Those Who Hunt the Night(46)

There was a good chance that Lydia was in that house.

He crossed the yard cautiously. If the day stalker—be it Grippen or Tulloch the Scot or some nameless ancient—were there, the vampire could hear him whatever he did. There were two of them, he remembered—he’d have towatch his back, as much as one could against vampires. And one of them, at least, was mad.

He stepped up onto the little terrace to the left of the areaway and forced one of the long windows, gritting his teeth at the sharp click as the latch gave back. Shielded behind the corner of the embrasure, he waited for a long time, listening. Distantly he heard something fall, somewhere in the house—then the panicked flurry of thudding footfalls.

Heading for the carriage, he thought, and then, No vampire’s feet sound like that. A human accomplice? Given Calvaire’s penchant for confiding in prospective victims, it was logical. Was Grippen’s body even now searing, crumbing to ashes in some upper room as the last dim rays of the evening sun streamed through the broken shutters … ?

Asher found himself hoping so for his own sake, even as he tracked those fleeing footfalls with his ears. The stairs would debouch into the front hall; from there, the killer could leave by either the front or the back. He could slip through the half-open window, intercept him before he left the house …

But he drew back at the thought of entering those dense shadows beyond the window, and that probably saved his life. He was in the act of turning away to try to intercept the fugitive by the carriage when a hand shot out the window from the dimness of the house. It moved impossibly fast, catching him by the arm in a grip that crushed flesh and bone, dragging him toward the interior gloom with terrifying force. In the fading daylight, he got a confused impression of a leprous white talon, bulging sinews and misshapen knots of knuckles, and nails like claws, while the creature inside the house was still only a monstrous blur of white framed in the window’s darkness. As a second hand reached out to seize him around the back of theneck, Asher flicked one of the silver knives into his hand from his ulster pocket and slashed at the corded wrist.

Blood scorched him as if he’d been splattered with steaming water. The shriek from the darkness within was nothing human, a raw scream of animal rage and pain. He twisted from the loosened grip before he could be flung, as Grippen had once flung him stunningly against the wall, and dragged at his revolver, firing at the vague shape that came bursting from the dark beyond the French doors.

It flickered, changed, moving with unfollowable speed; he felt something behind him and turned to slash again with the knife still in his left hand. The vampire was behind him, the slanting final sunlight turning its skull-face ghastly—a vampire beyond all doubt, but what it had been before was hard to guess. Under the pulled-back lips the fangs were huge, broken tusks that had gouged seeping furrows into the pustuled skin of its chin. It screamed again and fell back, clutching at the cut Asher had opened in its palm, glaring at him with immense eyes, blue, staring, pupils swollen with inhuman hate.

The psychic impact was flattening. Asher felt as if his mind had been struck by a falling tree, dizziness and disorientation almost swamping his consciousness. He tried to fling the dead darkness off him, even as the thing seized him again and bore him back against the house wall, its grip wrapping over his gun hand and crushing the bones. He cried out as the revolver slipped from his fingers—the thing caught his knife wrist, then flinched back with another scream …

Silver, Asher thought, the silver chain. With his knife, he slashed at the thing again.

With another shriek of agonized fury, it caught his sleeve, pulled him forward, and slammed him back against the wall again with such violence that, in spite of his effort to keep his chin down, Asher’s head cracked against thebricks. His concentration slipped, breaking, though he fought to hold it, knowing, if he let the vampire’s mind get control of his, he was surely dead.

A voice shouted something. The vampire slammed him against the wall once more, and his vision blurred, pain swamping his mind under a dreaming tide of gray. He clung to the pain that was already screaming from his right arm, forcing himself to remain aware …

A name. The voice was shouting a name.

He tried to remember it, tried to cling to the pain of his broken wrist, as he slipped to the ground. He was dimly aware of the dampness of the bricks beneath his cheek and the murky sweetness of crushed leaves in his nostrils.

Whistling shrieks cut the air, and footfalls thudded closer. He hurt all over, his back and left wrist as well as his right, but his left hand would answer, closing around the knife hilt, though he knew he was outnumbered. The newspaper description of the savagery of the multiple murders came back to him, and the glaring horror of the vampire-thing’s eyes.

“Nay, then, what’s all this?”

“You all right, sir?”

He managed to raise himself to one elbow in time to confront the two blue-clothed giants that materialized out of the dusk. London’s finest, he thought groggily. The sun had slipped behind Harrow Hill. The twilight was cold in his bones.

“No,” he replied, as one of the bobbies helped him to sit up. “I think my wrist is broken.”

“Gorblimey, sir, what the ’ell…”

“I was coming to visit friends of mine in this house. I think I surprised burglars in the act. One of them attacked me but there were two—they were driving a brougham…”

One bobby glanced at the other—they were both big,pink-faced men, one from Yorkshire by his speech and the other a sharp-featured Londoner. Asher couldn’t help picturing the look of sardonic calculation Ysidro would give them. “That one as passed us, driving fit to kill, I’ll bet.”

“Bay gelding, white off-fore stocking,” Asher reported automatically.

“He dropped this, Charley,” the London-born officer said, picking up Asher’s revolver; the Yorkshireman glanced at it, then at the bloodied knife still in Asher’s hand.

“You allus go calling armed, sir?”

“Not invariably,” Asher said with a shaky grin. “My friend—Dr. Grippen—collects odd weapons. This one was sold to me as an antique, and I wanted his opinion on it.” He winced; his right hand was beginning to swell and throb agonizingly, the stretched skin turning bluish black; his left was bruising badly.

“Best send for doctor, Bob,” the Yorkshireman said. “Come inside, sir,” he added, as Bob hastened off down the path. “Happen they heard no one was to home.”

Asher glanced about him at the silent drawing room as they entered. “I’m not so sure of that.”

Heavy seventeenth-century furniture loomed at them through the dense shadows of the drawing room; here and there, metal gleamed, or glass. The bobby Charley steered Asher to a massive oak chair. “Best wait here, sir,” he said. “You do look like you been right through the mill.” But there wasn’t wholehearted solicitude in his tone—Asher knew the man didn’t quite believe his story. It scarcely mattered at this point. What mattered was that he had backup and a good reason for searching the house for Lydia. With luck, the killers had destroyed Grippen and hadn’t discovered her, if she were here …

“What did you say your friend’s name was, sir?”

“The owner of the house is Dr. Grippen,” Asher said.“My name is Professor James Asher—I’m a Lecturer at New College, Oxford.” He held his swollen hand propped against his chest; the throbbing went down his arm, and his head was beginning to ache. He fumbled a card from his pocket. “I was supposed to meet him here this afternoon.”

Charley studied the card, then secreted it in his tunic, somewhat reassured by this proof of gentility. “Right, sir. Just you rest yourself here. I’ll have a bit of a look about.”

Asher leaned back in the chair, fighting to remain conscious as the policeman left the darkening room. The shock of the fight was coming over him, clouding his mind, and his whole body ached. The face of the daylight vampire swam before his thoughts, queerly colorless as Ysidro’s was, but not smooth and dry-looking—rather it was swollen, puffy, pustulant. Thin rags of fair hair had clung to the scalp; he tried to recall eyebrows and could not—only those huge teeth, grotesque and outsize, and the staring hatred of the blue eyes.

Forcing his mind back to alertness, he fished the picklocks from his coat pocket—clumsily, for he had to reach across his body to do so—and placed them inconspicuously on a blackwood sideboard near the French doors. He guessed he would be under enough suspicion without having those found on his person. Staggering back to the chair, he mentally began ticking off details: brown jacket, corduroy or tweed, countrified and incongruous on that massive shape; and lobeless ears, oddly ordinary given the deformation of the rest of the face. He glanced at his left arm. Blood was staining the claw rips in the coat sleeve.

Dear God, was that what vampires became, if they lived long enough? Was that what the Plague, mixing with God only knew what other organisms of the vampire syndrome, could do? Would he, at the last, have to track down and kill Ysidro, to prevent him from turning into that?

He realized he was singularly lucky to be still alive.