Those Who Hunt the Night(31)

Simon followed him up the stairs and regarded the twisted hasp with its bent screws, the wood still clinging to their threads. In the ochre glow of the lamp, his eyes were somber—he was beginning to understand.

“There is no mark of a crow on the doorjambs,” he said, and Asher recognized the Elizabethan word for spanner.

“No,” Asher said. “Nor is there anything that could have been used for a fulcrum to get a lever under the door handle. It was jerked out with a straight pull. Again, it’s just within the realm of possibility that a human could have done it, but it isn’t very probable.”

There was long silence, in which, faintly, Asher could hear the patter of renewed rain from above. Then Ysidro said, “But it cannot have been a vampire. Even had he worn a glove to protect his hand from the stake, the daylight would have destroyed him.”

“Would it?” Asher led the way up the cellar steps to the gaslighted kitchen above. The coffin gaped on the floor before them, like some monstrous fish platter displaying a horrid chef d’oeuvre on the worn and ugly linoleum. In a kindling drawer near the stove, Asher found a piece of candle, angled it down the lamp chimney to get a flame, and bore it through the door that gave into the front part of the house.

“Did Calvaire ever speak of Paris? Of what caused him to leave?”

“No.” Ysidro drifted beside him, a soundless ghost in his gray suit. With the gas turned up full, it was obvious no one had crossed the dust-choked parlor or the hall from the front door. “He was not a man who dwelt upon the past,even so recent a past as that. Perhaps he had a reason, but many of us are that way. It is better so.”

“You said when he came here that he ‘promenaded himself’—waited to make his kill until Grippen had contacted him, and swore fealty to Grippen, in exchange for Grippen’s permission to hunt. But it’s obvious that even an inexperienced fledgling, if he’s careful, can conceal himself from the two oldest known vampires in Europe, at least for a time.”

Again Ysidro was silent, turning the implications of that over in his mind.

“Was there ever any talk of vampires older than yourself? Much older, say, a hundred years older? Two hundred years?”

An odd expression flickered in the back of Don Simon’s pale eyes. He paused on the stairs to the first floor, his pale hair haloed in the parlor gaslight behind him. “Of what are you thinking, James?”

“Of vampirism,” Asher said quietly. “Of the slow change of the body, cell by cell, into something other than mortal flesh and mortal bone—of the growth of the vampire’s powers. My wife’s a pathologist. I know that diseases change, like syphilis, the Plague, or chicken pox, even sometimes producing new symptoms, if they continue long enough without killing the patient.”

“And you think the vampire state a disease?”

“It’s a blood-borne contagion, isn’t it?”

“That is not all that it is.”

“Alcoholism alters the brain, driving its victims to madness,” Asher said. “High fevers can destroy the mind or parts of the mind; the mind itself can bring on physical ailments—nervousness, declines, what women call ‘vapors,’ brain fever. Any family practitioner could have told you that, even before Freud started doing his work on nervous hysteria.Emotional shock can cause anythingfrom a stroke to a miscarriage. If you’ve traveled in India, seen the things the fakirs do, you’ll know the mind can perform stranger feats upon the body than that.

“What I’m getting at is this: Does vampirism have symptoms, developments, which only manifest themselves after a certain span of years? A long span, longer than most vampires live or can remember? Would one eventually, in the span of years, toughen even against daylight? And you didn’t answer my original question.”

Instead of replying at once, Ysidro resumed his climb to the floor above, Asher following at his heels, the burning candle still in his hand. He lit the gas in the upper hall and opened the two doors there. One room was a parlor, the other a bedroom, both obviously long out of use.

“It is an odd thing,” Ysidro said slowly, “but there are not many vampires in Europe—or in America, which has had its own troubles—much over two hundred and fifty years old. These days vampirism is a phenomenon of the cities, where the poor are uncounted and deaths are relatively invisible. But cities tend to trap vampires in their own cataclysms.”

He opened the door at the end of the hall, leading to the attic stair. Asher paused briefly to study the two heavy hasps screwed into the wood of its inner side. Neither had been torn out; the padlocks, neatly open, were hooked through the steel staples on the doorframe.

He tried Bully’s remaining keys out of sheer routine—two of them fitted. Unlike the cellar, the attic door had a single hasp on the outside, but it was clear from the locks that no one had forced his way in or out.

They traded a glance, and Asher shrugged. “We might as well see what’s up there anyway—there may be papers.”

“Dr. Grippen and I were the only two who survived the Fire of London,” Ysidro went on, as they ascended thestair. “I only lived by lucky chance. As far as I know, no Munich vampire survived the troubles of the forties, and no Russian vampire Napoleon’s invasion, occupation, and incineration of Moscow. Rome has always been a perilous city for the Undead, certainly since the founding of the Inquisition.”

At the top of the attic stairs, the door stood open. A square of grimy yellowish light indicated a window and a street light somewhere below.

“Qué va?” Ysidro whispered behind Asher in the dark. “Did he sleep here, the windows would be muffled…”

It took Asher a moment, in the almost total darkness beyond the feeble circle of the candle’s light, to see what lay on the floor halfway between the door and the left-hand wall.

“Calvaire?” he asked softly, as Ysidro brushed past him and strode to that grisly heap of bones, ash, and seared metal oddments. Buttons, brace buckles, the lacing tips of shoes, and the charred metal barrel of a stylographic pen all glinted briefly in the fluttering yellow glow as he came to stand behind the kneeling vampire. Then he looked on past them, to the farther wall. A hinged panel gaped open, showing a coffin within a small closet which would have been totally indistinguishable from the wall itself when shut. Thick draperies and shutters had been torn from the attic’s single window. In the silence, the rain on the low roof was like the ominous tattoo of Prussian drums.

“At least a man,” he added, lowering his candle again to shed its weak radiance on the remains, “since there are no corset stays.” He was interested to note that, judging by the relative wholeness of the bones, Ysidro seemed to be correct about the French vampire’s age.

The vampire lifted a gold ring clear of the mess and blew the thin coating of ash and dust from it. A chance draft made the candle flame waver; the diamond of its settingwinked like a bright and baleful eye. “Calvaire,” he affirmed softly. “So he must indeed have wakened, with the searing of the light, to stagger already dying from his coffin…”

“Which is a curious thing,” Asher remarked, “if our killer, being a vampire himself, knew from the first that the head had to be cut off to prevent such a thing from happening. Almost as curious as the fact that the door downstairs wasn’t locked.” He stooped beside Ysidro to pick a couple of keys from the ghastly debris. He matched the wards and found them duplicates of Bully Joe’s keys. “There’s no mark of charring on the floor between the coffin’s place of concealment and the body, either. If, as you say, the flesh begins to burn at once…”

“He could not have admitted the killer himself,” Ysidro said. “Whatever the capabilities of the killer, Calvaire at least could not have gone anywhere near the door at the bottom of the steps during the hours of daylight.”

“And yet the killer entered that way.”

Ysidro lifted an inquiring brow.

“Had he not, he could simply have left the way he came, without unlocking the door at the bottom of the step at all. What it looks like is that Calvaire knew his killer, and admitted him himself, by night … Is it usual for a vampire to have two coffins in the same building?”

“It is not unusual,” Ysidro said calmly. “Fledglings frequently take refuge with their masters. And then, there are few houses which are safe for vampires, and those which are, ofttimes become veritable rookeries of the Undead, as you yourself found in Savoy Walk. That was one of my reasons for keeping from you as many details as possible. Not for their protection, you understand, but for yours.”

“I’m touched by your concern,” Asher said dryly. “Could the killer have killed or incapacitated Calvaire insome other way, leaving the body to be destroyed when daylight came?”

The vampire did not answer for a moment, sitting hunkered beside the burned skeleton, his arms extended out over his knees. “I do not know,” he said at length. “But if he had broken Calvaire’s neck or back—and the skull seems to be lying at a strange angle, though that, of course, might simply be the way it rolled when the muscles were consumed—it would have incapacitated him, so that he lay here on the floor, conscious but unable to move, while the light slowly brightened in the window. If our killer is himself immune to daylight,” he added neutrally, “it is possible that he remained to watch.”