Those Who Hunt the Night(55)

Although, Asher thought, as he fruitlessly searched the barren room for anything which could conceivably be used as a weapon or to facilitate escape, he wasn’t sure whether Blaydon would have killed a stranger to protect Dennis’ secret. At least, he added with a shiver, he wouldn’t have four days ago, when they’d caught her snooping around. That had been before he’d learned what a desperately time-consuming inconvenience keeping a hostage was. And that had been while he and Dennis were far more firmly anchored in sanity.

Looking at them now—Blaydon in his soiled collar and rumpled suit, with his silver-dust stubble of whiskers that glittered like the mad, fierce obsession in his eyes, and Dennis, hulking, restless, and fidgeting hungrily in the background—Asher was uncomfortably aware that both were stretched to the snapping point. However long father and son might have been able to go on undisturbed, Lydia’s imprisonment had thrown a strain on the situation, which his own wounding of Dennis had then made intolerable. They had the look of men who were fast losing their last vestiges of rationality.

With forced mildness, Blaydon said, “Dennis is going to want to feed on some vampire tonight, my friend. Now it can be you, or it can be James. Which way do you want it?” He still had the revolver with silver bullets in his hand, which was steady now—he must have gotten a little sleep in the train, Asher thought abstractedly. And as a doctor, of course, he’d have easy access to enough cocaine to keep him going for a while, at least.

Behind him, Dennis smirked.

Looking perfectly relaxed, Ysidro set one foot on the floor, folded his long hands on his knee, and considered the pair of them in the flickering lamplight. “It is clear to me that you do not understand the process by which one becomes vampire. If, when I drank James’ blood, I forced him to …”

Blaydon raised his hand sharply. “Dennis?” he barked. “Have you made a patrol? Checked for searchers?”

“There’s no one out there,” Dennis said, his gluey bass barely comprehensible now. “I’ve listened—don’t you think I’d hear another vampire, if any came looking for these two? Don’t you think I’d smell their blood? They’rehiding, Dad. You’ve got to dig them out or let me…”

“Check anyway,” Blaydon ordered sharply. Dennis’ naked brow ridges pulled together into a horrible frown. “Do it!”

“I’m hungry, Dad,” the vampire whispered sullenly. As he moved nearer, his monstrous shadow lurched over the low plaster of the ceiling and the claustrophobic narrowness of the walls. “Hungry—starving—my hands are burning me, and the craving’s on me like fever…”

Blaydon swallowed nervously, but kept his voice commanding with an effort. “I understand, Dennis, and I’m going to get you well. But you must do as I say.”

There was a long, ugly silence. Asher, lying at Ysidro’s feet, could see the struggle of wills reflected in Blaydon’s haggard face as he met his son’s glare. He’s slipping and he knows it, he thought, watching the sweat start on the old man’s face. How long before Dennis makes him a victim, as well as Ysidro and myself?

And Lydia, he added, with a chill of fear. And Lydia.

Then Dennis was gone. Asher realized they must all have had their consciousnesses momentarily blanked as the vampire moved, but it was so quick, so subtle, that he was not even aware of it, merely that Dennis vanished into the crowding shadows. He did not even hear the closing of the steel-sheathed door.

Blaydon wiped his mouth nervously with the hand that wasn’t holding the gun. He was still wearing the rather countrified tweed suit he’d had on that morning—that he’d had on for days, by the smell of it. Not, Asher reflected, that he or Ysidro could have passed for dandies either, both in shirt sleeves, himself unshaven and splotched with soot stains from climbing the wall last night. At least they’d slept, albeit uncomfortably. Once, when he’d wakened in the afternoon, there had been a tray of food there, undoubtedly brought by Dennis—an unsettling thought. He’deaten it and searched the room again, but it had yielded nothing but reinforced brick walls and door and Sheffield silver-plated steel window bars.

Blaydon waved his pistol at Ysidro. “Don’t get any ideas, my friend. While you’re in this room with me, you’re safe. Dennis would pull you down before you got out of the house, as easily as he brought you here in the first place.”

There was an annoyed glitter behind Ysidro’s hooded eyelids—a grandee, Asher thought, who did not care to be reminded that he’d been overpowered and manhandled by the hoi polloi. But he only regarded Blaydon levelly for a moment and asked, “Do you really believe that any of this will do you any good?”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” the pathologist said, rather sharply. “Go on with what you were saying. If you forced James … ?”

“To drink my blood,” Ysidro said slowly, unwillingly, his champagne gaze fixed upon Blaydon’s face. “That is how it is done—the physical part, at least. But the—perhaps you would say mental, but I think spiritual would be a better term, though these days it is an unfashionable one—”

“Let us say psychic,” Blaydon put in. “That’s what we’re really talking about, aren’t we?”

“Perhaps.” That faint, wry flick of a smile touched Ysidro’s narrow-lipped mouth. “In any case, it is the giving of his spirit, his self, his conscious, and what Herr Freud politely terms his unconscious into the embrace of mine, for me to show him the way over that abyss. It is the yielding of all secrets, the giving of all trust, the admission of another into the most secret chambers of the heart. Most do not even join so close with those they deeply love. To do this, you understand, requires an act of the most desperate will, the all-consuming desire to continue in consciousnessat whatever the cost.” The shadow flung by the lamp on the wall behind him, huge and dark, echoed the slight movement of his white hand. “Under this set of circumstances, I think James would find no point in making so desperate an effort at survival, though I suspect that under others he might.”

You will never know, Brother Anthony had whispered, deathlessly sorting bones in the crypts below Paris. Asher shook his head and said quietly, “No.”

Ysidro turned his head to look down at him, without any expression in his eyes. “And they say that faith in God is dead,” he commented. “I should think that your conscience, more than another man’s, might make of you a coward…” He turned back to regard his captor. “Whether or not James has that will to live, how many of those scum of the gutters whom you purpose to bring for me to transform into others like me would be capable of it? When a master vampire creates a fledgling, it is in part the master’s will and in part the fledgling’s trust which act. I do not believe myself capable of creating fodder, even did I consent to try. I certainly do not believe that one person in a hundred, or a thousand, has that will to survive.”

“That’s balderdash,” Blaydon said uneasily. “All this talk of the will and the spirit…”

“And if you did get lucky,” Asher put in, trying to shift his shoulders to take some of the pressure from Ms throbbing right arm, “what then? Are you really going to stay in a house with two, three, or four fledgling vampires? Fledglings whose wills are entirely subservient to their master’s? The start of this whole affair—Calvaire—was a careless choice on the part of the woman who made him. Are you going to be choosier? Especially if you’re giving Dennis specific orders to bring in none but the unfit, the socially useless, and the wicked?”

“You let me worry about that.” Blaydon’s voice had anedge like flint now, his eyes showing their old stubborn glint. “It’s only a temporary measure…”

“Like the income tax?”

“In any case I have no choice. Dennis’ condition is deteriorating. You’ve seen that. He needs blood, the blood of vampires, to arrest the symptoms. If you, Ysidro, refuse to help me…”

“It is not simply a matter of refusal.”

“Lying won’t help you, you know…”

“No more than lying to yourself helps you, Professor.” Behind that unemotional tone, Asher detected the faintest echo of a human sigh. Blaydon backed a few steps away, brandishing his gun.

“But if that is your choice, I shall have to take what measures I can…”

“More humans?” Asher inquired. “More of those you consider unfit?”

“It’s to save my son!” The old man’s voice cracked with desperation, and he fought to bring it to normal again. Rather shakily, he added, “And also for the good of the country. Once we have the experiment under control…”

“Good God, man, you don’t mean you’re going on with it!” Truly angry, Asher jerked himself to a sitting position, his back to the planed mahogany of the coffin. “Because of your failure, your own son is rotting to pieces under your eyes and you propose to go on with it?”