Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  “Medical?” Asher’s voice was sharp, and Ysidro looked at him once more with all his old chilly disinterest.

  “Lionel Grippen was a Doctor of Medicine and accounted very learned in his time, though, considering the practices of the day, this was not praising him to the skies. For a few decades past his initiation to the vampire state, he kept up with medical practice. Now he reads the journals, curses, and hurls them across the room, enraged that they no longer speak of anything with which he is familiar. Though I understand,” he added, “that it has been nearly two centuries since he has done even that.”

  “Has he, indeed?” Asher stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “You wouldn’t know if he still has any of his old kit?”

  “I doubt the originals still exist, though he would know where and how to obtain more.” The vampire regarded him now with interest, his head tipped a little to one side, his long, colorless hair blowing against the fragile cheekbones with the movement of the night.

  “Interesting,” Asher said. “Here, cabby! Pull up!”

  The man drew rein, cursing as he edged his horse out of the stream of traffic pouring off the Waterloo Bridge. Foot traffic was heavy here as well. Ysidro slipped from the cab and vanished at once into the jostling shapes beneath the blaze of the bridge’s lights. At Asher’s command, the cabby started forward again, grumbling at care-for-nothing toff fares, and proceeded to the chaos of cabs, carts, omnibuses, and pedestrians surrounding the half-constructed sprawl of Waterloo Station, a Dantesque vision of brick, gaslight, scaffolding, and smoke. As the cab jostled through the porridge of vehicles, Asher pulled off his gloves and drew from his ulster pocket a thick package. LAMBERT’S, said the modest label, with a discreet crest.

  With chilled fingers, he drew out two silver chains like the one he wore around his neck beneath his starched and respectable collar. It was tricky fastening the small clips around his wrists; but, for obvious reasons, it had been impossible to solicit Ysidro’s help. He tugged his shirt cuffs down over them and pulled his gloves back on, for the night was cold as well as wet; there was another shape in the tissue wrappings, narrow, like a child’s arm bone. He freed it and held it to the rain-streaming light—a sterling silver letter opener in the shape of an ornamental dagger. Having only bought it that afternoon, he had had no time to whet it and doubted in any case that the blade would hold much of an edge, but the point was certainly sharp enough to pierce flesh. Like a Scotsman’s skean dhu it had no guard. It fit neatly into his boot.

  He paid off the cab in front of the station. The man grunted, cracked his whip over his jaded old screw of a horse, and vanished as surely as the vampire had into the teeming mob.

  For a time, Asher stood in the open space of light and noise before the station, hearing the screeches of the trains, the hiss of steam, and the voices of thousands of travelers shouting, and feeling the rumble of the engines through the ground under his feet. Weariness made him feel slightly disoriented, for he had waited for Bully Joe Davies in the alley behind Prince of Wales Colonnade for hours after his return from Ernchester House, and had risen to meet Lydia at the Park after only a few hours’ sleep. He had meant to nap during the day; but, between Chancery Lane and Lambert’s in Bond Street, the rainy afternoon had slipped too quickly away.

  Now he felt chilled and weary, trying to recall when he had last slept through the night. A woman jostled past him, unseeing; as he watched her too-bright plaid dress retreat across the square to the platform, he remembered theblonde woman with the two children on the train from Oxford and shivered.

  In the field—“abroad,” as he and his colleagues politely termed those places where they were licensed to steal and kill—the train station was God’s own gift to agents, particularly one as vast as Waterloo, even with half its platforms still under construction: a thousand ways to bolt and so absolutely impersonal that you might brush shoulders with your own brother on the platform and never raise your eyes. Beyond question it was one of the hunting grounds of the vampire.

  Pulling his bowler down over his eyes and hunching his shoulders against the rain, he crossed the puddled darkness of the pavement toward the blazing maw of the Lambeth Cut.

  As he traversed that squalid and tawdry boulevard, his feeling of oppression grew. The crowds around the theatres and gin palaces there were scarcely less thick than those around the station, and far noisier. Music drifted from open doors; men in evening clothes crowded the entryways with women whose rain cloaks fell open to show brightly colored dresses beneath; jewels flashed in the lamplight, some real, some as fake as the women’s smiles. Now and then, a woman alone would call to him or crowd through the people on the flagway to stride a few steps with him, with a few jolly words in the characteristic slur he’d recognized in Bully Joe Davies’ voice. As he smiled politely, tipped his hat, and shook his head, he wondered if one of them was Davies’ sister Madge.

  This, too, was an ideal hunting ground.

  It depressed him, this consciousness of those silent killers who drank human life, Ysidro had told him, one night in perhaps four or five. It was, he supposed, like the consciousness he had developed in all those years with the Department, the automatic identification of exits andthe habitual checking of a man’s shoes, sleeves, or hands.

  Horace Blaydon’s bellowing voice echoed in his mind, in the big carbolic-smelling theatre at Radclyffe: “I’ll tell you one thing that’ll happen to you, if any of you manages to stay the course and become a doctor, which, looking at your pasty little faces, I sincerely take leave to doubt—you’ll be spoiled forever for the beauty of life. You’ll never see a girl’s rosy blush again without wondering if it’s phthisis, never hear your fat old uncle’s jolly laugh without thinkin’: ‘The old boy’s ridin’ for a stroke.’ You’ll never read Dickens again without pickin’ it apart for genetic blood factors and unhealthy drains.”

  “A rather unfortunate choice of examples,” Lydia had remarked, when she’d joined Asher by the door where he’d been waiting to escort her to tea at her uncle’s college, “since, with a complexion like his and that prematurely white hair, it’s obvious the man’s heading for an apoplexy himself. I wonder if the godlike Dennis will turn into that in twenty years’ time?”

  And Asher, suffering under the sting of being brown and unobtrusive and skirting the shadowy borders of middle age, had felt insensibly cheered.

  But, he thought, recalling Lydia’s clinical reaction to being surrounded by vampires, old Blaydon had, of course, been absolutely right.

  He turned from the Cut to Lower Ditch Street, a dingy thoroughfare whose few gaslights did little to dispel the rainy gloom. It was a neighborhood of crumbling brick terraces and shuttered shops, grimy, cramped, and sordid. Down the street, yellowish light shone on the pavement outside a gin shop; other than that, the street was dark. Asher’s own footfalls sounded loud, as did the thin, steady patter of the rain. Halfway down the unbroken frontage was the door he sought: Number 216. Its windows weredark; looking up, he saw them all heavily shuttered. The door was barred with a padlock and hasp.

  Asher stood for a long time before it, listening, as if, like the vampires, he could scent peril at a distance. In spite of his weariness, the ache in his bones as if he had fallen down a flight of stairs, and the hurt of his flesh for sleep, he forced all his senses alert. Bully Joe Davies had said that he was being stalked. The killer, a vampire who moved so silently that he could, in fact, stalk other vampires, might be watching him from the shadows of those dark buildings, waiting for him to leave the lights of the street.

  For that matter, Asher thought ironically as he crossed back to the mouth of the alley that ran behind Lower Ditch Street, Davies himself might be waiting for him. The fledgling vampire had moved so clumsily he doubted Davies’ ability to detect Ysidro, either last night or now, if Ysidro was, in fact, watching over him. However, if he was wrong …

  Uneasily, Asher scanned what little he could see of the smelly cleft of the alley and the street
behind him for sign of the vampire. There was none, of course. He was reminded of the picture an old Indian fighter in Arizona had once drawn for him—a white page with a horizon line bisecting it, two pebbles, and a minuscule cactus. It was titled “Arizona Landscape with Apaches.”

  He drew the silver knife from his boot, holding it concealed against his arm. 216 Lower Ditch Street had been purchased three months ago by Chrétien Sanglot, shortly after, Asher guessed, Bully Joe Davies had met the Frenchman.

  Cautiously, he advanced down the back lane, rain trickling from his hat brim and into his collar. There was a sharp crash from the brimming dustbins, and tiny red eyes glinted at him in irritation from the darkness. The alley wasfilthy beyond description, garbage and refuse of all kinds mingling into a kind of primordial slop under the steady patter of the rain.

  Counting the cramped little slots of yards, Asher found Number 216 easily and slipped through the broken boards of its back fence without trouble. The ground oozed with reddish mud; at the back of the yard, barely visible in the gloom, a broken-down outhouse simmered in a pool of nameless slime. “The Houses of Parliament,” he recalled abstractly, such buildings were christened in some areas of London …

  The rain had eased to a whisper. He strained his ears as he crossed the yard, trying to catch some sound, some signal of danger.

  In the yard he might be safe, at least from Bully Joe. He doubted the fledgling could come at him through that much water and mud without a sound. But once he was in the house, if Davies had seen Ysidro waiting for him, he was a dead man.

  The wet wood of the back steps creaked sharply beneath his weight. The door was only a vague outline in shadow, but he could see no padlock. Cautiously he turned the knob. The door creaked inward.

  “Come no further until I have lighted the gas,” Ysidro’s voice said softly from the darkness, startling Asher nearly out of his skin. “I think you should see this.”

  TEN

  A PIN-BURST explosion of gold came in the darkness, bright to Asher’s straining eyes, and there was a sting of sulphur. Already his mind was taking in the smell that filled his nostrils; the ashy, fetid choke of burned meat overpowering the mustiness of mildew and dust.

  Slow and gold, the light swelled around the steel fishtail of the burner, widening out to fill the whole of the square and dingy room.

  A coffin lay five feet from where Asher stood in the doorway, filled with ash and bone. From here, it looked like a lot of bone, the whole skeleton intact and black, but for the moment he didn’t go to check. He looked instead at the stone floor around the coffin, then sideways, past where Ysidro stood near the stove, to the dripping puddle beneath the vampire’s shed Inverness, which lay over the warped wooden counter top. There was no trace of dripped water anywhere else in the room, save where Ysidro himself had walked from the outer door to where he stood, just beside the stove.

  “So much,” he said quietly, “for a vampire who remains awake a little longer than his brethren. The rain didn’t stop until nearly dawn. The ground wouldn’t have been even spongy-dry until well into daylight.”

  He walked past the coffin to the cellar door, an open black throat on the other side of the room, taking his magnifying glass from his pocket. Fresh scratches and faint shuffling tracks marked the dusty linoleum of the floor, and here and there was a dim footprint, outlined in crusts of dried mud. After a moment’s study he put the glass away and replaced it with the measuring tape.

  “Two of them,” he said, kneeling to mark the length of one pale smudge. “One nearly my height, the other three or four inches taller, by the length of the stride. Together they carried the coffin up from the cellar to here, where there was daylight.” He sat back on his haunches, studying the shuffled and overlapped spoor.

  “Your friend Mr. Davies,” Ysidro murmured softly. Asher knew the vampire was going to cross to the coffin then and concentrated on watching him. Through a haze of what felt like almost unbearable sleepiness, he saw Ysidro take two long, quick strides; when it passed he was standing above the blackened remains, a colorless specter in his pale gray suit and webby hair. “The bones are intact.”

  He folded himself like an ivory marionette down beside the coffin and picked with fastidious fingers at what was inside. There was no expression on his thin face. Pocketing the measuring tape, Asher joined him in time to see him slide from between the ribs something that crumbled even in the inhuman lightness of Ysidro’s touch—something about a foot and a half long that was too straight to be a bone.

  Ysidro dropped it almost at once, pulled a silk handkerchief from some inner pocket, and wiped his fingers, stillwithout expression. “Whitethorn,” he said. “Burned nearly to ash, but still it stings.”

  Asher caught the long, narrow hand in his and turned it palm-up to the light. Faint red welts could already be seen on the white flesh. The fingers felt utterly cold to his touch, fragile as the sticks of an antique fan. After a moment, Ysidro drew his hand away.

  “They were taking no chances.”

  “They knew what to use, obviously.”

  “Any clown with access to a lending library would,” the vampire returned.

  Asher nodded and turned his attention to what was left of the corpse. There were, as he’d hoped, a number of keys in the vicinity of the blackened pelvis—trouser pocket, he thought absently, the carryall of a man who isn’t used to wearing a jacket when he works. Don Simon had been right about vampires’ combustibility: the bones were intact, not seared to crumbling and unrecognizable fragments as Lotta’s had been. The place where the spine had been severed to separate head and body was horribly clear.

  “Why is that?” he inquired softly. “Isvampirism a type of petrification that slowly alters first the flesh, then the bone, into something other than mortal substance? Is that why the younger vampires go up like flashpaper, while the older ones burn more slowly, more completely?”

  “I don’t think it can be so simple as that,” Simon replied, at the end of a long hesitation. “There are—interlocking effects, psychic as well as physical. But yes—I have often believed it to be as you say. Grippen was burned once by the sun, fifty, seventy years ago. It was nowhere near as bad as my own experience during the Fire, and now the scars are almost gone. We toughen a little, as I said, even to daylight. But not to this extent.”

  There was silence as they looked at each other, then, across the coffin contents of ash and heat-split buttons,brown mortal eyes looking into immortal gold.

  “How old,” Asher asked at last, “is the oldest vampire in Europe?”

  “Three hundred and fifty-two years,” Ysidro responded softly, “give or take a few.”

  “You?”

  A slight inclination of that strange, demon head. “To the best of my knowledge.”

  Asher got to his feet and hunted the cupboards until he found a brass lamp, which he lit from the gas, mildly cursing the inconvenience in Ciceronian Latin and wishing that electric torches were either small enough to carry easily about his person or reliable enough to warrant the nuisance of lugging them. A brief examination showed him no locks or hasps, though five of the keys he’d picked from the ashes were of the cheap padlock type. Perhaps Davies, like Calvaire, had several different safe houses. Ysidro followed him without a word as he crossed to the cellar steps. The stink of mold and wet earth rose about them like chokedamp as they descended.

  “I thought the killer might be Grippen, you know,” he said, and Ysidro nodded, absolutely unsurprised by the theory. “I suspect you did, too.”

  “The thought crossed my mind. It was why I sought out a mortal agent. This was not sheerly because I consider him a lout and a brute: he had good reason to wish Calvaire dead. Calvaire was a challenge to his authority. It was clear that Calvaire was trying to establish his own power here in London, even when none of us knew he was purchasing property, let alone creating a fledgling who would do his bidding. And Grippen is of the height to have made the marks upon Neddy Hammersm
ith’s windows.”

  They paused at the foot of the steps, Asher lifting the lamp nearly to the low ceiling beams to illuminate the cellar around them. Its glare smudged the dusty boards of anearly empty coalbin in light and caught the fraying edges of translucent curtains of cobweb, thick with dust.

  “Would he have harmed his own fledglings? Davies didn’t think he would.”

  “Davies did not know Grippen.” Ysidro paused for a long moment, a faint line flexing briefly between his ash-colored brows. “You must understand that the bond between a master vampire and the fledgling he creates is an incredibly strong one. It is not merely that, without the teaching of the master, the fledgling cannot hope to survive in a world where the veriest touch of sunlight will ignite every cell in his body—cannot hope even to make sense of the new world dinning and crying and burning into senses that suddenly gape like an open wound.”

  He spoke hesitantly now, not picking over what he would and would not tell, but struggling with things that in 350 years he had not told anyone. “In the making of the new vampire, their minds lock. The dying man’s or woman’s clings to that of one who has already passed through the experience of physical death. In a sense,” he went on, not awkwardly but very slowly, like a demon trying to explain to the living what it is like to exist surrounded by the damned, “the fledgling must give his soul to the master, to hold for him while he—crosses over. I cannot explain it more nearly than that.”

  “A man must love his life very desperately,” Asher said, after long silence, “to do that.”

  “It is easier to do than you think,” Simon replied, “when you are feeling your own heart falter to a stop.” Then he smiled, wry in the dim glow of the lamp but with that faint echo of an old charm, like a faded portrait of someone he had once been. “A drowning man seldom pushes a plank away, no matter who holds the other end. But you understand how absolute is the dominance established.”