James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (4 page)

Asher studied him for a long moment under the jumpy glare of the gas jet in its pierced metal sheath. The face was smooth and unwrinkled and hard, the slender body poised and balanced like a young man's in its well-tailored gray suit. But the jeweled eyes held in them an expression beyond denning, the knowledge of one who has seen three and a half centuries of human folly and human sin reel gigglingly by; they were the eyes of one who was once human, but is no longer.

“You're not telling me everything,” he said.

“Did your Foreign Office?” Ysidro inquired. “And I am telling you this, James. We will hire you, we will pay you, but if you betray us, in word or in deed, there will be no place on this earth where you or your lady Lydia will be safe from us, ever. I hope you believe that, for both your sakes.”

Asher folded his hands, settled his shoulders back into the worn plush. “You hope I believe it for your own sake as well. In the night you're powerful, but by daylight you seem to be curiously easy to kill.”

“So,” the vampire murmured. For an instant his delicate mouth tightened; then the expression, if expression it was, smoothed away, and the pale eyes lost some of their focus, as if that ancient soul sank momentarily into its dreams. Though the whole car vibrated with the rush of the dark rails beneath their feet, Asher had a sense of terrible silence, like a monster waiting in absolute stillness for its prey.

Then he heard a hesitant step in the corridor, a woman's, though traffic up and down the narrow passage had long ceased. The compartment door slid open without a knock. Framed in the slot of brown oak and gaslight stood the woman who had watched over her two sleeping children on the platform, staring before her like a sleepwalker.

Ysidro said nothing; but, as if he had invited her in, the woman closed the door behind her. Stepping carefully with the swaying of the train, she came to sit on the edge of the seat at the vampire's side.

“I—I'm here,” she stammered in a tiny voice, her eyes glassy under straight, thin lashes. “Who—why . . . ?”

“It is nothing you need trouble about, bellisima” Ysidro whispered, putting out one slim hand in its black glove to touch her face. “Nothing at all.”

“No,” she whispered mechanically. “Nothing at all.” Her dress was of shabby red cloth, clean but very old, the fabric several times turned; she wore a flat black straw hat, and a purple scarf round her neck against the cold. She couldn't have been more than twenty-five— Lydia's age—and had once been pretty, Asher thought, before ceaseless worry had graven those petty lines around her mouth and eyes. Tersely he said, “All right, you've made your point . . .”

“Have I?” The delicate black fingers drew forth the wooden pin that held the hat to the tight screw of fair hair; caressingly, like a lover's, they began to work loose the pins from the hair itself. “In all the rather silly legends about us, no one ever seems to have pinpointed the true nature of the vampire's power—a kind of mesmerism, as they used to call it, an influence over the minds of humans and, to some extent, beasts. Though I am not sure into which category this creature would fall . . .”

“Send her away.” Asher found his own voice was thick, his own mind seeming clogged, as if he, too, were half dreaming. He made as if to rise, but it was like contemplating getting out of bed too early on a foggy morning—far easier to remain where he was. He was aware of Ysidro's glance on him, sidelong under long, straight eyelashes nearly white.

“She was only along in one of the third-class carriages, she and her daughters.” With slow care the vampire unwound the purple scarf, letting it slither heedless to the carriage floor; unfastened the cheap celluloid buttons of the woman's collar. “I could have summoned her from anywhere on the train, or, had she not been on it, I could have stood on the platform at Paddington and called her; and believe me, James, she would have gotten the money somehow and come. Do you believe that?”

Like dark spiders, his fingers parted her collar, down to the sad little ruffle of her mended muslin chemise; the milky throat rose like a column from the white slope of her breast. “Do you remember your wife and her servants, asleep because I willed that they should sleep? We can do that, I and my—friends. I know your people now. At my calling, believe me, they would come—that big mare of a chambermaid, your skinny little Mrs. Grimes, your stupid scullion, or the lout who looks after your gardens and stables—do you believe that? And all without knowing any more about it than this woman here.” His black leather flngers stroked the untouched skin. The woman's open eyes never moved. As if he were deep in the sleep of exhaustion, Asher's mind kept screaming at him, Get up! Get up! But he only regarded himself with a kind of bemusement, as if separated from his body by an incredible distance. The noises of the train seemed dulled, its shaking almost lulling, and it seemed as if this scene, this woman who was about to die, and indeed everything that had happened since that afternoon, which he'd spent explaining the Sanskrit roots of Romany to an undergraduate named Pettifer, were all a dream. In a way it made more sense when viewed so.

“A poor specimen, but then we feed upon the poor, mostly—they're far less likely to be avenged than the rich.” A fang gleamed in the trembling gaslight. “Do you believe I can do this to whomever I will? To you or to anyone whose eyes I meet?”

No, thought Asher dully, struggling toward the surface of what seemed to be an endless depth of dark waters. No.

“No.” He forced himself to his feet, staggering a little, as if he had truly been asleep. For a moment he felt the vampire's naked mind on his, like a steel hand, and quite deliberately he walled his mind against it--In his years of working for the Foreign Office there were things he had willed himself not to know, the consequences of actions he had taken. The night he had shot poor Jan van der Platz in Pretoria he had forced himself to feel nothing, as he did now. The fact that he had succeeded in it then was what had turned him, finally, from the Great Game.

As deliberately as he had pressed the trigger then, he walked over to the woman and pulled her to her feet. Ysidro's pale eyes followed him, but he did not meet them; he pushed the woman out of the compartment ahead of him and into the corridor. She moved easily, still sleepwalking. On the little platform between the cars the wind was raw and icy; with the cold air, his mind seemed to clear. He leaned in the doorframe, feeling oddly shaken, letting the cold smite his face.

Beside him the woman shuddered. Her hands—ungloved, red, chapped, and callused, in contrast to that white throat—fumbled at her open collar as her eyes flared with alarm and she stared, shaken and disoriented, up into his face. “What—who—?” She pushed away from him, to the very rail of the narrow space, as if she would back off it entirely into the flying night.

Asher dropped at once into his most harmless, donnish stance and manner, an exaggeration of the most gentle facet of his own personality that he generally used when abroad. “I saw you just standing in the corridor, madam,” he said. “Please forgive my liberty, but my wife sleepwalks like that, and something about the way you looked made me think that might be the case. I did speak to you and, when you didn't answer, I was sure of it.”

“I. . .” She clutched at her unbuttoned collar, confusion, suspicion, terror in her rabbity eyes. He wondered how much she recalled as a dream, and became at once even more consciously the Oxford don, the Fellow of New College, the philologist who had never even heard of machine guns, let alone wadded up plans of them into hollowed-out books to ship out of Berlin.

“Fresh air will wake her up—my wife, I mean. Her sister sleepwalks, too. May I escort you back to your compartment?”

She shook her head quickly and mumbled, “No—thank you, sir—I— you're very kind . . .” Her accent Asher automatically identified as originating in Cornwall. Then she hurried over the small gap between the cars and into the one beyond, huddled with cold and embarrassment.

Asher remained where he was for some minutes, the cold wind lashing at his hair.

When he returned to the compartment, Ysidro was gone. The only thing that remained to tell him that all which had passed was not, in fact, a dream was the woman's purple scarf, collapsed like a discarded grave band on the floor between the two seats. Asher felt the anger surge in him, guessing where the vampire was and what he would be doing, but knowing there was nothing he could do. He could, he supposed, run up and down the train shouting to beware of vampires. But he had seen Ysidro move and knew there was very little chance of even glimpsing him before he found another victim. In a crowded third-class carriage or an isolated sleeping car, a dead man or woman would pass unnoticed until the end of the journey, always provided the body were not simply tipped out. Mangled under the train wheels, there would be no questions about the cause of death or the amount of blood in the veins.

But of course, if he issued a warning, nothing at all would happen save that he would be locked up as a bedlamite.

Filled with impotent rage, Asher flung himself back in the red cushioned seat to await Don Simon Ysidro's reappearance, knowing that he would do as the vampire asked.

Her name was Lotta.“ Don Simon's soft voice echoed queerly in the damp vaults of the tomb. ”She was one of . . .“ He hesitated fractionally, then amended, ”A hatmaker, when she was alive.“ Asher wondered what Ysidro's original description of her would have been, ”In life she was a rather poor specimen of a human—cocky, disrespectful of her betters* a thief, and a whore.“ He paused, and again Asher had the impression that the Spaniard was picking through a jewel box of facts for the few carats' worth of information with which he was willing to part. ”But she made a good vampire."

Asher's left eyebrow quirked upward, and he flashed the beam of Ysidro's dark lantern around the low stone vaults above their heads. Shadowed niches held coffins; here and there, on a keystone arch, a blurred coat of arms had been incised, though why, if Death had not been impressed by the owner's station, the family expected Resurrection to be, he was at a loss to decide. Highgate was not a particularly old cemetery, but it was intensely fashionable—vaults in this part started at well over a hundred guineas—and the tomb, with its narrow stair leading down from a tree-lined avenue of similar pseudo-Egyptian mausoleums, was guarded by its well-paid-for isolation and was, at the same time, far easier to enter than the crypt of some City church would have been.

“And what makes a good vampire?”

For a moment he thought Ysidro would evade the question. The Spaniard stood for a moment, nearly invisible in the shadows of a dark niche, his aquiline face inscrutable in its long frame of colorless hair. Then he said slowly, "An attitude of mind, I suppose. You must understand, James, that the core of a vampire's being is the hunger to live, to devour life—the will not to die. Those who have not that hunger, that will, that burning inside them, would not survive the—process—by which the living become Undead and, even if they did, would not long continue this Unlife we lead. But it can be done well or poorly. To be a good vampire is to be careful, to be alert, to use all the psychic as well as the physical faculties of the vampire, and to have that flame that feeds upon the joy of living.

“Lotta, for all her vulgarity—and she was amazingly vulgar—was a truly attractive woman, and that flame of life in her was part of the attraction. Even I felt it. She truly reveled in being a vampire.”

The yellow lance of the lantern beam passed over the short flight of granite steps leading down from the level of the avenue outside—the avenue that, even in daylight, would have been dim with subaqueous green shade—and gleamed faintly on the metal that sheathed the vault doors. Even entering the place, Asher could see that the dust and occasional blown leaves lay far less thickly on those steps and on the sort of trodden path that led to this niche to the right of the vault. It marked Lotta's nightly comings and goings and obviated any specific track of the one who had found her sleeping here.

“I take it you knew her when she was alive?”

“No.” The vampire folded his arms, a gesture which barely stirred the black folds of his Inverness.

In the glaring gaslights of Paddington Station Asher had seen that Ysidro had lost some of his terrible pallor, looking almost human, except for his eyes—presumably, Asher thought with a sort of dark humor, he had dined on the train. It was more than could be said for himself. While Ysidro summoned a cab from the rank of horse-drawn hansoms before the station, he'd bought a meat pasty from an old man selling them from a cart, and the taste of it lingering in his mouth was as bizarre an incongruity in this macabre gloom as had been the act of eating it in the cab with the vampire sitting ramrod-straight at his side. Ysidro had offered to pay the halfpenny it had cost—Asher had simply told him to put it on account.

“Then you didn't make her a vampire?”

Either he was growing more used to the minimal flickers that passed for the vampire's expressions or Ysidro had held the woman in especial contempt. “No.”

“Who did, then?”

“One of the other vampires in London.”

“You're going to have to give me some information sometime, you know,” Asher remarked, coming back to Don Simon's side.

“I see no reason for you to know who we are and where to find us. The less you know, the less danger there will be for all of us, yourself included.”

Asher studied that cool, ageless face by the amber kerosene glow and thought, They plan to kill me when this is over. It was only logical if, as Ysidro had said, the first defense of the Undead was the disbelief of the living. He wondered if they thought he was a fool or merely believed him to be controllable in spite of this knowledge. Anger stirred in him, like a snake shifting its coils.

And more than anger, he was aware of the obscure sense that he had picked up in his years of working for the Department, an impression of looking at two pieces of a puzzle whose edges did not quite match.

He walked back to the niche, with its thick stench of fresh ashes, and raised the lantern high.