'I almost went over the edge,' I said. 'I was well on the way. Yesterday morning, on my way back from the hunt, I ran into the little girl from next door in the entrance. I didn't even dare say hello, my fangs had already sprouted. And last night, when I felt the Call summoning the boy ... I almost joined the vampires.'
The owl was looking into my eyes.
'Why do you think the boss gave me the job?'
A stuffed dummy. Clumps of dusty feathers stuffed with cotton wool.
'So I could see things through their eyes?'
The doorbell rang in the hallway. I sighed and shrugged: it was her own fault, after all, anyone would be better to talk to than this boring bird. I switched the light on as I walked to the door and opened it.
Standing there in the doorway was a vampire.
'Come in, Kostya,' I said, 'come in.'
He hesitated at the door, but then came in. He ran his hand through his hair – I noticed that his palms were sweaty and his eyes restless.
Kostya's only seventeen. He was born a vampire, a perfectly ordinary city vampire. It's really tough: with vampire parents a child has almost no chance of growing up human.
'I've brought back the CDs,' Kostya muttered. 'Here.'
I took the pile from the boy, not even surprised there were so many. I usually had to nag him for ages to bring them back: he was terribly absentminded.
'Did you listen to them all?' I asked. 'Did you copy any?'
'No ... I'll be going . . .'
'Wait.' I grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him into the room. 'What's going on?'
He didn't answer.
'You already know?' I asked, beginning to catch on.
'There aren't many of us, Anton,' said Kostya, looking me in the eye. 'When one of us passes away, we sense it immediately.'
'Okay. Take your shoes off, let's go into the kitchen and have a serious talk.'
Kostya didn't argue. But I was desperately trying to figure out what to do. Five years earlier, when I became an Other and the Twilight side of the world was revealed to me, I'd made plenty of surprising discoveries. And one of the most shocking was the fact that a family of vampires was living right above my head.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was on my way home from classes that seemed so ordinary, they reminded me of my old college. Three double lectures, a lecturer, heat that had the white coats glued to our bodies – we rented the lecture hall from a medical college. I was fooling around as I walked home, dropping into the Twilight in short bursts – I couldn't manage any longer back then. Then I began feeling out the people walking down the street, and at the entrance I ran into my neighbours.
They're really nice people. I wanted to borrow a drill from them once, and Kostya's father, Gennady, he's a builder, just came round and had some fun helping out with the concrete walls, demonstrating conclusively that the intelligentsia can't survive without the proletariat . . .
And now suddenly I could see they weren't humans at all.
It was terrifying. The brownish-grey auras, the hideous pressure. I stopped dead, staring at them in horror. Polina, Kostya's mother, looked surprised, the boy froze and turned his face away. But the head of the family walked towards me, moving deeper into the Twilight as he came, walking with the elegant stride that only vampires, alive and dead at the same time, have. The Twilight is their natural habitat.
'Hello, Anton,' he said.
The world around me was grey and dead. I'd dived into the Twilight after him without even noticing it.
'I knew you'd cross the barrier some day,' he said. 'Everything's okay.'
I took a step back – and Gennady's face quivered.
'Everything's okay,' he said. He opened his shirt and I saw the registration tag, a blue imprint on the grey skin. 'We're all registered. Polina! Kostya!'
His wife also crossed into the Twilight and unfastened her blouse. The boy didn't move and it took a stern glance from his father to get him to show his blue seal.
'I have to check,' I whispered. My passes were clumsy, I lost track twice and had to start again. Finally the seal responded. 'Permanent registration, no known violations . . .'
'Is everything okay?' asked Gennady. 'Can we go now?'
'I . . .'
'Don't worry about it. We knew you'd become an Other some day.'
'Go on,' I said. It was against the rules, but that was the last thing I was bothered about.
'Yes . . .' Gennady paused for a moment before he left the Twilight. 'I've been in your home . . . Anton, I return to you your invitation to enter . . .'
Everything was just as it should be.
They walked away and I sat down on a bench, beside an old granny warming herself in the sunshine. I lit a cigarette, trying to sort out my thoughts. The granny looked at me and said:
'Nice people, aren't they, Arkasha?'
She was always getting my name wrong. She only had two or three months left to live, I could see that quite clearly now.
'Not exactly . . .' I said. I smoked three cigarettes, then trudged off into the building. I stood in the doorway for a moment, watching the grey 'vampire's trail' fade away. I'd just learned how to see it that very day . . .
I moped into the evening. I leafed through my notes, which meant I had to withdraw into the Twilight. In the ordinary world, the pages of those standard exercise books were a pure, unsullied white. I wanted to call our group's supervisor or the boss himself – I was his personal responsibility. But I felt I had to make the decision myself.