Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel Page 5

  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.

  The clutter in the bedroom was worse. Three giant armoires loomed over a bed that had obviously never been used for sleep; their doors sagged open under the press of gowns. Other dresses were heaped on the bed, a shining tangle of ruffles in which pearls gleamed like maggots in meat—yards of flounced organdy three generations out of date and narrow, high-waisted silks, older still and falling apart under the weight of their own beading as he gently lifted them from the shadowy disarray. Cosmetics and wigs, mostly of a particular shade of blonde, cluttered the dressing table, whose mirror frame bulged with cards, notes, bibelots, and bills; jewels trailed among the mess in prodigal clusters, like swollen and glittering fruit. Near the foot of the bed, Asher saw an old shoe, broad-toed, square-heeled, with paste gems gleaming on its huge buckle and ribbons faded to grayish ghosts of some former indigo beauty. Gold sovereigns strewed a corner of the dressing table under a layer of dust and powder. Picking one up, Asher saw that they bore the head of the unfortunate Farmer George.

  “Did her beaux give her money?” he asked quietly. “Or was she in the habit of robbing them after they were dead?”

  “Both, I expect,” Ysidro replied. “She never saved much. Hence her need to live in rooms—or in any case to rent them to store her things. But, of course, she could not risk sleeping here, with the possibility of her landlady entering to ask questions. And more questions would be asked, of course, if she shuttered the windows tightly enough to cut out all sunlight,”

  “Hence Highgate,” Asher murmured, removing a dressmaker’s bill from the table and turning it over in his hands.

  “The propensity of the vampires for sleeping among the dead,” Ysidro said, standing, arms folded, just within the connecting door, “stems not so much from our fondness for corpses—though I have been told many vampires in theso-called Gothic ages considered it no more than proper—but from the fact that the tombs would be undisturbed by day. And by night, of course, interference would not matter.”

  “On the contrary, in fact,” Asher remarked. “Must have played hob with the Resurrection trade.” He was systematically removing all the cards, all the notes, and all the invitations that he could find from the mirror frame and dressing table, shoving them into an old-fashioned beaded reticule for examination later at leisure. “And I presume your money comes from investments?”

  “That is not something which concerns you.”

  He flipped open a drawer. The reek of old powder and decaying paper rose to his nostrils like the choke of dust. The drawer was crammed with a chowchow of bills, most of them yellow and cracking with age, letters still shoved into embossed envelopes which bore illegible handwritten franks instead of postage marks or stamps, and little wads of notes issued by banks long collapsed. “It concerns me how I’ll get money to pursue my investigations.”

  Ysidro regarded him for a moment from beneath lowered eyelids, as if guessing that reimbursement was, in fact, the least of Asher’s concerns. Then he turned away and began picking up and discarding the dozens of reticules of various ages, styles, and states of decomposition that lay among the anarchy of the bed or drooped from drawers of kerchiefs and underclothes. He opened them, plucking forth small wads of bank notes or emptying glittering streams of gold or silver onto the dressing table carelessly, as if the very touch of the money disgusted him.

  A true hidalgo of the Reconquista, Asher thought, amused again and interested to see that three and a half centuries among a nation of shopkeepers hadn’t changed him.

  “Will that suffice?”

  Asher sorted through the money, discarding anything more than twenty years old, except for one George III gold piece he pocketed as a souvenir. “For now,” he said. “Since Lotta was the fourth victim, it isn’t tremendously likely the killer started his investigations with her, but there might be something in all this paper—the name of a recent victim, an address, something. I’ll want to see the rooms of the others—Calvaire, King, and Hammersmith—and I’ll want to talk to these ‘friends’ of King’s you spoke of…”

  “No.”

  “As you wish,” Asher said tartly, straightening up and flipping shut the drawer. “Then don’t expect me to find your killer.”

  “You will find the killer,” Ysidro retorted, his voice now deadly soft, “and you will find him quickly, ere he kills again. Else it will be the worse for you and for your lady. What you seek to know has nothing to do with your investigation.”

  “Neither you nor I has any idea what has to do with my investigation until we see it.” Anger stirred in Asher again, not, as before, anger with the vampires, but the frustration he had known when dealing with those bland and faceless superiors in the Foreign Office who could not and would not understand field conditions, but demanded results nevertheless. For a moment he wanted to take Ysidro by his skinny neck and shake him, not solely from his fear of what might happen to Lydia, but from sheer annoyance at being ordered to make bricks without straw. “If I’m going to do as you ask, you’re going to have to give me something…”

  “I will give you what I choose.” The vampire did not move, but Asher sensed in him a readiness to strike andknew the blow, when it came, would be irresistible as lightning and potentially as fatal. Nothing altered in the voice, cold and inert as poison. “I warn you again—you are playing with death here. What bounds I set are as much for your own protection as for mine. Take care you do not cross them.

  “Understand me, James, for I understand you. I understand that you intend to work for me only so long as it will take you to find a way to destroy me and those like me with impunity. So. I could have found a man who is venal and unintelligent, who would not even have been told who and what I am, to whom I would simply have sa
id: Find me this; find me that; meet me with the results tonight. There are men who are too unimaginative even to ask. But it would not have answered. One does not select cottonwood to fashion a weapon to preserve, perhaps, one’s life; one selects the hardest of teak. But with that hardness comes other things.”

  They faced each other in silence, in the silken chaos of that cluttered chamber with its stinks of ancient perfume. “I won’t have you coming to Oxford again.”

  “No,” Ysidro agreed. “I, too, understand. Whoever is behind these murders, I will not lead him to your lady. Take rooms here in this city—I will find you. For those of us who hunt the nights, that will be no great task. You might remember that, also, should it cross your mind to ally yourself with our murderer.”

  “I’ll remember,” Asher promised quietly. “But you remember this: if you and your fellow-vampires kill me, you’ll still have a problem. And if you play me false, or try to take hostages, or so much as go near my wife again, you’ll have an even bigger problem. Because then you’ll have to kill me and you’ll still need to find someone else to do your day work for you. I’ll play straight with you, but, in a sense, you’ve put yourself in my hands, as I am inyours. I believe in your existence now…”

  “And whom would you tell who would believe you?”

  “It’s enough that I believe,” said Asher. “And I think you know that.”

  FOUR

  “HOW DOES one go about investigating the personal life of a woman who’s done murder on a regular basis for the last hundred and fifty years?”

  Lydia Asher paused, the handkerchief-wrapped fragments of bone in hand, and tilted her head consideringly at her husband’s question. With her long red hair hanging down over nightgowned shoulders and her spectacles glinting faintly in the misty gray of the window light, she looked more like a fragile and gawky schoolgirl than a doctor. Asher stretched out his long legs to rest slippered feet on the end of the bed. “She must have hundreds of potential enemies.”

  “Thousands, I should say,” Lydia guessed, after a moment’s mental calculation. “Over fifty thousand, counting one per night times three hundred and sixty-five times a hundred and fifty…”

  “Taking off a few here and there when she went on a reducing diet?” Asher’s mustache quirked in his fleet grin; only his eyes, Lydia thought, were not the same as theyhad been. Below them in the house, Ellen’s footsteps tapped a half-heard pulse as she went from room to room, laying fires; further off, on the edge of awareness, Lydia could detect the regular clatter and tread of breakfast being prepared.

  Ellen had insisted on remaining awake long enough to fix a scratch dinner, after they had all wakened mysteriously in the chilled depths of the night. Lydia had sent them all to bed as soon as possible. The last thing she’d needed was the parlor maid’s unbridled imagination, the cook’s self-dramatization, and the tweeny’s morbid credulity to add to what she herself had found a deeply disturbing experience. That James had been home she’d deduced from the fact that the fires were built up, though why he should have taken apart his revolver and left the knife he didn’t think she knew he carried in his boot among the pieces on his desk had left her somewhat at a loss. Characteristically, she had spent the remainder of the night searching through her medical journals—which she kept in boxes under the bed, as they’d overflowed the library—for references to similar occurrences, alternately outlining an article on the pathological basis for the legend of Sleeping Beauty and dozing in the tangle of lace-trimmed counterpane and issues of the Lancet. But her dreams had been disturbing, and she had kept waking, expecting to find some slender stranger standing silently in the room.

  “I don’t think so,” she said now, shaking back the clouds of her sleeve-lace and pushing up her specs. “Could a vampire go on a reducing diet? There isn’t any fat in blood.”

  Her mind scouted the thought while Asher hid his grin behind a cup of coffee.

  She unwrapped the two vertebrae from James’ handkerchief, and held them to the slowly brightening light of the window. Third and fourth cervical, badly charred andoddly decomposed, but, as James had described, the scratch on the bone was clearly visible. “There must be tissue repair of some kind, you know,” she went on, wetting her finger to rub some of the soot away, “if Don Simon’s burns ‘took years to heal.’ I wonder what causes the combustion? Though there are stories of spontaneous human combustion happening in very rare instances to quite ordinary people—if they were ordinary, of course. Did you get a look at the coffin lining? Was it burned away, too?”

  Asher’s thick brows pulled together as he narrowed his eyes, trying to call back the details of that silent charnel house. He hadn’t had medical training, but, Lydia had found, he had the best eye for detail she had ever encountered in a world that ignored so much. He would be that way, she thought, even if his life hadn’t depended on it for so many years.

  “Not burned away, no,” he said after a moment. “The lining at the bottom was corroded and stained, almost down to the wood; charred and stained to a few inches above where the body would come on the sides. The clothes, flesh, and hair had been entirely destroyed.”

  “Color of the stains?”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t see by lantern light.”

  “Hmn.” She paused in thought, then began patting and shaking the pillows, comforter, and beribboned froth of shams around her, looking for her magnifying glass—she was sure she’d been using it to peruse some dissecting-room drawings the other night in bed.

  “Night stand?” Asher suggested helpfully. She fished it out to look more closely at the third cervical.

  “This was done with one stroke.” She held it out—he leaned across to take it and the glass and studied it in his turn. “Something very sharp, with a drawing stroke: a cleaver or a surgical knife. Something made for cuttingbone. Whoever used it knew what he was doing.”

  “And wasn’t about to lose his nerve over severing a woman’s head,” Asher added thoughtfully, setting aside the bone. “He’d already killed three other vampires, of course. Presumably whatever started him on his hunt for vampires was enough to overcome his revulsion, if he felt any, the first time—and after that, he’d have proof that they do in fact exist and must be destroyed.” As he spoke, he tugged gently on the faded silk ribbons of the old reticule, coaxing it open in a dry whisper of cracking silk.

  “Surely the mere circumstances of their loved one’s death would have proved that.” When James didn’t answer, she looked up from examining the oddly dissolved-looking bone. What she saw in his face—in his eyes, like a burned-on reflection of things he had seen—caused the same odd little tightening within her that she’d felt when she was four and had awakened in the night to realize there was a huge rat in her room and that it was between her and the door.

  Slowly he said, “If that’s the reason behind the killings, yes. But I think there’s more to it than that—and I don’t know what. If Ysidro’s telling the truth, vampires can generally see ordinary mortals coming.”

  “If he was telling the truth. It might have been a lie to make you keep your distance, you know.” She shook one long, delicate finger at him and mimicked, “‘Don’t you try nuthin’ wi’ me, bucko, ’cos we’ll see you comin’.’”

  “You haven’t seen him in action.” The somberness fled from his eyes as he grinned at himself. “That’s the whole point, I suppose: nobody sees them in action. But no. I believe him. His senses are preternaturally sharp—he can count the people in a train coach by the sound of their breathing, see in the dark … Yet the whole time I was with him, I could feel him listening to the wind. I’ve seen mendo that when they think they’re being followed, but can’t be sure. He hides it well, but he’s afraid.”

  “Well, it does serve him right,” Lydia observed. She hesitated, turning the vertebra over and over in her fingers, not looking at it now any more than she looked at the grass stems she plucked when she was nervous. She swallowed hard, trying to sound ca
sual and not succeeding. “How much danger am I in?”

  “Quite a lot, I think.” He got up and came around to sit on the pillows beside her; his arm in its white shirt sleeve was sinewy and strong around her shoulders. Her mother’s anxious coddling—not to mention the overwhelming chivalry of a number of young men who seemed to believe that, because they found her pretty, she would automatically think them fascinating—had given Lydia a horror of clinginess. But it was good to lean into James’ strength, to feel the warmth of his flesh through the shirt sleeve, the muscle and rib beneath that nondescript tweed waistcoat, and to smell ink and book dust and Macassar oil. Though she knew objectively that he was no more able to defend either of them against this supernatural danger than she was, she cherished the momentary illusion that he would not let her come to harm.

  His lips brushed her hair. “I’m going to have to go down to London again,” he said after a few minutes, “to search for the murderer and to pursue investigations as to the whereabouts of the other vampires in London. If I can locate where they sleep, where they store their things, where they hunt, it should give me a weapon to use against them. It’s probably best that you leave Oxford as well…”

  “Well, of course!” She turned abruptly in the circle of his arm, the fragile suspension of disbelief dissolving like a cigarette genie with the opening of a door. “I’ll come down to London with you. Not to stay with you,” she added hastily, as his mouth opened in a protest he was momentarilytoo shocked to voice. “I know that would put me in danger, if they saw us together. But to take rooms near yours, to be close enough to help you, if you need it…”