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

  “You are fortunate,” the vampire said softly. He paused, then continued, “I have taken a first-class compartment for us—at this time of night, we should have it to ourselves. I will join you there after the train leaves the station.”

  Oh, will you? Asher thought, his right eyebrow quirking up and his every instinct and curiosity coming suddenly alert as the vampire moved off down the platform with a lithe, disquieting stride, his dark Inverness cloak flaring behind him. Thoughtfully, Asher sought out their compartment, divested himself of bowler and scarf, and watched the comings and goings on the platform with great interest until the train moved away.

  The cloudy halo of the platform lights dropped behind them; a scattering of brick buildings and signal gantries flipped past in the foggy dark. He saw the gleam of lights,like an ironic omen, on the ancient markers of the old graveyard, then on the brown sheet-silk of the river as they passed over the bridge. The darkness of the countryside took them.

  Asher settled back against the worn red plush as the compartment door slid open and Ysidro entered, slim and strange as some Egyptian cat-god, his fair, cobweb-fine hair all sprinkled with points of dampness in the jolting flicker of the gas jet overhead. With a graceful movement, he shrugged out of his slate-gray Inverness; but, in spite of his flawless Bond Street tailoring, Asher was coming to wonder how anyone ever mistook him for anything human.

  Folding his hands on his knee, Asher inquired casually, “Just whom are you afraid of?”

  The long, gloved hands froze momentarily in their motion; the saffron eyes slid sharply to him, then away.

  “In this day and age I’d be surprised to learn it’s a mob with a crucifix and torches, but a man doesn’t jump on a train at the last moment unless he’s making damned sure who gets on ahead of him, and that no one’s coming behind.”

  Ysidro’s gaze rested on him for a moment longer, calm as ever, though his whole body seemed poised for movement; then he seemed infinitesimally to relax. He set his coat aside and sat down. “No,” he said presently. “That is our strength—that no one believes, and, not believing, lets us be. It is a superstition that is one of the many things ‘not done’ in this country. We learned long ago that it is good policy to cover our traces, to hide our kills or to make them look like something else. Generally it is only the greedy, the careless, the arrogant, or those with poor judgment who are traced and killed, and even they not immediately. At least so it has been.”

  “So there are more of you.”

  “Of course,” the vampire said simply. He folded hisgloved hands, sitting very straight, as if, centuries after he had ceased to wear the boned and padded doublets of the Spanish court, the habit of their armoring persisted. Long used to judging men by the tiny details of their appearance, Asher marked down the medium-gray suit he wore at fifty guineas or better, the shoes as made to order in the Burlington Arcade, the gloves of kid fine as silk. Even minimal investments, he thought dryly, must accrue an incredible amount of interest in three hundred years …

  “There were some—two or three, a master vampire and her fledglings—at one time in Edinburgh, but Edinburgh is a small town; late in the seventeenth century the witch-hunters found the places where they hid their coffins. There are some in Liverpool now, and in that packed, crass, and stinking cesspit of factories and slums that has spread like cancer across the north.” He shook his head. “But it is a young town, and does not offer the hiding places that London does.”

  “Who’s after you?” Asher asked.

  The champagne-colored eyes avoided his own. “We don’t know.”

  “I should think that with your powers …”

  “So should I.” The eyes returned to his, again level and cool as the soft voice. “But that does not seem to be the case. Someone has been killing the vampires of London.”

  Asher raised one thick brow. “Why does that surprise you?”

  “Because we do not know who it is.”

  “The people you kill don’t know who you are,” Asher pointed out.

  “Not invariably,” the vampire agreed. “But when they do, or when a friend, or a lover, or a member of their family guesses what has happened to them, as occasionally chances, we usually have warning of their suspicions. We see them poking about the places where their loved oneswere wont to meet their killers—for it is a frequent practice of vampires to befriend their victims, sometimes for months before the kill—or the churchyards where they were buried. Most of us have good memories for faces, for names, and for details—we have much leisure, you understand, in which to study the human race. These would-be vampire hunters in general take several weeks to bring themselves to believe what has happened, to harden their resolve, and in that time we often see them.”

  “And dispose of them,” Asher asked caustically, “as you disposed of their friends?”

  “Dios, no.” That flexible smile touched his face again, for one instant; this time Asher saw the flicker of genuine amusement in the pale, ironic eyes. “You see, time is always on our side. We have only to melt into the shadows, to change our haunts and the places where we sleep for five years, or ten, or twenty. It is astounding how quickly the living forget. But this time…” He shook his head. “Four of us have died. Their coffins were opened, the light of the sun permitted to stream in and reduce their flesh to ashes. The murders were done by daylight—there was nothing any vampire could have done to prevent them, or to catch the one who did them. It was this that decided me to hire help.”

  “To hire help,” Asher said slowly. “Why should I…”He stopped, remembering the still gaslight of the library shining on Lydia’s unbound red hair.

  “Precisely,” Ysidro said. “And don’t pretend you did not know that you were hired to kill by other killers in the days when you took the Queen’s Coin. Wherein lies the difference between the Empire, which holds its immortality in many men’s consciousness, and the vampire, who holds it in one?”

  It could have been a rhetorical question, but there wasnot that inflection in the vampire’s voice, and he waited afterward for an answer.

  “Perhaps in the fact that the Empire never blackmailed me into serving it?”

  “Did it not?” There was the faintest movement of one of those curving brows—like the smile, the bleached echo of what had once been a human mannerism. “Did you not serve it out of that peculiarly English brand of sentimentalism that cherishes sodden lawns and the skyline of Oxford and even the yammering dialects of your peasants? Did you not risk your own life and take those of others, so that ‘England would remain England’—as if, without Maxim guns and submarines, it would somehow attach itself to the fabric of Germany or Spain? And when this ceased to be a consideration for you, did you not turn your back in disgust upon what you had done like a man falling out of love?

  “We need a man who can move about in the daylight as well as in the hours of darkness, who is acquainted with the techniques of research and the nuances of legend, as well as with the skills of a killer and a spy. We merely agree with your late Queen as to the choice of the man.”

  Asher studied him for a long moment under the jumpy glare of the gas jet in its pierced metal sheath. The face was smooth and unwrinkled and hard, the slender body poised and balanced like a young man’s in its well-tailored gray suit. But the jeweled eyes held in them an expression beyond defining, the knowledge of one who has seen three and a half centuries of human folly and human sin reel gigglingly by; they were the eyes of one who was once human, but is no longer.

  “You’re not telling me everything,” he said.

  “Did your Foreign Office?” Ysidro inquired. “And I am telling you this, James. We will hire you, we will pay you, but if you betray us, in word or in deed, there will be no place on this earth where you or your lady Lydia will besafe from us, ever. I hope you believe that, for both your sakes.”

  Asher folded his hands, settled his shoulders back into the worn plush. “You hope I believe it for your own sake as well
. In the night you’re powerful, but by daylight you seem to be curiously easy to kill.”

  “So,” the vampire murmured. For an instant his delicate mouth tightened; then the expression, if expression it was, smoothed away, and the pale eyes lost some of their focus, as if that ancient soul sank momentarily into its dreams. Though the whole car vibrated with the rush of the dark rails beneath their feet, Asher had a sense of terrible silence, like a monster waiting in absolute stillness for its prey.

  Then he heard a hesitant step in the corridor, a woman’s, though traffic up and down the narrow passage had long ceased. The compartment door slid open without a knock. Framed in the slot of brown oak and gaslight stood the woman who had watched over her two sleeping children on the platform, staring before her like a sleepwalker.

  Ysidro said nothing; but, as if he had invited her in, the woman closed the door behind her. Stepping carefully with the swaying of the train, she came to sit on the edge of the seat at the vampire’s side.

  “I—I’m here,” she stammered in a tiny voice, her eyes glassy under straight, thin lashes. “Who—why … ?”

  “It is nothing you need trouble about, bellisima,” Ysidro whispered, putting out one slim hand in its black glove to touch her face. “Nothing at all.”

  “No,” she whispered mechanically. “Nothing at all.” Her dress was of shabby red cloth, clean but very old, the fabric several times turned; she wore a flat black straw hat, and a purple scarf round her neck against the cold. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—Lydia’s age—and had once been pretty, Asher thought, before ceaseless worry had graven those petty lines around her mouth and eyes.

  Tersely he said, “All right, you’ve made your point…”

  “Have I?” The delicate black fingers drew forth the wooden pin that held the hat to the tight screw of fair hair; caressingly, like a lover’s, they began to work loose the pins from the hair itself. “In all the rather silly legends about us, no one ever seems to have pinpointed the true nature of the vampire’s power—a kind of mesmerism, as they used to call it, an influence over the minds of humans and, to some extent, beasts. Though I am not sure into which category this creature would fall…”

  “Send her away.” Asher found his own voice was thick, his own mind seeming clogged, as if he, too, were half dreaming. He made as if to rise, but it was like contemplating getting out of bed too early on a foggy morning—far easier to remain where he was. He was aware of Ysidro’s glance on him, sidelong under long, straight eyelashes nearly white.

  “She was only along in one of the third-class carriages, she and her daughters.” With slow care the vampire unwound the purple scarf, letting it slither heedless to the carriage floor; unfastened the cheap celluloid buttons of the woman’s collar. “I could have summoned her from anywhere on the train, or, had she not been on it, I could have stood on the platform at Paddington and called her; and believe me, James, she would have gotten the money somehow and come. Do you believe that?”

  Like dark spiders, his fingers parted her collar, down to the sad little ruffle of her mended muslin chemise; the milky throat rose like a column from the white slope of her breast. “Do you remember your wife and her servants, asleep because I willed that they should sleep? We can do that, I and my—friends. I know your people now. At mycalling, believe me, they would come—that big mare of a chambermaid, your skinny little Mrs. Grimes, your stupid scullion, or the lout who looks after your gardens and stables—do you believe that? And all without knowing any more about it than this woman here.” His black leather fingers stroked the untouched skin. The woman’s open eyes never moved. As if he were deep in the sleep of exhaustion, Asher’s mind kept screaming at him, Get up! Get up! But he only regarded himself with a kind of bemusement, as if separated from his body by an incredible distance. The noises of the train seemed dulled, its shaking almost lulling, and it seemed as if this scene, this woman who was about to die, and indeed everything that had happened since that afternoon, which he’d spent explaining the Sanskrit roots of Romany to an undergraduate named Pettifer, were all a dream. In a way it made more sense when viewed so.

  “A poor specimen, but then we feed upon the poor, mostly—they’re far less likely to be avenged than the rich.” A fang gleamed in the trembling gaslight. “Do you believe I can do this to whomever I will? To you or to anyone whose eyes I meet?”

  No, thought Asher dully, struggling toward the surface of what seemed to be an endless depth of dark waters. No.

  “No.” He forced himself to his feet, staggering a little, as if he had truly been asleep. For a moment he felt the vampire’s naked mind on his, like a steel hand, and quite deliberately he walled his mind against it. In his years of working for the Foreign Office there were things he had willed himself not to know, the consequences of actions he had taken. The night he had shot poor Jan van der Platz in Pretoria he had forced himself to feel nothing, as he did now. The fact that he had succeeded in it then was what had turned him, finally, from the Great Game.

  As deliberately as he had pressed the trigger then, hewalked over to the woman and pulled her to her feet. Ysidro’s pale eyes followed him, but he did not meet them; he pushed the woman out of the compartment ahead of him and into the corridor. She moved easily, still sleepwalking. On the little platform between the cars the wind was raw and icy; with the cold air, his mind seemed to clear. He leaned in the doorframe, feeling oddly shaken, letting the cold smite his face.

  Beside him the woman shuddered. Her hands—ungloved, red, chapped, and callused, in contrast to that white throat—fumbled at her open collar as her eyes flared with alarm and she stared, shaken and disoriented, up into his face. “What—who—?” She pushed away from him, to the very rail of the narrow space, as if she would back off it entirely into the flying night.

  Asher dropped at once into his most harmless, donnish stance and manner, an exaggeration of the most gentle facet of his own personality that he generally used when abroad. “I saw you just standing in the corridor, madam,” he said. “Please forgive my liberty, but my wife sleepwalks like that, and something about the way you looked made me think that might be the case. I did speak to you and, when you didn’t answer, I was sure of it.”

  “I…” She clutched at her unbuttoned collar, confusion, suspicion, terror in her rabbity eyes. He wondered how much she recalled as a dream, and became at once even more consciously the Oxford don, the Fellow of New College, the philologist who had never even heard of machine guns, let alone wadded up plans of them into hollowed-out books to ship out of Berlin.

  “Fresh air will wake her up—my wife, I mean. Her sister sleepwalks, too. May I escort you back to your compartment?”

  She shook her head quickly and mumbled, “No—thank you, sir—I—you’re very kind…” Her accent Asher automatically identified as originating in Cornwall. Then she hurried over the small gap between the cars and into the one beyond, huddled with cold and embarrassment.

  Asher remained where he was for some minutes, the cold wind lashing at his hair.

  When he returned to the compartment, Ysidro was gone. The only thing that remained to tell him that all which had passed was not, in fact, a dream was the woman’s purple scarf, collapsed like a discarded grave band on the floor between the two seats. Asher felt the anger surge in him, guessing where the vampire was and what he would be doing, but knowing there was nothing he could do. He could, he supposed, run up and down the train shouting to beware of vampires. But he had seen Ysidro move and knew there was very little chance of even glimpsing him before he found another victim. In a crowded third-class carriage or an isolated sleeping car, a dead man or woman would pass unnoticed until the end of the journey, always provided the body were not simply tipped out. Mangled under the train wheels, there would be no questions about the cause of death or the amount of blood in the veins.

  But of course, if he issued a warning, nothing at all would happen, save that he would be locked up as a bedlamite.r />
  Filled with impotent rage, Asher flung himself back in the red cushioned seat to await Don Simon Ysidro’s reappearance, knowing that he would do as the vampire asked.

  THREE

  “HER NAME was Lotta.” Don Simon’s soft voice echoed queerly in the damp vaults of the tomb. “She was one of…” He hesitated fractionally, then amended, “A hat-maker, when she was alive.” Asher wondered what Ysidro’s original description of her would have been. “In life she was a rather poor specimen of a human—cocky, disrespectful of her betters, a thief, and a whore.” He paused, and again Asher had the impression that the Spaniard was picking through a jewel box of facts for the few carats’ worth of information with which he was willing to part. “But she made a good vampire.”

  Asher’s left eyebrow quirked upward, and he flashed the beam of Ysidro’s dark lantern around the low stone vaults above their heads. Shadowed niches held coffins; here and there, on a keystone arch, a blurred coat of arms had been incised, though why, if Death had not been impressed by the owner’s station, the family expected Resurrection to be, he was at a loss to decide. Highgate was not a particularly old cemetery, but it was intensely fashionable—vaults in this part started at well over a hundred guineas—and the tomb, with its narrow stair leading down from a tree-lined avenue of similar pseudo-Egyptian mausoleums, was guarded by its well-paid-for isolation and was, at the same time, far easier to enter than the crypt of some City church would have been.

  “And what makes a good vampire?”