Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  He was uncomfortably aware that the Paris vampires had not even the threat of the day killer to reconcile them to the presence of a human in their midst.

  “My most vivid memories of Paris are of its mud, of course,” the vampire went on quietly. “Everyone’s were, who knew it then. It was astounding stuff, la boue de Paris—black and vile, like a species of oil. You could never eradicate either its stain or its smell. It clung to everything, and you could nose Paris six miles away in open country. In the days when every gentleman wore white silk stockings, it was pure hell.” The faintest hint of self-mockery crept into his voice, and Asher pictured that still and haughty face framed in the white of a court wig.

  “The beggars all smelled of it, too,” Ysidro added.“Hunting in the poor quarters was always a nightmare. Now…” He paused, and there was a curious flex in that supple voice.

  “It would take me a long time to relearn Paris. Everything has changed. It is strange territory to me now. I do not know its boltholes or hiding places; I no longer even speak the language properly. Every time I say ci instead of ce, je ne l’aime point instead of je ne l’aime pas, every time I say je fit quelquechose instead of je l’ai fait, I mark myself as a stranger.”

  “You only mark yourself as a foreigner who has learned French from a very old book,” Asher replied easily. “Have you ever talked to a Brahman in London for the first time? Or heard an American southerner speak of ‘redding up a room’?” The cab stopped; under the silk scarf bound over his eyes, Asher could detect very little light and knew that the street itself was quite dark, particularly for a city as brightly illuminated as Paris. The place was quiet, too, save for the far-off noises of traffic in some nearby square—the Place de la Bastille at a guess—but the smell was the smell of poverty, of too many families sharing too few privies, of cheap cooking, and of dirt. The Marais, Asher knew, had declined drastically from the days when Louis XV had courted Jeanne Poisson through its candlelit salons.

  There was a slight jogging as the vampire got out of the cab and the muted exchange of voices and, presumably, francs. Then a light, firm hand touched his arm, guiding him, and he heard the cab rattle away down the cobbles. “Do you speak Spanish any more at all?”

  There was level pavement, then a step down, and a sense of close walls and cold shade—the doorway vestibule whose gates would open into the central court of one of the big old hôtels particuliers. Beside him, very quiet,came Ysidro’s voice: “I doubt I could even make myself understood in Madrid.”

  “Have you never gone back there, then?”

  In the ensuing moment of silence, Asher could almost see Ysidro’s eyes resting on him with their calm, noncommittal gaze while the vampire sifted through all possible responses for the one which would give the least. “What would be the point?” he asked at last. “My people are, and have been since the Reconquista, suspicious and intolerant.” Asher realized with a small start that by my people he meant Spaniards, not vampires. “With the Inquisition probing every cellar for heretics and Jews, what chance would a vampire stand? It is possible in most circumstances to avoid the touch of silver, but such avoidance is, in civilized countries, not marked. Were it noticed in Spain in those days, it would have been fatal.”

  Asher heard then a faint scratching, like the furtive scuffle of a mouse behind a wainscot, as the vampire scraped at the panels of the door with his nail, a sound which only other vampires would hear.

  But other vampires, of course, would have detected their voices in the street.

  He heard nothing within, but sensed feet floating weightlessly down the stair; his heart, it seemed, was thumping uncomfortably fast. “Do they know about me?” he asked.

  They had taken the night mail by way of Calais. The porters had grumbled at the size and awkwardness of the huge leather-and-iron trunk that was ticketed as part of Asher’s luggage, but had been surprised at its comparative lightness. “Wot you got in there, mate, bleedin’ feathers?”

  “I trust that all travel arrangements will go as we have made them,” Ysidro had commented, leaning on the Lord Warden’s aft rail and watching the few twinkling lights onthe Admiralty Pier fade into the thin soup of iron-colored mist. “But it never pays to take chances.”

  He glanced beside him at Asher, whose mind had already recorded the slight flush of color in the white cheeks, the warmth in those cool fingers. Standing beside him, gloved hands on the rail and collar turned up against the raw cold of the night, Asher had been conscious of a vague disgust and alarm, not at the vampire, but at himself, for noting these signs as a mere deductive detail and not the certain evidence of some poor wretch’s murder in a London slum. He had felt angry at himself and frustrated, as he had often been in his latter dealings with the Foreign Office, burdened with a sense of performing what was only marginally the lesser of two colossal wrongs.

  The vampire’s gaze had turned, as if he could still descry the dark shape of Dover’s cliffs, invisible now in the west. “At the risk of sounding crude,” he had gone on carefully, “I would like to point out to you that at present I am the only one protecting you from Grippen and his cadre. Were you to destroy me, you might perhaps ensure your lady’s safety for a season, for I am the only one who knows the terms of our agreement…”

  Asher had started, relief loosening a knot of apprehension in his chest that had been with him, it seemed, so long that he had almost forgotten its origin.

  With the possibility of a daylight-hunting vampire looming uneasily in his mind, he had not dared another meeting with Lydia, but it had been one of the hardest things he had ever done simply to take his leave of her by anonymous telegram. Ysidro, he presumed, would be able to protect him in Paris—if protecting him was in fact his intention—but he turned cold with dread at the thought of Lydia staying in London alone. Only the knowledge that she was enormously sensible and would wait, as ordered, to hear from him before undertaking anything remotelydangerous—the knowledge that she understood the situation—made it bearable and, then, bearable only in relative terms.

  He felt a surge of gratitude toward the vampire of which he was almost ashamed—gratitude and surprise that Ysidro would have told him this.

  “But you would never be able to go near her again,” the vampire went on. “The others would track you and destroy you, as one who knows too much. In so doing, they would undoubtedly find her as well.”

  Asher glanced sourly at his companion. “And how do I know that won’t be the case in any event, when this affair is over?”

  The vampire’s gaze had been unfathomable in the dim glow of the steamer’s deck lights, but Asher thought he heard a trace of unhuman amusement in his voice. “From that, too, I shall protect you. Do you not trust me, as I perforce trust you?”

  As usual, he could not tell whether Ysidro was being ironic or not.

  Long before the train had reached the Gare du Nord, Ysidro had left their compartment; Asher had not seen him anywhere in the station during the nuisance of customs in the Salle des Bagages, nor in the square or the streets outside. He was becoming used to this. The sky was already paling; he’d wired ahead to the Chambord, a small hotel in the Rue de la Harpe where he often stayed when in Paris in his Oxford persona, and they had rooms waiting for him. Entering the tiny lobby, with its fusty smells of cooking and its moldering Empire furnishings, it had troubled him that in all the years that he had known Paris, the city had been the abode of vampires. That was true of London as well, and he wondered if he would ever be able to return to the way in which he had once looked on the world.

  Of course, early on in his career, he had lost the innocenceof looking on the world as the bright surface of a beautiful pond. His tamperings with the Foreign Office, with the shadow life of information, and the murky dramas into which the cursed Department had pitchforked him had taken care of that. But beneath his continual awareness of secrets, boltholes, and dangers, there was a new awareness, as if he had suddenly become cognizant, not only of the fi
sh that swam beneath the surface of the pond, but of things utterly unimaginable that moved through the black mud at its bottom.

  He had slept until late in the day in his small room up under the high bulge of the roof slates, then bathed and dressed in a thoughtful frame of mind. He had written to Lydia, assuring her of his safe arrival, and mailed the letter enclosed in another to one of his students who had agreed to forward anything for Miss Merridew. It would reach her a day late, but better that, he reasoned, than risk the vampires tracing her. After a light dinner in a café, he sought out the Place des Innocents, the square near the vast central markets of the city, where once the Church of the Holy Innocents and its notorious cemetery had stood.

  There was nothing there now—a tree-lined place with a Renaissance fountain, hemmed in by the gray bulk of the Halles on one side and high, brown-fronted immeubles on three others. The vampire of the Holy Innocents had slept in the crypt, Ysidro had said—like Rhys the Minstrel, haunting the crypts of the old Church of St. Giles near the river until the town grew large enough around him so that its inhabitants became strangers to one another and did not notice one more white-faced stranger walking the night in their midst.

  Standing now at Ysidro’s side, straining his ears to catch even the whisper of descending feet crossing the cobbled court beyond the door, he wondered if that crypt was still there, buried beneath the soil like the subcellar ofCalvaire’s house in Lambeth, forgotten to all save those who were interested in places proof against the light of day.

  The vampires might know. That and other things. He had turned from the Place des Innocents, followed the Rue St. Denis toward the gray sheet of the river, shining between the dove-colored buildings of its banks. To them, this startlingly clean city, with its immaculate streets, its chestnut trees rusty with autumn, was only a topcoat of varnish on a dark swamp of memories, another city entirely.

  He had stood for some time on the bank above the quays of the Seine, staring at the gray tangle of bridges upstream and down, the gothic forest of pinnacles that clustered on the Ile de la Cité and the square, dreaming towers of Notre Dame. And just beneath them, on the embankment, he had gazed consideringly at the massive iron grillworks that barred passers-by from the subterranean mazes of the Paris sewers.

  “The sewers?” Elysée de Montadour wrinkled her long nose in a deliberate gesture of distaste, her diamonds winking in the blaze of the gaslight. “What vampire in his right mind would haunt them? Brrr!” She shivered affectedly. All her gestures, Asher observed, were theatrical, a conscious imitation of human mannerism rather than a reminiscence of its actual spontaneity, as if she had studied something not native to her. He found himself preferring Don Simon’s uncanny stillness—the Spanish vampire stood, gray-gloved hands resting like hunting cats on the curving Empire back of the lady’s divan, seeming by comparison more than ever immobile—petrified long ago, as Lydia had said, in ectoplasmic ivory.

  “Do you ever hunt in them?” Though none of the other vampires in the long, gold-papered salon came near them, he was conscious of the light run of their voices behindhim, as they played cards with spectral speed and deftness or chatted with the half-murmuring whisper of the wind. Seated in a spindly Louis XVI chair opposite Elysée, he knew they were watching him and listening as only vampires could listen, like so many suave and mocking sharks lying just beneath the surface of water, whose shore he could never hope to reach in time. In one corner of the salon, a tall girl whose dark shoulders rose like bronze above a gown of oyster-colored satin played the piano—Tchaikovsky, but with a queer, dark curl to it, a sensuousness and syncopation, like music trickling from behind a mirror that looked into Hell.

  “Foi, and subject myself to the rheumatism?” Elysée laughed, a cold and tinkling sound without mirth, and made a great play with her swan’s-down fan.

  “And for what, enfin?” One of the graceful young men who made up her coterie of fledglings lounged over to the end of her divan. This one was brown-haired, his blue eyes bright against rounded and beautiful features; Asher wondered if Elysée had made them all vampires for their looks. Like all of the half dozen or so of Elysée’s cadre, he was dressed in the height of fashion, his jet black evening clothes meticulously tailored, contrasting sharply with the white of his shirt and of the flesh above. “A sewer sweeper, whom one must kill without conversation and hide, like a dog burying carrion? Where is the fun in that?” His fangs gleamed as he grinned down at Asher.

  Elysée shrugged alabaster shoulders above a dark green gown. “In any case, their superintendents count the sweepers very carefully when they go down, and when they come up. And they are canaille, as Serge says, and no fun in the hunt.” She smiled briefly, dreamy delight in her green eyes with their terrible vampire glitter, like a greedy girl savoring the taste of forbidden liqueur. “Alors, there are eight hundred miles of sewers down there. He wouldwither up like a prune, this Great, Terrible, Ancient Vampire of Paris whom no one has ever seen…”

  “What about the catacombs?” Simon asked softly, disregarding the mockery in her voice. A curious silence lifted into the room like an indrawn breath. The piano stilled.

  “We all been there, sure.” The dark girl rose from the instrument’s bench, moved across the room with a deliberate, lounging slowness that somehow partook of the same eerie weightlessness that comprised the other vampires’ speed. Instinctively Asher forced himself to concentrate on watching her, sensing that if he did not, she would be all but invisible in the movement of his eye. They had been speaking French—Ysidro’s, as he had said, not only old-fashioned but with an occasional queer childish singsong quality to its pronunciation—but this girl spoke English, with a liquid American drawl. In spite of the almost unbearable lentitudinousness of her movements, she was behind him before he was ready for it, her tiny hand molding its way idly across his shoulders, as if memorizing the contours of them through the cloth of his coat. “They keep count there, too, of workers and visitors. You hid there, didn’t you, Elysée, during the siege?”

  There was just a touch of malice in her voice, like the artfully accidental stab of a pin, and Elysée’s green eyes flickered at the reminder of what must have been an undignified flight from the rioting Communards. “And who would not have?” she demanded after a moment. “I took refuge there during the Terror as well, with Henriette du Caens. They weren’t ossuaries then, you know—just old quarries in the feet of Montrouge, stretching away into darkness. Bien sûr, Henriette used to say she thought there might be—something else—there. But I never saw nor heard anything.” There was a touch of defiance in her voice.

  “But you were a fledgling then,” Simon replied in his soft voice, “were you not?”

  “Fledgling or not, I was not blind.” She tapped half-irritably, half-playfully at his knuckles with her fan—when the ivory sticks came down Simon’s gloved fingers were no longer beneath them, though Asher did not see the hand move. She turned back to Asher, a handsome woman if not pretty, with the face and body of a woman in her prime and eyes that had long since ceased to be human. She shrugged.

  “Eh bien, that was long ago. And toward the end Henriette feared everything. François and I had to hunt for her, among the mobs that roamed the city by night; we brought them to her there. Aye, and risked our lives, when wearing the wrong color of kerchief could set them all baying ‘ala lanterne’ like the pack of scurvy hounds they were! François de Montadour was the original owner of this hôtel, you understand.” Her wave, wrist properly leading, was airy and formal, like a painting by David; the white plumes nodded in her hair. There were a dozen huge candelabra burning as well as the gas jets along walls and ceiling—the light caught in the glittering festoons of crystal lusters, in the long mirrors that ranged one wall, and in the black glass of the twelve-foot windows along the other, all thrown back in an unholy halo around her.

  “He, Henriette, and I were the only ones to escape the Terror, and even François did not, in the end, escape. After it was o
ver…” She shrugged again, a gesture designed to show off the whiteness of her shoulders. Behind him, Asher could feel the dark American girl move closer to his chair, her body touching his back, her hands resting on his shoulders, the cold of them seeming to radiate against his flesh.

  “Henriette never recovered, though she lived near a life span after that. Eh bien, she was after all a lady of Versailles.She used to say, nights when we had brought her some drunkard whose blood filled her with wine in turn, that no one who had not experienced the sweetness of those days could ever understand just what it was which hadbeen lost. Perhaps she could not get used to the fact that it was gone.”

  “She was an old lady,” the dark girl’s voice said, syrupy and languorous from behind Asher’s head. “She didn’t need no drunkard’s blood to loosen her tongue about the old days, about the kings and about Versailles.” Her nails idled at the ends of his hair, as if she toyed with a pet dog. “Just an old lady whinin’ for yesterday.”

  “When one day you return to Charleston, Hyacinthe,” Ysidro said quietly in the English in which Hyacinthe spoke, “and see where the American army shelled the streets where you grew up, when you find that men themselves have changed there, I hope you will remember.”

  “Men never change.” She shifted her body again, her hip touching Asher’s shoulder, a disturbing shiver passing into his body as if communicated by electricity. “They only die… and there are always more men.”

  “Even so.”

  Asher found himself sitting very still, aware that Simon, behind Elysée’s divan, was poised on the verge of lightning speed; aware, too, of the touch of a quarter-inch of Hyacinthe’s fingertip against the skin of his throat. At Ysidro’s request, he had left his silver chains behind at the hotel. They would never have let him in, the vampire had said, if they’d suspected, and such a show of bad faith would have damaged Ysidro’s own somewhat questionable standing among them. Though Asher could not see it, he was aware of the quadroon girl’s glance, teasing and defiant, daring Simon to stop her if she decided to kill this human protégé of his, challenging him to try his speed against hers.