Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  Lydia said softly, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Those who declare war because they want each other’s colonies, each other’s oil wells, each other’s coal mines and farmland and trade. Those who lie to poor men, untaught men, and tell them the poor and untaught men on the other side are the true enemy and must be killed. Those who hold up pictures of saints, or pictures of monsters, to keep the poor and the untaught from looking about the world for themselves.’

  She said again, ‘Yes.’

  Heller was still looking at her. Trying to convince himself, she knew, that he had not seen what he saw.

  She said, ‘You were in the German navy. On a submarine.’

  ‘I was, yes.’

  ‘He’s going to ask you about it,’ she went on, hesitant. ‘He is a … a mesmerist. A hypnotist. He has psychical powers—’

  His face flinched and waved the idea away like a cobweb. ‘What, like that imbecile Russian woman keeps talking about? Do you actually believe that, Comrade?’

  ‘I’ve seen him do things,’ said Lydia, ‘that can be explained in no other fashion. I have known him for years—’

  Heller shook his head, as if trying to recover from a blow. ‘This I did not expect of you, Comrade. You are a scientist, you are a woman of strength and sense. Leave that kind of drivel to idiots like Tania – yes, she’s a good, kind woman but soaked in superstition as a sponge in brandy. She says precisely that, about that charlatan Izora – because it’s what she’s been taught to believe. That’s how she’s been taught the world works. But you …’

  ‘Then if you don’t believe,’ said Lydia, ‘why are you afraid of him?’

  ‘I’m not afraid of him.’ She saw the lie in his eyes. Heard it in the pause – too long – before he came out with the words.

  ‘If you’re not afraid of him,’ said Lydia, ‘will you at least wait here? And speak with him, answer whatever he asks, when I bring him?’

  Another pause, also slightly too long. ‘I don’t like to see him make a fool of you.’

  In his voice she heard that it wasn’t that.

  ‘As a free woman, Comrade,’ smiled Lydia, ‘it is I who have the right to make a fool of myself. Will you wait here?’

  He folded his arms, and turned grudgingly away. ‘Yes.’

  Asher heard Augustin stir in the darkness. The whisper of his clothing, the faint squeak of the leather of his boots. Another indication, he reflected, of the man’s youth among the Undead. As they aged, they learned silence, or else how to turn the minds of the living away from whatever sound they might make: he was sometimes not entirely sure. He heard the faint, thin clatter of the silver cell’s barred door (he must have pushed at it with his foot), and then, sullenly, ‘Come and let me out, Anglais, or it will be the worse for you.’

  ‘I don’t have the key,’ said Asher.

  The young vampire muttered an obscenity. Asher had observed, in the entire long day of dozing in the blackness, that there had never been so much as the whisper of rats.

  He knew the vampires feared them. But even the rats, it appeared, feared the mark Szgedny had made on the wall.

  ‘I hope the bitch drinks your blood for a week before she kills you. She’ll be here, you know,’ Augustin added. ‘She’ll have guessed we met somehow, or those idiots Roger and Baptiste will blab it all to her when she catches them … and fat lot of good it will do them. She’ll break their necks and leave them lying in a shell hole for the sunlight to find. Bitch. A whore made for the devil.’

  ‘I can see why the thought of getting a few fledglings of your own and emigrating to Bordeaux sounded like a good plan.’

  Augustin cursed at him.

  ‘Or breaking into Barvell’s apartment and getting whatever notes he had, on how to subdue even a master vampire to one’s will. How was it done, by the way? Drugs? Something that weakens the powers of the mind?’

  ‘If only. Tchah! It is pain,’ said Augustin. ‘Simple pain. That’s what I would have loved to see – that whore Elysée spasming and screaming on the floor in front of me, while I held the syrette of antidote in my hand.’

  Asher lit the lantern, flashed it briefly around the chamber, wondering if this was, in fact, the same place to which Ysidro had brought him to keep him safe from the Paris nest. Or were there more than one such cell, hidden in the tunnels of the ancient mines? Augustin sat in the very center of the silver cage – which indeed had a cot in it, as Asher remembered – and the vampire kept shifting about, as if even the closeness of the silver bars itched his skin and made his muscles twitch.

  ‘Some of the others – Serge, and Hyacinthe, and later a couple of the Venice vampires I met at the Front – talked about books they’d heard of. Books that told of potions, philtres, that vampires can use, to do things like keep awake into the daylight hours. Abraham – one of the Venice vampires – told me recently, these things all work because they use things we can’t touch, things that eat at our flesh, silver or garlic or aconite. Without those things, no medicine or chemical or whatever can harm us.’

  The vampire shrugged. ‘It all made no sense to me. A gentleman studies literature and the arts, not chemistry like an apothecary. I cleared out Barvell’s notes but like I said, I couldn’t make heads or tails of them. Then the fighting started, and I had other things to think about. I wasn’t going to put my life into the hands of any chemist or doctor, who could use the stuff against me …’

  He stood up, and rubbed his hands, like a man who’s had some caustic solution sprayed on his skin, some trace of which remains even after washing. The whole left side of his face was a mass of blisters, puffed and swollen. The rest, the tight-stretched skin of a corpse.

  ‘He’s going to kill you, you know,’ he added. And he smiled, pleased at the thought.

  She walked in the corridors along the coal bunkers, and through the silent dimness of the untenanted engine rooms. With the long propeller shafts bent – and according to Dr Liggatt, they hadn’t been bent very much by Kimball’s pipe bomb – there was no question of running the engines. Only a few of the furnaces were in operation, powering the generators to keep the ship’s lights on. The ‘black gang’ took turns doing the work, and she had seen them, loitering among the Third Class passengers, in the Third Class dining room or the deck wells, as high up in the ship as they were permitted to go.

  Nobody, Lydia suspected, was going to sleep below decks tonight.

  Simon, she thought, crushed by the stillness, by the waiting for the torpedo to hit. Oh, Simon, please come …

  Please be well enough to come.

  Will he die? Miranda had asked.

  When he said, ‘Mistress,’ behind her, in the shadows of the corridor which led to the bulk cargo hold, she turned, and for a moment had the sensation of seeing him in some terrible dream. He looked not only emaciated; pain was stamped on every line of his face, ageing those terrible yellow eyes, drawing at the scars that crossed his cheek and throat. He had acquired from somewhere the clothing of an emigrant, a coarse tweed jacket and patched corduroy trousers, and they hung on his bones like rags on a picket fence. Over these he’d draped a plaid shawl, and in spite of that, and the gloves that covered his hands – and his claws – he shivered, like a man dying of cold.

  She took his hands, icy within the gloves, and then put her arms around him.

  Are you all right? would have been stupid.

  Where have you been hiding? Irrelevant.

  I’ve been worried sick, obvious.

  ‘Have they repaired the wireless?’ he asked in his whispery voice, and Lydia shook her head.

  ‘Cochran – and I’m certain it was Cochran who disabled it, or had it disabled – damaged or stole all the spare parts necessary for its repair. Tossed them overside, I should think, lest they be traced back to him. It’s what I’d have done. Jamie, too, probably. I had a look through his rooms, while the captain was arguing with Oliver Cochran’s lawyers. Captain Winstanley’s having distress flares fired off, though half the
passengers are saying they’ll bring suit against the American Shipping Line for showing a submarine exactly where we are.’

  ‘I can scarce,’ remarked the vampire, ‘argue with them on that head. And I trust you found nothing of use?’

  She shook her head. ‘Barvell’s room was smashed to atoms.’ She thought a corner of his mouth moved at that. Only pain, she reflected, would have wrung any expression of anything, from his habitually expressionless, devastated face.

  ‘I trust also,’ he went on, ‘that there is no need for me to tell you that when we are torpedoed – as I think we must be, and soon – you are to take your daughter and get onto the first lifeboat that offers, without the waste of so much as one moment hunting for me? If it happens in darkness, daylight is bound to come ere a rescuing vessel does, and I must perforce slip off the lifeboat and into the lightless deep. I cannot drown,’ he added, seeing the tears that filled her eyes. ‘And I expect the poison will kill me in fairly short order. ’Twill be welcome,’ he added quietly, ‘to end the dreams.’

  His hand trembled, very slightly, in hers, a sort of steady vibration that belied the calm of his voice.

  ‘Dreams?’

  ‘Of every soul,’ he said, ‘that I have killed. All of them. Each of them. Of every life taken, over the years. Every day, since the poison has been in me. Those energies that I absorbed, to feed my own powers of illusion and mastery – each of those lives comes back to me, individually and whole. Names, memories, the faces of those they loved or hated, and what made the love or the hate. Wives, children, sweethearts. Whores they killed, for most of my victims were human swine who well deserved their deaths. Children, sometimes, they raped and then hanged from the rafters of their dead parents’ houses in the wars. All those memories. All those deeds. An army of the dead.’

  He held out his hand, turning it as if he saw it once more clotted with blood. ‘Each by each. As if each life were my life. Each deed the work of my hand. As if I journeyed through Hell kissing the lips of every soul I met.’

  Lydia’s eyes met his, sickened with pity and stabbed by the involuntary thought, It is no more than what you deserve. And she knew that he knew that, too.

  She wondered if her own activities, her own love for him, would get her condemned on Judgment Day as Accessory After the Fact. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.

  ‘Listen,’ she whispered at last. ‘At midnight – always supposing we aren’t torpedoed before then – will you have your powers of thought again? Of illusion?’

  He put the recollection of the dreams aside, with a slight movement of his fingers, and thought for a moment. ‘I think so,’ he replied after a time. ‘If I were to take the whole of the antivenin – about three-quarters of a single dose remains – I think so. I injected myself with about a drachm of the stuff last night, ere I hid, and I feel the pain returning, even now. I know not how long I will last, when ’tis gone.’

  When she did not speak he stood for a time, looking across into her eyes. ‘Why do you ask me this, Mistress?’

  ‘If you took a full dose, or nearly a full dose,’ said Lydia, stumbling a little in her words, ‘as much as you have, when midnight comes, could you see – could you feel – the approach of a submarine?’

  ‘I think I scarce need to do so.’ His hands tightened slightly over hers. ‘We all of us know they are on their way.’

  ‘Could you enter the dreams of its crew?’

  He started to reply, then stopped. Something flickered behind the despair in those bruise-circled yellow eyes. Something like life.

  He almost smiled.

  ‘If you … if you were able to look into the mind, look into the thoughts, of a man who has been on such a vessel,’ she said. ‘It’s what you did, after all, with poor Captain Palfrey – who is frantic with worry about you, by the way. But you’ve convinced him that he’s been places, and received orders, and seen things, and talked to people that in fact didn’t take place at all. And you’ve done it with others – I’ve seen you. Others whom you’d never met, never seen, whose dreams you’ve read at a distance, whose eyes and steps you’ve turned aside. Whom you were able to call to you, deceive, and use, through their dreams.’

  Still he said nothing, but she saw in his face the run of his thought.

  ‘If you knew about what’s on a submarine – what it looked like – could you tell these men, these submariners,’ she went on, ‘while they’re sleeping – in their dreams – to rise from their bunks, and smash up their own engines? Or fire off their own torpedoes at nothing?

  ‘I don’t think,’ she continued, ‘that it would take much. The men are exhausted.’ Her voice sank. ‘You’ve seen the men at the Front. Even those who aren’t wounded, after six weeks in the trenches they’ll fall asleep standing up on guard duty. And in a submarine it’s worse, because of the engine fumes. You’ve seen their eyes. They can barely tell sleep from waking as it is. They aren’t really there at all.’

  He said, very softly, ‘Ah.’

  And again she knew his thought.

  That if he succeeded, they were still two days from port.

  Would he be dead in two days? Dead in agony, or driven mad by pain to the extent that he would either hunt – and lay himself open to lynching by the passengers – or throw himself out into the sunlight, to end his anguish in cleansing fire.

  A prelude – she saw this shadow in his impassive face – to the unending fires of Hell.

  She didn’t know. She wondered if he knew how long it would take. If even Barvell had known.

  Would you die like that, for me and my child?

  She couldn’t say it.

  For everyone on this ship – Aunt Louise and Princess Natalia and Heller and William the waiter and Mr Goldhirsch and Ariane and Yakov and all those grubby men in the engine crew.

  ‘Would you have the strength to do that?’

  He closed his eyes. The trembling in his hands had worsened, and she saw the corner of his mouth twitch with the stab of growing pain. Then he looked at her again, and pressed her hand with cold lips. ‘God help me,’ he said, as if he meant the words. ‘I know not, Mistress.’

  And he smiled again, the brief, sweet smile of a living man. ‘But I shall certainly enjoy trying.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Bells were ringing evensong all over Paris when Asher, Graf Szgedny, and Augustin Malette emerged from the crypt of what had been a monastery in the Rue St-Jacques, three blocks from Augustin’s small townhouse in Montparnasse. Asher bought a newspaper at an estaminet on the nearest corner – the woman behind the counter, after one look from the Graf, didn’t seem to notice that Asher was wearing a blood-crusted German Army greatcoat.

  There was no report of an American liner having been torpedoed.

  Yet …

  If they’re printing the truth. In wartime, who could tell?

  He folded the slender sheets – with the rationing of paper he was a little surprised he’d been able to find a paper at all – and stowed them in his pocket.

  It’s Sunday. They should reach New York within hours.

  He shut his eyes for a moment, in silent prayer.

  Whatever the Master of Prague had said to the golden-haired vampire, Augustin made no attempt to lose himself as they walked the dank and smelly flagway, and with scarcely a word he let them into the tall, narrow, eighteenth-century house, and led them up the stairs.

  The furnishings were cheap within those graceful rooms; like sluttish hand-me-downs worn by some aristocrat impoverished by time. The place had clearly been set up – as vampires often set up the living quarters of their houses – simply to allay the suspicions of the living. Asher could see that the few books in the single bookshelf had never been read, the garish chromolithographs on the walls chosen at random. The upholstery of the chairs was faded and dusty.

  Augustin had stowed Barvell’s notes under the tiles of a small hearth in the bedroom. There were two notebooks, and a thick sheaf of purchase orders and in
voices from chemical firms in France, Germany, and the United States. It took most of the night for Asher to go through them, sifting out data about quantities, mixtures, processes, distillations: ‘Some of this isn’t chemistry,’ he remarked at one point, and Szgedny came to look over his shoulder in the dim glow of an oil lamp. Augustin had been dismissed, presumably to hunt.

  The vampire’s long, crooked finger traced the diagrams written in the notebook’s margins. ‘This is the Seal of Solomon. And there, the Seal of Air. We are beings of Air and Earth, Anglus: this man Barvell seems to have taken the matter into account. You will send this to your lady in America?’

  Asher was deeply conscious of the Graf’s other hand where it rested on the back of his neck. The flesh was warm, heated by the life of some victim he’d encountered on his way to the old mineshafts. In wartime, soldiers came to Paris, and if they never returned to the trenches when their leave was up, no one would ask why. The tunnels in Paris ran deep.

  Asher said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hath she knowledge of the deeper ways?’

  ‘She doesn’t believe a word of it, but she will follow what I send her. In truth I know more about alchemy than about chemistry.’

  The old vampire’s fangs gleamed in a smile. ‘Good, then.’ There was a mirror tucked inconspicuously in a corner of the room – even in a vampire’s sitting room, there had to be some way for Augustin to ascertain that his tie was straight and his hair properly combed. In it, Asher could see himself, and the shadowy figure behind him. The thing’s face, within the leonine frame of gray hair, was nothing human.

  ‘Are there vampires in the United States?’ he asked.

  ‘Pah.’ The Graf dismissed the Western hemisphere and all who dwelt therein. ‘What will your lady do, when she receives … all of this?’ His claws brushed the growing stack of pages at Asher’s elbow. ‘Enslave poor Simon herself?’

  ‘No. That much I do know. It may not even work, you know,’ he added. ‘These notes were stolen five years ago. Since that time, Barvell killed at least two fledglings that I know about – maybe more – experimenting … maybe with dosage, maybe with concentration, maybe with the rates at which the efficacy of the formula decays over time. Augustin said he felt them die, and that it took days. Lydia may kill Ysidro with the first injection she gives him. Or cripple him, or drive him mad.’