Those Who Hunt the Night(8)

“I went there last night, after I discovered … this.” He gestured behind them, as Asher slid shut the lantern slide and trod cautiously along the utter darkness of the wet, fog-drowned slot of the avenue of tombs. After a momentthe light, steel-strong touch of the vampire’s hand closed on Asher’s arm, guiding him along in the total darkness. Intellectually he understood that he was perfectly safe, so long as Ysidro needed his help, but still, he made a mental note to be careful how often he found himself in this particular situation.

“How did you happen to discover it?” he inquired as they emerged from the end of the avenue under a massive gateway carved by the cemetery’s developers to resemble some regal necropolis of the Pharaohs. “If, as you say, you never got along with Lotta, what would you be doing visiting her tomb?”

“I wondered how long it would take me to fall under suspicion.” Asher caught the glint of genuine humor in Simon’s ironic glance. “I plead innocence, my lords of the jury—I had, as they say in the novels, retired to my room and was sound asleep at the time.”

In spite of himself Asher grinned. “Can you bring a witness?”

“Alas, no. In truth,” he went on, “I had been—unquiet—for some weeks before any evidence of trouble arose. There was a vampire named Valentin Calvaire, a Frenchman, who had not been seen for two, three weeks. I was beginning to suspect ill had befallen him—he was only recently come to London, by our standards, and might have been unfamiliar yet with the hiding places and the patterns of this city’s life. It is easy in those circumstances for a vampire to come to grief, which is one of the reasons we do not often travel.”

Asher had the momentary impression that Ysidro had more to say on the subject of Valentin Calvaire; but, after the briefest of inner debates, he seemed to think better of it and simply went on, “I think now that he was the first victim, though no body, no burned coffin, was ever found. But then, none of us knew all of his sleeping places.

“But eighteen days ago some—a friend of mine—came to me saying that one of the other vampires, a friend to us both, had been killed on the previous day, his coffin left open to the sun. She was distraught, though it is the kind of thing which can happen accidentally—for instance, many of our secret hiding places, the ancient cellars where we had hidden our coffins for years, were broken open and destroyed when they cut for the Underground. This vampire—his name was Danny King—had indeed slept in such a cellar. The window shutters were wide open, as was the coffin’s lid.”

Enough thin moonlight filtered through the fog so that Asher could see his companion’s face, calm and detached, like the faces of the cold stone children they had passed in the rustling murk of the cemetery around them. The curving wall of tombs that surrounded them like a canyon opened out into a stair, overhung with trees that shadowed again the vampire’s white face, and Asher was left with that disembodied voice like pale amber, and the steely strength of the long fingers on his arm.

“Perhaps ten days after that, Lotta and a friend of hers came to me saying they had gone up to the rooms of another vampire, an Edward Hammersmith, who lived in an old mansion in Half Moon Street that his father had owned when he was a man. They had found all the shutters pried off the windows and the coffin open, filled with bones and ash. And then I knew.”

“And neither King nor Hammersmith appeared to have awakened or tried to get out of their coffins?”

“No,” Ysidro said. “But with Calvaire’s death the killer would have known what it was that he hunted.”

“The question is,” Asher said, “whether he knew it before.”

“We asked that of ourselves. Whether anyone had been seen dogging our steps, lingering about, as humans dowhen they are working up their resolve even to believe that one they loved was indeed the victim of a vampire. In Mr. Stoker’s interesting novel, it is only the coincidence that the heroine’s dear friend and also her husband were victims of the same vampire and that the husband had seen other vampires at their hunt that leads her and her friends to put all the rest of the details together and come up with the correct answer. Most people never reach that stage. Even when the vampire is careless, and the evidence stares them in the face, they are always far more eager to believe a ‘logical explanation.’

“I find it typical,” he added, as they passed through the softly echoing gloom of an enclosed terrace, a catacomb of brick vaults and marble plaques that marked the modest tombs of its sleepers, “that vampirism is portrayed as an evil only just entering England—from the outside, naturally, as if no true-born Englishman would stoop to become a vampire. It had obviously never occurred to Mr. Stoker that vampires might have dwelt in London all along.”

They left the cemetery as they had entered it, over the wall near St. Michael’s Church, Ysidro boosting Asher with unnerving strength, then scrambling lightly up after him. The fog seemed less thick here as they strolled beside the cemetery wall and down Highgate Hill. The woolly yellow blur of the lantern, now that it would no longer bring the watchmen down on them, picked pearled strands of weed and web from the darkness of the roadside ditch, as it had picked the jewels from the coffin ash. Asher’s breath drifted away as steam to mingle with the cloudy brume all around them, and he was interested to see that, even when he spoke, Don Simon’s did not.

“How long have there been vampires in London?” he asked, and the shadowed eyes flicked sidelong to him again.

“For a long time.” The shutting once again of that invisibledoor was almost audible, and the rest of the walk was made in silence. Behind them in the fog, Asher heard the clock on St. Michael’s chime the three-quarters—while passing through the cemetery itself he had heard it speak eleven. Highgate Hill and the suburban streets below it were utterly deserted, the shops and houses little more than dark bulks in the drifting fog through which the gaslights made weak yellow blobs.

“Thought you toffs was never comin’ back,” their cabby began indignantly, struggling up out of the tangle of his lap robes in the cab, and Ysidro inclined his head graciously and held out a ten-shilling note.

“My apologies. I hope it caused you no inconvenience?”

The man looked at the money, touched his hat brim quickly, and said, “Not at all, guv’—not at all.” His breath was redolent of gin, as was the inside of the cab. It was, Asher reflected philosophically as he climbed in, a cold night.

“Albemarle Crescent, Kensington,” Ysidro said through the trap, and the cab jolted away. “Insolent villain,” he added softly. “Yet I have found it seldom pays to engage in quarrels with menials. Regrettably, the days are past when I could have ordered him thrashed.” And he turned his cool profile to gaze—not quite tranquilly, Asher thought—into the night.

Albemarle Crescent was a line of houses that had seen better days, though a kind of faded elegance clung to them still, like a duchess’ gown bought third-hand at a rag fair. At that hour, the neighborhood was deathly silent. Standing on the flagway, wrapped in a fog that was thicker now, here closer to the river, Asher could hear no sound of passers-by. In Oxford at this hour, the dons would still be up, wrangling metaphysics or textual criticism, undergraduates carousing or scurrying through the streets, gowns billowing behind them, in the course of some rag or other; inother parts of London, the very rich, like the very poor, would be drinking by lamplight. Here the stockbrokers’ clerks, the junior partners of shopkeepers, the “improved” working class, kept themselves to themselves, worked hard, retired early, and did not question overmuch the comings and goings of those around them.

Ysidro, who had stood for some moments gazing into the fog at the barely visible bulk of the terraced row, murmured, “Now we can enter. I have deepened their sleep against the sound of my own footfalls, but I have never before had call so to mask a living man’s. Tread soft.”

Lotta’s rooms were on the second floor; the ground floor smelled of greasy cooking, the first of stale smoke and beer. They left the lantern unobtrusively cached in the entryway. No lights were on anywhere, save over the entry, but Ysidro guided him unerringly as he had before. The old-fashioned, long-barreled key Asher had found with the latchkey proved, as he’d suspected, to open Lotta’s door, and it was only when they had closed it again and locked it behind them that he took a lucifer from his pocket and lit the gas.

Color smote his eyes, magnified and made luminous by the soft shimmer of the gaslight; the room was an incredible jumble of clothes, shoes, peignoirs, trinkets, shawls, laces, opera programs, invitations, and cards, all heaped at random over the cheap boarding house furniture, like an actress’ dressing room between scenes. There were evening gowns, scarlet, olive, and a shade of gold which only a certain shade of blonde could wear with effect, kid opera gloves spotted with old blood, and fans of painted silk or swan’s-down. A set of sapphires—necklace, earrings, double bracelets, and combs—had been carelessly dumped on a tangle of black satin on the mahogany of the table, glinting with a feral sparkle as Asher’s shadow passed across them.