Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  “Yes. They became quite good friends.”

  “Were they lovers?”

  Ysidro paused at the top of the second flight of stairs, the lamp held low in his hand, its light streaming up onto the narrow, fragile-boned face and haloing the webby stringiness of his hair, casting a blot of shadow on the low ceiling above. Carefully, he replied, “As such vampires understand the concept, yes. But it has nothing to do with either love or sexual union. Vampires have no sex—the organs are present, but nonfunctional. And neither Lotta nor Calvaire would even have considered the happiness of the other, which is what I understand to be one of the tenets of mortal love.”

  “Then what was between them?”

  “A shared ecstasy in the kill.” He turned to open the small door to the left of the stairs, then paused and turned back. “There is, you understand, an ecstasy, a surge of—I don’t know what. A ‘kick,’ I think they call such things now—in the drinking of the life as it pours from the veins of another. It is not only in the taste of the blood, which I am told not all of us find pleasant, though I do. We are as much creatures of the psychic as the physical. We perceive things differently from human perceptions. We can taste—feel—the texture of the minds of others, and at no time more intensely than when the human mind is crying out in death. That is what we drink, as well as the blood—the psychic force, which answers to and feeds our own psychic abilities to control the minds of others.”

  He leaned in the doorway, cocking his head a little, so that the strands of his pale hair fell in attenuated crescents on his shoulders. The lamp in his hands touched face andhair, warming them, alike colorless, into the illusion of goldenness, like honey-stained ivory. Asher was conscious, suddenly, of the empty darkness of the house all around.

  His voice continued, light and disinterested and absolutely without inflection, committing nothing of the enigma of his eyes. “As a vampire, I am conscious at all times of the aura, the scent, of the human psyches near me, as much as I am conscious of the smell of live blood. Some vampires find this almost unbearably exciting, which is why they play with their victims. There is never a time—I am told—when they are not thinking, Shall it be now or later? It is that which feeds us, more than the physical blood—it is that which we hunt. And that psychic hunger, that lust for the draining of the soul, is as far beyond the knife-edge instant before the cresting of sexual orgasm as that instant is beyond—oh—after you have had two pieces of marzipan, and you are wondering whether you might like a third one, or a bit of honey cake instead.”

  After a long while Asher said quietly, “I see.”

  “You don’t,” Ysidro replied, his voice whispering away in soft echoes against the darkness of the empty house, “and you can’t. But you would do well to remember it, if ever you find yourself in the company of other vampires than I.”

  There were candles in all the wall sconces of the room where Edward Hammersmith had kept his coffin. Ysidro thrust one of them down into the lamp chimney to touch the flame, then went around the room, lighting the others, until the whole place blazed with a quivering roseate glow unlike the soft steadiness of gaslight. Asher noted boxes of candles stacked carelessly in every corner and puddles of wax, raised to lumpy stalagmites four and five inches high, on the Turkey carpets beneath each wax-clotted sconce. In the center of the room, the print of the coffin lay clear and dark upon the dusty rug, though the coffin itself was gone.There were no traces of ash or burning around the edge of that sharp, dust-free oblong—only a scuffed path leading there from the door, worn by Hammersmith’s feet, and a few smudgy tracks in the dust, leading beyond it to the room’s two tall windows. The heavy shutters that had covered these had been stripped of the three or four layers of black fabric that curtained them and ripped from their nails.

  Skirting the tracks, Asher walked to the windows, holding the lamp to the wooden frames, then to the shutters themselves.

  “My height or better,” he remarked. “Strong as an ox—look at the depths of these crowbar gouges.” Going back, he fished his measuring tape from his pocket—a miniature one of Lydia’s in an ivory case—and noted the length and width of the track, and the length of the stride.

  “The coffin was fitted with interior latches,” Ysidro said, remaining where he had been in the restive halo of the candelabrum’s light. “They were crude, of course—Danny King installed them for Neddy—and the lid had been simply levered off, tearing the screws from the wood.”

  “Where is it now?” Asher held the lamp high, to examine the plaster of the low ceiling above.

  “We buried it. In the crypt of St. Albert Piccadilly to be precise—there being no danger of infection or smell.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  Ysidro replied blandly, “My friends and I.” He half shut his eyes, and one by one the candles around the room began to go out.

  He had spoken of a vampire’s psychic powers—Asher had seen both Western mediums and Indian fakirs who could do much the same thing. Still, he picked up his lamp hastily and joined Ysidro by the door before the last of those firefly lights snuffed to extinction, leaving only darknessand the lingering fragrance of beeswax and smoke.

  “Tell me about Danny King,” he said, as they descended the stairs to the drawing room once again. “He was obviously a friend of Neddy’s, if he fixed up his coffin for him. Was he a friend of Lotta and Calvaire’s as well?”

  “He was a friend to most of us,” Ysidro said. “He had an unusually easygoing and amiable temperament for a vampire. He was an uneducated man—he had been a carriage groom, a ‘tiger’ they were called, to … during George IV’s Regency for his father.”

  Asher found candles, and began lighting lamps and wall sconces in the vast drawing room as they had done upstairs. With the increased illumination, the clutter only appeared worse, mounds of music, of books, and of bundled journals scattered everywhere. Strewn among them were small bits of personal jewelry, stickpins and rings such as a man might wear, and literally scores of snuffboxes, most of them covered with dust and filled with snuff dried to brown powder, whose smell stung Asher’s nose.

  “Where did he keep his things?” He turned back to the tambour desk in one corner, its top, like everything else in the room, a foot and a half thick in books, in this case the collected works of Bulwer-Lytton—by its appearance, well-thumbed, too. Asher shuddered. The solitary vampire’s evenings must have hung heavy indeed.

  “He did not have many.”

  “He couldn’t have carried them round London in a carpetbag.” Asher opened a drawer.

  It was empty.

  He brought the lamp down, ran his hand along the drawer’s upper rim. There was dust on the first few inches, as if the drawer had been left ajar for years, but there was no dust in the bottom. He hunkered down to open the drawer below.

  That, too, was empty. All the other drawers in the desk were.

  “Had this been done when you and your friends found Hammersmith’s body?”

  Ysidro drifted over to the desk, contemplated the empty drawers for a moment, then let his disinterested gaze float back over the clutter of music pieces, books, and journals that bulged from every other available receptacle in the room. He reached into a corner of a bottom drawer, drew out a fragment of what had clearly been a bill for a servants’ agency, paid in full in 1837. “I don’t know.”

  Asher remained where he was for a moment, then stood, picked up the lamp, and threaded his way between stacks of books to the fireplace. It was clear that it had once contained books, too—they were now heaped at random all around it. He knelt and ran his fingers over their covers. The dust that lay thinly over everything else was absent. The fireplace was heaped with ashes—fresh.

  He glanced up at the vampire, who, though Asher had not seen him do so, had joined him by the cold hearth.

  “Burned,” he said quietly, looking up into that narrow, haughty face. “Not taken away and sorted through to trace other vampires or possible contacts. Burned.�
�� He got to his feet, feeling again the stir of frustrated anger in him, the annoyance with Ysidro and his invisible cronies. For a moment he had thought he’d seen puzzlement on that thin-boned face and in the pucker of the slanting brows, but if he had it was gone now.

  “Was this done at King’s place also?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because King did not keep such things,” Ysidro replied smoothly.

  Asher started to retort, Then who kept them for him? and stopped himself. The dark eyes were fixed on his facenow, watching, and he tried to keep the sudden cascade of inferences out of his expression.

  More calmly he said, “It all comes back to Calvaire. It started with him, and he seems to have been a linchpin of some kind in this; I’m going to have to see his rooms.”

  “No.” As Asher opened his mouth to protest, Ysidro added, “That is as much for your protection as for ours, James. And in any case, he was not found in his rooms—in fact his body was not found at all.”

  “That doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been followed to them, taken away in his sleep, and killed.”

  Ysidro’s eyes glinted angrily, but his voice remained absolutely level. “No one follows a vampire.”

  “Then why do you keep looking over your shoulder?” Disgusted, Asher picked up the lamp and strode through the mazes of books toward the door, the stairs, and the outer, saner world of the cold London night.

  SIX

  AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM Asher had his cab set him down and stood before the shut iron palings, listening to the rattle of wheels retreat away down Great Russell Street in the darkness. He knew this area of Bloomsbury the way a jack hare knew its burrows—alleys, mews, quiet squares, and pubs that had inconspicuous doors into back lanes and owners who didn’t much mind who used them. It was one reason he’d chosen it.

  The streets were relatively deserted, save for an occasional cab clattering its way to Euston or back from the theaters on Shaftesbury Avenue. He made his way swiftly down small turnings, across a mews behind Bedford Place and through a deep-shadowed lane between high houses whose sunken areaways formed an unbroken line of pits, like a protective moat, between pavement and rose-brick walls. He crossed Bruton Place and found the black slot of the alley that backed both it and Prince of Wales Colonnade. There in the moist and potholed darkness he halted, the stenches of a hundred garbage bins floating in the wetnight air about him, and looked down the alley, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the dark.

  The vampire was watching his window.

  It took some moments for Asher to distinguish the dark angular shape against the blackness of the alley wall—had it possessed Ysidro’s weird quality of stillness, he doubted he’d have ever been able to. But the vampire must have moved slightly, resolving what at first seemed to be paler patches on the bricks into an angular white face and big white hands, hands that picked uncomfortably at the ill-setting collar of a black coat. For a moment, Ysidro’s words floated into Asher’s mind: I am conscious of the smell of live blood … You would do well to remember it, if ever you find yourself in the company of other vampires than I …

  To hell with it, he thought irritably, angry that they’d be following him, watching him. With Ysidro as my only source of information, I’m certainly never going to get anywhere. If I’m working for them, they jolly well can’t kill me.

  Yet, his mind added, as he began to walk down the alley.

  The vampire swung around at his footstep. For a heart-shaking second, the creature’s eyes caught the dim light, reflective as a cat’s; Asher saw the gleam of the long teeth. A split instant before it would have charged to take him, he said, “Come here,” in the tone that had always gotten the best results from Prussian farm hands, and it worked. The vampire checked, baffled, and then seemed to realize who he was.

  He came shamblingly, without Ysidro’s invisibility and without Ysidro’s deadly grace, and Asher breathed again.

  “And you are … ?”

  The vampire stopped a few feet from him, staring at him with glinting eyes under a narrow, craggy brow. “Bully Joe Davies is me name,” he said, in an accent which Asherplaced within half a mile of New Lambeth Cut. He licked his lips, showing his fangs disquietingly, a nervous gesture which, after Ysidro’s poise, made him seem incredibly gauche. Truculently he added, “You cry out or make a noise and I’ll suck you dry afore the cat can lick her ear.”

  Asher studied him for a moment with deliberate contempt. He was a man in his twenties, long-armed, raw-boned, and awkward-looking in a black suit that did not fit well—that hard little nut of a face would have looked more at home above the corduroy work pants and frieze jacket of a mill hand or docker. Black hair was slicked back under a five-shilling derby; there was blood under the uncut nails.

  “If you didn’t have some reason to speak to me, I assume you would have done that already,” Asher retorted. “Days ago, in fact … Why have you been following me?”

  Davies took a step closer. The smell of old blood in his clothes was repulsive. When he spoke his whisper was rank as a charnel house. “That toff Ysidro—he gone?”

  Asher’s every sense of danger came alert. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said coldly. “He could have followed me back here. We parted rather abruptly. I haven’t seen or heard him, but then, one doesn’t.”

  Bully Joe threw a swift glance around him, and Asher saw fear gleam in his bloodshot blue eyes. He edged closer still, his long-nailed fingers picking at Asher’s sleeve, his voice lowered to a hoarse breath. “Has he spoke of me?” he whispered. “Does he know of me?”

  With an effort Asher kept the surge of overwhelming curiosity out of his voice. “Shouldn’t he?”

  The hand closed around his arm, reminding Asher of that other tenet of vampire lore—that they had the strength of ten men. Ysidro certainly had. “If you speak of me, if you say aught of me, I’ll kill you,” Davies breathed. “They’d kill me, they would—Grippen, and that chilly Papistbastard Ysidro—if they knew about me, knew Calvaire had made me. First, I thought it was Grippen and the others what done for Calvaire. Then I heard them others had been killed—Neddy Hammersmith and Lottie. Christ, they was Grippen’s own get! Sodding bastard’d never kill his own! And now I’m being followed, being watched …”

  “By whom?” Asher demanded sharply. “How do you know?”

  “Dammit, you think I’d be askin’ a mortal man if I knowed that?” Bully Joe swung around, twisting his hands, his hard face contorting with rage rooted in fear, and Asher fought not to step away from him, not to show his own fear. “Summat’s after me, I tell you! And I hear the others talking—Coo, ain’t that a tickler? I can stand acrost the street in the shadows and hear every word they says! And they say there’s some bloke killin’ us wi’ a stake in the heart, just like in them old books, and lettin’ the sun in! You gotta protect me, same as you’re helpin’ the others…”

  His hands closed around Asher’s sleeve again, and Asher thought fast. “I will protect you,” he said, “if you’ll help me, answer my questions. Who are you? Why do the others want to kill you?”

  The calm authority in his voice seemed to quieten Davies, but the vampire’s reply was still sulky and impatient. “I told you, I’m Calvaire’s get. Grippen’s the Master of London. None of the others’ll dare get a fledgling wi’out his say-so. Grippen don’t want none in London but his own get, his own slaves …”

  “But Calvaire wasn’t Grippen’s get.”

  Davies shook his head, goaded, weary, confused. “Narh. He come in from Paris, he said, though he talked English like a regular man. He made me, said I’d live forever, have all the gelt I wanted, never die! He never said it’d be like this!” Desperation crept into his tone. “For amonth now I been livin’ from pillar to post, never sleepin’ the same place twicet! Hidin’ from Grippen, hidin’ from Ysidro … Calvaire said he’d take care of me, show me what I got to know! But it’s all gone wrong now! Everything’s all d
innin’ and burnin’ in my ears, smellin’ the blood of every livin’ soul…”

  He broke off, licking his lips, his burning eyes fixing on Asher’s throat, like a drunkard forgetting his thought in midsentence. Slowly, thickly, he whispered, “I killed a girl last night—Chink girl, down by the Limehouse—and I don’t dare hunt another for a couple o’ days at least. But my brain’s burnin’ for it! I dunno how the others do it, kill and not get the flatties down on ’em…”

  Asher felt the hand tighten again around his arm, begin to draw him inexorably closer to that twisted, fanged face. With deliberate calm, he asked, “And now you’re being followed?”

  Davies flinched, as if he’d been shaken from sleep; he loosed his grip and stepped back, wiping his lips with a hand that shook. “I dunno,” he whispered. “Sometimes it’s like I can feel summat in the night, watchin’ me, and I’ll turn around and there’s nuthin’! Other times … I dunno.” He shook his head, his lip lifting back from stained yellow fangs.

  “I don’t want to die! I died once already. I went through it with Calvaire! I wouldn’t of let him do this to me, ’cept that I didn’t want to die! Christ Jesus, I didn’t know it’d be like this!”

  There was a noise at the end of the alley. Davies swung around, his hand tightening with bone-crushing force on Asher’s elbow. Through the pain, Asher was still interested to note that no sweat stood out on the vampire’s white face. A man and a teen-age boy stood momentarily framed in the lighter slot of the alley’s mouth, the boy looking coyly away as the man bent his head down. Then, as if theyheard Asher’s involuntary gasp of pain, they paused, peering sightlessly into the darkness. After an uneasy moment they moved away.