Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel

by Barbara Hambly

  “Whom you later murdered.”

  “Oh, really, James!” Blaydon cried impatiently. “A woman of her class! And I’ll take oath Albert Westmoreland’s death could be traced back to her, for all his family bribed the doctor to certify it was the result of a carriage accident. Besides, by that time we had run out of other clues. I needed her blood for further experimentation, and Dennis needed it just to stay alive.”

  “You knew Calvaire was a vampire, then?”

  “Oh, yes. He made no secret of it—he seemed to revel in astonishing me, in making nothing of the most difficult tests I could set to him. He gloated in the powers that he held. And Dennis was fascinated—not, I swear, with Calvaire’s evil, but with his powers. Calvaire was fascinated, too, though for reasons of his own, I dare say. He let me take samples, substantial samples, of his blood, to try and isolate the factors which enhanced the workings of the psychic centers of the brain and to separate them from those which caused the mutation of the cells themselves into that photoreactive pseudoflesh and the physiological dependence on the blood of others. And I would have succeeded, perhaps even been able to alter Calvaire’s condition. I know I would have…”

  “You wouldn’t have.” Asher glanced across at the hulking, glowering shape by the door, guessing already what had happened. Pity and disgust mingled in him like thetaste of the blood and brandy in his mouth. “According to the vampires themselves, those powers come from psychically drinking the deaths of their human victims. It’s the psychic absorption of death that gives them psychic powers, and without it, they lose them.”

  “Nonsense,” Blaydon said sharply. “That can’t be true. There’s no reason for it to be true. What do the vampires know of it, anyway? They aren’t educated. Calvaire never said anything…”

  “I’m sure Calvaire never ceased killing humans long enough to know whether it was true or not.” The only way Ysidro could have known or the only way Anthea could have known, he thought, was to have tried it themselves. “Calvaire wanted power. He wasn’t going to tell you anything more than he had to before he got it.”

  “I’m sure that isn’t the case.” Blaydon shook his head stubbornly, angry even at the suggestion that what he had done had been for nothing and that he had been, in fact, Calvaire’s dupe. “There are physical causes for everything—unknown organisms, chemical changes in the brain fluid itself. In any case, I evolved a serum which showed great promise. I—I made the mistake of telling Dennis about it. He demanded to test it, demanded to be the first of this corps of—of psychic heroes. I refused, naturally…”

  “And naturally,” Asher said dryly, “Dennis broke into your laboratory and took matters into his own hands.” It was, he reflected, exactly the sort of thing that Dennis would do. He was the perfect storybook hero, the perfect Sexton Blake, who could experimentally drain beakers of unknown potions and come off with, at most, prophetic hallucinations that coincidentally advanced the plot.

  Poor Dennis. Poor, stupid Dennis.

  Dennis’ eyes narrowed viciously, as if, like Brother Anthony, he could see Asher’s thoughts. “What would you have done?” he mumbled, his voice deep and thick, as ifhis very vocal cords were loosening. “Snugged back in your nice comfy study and let another man take the risks, as you’ll do when those damn sauerkraut eaters finally force us to fight? What did you tell her, Asher? What did you tell Lydia about me that made her choose a sly old man over someone who would love and protect her as I will? But you made her work for you, made her put herself in danger. I’d never have let her come here to London.”

  You’d have left her in ignorance of her danger at Oxford, wouldn’t you? Asher thought, feeling strangely calm. You’d have told her it wasn’t her affair. Knowing Lydia, that would have run her into danger three times quicker and without the knowledge of what she was dealing with.

  Dennis stepped forward, holding up his hands. All around the edges of the bandages that covered the palms, Asher could see rims of green-black flesh, like a spreading stain, puffy, malodorous, foul against the ice-white skin. “I was fine until you did this,” he said thickly. “I’ll enjoy drinking you like a sucked orange.”

  And he was gone.

  Rather shakily, Blaydon said, “He wasn’t, you know. Fine, I mean. His—his condition was deteriorating, although the infection caused by the silver seems to have greatly advanced the process. I wasn’t able to isolate that factor, it seems—as I said, the serum was far from perfect. And he needs the blood of vampires, as ordinary vampires need human blood. It seems to arrest the progression of the symptoms for a number of days. He killed Calvaire the first night this happened—I was quite angry at him, for Calvaire would have been a great help. But Dennis had a—a craving. And he was disoriented, maddened by the alteration in his senses; he still is, to a degree. I didn’t even know until it was done…”

  Asher wondered whether Calvaire had tried to controlDennis, up in his attic in Lambeth, as he’d controlled Bully Joe Davies.

  Blaydon wet his lips again and threw another nervous glance over his shoulder toward the shut door. “After that, we searched Calvaire’s room for notes to tell us where we could find other vampires. Dennis knew some of Lotta’s haunts and followed her to the Hammersmith mansion in Half Moon Street and to the haunts of another vampire she knew. I went with him—I wanted desperately to take some of their blood, not only to perfect my serum, but to find a cure for Dennis’ condition. More than anything else, I wanted a whole vampire, unharmed, but it was impossible to get them away in the daylight hours, of course. So I—I had to destroy their bodies, lest the others take fright and hide. I had to be content with as much blood as I could take…”

  “And Dennis got the rest?” With shaking fingers Asher took the brandy glass from Blaydon’s hand and drained it. The gold heat of it reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since a sandwich at the Charing Cross precinct house last night—he couldn’t even recall what before that.

  “He needed it,” Blaydon insisted. A little testily, he added, “All those who were killed were murderers, those who had killed again and again, for hundreds of years, I dare say…”

  “Those Chinese and ‘young persons,’ as the paper called them, as well?”

  “He was fighting for his life! Yes, he shouldn’t have taken humans. It got in the newspapers; the hunt will be on for us if it happens again. I told him that after Manchester. And it doesn’t really satisfy him, no matter how many he kills. But it helps a little…”

  “I dare say.” Asher drew himself up a little against the coffin, knowing he was a fool to anger this man who was demonstrably balanced on the ragged edge of sanity andyet too furious himself at such hypocrisy and irresponsibility to care. “And I expect he’ll ‘do what he needs to’ in order to ‘make himself comfortable,’ as I believe you phrased it…”

  Blaydon lunged to his feet, his hands clenching into fists, though they shook as if with palsy. Color flooded unhealthily up under the flaccid skin. “I’m sorry you feel that way about it,” he said stiffly, as if he had long ago memorized the phrase as the proper end to any interview. “In any case it won’t be necessary, not any longer. I can keep Dennis alive and have enough vampire blood, from a true vampire, to experiment with until I can find an antivenin…”

  “And how are you going to keep Dennis from killing him the moment your back is turned?” Asher demanded quietly. “You’re going to have to sleep sometime, Horace; if Dennis gets another craving, you’re going to be back to square one…”

  “No,” Blaydon said. “I can control him. I’ve always been able to control him. And in any case, that will no longer be a problem. You see, now that I have this vampire, he can make others—a breeding stock, as it were, for Dennis to feed upon. And I’m afraid, James, that you’re going to be the first.”

  TWENTY

  “WHAT YOU WANT is not possible.” In the upside-down glow of the oil lamp Blaydon had set on the floor, Ysidro’s face had the queer, stark look of a Beardsley drawing, fra
med in his long, colorless hair. His rolled-up shirt sleeves showed the hard sinewiness of his arms; like his throat and chest, visible through the unbuttoned collar, they were white as the linen of the garment. He sat cross-legged, like the idol of some decadent cult, on his own coffin, with Asher lying, bound hand and foot, at his feet.

  Blaydon and Dennis had come in and done that toward sunset. Before he’d fallen asleep again that morning, which he’d done shortly after Blaydon had left him, Asher had heard Blaydon go out, with muffled admonitions to Dennis to remain in the house, to guard them, and on no account to harm them. Don’t eat the prisoners while Daddy’s away, he had thought caustically. Straining his ears, he’d heard Blaydon mention the Peaks, that sprawling brick villa on the Downs near Oxford that had belonged to Blaydon’s wife, where she had lived, playing the gracious hostess on weekends to her husband’s Oxford colleagues or her son’s friends from London or the Guards.

  They must be keeping Lydia there, Asher thought, the rage in him oddly distant now, as if the emotions belonged to someone else. No wonder Blaydon had the look of a man run ragged. Even if he had kept a staff there after his wife’s death three years ago—and Asher knew he’d simply shut the place up when he’d moved his residence to London—he still wouldn’t have been able to trust them. The Peaks might be isolated; but, as the vampires had always known, servants have a way of finding things out. Once Blaydon had taken Lydia prisoner, he had to keep her someplace and look after her. That meant an hour and a half by train to Prince’s Risborough and another forty minutes to an hour by gig over the downs to the isolated house in its little vale of beechwoods, then back again, at least once, perhaps twice a day. And on top of that, the vampires were deeper in hiding, and Dennis was getting physically worse and more difficult to control. No wonder Blaydon looked as if he had not slept in a week.

  As he had said, he and Dennis both had been a month in Hell.

  If it hadn’t been Lydia who was in his power, Lydia who was lying drugged and helpless in that empty house, Asher would have felt a kind of spiteful satisfaction at the situation. As it was, he could only thank God that Dennis still had sufficient twisted passion for Lydia to keep Blaydon from harming her.

  Although, Asher thought, as he fruitlessly searched the barren room for anything which could conceivably be used as a weapon or to facilitate escape, he wasn’t sure whether Blaydon would have killed a stranger to protect Dennis’ secret. At least, he added with a shiver, he wouldn’t have four days ago, when they’d caught her snooping around. That had been before he’d learned what a desperately time-consuming inconvenience keeping a hostage was. And that had been while he and Dennis were far more firmly anchored in sanity.

  Looking at them now—Blaydon in his soiled collar and rumpled suit, with his silver-dust stubble of whiskers that glittered like the mad, fierce obsession in his eyes, and Dennis, hulking, restless, and fidgeting hungrily in the background—Asher was uncomfortably aware that both were stretched to the snapping point. However long father and son might have been able to go on undisturbed, Lydia’s imprisonment had thrown a strain on the situation, which his own wounding of Dennis had then made intolerable. They had the look of men who were fast losing their last vestiges of rationality.

  With forced mildness, Blaydon said, “Dennis is going to want to feed on some vampire tonight, my friend. Now it can be you, or it can be James. Which way do you want it?” He still had the revolver with silver bullets in his hand, which was steady now—he must have gotten a little sleep in the train, Asher thought abstractedly. And as a doctor, of course, he’d have easy access to enough cocaine to keep him going for a while, at least.

  Behind him, Dennis smirked.

  Looking perfectly relaxed, Ysidro set one foot on the floor, folded his long hands on his knee, and considered the pair of them in the flickering lamplight. “It is clear to me that you do not understand the process by which one becomes vampire. If, when I drank James’ blood, I forced him to …”

  Blaydon raised his hand sharply. “Dennis?” he barked. “Have you made a patrol? Checked for searchers?”

  “There’s no one out there,” Dennis said, his gluey bass barely comprehensible now. “I’ve listened—don’t you think I’d hear another vampire, if any came looking for these two? Don’t you think I’d smell their blood? They’rehiding, Dad. You’ve got to dig them out or let me…”

  “Check anyway,” Blaydon ordered sharply. Dennis’ naked brow ridges pulled together into a horrible frown. “Do it!”

  “I’m hungry, Dad,” the vampire whispered sullenly. As he moved nearer, his monstrous shadow lurched over the low plaster of the ceiling and the claustrophobic narrowness of the walls. “Hungry—starving—my hands are burning me, and the craving’s on me like fever…”

  Blaydon swallowed nervously, but kept his voice commanding with an effort. “I understand, Dennis, and I’m going to get you well. But you must do as I say.”

  There was a long, ugly silence. Asher, lying at Ysidro’s feet, could see the struggle of wills reflected in Blaydon’s haggard face as he met his son’s glare. He’s slipping and he knows it, he thought, watching the sweat start on the old man’s face. How long before Dennis makes him a victim, as well as Ysidro and myself?

  And Lydia, he added, with a chill of fear. And Lydia.

  Then Dennis was gone. Asher realized they must all have had their consciousnesses momentarily blanked as the vampire moved, but it was so quick, so subtle, that he was not even aware of it, merely that Dennis vanished into the crowding shadows. He did not even hear the closing of the steel-sheathed door.

  Blaydon wiped his mouth nervously with the hand that wasn’t holding the gun. He was still wearing the rather countrified tweed suit he’d had on that morning—that he’d had on for days, by the smell of it. Not, Asher reflected, that he or Ysidro could have passed for dandies either, both in shirt sleeves, himself unshaven and splotched with soot stains from climbing the wall last night. At least they’d slept, albeit uncomfortably. Once, when he’d wakened in the afternoon, there had been a tray of food there, undoubtedly brought by Dennis—an unsettling thought. He’deaten it and searched the room again, but it had yielded nothing but reinforced brick walls and door and Sheffield silver-plated steel window bars.

  Blaydon waved his pistol at Ysidro. “Don’t get any ideas, my friend. While you’re in this room with me, you’re safe. Dennis would pull you down before you got out of the house, as easily as he brought you here in the first place.”

  There was an annoyed glitter behind Ysidro’s hooded eyelids—a grandee, Asher thought, who did not care to be reminded that he’d been overpowered and manhandled by the hoi polloi. But he only regarded Blaydon levelly for a moment and asked, “Do you really believe that any of this will do you any good?”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” the pathologist said, rather sharply. “Go on with what you were saying. If you forced James … ?”

  “To drink my blood,” Ysidro said slowly, unwillingly, his champagne gaze fixed upon Blaydon’s face. “That is how it is done—the physical part, at least. But the—perhaps you would say mental, but I think spiritual would be a better term, though these days it is an unfashionable one—”

  “Let us say psychic,” Blaydon put in. “That’s what we’re really talking about, aren’t we?”

  “Perhaps.” That faint, wry flick of a smile touched Ysidro’s narrow-lipped mouth. “In any case, it is the giving of his spirit, his self, his conscious, and what Herr Freud politely terms his unconscious into the embrace of mine, for me to show him the way over that abyss. It is the yielding of all secrets, the giving of all trust, the admission of another into the most secret chambers of the heart. Most do not even join so close with those they deeply love. To do this, you understand, requires an act of the most desperate will, the all-consuming desire to continue in consciousnessat whatever the cost.” The shadow flung by the lamp on the wall behind him, huge and dark, echoed the slight movement of his white h
and. “Under this set of circumstances, I think James would find no point in making so desperate an effort at survival, though I suspect that under others he might.”

  You will never know, Brother Anthony had whispered, deathlessly sorting bones in the crypts below Paris. Asher shook his head and said quietly, “No.”

  Ysidro turned his head to look down at him, without any expression in his eyes. “And they say that faith in God is dead,” he commented. “I should think that your conscience, more than another man’s, might make of you a coward…” He turned back to regard his captor. “Whether or not James has that will to live, how many of those scum of the gutters whom you purpose to bring for me to transform into others like me would be capable of it? When a master vampire creates a fledgling, it is in part the master’s will and in part the fledgling’s trust which act. I do not believe myself capable of creating fodder, even did I consent to try. I certainly do not believe that one person in a hundred, or a thousand, has that will to survive.”

  “That’s balderdash,” Blaydon said uneasily. “All this talk of the will and the spirit…”

  “And if you did get lucky,” Asher put in, trying to shift his shoulders to take some of the pressure from Ms throbbing right arm, “what then? Are you really going to stay in a house with two, three, or four fledgling vampires? Fledglings whose wills are entirely subservient to their master’s? The start of this whole affair—Calvaire—was a careless choice on the part of the woman who made him. Are you going to be choosier? Especially if you’re giving Dennis specific orders to bring in none but the unfit, the socially useless, and the wicked?”

  “You let me worry about that.” Blaydon’s voice had anedge like flint now, his eyes showing their old stubborn glint. “It’s only a temporary measure…”

  “Like the income tax?”

  “In any case I have no choice. Dennis’ condition is deteriorating. You’ve seen that. He needs blood, the blood of vampires, to arrest the symptoms. If you, Ysidro, refuse to help me…”