Those Who Hunt the Night(38)

Asher glanced sharply across at him, but met only matter-of-fact inquiry in those cool, strange eyes. Instead of replying, he said, “If he wanted to slay his own kind, there are plenty to begin on here, without going to London for the purpose. And if the killer is his contemporary, with thesame alterations of powers, Brother Anthony may be our only hope of tracking him.”

“If he will.” They crossed a street. Asher had a momentary sense of movement in the noisome blackness of an alley to their right and the mutter of voices as the local toughs wisely decided not to molest this particular pair of passers-by. “And if, given that you can coax him from the earth to which he has gone, he consents to assist us and not ally himself with the killer.”

Asher shivered, remembering how the little monk had seemed to melt from the darkness, the cold tickle of those frail fingers on his hand, and their unbreakable strength. He knew what his own reaction would be to a mortal man who allied himself with vampires. Perhaps it was best after all to let sleeping dogs lie.

They passed through a darkened square whose fountain sounded unearthly loud in the stillness, turned into the Boulevard St. Michel. Even that great artery was virtually empty. The chestnut trees that lined it rustled overhead like a dim woods, their leaves lying in soggy drifts along the walls of the great hospitals which clustered in that neighborhood. The electric street lamps threw too-bright halos, making the gloom seem all the more dense. Now and then, a passing fiacre broke the eerie silence with the sharp tap of hooves, but that was all. The night was still and cold; Asher pulled his scarf more closely around his throat and huddled deep into the folds of his ulster.

Presently he asked, “If there is a strange vampire operating in London—be it Tulloch the Scot, even Rhys himself, or some other—might we not trace it through unexplained kills? Would a vampire that ancient have to kill as often?”

“Any city on earth,” Don Simon replied austerely, “gives forth such spate of unexplained kills of its own, through disease, cold, filth, and uncaring, that it were difficult to trace a single vampire’s poor efforts. As for needing blood less frequently—or needing, rather, the life, the death cry of the mind to feed the powers of the mind on which our very survival depends—that I do not know.”

He paused for a moment on the pavement. A whisper of straying wind moved in his dark cloak and lifted the pale hair from his collar. For a moment, it seemed as if he himself would drift onto it like a vast gray leaf. Then he walked on.

“It is not merely that we are dependent on the nourishment of the blood, James, and the psychic feed of the passing of the soul. Many of us are addicted to them. Some suffer this to greater or lesser degree, and some, in fact, take great pleasure in the addiction. Lotta used to prolong her fasts from the ultimate kill as much as possible, to sweeten them when they came, but it is a dangerous practice. In some, the craving rises almost to madness. It can make us hasty or careless, and in all things concerning us, carelessness is death.”

They were nearing the miniature maze of streets near the river where the Hotel Chambord stood; the cold smell of the Seine hung in the air, and already, down the cobbled side streets, the milk sellers were about. Asher studied sidelong the delicate profile, the white, hooked nose and loose thickness of colorless hair.

“You haven’t relaxed in three hundred and fifty years,” he said softly, “have you?”

“No.”

“Do you relax when you sleep?”

The vampire did not look at him. “I do not know. We all learn too late that sleep is not the same as it was.”

“Do you dream?”

Ysidro paused, and again Asher had the impression he was on the point of being lifted and whirled away by the faint stirring of the wind. A faint flex line of a bitter smiletouched the white silk of the skin, then smoothed away. “Yes,” Simon said expressionlessly. “I dream. But they are not like human dreams.”

Asher wondered whether, when Simon sought whatever lair he had made for himself in Paris, he would dream of Brother Anthony, sorting bones in the dark.

Then suddenly he was alone. Somewhere in the back of his mind he had the sensation of having once dreamed, himself, about a slim, cloaked form walking away toward the whitish mists of the Seine, but that was all.

SAVAGE MURDERS IN LONDON

THE RIPPER STALKS AGAIN?



A series of shocking crimes rocked London last night when nine people—six women and three men—were brutally murdered in the Whitechapel and Limehouse districts of London between the hours of midnight and four in the morning. The first of the bodies, that of variety actress Sally Shore, was found by dustmen in the alley behind the Limehouse Road. She had been much bruised and cut about, so savagely that, when found, her body was almost completely drained of blood. The eight other victims, found in various places in the neighborhood, were in a similar condition. Police remarked upon the fact that in no instance were screams or cries for help heard and upon the fact that, though the bodies were nearly drained of blood, very little was found at the scenes, leading them to believe that the murders took place elsewhere and the bodies were transported to the places where they were found…

Asher set down the newspaper beside his midday breakfast of croissant and coffee, feeling cold to his bones. Nine!

What had Simon said? After a long fast, the time always comes when the craving sets in and will not be denied.

Nine.

He felt sick.

It wasn’t the London vampires. That much he knew. They had to live in London—Grippen, the Farrens, Chloé. But a strange vampire, hiding from them in London, might indeed be traceable through his kills, by those who knew what to look for. He had lain hidden as long as he could, fasting and silently murdering …

He glanced at the date. It was this morning’s paper. Last night, when he and Simon had been stalking Anthony in the darkness of the catacombs, the murderer had struck again. This time it was not vampires who were his victims, but humans.

Admittedly, he thought, glancing down the article, not particularly important humans—the women were all listed as “variety actresses,” seamstresses, or simply, “young women.” Given the area in which they were found and given the hour they were killed, there was no real doubt as to their true professions. But it made their murders no less atrocious; and it made the lives of everyone else in London no more secure.

They had not cried out. Horribly, the thin, dreamy face of the woman on the train returned to him, the way her hand had fumbled willingly at her collar buttons, the glazed somnambulance of her eyes. He remembered Lydia’s red hair, gleaming in the dim radiance of the gas lamps, and his palms grew cold.

No, he told himself firmly. She knows the danger—she’s sensible enough to stay indoors, close to people, at night …

That knowledge did not help.

He raised his head, staring sightlessly at the traffic jostling past the café where he sat. The thin mist of earlydawn had burned away into a crisp, brittle sunlight, like crystal on the sepia buildings across the street and the India-ink traceries of the bare trees. The boulevardiers were out for a stroll, reveling in the last fine weather of autumn—leisured gentlemen in well-tailored blazers, men of letters, self-proclaimed wits and artistes. Open-topped carriages rolled past on their way to the Bois de Boulogne, affording glimpses of the elegant matrons of the Paris gratin or of expensively dressed sin—the “eight-spring luxury models” of the demimonde.

Asher saw none of it. He wondered where Simon might be found. Elysée de Montadour’s hôtel was, he was virtually certain, somewhere in the Marais; he supposed that given a day in which to search through the building records, he could locate the place. But there was no guarantee that Ysidro was sleeping there—somehow he doubted that slim, enigmatic hidalgo would put himself anywhere near the power of Elysée and her cicisbeos—and his visit to Ernchester House had taught him the folly of entering vampire nests alone. And in any case, what he wanted now most to know was something which could only be ascertained while the sun was in the sky.

He felt absently in his pocket for the wax tablets and wondered what time the guards at the catacombs had their dinner.

One of the advantages of working for the Foreign Office, Asher had found, had been a nodding acquaintance with the fringes of the underworld in a dozen cities across Europe. His Oxford colleagues would have been considerably startled had they realized how easily their unassuming Lecturer in Philology could have obtained any number of strange services, from burglary to murder to “nameless vices”—most of which had perfectly good names, in Latin, at least. In spite of the fact that England and Francewere the closest of allies, he had in the past had cause to need keys cut in a hurry in Paris with no questions asked and, on this occasion, he knew precisely where to go.

As it was neither the first nor the third Saturday of the month, he had little fear of meeting parties of tourists at the catacombs or the large numbers of guards that the Office of Directory and Treasury considered necessary to herd them through. The catacombs would be staffed by one or at most two old pensioners of the State, and, though the dinner hour was long over by the time Asher reached Montrouge, with the aid of luck and human nature, they might be together gossiping instead of keeping watch at both entrances.