Those Who Hunt the Night(53)

“You’re glad, aren’t you?” The deformation caused by the growth of his fangs caused Dennis to mumble almostunintelligibly. With his blotted handkerchief he patted at his chin again. “Glad to see me like this. You hope Lydia will see me like this, too, don’t you? But she won’t. She’s not going to see me ’til I’m better.”

“Of course she won’t, Dennis,” Blaydon said reassuringly. “And you’ll be better soon. I’ll find a serum to make you better…”

Slowly, the shocked stillness seemed to break in Asher’s veins with the horrible throb of stirring blood. “Where is she?”

“That won’t matter to you,” the vampire said. “You’re never going to see her again.”

Asher heaved himself up, his whole body screaming in pain, and reached to catch Blaydon’s lapel. “Where is she?!”

He was slammed back against the floor as if he’d been hit by a swinging anvil before he was even aware Dennis had moved. Darkness blurred in front of his eyes, and he tasted blood in his mouth and nose. Somewhere he heard Blaydon say sharply, “Dennis, no!” like a spinster calling off a savage dog, and felt the dark crush of Dennis’ mind on his, as he had at Grippen’s. Shadow blotted the light above him; that dim, barking voice went on, “He’s concerned about her, of course he is…”

“I want him.”

He was fighting unconsciousness, the reek of decaying flesh filling his nostrils as the thing bent over him.

“And you’ll have him, of course you will.” It was strange to hear the fear in Blaydon’s voice—Blaydon who had always been ready to spit in Satan’s eye or God’s. “But I need him now, Dennis. Let him be.”

“He’ll tell us where the others are,” Dennis growled, and a drop of something—drool or pus—fell on the back of Asher’s neck. “You said we needed to trap him so he’d tell…”

“Yes, but we have a live vampire now, Dennis…”

“When can I have him?” Eagerness suffused the slurring voice. “I’m hurting, Dad, the thirst is killing me. That girl last night wasn’t near enough, and you got most of it. Dad, I can smell him through the coffin wood, smell both their blood…”

“Please, my boy. Please be patient.” Blaydon’s voice came closer, gently drawing his vampire son away. “I have another plan, a better plan, now, but your getting well depends on both of them being alive, at least until tonight. I—I—Do what you need to do to—to make yourself comfortable—but please, don’t touch either of them.”

The voices faded and blurred as Asher slid toward darkness. He heard Lydia’s name. “… perfectly safe, you know I’d never do anything to hurt her. Now fetch me some brandy, please. I’m sure James needs it.”

Sinking into unconsciousness, Asher was sure James needed it, too.

The taste of the brandy revived him, coughing. He’d been propped up against the coffin again—Blaydon, glass in hand, was staring at the red teeth marks still visible on his throat through the open collar of his shirt. Dennis stood by the closed door, a cut-glass decanter of brandy in his knotty fingers. Asher supposed he should be flattered that they considered him still capable of rushing Blaydon.

Without speaking, Blaydon lifted Asher’s left wrist and pushed back the torn shirt sleeve to study the wounds there among the blackened finger marks of Dennis’ grip.

“What did they do to you?”

Asher drew a deep bream and disengaged his hand to wipe at the blood trickling from his nose into his mustache and down the side of his face. “It was a misunderstanding.”

“What did they do to you?” Blaydon seized his arm,shaking him urgently. “Did they only drink your blood—or was it something more?”

His dewlaps were quivering with the trembling of his chin; Asher stared up at him, eyes narrowing. “If it was anything more, I’d be dead now.”

“Would you?” His voice lowered, but he could not keep from it that unholy eagerness, that sudden urgency barely restrained. “Your specialty was comparative folklore, James. You know about such things. Is it true that if your blood is drunk by a vampire—a true vampire—you become one yourself when you die? Is that how it’s done?”

Something about the greedy gleam in his eye raised the hackles on Asher’s neck. “I should think Dennis could tell you that,” he said slowly. “What do you mean, ‘a true vampire’?” His eyes went past him to Dennis, monstrous, deformed. “Why do you say it is your doing that Dennis is as he is?”

A flush crept up under Blaydon’s pasty skin, and his little blue eyes shifted quickly away.

In a low voice Asher went on, “What is it you want with a vampire’s blood? Why draw it out with a needle as well as letting Dennis drink of it? Why is Dennis as he is and not like the other vampires? Did Calvaire or whatever vampire made Dennis have some infection that he passed along? Or … ?”

“It is in the blood, isn’t it?” Blaydon said, still not looking at him. “The organism or constellation of organisms, virus or serum or chemical, that causes vampirism. Isn’t it?” His voice rose, verging once more on a cry. “Isn’t it?”

“Lydia thinks so.”

Blaydon’s mouth tightened up like a trap at the mention of Lydia, and his eyes shifted nervously under Asher’s silent gaze. “She—she recognized me, you see. At the Daily Mail offices, when I was looking for clippings and clues. I’d run out of clues about the whereabouts of the othervampires. I had to have more. She’d read my articles, too. She was already looking for a doctor. She said it was obvious I’d be prepared to believe in a vampire as a medical phenomenon where others wouldn’t. Dennis said he saw her once in London, while he was following that fledgling of Calvaire’s. He couldn’t follow her then, but when she came snooping about here … Dennis caught her…” He laughed like a crow cawing. “Slip of a schoolgirl, and she’s cleverer than the lot of us. She guessed at once what I’d done.”

“You created artificial vampirism.”

Asher did not ask it as a question, and Blaydon only blew out his breath in a sigh, as if relieved that he did not have to hide it any longer.

“It didn’t start out that way.” His voice was weary, almost pleading. “I swear it didn’t. You know, James—of course you know—that it’s only a matter of time before war comes with Germany and her allies. The Kaiser’s spoiling for it. Oh, yes, I’ve heard the rumors about you and about where and how you spend your Long Vacations. You know the urgency of the matter. So don’t come all righteous with me over what you’ve only done yourself in a different way. I dare say you’ve caused the deaths of well over twenty-four men, and in just as good a cause.”

Blaydon took a deep breath, turning the half-filled brandy glass in his hands. “You know—or perhaps you don’t—that, in addition to my work with viruses, for a long time my interest has been in physical causes of so-called psychic phenomena. For a time, I believed, along with Peterkin and Freiborg, that such things could be bred in. God knows how many mediums and table tappers I tested over the years! And I came to the conclusion that it has to be some alteration in the brain chemistry that gives these people their so-called powers: a heightening of thesenses; an extrasensory awareness; and that incredible, intangible grasp on the minds of other men.

“Now, you can understand the need to be able to duplicate such powers at will. You’ve worked in Intelligence, James. Think what a corps of such men, dedicated to the good of England, could be in the war that we all know is coming! I tried hard to isolate that factor, to little avail. And then Dennis introduced me to Valentin Calvaire. He’d met Calvaire through a mutual friend…”

“Whom you later murdered.”

“Oh, really, James!” Blaydon cried impatiently. “A woman of her class! And I’ll take oath Albert Westmoreland’s death could be traced back to her, for all his family bribed the doctor to certify it was the result of a carriage accident. Besides, by that time we had run out of other clues. I needed her blood for further experimentation, and Dennis needed it just to stay alive.”

“You knew Calvaire was a vampire, then?”

“Oh, yes. He made no secret of it—he seemed to revel in astonishing me, in making nothing of the most difficult tests I could set to him. He gloated in the powers that he held. And Dennis was fascinated—not, I swear, with Calvaire’s evil, but with his powers. Calvaire was fascinated, too, though for reasons of his own, I dare say. He let me take samples, substantial samples, of his blood, to try and isolate the factors which enhanced the workings of the psychic centers of the brain and to separate them from those which caused the mutation of the cells themselves into that photoreactive pseudoflesh and the physiological dependence on the blood of others. And I would have succeeded, perhaps even been able to alter Calvaire’s condition. I know I would have…”