Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 3

Her name was Lotta." Don Simon's soft voice echoed queerly in the damp vaults of the tomb. "She was one of..." He hesi-tated fractionally, then amended, "A hatmaker, when she was alive." Asher wondered what Ysidro's original description of her would have been, "In life she was a rather poor specimen of a human-cocky, disrespectful of her betters* a thief, and a whore." He paused, and again Asher had the impression that the Spaniard was picking through a jewel box of facts for the few carats' worth of information with which he was willing to part. "But she made a good vampire."

Asher's left eyebrow quirked upward, and he flashed the beam of Ysidro's dark lantern around the low stone vaults above their heads. Shadowed niches held coffins; here and there, on a keystone arch, a blurred coat of arms had been incised, though why, if Death had not been impressed by the owner's station, the family expected Resurrection to be, he was at a loss to decide. Highgate was not a particularly old cemetery, but it was intensely fashionable-vaults in this part started at well over a hundred guineas-and the tomb, with its narrow stair lead-ing down from a tree-lined avenue of similar pseudo-Egyptian mausole-ums, was guarded by its well-paid-for isolation and was, at the same time, far easier to enter than the crypt of some City church would have been.

"And what makes a good vampire?"

For a moment he thought Ysidro would evade the question. The Spaniard stood for a moment, nearly invisible in the shadows of a dark niche, his aquiline face inscrutable in its long frame of colorless hair. Then he said slowly, "An attitude of mind, I suppose. You must under-stand, James, that the core of a vampire's being is the hunger to live, to devour life-the will not to die. Those who have not that hunger, that will, that burning inside them, would not survive the-process-by which the living become Undead and, even if they did, would not long continue this Unlife we lead. But it can be done well or poorly. To be a good vampire is to be careful, to be alert, to use all the psychic as well as the physical faculties of the vampire, and to have that flame that feeds upon the joy of living.

"Lotta, for all her vulgarity-and she was amazingly vulgar-was a truly attractive woman, and that flame of life in her was part of the attraction. Even I felt it. She truly reveled in being a vampire."

The yellow lance of the lantern beam passed over the short flight of granite steps leading down from the level of the avenue outside-the avenue that, even in daylight, would have been dim with subaqueous green shade-and gleamed faintly on the metal that sheathed the vault doors. Even entering the place, Asher could see that the dust and occa-sional blown leaves lay far less thickly on those steps and on the sort of trodden path that led to this niche to the right of the vault. It marked Lotta's nightly comings and goings and obviated any specific track of the one who had found her sleeping here.

"I take it you knew her when she was alive?"

"No." The vampire folded his arms, a gesture which barely stirred the black folds of his Inverness.

In the glaring gaslights of Paddington Station Asher had seen that Ysidro had lost some of his terrible pallor, looking almost human, ex-cept for his eyes-presumably, Asher thought with a sort of dark hu-mor, he had dined on the train. It was more than could be said for himself. While Ysidro summoned a cab from the rank of horse-drawn hansoms before the station, he'd bought a meat pasty from an old man selling them from a cart, and the taste of it lingering in his mouth was as bizarre an incongruity in this macabre gloom as had been the act of eating it in the cab with the vampire sitting ramrod-straight at his side. Ysidro had offered to pay the halfpenny it had cost-Asher had simply told him to put it on account.

"Then you didn't make her a vampire?"

Either he was growing more used to the minimal flickers that passed for the vampire's expressions or Ysidro had held the woman in especial contempt. "No."

"Who did, then?"

"One of the other vampires in London."

"You're going to have to give me some information sometime, you know," Asher remarked, coming back to Don Simon's side.

"I see no reason for you to know who we are and where to find us. The less you know, the less danger there will be for all of us, yourself included."

Asher studied that cool, ageless face by the amber kerosene glow and thought, They plan to kill me when this is over. It was only logical if, as Ysidro had said, the first defense of the Undead was the disbelief of the living. He wondered if they thought he was a fool or merely believed him to be controllable in spite of this knowledge. Anger stirred in him, like a snake shifting its coils.

And more than anger, he was aware of the obscure sense that he had picked up in his years of working for the Department, an impression of looking at two pieces of a puzzle whose edges did not quite match.

He walked back to the niche, with its thick stench of fresh ashes, and raised the lantern high.

The coffin that lay on the hip-high stone shelf was reasonably new, but had lost its virgin gloss. Its lid had been pulled forward and lay propped longways against the wall beneath the niche itself; there were multiple scratches on the stonework, where the coffin had been pulled forward and back, of various degrees of freshness, difficult to determine in the tin lantern's shadows.

He held the light low, illuminating the interior, the hot metal throw-ing warmth against his wrist between shirt cuff and glove, the smell of burning kerosene acrid in his nostrils. His first thought was how intense the heat must have been; it had eaten at the bones themselves, save for the skull and the pelvis. The long bones of arms and legs were attenu-ated to bulb-ended rods, the vertebrae little more than pebbles, the ribs charred to crumbling sticks. Metal glinted, mixed with the ash-corset stays, buttons, a cut-steel comb, the jeweled glitter of rings.

"So this is what happens to vampires when the sun strikes them?"

"Yes." Ysidro's noncommittal features could have been carved of alabaster for all the expression they showed, but Asher sensed the thoughts behind them, racing like a riptide.

He moved the lantern, flashing its beam around the crypt close to the coffin's base-mold, dirt, dampness. "Yet she made no effort to get out of the coffin."

"I am not sure that burning would have waked her." The vampire drifted over to stand at his side, looking down over his shoulder into the casket. "Exhaustion comes upon us at dawn; once we sleep, there is no waking us until darkness once more covers the land."

From the mess in the coffin, Asher picked the stump of a half-decom-posed bone, blew sharply on it to clear away the ashes, and held it close to the light. "Not even if you burst into flames?"

"It is not 'bursting into flames,' " Ysidro corrected in his soft, abso-lutely level voice, "It is a burning, a corrosion, a searing away of the flesh..."

Asher dropped back the first bone he had found, fished about for another. Given the number of murders Lotta had committed over the years, he thought, her remains didn't rate much in the way of respect. "How long does it take, first to last?"

"I have no idea, having never, you understand, been able to witness the process. But I know from my own experience that its onset is instan-taneous upon contact with the sun's light."

Glancing up swiftly, for an instant Asher found himself looking into the crystalline labyrinth that stretched into endless distance behind the colorless eyes,

Ysidro went on, without change in the timbre of his voice, "I was, as you see, able to reach shelter within a second or so-I do not know how long it would have taken me to die. My hands and face were blistered for months, and the scars lasted for years." After a moment he added, "The pain was like nothing I had ever experienced as a living man."

Asher studied the vampire for a moment, that slender young man who had danced with Henry VIII's remarkable daughters. "When was this?"

The heavy eyelids lowered infinitesimally. "A long time ago."

There was a silence, broken only by the faint hiss of the hot metal lantern slide, and by Asher's solitary breath. Then Asher turned back, to pick again through the charred ruin of bones. "So merely the opening of her coffin wouldn't have wakened her, in spite of a vampire's powers. I'm still a bit surprised; by the way the coffin lining is undamaged all around the top, she didn't even try to sit up, didn't even move..."

Ysidro's thin, black-gloved hand rested on the edge of the coffin near Asher's down-turned face. "The vampire sleep is not human sleep," he said softly. "A friend of mine says she thinks it is because the mental powers that waken with the transition to the vampire state weary the mind. I myself sometimes wonder whether it is not because we, even more so than the living, exist day to day by the sheer effort of our own wills. Perhaps it amounts to the same thing."

"Or perhaps," Asher said, lifting another small stump of bone from the charred mess, "it was because Lotta was already dead when her flesh ignited."

The vampire smiled ironically. "When her flesh ignited," he re-marked, "Lotta had already been dead for approximately a hundred and sixty years."

Asher held the fragment of bone up in the beam of the lamp. "There's not much left, but the bone's scratched. This is one of the cervical vertebrae-her head was severed. Her mouth may have been stuffed with garlic..."

"That is customary in such cases."

"Not in 1907, it isn't." He set the lantern on the corner of the coffin and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wrap the charred scraps of bone. "It indicates, among other things, that the killer entered the tomb, closed the door, opened the coffin, severed the head, and only then reopened the door to allow daylight to destroy the flesh. So he knew what to expect. I take it Lotta was not the first victim?"

"No," Ysidro said, looking expressionlessly down over Asher's shoul-der as he began once more to sift the ash, gems, and decomposing bones. The saffron light picked splinters of brightness from the facets of jewels and the edges of charred metal.

Asher's probing fingers dug, searched, and tossed aside, seeking for what he knew had to be there. "Were the other victims beheaded also? Or staked through the heart?"

"I have no idea. The bodies, you understand, were nearly as badly decomposed as hers. Is it important?"

"It would tell us-particularly the condition of the first body you found-whether the killer knew initially that he was going after vam-pires. Real vampires, physiological vampires, and not just lunatics who enjoy sleeping in coffins."

"I see."

Asher wondered what it was hedid see, veiled behind those lowered eyelids. Certainly something. "What are your theories on this?"

"I'm paying you for yours."

Asher's mouth quirked with irritation. "There are things you aren't telling me."

"Many of them," the vampire agreed evenly, and Asher sighed and abandoned that tack.

"Did she play with her victims?"

"Yes." Disdain glinted along the edge of his tone. A vulgar Cockney, Asher thought, amused; scarcely to the taste of this fastidious hidalgo from the court of Philip II. "She liked rich young men. She would play them along for weeks, sometimes, meeting them places, letting them take her to supper-since one seldom actually watches one's dinner partner eat, it is a simple enough illusion to maintain-or to the theater or the opera, not that she had the slightest interest in music, you under-stand. She could not make of them a steady diet-like the rest of us, she subsisted chiefly upon the city's poor. But she enjoyed the knowledge that these silly youths were entertaining their own killer, falling in love with her. It pleased her to make them do so. She savored the terror in their eyes when they finally saw the fangs. Many vampires do."

"Do you?"

Don Simon turned away, a flicker of tired distaste in his eyes. "There was a time when I did. Are we finished here?"

"For now." Asher straightened up. "I may come back in the daylight, when there's more chance of seeing something. Where were her rooms?" When Ysidro hesitated, he insisted, "She can't have strung her suitors along for centuries wearing just the one dress." He held up the latchkey he had taken from the ashes.

"No." The vampire drifted ahead of him across the narrow vault and mounted the steps while Asher thrust closed the iron-sheeted vault door behind them. The areaway around it was thick with leaves, though they had been swept away time and again by the opening of the door: it had been thirty years since the Branhame family had died out, leaving their tomb to those who slept and the one who, up until the night before last, had not. The air outside was foggy and still. The vampire's caped great-coat hung about his slender form in folds, like the sculpted cloak of a statue. His head was bare; his eyes were hooded pits of gleaming shadow. "No, and Lotta was one of those women who saw immortality in terms of an unlimited wardrobe.

"I went there last night, after I discovered... this." He gestured behind them, as Asher slid shut the lantern slide and trod cautiously along the utter darkness of the wet, fog-drowned slot of the avenue of tombs. After a moment the light, steel-strong touch of the vampire's hand closed on Asher's arm, guiding him along in the total darkness. Intellectually he understood that he was perfectly safe, so long as Ysidro needed his help, but still, he made a mental note to be careful how often he found himself in this particular situation.

"How did you happen to discover it?" he inquired as they emerged from the end of the avenue under a massive gateway carved by the cemetery's developers to resemble some regal necropolis of the Pha-raohs. "If, as you say, you never got along with Lotta, what would you be doing visiting her tomb?"

"I wondered how long it would take me to fall under suspicion." Asher caught the glint of genuine humor in Simon's ironic glance. "I plead innocence, my lords of the jury-I had, as they say in the novels, retired to my room and was sound asleep at the time."

In spite of himself Asher grinned. "Can you bring a witness?"

"Alas, no. In truth," he went on, "I had been-unquiet-for some weeks before any evidence of trouble arose. There was a vampire named Valentin Calvaire, a Frenchman, who had not been seen for two, three weeks. I was beginning to suspect ill had befallen him-he was only recently come to London, by our standards, and might have been unfa-miliar yet with the hiding places and the patterns of this city's life. It is easy in those circumstances for a vampire to come to grief, which is one of the reasons we do not often travel."

Asher had the momentary impression that Ysidro had more to say on the subject of Valentin Calvaire; but, after the briefest of inner debates, he seemed to think better of it and simply went on, "I think now that he was the first victim, though no body, no burned coffin, was ever found. But then, none of us knew all of his sleeping places.

"But eighteen days ago some-a friend of mine-came to me saying that one of the other vampires, a friend to us both, had been killed on the previous day, his coffin left open to the sun. She was distraught, though it is the kind of thing which can happen accidentally-for in-stance, many of our secret hiding places, the ancient cellars where we had hidden our coffins for years, were broken open and destroyed when they cut for the Underground. This vampire-his name was Danny King-had indeed slept in such a cellar. The window shutters were wide open, as was the coffin's lid."

Enough thin moonlight filtered through the fog so that Asher could see his companion's face, calm and detached, like the faces of the cold stone children they had passed in the rustling murk of the cemetery around them. The curving wall of tombs that surrounded them like a canyon opened out into a stair, overhung with trees that shadowed again the vampire's white face, and Asher was left with that disem-bodied voice like pale amber, and the steely strength of the long fingers on his arm.

"Perhaps ten days after that, Lotta and a friend of hers came to me saying they had gone up to the rooms of another vampire, an Edward Hammersmith, who lived in an old mansion in Half Moon Street that his father had owned when he was a man. They had found all the shutters pried off the windows and the

coffin open, filled with bones and ash. And then I knew."

"And neither King nor Hammersmith appeared to have awakened or tried to get out of their coffins?"

"No," Ysidro said. "But with Calvaire's death the killer would have known what it was that he hunted."

"The question is," Asher said, "whether he knew it before."

"We asked that of ourselves. Whether anyone had been seen dogging our steps, lingering about, as humans do when they are working up their resolve even to believe that one they loved was indeed the victim of a vampire. In Mr. Stoker's interesting novel, it is only the coincidence that the heroine's dear friend and also her husband were victims of the same vampire and that the husband had seen other vampires at their hunt that leads her and her friends to put all the rest of the details together and come up with the correct answer. Most people never reach that stage. Even when the vampire is careless, and the evidence stares them in the face, they are always far more eager to believe a 'logical explanation.' "

"I find it typical," he added, as they passed through the softly echo-ing gloom of an enclosed terrace, a catacomb of brick vaults and marble plaques that marked the modest tombs of its sleepers, "that vampirism is portrayed as an evilonly just entering England-from the outside, naturally, as if no true-born Englishman would stoop to become a vam-pire. It had obviously never occurred to Mr. Stoker that vampires might have dwelt in London all along."

They left the cemetery as they had entered it, over the wall near St. Michael's Church, Ysidro boosting Asher with unnerving strength, then scrambling lightly up after him. The fog seemed less thick here as they strolled beside the cemetery wall and down Highgate Hill. The woolly yellow blur of the lantern, now that it would no longer bring the watchmen down on them, picked pearled strands of weed and web from the darkness of the roadside ditch, as it had picked the jewels from the coffin ash. Asher's breath drifted away as steam to mingle with the cloudy brume all around them, and he was interested to see that, even when he spoke, Don Simon's did not.

"How longhave there been vampires in London?" he asked, and the shadowed eyes flicked sidelong to him again.

"For a long time." The shutting once again of that invisible door was almost audible, and the rest of the walk was made in silence. Behind them in the fog, Asher heard the clock on St. Michael's chime the three-quarters-while passing through the cemetery itself he had heard it speak eleven. Highgate Hill and the suburban streets below it were utterly deserted, the shops and houses little more than dark bulks in the drifting fog through which the gaslights made weak yellow blobs.

"Thought you toffs was never comin' back," their cabby began indig-nantly, struggling up out of the tangle of his lap robes in the cab, and Ysidro inclined his head graciously and held out a ten-shilling note.

"My apologies, I hope it caused you no inconvenience?" The man looked at the money, touched his hat brim quickly, and said, "Not at all, guv'-not at all," His breath was redolent of gin, as was the inside of the cab. It was, Asher reflected philosophically as he climbed in, a cold night.

"Albemarle Crescent, Kensington," Ysidro said through the trap, and the cab jolted away, "Insolent villain," he added softly. "Yet I have found it seldom pays to engage in quarrels with menials. Regrettably, the days are past when I could have ordered him thrashed." And he turned his cool profile to gaze-not quite tranquilly, Asher thought- into the night.

Albemarle Crescent was a line of houses that had seen better days, though a kind of faded elegance clung to them still, like a duchess' gown bought third-hand at a rag fair. At that hour, the neighborhood was deathly silent. Standing on the flagway, wrapped in a fog that was thicker now, here closer to the river, Asher could hear no sound of passers-by. In Oxford at this hour, the dons would still be up, wrangling metaphysics or textual criticism, undergraduates carousing or scurrying through the streets, gowns billowing behind them, in the course of some rag or other; in other parts of London, the very rich, like the very poor, would be drinking by lamplight. Here the stockbrokers' clerks, the ju-nior partners of shopkeepers, the "improved" working class, kept them-selves to themselves, worked hard, retired early, and did not question overmuch the comings and goings of those around them.

Ysidro, who had stood for some moments gazing into the fog at the barely visible bulk of the terraced row, murmured, "Now we can enter. I have deepened their sleep against the sound of my own footfalls, but I have never before had call so to mask a living man's. Tread soft."

Lotta's rooms were on the second floor; the ground floor smelted of greasy cooking, the first of stale smoke and beer. They left the lantern unobtrusively cached in the entryway. No lights were on anywhere, save over the entry, but Ysidro guided him unerringly as he had before. The old-fashioned, long-barreled key Asher had found with the latchkey proved, as he'd suspected, to open Lotta's door, and it was only when they had closed it again and locked it behind them that he took a lucifer from his pocket and lit the gas.

Color smote his eyes, magnified and made luminous by the soft shim-mer of the gaslight; the room was an incredible jumble of clothes, shoes, peignoirs, trinkets, shawls, laces, opera programs, invitations, and cards, all heaped at random over the cheap boarding house furniture, like an actress' dressing room between scenes. There were evening gowns, scarlet, olive, and a shade of gold which only a certain shade of blonde could wear with effect, kid opera gloves spotted with old blood, and fans of painted silk or swan's-down. A set of sapphires-necklace, earrings, double bracelets, and combs-had been carelessly dumped on a tangle of black satin on the mahogany of the table, glinting with a feral sparkle as Asher's shadow passed across them.

The clutter in the bedroom was worse. Three giant armoires loomed over a bed that had obviously never been used for sleep; their doors sagged open under the press of gowns. Other dresses were heaped on the bed, a shining tangle of ruffles in which pearls gleamed like maggots in meat-yards of flounced organdy three generations out of date and narrow, high-waisted silks, older still and falling apart under the weight of their own beading as he gently lifted them from the shadowy disar-ray. Cosmetics and wigs, mostly of a particular shade of blonde, clut-tered the dressing table, whose mirror frame bulged with cards, notes, bibelots, and bills; jewels trailed among the mess in prodigal clusters, like swollen and glittering fruit. Near the foot of the bed, Asher saw an old shoe, broad-toed, square-heeled, with paste gems gleaming on its huge buckle and ribbons faded to grayish ghosts of some former indigo beauty. Gold sovereigns strewed a corner of the dressing table under a layer of dust and powder. Picking one up, Asher saw that they bore the head of the unfortunate Farmer George.

"Did her beaux give her money?" he asked quietly. "Or was she in the habit of robbing them after they were dead?"

"Both, I expect," Ysidro replied. "She never saved much. Hence her need to live in rooms-or in any case to rent them to store her things. But, of course, she could not risk sleeping here, with the possibility of her landlady entering to ask questions. And more questions would be asked, of course, if she shuttered the windows tightly enough to cut out all sunlight."

"Hence Highgate," Asher murmured, removing a dressmaker's bill from the table and turning it over in his hands.

"The propensity of the vampires for sleeping among the dead," Ysidro said, standing, arms folded, just within the connecting door, "stems not so much from our fondness for corpses-though I have been told many vampires in the so-called Gothic ages considered it no more than proper-but from the fact that the tombs would be undisturbed by day. And by night, of course, interference would not matter."

"On the contrary, in fact," Asher remarked. "Must have played hob with the Resurrection trade." He was systematically removing all the cards, all the notes, and all the invitations that he could find from the mirror frame and dressing table, shoving them into an old-fashioned beaded reticule for examination later at leisure. "And I presume your money comes from investments?"

"That is not something which concerns you."

He flipped open a drawer. The reek of old powder and decaying paper rose to his nostrils like the choke of dust. The drawer was crammed with a chowchow of bills, most of them yellow and cracking with age, letters still shoved into embossed envelopes which bore illegi-ble handwritten franks instead of postage marks or stamps, and little wads of notes issued by banks long collapsed. "It concerns me how I'll get money to pursue my investigations."

Ysidro regarded him for a moment from beneath lowered eyelids, as if guessing that reimbursement was, in fact, the least of Asher's con-cerns. Then he turned away and began picking up and discarding the dozens of reticules of various ages, styles, and states of decomposition that lay among the anarchy of the bed or drooped from drawers of kerchiefs and underclothes. He opened them, plucking forth small wads of bank notes or emptying glittering streams of gold or silver onto the dressing table carelessly, as if the very touch of the money disgusted him.

A true hidalgo of the Reconquista, Asher thought, amused again and interested to see that three and a half centuries among a nation of shopkeepers hadn't changed him.

"Will that suffice?"

Asher sorted through the money, discarding anything more than twenty years old, except for one George III gold piece he pocketed as a souvenir. "For now," he said. "Since Lotta was the fourth victim, it isn't tremendously likely the killer started his investigations with her, but there might be something in all this paper-the name of a recent victim, an address, something. I'll want to see the rooms of the others- Calvaire, King, and Hammersmith-and I'll want to talk to these 'friends' of King's you spoke of..."

"No."

"As you wish," Asher said tartly, straightening up and flipping shut the drawer. "Then don't expect me to find your killer."

"You will find the killer." Ysidro retorted, his voice now deadly soft, "and you will find him quickly, ere he kills again. Else it will be the worse for you and for your lady. What you seek to know has nothing to do with your investigation."

"Neither you nor I has any idea what has to do with my investigation until we see it," Anger stirred in Asher again, not, as before, anger with the vampires, but the frustration he had known when dealing with those bland and faceless superiors in the Foreign Office who could not and would not understand field conditions, but demanded results neverthe-less. For a moment he wanted to take Ysidro by his skinny neck and shake him, not solely from his fear of what might happen to Lydia, but from sheer annoyance at being ordered to make bricks without straw. "If I'm going to do as you ask, you're going to have to give me some-thing..."

"I will give you what I choose." The vampire did not move, but Asher sensed in him a readiness to strike and knew the blow, when it came, would be irresistible as lightning and potentially as fatal. Nothing altered in the voice, cold and inert as poison. "I warn you again-you are playing with death here. What bounds I set are as much for your own protection as for mine. Take care you do not cross them.

"Understand me, James, for I understand you. I understand that you intend to work for me only so long as it will take you to find a way to destroy me and those like me with impunity. So. I could have found a man who is venal and unintelligent, who would not even have been told who and what I am, to whom I would simply have said: Find me this; find me that; meet me with the results tonight. There are men who are too unimaginative even to ask. But it would not have answered. One does not select cottonwood to fashion a weapon to preserve, perhaps, one's life; one selects the hardest of teak. But with that hardness comes other things."

They faced each other in silence, in the silken chaos of that cluttered chamber with its stinks of ancient perfume. "I won't have you coming to Oxford again."

"No," Ysidro agreed. "I, too, understand. Whoever is behind these murders, I will not lead him to your lady. Take rooms here in this city -I will find you. For those of us who hunt the nights, that will be no great task. You might remember that, also, should it cross your mind to ally yourself with our murderer."

"I'll remember," Asher promised quietly. "But you remember this: if you and your fellow-vampires kill me, you'll still have a problem. And if you play me false, or try to take hostages, or so much as gonear my wife again, you'll have an even bigger problem. Because then you'll have to kill me and you'll still need to find someone else to do your day work for you. I'll play straight with you, but, in a sense, you've put yourself in my hands, as I am in yours. I believe in your existence now..."

"And whom would you tell who would believe you?

"It's enough that I believe," said Asher. "And I think you know that."