James Asher 2 - Traveling With The Dead (20 page)

Asher recalled something Ysidro had said to him once, about being unable to sense the presence of people deep in cellars through the muffling weight of the earth.

“She’ll be in the crypt under the stable.”

Flame light poured down the stairs, bloody on the earl’s face; a thin face and not particularly an aristocratic one, with an indefinable air of age despite the fact that, like Anthea, he appeared to be no more than thirty-five. Asher did notice, as they raced up the stairs into the choking inferno of the scullery, that at no time did sweat break from the smooth skin of the vampire’s brow.

Asher crossed the yard at a run, but the vampire earl was ahead of him, moving with an insectile, weightless speed, huge bounds like a gazelle. Ernchester stopped, however, in front of the burning stable, hands raised before his face and his blue-gray eyes sick with horror and shock.

The earl followed him without question, however, circling the building to the rear, where the flames were less. Asher drove his boot through a cellar window, dropping into what had been a boiler room. The place smelled of dirt and damp brick, and the thin, sickly odor of kerosene that lifted the hair on Asher’s neck. He dug another match from his pocket, scratched it on the wall behind him. There were barrels of the stuff, ranged along the wall beyond the hunched black monstrosity of the generator itself. He heard the earl whisper, “God’s death!” behind him, and pointed toward what looked to be the door of a closet, nearly invisible in the shadows by the coal bin.

“Through there. We have a few minutes. The fire’s just caught.”

The door was locked. Ernchester ripped the entire mechanism—lock plate, handle, bolt—free of the wood without visible effort and threw it clanging to the brick floor, then vanished like a moth in the darkness.

Asher had been in the crypt many times. Like the subcellar beneath the scullery, Fairport used it to conceal people who weren’t supposed to be in Vienna or who had to leave the town in a hurry. Because of its remoteness from the main house—and the patients who usually resided there—it had also been used for meetings, if instructions had to be passed along with minimum risk of being seen.

He’d felt his way halfway down the boxed-in stairway when yellow light glowed at the bottom. Through the doorway he saw Ernchester setting on the table a newly lighted oil lamp and turning back to the coffin trunk that filled half of the room.

“She’s in here,” the earl said softly and knelt beside the trunk. He passed his hands along the lid, pressed his cheek to the leather. His eyes closed. The flesh around them rumpled and compressed, like an old man’s. Then he moved his head and looked up over his shoulder at Asher, standing in the doorway. “Can you take an end?”

It was awkward, getting the trunk around the corners of the stair. Even in the few minutes they had been in the crypt, the air in the boiler room had heated, and the smoke there was growing thick. Like the house, the stable was wood, the roof and walls went up like tinder. When they dragged and manhandled the trunk upstairs, they found the ground floor suffocatingly hot, filled with blinding smoke under a vicious rain of cinder and sparks. Asher coughed, gasping for breath, his grip on the trunk slipping. As his knees gave under him, he wondered suddenly what chemicals Fairport had in the laboratories here and what fumes they might be adding to the miasma of smoke.

He tried to get to his feet, and fell.

Above the roaring of the fire overhead he heard the scratch of the trunk’s brass-bound corners as Ernchester—unbreathing, undead, desperate to save his wife at all costs—dragged it toward the door and safety.

Black unconsciousness rolled over Asher like a wave. He tried to stand, then realized that the air was a little cooler down near the floor. Inhaling was like trying to breathe kerosene. Kerosene, he thought dizzily. When the roof goes, it’ll take the floor with it, and the whole place will turn into a furnace… The thought that he’d probably be killed by the falling roof before the kerosene scattered the building over half an acre of the Vienna Woods was not much of a comfort. At one point he thought he was crawling, but a moment later realized he was lying with his cheek to the superheating linoleum of the floor, a fallen cinder burning the back of his left hand.

Hands as cold and strong as machinery took hold of his arms, lifting and dragging him as if he were a bale of sticks. The smell of smoke seemed stronger outside, perhaps because his lungs were working again. He stumbled, trying to get his feet under him, and clutched at the shoulders that supported his arm.

He felt them flinch.

Silver, he thought. The chain on his wrist would sting through Ernchester’s coat.

The trunk lay just within the compound gate. It was still shut. Ernchester must have turned back the moment he’d dragged it out of range of the fire.

“She’s asleep.”

Asher raised his head, his brown hair hanging in his eyes, his face burning in the cold air under a film of sweat, soot, and grime. Ernchester knelt beside the trunk, one arm resting along its lid, the reflection of the flames imparting gory color to his narrow face, glittering in his close-cropped fair hair, his haunted, weary eyes.

“Drugged, I think,” Ernchester went on softly. “That is… as well. Thank you.”

Asher looked back across the gardens. The front part of the main house was in flames. The rear wing, where Fairport’s office and his own rooms had been, was still intact. By the flaring light two bodies were clearly visible on the gravel paths.

He fumbled in his pocket for Fairport’s keys, found two that would open the trunk’s heavy latches. Ernchester touched his hand lightly as he would have opened the lid. “Not yet. The air will revive her, and I don’t think I could stand that. I won’t do that to her.” The earl straightened his back, though he remained kneeling, one hand atop the other on the lid of the trunk. “Take her away from here. Go with her back to England. Take her out of this place. I beg you.” He closed his eyes. “I beg you.”

Firelight picked out the sudden lines around his eyes, the set of the thin lips—a face no one would notice, thought Asher, except that it was not a nineteenth-century face, much less one that belonged to this newborn era. The muscles, the speech, the expressions that had formed the mouth and chin and the set of the cheeks were all from some earlier time, and the years had not changed them.

“I can’t repay you,” he added softly. “I won’t be seeing you, nor anyone known to you, ever again. I will owe you this favor, this boon, for all of time. But please make sure she gets home all right. Tell her—” His voice did not break but halted for a moment, almost as if he sought words. “Tell her that she is all that I ever wanted, and all that I ever had.”

Then he raised first the outer lid, then the inner, to reveal the woman sleeping within.

The living dead, they had been called. By the fevered glare of the firelight she looked, indeed, both alive and dead: waxen, still, unbreathing, with her dark hair scattered about her, the linen of her gown not whiter than the flesh it covered. And beautiful, thought Asher. Beautiful beyond words.

Looking up, he saw Ernchester’s face, without expression, as though all expression had grown too much to be supported under the weight of endless years, save for his eyes.

Ernchester bent a little to touch his wife’s cheek, then leaned down to kiss her lips. To Asher he said, “She’ll wake soon. Tell her that I love her. Always.”

Yellow light flared higher as flames ran along the roof of the main house. Asher turned, startled, in time to see a spindly figure move on the balcony, work and thrust itself to its feet, wobbling and off balance. Disheveled white hair caught the light, and the lenses of his spectacles made great rounds of burning amber as he turned his head. Staggering, Fairport began to descend the stairs.

Asher shouldn’t have been able to hear it under the roaring of the fire, but he did. Thin, silvery laughter, like the breaking of wafer-frail glass, and beneath that, the obscene toad-croak of a bass chuckle. They seemed to hover on the balcony, and on the stair, not quite touched by the fire’s light, as if visibility were something to be put on or off at will, but at one point Asher thought that one of them wore a dress the color of web and moonlight.

Fairport cried under the gag and fell, rolling down the stairs. They floated after him, half-seen migraine visions of alabaster faces, shining hands, eyes that caught the light as had those of the rats among the bones of St. Roche. At the foot of the steps he tried to get to his feet, falling heavily and trying again, and they ringed him, like porpoises playing, flickering shadows of a force he had entirely underestimated, following him as he scrabbled and heaved along the ground.

They let him get quite some distance before they began to feed.

With a roar, the roof of the stables fell in, curtains of flame leaping higher, yellower, beating upon yet somehow failing to completely illuminate what was happening in the court. Then a deeper roar, like a battery of eight-inch guns, and the earth jarred underfoot as the kerosene went up. Beside Asher, Anthea cried out, “Charles!” and sat up suddenly, her brown eyes wide with terror.

Asher caught her hand. Her gaze met his, clouded with old dreams. “The stones. The stones exploded with the heat.” Then she flinched and turned her face away, and Asher realized that for a moment she had thought she was still in London, many years before, when the whole of that city burned.

She said again, “Charles,” and when she looked at him then, her eyes were clear.

“He’s gone.”

She started to rise, and he closed his hand hard on hers, draw-ing her back and knowing he had no way to hold her if she simply wrenched herself free. She could have broken his wrist, or his neck, with very little effort. She looked at him again, questioning and pleading, her black curls a cloud around her face and shoulders, the flame a soaked gold in her eyes.

“He told me to take you back to England,” Asher said. “To see that you reached there safely. He said that he would not see me— and, I presume, you—again. He said that he loves you, always and forever.”

In the courtyard the vampires had sunk down in a ring around Fairport, whose frantic noises had risen to a muffled crescendo, then ceased. Asher wondered what he’d do if Anthea vanished, as Ernchester had, flickering away like a ghost in the woods to seek him. He’d never make it back to Vienna.

For a moment he thought she would. Then she, too, glanced across at the dark shapes in the firelight. Just for a moment her pale tongue slipped out and brushed her lips.

But when she turned to him, her eyes were a woman’s eyes. “Do you know where he’s gone?”

Asher stroked a corner of his mustache. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I can guess. And my guess is: Constantinople.”

“Thursday.” Lydia stared blankly at the newspaper by the glare of the station lights. “Thursday night. We were still in Paris.”

Margaret whispered, “Oh, my God,” through hands pressed to her mouth.

“I thought… I thought I’d have a little more time to catch up with him. That things wouldn’t happen so quickly.”

Ysidro reappeared at their side, trailed by a laconic individual in a Slovak’s baggy white britches who, at his command, loaded Ysidro’s trunk and portmanteau, Margaret’s satchel, and Lydia’s voluminous possessions onto a trolley that he pushed away in the direction of the doors. The vampire tweaked the newspaper from Lydia’s hands, and read.

DOCTOR PERISHES IN SANITARIUM FIRE Early yesterday evening the well-known sanitarium “Fruhlingzeit” burned to the ground in a conflagration of epic proportions, claiming the life of the man who had made it his life-work and monument. The body of the most distinguished English specialist in rejuvenatory medicine, Dr. Bedford Fairport, whose work has contributed to the comfort and healing of hundreds of men and women in Vienna over the past eighteen years, was found in the smoking ruins by police constables and firefighters in the early hours of Friday morning. According to the Vienna police, foul play is suspected. The bodies of a coachman and a laborer were also found.

No patients were present at the sanitarium when it burned, Dr. Fairport having temporarily closed the premises last week. The distinguished Herr Hofrat Theobald Beidenstunde, of the Imperial-and-Royal Austrian Coal Board, undergoing treatment for a nervous condition at Fruhlmgzeit last week, states that Herr Professor Doktor Fairport requested that all patients return to their homes due to repairs on the foundations of the main building. Complete financial recompense was made to all patients so affected.

It is believed that the fire started in the laboratory where a generator was positioned too dose to stores of kerosene, and later spread to the main villa. However, since all three bodies bore marks of violence, arson is being considered as a possibility. Further investigation by the Vienna police is under way.

“Behold an Englishman,” murmured Ysidro. “The good Hofrat Beidenstunde should thank his stars he was reimbursed. The old Queen would never have approved such request for funds.” He folded the newspaper and bestowed it in the pocket of his cloak.

“Victoria?” Margaret Potton asked in surprise.

“Elizabeth. There is nothing there which proves your husband’s fate, mistress. This way.”

The Slovak was waiting for them in the square outside, on the seat of a gaily painted wagon. Ysidro helped the two women in—lifting Lydia with unnerving ease from the pavement—and without wasted words they proceeded into the winding network of high-walled ways that made up the most ancient part of the Altstadt.

“Who—besides Fairport—would Jamie seek out in Vienna?”

“Three years ago it was a man named Halliwell.” Ysidro turned his head, as if listening for some sound below or between the myriad voices and threads of stray music that clamored all around them on the bustling streets. “I have no more recent knowledge than that, nor am I sure where the Department has its headquarters these days. The embassy would be the place to inquire. Say that you seek your husband, that you wish to speak with Halliwell.”