dressing gown. The metal tripod stuck out, but that didn't concern us too much.
The driver was a human being. It looked as if the Edinburgh Watch made much greater use of paid human staff than we did.
We drove quickly out of the tourist centre and set off in the general direction of the bay.
'Thanks for calling me over,' said Semyon, gazing out of the window with undisguised delight. 'I'd been stuck in Moscow too long ... So tell me, what's going on?'
I started telling him. At first Semyon listened with the conde scending interest of an experienced old soldier listening to a raw recruit's horror stories. But then he turned serious.
'Anton, are you sure? I mean that Power flows down there?'
'Shall I ask the driver to turn back and drive past the Dungeons?'
Semyon sighed and shook his head. He said just two words:
'A vault.'
'Meaning?'
'A hiding place. Where something very important is hidden.'
'Semyon, I don't really understand...'
'Anton, imagine that you are a very, very powerful magician. And, for instance, you can stroll around on the fifth level of the Twilight.'
'I can't.'
'Imagine it?'
'Stroll around down there. I can imagine it easily enough.'
'Then imagine it. You can go deeper than any of the Others that you know. You suddenly need to hide something that's very valuable. A magical artefact, a powerful spell ?even a sack of gold, if you like. So what do you do? Bury it in the ground? It will be found. Especially if you're hiding a magical object: it would create a disturbance in the Power around itself, no matter how you covered it up. Then you take this thing and go down deep into the Twilight... '
'And I leave it there, say on the fifth level,' I said and nodded. 'But an object from our world would be pushed back up...'
'That's why you need a constant stream of Power. Well... it s like putting an object that floats on the bottom of a bath of water. Left on its own, it will surface. But of you keep it pressed down with a stream of water...'
'I understand, Semyon.'
'Do you have any ideas about who hid what down there?'
'Yes,' I said. 'Only first I'll ask Foma about it.'
The phone in my pocket rang again. Would it never give me any peace...
'Yes?' I said, without looking at the screen.
'Anton, this is Geser.'
The boss's voice sounded strange somehow. As if he was bewildered.
'Hello?
'I've had a word with Foma, and he's promised to be frank with you. And with Semyon, now it's come to that... '
'Thank you, Boris Ignatievich.'
'Anton...' Geser began and paused. 'There's another thing... We've dug back into Victor Prokhorov's past. And we've found something.'
'Well?' I asked, already sure that I shouldn't expect anything good.
'Did his photo look familiar to you?'
'An ordinary-looking young guy. A statistically average Moscow face.' I caught myself starting to get rude, the way I always do when I get agitated. 'Every second guy in every college looks like that.'
'Try to picture Victor a bit younger. As a teenager.'
I made an honest effort. And answered;
'You get a statistically average Moscow schoolboy. In every school... '
'But you've almost certainly seen him, Anton. And not just once.
He was in the same class at school as your neighbour Kostya Saushkin. He knew him very well ?you could say they were friends. He probably dropped in to see him at home quite often. I think sometimes he must have run into you, waving his brief case about and laughing for no reason at all.'
'It's not possible,' I whispered. Geser's story had flabbergasted me so completely that I wasn't even amazed by the untypically colourful way he'd told it. Waving his briefcase about and laughing? Yes, more than likely. If there are children living on your stairwell in the apartment building you're bound to stumble over their briefcases, hear them laughing and step in little patches of chewing gum. But who remembers the faces... ?
'Anton, it's true. The only vampire Victor ever knew was Kostya Saushkin.'
'But Geser, Kostya was killed.'*
(* This story is told in the third part of the book The Twilight Watch.)
'Yes, I know,' said Geser. 'At least, that's what we all thought.'
'He couldn't have survived,' I said. 'There's no way he could have. Three hundred kilometres above the Earth. There isn't any Power there. He burned up in the atmosphere. He burned up, you understand, Geser? Burned up!'
'Stop shouting,' Geser told me calmly. 'Yes, he burned up. We watched his spacesuit on radar right to the very end. But what