Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 15

EIGHT PERISH IN WAREHOUSE FIRE FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED [From theManchester Herald ]

Fire ravaged the cotton warehouse of Moyle Co. in Liverpool Street last night, claiming the lives of eight vagrants who are be-lieved to have taken shelter in the warehouse from the cold. How-ever, police report the discovery of a small quantity of blood on the pavement of the alley behind the warehouse, indicating that some sort of foul play may have taken place, though all the bodies were too badly burned to provide definite clues. All eight bodies were found clumped close together in the rear part of the warehouse, near where the fires started; there is no evidence that any of these unknown vagrants attempted to extinguish the blaze in its early stages, and, in fact, police believe that all eight may have been dead of some other cause before the fire started. The fire was blazing strongly when first seen by watchman Lawrence Bevington, who claims that he saw no indication of smoke or other trouble when he passed the warehouse earlier...

No, Lydia thought calmly, he wouldn't. If I were trying to hide my kills by incinerating the bodies, I'd make certain the watchman was sleeping at the appropriate moment.

Her hand was shaking as she set down the newspaper.

Manchester. Anonymous masses of factory workers, stevedores, and coal heavers, unmissed save by those who knew them and maybe not even then.

She looked at the list she'd made, lying on top of theJournal of Comparative Folklore, and wondered how long she dared wait now,

She had promised James not to do anything until she had checked with him, not to put herself in danger. She knew she was a child in a bog here, unable to tell the difference between a tuft that would bear her weight and one that was only a little greenery floating on the top of quicksand; she knew that the vampires would be waiting. The fear that she had lived with for weeks rose again in her, the fear of that guttural voice calling in her dreams, the fear of the gathering darkness, the fear she had felt in the cold fog of the court the night she had gone out to seek a vampire. Everything she had been reading had only taught her to fear more.

But how long was she going to wait? The last thing she'd heard from James was that he was going to see the Paris vampires, under the prob-lematical protection of Don Simon Ysidro. She shut her heart, trying to freeze it into submission, trying not to connect that letter with this long silence. But her heart whispered to her that they had no reason to keep him alive. And there was a good chance that, as Calvaire's friends, they might have something to hide, not only from humans, but from vampire kin.

I'll wait one more day, she promised herself, trying to relax the steely hand that seemed to clutch at her throat from the inside.His letters have to go long-ways-about through Oxford... it could have gotten delayed...

She looked back at her list, which she had compiled last night, and at the newspaper lying beside it. The vampire's rampages had killed seven-teen people in the last three days.

Her fingers still unsteady, she took off her spectacles and set them aside, then lowered her head to her crossed arms and wept.

Asher woke feeling stronger, but still weighted, not only with exhaus-tion, but with an uncaring lassitude of the spirit with which he was familiar from his more rough-and-tumble philological research trips. His dreams had been plagued by the sensation that there was something he was forgetting, some detail he was missing. He was back in the van der Platz house in Pretoria, hunting for something. He had to move swiftly because the family was due back, the family which considered him such a pleasant and trustworthy guest, a Bavarian professor only there to study linguistic absorption.

But he had forgotten what it was that he hunted. He only knew it was vital, not only to the war between England and its recalcitrant colonials, but to his own life, to the lives of everyone dear to him. Notes, he thought, or a list-that was it, the list of the articles he'd published; they mustn't find it, mustn't trace him through them... So he hunted, increasingly frightened, partly because he knew the van der Platzes, though Boers, were the kingpins of German intelligence in Pre-toria and would not hesitate to turn him over to the commandos if they discovered he was not as he seemed, partly because he knew that behind one of those doors he opened and closed in such aimless haste he was going to find Jan, the sixteen-year-old son of the household and his friend, with the top of his head shot off...

"I killed him," he said as he opened his eyes.

Cold, fragile fingers touched his. Against the dimness of the low ceiling, he saw the thin white Face floating in its pale cloud of tonsure, green eyes gleaming strangely against the sunken shadows of the skull-like head. He had spoken in English, and in English a voice whispered back, "Killed thou this boy in anger, or for gain?"

He knew Brother Anthony had read his dream, seen it like a cinemat-ograph picture, though how he knew this he was not sure.

"It would have been better if I had," Asher replied softly. "He might have understood that. But no." His

mouth twisted with the bitter taste of his own awareness. "I killed for policy, to protect the information I had learned, so I could get back to England with it, and return to learn more. I did not want to be..." He hesitated on the wordblown, an idiom the old monk would not understand, and then finished the phrase, "... revealed as a spy."

What a euphemism, he thought, reflecting how much thought was erased by that simple change of wording. No, he had not wanted to be revealed to these people who had trusted him as a spy, who was using their trust as he'd have used a stolen bicycle, to be later abandoned to rust by the side of the road.

"It is no longer lawful for me to absolve thee of this." Like broken wisps of straw, the thin fingers stroked at his hands; the green eyes looking into his were mad and haunted and filled with pain, but Asher had no fear of him, no sense of a lust for blood. The whispering voice went on, "I, who cried against simoniac priests, venal priests, and priests who took bribes to forgive in advance the sins their patrons longed to commit-how can I expect God to hear the words of a mur-derer-priest, a vampire-priest? Yet Saint Augustine says that it is lawful for soldiers to kill in battle, and that those deaths will not be held against them before the throne of God."

"I was not a soldier," Asher said quietly. "In battle, one shoots at men who are shooting at one. It is self-defense, to protect one's own life."

"To protect one's own life," the vampire echoed tiredly. The skull-face did not change, save that the sunken green eyes blinked. "How many have died to protect my life, my-immortality? I argue that I did not choose to become what I am, but I did. I chose it when the vampire that made me drank of my blood, forced his bleeding wrist against my lips, and bade me drink, bade me seize the mind that I saw burn before me in darkness like a flame, willing me to live. I chose then to live and not to die. I chose then and I have chosen every night since."

Exhaustion lay over Asher like a leaded blanket-the conversation had the air of being no more than another part of his dream. "Was there a reason?"

"No." The monk's cold little hand did not move on his. Against the low ceiling, his shadow hung, huge and deformed, in the candlelight- the glint of its reflection caught on needle-like fangs as he spoke. "Only that I loved life. It was my sin from the beginning, my sin throughout my days with the Minorites, the Little Brothers of St. Francis. I loved the body we were enjoined to despise, reveled in those little luxuries, those small comforts, which our teachers warned us to deny ourselves. A warning well given, perhaps. They said that such delight in the ephemera of matter would addict the soul. And so it has done.

"Perhaps it was that I did not want to confront God with the sin of luxuriousness on my conscience. I no longer remember. And now I am burthened down with more murders than I can count. I have slain armies, one man at a time; in the lake of boiling blood which Dante the Italian saw in Hell, I will be submerged to the last hairs upon my scalp. Truly a fit portion for one who has sought hot blood from the veins of the innocent to prolong his own existence. And that is what I cannot face."

Susurrant and unreal, that voice followed him down into dreams again, and this time he found himself walking on the stone banks of a crimson lake, boiling and fuming to a bruised horizon in a black cavern that stretched farther than sight. The smell of the blood choked in his nostrils, and its thick, guttural bubbling filled his ears. Looking down, he could see in the tide pools the yellowish serum separating out of the blood, as it did in Lydia's experimental dishes. In the lake itself he could see them all: Grippen, Hyacinthe, Elysee, Anthea Farren with her creamy breasts bare and splashed with gore, screaming in pain... On the bank of that hellish lake walked Lydia in the trailing draperies of her ecru tea gown, a glass beaker in her hand, her hair falling in a rusty coil down her back and spectacles faintly steamed with heat, bending down to dip up the blood from the churning Phlegethon. Asher tried to call to her, but she was walking away, holding the beaker up to the light and examining the contents with her usual absorbed attention. He tried to run toward her, but found he could not move, his feet seeming rooted to the broken black lava rock; looking back, he saw the bubbling red lake beginning to rise, the blood trickling toward him to engulf him, like the vampires, for his sins.

He opened his eyes and saw Ysidro, sitting near the candle reading the London Times, and knew that it was night. "Interesting," the vam-pire said softly, when Asher told him of his conversation with the old priest, "He is awake during the daylight hours, then, whether or not he can tolerate the touch of the sun itself, though I suspect that he can. And the silver lock on the door has been forced and replaced."

"He has to have come here somehow."

Ysidro folded the paper with a neat crackle, and set it aside. "He may have used the sewers. Perhaps he knew, from other years, that this was my house; perhaps he only followed me back here from the catacombs that first night and guessed, when he saw me fighting to save you, that I would want you brought here. I have, needless to say, moved my resi-dence, now that Grippen and Elysee know of this place... Do you feel strong enough to walk?"

Asher did, but even the minor effort of washing and shaving in the basin of water Simon had brought left him exhausted, and he was grate-ful to return to his cot. Later, after he'd rested, he asked for and got envelopes and paper. In the course of the following day, he wrote two letters to Lydia, one addressed to her under her own name in Oxford, the other addressed to Miss Priscilla Merridew and enclosed, as his former correspondence had been, in a forwarding note to one of his students. He reassured her of his comparative safety, though he felt a twinge of irony at the phrase. Things had to be truly serious, he re-flected, for him to consider helpless imprisonment in a cellar in the care of two vampires as grounds for optimism. Ysidro agreed to post them without demur-Asher could only hope that the rather simple camou-flage would work, or at worst that he'd be able to get Lydia to some other residence before the Spaniard was able to return to Oxford and trace her down.

He remained in the cellar another two days, sleeping mostly, reading the books and newspapers Simon brought to him or listening in schol-arly satisfaction as the vampire read Shakespeare to him in its original pronunciation, and slowly feeling his strength return. He never saw Brother Anthony, except in queer, involuted dreams, but now and then the water pitcher in the cell would be refilled when he awoke. The second afternoon, he woke to find two railway tickets propped against the candlestick, and his luggage stacked neatly at the foot of his cot. With the tickets was a note, written on creamy new stationery in a sixteenth-century hand: Ca w you be ready to leave for London at sun-down?

Beneath this was a folded copy of the L ondonTimes, with the head-line MASSACRE IN LIMEHOUSE.

Seven more people, mostly Chinese from the docks, had been killed.

Weak and shaky, Asher crawled from his cot and staggered to the bars. They were massively strong, forged to defeat even a vampire's superhuman strength-the silver padlock, which did not seem to have kept Brother Anthony out, still held the door. He leaned against the bars and said softly into the darkness, "Anthony? Brother Anthony, listen. We need you in London. We need your help. We can make the journey in a single night; we have provision for it if daylight overtakes us. You must come with us-you're the only one who can aid us, the only one who can track this killer, the only one who can aid human-kind. Please help us. Please."

But from the darkness came no sound.

"I'm not surprised," Simon remarked later, when Asher told him about it as the boat train steamed out of the Gare du Nord and into the thin mists of the evening. "It is difficult to tell how much he knows or guesses of what is going on-a great deal, if he followed us, as vampires often do, listening to our conversation from a distance. It may be that he considers the deaths of vampires only meet; and it may also be that he knows more of the matter than we do and will not speak the killer's name to us because he knows it himself. Among vampires friendships are rare, but not unheard of."

He unfurled the newspaper he had bought over his neat, bony knees and studied the headline with impassive eyes. "I mislike this, James," he said softly, and Asher leaned around to see. limehouse vampire, the headline screamed. police baffled. 'There was another series of killings two nights before that, in Manchester-the London papers did not carry it until the massacre today. A vampire could travel the dis-tance in a matter of hours-as indeed could a man. After a blood feast of nine people, no normal vampire would so much as look at another human being, even were it safe to do so, for a week at least. Few of us feed more than twice a night, and most not more than one in four or five -not upon humans, anyway. This..." The slender brows twitched together. "This troubles me."

"Have you run across it before?"

The slim hands creased the paper again and put it by, "Not person-ally, no. But Rhys spoke of something of the sort happening during the Plague. "He had been a vampire since before the Black Death...

"To those who drank the blood of the Plague's victims?"

Ysidro folded his hands upon his knee, slim and colorless in his gray suit, and did not look at Asher, "Oh, we all did that," he said evenly. "Rhys did during the Great Plague and took no ill; Grippen and I both did, during the last outbreak of the Plague in London in '65. One could not tell, you understand, whom the Plague would choose before dawn. One night, I drank of a woman's blood as she lay in her bed beside her husband; as I laid her back dead, I moved the sheets aside and saw him dead already, with the black boils just beginning in his armpits and groin. I fled into the streets and there Tulloch the Scot found me, vomit-ing my heart out, and asked me why I troubled with it. 'We are dead already,' he said. 'Fallen souls on whom Death has already had his will. What are these virgin fears?' "

The vampire spoke without emotion, gazing into the distance with fathomless yellow eyes; but looking at the delicate, hook-nosed profile, Asher glimpsed for the first time the abysses of dark memory that lay beneath that disdainful calm,

"Even in his later years, Rhys was a traveler-an unusual circum-stance for the Undead. He would vanish for years, sometimes decades, at a time-indeed it was only by chance that I saw him in London the week before the Great Fire. He once told me of vampires in Paris and Bavaria during the Plague who would go into fits of attacking humans, killing again and again in a night, though he did not know whether this was something in the Plague itself, or simply horror at that which was happening all around them. But there were some, he said, though by no means all, who, without warning, years and often centuries later, would be seized with the need to kill in that fashion again and again. I know Elizabeth the Fair used to go into the plague houses and kill the families who had not yet broken out-she was killed after what always sounded to me like a very stupid rampage, a series of careless killings that was not at all like her. She had never showed that tendency before and she had been a vampire for centuries."

"But you have never done so?"

Still the vampire did not meet his eyes. "Not yet."

They reached London in the black fog of an autumn predawn. In-stead of fading away as had always been his wont before the train even pulled up to the platform, Ysidro rode with Asher in the cab back to his lodgings and saw him ensconced in bed before vanishing into the peril-ously waning dark. Though the vampire treated the matter as simply part of his obligation to an employee who must be kept serviceable, Asher was grateful and rather touched and heartily glad of the help. He had slept when he could on the journey; by the time they reached Prince of Wales Colonnade, he felt, as Mrs. Grimes frequently phrased it, as if he'd been pulled through a mangle.

The sun woke him hours later. His landlady, who had been horrified by his haggard appearance, brought him breakfast on a tray and asked if there was anything she could do to help. "Is there someone I can send for, sir?" she demanded worriedly. "If you've been ill, you'll need some-one to look after you, and dear knows, though we're put here to help our fellow creatures, what with four lodgers and the keeping up of the place, I simply haven't the time it would take."

"No, of course not," Asher said soothingly. "And I'm deeply obliged for what you have been able to do. I have a younger sister here in London; if you would be so good as to send your boy to the telegraph office, I'll be able to go to meet her, and she'll get me whatever I'll need."

It was an awkward and time-consuming arrangement, but he knew that, if he simply sent a note to Bruton Place, they'd wonder why she didn't just walk back over with the bearer, and he was not going to risk having Lydia associated in any way with Prince of Wales Colonnade, if he could help it. He'd closed one window curtain to alert Lydia to the fact that a telegram would follow. Writing the message with a hand that still wobbled unsteadily around the pen, he decided, regretfully, that it would be safer if they did not meet at all-merely exchanged parcels of information at the letter drop in the Museum's cloakroom. His soul ached to see her, to touch her, to hear her voice, and to know she was safe, but knowing what little he knew now about the killer, he did not dare even risk a meeting in broad daylight in the Park.

Even the fact that he had done so once made his heart contract with dread. The killer could have been watching, as Ysidro said, unseen and at a distance, listening to every word they uttered-a day stalker, mad and feverish with the hunger of the ancient Plague. Bully Joe Davies' face returned to his mind, craggy and twisted behind his straggling, dirty hair-the glottal, desperate cockney voice whispering, "My brain's burnin' for it!... it keeps hurtin' at me and hurtin' at me..." and the frantic, naked hunger in his eyes.

Bitter self-loathing filled him-the godlike Dennis Blaydon, he thought viciously, would never have put her in danger like this.

He sent the telegram reply paid and put in a dogged two hours, writing up his adventures and findings in Paris. Even that exhausted him and depressed him, as well. He craved rest as he had craved water in the days down in Ysidro's cellar, after his blood had been drained; he wanted to have Lydia out of this, himself out of this, and wanted the silence and green peace of Oxford, even for a little while. He yearned for rest, not to have to think about even the hypothetical vampires of folk-lore, much less the real ones who lurked beneath the pavements of London and Paris, listening to the passing of human feet on the flagways overhead, watching from the shadows of alleys with greedy, speculative, unhuman eyes.

But that was not an option any more. So he wiped the sweat of effort from his face with a corner of the pillow sham and continued driving his pen over the sheets of foolscap on his lap, straining his ears for the sound of the commissionnaire's returning knock on the door.

But no reply came.

With some effort, he dressed again and sent for a cab, partly to give the impression that he meant to go some distance, partly because there was every chance he would have to track Lydia in Chancery Lane or Somerset House-and partly because even the thought of walking two blocks made his body ache.

"Miss Merridew, sir?" the landlady at Bruton Place said, with the Middle English by which he'd earlier subconsciously identified her as an immigrant from eastern Lancashire. "God bless you, sir, you're the one we've been hoping would call, for the good Lord knows the poor lass didn't seem to know a soul in London..."

"What?" Asher felt himself turn cold to the lips. The landlady, seeing the color sink from his already white face, hastily guided him to an armchair in her cluttered parlor.

"We didn't know what to do, my man and I. He says people stays here because they don't want folks nosy-parkering into their affairs, and, if you'll forgive me,sir, he says a pretty lass like that is just as like not to come home of an evenin'. But I know a wrong 'un when I sees her, sir, and your Miss Merridew weren't that road..."

"What happened?" His voice was very quiet.

"Dear God, sir-Miss Merridew's been gone for two nights now, and if she didn't turn up by tomorrow morning, whatever my man says, I was going to call in the police."