Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  It resembled a large armoire, some seven feet tall and mounted on trestles which raised it another twelve inches from the floor. Black velvet curtains hung over its open door. (Heaven only knows what’s inside it.) Though the stateroom was generously proportioned, the cabinet took up a great deal of it. Additionally and disconcertingly, along the wall at right angles to it there was a sort of platform which could have been two trunks placed end-to-end, or one trunk easily large enough to contain a human body. It was difficult to tell, because yet another black velvet pall covered the whole.

  Her earlier conversation with Don Simon returned to her. Surely not …?

  Lydia cast a startled glance at the princess, who was directing the footman Zhenya in shifting the eight chromium chairs around the central table. Everyone was bumping elbows and tripping. Six bells rested on its top of the draped platform, each covered with a glass dome, and, also covered in glass, a slate. Lydia, when she made the excuse of stepping out of Mr Cochran’s way and put her hand on top of the almost-six-foot platform, didn’t feel a break in the surface beneath the cloth.

  It could almost have been a coffin.

  Good Heavens, is Madame Izora the servant of this other vampire? With the princess as her dupe?

  She removed her glasses again before Aunt Louise – expounding on the nature of the Superior Race to Dr Yakunin – could get to her feet to take them forcibly from her face, and glanced quickly at Mr Cochran, who also appeared to be studying the platform or whatever it was under those draperies. With the lamps so low it was impossible to tell, and she couldn’t think of a convincing reason to look under the drape herself.

  Good Heavens, is he going to send Mr Kimball and his thugs to burglarize the room?

  But just then Monsieur le Duc, escaping from Mademoiselle Ossolinska in the outer parlor, slipped through the door and jumped nimbly up onto the platform, the better to lick his mistress’ face.

  Hmmn … well, another theory gone west. In any novel the dog would have taken one sniff of a vampire’s coffin and run yelping from the room.

  It probably only holds more equipment of Madame’s or the works for ringing those bells under the glass domes. But still …

  Madame Izora, sylph-like in a clinging gown of iridescent black silk (Vionnet, Lydia guessed), lit a single candle in the center of the table. Zhenya blew out the lamps, tucked Monsieur le Duc under one arm, and stepping outside, closed the door. ‘Please,’ said the seer, ‘look into the cabinet, all of you.’

  Both the Cochrans demurred, insisting that they trusted Madame Izora implicitly, and that to peek behind the curtains was an insult. But at the Princess Gromyko’s urging they did so at last. More bumping and blundering among the chairs. Lydia put on her glasses again, despite furious disapproving signals from Aunt Louise, and looked also. She guessed there would be comment if she took out her pocket measuring tape and checked the inner against the outer dimensions.

  It reminded her forcibly of the narrow locker of cleaning supplies where Gospod Vodusek was hiding his pilfered liquor. A few shelves contained, among other things, a small brass bowl of what smelled like some kind of herb seeds – Lydia later learned these were lavender buds – a branch of fern lying on an intricately folded piece of white silk, and a ‘talking board’ or ‘ouija board’ of the sort that Lydia’s cousins had used at the Peasehall Manor séance last summer.

  When everyone was seated – Lydia still bespectacled – Madame brought out the fern and the lavender buds and performed what looked like a ritual aspersion (James had told her all about such folkloric practices in their various local guises). Replacing these (and presumably hooking up whatever equipment in the cabinet was necessary to ring the bells), the seer brought out the ouija board and its little wheeled planchette, and took her own place with her back so close to the cabinet, owing to the crowding of the room, that the velvet curtains which draped its opening actually swagged over the back of her chair.

  At last summer’s séance, Lydia’s cousins had informed her – with a good deal of reproach – that the reason their attempts to communicate with spirits had come to nothing was because of Lydia’s unbelief. ‘The spirits do not deign to convince unbelievers,’ had declared Cousin Maria, while Cousin Tilda, fourteen and passionate about nearly everything, had begged Lydia to ‘open her heart to the forces beyond our comprehension’. Clare, still adrift in her personal darkness after the death of her husband in the Ypres Salient, had silenced the other girls with a quiet, ‘It isn’t anybody’s fault’. But the way she’d glanced at Lydia had given the lie to her words.

  And much as she sympathized with Clare’s desperation to have some word from George, Lydia could not help reflecting on how convenient it was that no ‘spirits’ would manifest themselves in the presence of those who were not ready and willing to unquestioningly believe.

  In any case, whatever spirits floated above the heaving Atlantic outside, they seemed to have no qualms whatsoever about presenting themselves in the company of a skeptic. They obligingly chimed the bells within their domes of glass, and played the piano in the parlor. Muffled by the closed door of the séance room, Lydia thought there was something strange about its tone and wondered if in fact there was a gramophone somewhere out there. In the dense gloom it was difficult to tell. (‘The harsh rays of ordinary light are inimical to the spirits,’ had said Cousin Maria. Another convenient circumstance, had reflected Lydia – despite the fact that she was, perforce, a firm believer in the Undead and was in fact wearing a pearl-and-emerald Tiffany necklace given to her by a man who’d been dead for 362 years.)

  Aunt Louise received a brief message from her deceased school friend Martha Barnes (full of generalities, Lydia thought – and in any case it was difficult to picture Aunt Louise at boarding school) and she herself one from her mother. Safe, the planchette laboriously spelled out, sliding across the polished ouija board under the skilled hand of Madame Izora. Child safe upon the waters. No enemy here.

  Lydia guessed the seer had been chatting with Aunt Louise. It was all window dressing, but she still felt the sting of anger at seeing her mother’s name.

  They joined hands. Madame Izora closed her eyes. In time, when the bells chimed again within their glass prisons and then fell still, Madame whispered, ‘She is here. Phyleia …’

  Phyleia, the princess had earlier informed Lydia, was the name of Madame’s spirit control, formerly a hetaera in fifth-century Athens. Had Jamie been present, Lydia would have whispered to him to address the spirit in Classical Greek.

  And Jamie, Lydia was sure, would have whispered back that to do so would only distract the medium when there was information that she might, possibly, be able to sense.

  ‘The Undead,’ whispered Princess Gromyko. ‘The drinkers of death. The drinkers of souls. Are they on this vessel?’

  In a curiously flat, harsh voice, the seer replied, ‘Yes.’

  ‘This thing that killed the child Luzia,’ urged the princess. ‘That killed the girl Pavlina …’

  Madame Izora’s dark brows knit below the edge of her black-and-gold headband. She flinched, and turned her face aside, like a woman who is being shouted at and fears violence. Glancing beside her in the candlelight, Lydia saw Cochran leaning forward across the table, his eyes fixed on the woman and glittering with a kind of starved eagerness.

  ‘Killed them.’ The word came out a flat croak. ‘Not … Spanish …’

  The others looked baffled, but Lydia had to pinch her own hand, hard, to keep from exclaiming aloud.

  ‘Where is the one who killed them?’ demanded Cochran. ‘Are there two on this ship?’

  The princess gasped, ‘Two?’ and Mrs Cochran looked as if she would have brought her fingers to her lips, had not her husband on the one side and Aunt Louise on the other gripped them hard.

  ‘Two …’ Madame Izora’s face convulsed. ‘Two of them. One who killed. One who … One who …’

  ‘Where is the other?’ Cochran looked as if he were about to grab h
er by the arms and shake the answer out of her. ‘The one who killed?’

  ‘Darkness …’ The slender little woman began to tremble convulsively. Then she sobbed, ‘Oh, dear God! Somebody stop him! The little boy – he’s got a little boy! Darkness – chains – oh, dear God, somebody help him!’

  ‘Where?’ shouted Cochran.

  Lydia, leaning forward, asked, ‘What do you hear? What do you smell?’

  ‘Where is it hiding?’ Cochran leaped to his feet and let go of the hands of both Lydia and his wife, to grab Izora by the arms.

  With a cry the little woman tried to twist free of him, then crumpled forward in a storm of weeping.

  SIXTEEN

  The dead travel fast, Bürger says in ‘Lenore’, and after an hour in the rear seat of a big Peugeot touring car with Joël at the wheel, Asher wanted to ask the author of the ballad if this was what he’d meant. ‘You know if he runs us off the road,’ he remarked in what he hoped was a conversational tone to Elysée beside him, ‘it won’t kill him, or you, but it may very well strand you in the open at sunrise.’

  She leaned against his chest – warily, because he still wore chains of silver around his neck and wrists – and tweaked his mustache. ‘Eh bien, Professor, we all of us, who hunt the night, have learned how to find shelter. And all the more so now, when so many have fled their homes before the guns.’

  It was true, Asher observed, as they drove north and west through Compiègne and Noyon and on into the darkness, that no lights glowed in the abysses of what had once been populous and pleasant countryside. War had advanced, and retreated, and advanced again – the Germans had swept through here nearly to the suburbs of Paris in August of 1914. Though Joël persisted in driving at a speed suitable for the roads of what felt now like a distant past – almost another planet – the pavement was broken and torn by the passage of heavy vehicles, and the motorcar swerved wildly and repeatedly to avoid shell holes half-filled, by the smell of them, with stagnant water and dead things.

  Not a place to be stranded afoot, Asher reflected grimly, even without a broken leg or a broken shoulder, if the Undead driver happened to demolish the car and then flitted off to seek shelter from the day’s accusing light.

  At a little after three, by his watch, still the dead of the early-spring night, the flicker of what he would have taken for heat lightning – had it been summer – began to show in the north-east. With it, the far-off rumble of the guns.

  He’d spent nearly a year on the Western Front, mostly dressed in a German uniform sitting on benches in prisoner depots. He’d listened to the captured men around him, chatted occasionally with them of where they’d been stationed and where they’d come from, and what conditions were like back home (‘I’ve been here so long it seems like some other world to me,’ he’d say to them. ‘Like something I dreamed …’). His German was flawless and he knew the boffins back at Whitehall could discover all kinds of information from the bits he collected, fragments that could be fed back to agents more deeply buried in German itself, or tiny wedges that could be leveraged in the event of negotiations, once Germany became sufficiently desperate.

  Later, he had hated the dark forests of Silesia, the dank sour wetness of those endless half-frozen marshlands – the months of inactivity, starvation, and despair. But living as a lost soul in a regiment of lost souls was still better, he felt to the marrow of his bones, than living with the constant hammering of the guns.

  Joël hadn’t switched on the Peugeot’s headlamps, so Asher could see nothing of the land around them as they neared the lines. But the smell of them intensified, even in the cold. The smell of the trenches, faint at first, grew stronger: the stink of latrines, or of corners of the maze of those interconnected ditches where men relieved themselves rather than bother to walk the distance to the rat-swarming privies. The stench of corpses, dead in the wires and shell holes of No Man’s Land, that the medical orderlies hadn’t been able to retrieve. The reek of cordite that overhung the trenches like a fog; of woodsmoke where the men burned whatever deadfalls or bits of shoring – or the ruins of smashed farmhouses – they could find, against the bone-eating cold; of the churned-up earth itself. As all these grew stronger, he caught now and then in the blackness the flickering whiff of cigarette smoke, where a sentry sucked on a Woodbine to keep himself awake or to stave off hunger.

  The guns got louder. As the flare of an explosion lighted the distant sky, they passed a makeshift signpost that marked the way to Chauny and Amiens, and as if through the wrong end of a telescope, tiny and very far away, Asher saw the countryside as he had seen it first in his teens. Hedgerows white with blossom, farm tracks shaded by oak and beech. The smell of hay. It pierced the very core of his heart.

  He had walked this very road, half a dozen times. Could remember the name of the farmer half a mile east of this crossroad, who would give him lunch and ask him about England, and boast about his own son who worked in Arras.

  Asher wondered if that farmer – or his son – were still alive.

  Did the vampires ever feel like this? he wondered, looking at the dark curls lying against his shoulder, clustered beneath Elysée’s fashionable velvet hat. See a place, changed and chewed and unrecognizable with time, and remember?

  Was that why some of them went mad as they aged?

  Or did people to whom such thoughts were likely to occur, not become vampires?

  The car slowed, as the potholes grew thicker and the road surface vanished in a morass of chopped-up pavement, earth, and mud. Joël swore, and Elysée said, ‘Never mind, my beautiful one, we’re only a short walk from the hospital.’ Asher guessed she meant the clearing station, a mile or so back from the lines. And indeed, the reek in the darkness had become worse, not only of No Man’s Land itself, but of gangrene and rotting tissue, and the horrible greasiness of human flesh consumed by incinerators. They abandoned the car and walked, the lights of the clearing station appearing dimly through the ruins of what had been – Asher guessed from the ground underfoot and the regularity of the trees – an orchard.

  Tents surrounded what had been a sizeable farm. One, set a little apart from the others, was, he guessed, the Moribund Ward, where men too badly hurt to live were made comfortable in the few hours or days left them. Among the black trees of that black orchard he smelled more cigarette smoke. In another place, vomit. Once he saw the glimmer of a bullseye lantern, shaded down to a slit, and beside it, heard a woman crying as if her heart would break.

  He knew there were vampires in the orchard but knew that the woman – a nurse, or an ambulance volunteer – was perfectly safe. A crumb on the floor of a banqueting hall. He was so tired he barely felt anger, though he knew he would do so later.

  Closer to the tents, he could hear the vampires. See them, sometimes, or at least see their eyes, when they caught the light of the lanterns. Much of his adult life he’d studied the legends of the Undead – much of his adult life, not believing in them – and nothing had prepared him for this. Glimpses of pale faces, pale hands. The flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. Voices below the lowest whisper, yet audible, ‘Darling, absolutely the most delicious little whore … pursued her for hours through the warehouses … Well, one has to keep one’s skills sharp …’

  ‘Going to be a push on, up at Arras …’ This last in French. ‘The shooting should be over by Wednesday.’ And in Italian: ‘The miserable little catamite had cards stuck under the bottom of the table! If he hadn’t been Graf Szgedny’s I’d have broken his skinny neck …’

  Graf Szgedny, Asher knew, was the master vampire of Prague. He held sway, with an enclave of his fledglings, over this area of the Front. Or he had, a year ago, before Asher had been transferred east. It sounded like he still did. Beside him, Asher heard Elysée whisper, ‘Augustin …’ A moment later she, and Joël, were gone, leaving him alone in the haunted darkness.

  He stood still, knowing – or at least hoping – that she would return.

  Hoping –
and there was no guarantee that this wouldn’t actually be the case – that all of this journey hadn’t been an elaborate game, of the kind that vampires liked to play. To sweeten the taste of another’s death with the fragrances of despair and trust betrayed.

  He certainly wouldn’t put it past her.

  He felt them behind him, around him, whispering in the dark. They knew he’d come here with one of their own. They passed the word along.

  Without even the challenge of a hunt anymore, they would be more nosy than ever – and cruel with the cruelty of the bored.

  He asked aloud, in French, ‘Is the Graf here this evening, then?’

  After a long stillness, a woman asked, also in French, ‘Who is it who would know?’

  ‘My name is Professor Asher,’ he responded politely, and removed his peaked uniform cap. ‘I’m here with Madame Elysée. We seek Augustin Malette of Paris, or any of his fledglings. I was under the protection of the Graf Szgedny in Amiens, two years ago,’ he added, vampires no less than motor pool clerks being susceptible to name-dropping. ‘I would like to pay him my respects.’

  He felt rather than heard them whisper. Then a woman – maybe the same one, maybe another – said, ‘Elysée will kill Augustin, for going and making fledglings. He’ll be halfway to England before morning. For certain she’ll kill his fledglings.’

  ‘I can take you to him,’ said another woman, and Asher felt his hair prickle, guessing she would not. Being sated with deaths would not lessen, for them, the entertainment of a long chase through the horror of abandoned trenches. ‘He’s not far.’

  She stepped from the darkness then, a pale glimmering shape in the far-off gleam of the lanterns in the clearing station. Vampires at the Front often wore officers’ uniforms. This girl had chosen to clothe herself as a dream dreamed by dying men, or men in terror that each quarter-hour would be their last. Thin white lawn moved like a shroud with the motion of her narrow flanks. Her arms were bare, and much of her throat. The warmth, Asher knew, of the deaths she had absorbed kept that milk-white flesh warmer than the heart which had once beat in it. Blonde hair hung past her waist. Her face was the face of a trusting child.