Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  Queer and sharp to Asher’s mind, like the image in a dream, rose the vision of a slim, fair hidalgo in the pearl-sewn black velvets of the Spanish court, his head lying back over the white hand of the thin little man who knelt beside him. Like a fragile spider, Anthea had said …

  “Is that why you’ve never made a fledgling?”

  Ysidro did not look at him. “Si,” he whispered, lapsing for an instant into the antique Spanish of his past. His eyes flicked back to Asher’s, and the wry, sweet smile returned. “That, and other reasons. Master vampires distrust their fledglings, of course, for the resentment engendered by that dominance, that iron intimacy, is enormous. They distrust still more those who are not their fledglings, over whom they have no control. In any event to be vampire is to have an almost fanatic desire to command absolutely one’s environment and everyone about one. For we are, as you have observed, oddly fragile creatures in our way, besides being necessarily selfish and strong-willed to begin with in order to survive the transition to the vampire state at all.

  “So yes,” he added, segueing abruptly back to the original topic of conversation, “I believe Grippen would kill his own fledglings, did he think they might be leaguing with another vampire to dispute his mastery, either from fondness for his rival, like Lotta, or weakness, like Neddy, or resentment; though Danny King might accept Grippen’s dominance over himself, he hated Grippen for holding it over Charles and Anthea. Many things pointed to a vampire killing his own, and the logical candidate was Grippen. But there are two of them, as you said, and Grippen, like us all, is a creature of the night.”

  He paused for a moment, considering Asher sidelong from cold, pale eyes. Then he continued, “I believe this is what you seek?” His cold fingers took the lamp fromAsher’s hand, lifting it high as he stepped a short way into the cellar.

  What Asher had taken for a shadow denser than the rest he now saw was a doorway, its lintel barely five feet in height, its thick oak door hanging open to reveal a throat of blackness beyond. The light picked out the shapes of old stonework, a medieval ceiling groin and the top of a worn spiral of stone steps.

  “A merchant’s house once stood on this ground,” the vampire said, crossing the cellar with that odd, drifting walk, Asher at his heels. “Later it was an inn—the Goat and Compasses; originally, of course, it was ‘God Encompasseth Us,’ a pious motto painted above the door which did not save it from being burned by Cromwell’s troops.” He led the way carefully down the foot-hollowed twist of steps to the cellar that lay below—small, bare, and circular, containing nothing but the ruin of mildewed sacking, rats’ nests, and four bricks, set in a coffin-shaped rectangle in the middle of the floor to keep whatever had once rested upon them up off the damp.

  “London is full of such places,” Ysidro continued, his voice the whisper of a bleached ghost in the muffling darkness. “Places where old priories, inns, or houses were burned, their foundations later built upon by men who knew nothing of the cellars beneath.”

  Asher walked to the bricks, studied their layout thoughtfully, then returned to hold the lantern close to the framing of the stair’s narrow arch. Without a word, he ascended again, studying the walls carefully as he went. The door at the top, examined more thoroughly, had once been padlocked from the inside. The padlock remained closed—it was the hasp that had been ripped free of the wood.

  “Why not a hasp on the outside as well, for when he was gone?”

  “If he was gone,” Ysidro said, “what purpose would it serve beyond telling an intruder that there might be some thing of value hidden there? An empty coffin is not a thing one steals easily.”

  Behind him in the stair, the vampire’s soft-toned words continued to echo weirdly against the old stonework. “I have no doubt that this is one of the places where Calvaire slept, utterly beyond the reach of sunlight. Davies would have known of it and come here when he needed shelter.”

  “Didn’t help him much.” Asher scratched a corner of his mustache, fished from his pocket the padlock keys he had taken from Bully Joe’s ashes, and tried them in the lock. “It just made more work for his murderers, carrying his coffin up to the kitchen to ignite the body in the sunlight.” The second key sprang the lock open—Asher noted it, returned it to his pocket, and moved a pace or two down the steps to reexamine the ancient stone wall at the turn of the stairs. “Calvaire was his master; it’s clear he used Bully Joe’s knowledge of the neighborhood to purchase the ground lease on the building, so, of course, Bully Joe would have keys.” He frowned—even with the magnifying lens he took from his pocket, he did not find the thing he sought. “He said Calvaire was dead—he seemed pretty sure of it.”

  “Perhaps he buried him, as Anthea and I buried Danny and poor Ned Hammersmith. The poor…” Ysidro paused, looking about him at the narrow confines of the stair and the hairpin turn of the enclosing wall. A slight frown tugged at his sparse brows. “But if the coffin were carried up from the subcellar…”

  “They’d have had to carry it upright to get it around the corner, yes. I’m not certain, but I don’t think a single man could have done so with a body in it—carried it so firmly and lightly that it left no scratches on the walls or the doorjambs. Even two men carrying it at a steep angle wouldhave conceivably left some mark. There’s enough light in the cellar above to have begun burning the body there, so they couldn’t have carried it separately. And then there’s the door itself.”

  Simon followed him up the stairs and regarded the twisted hasp with its bent screws, the wood still clinging to their threads. In the ochre glow of the lamp, his eyes were somber—he was beginning to understand.

  “There is no mark of a crow on the doorjambs,” he said, and Asher recognized the Elizabethan word for spanner.

  “No,” Asher said. “Nor is there anything that could have been used for a fulcrum to get a lever under the door handle. It was jerked out with a straight pull. Again, it’s just within the realm of possibility that a human could have done it, but it isn’t very probable.”

  There was long silence, in which, faintly, Asher could hear the patter of renewed rain from above. Then Ysidro said, “But it cannot have been a vampire. Even had he worn a glove to protect his hand from the stake, the daylight would have destroyed him.”

  “Would it?” Asher led the way up the cellar steps to the gaslighted kitchen above. The coffin gaped on the floor before them, like some monstrous fish platter displaying a horrid chef d’oeuvre on the worn and ugly linoleum. In a kindling drawer near the stove, Asher found a piece of candle, angled it down the lamp chimney to get a flame, and bore it through the door that gave into the front part of the house.

  “Did Calvaire ever speak of Paris? Of what caused him to leave?”

  “No.” Ysidro drifted beside him, a soundless ghost in his gray suit. With the gas turned up full, it was obvious no one had crossed the dust-choked parlor or the hall from the front door. “He was not a man who dwelt upon the past,even so recent a past as that. Perhaps he had a reason, but many of us are that way. It is better so.”

  “You said when he came here that he ‘promenaded himself’—waited to make his kill until Grippen had contacted him, and swore fealty to Grippen, in exchange for Grippen’s permission to hunt. But it’s obvious that even an inexperienced fledgling, if he’s careful, can conceal himself from the two oldest known vampires in Europe, at least for a time.”

  Again Ysidro was silent, turning the implications of that over in his mind.

  “Was there ever any talk of vampires older than yourself? Much older, say, a hundred years older? Two hundred years?”

  An odd expression flickered in the back of Don Simon’s pale eyes. He paused on the stairs to the first floor, his pale hair haloed in the parlor gaslight behind him. “Of what are you thinking, James?”

  “Of vampirism,” Asher said quietly. “Of the slow change of the body, cell by cell, into something other than mortal flesh and mortal bone—of the growth of the vampire’s powers. My
wife’s a pathologist. I know that diseases change, like syphilis, the Plague, or chicken pox, even sometimes producing new symptoms, if they continue long enough without killing the patient.”

  “And you think the vampire state a disease?”

  “It’s a blood-borne contagion, isn’t it?”

  “That is not all that it is.”

  “Alcoholism alters the brain, driving its victims to madness,” Asher said. “High fevers can destroy the mind or parts of the mind; the mind itself can bring on physical ailments—nervousness, declines, what women call ‘vapors,’ brain fever. Any family practitioner could have told you that, even before Freud started doing his work on nervous hysteria.Emotional shock can cause anythingfrom a stroke to a miscarriage. If you’ve traveled in India, seen the things the fakirs do, you’ll know the mind can perform stranger feats upon the body than that.

  “What I’m getting at is this: Does vampirism have symptoms, developments, which only manifest themselves after a certain span of years? A long span, longer than most vampires live or can remember? Would one eventually, in the span of years, toughen even against daylight? And you didn’t answer my original question.”

  Instead of replying at once, Ysidro resumed his climb to the floor above, Asher following at his heels, the burning candle still in his hand. He lit the gas in the upper hall and opened the two doors there. One room was a parlor, the other a bedroom, both obviously long out of use.

  “It is an odd thing,” Ysidro said slowly, “but there are not many vampires in Europe—or in America, which has had its own troubles—much over two hundred and fifty years old. These days vampirism is a phenomenon of the cities, where the poor are uncounted and deaths are relatively invisible. But cities tend to trap vampires in their own cataclysms.”

  He opened the door at the end of the hall, leading to the attic stair. Asher paused briefly to study the two heavy hasps screwed into the wood of its inner side. Neither had been torn out; the padlocks, neatly open, were hooked through the steel staples on the doorframe.

  He tried Bully’s remaining keys out of sheer routine—two of them fitted. Unlike the cellar, the attic door had a single hasp on the outside, but it was clear from the locks that no one had forced his way in or out.

  They traded a glance, and Asher shrugged. “We might as well see what’s up there anyway—there may be papers.”

  “Dr. Grippen and I were the only two who survived the Fire of London,” Ysidro went on, as they ascended thestair. “I only lived by lucky chance. As far as I know, no Munich vampire survived the troubles of the forties, and no Russian vampire Napoleon’s invasion, occupation, and incineration of Moscow. Rome has always been a perilous city for the Undead, certainly since the founding of the Inquisition.”

  At the top of the attic stairs, the door stood open. A square of grimy yellowish light indicated a window and a street light somewhere below.

  “Qué va?” Ysidro whispered behind Asher in the dark. “Did he sleep here, the windows would be muffled…”

  It took Asher a moment, in the almost total darkness beyond the feeble circle of the candle’s light, to see what lay on the floor halfway between the door and the left-hand wall.

  “Calvaire?” he asked softly, as Ysidro brushed past him and strode to that grisly heap of bones, ash, and seared metal oddments. Buttons, brace buckles, the lacing tips of shoes, and the charred metal barrel of a stylographic pen all glinted briefly in the fluttering yellow glow as he came to stand behind the kneeling vampire. Then he looked on past them, to the farther wall. A hinged panel gaped open, showing a coffin within a small closet which would have been totally indistinguishable from the wall itself when shut. Thick draperies and shutters had been torn from the attic’s single window. In the silence, the rain on the low roof was like the ominous tattoo of Prussian drums.

  “At least a man,” he added, lowering his candle again to shed its weak radiance on the remains, “since there are no corset stays.” He was interested to note that, judging by the relative wholeness of the bones, Ysidro seemed to be correct about the French vampire’s age.

  The vampire lifted a gold ring clear of the mess and blew the thin coating of ash and dust from it. A chance draft made the candle flame waver; the diamond of its settingwinked like a bright and baleful eye. “Calvaire,” he affirmed softly. “So he must indeed have wakened, with the searing of the light, to stagger already dying from his coffin…”

  “Which is a curious thing,” Asher remarked, “if our killer, being a vampire himself, knew from the first that the head had to be cut off to prevent such a thing from happening. Almost as curious as the fact that the door downstairs wasn’t locked.” He stooped beside Ysidro to pick a couple of keys from the ghastly debris. He matched the wards and found them duplicates of Bully Joe’s keys. “There’s no mark of charring on the floor between the coffin’s place of concealment and the body, either. If, as you say, the flesh begins to burn at once…”

  “He could not have admitted the killer himself,” Ysidro said. “Whatever the capabilities of the killer, Calvaire at least could not have gone anywhere near the door at the bottom of the steps during the hours of daylight.”

  “And yet the killer entered that way.”

  Ysidro lifted an inquiring brow.

  “Had he not, he could simply have left the way he came, without unlocking the door at the bottom of the step at all. What it looks like is that Calvaire knew his killer, and admitted him himself, by night … Is it usual for a vampire to have two coffins in the same building?”

  “It is not unusual,” Ysidro said calmly. “Fledglings frequently take refuge with their masters. And then, there are few houses which are safe for vampires, and those which are, ofttimes become veritable rookeries of the Undead, as you yourself found in Savoy Walk. That was one of my reasons for keeping from you as many details as possible. Not for their protection, you understand, but for yours.”

  “I’m touched by your concern,” Asher said dryly. “Could the killer have killed or incapacitated Calvaire insome other way, leaving the body to be destroyed when daylight came?”

  The vampire did not answer for a moment, sitting hunkered beside the burned skeleton, his arms extended out over his knees. “I do not know,” he said at length. “But if he had broken Calvaire’s neck or back—and the skull seems to be lying at a strange angle, though that, of course, might simply be the way it rolled when the muscles were consumed—it would have incapacitated him, so that he lay here on the floor, conscious but unable to move, while the light slowly brightened in the window. If our killer is himself immune to daylight,” he added neutrally, “it is possible that he remained to watch.”

  “Another argument,” Asher said, “for the fact that Calvaire knew him, it being less entertaining to watch the sufferings of those to whom we are unknown and indifferent.”

  “Interesting.” Ysidro turned the ring he held this way and that, the candlelight shattering through its delicate facets to salt that alabaster face with a thousand points of colored fire. “The odd thing is that among vampires, there is a legend of an ancient vampire, so old and powerful that no one ever sees him anymore—so old that even other vampires cannot sense his passage. Even a hundred and fifty years ago, other vampires were avoiding his haunts. To them he was semifabulous, like a ghost. Traditions among them said that he had been a vampire since before the days of the Black Death.”

  “And what were his haunts?” Asher asked, knowing already what the Spaniard would say.

  The expressionless eyes raised from the glitter of the gem before them. “He slept—or was said to sleep—in the crypts below the charnels of the churchyard of the Holy Innocents, in Paris.”

  ELEVEN

  “IT IS NOT THE CITY THAT IT WAS.”

  If there were nuances tothat soft, light voice of bitterness, anger, or regret, it would have taken a vampire’s hyperacute perceptions to read them—Asher himself heard none. Around him the closed cab jostled and swayed. When his elbow,
raised where his hand, linked through the hanging strap, came in contact with the window, he felt through his coat sleeve the chill of the glass. The noises of the street came to him dimly: the clatter of wheels, on pavement of wood and asphalt, rebounding from the high brown walls of the immeubles; the occasional hoots of motorcars; the pungent cursing of the sidewalk vendors; and the gay, drifting frenzy of violin and accordion that spoke of some caf’ conc’ in progress.

  Blindfolded, he could see nothing, but the sounds of Paris were distinctive and as bright a kaleidoscope as its sights. No one, he thought, who had ever been here ever questioned how it was in this place that Impressionism came to be.

  Ysidro’s voice went on, “I have no sense of being at home here—this sterile, inorganic town where everything is thrice washed before and after anyone touches it. It is the same everywhere, of course, but in Paris it seems particularly ironic. They seem to have taken this man Pasteur very seriously.”

  The noises changed; the crowd of vehicles around them seemed more dense, but the echoes of buildings were gone. Asher smelled the sewery stink of the river. A bridge, then—and judging by the length and the din of a small square and buildings halfway along, it could only be the Pont Neuf, a name which, like that of New College, Oxford, had not been accurate for a number of centuries. In a short time, they turned right, and continued in that direction. Asher calculated they were headed for the old Marais district, the one-time aristocratic neighborhoods that had not been badly damaged by either the Prussians, the Communards, or Baron Haussmann, but said nothing. If Ysidro chose to believe that blindfolding him would keep him in absolute ignorance of the whereabouts of the Paris vampires, he—and they—were welcome to do so.