Those Who Hunt the Night(42)

“Anthony?” Asher shook his head. His hoarse voice was so weak none but a vampire would have heard. “I don’t know. Someone was.” A dream—a hallucination?—of skeleton fingers caressing the silver padlock floated somewhere in his consciousness; but, like light on water, it eluded his grasp.

“I left this on the other side of the cell.” From the satchel the vampire took a wide-mouthed flask and a carton which smelled faintly of bread pudding.

As Ysidro poured a thick soup out of the flask, Asher remarked, “What, not blood?”

Ysidro smiled again. “I suppose it is customary in novels—it was in Mr. Stoker’s, anyway—for the victims of a vampire to receive transfusions from all their friends, but somehow I could not see myself soliciting such favors from passers-by.”

“‘Just come down this cellar with me, I’d like a little of your blood?’ I expect Hyacinthe could do it, too. But it wouldn’t work, or so Lydia tells me. Apparently human blood isn’t all of one type.”

“Of course, such matters have been considered among vampires ever since Mr. Harvey’s interesting articles first appeared.” Ysidro handed him the soup and helped him sit up to eat it. “We have long been familiar with the whole apparatus of transfusions and hollow needles. In fact I’m told some of the Vienna vampires used to inject their victims with cocaine before they drank. When Dewar containers were developed last year, Danny made some experiments in storing blood, but it seems to lose both itstaste and its efficacy literally within moments after it leaves the living body. In any case it is not the blood alone thatchiefly sustains us. If it were,” he added, without change in the soft inflections of his voice, “do you think that any of us would be the way we are?”

Asher set down the bowl on his knees, his hands shaking too much with sheer weakness to hold it. Ysidro’s steadying grip was chill as the hand of a corpse. Their eyes met. “Don’t be naïve.”

The vampire’s pale eyebrow tilted. “You may be right, at that.” Whether he spoke of Lotta, Hyacinthe, or himself was impossible to tell. He took the empty bowl and turned away, every movement spare and economical as a sonnet. “I doubt you’ll need concern yourself with Grippen at the moment. He and Chloé are bound back to London…”

“Simon…”

He looked back, the gilt candlelight seeming almost to shine through him, as it shone through the edges of fingers held near to the flame—demon and killer a thousand times over, and the man who had saved Asher’s life.

“Thank you.”

“You are in my service,” the vampire replied, the unstressed axiom of a nobleman who questions neither his rights nor his duties. “And we have not yet scotched this killer.

“I am still not entirely convinced,” he continued, neatly returning bowl, flask, and spoon to his satchel, “that the killer is not Grippen himself. I have given thought to your assertion that our state is a medical pathology. If there is some alteration of state which takes place close to the three hundred and fiftieth year…”

“Then wouldn’t you be experiencing it, too?”

“Not necessarily.” He turned back and held up his white, long-fingered hands shoulder-high, showing the colorless flesh next to his stringy, ash-pale hair. “Though I was still quite fair-haired as a living man, I had more colorthan this, and my eyes were quite dark. This—bleaching—is not common, but not unknown among our kind. Perhaps it is what they call a mutation of the virus, if virus it be. The oldest vampire I knew, my own master Rhys, was also ‘bleached,’ though other vampires he created were not. Therefore as a condition it might affect other changes that take place when a vampire ages. And since it seems that Calvaire left Paris for precisely those reasons which turned Grippen against him in London…”

“No.” Asher sank back to his pillow, exhausted with the mere effort of sitting up and eating, wanting nothing more, now, than to sleep again. “Didn’t you read the newspaper? It was in my pocket…” He hesitated. “No it wasn’t, I left it in the catacombs. A section of the London Times. It can’t have taken Grippen less than a night to come here, and the night before I was attacked, nine people were killed by a vampire in London. Oh, the police were puzzled by the lack of blood in the bodies, but it was…”

“Nine!”

It was the first time he had ever seen Simon truly shocked. Or perhaps, he thought, he was simply able to read the vampire better now.

“I didn’t think it sounded like any of the London vampires. Grippen may be a brute, but he hasn’t survived three hundred and fifty years by indulging in stupid rampages like that. And now I know it couldn’t have been either Grippen or Chloé, and it certainly doesn’t sound like the Farrens. What it sounded like was a vampire who’d been lying low.”

“And who took the first moment when Grippen was gone,” Simon murmured softly, “to satisfy a craving that must by that time have been monstrous. But nine…”

“In any case,” Asher said, “it means that we are definitely dealing with another vampire.”

Ysidro nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And by the sound of it, in all probability, a mad one.”

Asher sighed. “My old nanny used to say, ‘Every day in every way things are getting better and better.’ It comforts me to know she was right.” And he dropped his head to the thin straw of the pillow and fell instantly to sleep.





FIFTEEN




EIGHT PERISH IN WAREHOUSE FIRE

FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED

[From the Manchester Herald]



Fire ravaged the cotton warehouse of Moyle &Co. in Liverpool Street last night, claiming the lives of eight vagrants who are believed to have taken shelter in the warehouse from the cold. However, police report the discovery of a small quantity of blood on the pavement of the alley behind the warehouse, indicating that some sort of foul play may have taken place, though all the bodies were too badly burned to provide definite clues. All eight bodies were found clumped close together in the rear part of the warehouse, near where the fires started; there is no evidence that any of these unknown vagrants attempted to extinguish the blaze in its early stages, and, in fact, police believe that all eight may have been dead of some other cause before the fire started. The firewas blazing strongly when first seen by watchman Lawrence Bevington, who claims that he saw no indication of smoke or other trouble when he passed the warehouse earlier …

No, Lydia thought calmly, he wouldn’t. If I were trying to hide my kills by incinerating the bodies, I’d make certain the watchman was sleeping at the appropriate moment.

Her hand was shaking as she set down the newspaper.

Manchester. Anonymous masses of factory workers, stevedores, and coal heavers, unmissed save by those who knew them and maybe not even then.

She looked at the list she’d made, lying on top of the Journal of Comparative Folklore, and wondered how long she dared wait now.

She had promised James not to do anything until she had checked with him, not to put herself in danger. She knew she was a child in a bog here, unable to tell the difference between a tuft that would bear her weight and one that was only a little greenery floating on the top of quicksand; she knew that the vampires would be waiting. The fear that she had lived with for weeks rose again in her, the fear of that guttural voice calling in her dreams, the fear of the gathering darkness, the fear she had felt in the cold fog of the court the night she had gone out to seek a vampire. Everything she had been reading had only taught her to fear more.

But how long was she going to wait? The last thing she’d heard from James was that he was going to see the Paris vampires, under the problematical protection of Don Simon Ysidro. She shut her heart, trying to freeze it into submission, trying not to connect that letter with this long silence. But her heart whispered to her that they had no reason to keep him alive. And there was a good chancethat, as Calvaire’s friends, they might have something to hide, not only from humans, but from vampire kin.

I’ll wait one more day, she promised herself, trying to relax the steely hand that seemed to clutch at her throat from the inside. His letters have to go long-ways-about through Oxford … it could have gotten delayed…

She looked back at her list, which she had compiled last night, and at the newspaper lying beside it. The vampire’s rampages had killed seventeen people in the last three days.

Her fingers still unsteady, she took off her spectacles and set them aside, then lowered her head to her crossed arms and wept.

Asher woke feeling stronger, but still weighted, not only with exhaustion, but with an uncaring lassitude of the spirit with which he was familiar from his more rough-and-tumble philological research trips. His dreams had been plagued by the sensation that there was something he was forgetting, some detail he was missing. He was back in the van der Platz house in Pretoria, hunting for something. He had to move swiftly because the family was due back, the family which considered him such a pleasant and trustworthy guest, a Bavarian professor only there to study linguistic absorption.

But he had forgotten what it was that he hunted. He only knew it was vital, not only to the war between England and its recalcitrant colonials, but to his own life, to the lives of everyone dear to him. Notes, he thought, or a list—that was it, the list of the articles he’d published; they mustn’t find it, mustn’t trace him through them … So he hunted, increasingly frightened, partly because he knew the van der Platzes, though Boers, were the kingpins of German intelligence in Pretoria and would not hesitate to turn him over to the commandos if they discovered he wasnot as he seemed, partly because he knew that behind one of those doors he opened and closed in such aimless haste he was going to find Jan, the sixteen-year-old son of the household and his friend, with the top of his head shot off …