Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘The lining hath not the feel of having been tampered with. He will have notes – if he hath such things at all – upon his person.’ He lifted out a small box containing a hypodermic syringe and held it up, glinting evilly in the reflected light. ‘Myself, I would not trust this Cochran no matter how much he paid me. And here are ampoules for the drug. Hijo de puta,’ he added. ‘Only one is full. The others, empty.’

  ‘And they’ll know,’ said Lydia quietly, ‘if that one has been tampered with, and will change all their precautions. Until we have some plan, some next step, we can’t let that happen.’ She looked across into the vampire’s sulfur-yellow eyes. ‘These empty ones have been used … Ah.’ She withdrew another box, still in the wrapping of a medical supply house.

  ‘And here are new ones, not yet filled. He’ll be putting up a new batch, now that he’s settled in.’

  ‘And mayhap he fears that once he hath mixed sufficient quantity to keep me obedient, Cochran will dispense with him, and find another alchemist to do his bidding when we reach New York. Could a good chemist, given this –’ his clawed forefinger made the tiniest tick on the glass of the single filled phial – ‘and quantities of each element, come on the right mixture?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ Lydia replaced the box of new phials, arranged the luggage in the cupboard exactly as it had been. ‘Not without Barvell’s notes as to temperature and timing of the reaction. We’ll have to check again, later – so he mustn’t even suspect I’ve been in here. We have five days,’ she added. ‘Can you – do you have any power at all within the coffin?’

  Don Simon held up his hand, the silk-white flesh on his wrist seared – literally blackened with second- and third-degree burning. ‘Within that coffin, nothing,’ he said, in his expressionless whisper. ‘Even here outside, the mental glamour – the influence on the minds of the living – is impossible on so vast a world of moving water. Yet I can hear as I do upon dry land, and see, as always, in darkness. Only for perhaps ten minutes on either side of midnight – true astronomical midnight, when this ship, this tiny world, stands exactly opposite to the power and pull of the sun – do our full powers return, if we be free to use them. Know you when this girl was killed?’

  She shook her head. ‘Her body wasn’t found until around three in the morning, in a place public enough that it could not have been done there. Do you know –’ she took his cold fingers in hers – ‘why it is that you only regain power at midnight? Jamie told me about that – that a vampire is helpless on running water, except at the very hour of midnight, or at the turning of the tide …’

  ‘I know not, Mistress. Believe me, I have studied the vampire condition for centuries, e’en as my masters did, Rhys the White of London, and Constantine Angelus in Paris. I know – they knew – that our flesh itself alters, cell by cell, into something which is not human flesh; something which will take unquenchable fire in the sun; something lighter and stronger than the flesh of men. Whatever it is, ’twill not bear the touch of things which living men find harmless: silver, garlic, the petals of the Christmas rose. My masters knew, as I know, that our minds alter as well, and we acquire the capacity to deceive the minds of the living. They knew, as I know, that this capacity waxes as we age, until we can walk in the dreams of the living, or command them from within their minds. But what it is in the deaths of our victims which feeds our powers; why our powers slack and wither without such feeding; why we cannot deceive our own eyes in a mirror, or use these powers upon water save at certain brief seasons – this we do not know. Nor do I know – nor did they know – why any of this came to be.’

  He was silent for a time, looking down at the hypodermic which he still held in his burned fingers.

  ‘Nor do I know whether they knew – as I have observed – that many of the vampires I have met over four centuries of age go mad.’ He turned his head sharply, as if at some noise, then said, ‘Best we go outside, Lady, where you at least will be able to flee.’ He set the hypodermic back into its box, pinched out the candle, switched off the light. Then he took her hand, his own cold as a dead man’s. His right hand touched her back, guiding her across the little corridor again and then out through the dark parlor.

  ‘Are they coming—?’

  ‘Not yet. And from what you have told me, Mistress, I suspect,’ he added, as they slipped from the blackness out into the harsh chill and electric glare of the promenade deck, ‘that when your aunt and all others leave this magical circle which they have made, Cochran and Barvell will remain for a time, to question the seer in private.’

  ‘About what?’ asked Lydia, surprised.

  He answered as if the reply were self-evident. ‘The whereabouts of this vampire.’

  ‘But he’s got a vampire!’

  ‘An unwilling one, heretofore. One who was taken in a trap.’ He turned his hands over, considering the burns on his wrists. ‘Though now that I know you are indeed on the City of Gold – is my good John here also, by the way? Or our James?’

  ‘Captain Palfrey is, yes. James – I think –’ her voice caught a little – ‘is still in Paris.’

  ‘Forgive me, Lady.’ He raised her hand to his lips. ‘Forgive me calling for you as I did. I was … in terror and in pain.’ The words came out as if he could barely bring himself to admit it. ‘’Twas beyond hope that you would come for me; beyond expectation that I could avoid the fate of being enslaved by this American.’

  ‘Is he working for the Germans? Or the Americans?’

  ‘Nothing so noble –’ his voice again turned for a moment to cold acid – ‘if noble be the word. For himself only. To kill, undetectably, those who would cause trouble for his factories, his railroads, his mines. ’Tis money, not the honor of land or king or God, that moves him. The man has the mind of a tradesman. His own convenience is all he sees.’

  In his voice she heard the hidalgo of antique Spain, the nobleman who would suffer the greatest of hardships and danger in the cause of God or his king, but would starve before he earned his own bread.

  She remembered, too, the contempt in Georg Heller’s voice, when he spoke of the rich who stole from the poor.

  ‘He wants a bravo, like unto his other hired bravos. Now that he has this poison, this weapon, he will scour the world, I daresay, for another of my condition to enslave. The murder of strikers and socialists,’ the vampire went on slowly, ‘would be only the beginning, I think. In time, I think this Cochran would find other uses for one who can kill with impunity, and I suspect it would come to being lent out like a whore to politicians who have need of their enemies to vanish.

  ‘Now that I know that you are here, Mistress – now that I know that I am not alone –’ he shut his eyes for a moment, as if in prayer (do vampires pray? she wondered) – ‘I think that I will capitulate, and swear my allegiance to him. Know you if he is a Protestant? That doesn’t surprise me. The Holy Father long ago absolved us all of any oath made to heretics.’ One corner of his mouth moved in an ironic half-grin. ‘I don’t suppose an oath sworn on the cross, or a testament, would reassure him. Both he and Barvell wear crucifixes the size of frying pans when they speak to me and seem to think that this –’ he held up his left arm, displaying, on the back of the wrist, a savage cross-shaped burn – ‘was the doing of Our Lord’s image rather than the silver content of the talisman. I thank you,’ he said again, more quietly. ‘Deeply as I value my good John Palfrey’s loyalty and strength, he hath not, as my valet would have said long ago, sufficient brain to outweigh a pistol ball. E’en with the sea all round me, ’tis good to stand here in open air. To not be in pain.’

  For a time neither spoke, and the voice of the water murmured about them like the heartbeat of the world. Voices drifted to them, formless murmurs, from the public First Class promenade below them on C Deck, and from the Second Class promenade further amidships of that. The hour was late, the North Atlantic night freezing. Beyond the glow of the ship’s lights only thin spumes of white flicked along the crests of ebo
n waves. Lydia guessed that only young (or possibly not-so-young) lovers would be strolling those covered decks in the yellow electric radience, huddled in their greatcoats and warmed by each other’s nearness.

  She hoped James, wherever he was, was keeping warm. The thought of him went through her palpably: heart, flesh, tears. She made herself ask, ‘Is there anything that can be done about the pain? I know – you’ve told me – that the Undead don’t … don’t process substances the way the living do, not unless they’ve been mixed with something like silver nitrate. Does that go for anodynes as well?’

  ‘Even so, Lady. Another, I assume, of those little jests God plays upon those of us who would sacrifice the lives of others, that we ourselves might live forever.’

  He paused, and glancing sidelong at him, Lydia thought he was – incredibly – about to say something else, something perhaps concerning God and pain and three centuries of preying upon those he had personally considered less worthy of life than himself. But after a moment he only said, ‘I think it likely that Cochran, having convinced himself that he hath the means to bring the Undead to heel, will enlist my aid in hunting this vampire aboard ship. He might even bribe me with the promise that, the other’s services being secured, he will let me go free. Always supposing there is a vampire.’

  Lydia frowned. ‘Who would fake such a thing? And why?’

  ‘What vampire would be such a fool as to kill under these circumstances?’

  ‘He – or she – could be mad. You’ve said vampires do go mad. I mean, why would a vampire come on board ship at all? I was afraid,’ she faltered, ‘that it was you. That you had been … either deranged, or made so desperate by … by hunger. But it is true,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘that such a killing could be faked. And whoever killed poor Pavlina Jancu – either a vampire or a … a hoaxer – they killed her elsewhere and left her body where it would be found, rather than disposing of it. But if it was someone who wanted to cover up his tracks for actually murdering that poor girl, it’s an absolutely cork-brained way to go about it.’

  ‘One never—’ began the vampire. Then his head snapped around, and his brows twitched down over the bridge of his nose again.

  Lydia turned her head also, listening. Was that a noise from the fore deck well of the ship, above the throb of the engines?

  ‘Screaming,’ said Don Simon softly. ‘Best you lock me up again, Mistress, and go to see what’s afoot.’

  ELEVEN

  Clattering down the gangway into the fore deck well, Lydia was overtaken by the maid Tania. ‘What is it?’ she gasped, and the young woman stammered, partly in French and mostly in a torrent of Russian, that (as far as Lydia could make it out) Zhenya – the princess’s footman – had rushed into her room telling her that a child had been killed by the vampire. The door from the deck well into the Third Class section was jammed with people, pushing in and out and clamoring in a mix of languages. A big fair-haired man in livery caught Tania by the arm and poured out an explanation in Russian, then, with Tania ably assisting (she was nearly as tall as he), began to force a way for Lydia through the press towards the room where the child lay.

  ‘Ya doktor,’ Lydia gasped, clinging tight to the back of Zhenya’s belt. ‘Zhdravnik …’ She hoped that was Slovenian for doctor, anyway. Or close enough, to what some of the orderlies at the clearing station had called the surgeons. ‘Giatrass …’

  ‘Giatros,’ Tania corrected over her shoulder – either she’d picked up a little Greek from another servant, or knew it from someone at home.

  ‘Giatros. Doktor,’ Lydia repeated, thrusting her way through the narrow door of the chamber. ‘Doktor …’

  ‘I fear –’ Old Father Kirn turned from the bunk, on which the body of a dark-haired seven-year-old girl lay – ‘that this is not the province of medicine anymore, good Madame.’ His deep-scored face was ravaged with horror, grief, and barely-suppressed rage. Beside him, the woman who had been bent over the child’s body half raised herself and screamed again, a wailing cry of anguish.

  ‘Luzia! Luzia!’

  Tania knelt at once by the woman’s side, put an arm around her shaking shoulders. On her other side a girl of fifteen or sixteen knelt with her arm around her waist, dark-haired and swarthy, wearing the gold earrings and tawdry jewelry of a gypsy. Little Luzia’s ears, too, had been pierced, and many of the women in the minuscule cabin – crammed to suffocation – looked uncertain whether to hang back, or to offer comfort to one who they’d all, clearly, been taught was a daughter of Ishmael.

  Close behind her, Lydia heard the whispered words, Gypsy trash …

  But four or five clustered round, offering what comfort they could, in Czech, in Walloon, in Yiddish or Russian. Mothers who knew what it was, to lose a child.

  ‘Luzia!’ the gypsy woman screamed again. ‘Copilul meu!’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The little one was not in her bunk this evening,’ said Father Kirn in his inaccurate German. ‘This was not unusual in the earlier hours after supper.’

  ‘The room is hot,’ spoke up the golden-haired Sudetendeutsche girl Ariane, who had defended Valentyn Marek last night. She was on the bed, wedged in beside the distraught mother’s family. ‘I said I’d take them all up into the deck well. Everybody’s cramped and bored down here. It was dark, but there are lights up there. I should have watched better—’

  ‘No, no,’ the priest whispered. ‘No, this was none of it your fault, Ariane.’ To Lydia, he said, ‘The little one’s sisters could not say exactly when last they saw her. And it is, indeed, dark, with many shadows. I think,’ he added, with a crooked attempt at a smile, ‘in truth, that is why they consider it such fun.’

  ‘We thought she came back here.’ Tears flooded Ariane’s eyes. ‘Or would soon. It was ten before anyone began to search.’

  In the corridor a man was shouting in German, ‘It is as I said! There is a vampire on this ship, a devil – vodolak! Nosferatu! Undead!’ Someone cried out an objection – at least, it sounded like an objection, but Lydia’s Russian (if his language was Russian) was too fragmentary to be sure.

  Ariane flinched, but the old priest only reached for the small wooden box – like a microscope case, thought Lydia – that sat on the floor at his side, and carefully took out a fragile wafer of flour, stamped with part of a design. Ariane crossed herself. Luzia’s mother only grasped the priest’s arm and wept.

  Lydia, kneeling in the narrow space that Father Kirn had made for her at the bunk-side, saw by the makeshift bundles beside the pillow that at least two children were meant to sleep there, possibly more. Tiny Luzia, her tangled black curls still disheveled from the evening’s play, looked calm, and Lydia couldn’t help noting, when the priest opened her mouth to insert the fragment of Host, that her jaw hadn’t yet begun to stiffen.

  The big artery of her neck had been slit, two short deep cuts such as Lydia had seen made by vampire claws. The flesh around the wounds looked pinched and bruised, and Lydia mentally cursed herself for not having studied more closely the exact appearance of vampire bites – heaven knows I’ve had the opportunity …

  The child’s hands and face, chalky with dearth of blood, were still faintly warm.

  Leaning close, Lydia moved aside the grape-black curls, to look behind the ears. No blood, but the hair itself was slightly damp, and smelled of …

  Something. Sourish, dirty water …

  Another smell. Lydia bent to sniff the child’s lips.

  Chocolate.

  There was the tiniest trace of it, still clinging to a corner of the child’s mouth.

  Turning the little hand over, she sniffed the fingers. The dirty-water smell lingered there, too, as if someone had mopped at the delicate ivory fingers with a wet rag.

  ‘Is there a chance that I can examine this child?’ she whispered to Father Kirn. ‘To see if she was hurt in any other fashion?’ Something about the smell of the candy revolted her, reminded her that there were monsters very much aliv
e in the world that also killed little girls after giving them sweets. But it would not do to say so, not with the girl’s mother sobbing inches from her shoulder. Don’t lay that on her, along with her child’s death.

  And indeed, on the ocean, without the use of mental powers of illusion, a vampire would have to hunt with candy, to draw his prey.

  ‘In what other fashion do you need, good Madame?’ Gently, the priest removed the short prayer rope from his own belt, tied it to a piece of string from his pocket, and put this like a necklace around the child’s neck. ‘The poor little mite is dead—’

  ‘Tata, tata!’ The mother shook the priest with a convulsive strength. ‘Tell me her soul not forfeit! Tell me my little one not walk as living damned!’

  Out in the corridor, the man Vodusek sniffed, ‘Damned indeed! I swear the gypsy brat wasn’t baptized …’

  ‘Be at peace.’ The old man made the sign of the cross on the woman’s forehead, then from the pyx beside him took a little vial of holy oil, and with it, repeated the sign on Luzia’s forehead as well. ‘Jesus the Christ said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me”. Your daughter is safe in God’s arms.’

  ‘It’s true, Frau Pescariu,’ urged Ariane, putting her arm around the mother again. ‘You know it’s true. The Cross, and the Host, they will keep her safe. The vampire can endure none of these things.’

  Lydia could have disagreed, but didn’t. Someone standing deeper in the room made the sign of the cross and Lydia recognized old Grandpa Marek, tears of agony running down his face. She couldn’t keep herself from wondering, How would one go about staking someone through the heart on shipboard? Much less cutting off their head and burying them at the crossroad?

  ‘Let us through! Let us through!’ Voices in the corridor. ‘Proydem cherez,’ they added, fumbling at the pronunciation. ‘Lasciaci passare …’