Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  Ysidro went on softly, his eyes never leaving hers, “Asfor Henriette, she was a lady of Versailles, speaking even the language of ‘this country,’ as they used to call it: that enchanted Cythera that floated like an almond blossom balanced on a zephyr’s breath above a cesspit. I understand her comparing the world after Napoleon marched through it to what it was before and finding it wanting. I think she simply grew tired of watching for danger, tired of struggling—tired of life. I saw her the last time I visited Paris, before the Prussians came, and I was not surprised to hear that she did not survive the siege. Did she ever speak, Elysée, of the Vampire of the Innocents?”

  “No.” Elysée fanned herself, a nervous gesture, since Asher had observed that the other vampires seemed to feel neither heat nor cold. The others were slowly gathering around his chair in a semicircle behind Hyacinthe, facing Elysée on the divan and Simon at her back. “Yes. Only that there was one.” She made a scornful gesture which did not quite disguise her discomfort at the topic.

  “The Innocents was a foul place, the ground mucky with the bodies rotting a few inches beneath the feet, skulls and bones lying everywhere on the ground. It stank, too. In the booksellers’ and lingerie vendors’ stands that were built in the arches, you could look up and see through the chinks in the rafters the bones stacked in the lofts above. The Great Flesh-Eater of Paris, we called it. François and the others—Henriette, Jean de Valois, old Louis-Charles d’Auvergne—sometimes talked about the stories of a vampire who lived there, a vampire no one ever saw. After I became vampire I went there to look for him, but the place … I didn’t like it.” An old fear flickered briefly in those hard emerald eyes.

  “Nobody blames you for that, honey, I’m sure,” Hyacinthe purred with malicious sympathy. “I’m thinking if he ever bided there at all, he’s got to have been crazy as a loon.”

  “Did Calvaire ever go there?” Asher inquired, turning his head to look up into her face, and she smiled down at him, beautiful as a long-contemplated sin.

  “It was all gone ’fore Calvaire was even bit, honey.”

  “Did he go to the catacombs, then? Did he ever speak of this—this spectral vampire?”

  “Calvaire,” sniffed one of the other vampires, a dark-haired boy whom Asher had guessed had barely begun to grow a beard when Elysée had claimed him. “The Great Vampire of Paris. He might just.”

  Asher glanced over at him curiously in the shimmering refulgence of light. “Why?”

  Behind him, Hyacinthe replied with silky scorn, “Because it was the kind of thing the Great Vampire of Paris would do.”

  “He was very taken with being—one of us,” explained Elysée slowly.

  The brown-haired young man, Serge, seated himself gracefully on the divan at Elysée’s feet. “We all have a little fun, when we can,” he explained with a grin that would have been disarming, but for the fangs. “Calvaire was just a little grandiose about it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Hyacinthe’s fingers touched his hair. “You wouldn’t, under the circumstances.”

  “Calvaire was a braggart, a boaster,” Elysée said, closing her swan’s-down fan, stroking the soft white fluff between fingers as hard and as pale as the ivory of the sticks. “Like some others.” Her glance touched Hyacinthe for a malignant instant. “To sit with your victim in an opera box, a café, or a carriage—to feel the blood with your lips through the skin, spinning it out as long as you can, waiting … then to go drink elsewhere, only to quench the thirst, and go back the next night to him again, to that personal, innocent death…” She smiled dreamily oncemore, and Asher was conscious of a slight movement among the vampires behind him and of the swift flick of Ysidro’s eyes.

  “But Valentin carried it a step further, a dangerous step. Perhaps it was partly that he wanted power, that he wanted fledglings of his own, though he dared not make them here in Paris, where I rule, where I dominated him through that which he gave me in passing from life to … everlife. But I think he did it for the—the ‘kick,’ as you say in English—alone. He would sometimes let his victim know, especially the victims who found it piquant to know how near they flirted with death.

  “He would lead them into it, seduce them … he had a fine grace and would play death like an instrument, drinking it, in all its perverse sweetness. Bien sûr, he could not be permitted to continue…”

  “It is a dangerous thing,” the boy vampire to Asher’s right said, “to let anyone know just who we are and what we are, no matter what the reason.”

  “He was furious when I forbade it him,” Elysée remembered. “Furious when I forbade him to make fledglings of his own, his own coterie … for that was the reason he gave. But I think that it was just that he enjoyed it.”

  “But then,” Hyacinthe murmured, “the ones he told always expected to win.”

  Something in her voice made Asher look up; her hand caught him very lightly under the jaw forcing his head back so that his eyes met hers. Under her fingers, he could feel the movement of his own pulse; she was looking down into his eyes and smiling. For a moment it did not seem to him that he breathed, sensing Simon’s readiness to spring and knowing there was no way—even if Elysée’s fledglings did not try to stop him—that he could cross the distance in the time it would take Hyacinthe to strike.

  Elysée’s voice was soft, as if she feared to tip somefragile balance. “Let him alone.” He saw Hyacinthe’s mocking smile widen and felt the slight tensing of her fingertips against his throat.

  Quite deliberately, he put up his hand and grasped the cold wrist. For an instant it was like pulling at the limb of a tree; then it yielded, mockingly fluid in his, and she stepped back as he stood up. But she still smiled into his eyes, lazily amused, as if he’d failed some test of nerve, and there was in the honey-dark eyes the savoring of what it was like to seduce a victim who knew what was happening. His eyes held hers; then, just as deliberately, he dismissed her and turned back to Elysée.

  “So you don’t believe Calvaire sought out this—this most ancient vampire in Paris.”

  The fan snapped open again, indignant. Elysée’s eyes were on Hyacinthe, not on him. “I am the most ancient vampire in Paris, Monsieur le Professeur,” she said decidedly. “There is no other, nor has there been for many years. And en tout cas, you—and others—” her glance shot spitefully from Hyacinthe to Ysidro, who had somehow come around the divan to her side and within easy grasping range of Asher “—would do well to remember that the single law among vampires, the single law that all must obey, is that no vampire will kill another vampire. And no vampire…” Her eyes narrowed, moved to Asher, and then back to the slender, delicate Spaniard standing at her side. “… will do that which endangers other vampires by giving away their haunts, their habits, or the very fact of their existence, to humankind.”

  Ysidro inclined his head, his pale hair falling forward over the gray velvet of his collar, like cobweb in the bonfire of gaslight and crystal. “Fear nothing, mistress. I do not forget.” His gloved hand closed like a manacle around Asher’s wrist, and he led him from the salon.

  TWELVE

  “SHE’S AFRAID,” Asher said, later. “Not that she didn’t have plenty of company,” he added, remembering the cold touch of Hyacinthe’s fingers on his throat. “Are all master vampires that nervous of their own power?”

  “Not all.” Behind them, the rattle of the cab horse’s retreating hooves faded along the wood and asphalt of the street, dying away into the late-night hush. Down at the corner, voices could still be heard in a workingmen’s estaminet, but for the most part the district of Montrouge was silent. It was as different as possible from the crumbling elegance of Elysée’s hôtel or the rather grubby slum in which it stood. Here the street was lined with the tall, sooty, dun stone buildings so common to Paris, the shabby shops on the ground floors shuttered tight, the windows of the flats above likewise closed, dark save for a chink of light here and there in attics where servants still lab
ored. Simon’s feet made no sound on the narrow asphalt footway. His voice might have been the night wind murmuring to itself in a dream.

  “It varies from city to city, from person to person. Elysée has the disadvantage of being not that much older than her fledglings and of not having been vampire long herself when she became, in effect, Master of Paris. And she has not always been wise in her choice of fledglings.”

  “Do you think Calvaire contacted the Vampire of the Innocents as part of a power play against Elysée?”

  “I suspect that he tried.” Simon stopped in the midst of the row, before an anonymous door. The main entrance to the catacombs was on the Place Denfert-Rochereau, which would be uncomfortably full of traffic even at this hour—the rattle of carriages and fiacres on the boulevards was audible even on this silent street. The moon was gone. Above the cliff of buildings and chimneys behind them, the sky was the color of soot.

  “Elysée is certainly convinced of it,” the Spaniard went on. “She was, you observed, most anxious that her fledglings—and particularly Hyacinthe, whom I guess to be not of her getting—disabuse themselves of any notion of doing the same. Did he exist at all, this Vampire of the Innocents, he would be vastly more powerful than Elysée—vastly more powerful than any of us.”

  “A day stalker, in fact.”

  Simon did not reply. For a long time the vampire stood as if abstracted in thought, and Asher wondered what the night sounded like to the vampire, whether those quick ears could pick up the breath of sleepers in the house beside which they stood or that queer, preternatural mind could sense the moving color of their dreams. At length the vampire signed to him, and Asher, after a swift glance up and down the deserted street, produced his picklocks from an inner pocket and went to work.

  “The watchman is in the office at the other entrance,” the vampire murmured, the sound more in Asher’s mindthan his ears. “Doubtless asleep—we should remain undisturbed.”

  The door gave under Asher’s cautious testing. He pocketed the picklocks and let Ysidro precede him into the cramped vestibule which was all there was above ground at this end of the catacombs. He heard the soft creak of a hinge, the muffled sounds of someone rifling a cupboard; then the scratch of a match. Ysidro had found a guard’s lantern. Asher stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

  With its boot-scarred desk in front of the iron grille that closed off one end of the room, the place was barely large enough for the two of them to move about. The lantern stood on a corner of the desk, shedding eerie illumination across Ysidro’s long hands as he sorted through a ring of keys, skeletal and yet queerly beautiful in the isolation of the light. “So efficient, the French,” the vampire murmured. “Here is a map of the passages, but I suggest that you stay close to me.”

  “I’ll be able to see the light for some distance,” Asher pointed out, taking the thumbed and grubby chart.

  Ysidro paused in the act of unlocking the grille. “That isn’t what I mean.”

  They descended the stair, narrow and spiraling endlessly down into the darkness.

  “Do you believe he is really here, then?” Asher asked softly, his hands pressed to the stone of wall and centerpost to keep his balance on the perilous wedges of the steps. “That he is still here at all?”

  “It is the logical place. As Elysée pointed out, the sewers are perpetually damp. Whereas we are not subject to the normal ills of the body, when a vampire begins to grow old—to give up—he does begin to suffer from joint ache. Some of the very old vampires I knew here in Paris, Louis du Bellière-Fontages and Marie-Therèse de St. Arouac,did. Louis had been a courtier of Henri the Third, one of his lace-trimmed tigresses—I knew him for years. I don’t think he ever got used to the way the Sun King tamed the nobility. Les fruits de Limoges, he called them—china fruit, gloss without juice. But the fact is that he was afraid, passing himself off at Versailles. He was growing old, old and tired, when I saw him last; his joints hurt him, and going outside his own hôtel frightened him. He was hunting less and less, living on beef blood and stolen chickens and the odd Black Mass baby. I was not surprised when I heard he had been found and killed.”

  “When was that?”

  “During one of the witchcraft scandals of the Sun King’s reign.” Simon halted at the bottom of the stairs, listening to the darkness, turning his head this way and that.

  “If the killer we’re looking for exists,” Asher murmured, and the echoes picked up his voice as if all the dead sleeping in the dark whispered back at him, “he’ll be in London still.”

  Ysidro shook his head, a gesture so slight it was barely perceptible. “I think you are right.” His voice was like the touch of wind among the ancient tunnels. “I feel no presence here,” he breathed. “Nothing—human, vampire, ghost. Only a muted resonance from the bones themselves.” He held the lantern aloft, and the gold light glistened on damp stone walls, wet pebbles, and mud underfoot, dying away in the intensity of the subterranean gloom. “Nevertheless, follow close. The galleries cross and branch—it is easy to lose one’s way.”

  Like spectres in a nightmare, they moved on into the darkness.

  For an endless time, they traversed the bare galleries of the ancient gypsum mines beneath Montrouge, black tunnels hewn of living rock whose walls seemed to press suffocatingly upon them, and whose ceiling, stained with the soot of tourists’ candles, brushed the top of Asher’s head as he followed Ysidro’s fragile silhouette into the abyss.

  Now and then they passed pillars, shoring up the vast weight of the earth to prevent subsidence of the streets above, and the sight of them caused Asher’s too-quick imagination to flirt with what it would be like, should the ceiling collapse and trap him here. In other places, the lamplight glanced over the black squares of branching passageways, dark as no darkness above the ground could be, or flashed across the water of wells, mere inches beneath the level of their feet.

  And in all that realm of the dead, Asher thought, he was the only living man. The man who walked beside him, who listened so intently to that darkness, had not been alive for three and a half centuries; the man whose lair they sought had been dead for nearly six.

  If indeed he had ever existed at all.

  Who was the ghost that the dead believed in?

  “Apparently there have been no killings of the Paris vampires.” The echoes traded the remark back and forth among themselves down the branching corridors; Asher was uncomfortably reminded of the peeping croak of the chorus of frogs said to guard the way to Hell. “Why would he have gone after Calvaire?”

  “Perhaps Calvaire told him too much.” Ysidro paused to make a chalk arrow on the wall, then walked on. “Calvaire wanted to become a master vampire. If he spoke to the Vampire of the Innocents at all, perhaps he offended him or roused in him a resolve to prevent Calvaire from gaining the power he sought; perhaps Calvaire had some other scheme afoot besides power alone. We do not know when Calvaire spoke to him. He might have fled Paris because of him, rather than because he had been thwarted by Elysée. And it may be something entirely different—the fact thatCalvaire was a Protestant heretic, for instance. A hundred years ago, I would never have employed you myself, had I suspected you of adherence to that heresy, no matter how well qualified you were.”

  “Try applying for a government job in Ireland,” Asher grunted. “It still doesn’t explain why he’d have killed Calvaire’s associates in London.”

  “If we find his lair,” the vampire said softly, “such matters may become more clear.”

  Ahead of them, something white gleamed in the darkness—pillars? They drew closer, and the pale blurs resolved themselves into oblong patches whitewashed carefully onto the black-painted pillars of a gate. Surrounded by utter darkness, there was something terrifying about its stark simplicity—final, silent, twenty meters below street level, and carved of native rock. Above the lintel, black letters on a white ground spelled out the words:

  STOP!

  THIS IS THE EMPIRE O
F THE DEAD.

  Beyond the gate, the bones began.

  The catacombs were the ossuary of Paris. All the ancient cemeteries within the confines of the city had been emptied into these rock-hewn galleries, the bones neatly ranged into horrible six-foot retaining walls built of tibias and skulls, with everything else dumped in a solid jumble behind, like firewood in a box. Brown and shiny, the bones stretched out of sight into the darkness of the branching galleries, the eye sockets of the courses of skulls seeming to turn with the lantern’s gliding light, an occasional bony jaw seeming to smile. Nobles decapitated in the Terror, streetsweepers,washerwomen,monks,Merovingiankings—they were all here somewhere, side by side in macabre democracy.

  The Empire of the Dead indeed, Asher thought. They passed an altar, like the gates, painted simple black and white, a dim shape that seemed to shine out of the darkness. Before the bones were occasional placards, announcing from which cemetery these tumbled remains had been taken, or exhorting the viewer, in French or in Latin, to recall his own mortality and remember that all things were dust.

  As an Englishman, Asher was conscious of a desire to pretend that this taste for the gruesome was a manifestation of some aspect of the French national character, but he knew full well that his own countrymen came here in droves. Following Simon as he wound farther and farther back through the narrow tunnels of the ossuary, pausing every now and then to mark the walls with numbered arrows to guide them back, he was conscious of the terrible fascination of the place, the morbid urge to muse, like Hamlet, on those anonymous relics of former ages.

  But then, he wondered, to how many of those brown, weathered skulls could his companion have said, “I knew him well…”?

  That train of thought led to others, and he asked, “Did you ever have your portrait painted?” The vampire’s glance touched the ranks of bones that heaped the walls in a head-high wainscot all around him, and he nodded, unsurprised.