Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1)

Those Who Hunt the Night (James Asher #1) Page 9

I don't see how that could be." As she walked, Lydia folded her arms across her chest against the chill that dampened even the change-able sunlight of the autumn forenoon. Beside the dull purple-brown of her coat, her red hair, pinned under the only unobtrusive hat in her vast collection, seemed blazingly bright; her spectacles winked like a he-liograph when she turned her head. In spite of them, she looked ab-surdly young, with a delicate prettiness which would have seemed touchingly vulnerable to anyone who had never seen her in the dissec-tion rooms.

Asher, at her side, kept a weather eye out across the sepia vistas of lawn and copse to both sides of the walk, but saw few other strollers. It had rained late in the night, and Hyde Park bore a slightly dispirited air; scudding clouds were collecting again overhead. A few black-clothed nannies hustled then- charges at double time through a rapid constitutional before the rain should commence again; that was all.

"Neither does Ysidro," Asher said. "But he suspected all along that the killer wasn't human. It's why he had to hire a human and, more-over, find one who could or would believe in vampires, who could operate to some degree independently-why he had to tell me what he was, in spite of the opposition from the other vampires. I think the others might have suspected they were dealing with a vampire, too. No human could stalk a vampire unseen-a human would be lucky to see one in the first place, let alone either recognize it for what it is or keep it in sight."

"You did," she pointed out.

Asher shook his head. "A fledgling, and an untrained one, at that," His glance skimmed the borders of the trees that half hid the steely gleam of the Serpentine, off to their left. Like Bully Joe Davies, he found himself wondering all the time now about shadows, noises, bent blades of grass...

"Did Bully Joe Davies ever turn up?"

"No. Ysidro and I waited until almost dawn. He just might have seen Ysidro and sheered off, but I doubt it. However, I think we'll be able to locate Calvaire's rooms in Lambeth-if he has them, and I'm virtually certain he does-by tracking property purchases since February, which was when Calvaire came here from Paris. If Calvaire was attempting to establish a power base in London-which he seems to have been doing, since he made a fledgling-he'd have bought property. Since Grippen didn't know about it, either, we may find something there."

They walked in silence for a time, the wind tugging now and then at the ends of Asher's scarf and at Lydia's skirts and coat.

Lydia nodded. "I'm wondering whether all vampires fall asleep at the same time-into the deep sleep. For, of course, just because the win-dows were opened to let in the sunlight doesn't mean that it was done while the sun was in the sky."

"I suppose, if the killer were a vampire, he might have-oh, a half-hour or so-to get to safety," Asher said, "More than enough, in Lon-don. And it would certainly solve the question of why he believed in vampires in the first place, let alone knew where to look."

"In all the books, the vampire hunter drives a stake through the vampire's heart," Lydia remarked thoughtfully. "If this one did, every-thing's been too charred to tell, but Lotta's head was certainly severed. If the sun weren't yet in the sky, I wonder if that would wake a sleeping vampire?-for that matter, if the mere opening of the coffin would do so? Are you sure I can't put my hand in your pocket?"

"Quite sure," Asher said, fighting his own inclination to walk closer to her, to hold out his arm to hers, or to have some kind of physical contact with this woman. "In spite of the evidence that the killer is a vampire, I still don't feel safe meeting you, even by daylight..."

She widened her brown eyes at him behind the schoolgirl specs. "Per-haps I could disguise myself as a pickpocket? Or if I tripped and stum-bled, and you caught me? Or fainted?" She put a gloved hand dramati-cally to her brow. "I feel an attack of the vapors coining on now..."

"No," Asher said firmly, grinning,

She frowned and tucked her hands primly into her muff. "Very well, but the next time Uncle Ambrose goes on about Plato and Platonic friendship, I'll have a few words to say to him. No wonder Don Simon didn't seem to worry too much about your allying yourself with the killer, as you'd originally thought you might. Do you still plan to do that, by the way?"

"I don't know," Asher said. "It isn't out of court entirely, but I'd have to know a good deal more than I do now. The fact that he's destroying them for reasons of his-or her-own doesn't mean he wouldn't destroy me with just as much alacrity." Or you, he added to himself, looking at that slim figure beside him, like a heroine of legend lying beside the hero, separated by a drawn sword.

Lydia nodded, accepting the change in a situation upon which her life depended with her usual calm trust. They walked along for a time, Lydia apparently sunk in her own trains of thought; Asher was content-almost-only to be with her, the dun gravel of the damp path scrunching faintly under their feet. Off across the gray lawns, a dog barked, the sound carrying fantastically in the cold air.

"Have you any idea how much light it takes to destroy their flesh?"

Asher shook his head. "I asked Ysidro last night. I've been trying to work that out, too-that half-hour or so of leeway. That's what's puz-zling me. Ysidro was caught at dawn on the second morning of the Great Fire of 1666. He says the thinnest gray light before sunrise burned his face and hands as if he'd stuck them into a furnace-more than that, his arms, chest, and parts of his legs and back beneath his clothes were scarred and blistered as well. According to Lady Ernchester, it was nearly fifty years before the scars went away."

"But they did go away," Lydia murmured thoughtfully. "So vampire fl eshdoes regenerate..." Her dark brows pulled even deeper, an edge of thought hardening her brown eyes, as if she looked past the piled whites and grays of the late-morning sky to some arcane laboratory of the mind beyond.

"Pseudoflesh, he called it," Asher said.

"Interesting." She reached up to unsnag a long strand of hair from the braided trim of her collar-Asher

had to keep his hands firmly in his pockets to avoid helping her. "Because I got that lover's knot from Evelyn this morning. I've had a look at it and those vertebrae under my microscope, and they look-I'm not sure how to put it and I wish it were capable of greater magnification. The bone was pretty damaged, but the hair... I'd like to be able to examine it at a subcellular level-and their flesh and blood, for that matter."

Of course, Asher thought. He himself saw the vampires linguistically and historically, when he wasn't simply trying to think of ways to avoid having his throat cut by them; Lydia would see vampirism as a medical puzzle.

"Do you know how petrified wood comes about?" she asked, as they neared Marble Arch with its scattered trees and loafers and turned back the way they came, two solitary and anonymous figures in the wide, cleared spaces of the Park's brown lawns. "Or how fish and ferns and dinosaur bones are fossilized in the Cambrian sandstones? It's a process of replacement, cell by cell, of the organic by the inorganic. There's been a lot of research done lately on viruses, germs that are smaller than bacteria, so small we can't see them with a microscope-yet. Small enough to operate at a subcellular level. I've been reading Horace Blaydon's articles on viruses in the blood; he did a lot of work on it while I was studying with him. I'm wondering whether a vampire's immortality comes from some kind of cellular replacement or mutation -whether vampirism is in fact a virus or an interlocking syndrome of viruses that alter the very fabric of the cells. That would account for the extreme photosensitivity, the severe allergic reactions to things like sil-ver and garlic and certain woods-why you'd have to fill the mouth with garlic to deaden the brain and stake the heart with one of those allergic woods to paralyze the cardiovascular system-why you'd have to separate the central nervous system..."

"And transmitted by blood contact." Again he wondered tangentially why, in the face of such an overwhelming body of corresponding evi-dence, there was such paucity of belief. "All the legends speak of vam-pires' victims becoming vampires. The vampires themselves speak of 'getting' fledglings, but that's apparently a matter of choice. Ernchester said that Grippen would not have stood for anyone but himself making a new vampire, but Calvaire evidently had no trouble initiating Bully Joe Davies."

"Initiating, but not training," Lydia said thoughtfully. "Or- wasit just a lack of training that made him clumsy enough for you to spot him? Do the psychic abilities that seem to be part of this viral syndrome only develop with time? How old were the vampires who were mur-dered?"

"Another interesting point," Asher said. "Lotta had been a vampire since the mid-1700s; Hammersmith and King were younger, almost exactly one hundred years. Ysidro saw all of them made. I don't know about Calvaire. One of the many things," he added dryly, "that we don't know about Calvaire."

"Valentin Calvaire," Ysidro murmured, settling back against the worn leather squabs of the hansom cab and tenting his long fingers like a stack of ivory spindles, reminding Asher somehow of a marmalade tomcat so old that its fur has gone nearly white. "Curious, how many trails seem to lead back to Valentin Calvaire."

"He was the first victim-presumably," Asher said. "At least the first victim killed in London; the only victim notfrom London; the only victim whose body we have never found. What do you know about him?"

"Less than I should like," the vampire replied, his voice soft beneath the rattling clamor of the theater-going crowds in Drury Lane all about them. "He was, as I said, one of the Paris vampires-he came here to London eight months ago."

"Why?"

"That was a topic which he never permitted to arise."

The vampire's tone was absolutely neutral, but Asher's mustache twitched as he detected the distaste in that chilly statement. Ysidro, he surmised with a hidden grin, had probably had very little use for M. Calvaire, ***

"I take it he was not of the nobility."

"What passes for nobility in France these days," Ysidro stated, with soft viciousness, "would not have been permitted to clear away the tables of those whose birth and style of breeding they so pitifully at-tempt to emulate. Anything resembling decent blood in that country was flushed down the gutters of the Place Louis-Quinze-excuse me, the Place de la Concorde-a hundred and seventeen years ago. What is left is the seed of those who fled or those who made themselves useful to thatcondotfiere Napoleon. Scarcely what one would call honorable antecedents."

After a moment's silence, he went on, "Yes, Calvaire claimed noble birth. It was precisely the sort of thing he would do."

"How long had he been a vampire?"

Ysidro's dark eyes narrowed with thought. "My guess would be less than forty years,"

Asher raised his eyebrows in surprise. He had, he realized, subcon-sciously equated age with power among the vampires-it was to the two oldest vampires, Ysidro and Grippen, that the others bowed in fear. The younger ones-Bully Joe Davies and the Opera dancer Chloe-seemed weak, almost pathetic.

"Consider it," Ysidro urged levelly. "Paris has been in a state of intermittent chaos since the fall of the Bourbon kings. Thirty-five years ago it underwent siege by the Prussians, shelling, riots, and government -if such it can be termed-by a rabble of rioters who formed a Com-mune and gave short shrift to anyone whom they suspected of treason-for which read, disagreement with their ideals. Vampires as a group rely largely upon a tranquil society to protect them. Wolves do not hunt in a burning forest."

Just as well, Asher thought dourly. During the riots in the Shantung Province, he'd had enough to worry about without a red-eyed kuei creeping up on him in the burned ruins of the Lutheran mission where he'd been hiding. After a moment, he asked, "And how did Grippen react to Calvaire's coming here?"

Ysidro was silent for a time, while the cab jolted its way through the increasing crowds of traffic toward the Waterloo Bridge. Rain made a faint, brittle whispering sound on the hardened leather roof of the cab. It had begun again late in the afternoon, while Asher was in the Public Records Office in quest of property bought in the last eight months in Lambeth by either Valentin Calvaire, Chretien Sanglot, or, just possibly, Joseph Davies. Now the whole city smelled of moisture, ozone, the exhaust of motorcars, the dung of horses, and the salt-and-sewage pungency of the river.

"Not well," he said at length. "You understand, we-vampires-find travel unnerving in the extreme. We are conservatives at heart; hence the myth that a vampire must rest within his native soil. Rather, he must always have a secure resting place, and such things are difficult to come by on the road. Calvaire had naturally heard of both Grippen and myself. When he arrived he-promenaded himself, I suppose you

would say-and did not drink of human blood until he had been con-tacted by the master vampire of the city."

"Grippen," Asher said. "Not yourself."

For the first time, he saw the flash of irritation, of anger, in the Spaniard's yellow eyes. But Ysidro only said mildly, "Even so."

"Why?" he pressed,

Ysidro merely turned his head a little, haughtily contemplating the throngs on the crowded flagways from beneath the lowered lids of his eyes.

"I've heard of Grippen's cadre, Grippen's get," Asher persisted. "Lord Ernchester, Anthea, Lotta, Chloe, Ned Hammersmith... Even though Danny King was the Farrens' servant, even though it was to them that he owed loyalty, it was Grippen who made him, 'at Charles' request andhis own.' According to Anthea Farren, you were both made by the same master vampire at about the same time. Why is he the Master of London, and not yourself?"

The memory of Anthea's face returned to him, framed in the dark hair with its red streaks like henna. She had warned him, had pulled him out of Grippen's hold; she had held the enraged vampire back from killing him while he escaped. Yet she and her husband were also Grippen's get-as Bully Joe Davies had said, Grippen's slaves. Why slaves?

For a moment he thought Ysidro would maintain that disdainful alabaster silence. But without turning his head back, the vampire re-plied, "Perhaps because I do not care to trouble myself." The familiar supercilious note was absent from his voice as he said it; he sounded, if anything, a little weary. Asher had the momentary sense of dealing, not with a vampire, but with the man whose occasional, oddly sweet smile flickered across those narrow features.

But like the smile, that evanescent glimmer of resignation, of a van-ished humanness, was gone-like the things one thinks one sees by starlight. Ysidro's voice became again as neutral as his coloring, as if even the holding of opinions had become meaningless to him over the years. "And it would be a trouble, as well as a certain amount of peril, to challenge Grippen's authority. I personally do not care to disrupt my existence by stooping to fight with apeon such as he. Calvaire was evidently not so fastidious. He swore allegiance to Grippen, but it is clear that he never intended to submit himself to our medical friend's authority..."

"Medical?" Asher's voice was sharp, and Ysidro looked at him once more with all his old chilly disinterest.

"Lionel Grippen was a Doctor of Medicine and accounted very learned in his time, though, considering the practices of the day, this was not praising him to the skies. For a few decades past his initiation to the vampire state, he kept up with medical practice. Now he reads the journals, curses, and hurls them across the room, enraged that they no longer speak of anything with which he is familiar. Though I under-stand," he added, "that it has been nearly two centuries since he has done even that."

"Has he, indeed?" Asher stroked his mustache thoughtfully. "You wouldn't know if he still has any of his old kit?"

"I doubt the originals still exist, though he would know where and how to obtain more." The vampire regarded him now with interest, his head tipped a little to one side, his long, colorless hair blowing against the fragile cheekbones with the movement of the night. "Interesting," Asher said. "Here, cabby! Pull up!" The man drew rein, cursing as he edged his horse out of the stream of traffic pouring off the Waterloo Bridge. Foot traffic was heavy here as well. Ysidro slipped from the cab and vanished at once into the jostling shapes beneath the blaze of the bridge's lights. At Asher's command, the cabby started forward again, grumbling at care-for-nothing toff fares, and proceeded to the chaos of cabs, carts, omnibuses, and pedes-trians surrounding the half-constructed sprawl of Waterloo Station, a Dantesque vision of brick, gaslight, scaffolding, and smoke. As the cab jostled through the porridge of vehicles, Asher pulled off his gloves and drew from his ulster pocket a thick package. lambert's, said the mod-est label, with a discreet crest.

With chilled fingers, he drew out two silver chains like the one he wore around his neck beneath his starched and respectable collar. It was tricky fastening the small clips around his wrists; but, for obvious reasons, it had been impossible to solicit Ysidro's help. He tugged his shirt cuffs down over them and pulled his gloves back on, for the night was cold as well as wet; there was another shape in the tissue wrap-pings, narrow, like a child's arm bone. He freed it and held it to the rain-streaming light-a sterling silver letter opener in the shape of an ornamental dagger. Having only bought it that afternoon, he had had no time to whet it and doubted in any case that the blade would hold much of an edge, but the point was certainly sharp enough to pierce flesh. Like a Scotsma n' sskean dhu it had no guard. It fit neatly into his boot.

He paid off the cab in front of the station. The man grunted, cracked his whip over his jaded old screw of a horse, and vanished as surely as the vampire had into the teeming mob.

For a time, Asher stood in the open space of light and noise before the station, hearing the screeches of the trains, the hiss of steam, and the voices of thousands of travelers shouting, and feeling the rumble of the engines through the ground under his feet. Weariness made him feel slightly disoriented, for he had waited for Bully Joe Davies in the alley behind Prince of Wales Colonnade for hours after his return from Ernchester House, and had risen to meet Lydia at the Park after only a few hours' sleep. He had meant to nap during the day; but, between Chancery Lane and Lambert's in Bond Street, the rainy afternoon had slipped too quickly away.

Now he felt chilled and weary, trying to recall when he had last slept through the night. A woman jostled past him, unseeing; as he watched her too-bright plaid dress retreat across the square to the platform, he remembered the blonde woman with the two children on the train from Oxford and shivered.

In the field-"abroad," as he and his colleagues politely termed those places where they were licensed to steal and kill-the train station was God's own gift to agents, particularly one as vast as Waterloo, even with half its platforms still under construction: a thousand ways to bolt and so absolutely impersonal that you might brush shoulders with your own brother on the platform and never raise your eyes. Beyond question it was one of the hunting grounds of the vampire.

Pulling his bowler down over his eyes and hunching his shoulders against the rain, he crossed the puddled darkness of the pavement to-ward the blazing maw of the Lambeth Cut.

As he traversed that squalid and tawdry boulevard, his feeling of oppression grew. The crowds around the theatres and gin palaces there were scarcely less thick than those around the station, and far noisier. Music drifted from open doors; men in evening clothes crowded the entryways with women whose rain cloaks fell open to show brightly colored dresses beneath; jewels flashed in the lamplight, some real, some as fake as the women's smiles. Now and then, a woman alone would call to him or crowd through the people on the flagway to stride a few steps with him, with a few jolly words in the characteristic slur he'd recognized in Bully Joe Davies' voice. As he smiled politely, tipped his hat, and shook his head, he wondered if one of them was Davies' sister Madge.

This, too, was an ideal hunting ground.

It depressed him, this consciousness of those silent killers who drank human life, Ysidro had told him, one night in perhaps four or five. It was, he supposed, like the consciousness he had developed in all those years with the Department, the automatic identification of exits and the habitual checking of a man's shoes, sleeves, or hands.

Horace Blaydon's bellowing voice echoed in his mind, in the big carbolic-smelling theatre at Radclyfle; "I'll tell you one thing that'll happen to you, if any of you manages to stay the course and become a doctor, which, looking at your pasty little faces, I sincerely take leave to doubt-you'll be spoiled forever for the beauty of life. You'll never see a girl's rosy blush again without wondering if it's phthisis, never hear your fat old uncle's jolly laugh without thinkin': 'The old boy's ridin' for a stroke.' You'll never read Dickens again without pickin' it apart for genetic blood factors and unhealthy drains."

"A rather unfortunate choice of examples," Lydia had remarked, when she'd joined Asher by the door where he'd been waiting to escort her to tea at her uncle's college, "since, with a complexion like his and that prematurely white hair, it's obvious the man's heading for an apo-plexy himself. I wonder if the godlike Dennis will turn into that in twenty years' time?"

And Asher, suffering under the sting of being brown and unobtrusive and skirting the shadowy borders of middle age, had felt insensibly cheered.

But, he thought, recalling Lydia's clinical reaction to being sur-rounded by vampires, old Blaydon had, of course, been absolutely right. He turned from the Cut to Lower Ditch Street, a dingy thoroughfare whose few gaslights did little to dispel the rainy gloom. It was a neigh-borhood of crumbling brick terraces and shuttered shops, grimy, cramped, and sordid. Down the street, yellowish light shone on the pavement outside a gin shop; other than that, the street was dark. Asher's own footfalls sounded loud, as did the thin, steady patter of the rain. Halfway down the unbroken frontage was the door he sought: Number 216. Its windows were dark; looking up, he saw them all heav-ily shuttered. The door was barred with a padlock and hasp.

Asher stood for a long time before it, listening, as if, like the vam-pires, he could scent peril at a distance. In spite of his weariness, the ache in his bones as if he had fallen down a flight of stairs, and the hurt of his flesh for sleep, he forced all his senses alert. Bully Joe Davies had said that he was being stalked. The killer, a vampire who moved so silently that he could, in fact, stalk other vampires, might be watching him from the shadows of those dark buildings, waiting for him to leave the lights of the street.

For that matter, Asher thought ironically as he crossed back to the mouth of the alley that ran behind Lower Ditch Street, Davies himself might be waiting for him. The fledgling vampire had moved so clumsily he doubted Davies' ability to detect Ysidro, either last night or now, if Ysidro was, in fact, watching over him. However, if he was wrong... Uneasily, Asher scanned what little he could see of the smelly cleft of the alley and the street behind him for sign of the vampire. There was none, of course. He was reminded of the picture an old Indian fighter in Arizona had once drawn for him-a white page with a horizon line bisecting it, two pebbles, and a minuscule cactus. It was titled "Arizona Landscape with Apaches."

He drew the silver knife from his boot, holding it concealed against his arm, 216 Lower Ditch Street had been purchased three months ago by Chretien Sanglot, shortly after, Asher guessed, Bully Joe Davies had met the Frenchman.

Cautiously, he advanced down the back lane, rain trickling from his hat brim and into his collar. There was a sharp crash from the brim-ming dustbins, and tiny red eyes glinted at him in irritation from the darkness. The alley was filthy beyond description, garbage and refuse of all kinds mingling into a kind of primordial slop under the steady patter of the rain.

Counting the cramped little slots of yards, Asher found Number 216 easily and slipped through the broken boards of its back fence without trouble. The ground oozed with reddish mud; at the back of the yard, barely visible in the gloom, a broken-down outhouse simmered in a pool of nameless slime. "The Houses of Parliament," he recalled abstractly, such buildings were christened in some areas of London..

The rain had eased to a whisper. He strained his ears as he crossed the yard, trying to catch some sound, some signal of danger.

In the yard he might be safe, at least from Bully Joe. He doubted the fledgling could come at him through that much water and mud without a sound. But once he was in the house, if Davies had seen Ysidro waiting for him, he was a dead man.

The wet wood of the back steps creaked sharply beneath his weight. The door was only a vague outline in shadow, but he could see no padlock. Cautiously he turned the knob. The door creaked inward.

"Come no further until I have lighted the gas," Ysidro's voice said softly from the darkness, startling Asher nearly out of his skin. "I think you should see this."