“A chestnut Arabian stallion,” the woman shrieked obediently.

A little girl slightly older than Nadya came out of my old apartment. Seven or eight years old, a pretty face, with a sad, frightened expression. Unlike her mother, she was dressed like a doll-in a smart dress, white socks, and shiny patent-leather shoes. She gave us a frightened glance, then looked at her mother with an expression of weary, exhausted sympathy.

“Sweetie pie!” the woman exclaimed, jumping away from Saushkin’s door. With a panic-stricken glance at Olga, she went dashing down to her daughter-or perhaps back to her apartment. “Go home,” Olga said in a quiet voice. “There’s no more water flooding your apartment. We’ll deal with your neighbor. And tomorrow morning go to the hairdresser’s, have a manicure, and get your hair done.”

The woman seized the girl by the hand and skipped in through the doorway with a frightened backward glance at us.

“What is it that makes people the way they are?” Olga asked thoughtfully as she looked at the mother and daughter.

As she closed the door, the woman yapped, “And don’t you…pee in the elevator anymore! I’ll call the militia!”

The word “pee,” softened from “piss” for the daughter’s sake, somehow seemed especially horrible-as if there were switches inside the woman’s head, clicking away as they tried to return her thoughts to normal.

“Is she sick?” I asked Olga.

“That’s just it, she isn’t,” Olga said in annoyance. “She’s psychologically healthy! Let’s go on through the Twilight…”

I glanced down, found my shadow, and stepped into it.

Olga appeared beside me.

We looked around and I couldn’t help whistling.

The entire stairway was overgrown with lumpy blue garbage. The moss was dangling from the ceiling and the banisters like an ultramarine beard, it was spread out across the floor in a cerulean carpet, and around the lightbulbs it was woven into honeycombed, sky-blue balls that could have inspired any designer to invent a new style of lampshade.

“The staircase has been neglected,” Olga said, vaguely surprised. “But then, a rabid vampire and a hysterical woman…”

We walked up to the door. I pushed on it-it was locked, of course. Even weak Others know how to lock their doors on the first level of the Twilight. I asked, “Shall we go deeper?”

Instead of answering, Olga took a step back, twisted around, and kicked the door hard just beside the lock. It swung open.

“Why do things the hard way?” Olga laughed. “I’ve been wanting to try out that kick for a long time.”

I didn’t ask who had taught her to break down doors like that. Despite Olga’s confidence, I was by no means certain that the apartment was empty. We went into the entrance hall (the blue moss was still there all around us) and both spontaneously left the Twilight.

It was such a long time since I had been here…

And it was a long time since anyone had been here. The apartment was full of that heavy, musty smell that you only find in rooms that have been closed up and abandoned. You’d think that even though no one had been breathing there, fresh air would at least enter through the ventilation system and the small cracks, but no. The air dies anyway, turning sour, like yesterday’s tea.

“There’s no smell,” Olga said with relief.

I understood what she meant. There were smells, of course-smells of musty damp and accumulated dust. But there wasn’t that smell we had been expecting, the one we had been afraid to find-the sickly sweet smell of bodies that had been drained of blood by a vampire.

“Nobody’s lived here for at least a month,” I agreed. I looked at the coatrack-a winter jacket, a fur cap…a pair of dirty, heavy, fur-lined boots on the floor. It wasn’t just a month, it was a lot longer than that. The owner of the flat had been missing since winter at least. I didn’t remove the defensive spells that I had applied to myself in the car, but I relaxed. “Right, then, let’s see how he lived…so to speak.”

We started our inspection in the kitchen. Like the rest of the apartment, the windows in there were covered with heavy curtains. The tulle that was now gray with dust was no doubt supposed to have given the apartment a cozy atmosphere. It hadn’t been washed for perhaps two years-ever since Polina died.

Behind my back Olga clicked a light switch, making me jump. She said, “Why are we walking around in the dark, like Scully and Mulder?…Check the refrigerator.”

I was already opening the door of the refrigerator that was churning away smugly to itself. Kitchen technology is the kind that gets along best without any human supervision. But a computer left unattended for six months will very often start to malfunction. I don’t know what the reason for that is, but it isn’t magic, that’s for sure. There isn’t any magic in hardware.

There was nothing horrible in the refrigerator, either. Well, nothing criminal. That was something I had hardly dared to hope for. A suspicious-looking three-liter glass jar covered with white mold contained sour tomato juice-you could have made moonshine out of it. Of course, it wasn’t good that the tomatoes had been allowed to go to waste, but the Tomato Watch from Greenpeace could deal with that particular crime. There were two-hundred-and five-hundred-gram bottles of thick glass standing in the door of the refrigerator. Each bottle had a Night Watch mark that glowed feebly through the Twilight-it was licensed donor blood.

“He didn’t even drink his allowance,” I said.

There were also sausages, eggs, and salami in the fridge, and in the freezer compartment there was a piece of meat (beef) and pelmeni (mostly soya). Basically the usual range of foods for a man living on his own. Only the vodka was missing, but that was inevitable. All vampires are nondrinkers by necessity: Alcohol immediately disrupts their strange metabolism-it’s a powerful poison for them.

After the kitchen I glanced into the toilet. The water in the toilet bowl had almost completely evaporated and there was quite a smell from the drains. I flushed the toilet and walked out.

“A good time to choose for that,” said Olga. I stared at her in confusion, then I realized that she was joking. The Great Enchantress was smiling. She had been expecting to see something terrible too, but now she had relaxed.

“Anytime’s good for that,” I replied. “It stank in there, so I flushed the toilet.”

“Yes, I realized.”

When I opened the bathroom door, I discovered that the lightbulb had burned out. Maybe he had left it switched on when he left. I couldn’t be bothered to search my pockets for a flashlight, so I called on the Primordial Power and lit up a magical light above my head. What I saw made me shudder.

No, it wasn’t any kind of horror scene. There was a bath, a sink, a tap slowly dripping, towels, soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste…

“Look,” I said, making the light brighter.

Olga walked up and glanced over my shoulder. She said thoughtfully, “That is curious.”

There was writing on the mirror. Not in blood, but in tri-colored toothpaste, so that the words actually reminded me of the Russian flag. Someone’s finger-and somehow I was sure it was Gennady Saushkin’s-had traced out three words in large capital letters on the glass surface of the mirror: