Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  He paused for a moment on the pavement. A whisper of straying wind moved in his dark cloak and lifted the pale hair from his collar. For a moment, it seemed as if he himself would drift onto it like a vast gray leaf. Then he walked on.

  “It is not merely that we are dependent on the nourishment of the blood, James, and the psychic feed of the passing of the soul. Many of us are addicted to them. Some suffer this to greater or lesser degree, and some, in fact, take great pleasure in the addiction. Lotta used to prolong her fasts from the ultimate kill as much as possible, to sweeten them when they came, but it is a dangerous practice. In some, the craving rises almost to madness. It can make us hasty or careless, and in all things concerning us, carelessness is death.”

  They were nearing the miniature maze of streets near the river where the Hotel Chambord stood; the cold smell of the Seine hung in the air, and already, down the cobbled side streets, the milk sellers were about. Asher studied sidelong the delicate profile, the white, hooked nose and loose thickness of colorless hair.

  “You haven’t relaxed in three hundred and fifty years,” he said softly, “have you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you relax when you sleep?”

  The vampire did not look at him. “I do not know. We all learn too late that sleep is not the same as it was.”

  “Do you dream?”

  Ysidro paused, and again Asher had the impression he was on the point of being lifted and whirled away by the faint stirring of the wind. A faint flex line of a bitter smiletouched the white silk of the skin, then smoothed away. “Yes,” Simon said expressionlessly. “I dream. But they are not like human dreams.”

  Asher wondered whether, when Simon sought whatever lair he had made for himself in Paris, he would dream of Brother Anthony, sorting bones in the dark.

  Then suddenly he was alone. Somewhere in the back of his mind he had the sensation of having once dreamed, himself, about a slim, cloaked form walking away toward the whitish mists of the Seine, but that was all.

  SAVAGE MURDERS IN LONDON

  THE RIPPER STALKS AGAIN?

  A series of shocking crimes rocked London last night when nine people—six women and three men—were brutally murdered in the Whitechapel and Limehouse districts of London between the hours of midnight and four in the morning. The first of the bodies, that of variety actress Sally Shore, was found by dustmen in the alley behind the Limehouse Road. She had been much bruised and cut about, so savagely that, when found, her body was almost completely drained of blood. The eight other victims, found in various places in the neighborhood, were in a similar condition. Police remarked upon the fact that in no instance were screams or cries for help heard and upon the fact that, though the bodies were nearly drained of blood, very little was found at the scenes, leading them to believe that the murders took place elsewhere and the bodies were transported to the places where they were found…

  Asher set down the newspaper beside his midday breakfast of croissant and coffee, feeling cold to his bones. Nine!

  What had Simon said? After a long fast, the time always comes when the craving sets in and will not be denied.

  Nine.

  He felt sick.

  It wasn’t the London vampires. That much he knew. They had to live in London—Grippen, the Farrens, Chloé. But a strange vampire, hiding from them in London, might indeed be traceable through his kills, by those who knew what to look for. He had lain hidden as long as he could, fasting and silently murdering …

  He glanced at the date. It was this morning’s paper. Last night, when he and Simon had been stalking Anthony in the darkness of the catacombs, the murderer had struck again. This time it was not vampires who were his victims, but humans.

  Admittedly, he thought, glancing down the article, not particularly important humans—the women were all listed as “variety actresses,” seamstresses, or simply, “young women.” Given the area in which they were found and given the hour they were killed, there was no real doubt as to their true professions. But it made their murders no less atrocious; and it made the lives of everyone else in London no more secure.

  They had not cried out. Horribly, the thin, dreamy face of the woman on the train returned to him, the way her hand had fumbled willingly at her collar buttons, the glazed somnambulance of her eyes. He remembered Lydia’s red hair, gleaming in the dim radiance of the gas lamps, and his palms grew cold.

  No, he told himself firmly. She knows the danger—she’s sensible enough to stay indoors, close to people, at night …

  That knowledge did not help.

  He raised his head, staring sightlessly at the traffic jostling past the café where he sat. The thin mist of earlydawn had burned away into a crisp, brittle sunlight, like crystal on the sepia buildings across the street and the India-ink traceries of the bare trees. The boulevardiers were out for a stroll, reveling in the last fine weather of autumn—leisured gentlemen in well-tailored blazers, men of letters, self-proclaimed wits and artistes. Open-topped carriages rolled past on their way to the Bois de Boulogne, affording glimpses of the elegant matrons of the Paris gratin or of expensively dressed sin—the “eight-spring luxury models” of the demimonde.

  Asher saw none of it. He wondered where Simon might be found. Elysée de Montadour’s hôtel was, he was virtually certain, somewhere in the Marais; he supposed that given a day in which to search through the building records, he could locate the place. But there was no guarantee that Ysidro was sleeping there—somehow he doubted that slim, enigmatic hidalgo would put himself anywhere near the power of Elysée and her cicisbeos—and his visit to Ernchester House had taught him the folly of entering vampire nests alone. And in any case, what he wanted now most to know was something which could only be ascertained while the sun was in the sky.

  He felt absently in his pocket for the wax tablets and wondered what time the guards at the catacombs had their dinner.

  One of the advantages of working for the Foreign Office, Asher had found, had been a nodding acquaintance with the fringes of the underworld in a dozen cities across Europe. His Oxford colleagues would have been considerably startled had they realized how easily their unassuming Lecturer in Philology could have obtained any number of strange services, from burglary to murder to “nameless vices”—most of which had perfectly good names, in Latin, at least. In spite of the fact that England and Francewere the closest of allies, he had in the past had cause to need keys cut in a hurry in Paris with no questions asked and, on this occasion, he knew precisely where to go.

  As it was neither the first nor the third Saturday of the month, he had little fear of meeting parties of tourists at the catacombs or the large numbers of guards that the Office of Directory and Treasury considered necessary to herd them through. The catacombs would be staffed by one or at most two old pensioners of the State, and, though the dinner hour was long over by the time Asher reached Montrouge, with the aid of luck and human nature, they might be together gossiping instead of keeping watch at both entrances.

  And why should they watch? The doors were locked, and who in their right mind would wish to break into the Empire of the Dead?

  Luck and human nature seemed to be in full operation that afternoon when Asher reached the inconspicuous back door of the catacombs through which they had entered last night. It was locked. Although a sign instructed him to apply for information in the Place Denfert-Rochereau several streets away, still he thumped for several seconds on the door.

  Only silence greeted him, which was as he had hoped. The keys Jacques la Puce had made for him that afternoon worked perfectly—even on this quiet street, picking the lock would have been noticed by someone. He slipped inside, appropriated another tin lantern, and made his way down the stair, locking the grille again behind him. It was just past three in the afternoon; these days darkness was complete by about six. If nothing else, he thought, he might ascertain whether vampires past a certain age were free of the leaden trance of the daylight hours. Beyond tha
t …

  He didn’t know. As a mortal it was laughable to think hecould locate Brother Anthony in the haunted maze. But it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that his presence there, alone and unprotected, might pique the ancient friar’s curiosity and draw him out of hiding, as it had done last night.

  After a long inner debate he had left his silver chains back at his hotel, since in all probability they would afford him no protection should Brother Anthony turn against him, and might very well be construed as a gesture of bad faith. In last night’s case it had been merely manners—like carrying a gun to a wedding reception, Ysidro had said; Asher hadn’t mentioned that he’d done that upon occasion. But he was uncertain how much Brother Anthony would sense, and it was vital that he speak to the old man this afternoon.

  Six hundred years, he thought, as the first of Ysidro’s chalked arrows came into the wavery circle of the lantern’s light. The last of the Capets had been on the throne when Anthony had first refused to die—when he had made the decision to accept immortality upon any terms. Asher wondered whether the monk had been hiding all that time, or whether he had been driven gradually to it and to madness, living among the corpses in the crypts of the Holy Innocents.

  His breath puffed in faint smoke in the glow of the lamp; it was cold in the endless galleries. The only sounds were the soft scrunching of wet pebbles underfoot and the occasional creak of the lantern’s handle. It had been unnerving to come here last night, with Ysidro as protection, even though at that time they had expected to encounter no one. It was terrifying now, absolutely alone with the darkness under the earth waiting just beyond the glow of the lamp. Oddly enough, Asher’s fears turned less upon the vampire he sought and more upon the occasional, illogicalfits of dread that the roof should cave in and bury him alive in the darkness.

  He saw the dark gates with a kind of relief—for he had feared, too, lest he miss one of Ysidro’s chalked arrows. The ranked walls of brown bones and staring skulls seemed less dreadful to him than those silent aisles of empty rock.

  It took him longer than he had counted upon to find Brother Anthony’s private haunts in the ossuary. He missed his way twice and wandered—he did not know how long—among the brown walls of bones, searching for the branching tunnel, the tiny altar. At last he thought to trace Ysidro’s slender bootprints in the watery mud among the pebbles of the floor, and after that found the arrow fairly easily. It came to him then that the psychic miasma that the vampires were capable of throwing around themselves had extended itself to Anthony’s entire territory. Simply, it was easy to miss the place, easy to be thinking of something else. No wonder none of the guards came near here. They were probably not even aware of avoiding the place at all. They merely did. It explained certain things about Ernchester House as well.

  He passed the chaos of the fallen bones, then the neat rows of pelvises, the decaying skulls assembled against the eventuality of final Judgment. With a kind of medieval morbidity, the ossuary had been established, like the ancient channel houses, to turn the mind to man’s mortality; in spite of himself, Asher found his reflections drawn to the men he had killed, and, disturbingly, the men who would undoubtedly die in any future war because of all those charts and plans and information he had smuggled out of Austria, China, and Germany, tucked away in his socks or his notes on consonantal shift.

  From what he knew of some of them, he had the uncomfortable sensation that in terms of ultimate responsibility, his personal death toll might well end up rivaling poor Anthony’s, who only killed to prolong his guilt-riddled Unlife.

  Before the steps of the altar, scattered with drifts of bone fragments, Asher stopped, listening to the terrible silence all around him. Banked along the walls, decaying skulls watched him with mournful eyes.

  His whisper ran like water along the bones, vanishing into the stony darkness. “Frater Antonius…”

  The sibilance of it hissed back at him.

  “In nomine Patris, Antonius…”

  Perhaps he did not sleep near this place at all. Asher sat gingerly down on the bare stone of the step, setting the lantern beside him. He took out his watch and was both surprised and vexed at how much time it had taken him to reach this place—it would be difficult to tell, now, whether a sufficiently ancient vampire would be awake in the daylight hours. But it could not be helped. He pulled his coat more closely around him, rested his chin on his drawn-up knees, and settled down towait.

  The lantern’s metal hissed softly in the absolute stillness. He listened intently, hearing nothing but now and then the far-off slither of a rat picking its way across the bones. The cold seemed to deepen and intensify with his inactivity—he rubbed his hands over the lantern’s heat, wishing he had thought to bring gloves. Once the red eyes of a rat glinted at him from the darkness beyond that tiny pool of light, then vanished. Ysidro had said vampires could summon certain beasts, as they could humans—how long, he wondered, had Brother Anthony depended upon that ability for his dinner?

  That led to the unnerving reflection that he might be doing so now. How did the vampire glamour work, once the vampire’s eyes had met those of his chosen victim?Was that why it had seemed tohim such a good idea to come here, alone and in daylight? Icould have summoned her from anywhere on the train … , Ysidro had said, unwinding the purple scarf from the poor woman’s throat, drawing the pins gently from her hair. Do you believe I can do this to whomever I will?

  True, he felt no sleepiness, none of the dreamy unreality of that episode on the train, but that might only mean that after centuries of practice, Brother Anthony was very, very good.

  The craving becomes unbearable …

  He remembered the newspaper headline and shivered.

  Still Brother Anthony did not appear.

  The kerosene in the lantern’s reservoir was now almost gone. He realized he’d have to leave if he were to find his way back out of the dark; the thought that the light might fail him while he was yet in the tunnels was terrifying and made him curse himself for not searching the vestibule for the stubs of the tourists’ candles while he was about it. He straightened his back and looked around him in the darkness. “Anthony?” he whispered in Latin. “I’m here to talk to you. I know you’re there.”

  There was no response. Only the skulls, staring at him with blank eyeholes, a hundred generations of Parisians, their bones neatly sorted and awaiting the final collation of Judgment Day.

  Feeling a little silly, Asher spoke again to the empty dark. At least, if what Ysidro and Bully Joe Davies had said was true, Anthony could hear him from a great distance away. “My name is James Asher, I am working with Don Simon Ysidro tofind a renegade vampire in London. We think he can hunt by day as well as by night He is a killer, brutal and indiscriminate, of men and vampires,bound not even by the laws that your kind make among themselves. Will you help us?”

  There was no movement in the darkness, only stillness, like the slow fall of dust.

  “Anthony, we need your help, humans and vampires alike. He has to be one of your contemporaries, or older yet. Only you can track him, can find him for us. Will you help us?”

  A rhyme singsonged its way around in his head, turning back on itself like a child’s chant:

  But the silence was unbroken,

  And the stillness gave no token,

  And the only word there spoken

  Was the whispered word, “Lenore.”

  This I whispered, and an echo

  Murmured back the word, “Lenore.”

  Merely this and nothing more.

  Poe, he thought, and totally appropriate for this waiting hush, this darkness that was not quite empty, and not quite dead.

  Merely this and nothing more … merely this and nothing more.

  On impulse, he took the newspaper from his pocket and laid it on the steps of the altar, folded open to the article about the murders. He lifted the almost-empty lantern, and the moving light twisted over the dead faces like a sudden shriek of mocking
laughter, the laughter of those who have learned the secret of what lies on the other side of the invisible wall of death.

  “I must go,” he said to the darkness. “I’ll be back tomorrow night, and the night after that, until you speak to me. Please help us, Anthony. Nine humans and four vampireshave died already, and now we know there will be more. We need your help.”

  Like a curtain swinging to, the darkness closed behind him as he passed along the corridors; and whether any watched him out, he did not know.

  FOURTEEN

  HOW DID ONE destroy a vampire who had passed beyond vulnerability to daylight? he wondered. Or presumably to silver and garlic and all the rest of it? He wished he could talk to Lydia, to hear her speculations on the problem, and he tried to think what they might be.

  If Anthony did not help him …

  Did this mutation in the course of time open other vulnerabilities—to cold, for instance? Simon had mentioned an extreme sensitivity to cold in the very old vampires. But short of luring the killer into a giant refrigerator, he didn’t see how that knowledge, even if it were true, would be of any assistance. He grinned wryly at the thought of himself and Ysidro, Eskimo-like in furs, grimly driving an icicle through the renegade’s heart, cutting off his head, and stuffing the mouth with snowballs. And, of course, the monthly bill for ice would be prohibitive.

  Perhaps, if Lydia was right and vampirism was simply a pathology of the blood, there might be a serum which could be devised to combat it. More applied folklore, hethought wryly. Maybe a concentration of whatever essence was in garlic, injected straight into the bloodstream…

  By whom? You and Sexton Blake?

  And in any case, vampirism was not simply a physical pathology. It had its psychic element, too, and that, like the physical abilities, seemed to increase with time. Could it perhaps be fought on psychic grounds?