Really?’

‘She knows about me; knows about Dmitry.’

‘And about me?’

Raisa shook her head. ‘I doubt it, but she’s still a danger.’

Yudin considered. Everything was becoming a danger. It was no surprise how much Tamara knew. Dmitry’s letter to Yudin, sent before his death, had revealed that a similar letter had been sent to Tamara. From it she’d guessed the truth about Raisa. It wouldn’t be a great leap from that to Yudin. It was already time to move on. He’d known for weeks that Prince Dolgorukov would soon be taking over command of the Third Section, and that could only lead to the discovery of what Yudin had been up to in Moscow. Down below, in one of the empty cells, he had begun packing his most treasured possessions into crates – his journals and scientific instruments being the most essential. He would have to find a place for them to be stored, to be sent for when he had re-established himself elsewhere. Where, he knew not. But Raisa was right about Tamara.

‘Deal with her,’ he said.

‘That’s what I was trying to do.’

‘Then try harder!’

He went over to his desk, expecting her to vacate his seat, but she stayed where she was. He looked at her, but still she did not move.

‘No,’ she said.

‘No?’

‘No, I won’t try harder. No, I won’t deal with her. Not until you keep your promise to me.’

‘My promise?’

‘You know.’

‘Ah!’ His promise that he would find a way for her to look upon her own reflection. He couldn’t string her along for ever. He’d had the mirror for months, but had not dared show it to her, much as he was tempted to. He was eager – desperate almost – to discover how a voordalak would react to truly seeing its own image, but fearful as well; certainly too fearful to perform such an experiment on himself. But he was also afraid of losing Raisa – at least, he had been. Now, if he were to move away from Moscow, then it would be safer not to take her with him. Perhaps this was the best time.

‘Move,’ he said, flicking his hand at her. She stood up from his desk and walked round to the other side of it. He took her place and opened the top right-hand drawer. Out of it he took his latest journal. He wrote down the date, 26 September 1856, and then a brief heading in anticipation of the events he would so carefully note.

Effects of Iceland Spar mirror on voordalak subject – Raisa Styepanovna.

Then he reached into the lower drawer, and took it out. It was still covered in the old, embroidered shawl – an essential protection, not for the mirror but for Yudin. He did not want to catch sight of his own reflection in there. Raisa’s eyes followed the shape beneath the cloth as he placed it on his desk.

‘A few words of explanation first, I think,’ he said.

‘Very well.’ Still she did not take her eyes from it.

‘I’ve long known that a normal mirror does reflect the image of a vampire, but I believed that it does so in a way that somehow alters the image.’

‘You’ve told me this before.’

‘I have, and that was what I believed. But now I think I was wrong.’

‘You?’

Yudin shrugged, happy to acknowledge his error. ‘I’m now of the opinion that it is only by reflection that the true image of the voordalak is revealed. What you and I see in each other is the illusion, the shroud of humanity that allows us to pass among them undetected – and among ourselves.’

‘But we don’t see our true selves in a mirror – we see nothing.’

‘Oh, we see it. We see it, but our minds cannot cope with it. They remove it – censor it like a diligent and benign government. We see nothing because it is safer to see nothing.’

‘But you have found a way to … avoid the censor?’

Yudin nodded. ‘It’s essentially an ordinary mirror, but instead of glass we have a sheet of a mineral that is well known for allowing the viewer to see two images of whatever they look at through it. In the case of a vampire, the mind is caught unawares. The first image is removed, but the second gets through.’

‘You tested it?’

‘On a human; a human looking at my reflection in the glass.’

‘What did they see?’

Yudin paused, careful to phrase his answer. ‘They wouldn’t say,’ he replied eventually. The memory of a woman’s laughter, echoing in the chambers beneath them, filled his mind. She had been laughing at him; laughing at what she saw of him in the mirror.

‘But you’ve never looked at yourself.’

‘I felt that would be unscientific. But if you don’t want to be the first, I’m sure I can find another way.’

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘Let me see.’

Yudin put his hand under the shawl and felt the mirror beneath, checking that the glass was facing down on to the desktop, keeping all risks to a minimum. It was. He held it still while he pulled the cloth away, and then slid it over towards Raisa. She put her hand on it, but did not lift it immediately.

‘You may not like what you see,’ he said. The words seemed decisive for her. She grasped the handle and held the mirror before her face.

For a moment her expression was calm. She stared at her image, obscured from Yudin’s sight, with an air of fascination. A smile almost crept to her lips. She glanced over at him with a look of amused excitement, but only for a moment, before returning to look into the glass.

‘Also,’ he said, ‘bist du die Schönste im ganzen Land?’

She said nothing. She raised her hand to her face and touched her cheek with her fingertips. Then she moved her hand away and looked at it directly, then put it back to her face so that she could see its reflection. Now her expression was of ever-growing puzzlement. She looked at her fingers, flexed them, turned her hand around to see its palm. Her eyes flicked between the reality of her hand and its image in the glass, as if trying to find any difference between the two – or perhaps any similarity.

‘Tell me what you see,’ he said.

A tiny sound escaped her throat, the closest thing she could manage to speech. She returned her hand to her face and now, rather than simply touching it, began to probe and explore it. Yudin could see tears form in her eyes, and wondered if she could see them herself. One or two began to trickle down her face. Now her probing had become a clawing. Her nails scratched down her cheek, drawing blood, whose droplets mingled with the saltwater of her tears. She watched and waited and the marks on her cheek soon healed, but as soon as they had she began again, her nails digging deeper than before so that Yudin could see the skin hanging from her.

Now at last she found the power of speech. Her voice was mournful, deeper than Yudin had ever heard it. ‘What have you done to me?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Yudin, still hopeful of learning something from her. ‘Tell me.’

She shook her head. Her nails continued to scratch at her face, creating new wounds faster than the old ones could heal. Her own blood caked her fingernails. Now she had them hooked into her lower eyelid. She began to pull mercilessly at it and the skin stretched and finally began to rupture. Her eye remained as beautiful as ever, its blue iris shining even in the dim lamplight, but below it her cheek came away, gripped tightly in her hand. It was a deliberate attempt to destroy her own face, to remove it in reality so that whatever she saw of its reflection might vanish too. But as she watched herself, her hand fell down to her side. The effort was clearly futile.

‘Tell me,’ Yudin repeated.

She let her other hand, still holding the mirror, fall and placed the two together like a ballerina with her arms bras-bas. The mirror was at about the level of her crotch, its back facing out towards Yudin. Her eyes were still tearful. The flap of torn flesh that hung down from below her right eye was only just beginning to heal.

‘Why should I tell you?’ she asked, her voice numb and empty. ‘Why should I tell you, when it’s so much easier to show you?’

As she spoke she lifted both her hands, raising up the mirror to face Yudin. He caught the reflection of his office wall sliding quickly past as the glass moved into place, and then, as he held up his hands to block the image and turned away, he caught the briefest glimpse of something awful sitting at his desk.

‘What’s the matter, Richard?’ she said, using the name by which she had known him so long before. ‘Aren’t you curious?’

Yudin kept his eyes averted. He felt his heart pump. His fear was visceral and he could not entirely account for it. It came from her, and however much Yudin might think of himself as different, he was one of them; a voordalak. Just as one terrified ox could spread its fear invisibly to the entire herd, so Raisa’s terror seeped into him.

‘Don’t you want to see what you’ve become?’ Raisa continued. ‘I was beautiful and I’ve faced myself. What do you have to fear?’

He could sense she was approaching him, but still did not turn to look. He searched the shelf behind his desk – the only place he could risk looking – trying to find something that might be of help.

‘I’m curious too,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen me, but I haven’t seen you. All I need to do is tilt the mirror, then I’ll see your face. And if you look, you’ll see mine.’ There was a pause and then she began to laugh, just as the old woman had. Yudin could only presume that she had done what she threatened and was now staring at his reflection instead of her own. ‘Oh, Richard,’ she said. ‘You really should look. You make me look quite, quite plain. It’s you who’s the fairest in the whole land.’ She continued to laugh but it was the forced, cold laughter of madness, the only possible reaction to a situation that was beyond sorrow, beyond tears and beyond hope.

Yudin turned and took the briefest glimpse at her, just enough to judge the position of the mirror. He was an inverted Perseus, daring only to gaze upon the gorgon in the flesh, not in her reflection. He fired the revolver that he had picked up from the shelf. The shot rang out and Yudin allowed himself another glimpse of what was going on. The bullet had missed the looking glass, but had hit Raisa in the wrist. Her thumb was bent at a peculiar angle, its tendon severed. Raisa herself did not seem to notice. She continued to laugh and gaze into the mirror even as it teetered and fell from her fingers.

It hit the stone floor and shattered, its fragments flying in all directions. The harsh sudden sound of its fracture brought an end to Raisa’s laughter. She gasped and fell to her knees, then picked up one of the small fragments of the looking glass and tried to peer into it, gripping it so tightly that it cut into her flesh and drew blood.

‘No,’ she moaned softly, and then louder, ‘no!’ She put the fragment back on the ground and reached out for others near her, placing them beside the first in an attempt to re-create the whole. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘One last look. Just one more.’

Yudin fired the gun again. This time there was no inaccuracy. He hit the shard of crystal that she had put down and it shattered to powder. Those around it were flung away. Raisa turned and looked at him.

‘Pity me!’ she said. She looked around the room as if not knowing where she was, as if Yudin was not even there, and then she was on her feet and running up the stairs to the world above. It was dark now and she would be safe outside, but if Yudin had possessed the ability to pity her, he would have prayed that it was still day and that her misery would have ended in an excruciating but mercifully brief inferno.

He took a few steps towards where the fragments of broken mirror still lay – at least twenty of them – preparing to clear them up. Then he froze. They had fallen randomly, facing in every direction. Those that lay flat on the floor were no problem, but some were raised up at just such an angle that they reflected Yudin’s image back at him, following him like eyes as he moved. None was large enough to see himself in clearly, but with every step he took he caught a glimpse of some dark creature slithering across the room. He saw shapes that he could make some sense of, but not relate to any part of his own body.

He reached out to pick up one of the fragments and saw his hand reflected in it. He pulled back. That it was the image of his hand, he knew simply from the physics of the matter, but he would never have recognized it. And yet, as had been the case with Raisa, he yearned to see more. He reached out again and picked up the piece of crystal, curling his fingers around the edge so that he could just see them reflected, black and hard.

He almost raised it to look into his face, but then sanity prevailed. He threw the fragment to the ground and in the same movement flung himself back across the room. The temptation to see the truth still filled him, but he resisted. He grabbed the embroidered shawl from his desk and shook it out, opening it fully, then tossed it across the floor as though it were a tablecloth and it was his job to prepare for dinner. The shawl swirled and descended gently as the air caught it and tried to prevent it from falling, but eventually it settled, covering almost all of what remained of the mirror. Two shards of the Iceland Spar glinted in the light. Yudin stuck out his foot tentatively and kicked them under the cloth.

It was the best he could do. To clear it away properly he would need help – human help. He strode to the bottom of the stairs.

‘Gribov!’ he bellowed. ‘Gribov! Get down here!’

But Gribov did not respond.