Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  And the gate was open. He glanced back at the brougham, standing unobtrusively in the lane, waiting …

  For whom?

  As if to reassure him, the bay hack between the brougham’s shafts shook its mane and chewed thoughtfully on its bit. The last broken fragments of the setting sunlight glinted on the bridle brasses.

  Did vampires go driving in the afternoons?

  He could think of one that might.

  Something seemed to tighten inside of him as he slipped into the rained and weedy yard. If he and Lydia could find this place, someone else certainly could—unless, of course, Ysidro was somehow right after all, and Grippen himself was able to get about by day.

  Either way, he was on the verge of this riddle’s dark heart, and, he reflected, probably in a great deal of danger.

  There was a good chance that Lydia was in that house.

  He crossed the yard cautiously. If the day stalker—be it Grippen or Tulloch the Scot or some nameless ancient—were there, the vampire could hear him whatever he did. There were two of them, he remembered—he’d have towatch his back, as much as one could against vampires. And one of them, at least, was mad.

  He stepped up onto the little terrace to the left of the areaway and forced one of the long windows, gritting his teeth at the sharp click as the latch gave back. Shielded behind the corner of the embrasure, he waited for a long time, listening. Distantly he heard something fall, somewhere in the house—then the panicked flurry of thudding footfalls.

  Heading for the carriage, he thought, and then, No vampire’s feet sound like that. A human accomplice? Given Calvaire’s penchant for confiding in prospective victims, it was logical. Was Grippen’s body even now searing, crumbing to ashes in some upper room as the last dim rays of the evening sun streamed through the broken shutters … ?

  Asher found himself hoping so for his own sake, even as he tracked those fleeing footfalls with his ears. The stairs would debouch into the front hall; from there, the killer could leave by either the front or the back. He could slip through the half-open window, intercept him before he left the house …

  But he drew back at the thought of entering those dense shadows beyond the window, and that probably saved his life. He was in the act of turning away to try to intercept the fugitive by the carriage when a hand shot out the window from the dimness of the house. It moved impossibly fast, catching him by the arm in a grip that crushed flesh and bone, dragging him toward the interior gloom with terrifying force. In the fading daylight, he got a confused impression of a leprous white talon, bulging sinews and misshapen knots of knuckles, and nails like claws, while the creature inside the house was still only a monstrous blur of white framed in the window’s darkness. As a second hand reached out to seize him around the back of theneck, Asher flicked one of the silver knives into his hand from his ulster pocket and slashed at the corded wrist.

  Blood scorched him as if he’d been splattered with steaming water. The shriek from the darkness within was nothing human, a raw scream of animal rage and pain. He twisted from the loosened grip before he could be flung, as Grippen had once flung him stunningly against the wall, and dragged at his revolver, firing at the vague shape that came bursting from the dark beyond the French doors.

  It flickered, changed, moving with unfollowable speed; he felt something behind him and turned to slash again with the knife still in his left hand. The vampire was behind him, the slanting final sunlight turning its skull-face ghastly—a vampire beyond all doubt, but what it had been before was hard to guess. Under the pulled-back lips the fangs were huge, broken tusks that had gouged seeping furrows into the pustuled skin of its chin. It screamed again and fell back, clutching at the cut Asher had opened in its palm, glaring at him with immense eyes, blue, staring, pupils swollen with inhuman hate.

  The psychic impact was flattening. Asher felt as if his mind had been struck by a falling tree, dizziness and disorientation almost swamping his consciousness. He tried to fling the dead darkness off him, even as the thing seized him again and bore him back against the house wall, its grip wrapping over his gun hand and crushing the bones. He cried out as the revolver slipped from his fingers—the thing caught his knife wrist, then flinched back with another scream …

  Silver, Asher thought, the silver chain. With his knife, he slashed at the thing again.

  With another shriek of agonized fury, it caught his sleeve, pulled him forward, and slammed him back against the wall again with such violence that, in spite of his effort to keep his chin down, Asher’s head cracked against thebricks. His concentration slipped, breaking, though he fought to hold it, knowing, if he let the vampire’s mind get control of his, he was surely dead.

  A voice shouted something. The vampire slammed him against the wall once more, and his vision blurred, pain swamping his mind under a dreaming tide of gray. He clung to the pain that was already screaming from his right arm, forcing himself to remain aware …

  A name. The voice was shouting a name.

  He tried to remember it, tried to cling to the pain of his broken wrist, as he slipped to the ground. He was dimly aware of the dampness of the bricks beneath his cheek and the murky sweetness of crushed leaves in his nostrils.

  Whistling shrieks cut the air, and footfalls thudded closer. He hurt all over, his back and left wrist as well as his right, but his left hand would answer, closing around the knife hilt, though he knew he was outnumbered. The newspaper description of the savagery of the multiple murders came back to him, and the glaring horror of the vampire-thing’s eyes.

  “Nay, then, what’s all this?”

  “You all right, sir?”

  He managed to raise himself to one elbow in time to confront the two blue-clothed giants that materialized out of the dusk. London’s finest, he thought groggily. The sun had slipped behind Harrow Hill. The twilight was cold in his bones.

  “No,” he replied, as one of the bobbies helped him to sit up. “I think my wrist is broken.”

  “Gorblimey, sir, what the ’ell…”

  “I was coming to visit friends of mine in this house. I think I surprised burglars in the act. One of them attacked me but there were two—they were driving a brougham…”

  One bobby glanced at the other—they were both big,pink-faced men, one from Yorkshire by his speech and the other a sharp-featured Londoner. Asher couldn’t help picturing the look of sardonic calculation Ysidro would give them. “That one as passed us, driving fit to kill, I’ll bet.”

  “Bay gelding, white off-fore stocking,” Asher reported automatically.

  “He dropped this, Charley,” the London-born officer said, picking up Asher’s revolver; the Yorkshireman glanced at it, then at the bloodied knife still in Asher’s hand.

  “You allus go calling armed, sir?”

  “Not invariably,” Asher said with a shaky grin. “My friend—Dr. Grippen—collects odd weapons. This one was sold to me as an antique, and I wanted his opinion on it.” He winced; his right hand was beginning to swell and throb agonizingly, the stretched skin turning bluish black; his left was bruising badly.

  “Best send for doctor, Bob,” the Yorkshireman said. “Come inside, sir,” he added, as Bob hastened off down the path. “Happen they heard no one was to home.”

  Asher glanced about him at the silent drawing room as they entered. “I’m not so sure of that.”

  Heavy seventeenth-century furniture loomed at them through the dense shadows of the drawing room; here and there, metal gleamed, or glass. The bobby Charley steered Asher to a massive oak chair. “Best wait here, sir,” he said. “You do look like you been right through the mill.” But there wasn’t wholehearted solicitude in his tone—Asher knew the man didn’t quite believe his story. It scarcely mattered at this point. What mattered was that he had backup and a good reason for searching the house for Lydia. With luck, the killers had destroyed Grippen and hadn’t discovered her, if she were here …

  “What did you say your friend’s name was,
sir?”

  “The owner of the house is Dr. Grippen,” Asher said.“My name is Professor James Asher—I’m a Lecturer at New College, Oxford.” He held his swollen hand propped against his chest; the throbbing went down his arm, and his head was beginning to ache. He fumbled a card from his pocket. “I was supposed to meet him here this afternoon.”

  Charley studied the card, then secreted it in his tunic, somewhat reassured by this proof of gentility. “Right, sir. Just you rest yourself here. I’ll have a bit of a look about.”

  Asher leaned back in the chair, fighting to remain conscious as the policeman left the darkening room. The shock of the fight was coming over him, clouding his mind, and his whole body ached. The face of the daylight vampire swam before his thoughts, queerly colorless as Ysidro’s was, but not smooth and dry-looking—rather it was swollen, puffy, pustulant. Thin rags of fair hair had clung to the scalp; he tried to recall eyebrows and could not—only those huge teeth, grotesque and outsize, and the staring hatred of the blue eyes.

  Forcing his mind back to alertness, he fished the picklocks from his coat pocket—clumsily, for he had to reach across his body to do so—and placed them inconspicuously on a blackwood sideboard near the French doors. He guessed he would be under enough suspicion without having those found on his person. Staggering back to the chair, he mentally began ticking off details: brown jacket, corduroy or tweed, countrified and incongruous on that massive shape; and lobeless ears, oddly ordinary given the deformation of the rest of the face. He glanced at his left arm. Blood was staining the claw rips in the coat sleeve.

  Dear God, was that what vampires became, if they lived long enough? Was that what the Plague, mixing with God only knew what other organisms of the vampire syndrome, could do? Would he, at the last, have to track down and kill Ysidro, to prevent him from turning into that?

  He realized he was singularly lucky to be still alive.

  The name, he thought. The voice had shouted a name, just as his head had cracked against the wall. His recollection was blurry, drowning under shock and pain and the weight of the vampire’s dark mind. Then there was the rattle of harness, the clatter of retreating wheels …

  The images faded as his consciousness slipped toward darkness.

  “You!”

  A powerful hand grabbed him and thrust him back against the back of the chair. His mind cleared, and he saw Grippen looming in the shadows of the now-dark room.

  Still holding his swollen right hand to his chest, Asher said wearily, “Let me alone, Lionel. The killer was here. Grippen … !” For the vampire had turned sharply and, had Asher not seized the corner of his cloak, would have been already halfway to the stairs. Grippen whirled back, his scarred face dark with impatient fury. Quietly, Asher said, “The red-haired girl.”

  “What red-haired girl? Let go, man!”

  The cloak was gone from his grip—even his unbroken left hand hadn’t much strength to it. Asher got to his feet, fighting a surge of dizziness as he strode after the vampire up the stairs.

  He found Grippen in one of the upper bedrooms, an attic chamber that had at one time housed the maids. He had to light one of the bedroom candles before ascending the narrow stair, no easy feat with only one workable hand; though the vaguest twilight still lingered outside, the windows of all the attics had been boarded shut, and the place was dark as pitch. He could hear nothing of the bobby Charley moving about the upper regions of the house. Presumably he was lying in one of the bedrooms in a trance cast by the master vampire’s mind. That unnatural slumber pressed on his own consciousness as he staggered up the stairs. The pain in his broken wrist helped.

  In the darkness he heard Grippen whisper, “Christ’s bowels,” unvoiced as the wind. The candle gleam caught a velvety sheen from his spreading cloak, and beyond it something glinted, polished gold—the brass mountings of a casket.

  There was a coffin in the attic.

  Asher stumbled forward into the room. As he did so his foot brushed something on the floor that scraped … a crowbar. Grippen was kneeling beside the coffin, staring in shock at what lay within. Asher’s glance went to the window; the boards were gouged but intact. The killers must have been just starting that part of the operation, he thought, when his own footfalls had drawn them from their task.

  Grippen whispered again, “Sweet Jesu.”

  Asher came silently to his side.

  Chloé Winterdon lay in the coffin, her head tilted to one side among the pillowing mounds of her gilt hair, her mouth open, fangs bared in her colorless gums, her eyes staring in frozen horror. She was clearly dead, almost withered-looking, the white flesh sunken back onto her bones.

  Only slightly bloodied, the pounded end of a stake protruded from between her breasts.

  Ragged white punctures marked her throat.

  Quietly, Grippen said, “Her blood has all been drained.”

  SEVENTEEN

  AT LEAST, ASHER reflected with exasperated irony at some point in the long hours between six-thirty and ten, when he was finally released from the Charing Cross station house, they couldn’t charge him with Chloé Winterdon’s murder. But this was only because Grippen had gently gathered the blonde girl’s body into his arms and vanished through some bolthole in the roof, leaving Asher to the tedious business of finding some story to tell the police—which they didn’t believe—being held for questioning, and getting his broken hand splinted by the police surgeon. They injected it with novocaine and warned him to take it to a regular doctor in the morning, but Asher refused all offers of veronal or other sedatives. He knew already it would be a long night.

  To questioning, he responded that he was a friend of Dr. Grippen’s, that he had gone there on the off chance that a mutual acquaintance, Miss Merridew, had taken refuge with the doctor; she had been missing some days. No, he hadn’t reported it before—he had just returned from Paristo find her gone. No, he didn’t know where Dr. Grippen could be reached. No, he had no idea why the burglars would have silver-tipped bullets in their gun. They made no comments about the bite marks on his throat and wrists, which was just as well.

  It was raining when he stepped outside, a thin, dispiriting rain. Weariness made him cold to the bones as he descended the station house steps, his brown ulster flapping cloakwise about him, his right arm in its sling folded up underneath. Even with the novocaine, it hurt damnably. Nearly half the night gone, he thought, and no nearer to finding Lydia than he had been that afternoon.

  There was a cab stand at the end of the street. He started toward it, and a dark shape was suddenly at his side, seeming to materialize from the misty rain. A heavy hand caught his elbow. “You’re coming with me.”

  It was Grippen.

  “Good,” Asher said wearily. “I want to talk to you.” After the thing that had attacked him, Grippen no longer impressed him much.

  Ysidro was waiting for them in a four-wheeler a little ways down the street. “You certainly took long enough,” he remarked, and Asher firmly resisted the urge to punch him as he slumped into the seat at his side.

  “I took a few hours out for dinner at the Café Royale and a nap,” he retorted instead. “If you’d put in an appearance earlier you could have joined me for coffee. They have very handsome waiters.” The cab jolted into movement, its wheels swishing softly on the wet pavement; Asher’s arm throbbed sharply in its sling. “Lydia’s gone. And I’ve seen the killer.”

  “Lydia?” Grippen said, puzzled.

  “My wife.” Asher’s brown eyes narrowed as he looked across at the big vampire in his rain-dewed evening cloak, the blunt, square head shadowed by the brim of his silk tophat. “The red-haired girl I asked you about, whose life is the price I’m allegedly being paid for this investigation.” Cold anger still filled him at Ysidro, at Grippen, at all of them, and at himself most of all for leading her into this.

  “Ah,” the master vampire said softly, and his hard, gray glance flicked to Ysidro. “I wondered on that.”

  “She was
in London all the time, helping me with my investigation,” Asher said, and Ysidro’s colorless eyebrows quirked.

  “I knew she had left Oxford, of course. I did not think you would bring her here.”

  “It seemed a good idea at the time,” Asher replied harshly. “She managed to find most of your lairs and all of your aliases before she disappeared. And if you didn’t take her,” he added, looking across again at Grippen, whose red face had gone redder as rage added to whatever blood he’d imbibed that evening, “then I suspect she found the killer as well. Now tell me the truth, because it’s going to have a bearing on how I conduct this investigation. Did you take her? And is she dead?”

  “You waste your breath,” the Master of London said slowly. “No to both your questions is the answer that’ll keep you for us and not against us; I know that, and you know that, and I’m thinking you’ll not believe it an I say it, but it is so. I’ve seen no red-headed moppet. I plight my faith on’t.”

  Asher drew a deep breath. He was shivering slightly all over, in nervous waves, reaction setting in on him to anger, exhaustion, and pain. He’d lost his hat at some part in the proceedings, and his brown hair fell forward over his forehead, the thin face beneath hard and far less clerkish than it usually seemed.

  From the corner of the cab, Ysidro’s light, disinterested voice said, “Tell us about the killer.”

  Asher sighed, and some of the tension ebbed from histall frame. “It was—monstrous,” he said slowly. “Foul. Diseased-looking. But beyond a doubt a vampire. It was bleached, as you are, Ysidro, but its skin was leprous and peeling. It was taller than I, taller than Grippen by an inch or so, and as broad or broader. Fair hair, but not much of it; it was falling out, I think. Blue eyes. It had a human partner—I heard his footsteps running down the stairs from the attic, and later he called the thing away from me; and that’s odd, when you realize the thing goes on killing rampages, taking seven or nine humans at a time. I’d certainly think twice about riding anywhere in a closed carriage with it.”