Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 10

A pin- burst explosion of gold came in the darkness, bright to Asher's straining eyes, and there was a sting of sulphur. Al-ready his mind was taking in the smell that filled his nostrils; the ashy, fetid choke of burned meat overpowering the mustiness of mildew and dust.

Slow and gold, the light swelled around the steel fishtail of the burner, widening out to fill the whole of the square and dingy room.

A coffin lay five feet from where Asher stood in the doorway, filled with ash and bone. From here, it looked like a lot of bone, the whole skeleton intact and black, but for the moment he didn't go to check. He looked instead at the stone floor around the coffin, then sideways, past where Ysidro stood near the stove, to the dripping puddle beneath the vampire's shed Inverness, which lay over the warped wooden counter top. There was no trace of dripped water anywhere else in the room, save where Ysidro himself had walked from the outer door to where he stood, just beside the stove.

"So much," he said quietly, "for a vampire who remains awake a little longer than his brethren. The rain didn't stop until nearly dawn. The ground wouldn't have been even spongy-dry until well into day-light"

He walked past the coffin to the cellar door, an open black throat on the other side of the room, taking his magnifying glass from his pocket. Fresh scratches and faint shuffling tracks marked the dusty linoleum of the floor, and here and there was a dim footprint, outlined in crusts of dried mud. After a moment's study he put the glass away and replaced it with the measuring tape.

"Two of them," he said, kneeling to mark the length of one pale smudge. "One nearly my height, the other three or four inches taller, by the length of the stride. Together they carried the coffin up from the cellar to here, where there was daylight." He sat back on his haunches, studying the shuffled and overlapped spoor.

"Your friend Mr. Davies," Ysidro murmured softly. Asher knew the vampire was going to cross to the coffin then and concentrated on watching him. Through a haze of what felt like almost unbearable sleepiness, he saw Ysidro take two long, quick strides; when it passed he was standing above the blackened remains, a colorless specter in his pale gray suit and webby hair. "The bones are intact,"

He folded himself like an ivory marionette down beside the coffin and picked with fastidious fingers at what was inside. There was no expres-sion on his thin face. Pocketing the measuring tape, Asher joined him in time to see him slide from between the ribs something that crumbled even in the inhuman lightness of Ysidro's touch-something about a foot and a half long that was too straight to be a bone.

Ysidro dropped it almost at once, pulled a silk handkerchief from some inner pocket, and wiped his fingers, still without expression. "Whitethorn," he said. "Burned nearly to ash, but still it stings."

Asher caught the long, narrow hand in his and turned it palm-up to the light. Fault red welts could already be seen on the white flesh. The fingers felt utterly cold to his touch, fragile as the sticks of an antique fan. After a moment, Ysidro drew his hand away.

"They were taking no chances."

"They knew what to use, obviously."

"Any clown with access to a lending library would," the vampire returned.

Asher nodded and turned his attention to what was left of the corpse. There were, as he'd hoped, a number of keys in the vicinity of the blackened pelvis- trouser pocket, he thought absently, the carryall of a man who isn't used to wearing a jacket when he works. Don Simon had been right about vampires' combustibility: the bones were intact, not seared to crumbling and unrecognizable fragments as Lotta's had been. The place where the spine had been severed to separate head and body was horribly clear.

"Why is that?" he inquired softly. "Is vampirism a type of petrification that slowly alters first the flesh, then the bone, into something other than mortal substance? Is that why the younger vampires go up like flashpaper, while the older ones burn more slowly, more completely?"

"I don't think it can be so simple as that," Simon replied, at the end of a long hesitation. "There are-interlocking effects, psychic as well as physical. But yes-I have often believed it to be as you say. Grippen was burned once by the sun, fifty, seventy years ago. It was nowhere near as bad as my own experience during the Fire, and now the scars are almost gone. We toughen a little, as I said, even to daylight. But not to this extent."

There was silence as they looked at each other, then, across the coffin contents of ash and heat-split buttons, brown mortal eyes looking into immortal gold.

"How old," Asher asked at last, "is the oldest vampire in Europe?"

"Three hundred and fifty-two years," Ysidro responded softly, "give or take a few."

"You?"

A slight inclination of that strange, demon head. "To the best of my knowledge."

Asher got to his feet and hunted the cupboards until he found a brass lamp, which he lit from the gas, mildly cursing the inconvenience in Ciceronian Latin and wishing that electric torches were either small enough to carry easily about his person or reliable enough to warrant the nuisance of lugging them. A brief examination showed him no locks or hasps, though five of the keys he'd picked from the ashes were of the cheap padlock type. Perhaps Davies, like Calvaire, had several different safe houses. Ysidro followed him without a word as he crossed to the cellar steps. The stink of mold and wet earth rose about them like chokedamp as they descended.

"I thought the killer might be Grippen, you know," he said, and Ysidro nodded, absolutely unsurprised by the theory. "I suspect you did, too."

"The thought crossed my mind. It was why I sought out a mortal agent. This was not sheerly because I consider him a lout and a brute: he had good reason to wish Calvaire dead. Calvaire was a challenge to his authority. It was clear that Calvaire was trying to establish his own power here in London, even when none of us knew he was purchasing property, let alone creating a fledgling who would do his bidding. And Grippen is of the height to have made the marks upon Neddy Hammer-smith's windows."

They paused at the foot of the steps, Asher lifting the lamp nearly to the low ceiling beams to illuminate the cellar around them. Its glare smudged the dusty boards of a nearly empty coalbin in light and caught the fraying edges of translucent curtains of cobweb, thick with dust.

"Would he have harmed his own fledglings? Davies didn't think he would."

"Davies did not know Grippen." Ysidro paused for a long moment, a faint line flexing briefly between his ash-colored brows. "You must understand that the bond between a master vampire and the fledgling he creates is an incredibly strong one. It is not merely that, without the teaching of the master, the fledgling cannot hope to survive in a world where the veriest touch of sunlight will ignite every cell in his body-cannot hope even to make sense of the new world dinning and crying and burning into senses that suddenly gape like an open wound."

He spoke hesitantly now, not picking over what he would and would not tell, but struggling with things that in 350 years he had not told anyone. "In the making of the new vampire, their minds lock. The dying man's or woman's clings to that of one who has already passed through the experience of physical death. In a sense," he went on, not awkwardly but very slowly, like a demon trying to explain to the living what it is like to exist surrounded by the damned, "the fledgling must give his soul to the master, to hold for him while he-crosses over. I cannot explain it more nearly than that."

"A man must love his life very desperately," Asher said, after long silence, "to do that."

"It is easier to do than you think," Simon replied, "when you are feeling your own heart falter to a stop." Then he smiled, wry in the dim glow of the lamp but with that faint echo of an old charm, like a faded portrait of someone he had once been. "A drowning man seldom pushes a plank away, no matter who holds the other end. But you understand how absolute is the dominance established."

Queer and sharp to Asher's mind, like the Image in a dream, rose the vision of a slim, fair hidalgo in the pearl- sewn black velvets of the Spanish court, his head lying back over the white hand of the thin little man who knelt beside him. Like a fragile spider, Anthea had said...

"Is that why you've never made a fledgling?"

Ysidro did not look at him. "Si, "he whispered, lapsing for an instant into the antique Spanish of his past. His eyes flicked back to Asher's, and the wry, sweet smile returned, "That, and other reasons. Master vampires distrust their fledglings, of course, for the resentment engen-dered by that dominance, that iron intimacy, is enormous. They distrust still more those who are not their fledglings, over whom they have no control. In any event to be vampire is to have an almost fanatic desire to command absolutely one's environment and everyone about one. For we are, as you have observed, oddly fragile creatures in our way, besides being necessarily selfish and strong-willed to begin with in order to survive the transition to the vampire state at all.

"So yes," he added, segueing abruptly back to the original topic of conversation, "I believe Grippen would kill his own fledglings, did he think they might be leaguing with another vampire to dispute his mas-tery, either from fondness for his rival, like Lotta, or weakness, like Neddy, or resentment; though Danny King might accept Grippen's dominance over himself, he hated Grippen for holding it over Charles and Anthea. Many things pointed to a vampire killing his own, and the logical candidate was Grippen. But there are two of them, as you said, and Grippen, like us all, is a creature of the night."

He paused for a moment, considering Asher sidelong from cold, pale eyes. Then he continued, "I believe this is what you seek?" His cold fingers took the lamp from Asher's hand, lifting it high as he stepped a short way into the cellar.

What Asher had taken for a shadow denser than the rest he now saw was a doorway, its lintel barely five feet in height, its thick oak door hanging open to reveal a throat of blackness beyond. The light picked out the shapes of old stonework, a medieval ceiling groin and the top of a worn spiral of stone steps.

"A merchant's house once stood on this ground," the vampire said, crossing the cellar with that odd, drifting walk, Asher at his heels. "Later it was an inn-the Goat and Compasses; originally, of course, it was 'God Encompasseth Us,' a pious motto painted above the door which did not save it from being burned by Cromwell's troops." He led the way carefully down the foot-hollowed twist of steps to the cellar that lay below-small, bare, and circular, containing nothing but the ruin of mildewed sacking, rats' nests, and four bricks, set in a coffin-shaped rectangle in the middle of the floor to keep whatever had once rested upon them up off the damp.

"London is full of such places," Ysidro continued, his voice the whisper of a bleached ghost in the muffling darkness. "Places where old priories, inns, or houses were burned, their foundations later built upon by men who knew nothing of the cellars beneath."

Asher walked to the bricks, studied their layout thoughtfully, then returned to hold the lantern close to the framing of the stair's narrow arch. Without a word, he ascended again, studying the walls carefully as he went. The door at the top, examined more thoroughly, had once been padlocked from the inside. The padlock remained closed-it was the hasp that had been ripped free of the wood.

"Why not a hasp on the outside as well, for when he was gone?"

"If he was gone," Ysidro said, "what purpose would it serve beyond telling an intruder that there might be some thing of value hidden there? An empty coffin is not a thing one steals easily."

Behind him in the stair, the vampire's soft-toned words continued to echo weirdly against the old stonework. "I have no doubt that this is one of the places where Calvaire slept, utterly beyond the reach of sunlight. Davies would have known of it and come here when he needed shelter,"

"Didn't help him much." Asher scratched a corner of his mustache, fished from his pocket the padlock keys he had taken from Bully Joe's ashes, and tried them in the lock. "It just made more work for his murderers, carrying his coffin up to the kitchen to ignite the body in the sunlight." The second key sprang the lock open-Asher noted it, re-turned it to his pocket, and moved a pace or two down the steps to reexamine the ancient stone wall at the turn of the stairs. "Calvaire was his master; it's clear he used Bully Joe's knowledge of the neighborhood to purchase the ground lease on the building, so, of course, Bully Joe would have keys." He frowned-even with the magnifying lens he took from his pocket, he did not find the thing he sought. "He said Calvaire was dead-he seemed pretty sure of it."

"Perhaps he buried him, as Anthea and I buried Danny and poor Ned Hammersmith. The poor..." Ysidro paused, looking about him at the narrow confines of the stair and the hairpin turn of the enclosing wall. A slight frown tugged at his sparse brows. "But if the coffin were carried up from the subcellar..."

"They'd have had to carry it upright to get it around the corner, yes, I'm not certain, but I don't think a single man could have done so with a body in it-carried it so firmly and lightly that it left no scratches on the walls or the doorjambs. Even two men carrying it at a steep angle would have conceivably left some mark. There's enough light in the cellar above to have begun burning the body there, so they couldn't have carried it separately. And then there's the door itself."

Simon followed him up the stairs and regarded the twisted hasp with its bent screws, the wood still clinging to their threads. In the ochre glow of the lamp, his eyes were somber-he was beginning to under-stand.

"There is no mark of a crow on the doorjambs," he said, and Asher recognized the Elizabethan word for spanner.

"No," Asher said. "Nor is there anything that could have been used for a fulcrum to get a lever under the door handle. It was jerked out with a straight pull. Again, it's just within the realm of possibility that a human could have done it, but it isn't very probable."

There was long silence, in which, faintly, Asher could hear the patter of renewed rain from above. Then Ysidro said, "But it cannot have been a vampire. Even had he worn a glove to protect his hand from the stake, the daylight would have destroyed him."

"Would it?" Asher led the way up the cellar steps to the gaslighted kitchen above. The coffin gaped on the floor before them, like some monstrous fish platter displaying a ho rr idchef d'oeuvre on the worn and ugly linoleum. In a kindling drawer near the stove, Asher found a piece of candle, angled it down the lamp chimney to get a flame, and bore it through the door that gave into the front part of the house.

"Did Calvaire ever speak of Paris? Of what caused him to leave?"

"No." Ysidro drifted beside him, a soundless ghost in his gray suit. With the gas turned up full, it was obvious no one had crossed the dust-choked parlor or the hall from the front door, "He was not a man who dwelt upon the past, even so recent a past as that. Perhaps he had a reason, but many of us are that way. It is better so."

"You said when he came here that he 'promenaded himself-waited to make his kill until Grippen had contacted him, and swore fealty to Grippen, in exchange for Grippen's permission to hunt. But it's obvious that even an inexperienced fledgling, if he's careful, can conceal himself from the two oldest known vampires in Europe, at least for a time."

Again Ysidro was silent, turning the implications of that over in his mind.

"Was there ever any talk of vampires older than yourself? Much older, say, a hundred years older? Two hundred years?"

An odd expression flickered in the back of Don Simon's pale eyes. He paused on the stairs to the first floor, his pale hair haloed in the parlor gaslight behind him. "Of what are you thinking, James?"

"Of vampirism," Asher said quietly. "Of the slow change of the body, cell by cell, into something other than mortal flesh and mortal bone-of the growth of the vampire's powers. My wife's a pathologist. I know that diseases change, like syphilis, the Plague, or chicken pox, even sometimes producing new symptoms, if they continue long enough without killing the patient."

"And you think the vampire state a disease?"

"It's a blood-borne contagion, isn't it?"

"That is not all that it is."

"Alcoholism alters the brain, driving its victims to madness," Asher said. "High fevers can destroy the mind or parts of the mind; the mind itself can bring on physical ailments-nervousness, declines, what women call 'vapors,' brain fever. Any family practitioner could have told you that, even before Freud started doing his work on nervous hysteria. Emotional shock can cause anything from a stroke to a miscarriage. If you've traveled in India, seen the things the fakirs do, you'll know the mind can perform stranger feats upon the body than that.

"What I'm getting at is this: Does vampirism have symptoms, devel-opments, which only manifest themselves after a certain span of years? A long span, longer than most vampires live or can remember? Would one eventually, in the span of years, toughen even against daylight? And you didn't answer my original question."

Instead of replying at once, Ysidro resumed his climb to the floor above, Asher following at his heels, the burning candle still in his hand. He lit the gas in the upper hall and opened the two doors there. One room was a parlor, the other a bedroom, both obviously long out of use.

"It is an odd thing," Ysidro said slowly, "but there are not many vampires in Europe-or in America, which has had its own troubles- much over two hundred and fifty years old. These days vampirism is a phenomenon of the cities, where the poor are uncounted and deaths are relatively invisible. But cities tend to trap vampires in their own cata-clysms."

He opened the door at the end of the hall, leading to the attic stair. Asher paused briefly to study the two heavy hasps screwed into the wood of its inner side. Neither had been torn out; the padlocks, neatly open, were hooked through the steel staples on the doorframe.

He tried Bully's remaining keys out of sheer routine-two of them fitted. Unlike the cellar, the attic door had a single hasp on the outside, but it was clear from the locks that no one had forced his way in or out.

They traded a glance, and Asher shrugged. "We might as well see what's up there anyway-there may be papers."

"Dr. Grippen and I were the only two who survived the Fire of London," Ysidro went on, as they ascended the stair. "I only lived by lucky chance. As far as I know, no Munich vampire survived the trou-bles of the forties, and no Russian vampire Napoleon's invasion, occu-pation, and incineration of Moscow. Rome has always been a perilous city for the Undead, certainly since the founding of the Inquisition."

At the top of the attic stairs, the door stood open. A square of grimy yellowish light indicated a window and a street light somewhere below.

"Que va?" Ysidro whispered behind Asher in the dark. "Did he sleep here, the windows would be muffled..."

It took Asher a moment, in the almost total darkness beyond the feeble circle of the candle's light, to see what lay on the floor halfway between the door and the left-hand wall.

"Calvaire?" he asked softly, as Ysidro brushed past him and strode to that grisly heap of bones, ash, and seared metal oddments. Buttons, brace buckles, the lacing tips of shoes, and the charred metal barrel of a stylographic pen all glinted briefly in the fluttering yellow glow as he came to stand behind the kneeling vampire. Then he looked on past them, to the farther wall. A hinged panel gaped open, showing a coffin within a small closet which would have been totally indistinguishable from the wall itself when shut. Thick draperies and shutters had been torn from the attic's single window. In the silence, the rain on the low roof was like the ominous tattoo of Prussian drums.

"At least a man," he added, lowering his candle again to shed its weak radiance on the remains, "since there are no corset stays." He was interested to note that, judging by the relative wholeness of the bones, Ysidro seemed to be correct about the French vampire's age.

The vampire lifted a gold ring clear of the mess and blew the thin coating of ash and dust from it. A chance draft made the candle flame waver; the diamond of its setting winked like a bright and baleful eye. "Calvaire," he affirmed softly. "So he must indeed have wakened, with the searing of the light, to stagger already dying from his coffin..,"

"Which is a curious thing," Asher remarked, "if our killer, being a vampire himself, knew from the first that the head had to be cut off to prevent such a thing from happening. Almost as curious as the fact that the door downstairs wasn't locked." He stooped beside Ysidro to pick a couple of keys from the ghastly debris. He matched the wards and found them duplicates of Bully Joe's keys. "There's no mark of charring on the floor between the coffin's place of concealment and the body, either. If, as you say, the flesh begins to burn at once..."

"He could not have admitted the killer himself," Ysidro said. "What-ever the capabilities of the killer, Calvaire at least could not have gone anywhere near the door at the bottom of the steps during the hours of daylight,"

"And yet the killer entered that way."

Ysidro lifted an inquiring brow.

"Had he not, he could simply have left the way he came, without unlocking the door at the bottom of the step at all. What it looks like is that Calvaire knew his killer, and admitted him himself, by night... Is it usual for a vampire to have two coffins in the same building?"

"It is not unusual," Ysidro said calmly. "Fledglings frequently take refuge with their masters. And then, there are few houses which are safe for vampires, and those which are, ofttimes become veritable rookeries of the Undead, as you yourself found in Savoy Walk. That was one of my reasons for keeping from you as many details as possible. Not for their protection, you understand, but for yours."

"I'm touched by your concern," Asher said dryly. "Could the killer have killed or incapacitated Calvaire in some other way, leaving the body to be destroyed when daylight came?"

The vampire did not answer for a moment, sitting hunkered beside the burned skeleton, his arms extended out over his knees. "I do not know," he said at length. "But if he had broken Calvaire's neck or back -and the skull seems to be lying at a strange angle, though that, of course, might simply be the way it rolled when the muscles were con-sumed-it would have incapacitated him, so that he lay here on the floor, conscious but unable to move, while the light slowly brightened in the window. If our killer is himself immune to daylight," he added neutrally, "it is possible that he remained to watch,"

"Another argument," Asher said, "for the fact that Calvaire knew him, it being less entertaining to watch the sufferings of those to whom we are unknown and indifferent."

"Interesting." Ysidro turned the ring he held this way and that, the candlelight shattering through its delicate facets to salt that alabaster face with a thousand points of colored fire. "The odd thing is that among vampires, there is a legend of an ancient vampire, so old and powerful that no one ever sees him anymore-so old that even other vampires cannot sense his passage. Even a hundred and fifty years ago, other vampires were avoiding his haunts. To them he was semifabulous, like a ghost. Traditions among them said that he had been a vampire since before the days of the Black Death."

"And what were his haunts?" Asher asked, knowing already what the Spaniard would say.

The expressionless eyes raised from the glitter of the gem before them. "He slept-or was said to sleep-in the crypts below the charnels of the churchyard of the Holy Innocents, in Paris."