Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘I thought it might be one of the Russian vampires,’ she went on. ‘But even with the rioting in St Petersburg, that’s no reason to have to flee Europe. And vampires aren’t – you aren’t – political, so far as I know.’

  ‘We are not.’ His yellow eyes narrowed. ‘E’en had the rioting in Petersburg progressed beyond what the newspapers said last week, the vampires of that city, and of Moscow, all have country places in which to hide – if, indeed, any remain in Russia at all. But this traveler … Having killed once, why would he kill twice? Is there only one?’ And he shook his head at the startled horror in her eyes. ‘I shall be much interested in what this Izora woman has to say. Listen for those things which she cannot have learned from the gossip of the maids – if anything. For there is something happening which I do not understand, and that,’ he concluded quietly, ‘is never a good thing.’

  FIFTEEN

  Asher returned to the Rue de Passy that same night.

  The Hotel Montadour was still dark.

  The wind had started up, turning the day’s thin rain to driving needles of ice. The City of Gold would be plowing heavy seas under starlight while the U-boats that almost certainly followed her could glide in still darkness below. He wondered if Lydia were asleep. Or did she lie awake amid a strew of books and magazines over the counterpane, wrapped in her green satin dressing gown, coppery hair lying half-uncoiled over her shoulders and spectacles perched on the end of her nose?

  Has she found Ysidro?

  Has she killed him?

  Will she kill him?

  He knocked on the door of the porter’s lodge, the blows echoing like a bronze hammer in the silence beyond. A wet gust tore at the skirts of his trench coat, rain spattering off his pulled-down hat.

  The thought crossed his mind, as he moved off down the empty blackness of the street, that if U-boats torpedoed the American liner tonight, he himself wouldn’t hear of it for days.

  They could be already dead, and all of this – all of everything, all of life – for nothing.

  He’d been in the Secret Service – he’d associated with the London vampires – far too long to think that any despairing cry of his heart – no!!! – wouldn’t be whipped away by darkness long before it reached the ear of God. And God probably had a great deal else to do tonight. It would be blowing sleet in that wretched camp in the black Silesian forests, where the men thought he was Major von Rabewasser, where poor little Dissel, his batman, huddled beside the smoky fire in their tent praying he wouldn’t freeze by morning.

  The man’s a German, my enemy. I shouldn’t care.

  I should be prepared to shoot him as promptly and discreetly as I shot my young friend Jan van der Platz, behind the barn of his family’s farmstead near Johannesburg, when he began – only began – to suspect me …

  Hands like the steel rings of a vise closed on his arms and he was shoved into a doorway; cold-clawed fingers caught at his throat and jerked back from the silver he wore. Reflective eyes flashed in the distant glow of a window down the street.

  He hadn’t even seen them surround him.

  His mind had been somewhere else.

  He tried to wrench free as one of them caught the front of his coat, jerked him forward so as to smash his skull against the brick of the wall behind him …

  ‘It’s Madame’s Anglais,’ said someone.

  He grabbed the wrist of the man who gripped his coat, steeled against the blow if it was coming. ‘I need to see Madame.’ He knew he’d stand a better chance of surviving the next five seconds if he caught their interest.

  They were around him, like sharks in the water, gripping his arms again. Still he felt the whisper that went among them – they were entertained. He knew they could hear the hammering of his heart. The terror of the living always amused them. They loved it when someone sobbed despairingly, No!

  They pushed him back against the panels of a door, deep-set in a soot-grimed wall. Three of them, all young men, though they’d probably been born before his grandfather. All in evening dress: he could see them silhouetted dimly against the reflection of windows across the street. Smelled Parma violet in their clothing, and stale blood.

  ‘Madame has left Paris.’ A trace of Norman dialect, stronger than he’d heard those few hours crossing through Rennes on his way to Brest. There was an archaic inflection, such as one sometimes heard on the Channel Islands. The speaker – no more than a dark shape – was as tall as himself, and wider-shouldered. Asher could hear the smile of cruel amusement in his tone. You think you can distract us, talk your way out of death. But we will kill you and you know it …

  Keeping his voice matter-of-fact, Asher said, ‘Then perhaps one of you gentleman can help me. There was a man named Barvell in Paris, a chemist who claimed to be a nerve doctor as well. I have reason to believe he was studying the Undead.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’ There was an almost childlike glee in the voice. See, there’s nothing you can say …

  ‘He was working on coming up with a way to enslave and control vampires. He has experimented on at least one, maybe more.’

  It was a bow drawn at a venture but beside him, he felt the slightest perceptible twitch in the grip on his right arm. The vampire holding him on that side said, in the light voice of a youth, ‘So that’s what—’

  The tall vampire moved his head, slightly, and the youth beside Asher fell silent.

  ‘He had an apartment on the Rue Monceau.’

  ‘No one controls us.’ The tall vampire released his grip on Asher’s coat-front. Cold hands framed his face. ‘No one enslaves us. Not Madame, for all her airs and graces. And only a fool believes the rumors of wartime. He is an even bigger fool, who goes seeking the Undead in their lairs.’

  ‘Serge!’ The voice of Elysée de Montadour, coming from the street behind them, was like the chop of a silver knife. In the same instant Asher kicked Serge, knowing the blow would do absolutely nothing but knowing also that he had nothing to lose. He heard Elysée’s voice as Serge twisted his head, trying to break his neck. The kick at least knocked the vampire’s balance and timing askew and the next second Serge was torn away from him and slammed against the corner of the doorway in which they stood. Asher twisted free, leaving his trench coat in the hands of the vampires on either side of him and lunged past Serge, stumbling, his senses swimming. At this hour of the night, in the blackness of the sleet-wet street, he guessed he’d make it about three steps before they’d be on him.

  He fell, but heard Elysée curse like a sailor, standing above him, and her three fledglings – despite Serge’s earlier assertion – evidently didn’t want to challenge the master vampire who had made them. When Asher turned painfully over and sat up, only Elysée was there beside him.

  ‘Connards.’ She pulled him to his feet with the frightening strength of the Undead. ‘I will have to deal with that conceited whoreson one day. Why I ever loved him I’m sure I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you love him?’ Asher turned his head, very carefully, and felt blood in his hair where the vampire’s claws had gouged. ‘Do you love them?’

  Elysée widened her great green eyes at him. ‘But of course! Why would one make a vampire of a man that one did not love passionately? That one did not wish to keep at one’s side forever? But what a block-head!’ She touched his bleeding scalp, licked the blood from her fingers and then smelled them, as if savoring the residue of perfume. Asher backed away from her second touch, took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the cuts, then knelt to daub the cloth in the puddles underfoot, and wiped the blood more thoroughly away. When he went into the doorway to retrieve his trench coat, he dropped the handkerchief there; she’d smell it in his pocket and it would distract her.

  He was aware that she glanced towards it, still drawn to the blood-smell, before she returned her attention politely to him. He was reminded of a child eyeing the last cookie on the luncheon plate.

  ‘I am desolated that I was not here last night. Did
you come, you silly man?’ She put her arm through his, drew him in the direction of her own door. ‘I asked Serge, and Louis-Claud – and I’m very much afraid that Louis-Claud suggested the most diverting hunt yesterday evening, for some drunken Australians who had lost their way down by the river. Was I very naughty?’ She leaned against him, and Asher fought the impulse to thrust her away.

  As if she felt his disgust at her she smiled at him, and in the same fashion that inattention and thoughts of his responsibilities had, ten minutes ago, swept all watchfulness from his mind, he felt the warm wave of her sexuality surge around him, as it had two nights before: the nearly-uncontrollable impulse to pull her to him, to kiss those blood-red lips. To push up her skirts and have her in the nearest doorway.

  With careful calm he said, ‘It was vexing. I learned some facts Thursday, and traveled to Brest, to send a wireless message to Lydia on board the ship where, I’m nearly certain, Ysidro is being held captive.’

  ‘Captive?’ The dreamy urgency of lust snapped off as if with the turning of an electric switch. ‘It is true, what you said?’ She straightened up in the doorway of the lodge. ‘That this what’s-his-name you spoke of, this Barvell, has found a way to enslave us?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’ Asher scratched a corner of his mustache. ‘Or at least that’s what he has to be seeking. And if he’s been in Paris since 1913, I think he must have used at least one vampire as a subject to experiment on. You say –’ he spoke carefully, knowing the Master of Paris was extremely touchy about any slurs on her absolute command of her territory and fledglings – ‘that you know every vampire in Paris. Yet in the past I know that there have been some who were not your get—’

  ‘Pah! Insects. I have driven them out.’ Her eyes glinted dangerously.

  ‘Are you sure? Because—’

  She looked sharply past his shoulder, and, following her gaze (with an agonizing cramp in the bruised muscles of his neck), Asher saw, in the dim reflection of the hooded lamp that now burned over the lodge door, that they had been joined by another. Dark eyes caught the feeble lamp glow like mirrors, and his hair, slick with brilliantine, was fair. The high cheekbones and cupid-bow lips, the delicate Grecian nose and well-shaped chin, were all very much the ‘type’ that Elysée de Montadour favored, and like the others of her fledglings that he’d seen, this one seemed to be wearing evening dress under his greatcoat.

  ‘He gets them at the Front,’ said the young man, in the youthful voice, and slight Provençal trill, that Asher had heard minutes before.

  His eyebrows went up.

  Elysée snapped, ‘Who does?’

  ‘This man – Barvell?’ The fledgling took a step forward, and looked hesitantly from Elysée to Asher. ‘Augustin – Augustin Malette – I swear to you, Madame,’ he added, to Elysée, whose eyes had flared wide at the mention of her ‘tricky’ fledgling. ‘Augustin has no thought of disrespect to you, no thought of challenging you for control of Paris. But he has made fledglings – four that I know of – at the Front. He says that when the fighting is over, he will take them to some other city—’

  ‘Lying canaille!’ Elysée moved with the terrifying speed of the vampire, so that Asher didn’t see her strike, but the fair vampire staggered and put a hand to his bleeding cheek.

  ‘—Bordeaux or Brussels or Marseilles,’ he continued, ‘and set himself up there. Not that he does not have the deepest respect and love for you, Madame.’ Hand still to his face, he executed a profound and wary bow. ‘Please do not doubt that.’

  ‘Species of toad!’ By the look on her ghost-pale face, Elysée clearly did doubt it, and was just as clearly going to have some words with Augustin on the subject.

  But Asher only said, ‘And does Augustin, or one of his fledglings, know of vampires … disappearing?’

  ‘Two of Augustin’s fledglings, M’sieu. One was a nurse at one of the clearing stations, a most beautiful young lady, the other a young captain of the Signal Corps. Augustin …’ The fledgling hesitated, trying to find a tactful phrase. ‘Augustin has not the care – the experience – to advise his fledglings, to guide them as you do, Madame.’ He bowed again, and took Elysée’s hand, to bring it to his lips. ‘This young captain, this young nurse, they were very inexperienced. They had only been numbered among the Undead for a week, perhaps ten days. Augustin told me – some months ago it was, now – that they had been kidnapped, disappeared.’

  His sharp, youthful face twitched in a look of concern, almost fear. ‘He said – this was just after Christmas, Madame – he said they were still alive. Alive and in terrible pain. He spoke of going to Paris to seek them, but he – he feared you would be angry if he confessed to you that he made fledglings of his own.’

  ‘And well he should be afraid!’ Elysée’s hand flicked out and slapped him again, hard. The young man only turned his face meekly aside. ‘Pig!’

  ‘I have only seen him once since then, Madame, and I did not ask what had come of it.’

  ‘And you told me nothing of this?’

  ‘Madame,’ Asher broke in quietly, as the enraged vampire showed signs of striking her fledgling again and, possibly, driving him away. ‘This is a serious matter. I don’t know the capabilities or the exact intentions of this Dr Barvell – though I have some guesses about the latter. But I do know he’s being financed by an American industrialist, and I need to learn of him what I can. Not only to what extent he is able to control the Undead, but how many of the Undead he does control. Don Simon may not be the only one. And Dr Barvell may not have kept his findings to himself.’

  Elysée’s eyes flared with horror. She hadn’t thought of that.

  ‘As Augustin’s master, would you be able to find him at the Front?’

  ‘Of course!’ She spoke so quickly that he guessed she had no idea whether she’d be able to locate her erring fledgling or not. ‘Joël?’ She turned to the fair young vampire. ‘Whereabouts is Augustin, at the Front?’

  ‘Near Nesle,’ Joël replied.

  Asher did some rapid mental calculation. ‘Can you meet me there tomorrow night?’ he asked. ‘I can get authorization to travel, and quite possibly a motorcar.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ retorted Elysée. She tilted her head a little, listening to the clock on Notre Dame d’Auteuil striking the half-hour. ‘It is not yet two o’clock. We can be there long before the sun rises.’

  ‘Darling!’ The princess kissed Lydia on both cheeks, and slipped an arm around her waist as one of her footmen – an American ex-boxer named Samson Jones, according to Ellen’s gossip – resplendent in blue velvet livery laced with gold, shut the suite door behind Lydia, bowed, and helped her off with her shawl. ‘I am so glad you could come. How is the little one? Well asleep? I thought that aunt of yours would never cease her chatter, and her without the slightest knowledge of what it is to be a mother.’

  Her voice dropped to a whisper as she led Lydia across the parlor. As in the parlor of Aunt Louise’s suite next-door, Her Illustrious Highness had added her own touches to the hyper-modern American furniture: a discordant assortment of purple velvet cushions, peacock feathers in brass Chinese vases (Lydia could almost hear Ellen’s cries of horror at the bad luck evoked by this, particularly in the middle of the Atlantic with all the U-boats of the Kaiserliche Marine on their trail), sinuous sculptures of ebony and alabaster, assorted photographs and four icons in silver frames. The largest of the photographs, set prominently on the piano, was of the princess with two children, a tow-headed boy and a slightly older girl whose dark ringlets and heart-shaped face marked her almost definitively as Natalia Nikolaievna’s daughter.

  By the style of clothing, the photograph had been taken just before the War began. Lydia had never heard the princess so much as mention the children, and wondered where they were now. In a couple of Select Academies in Switzerland? Or had she, like her maid, lost them? Was that what had drawn her to Madame Izora and conversations with the dead?

  Beside that likeness, nearly as la
rge and in a frame of unmistakable Fabergé work, was a photograph of Monsieur and Madame, the two French bulldogs. There was also a solid silver icon of the Virgin of Kazan.

  ‘Of course,’ Aunt Louise proclaimed from the inner room into which Natalia led Lydia, ‘it isn’t the same thing as superstition at all. Lydia, take those ridiculous glasses off! They make you look like an insect! Communication with spirits on the Astral Plane,’ she resumed, turning back to Mrs Cochran, ‘has been scientifically proven, incontrovertibly, time and time again.’

  ‘Incontrovertibly,’ echoed Mrs Cochran, moving up beside her at the round pedestal table – its glass and chrome surface, Lydia noted, suitably covered in black velvet. The handsome Dr Barvell helped her into her chair, with considerably greater attention than Cochran demonstrated. The room – the equivalent of Lydia’s own chamber in the next-door suite – was a large one, its windows heavily curtained in black velvet which had clearly been added to the suite’s existing draperies. Not a shred of light can enter …

  Of course, she recalled. Spirit contact was supposed to be impossible in daylight.

  Lest accident disrupt the etheric vibrations, the bulbs had been removed from the electrical fixtures and two oil lamps substituted (did she bring those, too?), glowing with a soft golden light. Between the windows the mysterious box that had drawn Lydia’s attention on the gangway Wednesday loomed like a peak in the Grampians: she couldn’t imagine how it had been brought into the stateroom. Closer to, she recognized it as a structure similar to the one she’d seen at the séance which her cousins had held at Peasehall Manor last summer, when she’d been home, briefly, from France. Mediums (media?), her cousin Maria had informed her, called them ‘spirit cabinets’; their function was to ‘focus astral energies’ or ‘act as a spiritual battery’. As far as Lydia could tell, their actual function was to conceal behind their black velvet curtains the fact that the medium him-or-herself could easily slip out of the ropes that bound him hand and foot, and so produce all sorts of sounds and effects while supposedly tied up.