Those Who Hunt the Night(16)

Annoyed, he snapped, “Would you stop doing that and just come up to me like a human being?”

Ysidro thought about it for a moment, then countered quietly, “Would you stop identifying all the exits from a house before you go into it? I have a cab waiting.”

The houses in Half Moon Street were Georgian, red brick mellowed by time and somewhat blackened by the veiling soot of the city’s atmosphere, but retaining the graciousness of moderate wealth. Most of them showed lights in their windows; in the gaslight, Asher could make out the minuscule front gardens—little more than a few shrubs clustered around the high porches—groomed like carriage horses. An indefinable air of neglect clung to Number Ten, three-quarters of the way down the pavement. Asher identified it as the result of a jobbing gardener who had not been kept up to his work, and front steps that went weeks or months without being scrubbed—fatal, in London.

“Housekeeping presents its own problems for the Undead, doesn’t it?” he remarked quietly as they ascended the tall steps to the front door. “Either you keep servants or scrub your doorstep yourself—the windows here haven’t been washed, either. Every doorstep on the street is brick-batted daily but this one.”

“There are ways of getting around that.” Ysidro’s face, in profile against the reflection of the street lamps as he turned the key, retained its calmly neutral expression.

“I’m sure there are. But even the stupidest servant is going to notice something amiss when nobody orders any food or uses the chamber pots.”

The vampire paused, the tarnished brass door handle in his gloved hand. He regarded Asher enigmatically, but in the back of his brimstone-colored eyes, for an instant, Asher half thought he glimpsed the flicker of amused appreciation. Then the black cloak whispered against the doorframe, and Ysidro led the way into the house.

“Edward Hammersmith was the youngest son of a nabob of the India trade, almost exactly one hundred yearsago,” he said, his light, uninflected voice echoing softly in the darkness. “The house was one of three owned by the family; Hammersmith asked for and got it from his father after he became vampire, thereafter gaining a reputation as the family’s reclusive eccentric. He was in his way a reclusive eccentric even as a vampire—he seldom went out, save to hunt.”

There was a faint scratch, the whiff of sulphur overriding for a moment the general foetor of must and dampness that filled what, by the sound of the echoes, must be a large and lofty front hall. The sharp sliver of matchlight confirmed this an instant later, racing in threads along tarnished gilt panel moldings and the graceful medallions of a high Adam ceiling, almost invisible overhead in the gloom. For that first moment, Ysidro’s face, etched in those hard-cut shadows, seemed, too, something wrought of unbelievably delicate plaster. Then he touched the flame to the wick of an oil lamp that stood with several others on a Sheraton sideboard. The light leaped and slithered over the square mirror set in the sideboard, the web-shrouded lusters of the chandelier, the rounded glass of the smutted chimney which gray-gloved fingers, seeming so disembodied in the warm glow, fitted over the flame.

“Did he hunt with Lotta?”

“Upon occasion.” Sprawling shadows followed them up the stairs, flowing over carved wall panels warped with damp. “They were both…” Again that pause, that sense of veering, like a small boat before gusty wind, into potentially less dangerous seas. “Edward liked a change now and then. Usually he hunted alone.”

“Was he a ‘good vampire’?”

“Not very.” At the top of the first flight of stairs, Ysidro turned right and pushed open the double doors to what had once been the large drawing room. He held his lamp aloft as he did so, and the light scattered across books—literallythousands of books, crammed into makeshift shelves which not only lined every inch of wall nearly to the curve of the ceiling, but stacked the floor hip-deep in places. Little paths threaded between the stacks, like the beaten hoof lines or dassie tunnels that stitched unseen through the deep grass of the veldt. Towers of books ascended drunkenly from the two sideboards that loomed up out of the gloomy maze, and more were visible through the sideboards’ half-opened caned doors; they piled the seats of every chair but one in untidy heaps. Bundles of papers were scattered over them or lay loose like leaves blown in an autumn wind. Bending down, Asher picked up one that lay nearest the door—brown and brittle as Lotta’s oldest petticoats, it was sheet music of some obscure aria by Salieri.

Like a little island, there was an open place in the middle of the room, where grimy gray patches of lichenous carpet could be seen; it contained a chair, a small table supporting an oil lamp, a mahogany piano, and a harpsichord whose faded paint had nearly all flaked away. Sheet music heaped the floor under both instruments.

Beside him, Ysidro’s calm voice continued, “There is a regrettable tendency among vampires to become like the little desert mice, which hoard shining things in holes.”

“If passion for life is the core of your nature,” Asher remarked, “that isn’t surprising, but it must make for awkward domestic arrangements. Do all vampires do it?”

He looked away from the gloomy cavern, with its smells of mildew and damp, and found the vampire’s strange eyes on him, a flicker of inscrutable interest in their depths. Ysidro looked away. “No.” He turned from the door and moved toward the stairs at the far end of the hall, Asher following in his wake. “But I find the ones who do not rather boring.”

It was on the tip of Asher’s tongue to ask Ysidro what his hobby was, what passion filled the dark hours of hiswakefulness when he was not actively hunting his prey, but he decided to take advantage of the Spaniard’s relatively communicative mood with matters less frivolous. “Did Calvaire hunt with Lotta?”

“Yes. They became quite good friends.”

“Were they lovers?”

Ysidro paused at the top of the second flight of stairs, the lamp held low in his hand, its light streaming up onto the narrow, fragile-boned face and haloing the webby stringiness of his hair, casting a blot of shadow on the low ceiling above. Carefully, he replied, “As such vampires understand the concept, yes. But it has nothing to do with either love or sexual union  . Vampires have no sex—the organs are present, but nonfunctional. And neither Lotta nor Calvaire would even have considered the happiness of the other, which is what I understand to be one of the tenets of mortal love.”

“Then what was between them?”

“A shared ecstasy in the kill.” He turned to open the small door to the left of the stairs, then paused and turned back. “There is, you understand, an ecstasy, a surge of—I don’t know what. A ‘kick,’ I think they call such things now—in the drinking of the life as it pours from the veins of another. It is not only in the taste of the blood, which I am told not all of us find pleasant, though I do. We are as much creatures of the psychic as the physical. We perceive things differently from human perceptions. We can taste—feel—the texture of the minds of others, and at no time more intensely than when the human mind is crying out in death. That is what we drink, as well as the blood—the psychic force, which answers to and feeds our own psychic abilities to control the minds of others.”

He leaned in the doorway, cocking his head a little, so that the strands of his pale hair fell in attenuated crescents on his shoulders. The lamp in his hands touched face andhair, warming them, alike colorless, into the illusion of goldenness, like honey-stained ivory. Asher was conscious, suddenly, of the empty darkness of the house all around.

His voice continued, light and disinterested and absolutely without inflection, committing nothing of the enigma of his eyes. “As a vampire, I am conscious at all times of the aura, the scent, of the human psyches near me, as much as I am conscious of the smell of live blood. Some vampires find this almost unbearably exciting, which is why they play with their victims. There is never a time—I am told—when they are not thinking, Shall it be now or later? It is that which feeds us, more than the physical blood—it is that which we hunt. And that psychic hunger, that lust for the draining of the soul, is as far beyond the knife-edge instant before the cresting of sexual orgasm as that instant is beyond—oh—after you have had two pieces of marzipan, and you are wondering whether you might like a third one, or a bit of honey cake instead.”

After a long while Asher said quietly, “I see.”

“You don’t,” Ysidro replied, his voice whispering away in soft echoes against the darkness of the empty house, “and you can’t. But you would do well to remember it, if ever you find yourself in the company of other vampires than I.”

There were candles in all the wall sconces of the room where Edward Hammersmith had kept his coffin. Ysidro thrust one of them down into the lamp chimney to touch the flame, then went around the room, lighting the others, until the whole place blazed with a quivering roseate glow unlike the soft steadiness of gaslight. Asher noted boxes of candles stacked carelessly in every corner and puddles of wax, raised to lumpy stalagmites four and five inches high, on the Turkey carpets beneath each wax-clotted sconce. In the center of the room, the print of the coffin lay clear and dark upon the dusty rug, though the coffin itself was gone.There were no traces of ash or burning around the edge of that sharp, dust-free oblong—only a scuffed path leading there from the door, worn by Hammersmith’s feet, and a few smudgy tracks in the dust, leading beyond it to the room’s two tall windows. The heavy shutters that had covered these had been stripped of the three or four layers of black fabric that curtained them and ripped from their nails.