range of foods for a man living on his own. Only the vodka was missing, but that was inevitable. All vampires are non-drinkers 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 competely evaporated and there was quite a smell from the drains. I flushed the toilet and walked out.
'A good time to choose,' said Olga. I stared at her in confu sion, until I realised that she was joking. The Great Enchantress was smiling. She had been expecting to see something terrible too, but now she had relaxed.
'Any time's good for that,' I replied. 'It stank in there, so I flushed the toilet.'
'Yes, I realised.'
When I opened the bathroom door I discovered that the light bulb had burned out. Maybe he had left it switched on when he'd 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. 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 thought fully:
'That is curious.'
There was writing on the mirror. Not in blood, but in three-coloured toothpaste, so that the words naturally reminded me of the Russian flag. Someone's finger ?and somehow I was sure that it was Gennady Saushkin's ?had traced out three words in large capital letters on the glass surface of the mirror:
THE LAST WATCH
'No mystery story ever manages without words on the walls or the mirror,' said Olga. 'Although the writing ought to be in blood, of course...'
'This toothpaste suits the purpose too,' I replied. 'Red, blue and white. The traditional colours of the Inquisition are grey and blue.'
'I know,' Olga said thoughtfully. 'Do you think it was delib erate? Vampire, Inquisitor, Healer?'
'I can't see the line between deliberate intention and coinci dence,' I admitted.
I walked along the short corridor and glanced into the sitting room. The light worked there.
'It's very nice,' said Olga. 'The house is so run-down, but they did a nice repair job in here.'
'Gennady's a builder by profession,' I explained. 'He did every thing at home himself, and he helped me out once... well, I didn't know who he was then. He was very well thought of at work.'
'Of course he was, as a non-drinker,' Olga agreed and walked into the bedroom.
'He's a perfectionist too,' I said, continuing to praise Gennady as if we hadn't come here to lay the vampire to rest, and as though I was recommending him to Olga to refurbish her apartment.
I heard a muffled sound behind my back and turned round.
Olga was being sick. She was slumped against the doorpost, with her face turned away from the bedroom, and was puking straight onto the wall. Then she looked up at me, wiped her mouth with her hand and said:
'A perfectionist... Yes, so I just saw.'
I definitely didn't want to see what Olga had taken such a violent dislike to. But I walked to the door of the bedroom anyway, on legs that had turned to rubber in advance.
'Wait, I'll get out of the way' Olga muttered, moving aside for me.
I glanced into the bedroom. It took me several seconds to make sense of what I saw.
Olga needn't have bothered to move. I didn't even have time to turn round, I just puked up my lunch straight into the bedroom, through the doorway. If shaking hands through a doorway is bad luck, then what about puking through one?
Part Three CHAPTER 2
GESER WAS STANDING at the window, watching the city deck itself out in its evening lights. Standing there silently, with only his hands, which were clasped behind his back, moving ?as if he were weaving some kind of cunning spell.
Olga and I didn't say anything either. Anyone might have thought that it was all our fault...
Garik came in and lingered just inside the door.
'Well?' Geser asked without turning round.
'Fifty-two,' Garik said.
'What do the specialists say?'
'They've examined three. They all have the same injuries. The throat has been bitten and the blood has been drunk. Boris Ignatievich, can we carry on with this somewhere else? The stench is so terrible that the spells can't handle it... And it's all around the house already ... as if a sewer had burst... '