But it's the answer! she thought. I know it is!
She had promised James.
Frank Ellis' fancy motorcar came to mind; to impress her he'd run the throttle out full but wouldn't engage the engine; she, too, was fight-ing to go and knowing there was nothing to do but remain in this room and wait.
Wait for how long? She had to talk to him, had to tell him.
She walked to the window and drew the curtain-lately she had become uneasy about that, too. For the last two nights she had dreamed of lying half-asleep in bed, listening to a deep, muttering voice calling her name-calling her name from somewhere quite nearby. But some-thing about that voice had terrified her, and she had buried herself in the covers, trying to hide, wanting to call for James and knowing she dare not make a sound...
And she had wakened, trying to get out of bed.
She had taken to buying extra kerosene and leaving a small lamp burning low all night. This childishness troubled her, but not, she had decided, as much as waking in the darkness did.
He had to come back.
She took her seat at the desk, picked up the top journal of the stack she had marked to scan, and opened it, though she knew it would do nothing but confirm what she already suspected. All she could do for the moment was work, until James came back from Paris.
With a sigh, she settled into her study, carefully avoiding, for one more night, the question of what she would do if he did not.
Asher woke up dying of thirst. Someone gave him something to drink-orange juice, of all things-and
he slept again.
This happened three or four times. He never had the strength to open his eyes. He could smell water, the cold stink of filth, and the moldery reek of underground; it was utterly silent. Then he slept again.
When he finally could open his eyes, the light of the single candle, burning in an ornate gilt holder near the opposite wall, seemed unbear-ably bright. It took all the strength he had to turn his head, to see that he lay on a narrow bed in a small cell which still contained half a dozen stacked crates of wine bottles caked with plaster and dust. One open archway looked into a larger room beyond; the archway was barred all across, the narrow grilled door padlocked. On the other side of the bars stood Grippen, Elysee, Chloe, and Hyacinthe.
Chloe said, "I thought you said you could touch silver," in a voice of kittenish reproach.
"A man can have the strength to bend a poker in half and still not be able to do so with a red-hot one," Grippen retorted. "Don't be stupider than you are."
The padlock must be silver, Asher thought, dimly inferring that the discussion was about entering his cell and finishing what they had be-gun. The philologist in him noticed Grippen's accent, far more archaic than Ysidro's and a little like that which he'd heard among the Appala-chian mountaineers of America, He could feel bandages on his throat and both wrists and the scratchiness of considerable stubble on his jaw.
"Can you make him come and do it?" Hyacinthe inquired, regarding Asher with narrowed dark eyes. Something changed in her voice, and she murmured, as if for his ears alone, "Will you come and let me in, honey?"
For a moment the notion seemed entirely logical to Asher's ex-hausted mind; he only wondered where Simon might have put the key, Then he realized what he was thinking and shook his head.
Her huge dark eyes glowed into his, for that moment all that he saw or knew. "Please? I won't harm you-won't let them harm you. You can lock the door again after me."
For a few seconds he truly believed her, in spite of the fact that it had been she who had diverted his attention in the alley, in spite of knowing down to the marrow of his bones that she lied. That was, he supposed, what Simon had meant of Lotta when he had said that she was a "good vampire."
"Bah," Grippen said. "I misdoubt he could stand an he would."
Hyacinthe laughed.
"Are you having fun, children?"
Even as the words were spoken, Grippen was already turning his head, as if startled by them the moment before they sounded; the three women swung around, white faces hard in the single gold light of the candle as it curtsied in the flicker of wind. An instant later, Ysidro stepped out of the darkness, graceful and withdrawn-looking, but Asher noticed he did not come too near to the others.
"I ought to have guessed you'd have a bolthole in the sewers, like the Spanish rat you are," Grippen growled.
"If the French government will dig them, it were a shame not to put them to use. Did you ever know
Tulloch the Scot? Or Johannis Magnus?"
"The Scot's got to be dead, and this curst penpusher's got you in the way of asking questions like a curst Jesuit. Those concerns have ceased to be ours-ceased from the moment the breath went out of our lungs and the last waste of mortality from out of our bodies, and we woke with the taste of blood on our mouths and the hunger for more of it in our hearts. The dead don't traffic with the living, Spaniard."
"There are things which the living can do which the dead cannot."
"Aye- die and feed the dead. And if your precious doctor e'er sets foot in London, that's aye what he'll do."
"Unless you plan to keep him prisoner forever," Elysee crooned mockingly. "Are you that fond of him, Simon? I never guessed it of you."
Chloe let out a silvery titter of laughter.
"The dead can still die," Simon said quietly. "As Lotta would tell you, if she could; or Calvaire, or Neddy
..."
"Lotta was a fool and Calvaire a bigger one," Grippen snapped. "Calvaire was a boaster who boasted once too often to the wrong per-son of who and what he was. Think'ee that telling yet another mortal who and what we are is going to keep us safe? I always thought Span-iards had dung for brains and I'm sure on it now."
"The composition of my brains," said Simon, "makes neither Lotta, Neddy, Calvaire, nor Danny less dead, nor does it alter the fact that none of us has seen or heard a single breath of the one who has stalked and killed them. Only another vampire could have followed them, and only a vampire very ancient, very skilled, could have followed them unseen. More ancient than you, or I..."
"That's cock."
"There are no older vampires," Elysee added. "You border on.,." She glanced quickly at Grippen, as if remembering he and Simon were the same age, and visibly bit back the wordsenility.
"He's a day hunter, Lionel," Simon said. "And one day you may waken to find the sun in your eyes."
"And one day you'll waken with your precious professor hammering an ashwood map pointer into your heart, and good shuttance to you," Grippen returned angrily. "We deal with our own. You tell your little wordsmith that. An he conies back to London, you'd best stick close by his side."
And seizing Chloe roughly by the wrist, he strode from the cellar, the girl following him in a flutter of pale hair and ribbons, their monster shadows swooping after them in the flickering gloom.
"You're a fool, Simon," Elysee said mildly and trailed along after them, vanishing, as vampires did, in a momentary swirl of spider-gauze shawl.
Hyacinthe remained, blinking lazily at the Spanish vampire with her pansy-brown eyes. "Did you find him?" she asked in her golden syrup voice. "That ha'nt of the boneyards, the Most Ancient Vampire in the World?" Like a flirt, she reached out and touched his shirt collar, finger-ing it as she fingered everything, as if contemplating seduction.
"When I pulled you and Grippen and the others off James here," Simon replied softly, "did you see who carried him away?"
Hyacinthe drew back, nonplussed, as mortals must be, Asher thought, when confronted with the elusiveness of vampires. Without smiling, Simon continued. "Nor did I." Confused, Hyacinthe, too, left, seeming to flick out of sight like a candle puffed by wind. But Ysidro, by the tilt of his head and the direction of his cold eyes, obviously saw her go.
For a long moment, he stood there outside the bars, looking around him at the dark cellar. It had clearly been disused for years, perhaps centuries; past him, as his eyes grew more used to the light
, Asher could see the open grillwork in the floor which communicated with the sew-ers, though the other vampires had left in another direction, presum-ably upstairs to some building above. One of the oldhostels particuliers in the Marais or the Faubourg St. Germain, he wondered, which had survived the attentions of the Prussians? Or simply one of those ubiqui-tous buildings purchased in the course of centuries by some vampire or other, as a bolthole in case of need?
Then Ysidro spoke, so softly that it was only because he was used to the whispering voices of vampires that Asher heard him at all. "An-thony?"
From the dusty, curtaining shadows came no reply. After a moment the vampire took a key from his pocket, and, muf-fling his fingers in several thicknesses of the corner of his Inverness, steadied the lock to insert and turn it. Then he picked up a small satchel from a corner where, presumably, he had laid it down before addressing the others, and came into the cell. "How do you feel?"
"Rather like a lobster in the tank at Maxim's." A fleet grin touched the vampire's mouth, then vanished. "My apolo-gies," he said. "I could not be assured of reaching here before they did." He glanced down at something beside Asher's cot. When he lifted it, Asher saw that it was a pitcher, soft porcelain and once very pretty, now old and chipped, but with a little water in it. "Was he here?"
"Anthony?" Asher shook his head. His hoarse voice was so weak none but a vampire would have heard. "I don't know. Someone was." A dream-a hallucination?-of skeleton fingers caressing the silver pad-lock floated somewhere in his consciousness; but, like light on water, it eluded his grasp.
"I left this on the other side of the cell." From the satchel the vampire took a wide-mouthed flask and a carton which smelled faintly of bread pudding.
As Ysidro poured a thick soup out of the flask, Asher remarked, "What, not blood?"
Ysidro smiled again. "I suppose it is customary in novels-it was in Mr. Stoker's, anyway-for the victims of a vampire to receive transfu-sions from all their friends, but somehow I could not see myself solicit-ing such favors from passers-by."
" 'Just come down this cellar with me, I'd like a little of your blood?" I expect Hyacinthe could do it, too. But it wouldn't work, or so Lydia tells me. Apparently human blood isn't all of one type."
"Of course, such matters have been considered among vampires ever since Mr. Harvey's interesting articles first appeared." Ysidro handed him the soup and helped him sit up to eat it. "We have long been familiar with the whole apparatus of transfusions and hollow needles. In fact I'm told some of the Vienna vampires used to inject their victims with cocaine before they drank. When Dewar containers were devel-oped last year, Danny made some experiments in storing blood, but it seems to lose both its taste
and its efficacy literally within moments after it leaves the living body. In any case it is not the blood alone that chiefly sustains us. If it were," he added, without change in the soft inflections of his voice, "do you think that any of us would be the way we are?"
Asher set down the bowl on his knees, his hands shaking too much with sheer weakness to hold it. Ysidro's steadying grip was chill as the hand of a corpse. Their eyes met. "Don't be naive."
The vampire's pale eyebrow tilted. "You may be right, at that." Whether he spoke of Lotta, Hyacinthe, or himself was impossible to tell. He took the empty bowl and turned away, every movement spare and economical as a sonnet. "I doubt you'll need concern yourself with Grippen at the moment. He and Chloe are bound back to Lon-don..."
"Simon..."
He looked back, the gilt candlelight seeming almost to shine through him, as it shone through the edges of fingers held near to the flame- demon and killer a thousand times over, and the man who had saved Asher's life.
"Thank you."
"You are in my service," the vampire replied, the unstressed axiom of a nobleman who questions neither his rights nor his duties. "And we have not yet scotched this killer.
"I am still not entirely convinced," he continued, neatly returning bowl, flask, and spoon to his satchel, "that the killer is not Grippen himself. I have given thought to your assertion that our state is a medi-cal pathology. If there is some alteration of state which takes place close to the three hundred and fiftieth year..."
"Then wouldn't you be experiencing it, too?"
"Not necessarily." He turned back and held up his white, long-fin-gered hands shoulder-high, showing the colorless flesh next to his stringy, ash-pale hair. "Though I was still quite fair-haired as a living man, I had more color than this, and my eyes were quite dark. This- bleaching-is not common, but not unknown among our kind. Perhaps it is what they call a mutation of the virus, if virus it be. The oldest vampire I knew, my own master Rhys, was also 'bleached,' though other vampires he created were not. Therefore as a condition it might affect other changes that take place when a vampire ages. And since it seems that Calvaire left Paris for precisely those reasons which turned Grippen against him in London..."
"No." Asher sank back to his pillow, exhausted with the mere effort of sitting up and eating, wanting nothing more, now, than to sleep again. "Didn't you read the newspaper? It was in my pocket..." He hesitated. "No it wasn't, I left it in the catacombs. A section of the London Times. It can't have taken Grippen less than a night to come here, and the night before I was attacked, nine people were killed by a vampire in London. Oh, the police were puzzled by the lack of blood in the bodies, but it was..."
"Nine!"
It was the first time he had ever seen Simon truly shocked. Or per-haps, he thought, he was simply able to read the vampire better now.
"I didn't think it sounded like any of the London vampires. Grippen may be a brute, but he hasn't
survived three hundred and fifty years by indulging in stupid rampages like that. And now I know it couldn't have been either Grippen or Chloe, and it certainly doesn't sound like the Farrens. What it sounded like was a vampire who'd been lying low."
"And who took the first moment when Grippen was gone," Simon murmured softly, "to satisfy a craving that must by that time have been monstrous. Butnine.. ,"
"In any case," Asher said, "it means that we are definitely dealing with another vampire."
Ysidro nodded. "Yes," he said. "And by the sound of it, in all proba-bility, a mad one."
Asher sighed. "My old nanny used to say, 'Every day in every way things are getting better and better.' It comforts me to know she was right." And he dropped his head to the thin straw of the pillow and fell instantly to sleep.
Fifteen
EIGHT PERISH IN WAREHOUSE FIRE FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED [From theManchester Herald ]
Fire ravaged the cotton warehouse of Moyle Co. in Liverpool Street last night, claiming the lives of eight vagrants who are be-lieved to have taken shelter in the warehouse from the cold. How-ever, police report the discovery of a small quantity of blood on the pavement of the alley behind the warehouse, indicating that some sort of foul play may have taken place, though all the bodies were too badly burned to provide definite clues. All eight bodies were found clumped close together in the rear part of the warehouse, near where the fires started; there is no evidence that any of these unknown vagrants attempted to extinguish the blaze in its early stages, and, in fact, police believe that all eight may have been dead of some other cause before the fire started. The fire was blazing strongly when first seen by watchman Lawrence Bevington, who claims that he saw no indication of smoke or other trouble when he passed the warehouse earlier...
No, Lydia thought calmly, he wouldn't. If I were trying to hide my kills by incinerating the bodies, I'd make certain the watchman was sleeping at the appropriate moment.
Her hand was shaking as she set down the newspaper.
Manchester. Anonymous masses of factory workers, stevedores, and coal heavers, unmissed save by those who knew them and maybe not even then.
She looked at the list she'd made, lying on top of theJournal of Comparative Folklore, and wondered how long she dared wait now,
She had promised James n
ot to do anything until she had checked with him, not to put herself in danger. She knew she was a child in a bog here, unable to tell the difference between a tuft that would bear her
weight and one that was only a little greenery floating on the top of quicksand; she knew that the vampires would be waiting. The fear that she had lived with for weeks rose again in her, the fear of that guttural voice calling in her dreams, the fear of the gathering darkness, the fear she had felt in the cold fog of the court the night she had gone out to seek a vampire. Everything she had been reading had only taught her to fear more.
But how long was she going to wait? The last thing she'd heard from James was that he was going to see the Paris vampires, under the prob-lematical protection of Don Simon Ysidro. She shut her heart, trying to freeze it into submission, trying not to connect that letter with this long silence. But her heart whispered to her that they had no reason to keep him alive. And there was a good chance that, as Calvaire's friends, they might have something to hide, not only from humans, but from vampire kin.
I'll wait one more day, she promised herself, trying to relax the steely hand that seemed to clutch at her throat from the inside.His letters have to go long-ways-about through Oxford... it could have gotten delayed...
She looked back at her list, which she had compiled last night, and at the newspaper lying beside it. The vampire's rampages had killed seven-teen people in the last three days.
Her fingers still unsteady, she took off her spectacles and set them aside, then lowered her head to her crossed arms and wept.
Asher woke feeling stronger, but still weighted, not only with exhaus-tion, but with an uncaring lassitude of the spirit with which he was familiar from his more rough-and-tumble philological research trips. His dreams had been plagued by the sensation that there was something he was forgetting, some detail he was missing. He was back in the van der Platz house in Pretoria, hunting for something. He had to move swiftly because the family was due back, the family which considered him such a pleasant and trustworthy guest, a Bavarian professor only there to study linguistic absorption.
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