Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  A tall man and a strong one, he thought, staring abstractedly through the long windows down at the courtyard and at the frilly Gothic fantasies of the roof line beyond. A man capable of tracking a vampire? Even an inexperienced fledgling like Bully Joe Davies? Or was Bully Joe, disoriented and maddened by the flood of new sensations and now further confused by his master Calvaire’s death, merely prey to a chronic case of what Asher himself had occasionally experienced abroad—the conviction of perpetual pursuit. God knows, Asher thought, if even Ysidro had picked up the trick of glancing continually over his shoulder, what shape would Davies be in after—a month, had he said, since Calvaire’s death?

  And he made a mental note of the fact that Bully Joe seemed in no doubt that Calvaire had, in fact, been “donefor,” and had not merely disappeared, as Ysidro had once hypothesized.

  It was likelier that the killer, like himself, was a man of education, able to track by paper what he could not track in the flesh.

  Arguably, he was a man of patience, Asher thought, running his fingers along the dusty leaves of the St. Bride’s parish roll book; a man willing to go through the maddening process of sifting records, names, deeds, and wills, checking them against whatever clues he might have found in the vampires’ rooms before he—or someone else—burned it all.

  Certainly a man of resolution and strength, to slice off the head of the blonde woman in Highgate Cemetery with a single blow.

  And—perhaps most odd—a man who had sufficiently believed in vampires in the first place to make his initial stalking, his initial kill, which would conclusively prove to him that his prey, in fact, existed at all.

  That in itself Asher found quite curious.

  For that matter, he thought uneasily, turning back to his work, it might be Ysidro or the mysterious Grippen whom Bully Joe sensed on his heels. If that were the case, Asher knew he stood in double danger, for if Bully Joe realized it was Ysidro on his trail, he would never believe Asher had not betrayed him.

  After a tedious examination of ward records and parish rolls, he ascertained that Ernchester House had been sold in the early 1700s by the Earls of Ernchester, whose town house it had once been, to a Robert Wanthope. The house itself stood in Savoy Walk, a name only vaguely familiar to Asher as one of the innumerable tiny courts and passageways that laced the oldest part of London in the vicinity of the Temple. Oddly enough, there was no record of any Robert Wanthope having ever purchased any other propertyin London, in St. Bride’s parish or any other.

  Ten minutes’ walk to Somerset House and a certain amount of search in the Wills Office sufficed to tell Asher that Mr. Wanthope had never made a will—an unusual circumstance in a man who had sufficient funds to buy a town house. A brief visit to the Registry in another wing of the vast building informed him, not much to his surprise, that no record existed of Wanthope’s death or, for that matter, his birth.

  In the words of Professor Dodgson, Asher thought, curiouser and curiouser. Almost certainly an alias. Ernchester House had not surfaced in any record whatsoever since.

  It was nearly five when he left Somerset House. The raw wind was blowing tatters of cloud in over the Thames as he crossed the wide, cobbled court, emerging on the Strand opposite the new Gaiety Theatre. For a few minutes he considered seeking out Savoy Walk, but reasoned that there would be no one stirring in Ernchester House until dark—and in any case there was something he very much wanted to buy first.

  So he turned his steps westward, dodging across the tangles of traffic in Piccadilly and Leicester Square. Lights were beginning to go up, soft and primrose around the wrought-iron palisade of the public lavatories in Piccadilly Circus, brighter and more garish from the doors of the Empire and Alhambra. He quickened his pace, huddling in the voluminous folds of his ulster and scarf as the day faded. He had no idea how soon after sunset the vampires began to move, and above all, he did not want Ysidro to spot him now.

  The fashionable shops were still open in Bond Street. At Lambert’s he purchased a silver chain, thick links of the purest metal available; he stopped in a doorway in Vigo Street to put it on. The metal was cold against his throat as it slid down under his collar. As he wrapped his scarf backover it, he was torn between a vague sensation of embarrassment and wondering whether he shouldn’t have invested in a crucifix as well.

  But silver was spoken of again and again as a guard against the Undead, who far transcended the geographical and chronological limits of Christianity. Perhaps the crucifix was merely a way of placing a greater concentration of the metal near the big vessels of the throat. He only hoped the folklore was right.

  If it wasn’t, he thought, he might very well be dead before morning.

  Or, at least according to some folklore, worse.

  Now that was curious, he mused, jostling his way back through the thickening press of young swells and gaily dressed Cyprians around the Empire’s wide, carved doors. The folklore all agreed that the victims of vampires often became vampires themselves, but at no time had Ysidro spoken of his own victims, or those of the other mysterious hunters of the dark streets, as joining the ranks of their killers. Bully Joe Davies had spoken of a vampire “getting” fledglings, as Calvaire had “gotten” him—evidently against the commands of the master vampire Grippen.

  So it wasn’t automatic—not that Asher had ever believed that it was, of course. Even without Lydia’s projection of the number of victims a single vampire might kill in the course of a century and a half, logic forbade that simple geometrical principle; the vampires kept on killing, but the world was not inundated with fledgling vampires.

  There was something else involved, some deliberate process … a process jealously guarded by the Master of London.

  Grippen.

  A big toff, the tobacconist’s clerk had said. A hard boy, and never mind the boiled shirt.

  Grippen’s get, Bully Joe Davies had said. Grippen’s slaves.

  Was Ysidro? It was hard to picture that poised, pale head bending to anyone.

  Yet there was so much that was being hidden: an iceberg beneath dark waters; wheels within invisible wheels; and the power struggles among the Undead.

  He left the streaming traffic of Drury Lane, the jumbled brightness of Covent Garden behind him. Crossing the Strand again, he got a glimpse of the vast brooding dome of St. Paul’s against the darkening bruise of the sky. The lanes were narrow here, lacing off in all directions, canyons of high brown buildings with pubs flaring like spilled jewel boxes at their corners. Somewhere he heard the insouciant clatter of buskers, and a woman’s throaty laugh.

  He passed Savoy Walk twice before identifying it—a cobbled passage, like so many in the Temple district, between two rows of buildings, not quite the width of his outstretched arms. It curved a dozen feet along, cutting out the lights from Salisbury Place. His own footsteps pierced the gloom in a moist whisper, for fog was rising from the nearby river.

  The tiny passage widened to a little court, where the signs of small shops jutted out over the wet, bumpy stones—a pawnbroker’s, a second-hand bookshop, a manufacturer of glass eyes. All were empty and dark, crouching beneath the tall gambreled silhouette of the house at the rear of the court, a jewel of interlaced brickwork and leaded glass, nearly black with soot. The lights of the populous districts to the north and east caught in the drifting fog to form a mephitic, dimly luminous backdrop behind a baroque jungle of slanting roofs and chimneys. The house, too, was dark; but as Asher walked toward it, a light went up in its long windows.

  The steps were tall, soot-stained, and decorated withdecaying lions in ochre stone. There was long stillness after the echoes of the door knocker died. Even listening closely, Asher heard no tread upon the floor.

  But one leaf of the carved double door opened suddenly, framing against the dark honey of oil light the shape of a tall woman in ivory faille, her reddish-dark hair coiled thick above a face dry, smooth, and cold as white silk. By the glow of the many-paned lamps behind her, he could see
the Undead glitter of her brown eyes.

  “Mrs. Farren?” he said, using the family name of the Earls of Ernchester, and it surprised her into replying.

  “Yes.” Then something changed in her eyes.

  “Lady Ernchester?”

  She didn’t answer. He felt the touch of that sleepiness, that mental laziness of not paying attention, and forced it away; he saw in those glittering eyes that she felt that, too.

  “My name is Dr. James Asher. I’d like to talk to you about Danny King.”

  SEVEN

  “COME IN.” She stepped back from the door, gestured him to a salon whose pilastered archway opened to the right of the hall. Her voice was low and very sweet, without seductiveness or artifice of any kind. As he followed her, Asher was acutely conscious of the thudding of his own heart. He wondered if she was, too.

  The salon was large, perfectly orderly, but had a chilled air of long neglect. One dim oil lamp on the corner of a curlicued Baroque mantelpiece picked out the edges of the furnishings nearest it—graceful Hepplewhite chairs, the curve of a bow-front cabinet, and the claret-red gleam of carved mahogany in a thick archaic style. Asher wondered who would dust the place and brickbat that dingy front step, now that Danny King was dead.

  Mrs. Farren said, “I’ve heard of you, Dr. Asher.” As in Ysidro’s, there was neither commitment nor emotion in her voice. Standing before her in the small pool of lamplight, he could see the gleam of her protruding fangs, and the factthat, except when she spoke, the creamy thickness of her breasts did not rise or fall.

  “My apologies for intruding,” he said, with a slight bow. “If you’ve heard of me you know I’m seeking information—and if you know Don Simon Ysidro, you probably know I’m not getting much. Was Daniel King your servant?”

  “Yes.” She nodded once. Unlike Ysidro, though her voice was absolutely neutral, there was a world of brightness, of watchfulness, of feeling in her large, golden-brown eyes. “He was my husband’s,” she added after a moment, and inwardly Asher sighed with relief—he’d been afraid for a moment that all vampires were as utterly uncommunicative as Don Simon. “His carriage-groom—a tiger, they used to call them. That was during our last…”She hunted for the word for a moment, dark brows flinching slightly together, and suddenly seemed infinitely more human. “Our last period of being of the world, I suppose you could say. We had a number of servants. In those days such extravagant eccentricities as barring a whole wing of the house and leading an utterly nocturnal existence were more accepted by servants than they are now. But Danny guessed.”

  She stood with her back to the mantelpiece, her hands clasped lightly before her slender waist, in an attitude regal and slightly archaic, like a stiffly painted Restoration portrait. In life, Asher guessed, she had been a little plump, but that was all smoothed away now, like any trace of archaism in her speech. Her gown with its flared tulip skirt was modern, but the baroque pearls she wore in her ears could only have been so extravagantly set in the days of the last of the Stuart kings.

  When she moved, it had the same unexpectedness Ysidro’s movements did, that momentary inattention, and thenfinding her at his side. But she only said, “I suppose now that he’s gone, it’s I who must take your coat…”

  “Did you make him a vampire?”

  “No.” She hesitated a moment in the act of laying ulster, hat, and scarf on a nearby sideboard, her eyes moving from his, then back. “Grippen did that, at our request—and Danny’s. Danny was very devoted to Charles—my husband.”

  “Could you have?”

  “Is that question pertinent?” she inquired levelly. “Or just curiosity?”

  “The answer is that we would not have,” a voice spoke from the shadows, and Asher turned swiftly, having heard no creak from the floorboards that had murmured beneath his own weight. The man who stood there, face white as chalk in the gloom, seemed more like a ghost than a human being—thinnish, medium height, and with an indefinable air about him of shabbiness, of age, as if one would expect to see cobwebs caught in his short-cropped light-brown hair. “Not without Lionel’s permission.”

  “Lionel?”

  “Grippen.” The vampire shook his head, as if the name tasted flat and old upon his tongue. There was a weariness to his movements, a slowness, like age that had not yet reached his face. Glancing swiftly back at Mrs. Farren, Asher saw her eyes on this newcomer filled with concern.

  “He never would have stood for it,” the vampire explained. “He would have driven poor Danny out of every hole and corner within a year. He’s very jealous that way.” He held out one thin hand, said, “I’m Ernchester,” in a voice that echoed the resonance of that vanished title.

  Asher, who had gained a certain amount of familiarity with the Earls of Ernchester from his afternoon’s researches, guessed: “Lord Charles Farren, third Earl of Ernchester?”

  A faint smile brushed that white, square-jawed face, and for a moment there was a flicker of animation in the dead eyes. He inclined his head. “I fear I don’t look much like the portrait,” he said. Any number of portraits of ancient gentlemen lurked on the gloomy salon walls, too obscured with time and shadow to be even remotely recognizable. But Asher reasoned that, since the third Earl of Ernchester had died in 1682, and any portrait would have been two-thirds devoted to an elaborate periwig, it scarcely mattered.

  And, in fact, the third Earl of Ernchester had not died.

  Asher frowned, trying to recall the name of the Countess, and with the curious perspicacity of vampires Mrs. Farren said, “Anthea.” She stepped over beside her husband and guided him to a chair near the cold hearth; in her brown eyes was still that wariness, that concern when she looked at him and that watchful enmity when she regarded Asher. Asher saw the way Ernchester moved when he took his seat—with the same economy of movement he had seen in Ysidro, and indeed in Lady Anthea, but without life.

  “Did Danny sleep here?” he asked, and it was Anthea who replied.

  “Only very occasionally.” She straightened up and walked back to the hearth; it was a relief to Asher not to have to fight to see them move, as he did with Ysidro.

  “And I take it it wasn’t here that you found his body?”

  From the corner of his eye Asher was conscious of Ernchester looking away, resting his brow on his hand in a gesture that hid his face. It came as a shock to him that the Earl felt grief, and he saw anger for that, too—a protective anger—in Anthea Farren’s brown eyes.

  “If it had been,” she replied coolly, “you may be sure that the killer would have dispatched the both of us as well.”

  He bit his lip. Then, answering her anger and not her words, “I’m sorry.”

  Some of the tension seemed to slack in her strong frame, and the anger left her eyes. She, too, answered not his words. “It was foolish of you to come here,” she said. “Ysidro can be maddening, but, believe me, if he has kept things from you, it is because there is ground that it is perilous for a living man to tread.”

  “That may be,” Asher said. “But as long as he has a pistol to my head—as long as someone I love will suffer for it if I don’t find this killer—he’s not going to be able to have it both ways. I want to be shut of this business quickly—before he finds where I’ve hidden away the woman whose life is in hostage to him, before the killer realizes he has a day hunter on his trail, learns who I am, and tracks down this woman also—before I get any deeper entangled into the side of this affair that isn’t my business. But I can’t do that unless I have more information than Ysidro’s willing to give.”

  She considered him for a long moment, her head a little tilted, as if with the glossy weight of her dark hair. “He is—a very old vampire,” she said after a time. “He is cautious, like an old snake in a hole; he errs on the side of caution, maybe. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t really care much about anything.”

  It was odd to hear her speak of Ysidro as “old,” for the Spaniard had the queerly graceful air of a young man, almost a bo
y. It was Ernchester, thought Asher, with his oddly dead motions and his weary eyes, who seemed old. Asher glanced back at the chair where the Earl had sat, but the vampire was no longer there. Asher could not recall just when he had vanished. It was early evening, he remembered, and neither of his hosts had fed. But somehow, speaking to this quiet and beautiful woman who had been dead long before he was born, he could not fear her.

  He wondered if that were because she meant him no harm, or because she was using some subtle variation of the mental glamour of the vampire on him, as Ysidro had tried to do on the train. Ysidro’s words about “other vampires than I” lingered unnervingly in his thoughts.

  After a long pause, Anthea went on, “I’m not sure whether he or Grippen is the elder—they were both made about the same time, by the same master. Rhys the White, that was. A minstrel, who was master vampire of London—oh, years, years.

  “You understand that it was never usual for a commoner to survive as a vampire until cities began to get large enough for deaths to be invisible,” she added after a moment. “Only the landed had money and a place to be secure during the days when we sleep. Simon tells me that even in his time, London was like a small market town.” She smiled a little, her teeth white against a lip full but pale as wax. “And I suppose you’d think the London I grew up in paltry—we used to pick catkins in the marshes where Liverpool Station now stands.

  “It was the nobles who could sustain their security, who could hunt far enough afield—who could live on the blood of cattle and deer, if need be, to prevent suspicion from falling on themselves. But one cannot live for too long on the blood of animals. One cannot go too long without the kill. One grows—dull. Stupid. Weary. All things begin to seem very pointless. And out of that dullness, it is very easy to be trapped and killed.”