by Emily Tesh
It was all very dull. This was what Silver had always loathed about his mother’s approach to their one shared interest: how was it possible for the pursuit and discovery of marvels out of myth to be so thoroughly boring? Mrs Silver stripped romance and delight from everything; she looked upon the rarest and most extraordinary of beings rather as a rat-catcher looked upon rats. Perhaps she had been right all along. Perhaps Silver should have resigned himself already—resigned himself long ago—to a world that was essentially dry and unpleasant, where at the heart of every marvel there was just a skittering pest in the dark.
A little past midnight, Silver stood in the pool of light under one of Rothport’s few streetlamps, wondering if he should have just gone out in his nightshirt after all. Or perhaps the vampire’s historic tastes had changed so thoroughly that Silver was not suitable bait for it now; or perhaps it was entirely occupied with tormenting Maud Lindhurst and would not be abroad tonight.
Or perhaps after months of lurking in his thorn-girt fortress, Silver had lost his good looks on top of everything else.
He caught the peevish tone of his own thoughts and frowned at himself. He was not his mother; he would not be heartless. So Tobias Finch did not desire to repair their good relations; what had changed? Silver had not come here for him. He winced, catching his own thoughts in the obvious lie; why else had he come?
He had come, he reminded himself, because a young woman’s life was at stake. Maud Lindhurst, twenty-one years old: he tried to picture her and came up with a mental portrait of a sweet blue-eyed creature in a white dress. Possibly she wore flowers in her hair. She was of an age to be Silver’s younger sister. There, how could one fail to worry about Maud Lindhurst?
Something took hold of Silver’s sleeve. He made a sound closer to a yelp than a manly cry of surprise.
A wild-eyed old man who smelled strongly of fish—did anything in Rothport not smell of fish?—was gazing up at him in some distress. He opened his mouth and said—
Unfortunately, the old tramp’s local accent was so thick that it took several tries before Silver understood he was being given a terrible warning, and by that point he was trying not to laugh. “Thank you,” he managed.
The tramp gesticulated fiercely and then pointed—to heaven? No, to the hill. “Beware!” he hissed, and then a garble of sounds that Silver after a moment interpreted as “The old Abbot likes fresh meat like you!”
“Thank you,” he said. Of course, the ruined abbey. For no reason except sheer physical laziness Silver had been avoiding the steep road, half of it a stairway, leading up the hill. But he must have wandered through every other byway Rothport could offer by now; and where else to find a vampire but in a Gothic ruin?
“Beware!” cried the tramp again.
“Don’t worry about it, there’s a good fellow,” said Silver, and reached for his purse only to remember that he didn’t carry one any more. “I shall be most careful, I assure you.”
He disentangled his sleeve from the ancient’s trembling grasp, smiled at him, smiled too over his head at the tall form of Tobias, who hovered only a few yards off, plainly on the point of intervening. When Tobias did not smile back Silver looked away. In the puddle of light where he had been standing, he saw, tough dandelions had split the cobblestones and were poking their heads up towards the scatterings of April rain which hissed through the pool of lamplight. There would be yellow flowers in the morning.
Tobias was looking at the dandelions too. No, he wasn’t. He was looking at the beggar, thoughtfully, and after a moment he went over to the man and took him gently by the arm and handed him a coin from his purse.
“All right,” Silver said briskly, mostly to himself, and set off for Rothling Abbey.
* * *
In daylight, and on a warm summer’s day, the ruins of Rothling Abbey might have been a pleasure to visit: one could bring a picnic, exclaim over the view, and possibly attempt some watercolours. On a clear and moonlit autumn night, assuming one had wrapped up warmly first, the spot might still have offered some delight to those who enjoyed shivering at a ghostly ambiance.
On that damp and overcast April evening, after puffing up the last of the hill in increasing misery, Silver heartily wished he’d never heard of the place. He would have liked nothing more than to be in a bed. A soft and warm bed, with clean sheets and a minimum of woodland adornment: so not his bedroom at Greenhollow Hall, where half the furniture was doing its best to take root. In fact Silver could not think where his ideal bed might be; only that wherever it was, he very much wanted to be in it, either asleep or in the company of—some person who was not Tobias Finch; some other person, a charming and well-read individual who found Henry Silver both interesting and impressive.
Tobias had reached the top ahead of him. He had passed Silver on the way up, his long strides eating up the steep hill as comfortably as if he were wandering through a meadow. He was not even breathing hard, but he had taken his coat off and laid it over the top of a nearby crumbled half-wall. When Silver forced his gaze up to meet his eyes—must the man be so large—Tobias gave him a silent, professional nod. Loops stitched on his belt held three sharpened wooden stakes.
Silver shuddered. Here was the other reason he disliked this sort of thing. He almost pitied the vampire.
Maud Lindhurst, he reminded himself, and he held the picture of the flowers she might wear in her hair so firmly in his thoughts that sprays of blossom began to uncurl themselves on the creepers which were anchored to the crumbling abbey walls, ghostly pale pink in the wavering moonlight.
The ruin was bigger than it had looked from the bottom of the hill. Silver took a deep breath, straightened his back, lifted his chin—the better to attract a bloodsucker—and set off towards the tumbledown cloisters. He felt a faint prickling discomfort as he advanced: for the first time in two years, his sense of the life and power of the Hallow Wood receded from him. It had been a very long time since trees had grown on this wind-blasted headland.
Something moved serpent-quick in the shadows.
“Silver!” Tobias roared behind him.
Silver startled, glanced both ways, and then flinched away from a sudden cloud of dust which a cold wind seemed to blow directly into his face. Even as he breathed it in he thought, I should have held my breath; then darkness rose around him, and he knew nothing for a time.
* * *
Silver woke up lying on some very cold stones. For a baffled moment he thought time had run away with him altogether and he was once again sprawling on the floor of his own great hall at Greenhollow.
Then he smelled the musty air and felt the prickling discomfort which told him his wood was much further away than he was used to. He said, out loud, “Damn.”
Nothing answered him. Tobias? What had become of Tobias? It was pitch-dark in here. Was this the vampire’s lair? “Mr Finch!” Silver called out, and then, remembering, “Miss Lindhurst!”
Nothing. Silver struggled to his feet, reached out blindly with both hands, and discovered the room was a tiny dark cell. His hands touched an iron ring overhead—a trapdoor?—and his breathing quickened. Underground. He was underground. He gave the iron ring a hard tug and then attempted a shove. Neither had any effect.
Although he did not like to dwell on the matter, Silver was not fond of the dark, nor yet of confinement. He had been buried alive once. It did not live in his waking memory, but in dreams sometimes he still felt the cracking and churning of the earth, the twitching helplessness of the withered husk that Rafela had made of him, the force of strong roots pushing him down.
Damn, damn, damn.
Silver gritted his teeth and reached for the nearest things he could find. There was wild grass and heather, a scattering of gorse, and a tiny handful of determined survivors from what had once been a monks’ garden. None of these things were the Wood; they did not know him, they did not answer to his demands.
“Oh God,” Silver said. He could crack stone; he could overturn earth
. He knew he could. Bramble had demolished half his house, by God. There was no need to panic. “Mr Finch!” he called out again anyway. But Tobias had seen it, he had shouted a warning, he had not been fast enough to save Silver from this imprisonment. Maybe it had killed him. Silver’s mouth was dry; his hands shook. It was easy to forget how dangerous the monsters of legend could be. His indomitable mother walked with a limp now.
If it had killed Tobias, would Silver’s mother come for him? She would. Silver, with shameful relief, knew that she always would.
And if it had killed Tobias, what would it make of Adela Silver?
“Shall I come back?” inquired a voice above him, interrupting these bleak thoughts.
The trapdoor was open. A slim figure was crouched over it, with the planks braced on her shoulder.
“Unless you’d rather stay down there,” she said. “I suppose I should apologise.” She didn’t. “Come on, then, unless you’d rather sit around groaning.”
* * *
The hand that helped Silver scramble out of the tiny cell was strong for all its softness. The room he emerged into was another cellar, no less dark in principle, but a merry glow came from a portable paraffin stove and tall golden stands held arrays of candles in the four stone corners. Silver blinked at the candlesticks. They had a distinct ecclesiastical air. He turned to the stranger.
“Miss Lindhurst?” he said.
“Maud,” said the girl briskly. “Who the hell are you?”
Silver blinked. The only woman he had ever known to curse was his mother, and even that was very rare.
He was also staggered by the young lady’s appearance.
She was as distant from the lovely and doleful waif of Silver’s imagination as a hawk from a dove. Her hair was yellow—so far she matched the imaginary—but rather than a tastefully pastel blonde, it was a bold brassy guinea-gold colour, so bright one half suspected dye. Since Maud Lindhurst’s appearance in every other respect said that here was a woman who did not care for outward show—the bright hair was wound up at the back of her head in a coil so firm and severe it was worthy of Silver’s mother—Silver imagined it was natural. Otherwise, she was tall for a woman, with features too strong to be called pretty and too dull to be called striking: watery blue eyes, a long nose, a pinched little mouth. She was sloppily dressed in men’s clothing, tough corduroy trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. Silver was largely immune to the charms of young ladies in any case, but he did not think he had ever seen one less interested in being charming.
“Well?” she said.
“Miss Lindhurst, I really must protest—”
“I asked for your name, not your protestations,” said Maud.
“Henry Silver,” he said. “Miss Lindhurst, your parents—”
“Silver,” said Maud. “Any relation to Alfred Silver?”
“My late father. I—”
“I liked his paper on the classifications of the supernatural. No one’s bettered it since.” She narrowed her eyes. “Didn’t you have an article in the last Folklore? No, the one before. On the Hallow Wood. Rather coy, I thought.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You plainly knew more than you were saying,” said Maud, eyeing him with distaste. “Why pretend to be a scholar if you’re going to keep secrets? You didn’t mention the Wild Man once—anyone who knew anything about the Greenhollow matter would, unless there was something bloody odd going on.” As she was eyeing him, she went on in much the same tone, “What on earth are you wearing?”
“Miss Lindhurst,” said Silver, exasperated, “your parents—at some considerable expense—have employed a pair of master monster-hunters to track you down after believing you to be abducted by a vampire—”
She snorted with laughter.
“—and I am here because I have no ability to say no to my mother, and my coat is none of your business, and—what have you done with Tobias Finch?”
She raised her eyebrows. “That depends. Is Tobias Finch the Wild Man of Greenhollow?”
While Silver floundered over how to answer that question, she went on, “Because I have the Wild Man, or someone who looks extremely like him, sleeping off a double dose in the undercellar next to yours.”
“Miss Lindhurst,” Silver said in his firmest manner. “I do not know what has possessed you to run away from home and take up residence in—I suppose this crypt is a remnant of the old abbey?—and assault strange gentlemen, but—” Good God, maybe she was possessed, or hypnotised, or whatever it was that vampires were supposed to do to their victims. Silver found it hard to imagine a young lady behaving this way of her own free will. Although he also found it hard to imagine the vampire whose dark passions were inclined towards young women who dressed up in unflattering costumes and criticised Silver’s articles in Folklore.
“But?” said Maud, and then while Silver floundered her small mouth quirked up very slightly at the corner. If there was anything that was more charmless than a plain young lady who was shockingly direct with you, it was a plain young lady who was laughing at you. “Your Mr Finch is perfectly well. I probably should apologise.” She still didn’t. “I panicked. He’ll wake up when it wears off.”
“When what wears off?” Silver said. “What the hell did you do to us?” And that marked the first time he’d ever sworn in the presence of a lady, including his mother. Maud Lindhurst deserved it.
“Let me introduce you,” said Maud, “to the Demon of Rothling Abbey. It’s through here.”
* * *
In a square stone sarcophagus on a platform surrounded by golden candlesticks lay a shrunken white corpse swaddled in a black shroud. There was a wooden stake thrust squarely through its chest. It had also been beheaded, but the head had then been gently placed next to its neck. It tilted unfortunately to one side, but there, rheumed with death, were the dark and staring eyes, and there the hawk nose, of Rothport’s nine-hundred-year-old vampire.
“There he is,” said Maud. “Old Julius. He preferred Julius to Nigel, really, though he answered to both.”
“You knew him?”
“I used to play around the abbey ruins as a child,” Maud said. “He would come out to watch me, when the evenings were long enough. I spoke to him a few times. I think he was rather sad, really.” She said this without much feeling, as if she were discussing a distant great-uncle whom she had occasionally been forced to converse with at family gatherings. “I saw him with one of his handsome young men down in town once. They pulled the man out of the harbour the morning after. People said he fell in the water drunk and drowned.”
“What happened to his hand?” The corpse’s left wrist ended in a stump.
“Oh, I cut it off and powdered it,” Maud said. “Vampire dust is a natural soporific. I thought it might be useful. And so it was, of course.”
Silver took a deep breath and immediately wished he hadn’t. He’d breathed the stuff. His stomach squirmed.
“You’re not squeamish, are you?” said Maud, instantly dashing Silver’s hope that she wouldn’t notice. “I can’t stand squeamishness. But I’ve got smelling salts in my things somewhere if you need them.”
“No need,” Silver managed. He was rather embarrassed. His mother and Tobias would both have looked calmly down at the monster’s corpse without turning a hair, but Silver was not that sort. That had been a human being, once—long ago, perhaps, but—nine hundred years in the dark, creeping out at eventide to watch a child play—
Maud gave him a sceptical look but said, “Didn’t you say you hunted monsters? He ate people, if that makes you feel any better. Quite a lot of them over the years, I imagine.”
“My mother hunts monsters,” Silver said. “I study the marvellous. It’s not at all the same thing.”
He turned away from the sarcophagus, scraping the remnants of his dignity together. “Very well, you are not the victim of a vampire. I grant, Miss Lindhurst, that you seem quite capable of looking after yourself.
Were you abducted?”
“I climbed out of the window,” Maud said.
“I see.”
“I really should apologise,” she said, and still didn’t. “I see now that it would have been better to hide down here and wait for the pair of you to leave. I doubt you would have discovered the crypt after dark—the entrance is very well disguised—and by the time you came back in the morning, I would already have been gone. Only, I was above ground, taking measurements, and then . . . it was seeing him again that startled me.”
Silver said nothing. He was good at drawing people into informative conversation; Maud, now she was attempting it, was plainly a rank amateur. She wanted to know about Tobias. Or rather, she did know about Tobias, know something; something about Greenhollow, something about the Wild Man, something about the Hallow Wood. And she wanted to know more.
Silver did not care for it at all.
“I would like to see Mr Finch now,” he said.
“If you like,” said Maud, and she couldn’t even hide her disappointment properly.
* * *
Maud had indeed dragged Tobias into yet another subcellar of the sprawling hidden crypt. “There, you see?” she said, as the two of them looked down through the trapdoor. “He’s perfectly well. Just asleep.”
“Miss Lindhurst, you gave my companion a double dose of an untested soporific—”
“Of course it’s not untested,” she said sharply. “I tested it on myself. It’s entirely safe. How else do you think I knew a dosage?”