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"Wonderful stuff," Las commented, breathing out. "But it's got a high sugar content, I tell you! That's why I like
the Armenian cognacs-the sugar's taken right down to the minimum, but the full flavor's all still there . . . Let's
have another."
The glasses were filled a second time. Las looked at me expectantly.
"Here's to health?" I suggested uncertainly.
"To health," Las agreed. He drank and then sniffed at the handkerchief. He looked out the window, shuddered,
and muttered: "That's some stuff ... it doesn't mess around."
Page 128
"What's wrong?"
"You'll never believe it, but I thought I just saw a bat fly past the train!" Las exclaimed. "Huge, the size of a
sheepdog. Br-rr-rr ..."
I realized I'd have to give Kostya a couple of words of friendly advice. But out loud I just joked, "It probably wasn't
a bat, more likely a squirrel."
"A flying squirrel," Las said mournfully. "God help us all. . . No, honestly, a huge bat!"
"Maybe it was just flying very close to the glass?" I suggested. "And you only caught a glimpse of it, so you
couldn't judge how far away it was-so you thought it was bigger than it really was."
"Maybe so . . ." Las said thoughtfully. "But what was it doing here? Why would it want to fly alongside the train?"
"That's elementary," I said, taking the broken flask and pouring us a third glass each. "A locomotive moves at
such great speed that it creates a shield of air in front of it. The shield stuns mosquitoes and butterflies and all
sorts of other flying creatures and tosses them into turbulent streams of air running along both sides of the train.
And so at night bats like to fly along a moving train and eat the stunned flies."
Las thought about it. He asked, "Then why don't birds fly around moving trains in the daytime?"
"That's elementary too!" I said, handing him his glass. "Birds are much more stupid animals than mammals. Bats
have already guessed how to use trains to get food, but birds haven't figured it out yet. In a hundred or two
hundred years the birds will realize how to exploit trains too."
"How come I didn't realize all that for myself?" Las asked in amazement. "It's really all so very simple! Okay, then
. . . here's to common sense!"
We drank.
"Animals are amazing," Las said profoundly. "Cleverer than Darwin thought. I used to have ..."
I never got to hear what it was Las used to have-a dog, a hamster, or a fish in an aquarium. He glanced out the
window again and turned green.
"It's there again . . . the bat!"
"Catching the mosquitoes," I reminded him.
"What mosquitoes? It swerved around a lamppost like it wasn't even there! The size of a sheepdog, I tell you!"
Las stood up and resolutely pulled the blind down. He said in a determined voice:
"To hell with it... I knew I shouldn't read Stephen King just before bed . . . The size of that bat! Like a pterodactyl.
It could catch owls and eagles, not mosquitoes!"
That freak Kostya! I realized that in his animal form a vampire, like a werewolf, became dumber than dumb and
had little control over his own actions. He was probably getting a kick out of hurtling along beside the train in the
night, glancing into the windows, taking a breather on the lampposts. But he ought at least to take elementary
precautions.
"It's a mutation," Las mused. "Nuclear tests, leaks from reactors, electromagnetic waves, cell phones . . . and we
just carry on laughing at it all, think it's all science fiction. And the gutter press keeps feeding us lies. So who
can I tell-they'll just think I was drunk or I'm lying."
He opened his bottle of cognac with a determined expression.
"What do you think of mysticism?" he asked.
"I respect it," I said with dignity.
"Me too," Las admitted. "Now I do. I never even thought about it before ..." He cast a wary glance at the blind over
the window. "You live all those years, and then somewhere out in the Pskov peat bogs you suddenly meet a live
yeti-and you go right off your rocker. Or you see a rat a meter long. Or ..." he waved his hand and poured brandy
into the glasses. "What if it turns out there really are witches and vampires and werewolves living right here
alongside us? After all, what better disguise could there be than to get your image enshrined in the culture of the
mass media? Anything that's described in artistic terms and shown in the movies stops being frightening and
mysterious. For real horror you need the spoken word, you need an old grandpa sitting on a bench, scaring his
grandkids in the evening: 'And then the Master of the house came to him and said: "I won't let you go, I'll tie you
up and bind you tight and you'll rot under the fallen branches!"' That's the way to make people wary of anomalous
phenomena! Kids sense that, you know-it's no wonder they love telling stories about the Black Hand and the
Coffin on Wheels. But modern literature, and especially the movies, it all just dilutes that instinctive horror. How
can you feel afraid of Dracula, if he's been killed a hundred times? How can you be afraid of aliens, if our guys
always squelch them? Yes, Hollywood is the great luller of human vigilance. A toast-to the death of Hollywood,
for depriving us of a healthy fear of the unknown!"
Page 129
"I'll always drink to that," I said warmly. "Tell me, Las, what made you decide to go to Kazakhstan? Is it really a
good place for a vacation?"
Las shrugged and said, "I don't even know. I suddenly got a yen for something exotic-kumis in milking pails,
camel races, ram fights, mutton and sliced dough in a copper basin, beautiful girls with unfamiliar kinds of faces,
arboraceous cannabis in the town squares . . .
"What kind of cannabis?" I asked, puzzled.
"Arboraceous. It's a tree, only it never gets a chance to grow," Las explained, with the same kind of serious
expression I'd used for my stories about bats and swallows. "But what do I care? I'm ruining my health with
tobacco; I just fancy something exotic ..."
He took out a pack of Belomor and lit up.
"The conductor will be here in a minute," I remarked.
"No, he won't. I put a condom over the smoke detector." Las nodded upward. There was a half-inflated condom
stretched over the smoke-detector projecting from the wall. Delicate pink, with plastic studs.
"I think you probably have the wrong idea about the exotic fun Kazakhstan has to offer," I said.
"Too late to worry about that-I'm on my way now," Las muttered. "The idea just came to me out of nowhere this
morning: Why don't I go to Kazakhstan? I just dropped everything, gave my assistant his instructions, and went
to catch the train."
I pricked my ears up at that. "Just upped and left? Tell me, are you always so footloose and fancy-free?"
Las thought about it and shook his head. "Not really. But this was like something just clicked . . . Okay, it's no
big deal. Let's just have one more for the road ..."
He started pouring-and I took another look at him through the Twilight.
Even though I knew what to look for, I could barely even sense the vestigial trace-the unknown Other's touch had
been so light and elegant. It was already fading, almost cold already.
Simple suggestion, the kind that even the weakest Other could manage. But how neatly it had been done!
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