Like a curtain swinging to, the darkness closed behind him as he passed along the corridors; and whether any watched him out, he did not know.
FOURTEEN
HOW DID ONE destroy a vampire who had passed beyond vulnerability to daylight? he wondered. Or presumably to silver and garlic and all the rest of it? He wished he could talk to Lydia, to hear her speculations on the problem, and he tried to think what they might be.
If Anthony did not help him …
Did this mutation in the course of time open other vulnerabilities—to cold, for instance? Simon had mentioned an extreme sensitivity to cold in the very old vampires. But short of luring the killer into a giant refrigerator, he didn’t see how that knowledge, even if it were true, would be of any assistance. He grinned wryly at the thought of himself and Ysidro, Eskimo-like in furs, grimly driving an icicle through the renegade’s heart, cutting off his head, and stuffing the mouth with snowballs. And, of course, the monthly bill for ice would be prohibitive.
Perhaps, if Lydia was right and vampirism was simply a pathology of the blood, there might be a serum which could be devised to combat it. More applied folklore, hethought wryly. Maybe a concentration of whatever essence was in garlic, injected straight into the bloodstream…
By whom? You and Sexton Blake?
And in any case, vampirism was not simply a physical pathology. It had its psychic element, too, and that, like the physical abilities, seemed to increase with time. Could it perhaps be fought on psychic grounds?
As he walked down the empty back streets toward the lights of the boulevards, he shivered at the thought of those slow-ripening powers, vampire pawns advancing powerlessly across the chessboard of time, until they could become queens …
In the deserted darkness of the street ahead of him, a figure faded from the mists. A dusky face stood out above the white blur of a dress, framed in loose masses of thick, black hair. Small, soft hands reached toward him, and he felt himself go cold with dread. There was another reason, he remembered, for wanting to leave the catacombs while daylight lingered in the sky.
The white figure drifted toward him, with that same almost unbearable slowness he’d seen in Elysée’s drawing room, as if propelled only now and then by a vagrant breeze. But if he took his eyes from her, she would be on him like lightning; that much he knew. The murmur of that soothing-syrup voice was so low it was impossible that he should hear it at this distance as clearly as he did: “Why, James, there’s no need to run away. I just want to talk with you…”
She was already much closer than she should have been, drifting that slowly; he could see the smile in her sinful eyes. Feeling naked, he began to back slowly away, never taking his eyes from her …
Granite hands seized him from behind, pinning his arms, crushing suffocatingly over his mouth and twisting his head back. The foetor of old blood clogged his nostrilsas other hands closed around him, dragging him into the darkness of an alley, cold and impossibly strong. His body twisted and fought like a salmon on a line, but he knew already that he was doomed.
They pressed closer around him, white faces swimming in the gloom; he kicked at them, but his feet met nothing, and their laughter was sweet and rippling in his ears. A hand tore his collar away; he tried to cry “No!” but the palm over his mouth was smothering him, the brutal grip that dragged his head back all but breaking his neck. Against the naked flesh of his throat, the night air was cold, cold as the bodies pressing closer and closer …
Slashing pain, then the long, swimming drop of weakness. He felt his knees give way, the massive grip on his arms holding him up. He thought he heard Hyacinthe’s husky laugh. Small hands, a woman’s, stripped back his shirt cuff and he felt her rip open the vein and drink. Darkness seemed to flutter down over his mind, a dim consciousness of chill, bright candles seen far away, spinning over a terrifying abyss; for a moment, he had the impression that these people had been there with him when he had shot Jan van der Platz in Pretoria and played croquet with Lydia in her father’s garden.
A woman’s arms were around his body. Opening his eyes he saw Elysée’s face near his, her auburn hair tickling his jaw as she bent to drink. Beyond her was Grippen, bloated and red, blood smudging his coarse, grinning lips. Others crowded up—Chloé, Serge, the dark-haired boy, and others still—clamoring in sweet, thin voices for their turn. He tried again to whisper, “No…” but his breath was gone.
Red darkness swallowed him and turned swiftly black.
“I’m sorry, dear.” Mrs. Shelton came out of the narrow little dining-room door beneath the stairs, wiping her handson her apron—she must have been watching, Lydia thought, looking quickly up from the little pile of the evening’s post on the hall table. “Nothing for you, I’m afraid.”
In the face of that kindly sympathy, Lydia could only smile back and, tucking her book bag awkwardly under her arm, start up the stairs, groping one-handed to unpin her hat from her hair. Mrs. Shelton followed her up a few steps and laid an anxious hand on her arm. “It’s hard, dear,” the landlady said gently. “Your young man?”
Lydia nodded. Disengaging herself, she went on up the stairs, thinking, I’ll strangle him. And then, He’s got to come back soon.
Reasons why he didn’t—or couldn’t—crowded unpleasantly to her mind. She pushed them away, letting herself think only, I’ve got to get in touch with him somehow…
I’ve got to let him know …
The note to the charwoman was still pinned to the door with a blue-headed drawing pin: RESEARCH IN PROGRESS. PLEASE DO NOT CLEAN. She had half expected to have to fight for unviolated space, as she had always had to fight with every woman with whom she’d lived from her nanny down to Ellen, but evidently Dolly, the woman who did the cleaning for Mrs. Shelton, valued her own leisure far above “what was proper.” Lydia was confident the woman hadn’t so much as crossed the threshold.
She dumped her book bag on the floor beside the stacks of journals already there, removed her hat, and turned up the lamp. Though she knew James would have communicated to her in some fashion if he had come back to London at all, she walked through to the bedroom and looked out, down the grimy slit of the alley, to the window of 6 Prince of Wales Colonnade.
Both curtains were closed. No lamp burned behind them.
Drat you, Jamie, she thought, turning back to the sitting room with a queer, terrible tightness clenching inside her, Drat you, drat you, drat you, WRITE to me! Come back. I have to tell you this.
She leaned in the doorway between the two rooms, scarcely aware of the headache she’d had since two or three in the afternoon—scarcely aware, in fact, that she’d eaten nothing since breakfast—gazing at her desk with its heaps of journals, its notes, and its books: Peterkin’s Origins of Psychic Abilities, Freiborg’s Brain Chemistry and the Seventh Sense, Mason’s Pathological Mutation. On top of it lay the hastily written note from James, telling her he was dreadfully sorry, but he and Ysidro were leaving for Paris; beside it was the letter he had written from Paris itself, telling her he had arrived safely and was going to visit the Paris vampires that night.
Her heart seemed to be jarring uncomfortably beneath her stays. She understood, with the possibility of a day-stalking vampire, that he could not have met her to say farewell; it was her safety he was trying to protect, and she had guessed that he felt the vampires’ nets closer than ever about him. Anger at him was irrational, she told herself calmly; anger at the situation was irrational, because it was how it was and there were far worse things to happen to one; anger at him for not writing was irrational, because God only knew where he was, and he would write when he could. Screaming and kicking the walls would not help either him, her, or Mrs. Shelton’s charlady.
But I know the answer, she thought, and the steel-spring coil of knowledge, fear, and dread twisted itself a notch tighter within her. I know how we can find them. Jamie, come back and tell me I’m doing this right.
Jamie, come back, please.
Mechanically she shed her coat and her hat and pulled the pins from her hair, which uncoiled in a dry silken whisperdown her back. For a time, she stood over the mounds of papers, the articles on porphyria, that hideous and deforming malady of anemia and photosensitivity, on plague, on vampires—there were even two of James’—and on telepathy. She’d been working at Somerset House, at the newspaper offices, at Chancery Lane all day for days, then coming back to the lending libraries to get medical and folkloric journals, and returning every night to this.
From among the papers, she lifted something small and golden, like a flattened flower, soft and dry in her hands—the lover’s knot, braided by a shop which specialized in such things, from Lotta’s no-longer-human hair. As the tiny bud of knowledge had opened before her eyes like a rose, she had thought, Ihave to check this with James. It made perfect sense to her, but she didn’t know whether it was, in fact, practicable, and now there was literally no one to whom she could go.
But it’s the answer! she thought. I know it is!
She had promised James.
Frank Ellis’ fancy motorcar came to mind; to impress her he’d run the throttle out full but wouldn’t engage the engine; she, too, was fighting to go and knowing there was nothing to do but remain in this room and wait.