Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  “Of course, such matters have been considered among vampires ever since Mr. Harvey’s interesting articles first appeared.” Ysidro handed him the soup and helped him sit up to eat it. “We have long been familiar with the whole apparatus of transfusions and hollow needles. In fact I’m told some of the Vienna vampires used to inject their victims with cocaine before they drank. When Dewar containers were developed last year, Danny made some experiments in storing blood, but it seems to lose both itstaste and its efficacy literally within moments after it leaves the living body. In any case it is not the blood alone thatchiefly sustains us. If it were,” he added, without change in the soft inflections of his voice, “do you think that any of us would be the way we are?”

  Asher set down the bowl on his knees, his hands shaking too much with sheer weakness to hold it. Ysidro’s steadying grip was chill as the hand of a corpse. Their eyes met. “Don’t be naïve.”

  The vampire’s pale eyebrow tilted. “You may be right, at that.” Whether he spoke of Lotta, Hyacinthe, or himself was impossible to tell. He took the empty bowl and turned away, every movement spare and economical as a sonnet. “I doubt you’ll need concern yourself with Grippen at the moment. He and Chloé are bound back to London…”

  “Simon…”

  He looked back, the gilt candlelight seeming almost to shine through him, as it shone through the edges of fingers held near to the flame—demon and killer a thousand times over, and the man who had saved Asher’s life.

  “Thank you.”

  “You are in my service,” the vampire replied, the unstressed axiom of a nobleman who questions neither his rights nor his duties. “And we have not yet scotched this killer.

  “I am still not entirely convinced,” he continued, neatly returning bowl, flask, and spoon to his satchel, “that the killer is not Grippen himself. I have given thought to your assertion that our state is a medical pathology. If there is some alteration of state which takes place close to the three hundred and fiftieth year…”

  “Then wouldn’t you be experiencing it, too?”

  “Not necessarily.” He turned back and held up his white, long-fingered hands shoulder-high, showing the colorless flesh next to his stringy, ash-pale hair. “Though I was still quite fair-haired as a living man, I had more colorthan this, and my eyes were quite dark. This—bleaching—is not common, but not unknown among our kind. Perhaps it is what they call a mutation of the virus, if virus it be. The oldest vampire I knew, my own master Rhys, was also ‘bleached,’ though other vampires he created were not. Therefore as a condition it might affect other changes that take place when a vampire ages. And since it seems that Calvaire left Paris for precisely those reasons which turned Grippen against him in London…”

  “No.” Asher sank back to his pillow, exhausted with the mere effort of sitting up and eating, wanting nothing more, now, than to sleep again. “Didn’t you read the newspaper? It was in my pocket…” He hesitated. “No it wasn’t, I left it in the catacombs. A section of the London Times. It can’t have taken Grippen less than a night to come here, and the night before I was attacked, nine people were killed by a vampire in London. Oh, the police were puzzled by the lack of blood in the bodies, but it was…”

  “Nine!”

  It was the first time he had ever seen Simon truly shocked. Or perhaps, he thought, he was simply able to read the vampire better now.

  “I didn’t think it sounded like any of the London vampires. Grippen may be a brute, but he hasn’t survived three hundred and fifty years by indulging in stupid rampages like that. And now I know it couldn’t have been either Grippen or Chloé, and it certainly doesn’t sound like the Farrens. What it sounded like was a vampire who’d been lying low.”

  “And who took the first moment when Grippen was gone,” Simon murmured softly, “to satisfy a craving that must by that time have been monstrous. But nine…”

  “In any case,” Asher said, “it means that we are definitely dealing with another vampire.”

  Ysidro nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And by the sound of it, in all probability, a mad one.”

  Asher sighed. “My old nanny used to say, ‘Every day in every way things are getting better and better.’ It comforts me to know she was right.” And he dropped his head to the thin straw of the pillow and fell instantly to sleep.

  FIFTEEN

  EIGHT PERISH IN WAREHOUSE FIRE

  FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED

  [From the Manchester Herald]

  Fire ravaged the cotton warehouse of Moyle &Co. in Liverpool Street last night, claiming the lives of eight vagrants who are believed to have taken shelter in the warehouse from the cold. However, police report the discovery of a small quantity of blood on the pavement of the alley behind the warehouse, indicating that some sort of foul play may have taken place, though all the bodies were too badly burned to provide definite clues. All eight bodies were found clumped close together in the rear part of the warehouse, near where the fires started; there is no evidence that any of these unknown vagrants attempted to extinguish the blaze in its early stages, and, in fact, police believe that all eight may have been dead of some other cause before the fire started. The firewas blazing strongly when first seen by watchman Lawrence Bevington, who claims that he saw no indication of smoke or other trouble when he passed the warehouse earlier …

  No, Lydia thought calmly, he wouldn’t. If I were trying to hide my kills by incinerating the bodies, I’d make certain the watchman was sleeping at the appropriate moment.

  Her hand was shaking as she set down the newspaper.

  Manchester. Anonymous masses of factory workers, stevedores, and coal heavers, unmissed save by those who knew them and maybe not even then.

  She looked at the list she’d made, lying on top of the Journal of Comparative Folklore, and wondered how long she dared wait now.

  She had promised James not to do anything until she had checked with him, not to put herself in danger. She knew she was a child in a bog here, unable to tell the difference between a tuft that would bear her weight and one that was only a little greenery floating on the top of quicksand; she knew that the vampires would be waiting. The fear that she had lived with for weeks rose again in her, the fear of that guttural voice calling in her dreams, the fear of the gathering darkness, the fear she had felt in the cold fog of the court the night she had gone out to seek a vampire. Everything she had been reading had only taught her to fear more.

  But how long was she going to wait? The last thing she’d heard from James was that he was going to see the Paris vampires, under the problematical protection of Don Simon Ysidro. She shut her heart, trying to freeze it into submission, trying not to connect that letter with this long silence. But her heart whispered to her that they had no reason to keep him alive. And there was a good chancethat, as Calvaire’s friends, they might have something to hide, not only from humans, but from vampire kin.

  I’ll wait one more day, she promised herself, trying to relax the steely hand that seemed to clutch at her throat from the inside. His letters have to go long-ways-about through Oxford … it could have gotten delayed…

  She looked back at her list, which she had compiled last night, and at the newspaper lying beside it. The vampire’s rampages had killed seventeen people in the last three days.

  Her fingers still unsteady, she took off her spectacles and set them aside, then lowered her head to her crossed arms and wept.

  Asher woke feeling stronger, but still weighted, not only with exhaustion, but with an uncaring lassitude of the spirit with which he was familiar from his more rough-and-tumble philological research trips. His dreams had been plagued by the sensation that there was something he was forgetting, some detail he was missing. He was back in the van der Platz house in Pretoria, hunting for something. He had to move swiftly because the family was due back, the family which considered him such a pleasant and trustworthy guest, a Bavarian professor only there to study linguistic absorption.

  Bu
t he had forgotten what it was that he hunted. He only knew it was vital, not only to the war between England and its recalcitrant colonials, but to his own life, to the lives of everyone dear to him. Notes, he thought, or a list—that was it, the list of the articles he’d published; they mustn’t find it, mustn’t trace him through them … So he hunted, increasingly frightened, partly because he knew the van der Platzes, though Boers, were the kingpins of German intelligence in Pretoria and would not hesitate to turn him over to the commandos if they discovered he wasnot as he seemed, partly because he knew that behind one of those doors he opened and closed in such aimless haste he was going to find Jan, the sixteen-year-old son of the household and his friend, with the top of his head shot off …

  “I killed him,” he said as he opened his eyes.

  Cold, fragile fingers touched his. Against the dimness of the low ceiling, he saw the thin white face floating in its pale cloud of tonsure, green eyes gleaming strangely against the sunken shadows of the skull-like head. He had spoken in English, and in English a voice whispered back, “Killed thou this boy in anger, or for gain?”

  He knew Brother Anthony had read his dream, seen it like a cinematograph picture, though how he knew this he was not sure.

  “It would have been better if I had,” Asher replied softly. “He might have understood that. But no.” His mouth twisted with the bitter taste of his own awareness. “I killed for policy, to protect the information I had learned, so I could get back to England with it, and return to learn more. I did not want to be…”He hesitated on the word blown, an idiom the old monk would not understand, and then finished the phrase, “ … revealed as a spy.”

  What a euphemism, he thought, reflecting how much thought was erased by that simple change of wording. No, he had not wanted to be revealed to these people who had trusted him as a spy, who was using their trust as he’d have used a stolen bicycle, to be later abandoned to rust by the side of the road.

  “It is no longer lawful for me to absolve thee of this.” Like broken wisps of straw, the thin fingers stroked at his hands; the green eyes looking into his were mad and haunted and filled with pain, but Asher had no fear of him, no sense of a lust for blood. The whispering voice went on,“I, who cried against simoniac priests, venal priests, and priests who took bribes to forgive in advance the sins their patrons longed to commit—how can I expect God to hear the words of a murderer-priest, a vampire-priest? Yet Saint Augustine says that it is lawful for soldiers to kill in battle, and that those deaths will not be held against them before the throne of God.”

  “I was not a soldier,” Asher said quietly. “In battle, one shoots at men who are shooting at one. It is self-defense, to protect one’s own life.”

  “To protect one’s own life,” the vampire echoed tiredly. The skull-face did not change, save that the sunken green eyes blinked. “How many have died to protect my life, my—immortality? I argue that I did not choose to become what I am, but I did. I chose it when the vampire that made me drank of my blood, forced his bleeding wrist against my lips, and bade me drink, bade me seize the mind that I saw burn before me in darkness like a flame, willing me to live. I chose then to live and not to die. I chose then and I have chosen every night since.”

  Exhaustion lay over Asher like a leaded blanket—the conversation had the air of being no more than another part of his dream. “Was there a reason?”

  “No.” The monk’s cold little hand did not move on his. Against the low ceiling, his shadow hung, huge and deformed, in the candlelight—the glint of its reflection caught on needlelike fangs as he spoke. “Only that I loved life. It was my sin from the beginning, my sin throughout my days with the Minorites, the Little Brothers of St. Francis. I loved the body we were enjoined to despise, reveled in those little luxuries, those small comforts, which our teachers warned us to deny ourselves. A warning well given, perhaps. They said that such delight in the ephemera of matter would addict the soul. And so it has done.

  “Perhaps it was that I did not want to confront God withthe sin of luxuriousness on my conscience. I no longer remember. And now I am burthened down with more murders than I can count. I have slain armies, one man at a time; in the lake of boiling blood which Dante the Italian saw in Hell, I will be submerged to the last hairs upon my scalp. Truly a fit portion for one who has sought hot blood from the veins of the innocent to prolong his own existence. And that is what I cannot face.”

  Susurrant and unreal, that voice followed him down into dreams again, and this time he found himself walking on the stone banks of a crimson lake, boiling and fuming to a bruised horizon in a black cavern that stretched farther than sight. The smell of the blood choked in his nostrils, and its thick, guttural bubbling filled his ears. Looking down, he could see in the tide pools the yellowish serum separating out of the blood, as it did in Lydia’s experimental dishes. In the lake itself he could see them all: Grippen, Hyacinthe, Elysée, Anthea Farren with her creamy breasts bare and splashed with gore, screaming in pain … On the bank of that hellish lake walked Lydia in the trailing draperies of her ecru tea gown, a glass beaker in her hand, her hair falling in a rusty coil down her back and spectacles faintly steamed with heat, bending down to dip up the blood from the churning Phlegethon. Asher tried to call to her, but she was walking away, holding the beaker up to the light and examining the contents with her usual absorbed attention. He tried to run toward her, but found he could not move, his feet seeming rooted to the broken black lava rock; looking back, he saw the bubbling red lake beginning to rise, the blood trickling toward him to engulf him, like the vampires, for his sins.

  He opened his eyes and saw Ysidro, sitting near the candle reading the London Times, and knew that it was night. “Interesting,” the vampire said softly, when Asher told him of his conversation with the old priest. “He isawake during the daylight hours, then, whether or not he can tolerate the touch of the sun itself, though I suspect that he can. And the silver lock on the door has been forced and replaced.”

  “He has to have come here somehow.”

  Ysidro folded the paper with a neat crackle, and set it aside. “He may have used the sewers. Perhaps he knew, from other years, that this was my house; perhaps he only followed me back here from the catacombs that first night and guessed, when he saw me fighting to save you, that I would want you brought here. I have, needless to say, moved my residence, now that Grippen and Elysée know of this place … Do you feel strong enough to walk?”

  Asher did, but even the minor effort of washing and shaving in the basin of water Simon had brought left him exhausted, and he was grateful to return to his cot. Later, after he’d rested, he asked for and got envelopes and paper. In the course of the following day, he wrote two letters to Lydia, one addressed to her under her own name in Oxford, the other addressed to Miss Priscilla Merridew and enclosed, as his former correspondence had been, in a forwarding note to one of his students. He reassured her of his comparative safety, though he felt a twinge of irony at the phrase. Things had to be truly serious, he reflected, for him to consider helpless imprisonment in a cellar in the care of two vampires as grounds for optimism. Ysidro agreed to post them without demur—Asher could only hope that the rather simple camouflage would work, or at worst that he’d be able to get Lydia to some other residence before the Spaniard was able to return to Oxford and trace her down.

  He remained in the cellar another two days, sleeping mostly, reading the books and newspapers Simon brought to him or listening in scholarly satisfaction as the vampire read Shakespeare to him in its original pronunciation, andslowly feeling his strength return. He never saw Brother Anthony, except in queer, involuted dreams, but now and then the water pitcher in the cell would be refilled when he awoke.

  The second afternoon, he woke to find two railway tickets propped against the candlestick, and his luggage stacked neatly at the foot of his cot. With the tickets was a note, written on creamy new stationery in a sixteenth-century hand: Can you be ready to leave
for London at sundown?

  Beneath this was a folded copy of the London Times, with the headline MASSACRE IN LIMEHOUSE.

  Seven more people, mostly Chinese from the docks, had been killed.

  Weak and shaky, Asher crawled from his cot and staggered to the bars. They were massively strong, forged to defeat even a vampire’s superhuman strength—the silver padlock, which did not seem to have kept Brother Anthony out, still held the door. He leaned against the bars and said softly into the darkness, “Anthony? Brother Anthony, listen. We need you in London. We need your help. We can make the journey in a single night; we have provision for it if daylight overtakes us. You must come with us—you’re the only one who can aid us, the only one who can track this killer, the only one who can aid humankind. Please help us. Please.”

  But from the darkness came no sound.

  “I’m not surprised,” Simon remarked later, when Asher told him about it as the boat train steamed out of the Gare du Nord and into the thin mists of the evening. “It is difficult to tell how much he knows or guesses of what is going on—a great deal, if he followed us, as vampires often do, listening to our conversation from a distance. It may be that he considers the deaths of vampires only meet; and itmay also be that he knows more of the matter than we do and will not speak the killer’s name to us because he knows it himself. Among vampires friendships are rare, but not unheard of.”

  He unfurled the newspaper he had bought over his neat, bony knees and studied the headline with impassive eyes. “I mislike this, James,” he said softly, and Asher leaned around to see. LIMEHOUSE VAMPIRE, the headline screamed. POLICE BAFFLED. “There was another series of killings two nights before that, in Manchester—the London papers did not carry it until the massacre today. A vampire could travel the distance in a matter of hours—as indeed could a man. After a blood feast of nine people, no normal vampire would so much as look at another human being, even were it safe to do so, for a week at least. Few of us feed more than twice a night, and most not more than one in four or five—not upon humans, anyway. This…”The slender brows twitched together. “This troubles me.”