Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel Read online

  His hands were not quite steady as he replaced the stethoscope in its pigeonhole once more. He was suddenly extremely conscious of the beat of the blood in his veins.

  His voice remained level. “What do you want?”

  “Help,” the vampire said.

  “What?” Asher stared at the vampire, he realized—seeing the dark amusement in Ysidro’s eyes—like a fool. His own mind still felt twisted out of true by what he had heard—or more properly by what he had absolutely not heard—through the stethoscope, but the fact that the shadowy predator that lurked in the legends of every culture he had ever studied did exist was in a way easier to believe than what that predator had just said.

  The pale eyes held his. There was no shift in them, no expression; only a remote calm, centuries deep. Ysidro was silent for a few moments as if considering how much of what he should explain. Then he moved, a kind of weightless, leisurely drifting that, like Asher’s habitual stride, was as noiseless as the passage of shadow. He perched on a corner of the desk, long white hands folded on one well-tailored gray knee, regarding Asher for a moment with his head a little on one side. There was something almost hypnotic in that stillness, without nervous gesture, almost completely without movement, as if that had all been rinsed from him by the passing moons of time.

  Then Don Simon said, “You are Dr. James Claudius Asher, author of Language and Concepts in Eastern andCentral Europe, Lecturer in Philology at New College, expert on languages and their permutations in the folklore of countries from the Balkans to Port Arthur to Pretoria…”

  Asher did not for a moment believe it coincidence that Ysidro had named three of the trouble spots of which the Foreign Office had been most desirous of obtaining maps.

  “Surely, in that context, you must be familiar with the vampire.”

  “I am.” Asher settled his weight on one curved arm of the divan where Lydia still lay, unmoving in her unnatural sleep. He felt slightly unreal, but very calm now. Whatever was happening must be dealt with on its own bizarre terms, rather than panicked over. “I don’t know why I should be surprised,” he went on after a moment. “I’ve run across legends of vampires in every civilization from China to Mexico. They crop up again and again—blood-drinking ghosts that live as long as they prey on the living. You get them from ancient Greece, ancient Rome—though I remember the classical Roman ones were supposed to bite off their victims’ noses rather than drink their blood. Did they?”

  “I do not know,” Ysidro replied gravely, “having only become vampire myself in the Year of Our Lord 1555. I came to England in the train of his Majesty King Philip, you understand, when he came to marry the English queen—I did not go home again. But personally, I cannot see why anyone would trouble to do such a thing.” Though his expression did not change, Asher had the momentary impression of amusement glittering far back in those champagne-colored eyes.

  “And as for the legends,” the vampire went on, still oddly immobile, as if over the centuries he had eventually grown weary of any extraneous gesture, “one hears of fairies everywhere also, yet neither you nor I expect to encounter them at the bottom of the garden.” Under thelong, pale wisps of Ysidro’s hair, Asher could see the earlobes had once been pierced for earrings, and there was a ring of antique gold on one of those long, white fingers. With his narrow lips closed, Ysidro’s oversized canines—twice the length of his other teeth—were hidden, but they glinted in the gaslight when he spoke.

  “I want you to come with me tonight,” he said after a brief pause during which Asher had the impression of some final, inner debate which never touched the milky stillness of his calm. “It is now half past seven—there is a train which goes to London at eight, and the station but the walk of minutes. It is necessary that I speak with you, and it is probably safer that we do so in a moving vehicle away from the hostages that the living surrender to fortune.”

  Asher looked down at Lydia, her hair scattered like red smoke over the creamy lace of her gown, her fingers, where they rested over that light frame of wire and glass, stained with smears of ink. Even under the circumstances, the incongruity of the tea gown’s languorous draperies and the spectacles made him smile. The combination was somehow very like Lydia, despite her occasionally stated preference for the more strenuous forms of martyrdom over being seen wearing spectacles in public. She had never quite forgotten the sting of her ugly-duckling days. She was writing a paper on glands. He knew she’d probably spent most of the morning at the infirmary’s dissecting rooms and had been hurriedly scribbling what she could after she’d come home and changed clothes while waiting for him to arrive. He wondered what she’d make of Don Simon Ysidro and reflected that she’d probably produce a dental mirror from somewhere about her person and demand that he open his mouth—wide.

  He glanced back at Ysidro, oddly cheered by this mental image. “Safer for whom?”

  “For me,” the vampire replied smoothly. “For you. Andfor your lady. Do not mistake, James; it is truly death that you smell, clinging to my coat sleeves. But had I intended to kill your lady or you, I would already have done so. I have killed so many men. There is nothing you could do which could stop me.”

  Having once felt that disorienting moment of psychic blindness, Asher was ready for him, but still only barely saw him move. His hand had not dropped the twenty inches or so that separated his fingers from the hideout knife in his boot when he was flung backward across the head of the divan, in spite of his effort to roll aside. Somehow both arms were wrenched behind him, the wrists pinned in a single grip of steel and ice. The vampire’s other hand was in his hair, cold against his scalp as it dragged his head back, arching his spine down toward the floor. Though he was conscious of very little weight in the bony limbs that forced his head back and still further back over nothing, he could get no leverage to struggle; and in any case, he knew it was far too late. Silky lips brushed his throat above the line of the collar—there was no sensation of breath.

  Then the lips touched his skin in a mocking kiss, and the next instant he was free.

  He was moving even as he sensed the pressure slack from his spine, not even thinking that Ysidro could kill him, but only aware of Lydia’s danger. But by the time he was on his feet again, his knife in his hand, Ysidro was back behind the desk, unruffled and immobile, as if he had never moved. Asher blinked and shook his head, aware there’d been another of those moments of induced trance, but not sure where it had been.

  The fine strands of Ysidro’s hair snagged at his velvet collar as he tipped his head a little to one side. There was no mockery in his topaz eyes. “I could have had you both in the time it takes to prove to you that I choose otherwise,”he said in his soft voice. “I—we—need your help, and it is best that I explain it to you on the way to London and away from this girl for whom you would undertake another fit of pointless chivalry. Believe me, James, I am the least dangerous thing with which you—or she—may have to contend. The train departs at eight, and it is many years since public transportation has awaited the convenience of persons of breeding. Will you come?”

  TWO

  IT was perhaps ten minutes’ walk along Holywell Street to the train station. Alone in the clinging veils of the September fog, Asher was conscious of a wish that the distance were three or four times as great. He felt in need of time to think.

  On his very doorstep, Ysidro had vanished, fading effortlessly away into the mists. Asher had fought to keep his concentration on the vampire during what he was virtually certain was a momentary blanking of his consciousness, but hadn’t succeeded. Little wonder legend attributed to vampires the ability to dissolve into fog and moonbeams, to slither through keyholes or under doors. In a way, that would have been easier to understand.

  It was the ultimate tool of the hunter—or the spy.

  The night was cold, the fog wet and heavy in his lungs—not the black, killer fog of London, but the peculiarly moist, dripping, Oxford variety, which made the whole town seem slig
htly shaggy with moss and greenness and age. To his left as he emerged into Broad Street, thesculpted busts around the Sheldonian Theater seemed to watch him pass, a dim assemblage of ghosts; the dome of the theater itself was lost in the fog beyond. Was Ysidro moving among those ghosts somewhere, he wondered, leaving no footprint on the wet granite of the pavement?

  Or was he somewhere behind Asher in the fog, trailing silently, watching to see whether his unwilling agent would double back and return home?

  Asher knew it would do him no good if he did. His conscious mind might still revolt at the notion that he had spent the last half hour conversing with a live vampire—an oxymoron if ever I heard one, he reflected wryly—but the difference, if one existed, was at this point academic.

  He had been in deadly danger tonight. That he did not doubt.

  As for Lydia …

  He had absolutely no reason to believe Don Simon’s claim to be alone. Asher had considered demanding to search the house before he left, but realized it would be a useless gesture. Even a mortal accomplice could have stood hidden in the fog in the garden, let alone one capable of willing mortal eyes to pass him by. He had contented himself with lighting the fires laid in the study fireplace and the kitchen stove, so that the servants would not wake in cold—as wake they would, Ysidro had assured him, within an hour of their departure.

  And at all events, Ysidro knew where Asher lived. If the vampire were watching him, there was no chance of returning to the house and getting Lydia to safety before they were intercepted.

  And—another academic point—what precisely constituted safety?

  Asher shoved his gloved hands deeper into the pockets of the baggy brown ulster he had donned and mentally reviewed everything he had ever learned about vampires.

  That they were the dead who infinitely prolonged their lives by drinking the blood of the living seemed to be the one point never in dispute, bitten-off noses in Rome notwithstanding. From Odysseus’ first interview with the shades, there was so little divergence from that central theme that Asher was—intellectually, at least—mildly astounded at his own disbelief before he had pressed the stethoscope to that thin, hard ribcage under the dark silk of the vest, and had heard … nothing. His researches in folklore had taken him from China to Mexico to the Australian bush, and there was virtually no tongue which had not yielded some equivalent of that word, vampire.

  Around that central truth, however, lay such a morass of legend about how to deal with vampires that he felt a momentary spasm of irritation at the scholars who had never troubled to codify such knowledge. He made a mental note to do so, provided Ysidro hadn’t simply invited him to London for dinner with a few friends. Naturally, he reflected wryly, there wasn’t a greengrocer open at this hour, and he would look fairly foolish investigating back-garden vegetable patches for garlic en route to the station … totally aside from missing his train. And given the general standard of British cookery, searching for garlic would be a futile task at best.

  His ironic smile faded as he paused on the Hythe Bridge, looking down at the water, like slate the color of glass and smudged with the lights of Fisher Row, whose wet gray walls seemed to rise straight out of the stream. Garlic was said to be a protection against the Undead, as were ash, whitethorn, wolfsbane, and a startling salad of other herbs, few of which Asher would have recognized had he found them by the road. But the Undead were also said to be unable to cross running water, which Ysidro had obviously done on his way from the station—or had he come up from London to Oxford by train?

  A crucifix allegedly protected its wearer from the vampire’s bite—some tales specified a silver crucifix, and Asher’s practical mind inquired at once: How high a silver content? But like tales of the Catholic Limbo, that theory left vast numbers of ancient and modern Chinese, Aztecs, ancient Greeks, Australian bushmen, and Hawaiian Islanders, to name only a few, at an unfair disadvantage. Or did ancient Greek vampires fear other sacred things? And how, in that case, had unconverted pagan vampires in the first century A.D. reacted to Christians frantically waving the symbols of their faith at them to protect themselves from having their blood drunk or their noses bitten off? Not much vincere in hoc signo, he mused ironically, turning his steps past the Crystal Palace absurdity of the old London and Northwestern station and along the Botley Road to the more prosaic soot-stained brick of the Great Western station a hundred yards beyond.

  He was now not alone in the fog-shrouded roadbed between the nameless brick pits and sheds that railway stations seemed to litter spontaneously about themselves. Other dark forms were hastening from the lights of the one station to the lights of the other, struggling with heavy valises or striding blithely along in front of brass-buttoned porters whose breath swirled away to mingle with the dark vapors around them. From the direction of the London and Northwestern station, a train whistle groaned dismally, followed by the lugubrious hissing of steam; Asher glanced back toward the vast, arched greenhouse of the station and saw Don Simon walking, with oddly weightless stride, at his elbow.

  The vampire held out a train ticket in his black-gloved hand. “It is only right that I provide your expenses,” he said in his soft voice, “if you are to be in my service.”

  Asher pushed aside the ends of his scarf—a woolly gray thing knitted for him by the mother of one of hiswilder pupils—and tucked the little slip of pasteboard into his waistcoat pocket. “Is that what it is?” They climbed the shallow ramp to the platform. In the harsh glare of the gaslights, Ysidro’s face looked white and queer, the delicate swoop of the eyebrows standing out against pale hair and paler skin, the eyes like sulfur and honey. A woman sitting on a bench with two sleepy little girls glanced up curiously, as if she sensed something amiss. Don Simon smiled into her eyes, and she quickly looked away.

  The vampire’s smile vanished as swiftly as it had been put on; in any case, it had never reached his eyes. Like every other gesture or expression about him, his smile had an odd, minimal air, almost like a caricaturist’s line, though Asher had from it a sudden impression of an antique sweetness, the faded-out shape of what it once had been. For a moment more Ysidro studied the averted profile and the silvery-fair heads of the two children pressed against the woman’s shabby serge shoulders. Then his glance returned to Asher’s.

  “From the time Francis Waisingham started running his agents in Geneva and Amsterdam to find out about King Philip’s invasion of England, your secret service has had its links with the scholars,” he said quietly. The antique inflection to his speech, like its faint Castilian lisp, was barely discernible. “Scholarship, religion, philosophy—they were killing matters in those days, and at that time I was still close enough to my human habits of thought to be concerned about the outcome of the invasion. And too, it was still respectable among scholars to be a warrior, and among warriors to be a scholar, which it is no longer, as I’m sure you know.”

  Asher’s old colleague, the Warden of Brasenose, sprang to mind, totting disapprovingly over some minor Balkan flare-up in the course of which Asher had nearly lost his life, while Asher, cozily consuming scones on the otherside of the hearth, had nodded agreement that no, h’rm, England had no business meddling in European politics, damned ungentlemanly, hrmph, mphf. He suppressed his smile, unwilling to give this slender young man anything, and kept silent. He leaned his shoulders against the sooty brick of the station wall, folded his arms, and waited.

  After a moment Ysidro went on, “My solicitor—a young man, and agreeable to meet with his clients at late hours if they so desire—did mention that, when he worked in the Foreign Office, there was talk of at least one don at Oxford and several at Cambridge who ‘did good work,’ as the euphemism goes. This was years ago, but I remembered it, out of habit, and of interest in things secret. When I had need of an—agent—it was no great matter to track you down by the simple expedient of comparing the areas about which papers were published and their probable research dates with times and places of diplomatic unease. It st
ill left the field rather wide, but the only Fellow younger than yourself who might possibly have fit the criteria of time and place would have difficulty passing himself off as anything other than an obese and myopic rabbit …”

  “Singletary of Queens,” sighed Asher. “Yes, he was researching in Pretoria at the same time I was, trying to prove the degeneracy of the African brain by comparative anatomy. The silly bleater still doesn’t know how close he came to getting us both killed.”

  That slight, ironic line flicked into existence at the corner of Ysidro’s thin mouth, then vanished at once. The train came puffing in, steam roiling out to blend with the fog, while vague forms hurried onto the platform to meet it. A girl with a face like a pound of dough sprang from a third-class carriage as it slowed, into the arms of a podgy young man in a shop clerk’s worn old coat, and they embraced with the delighted fervor of a knight welcoming his princess bride. A mob of undergraduates came boiling outof the waiting room, noisily bidding good-by to a furiously embarrassed old don whom Asher recognized as the Classics lecturer of St. John’s. Linking their arms, they began to carol “Till We Meet Again” in chorus, holding their boaters over their hearts. Asher did not like the way his companion turned his head, studying them with expressionless yellow eyes as if memorizing every lineament of each rosy face. Too like a cook, he thought, watching lambs play at a spring fair.

  “The war was my last job,” Asher went on after a moment, drawing Ysidro’s glance once more to him as they crossed the platform. “I became—unsuitably friendly with some people in Pretoria, including a boy I later had to kill. They call it the Great Game, but it’s neither. I came back here, got married, and incorporated the results into a paper on linguistic borrowings from aboriginal tongues.” He shrugged, his face now as expressionless as the vampire’s. “A lecturer’s salary isn’t a great deal, but at least I can drink with my friends without wondering if what they’re telling me is the truth.”