Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  When she reached to take his hand he stepped back a pace, and she regarded him with pity in her dark eyes.

  ‘There’s nothing to fear. If it’s something so important that you come here, come with Elysée, come among us, can you not trust, even for a little while?’

  She probably wasn’t very old in her Undead state – the exaggerated rush of desire for her was heavy-handed and obvious. If she survived, Asher guessed she’d be very good at it in time. When he shook his head her eyes seemed about to fill with tears.

  Then she retreated, seeming to be re-absorbed into the darkness.

  ‘Where is it?’ Cochran jerked Madame Izora upright in her chair. She stared at him, with the blank, utterly baffled face of one pulled suddenly from deep sleep.

  ‘What?’ She wiped at her cheeks, looked in frightened astonishment at her wet fingers and then up at the others now crowding around her.

  ‘Where—’

  Princess Natalia thrust him aside to catch the seer’s hands. ‘What did you see, chère p’tite?’ Her voice was gentle.

  Izora shook her head, clearly – and as far as Lydia could tell, genuinely – ignorant. ‘What did I see?’ she repeated.

  ‘The Undead,’ snapped Cochran. ‘The vampire. You said it was someplace, that it had killed a boy—’ When Izora shook her head again, he looked ready to slap her.

  ‘We’d better get down there.’ Lydia started to rise.

  ‘No!’ Cochran clapped a hand on her shoulder, almost thrust her back into her seat. ‘That is – I’ll go. Louis, get your gear – and make sure the suite’s locked tight. Kimball!’

  Scuffing in the other room of the suite. Angry voices. Then the door opened to admit the detective and the princess’s two protesting footmen. ‘Get the boys and come with me. There’s been another murder down in Third Class.’

  Mr Kimball’s glance, where it touched the pale and shaken seer with the princess and Mrs Cochran bending close around her, was eloquent with disgust and disbelief. But he took the cigar out of his mouth and said, ‘Sure, boss,’ and stepped aside to let the ‘nerve doctor’ pass.

  ‘And don’t ask questions! M’am.’ Cochran turned to jab a finger at the Princess Gromyko. ‘Don’t you – Princess,’ he corrected himself, at a savage stare from his wife. He fumbled his watch from his pocket, checked the time. ‘It’s after midnight, M’a— Your Majesty. It probably isn’t safe for you to go down to Third now. You stay here. All of you stay here,’ he added, sweeping the little group with his sharp black gaze. ‘I’ll get my boys together …’

  ‘Should we not notify the captain?’ The princess straightened, her hand still protectively on Izora’s shoulder. ‘If this thing is hunting, moving about in the darkness—’

  ‘I can surely be of assistance.’ Dr Yakunin, visibly pale with shock and fear, fumbled with his silver pince-nez. (Lydia couldn’t imagine how anyone could balance the things even to read, much less chase children up and down F Deck as old Herr Goldhirsch had done.) ‘I have knowledge of these things.’

  ‘No!’ snapped Cochran again. ‘I’ll take care of all that. For right now, don’t anyone leave this suite and don’t anyone talk to anyone about what was said here. There’s no sense starting a panic,’ he added, as Aunt Louise opened her lips to declare, probably, that she would do nothing of the kind and he had no right to order her around. ‘And that’s what we’ll have if word of this gets out before we’ve trapped the thing.’

  He glanced over his shoulder, making sure that Kimball was out of the room. Then he lowered his voice still further. ‘It’s dangerous. Deadly. And though its powers are halved by the power of the ocean, it can still cause terrible harm if it thinks it’s been found out. M’am – Princess – why don’t all you ladies stay here and look after Mrs Izora? Get her some smelling salts or something. See if you can find out anything else from her.’

  His eyes darted to Lydia, and he bent closer to her, to whisper. ‘You’re a doctor. You know anything about hypnosis? Maybe that would—’

  Izora looked frightened (as well she might! thought Lydia), and Princess Gromyko said, ‘She remembers nothing, Mr Cochran. She never does. Remember, it was not she who saw this thing, but the spirit Phyleia.’

  He opened his mouth to suggest something else – or possibly to damn Phyleia as superstitious nonsense – then closed it. ‘See what you can find out,’ he ordered after a moment, then turned and strode from the room. Lydia heard the outer door of the suite open, and close.

  ‘Well,’ said Aunt Louise. ‘I think we would all be better for a cup of tea.’

  ‘I’ll see if Ossolinska is about,’ said Lydia quickly, and hurried after Cochran and into the parlor.

  The over-decorated room was empty – she wondered if Cochran would have the presence of mind to know he’d better take a translator with him below decks – and she crossed it, quickly, to the outer door. This she opened the barest crack, and peered out.

  And, yes, Cochran was outside, a dozen feet down the promenade, holding Don Simon Ysidro roughly by the arm. ‘—made a kill,’ the millionaire was saying in his sharp, harsh voice. ‘The crystal gazer said “darkness” and “chains”. We need to get down there fast and catch it before the kid’s body is found. She said it was a “little boy” this time. I hope to God the thing hid the body better this time than those other two. The whole place’ll be in hysterics and we’ll never find where it’s hiding.’

  Don Simon inclined his head. ‘It shall be as you command, lord.’ He moved as if to withdraw, but Cochran’s hand tightened hard around that thin bicep, jerking him back.

  ‘And I better not find you teaming up with that thing to double-cross me. You’re on parole, Ysidro. It won’t take me and Louis any trouble at all to pick you up and stow you back in the box when you double up screaming – except maybe to get you away from the mob that’s gonna tear you to pieces because they think it was you that killed those girls. And they will think it’s you, the minute they get a look at your face. So don’t you try any funny business.’

  In a tone that held as much shock as disgust, Don Simon said, ‘Ally myself with a peasant? What will you think of next?’

  Cochran laughed, and let him go. Don Simon brushed his sleeve, as if to straighten wrinkles or dust away filth. The millionaire looked at his watch again, and said, ‘Looks like you got four hours, before the antidote starts to wear off. I’ll see you back at the cabin at four thirty.’

  ‘It shall be as you command,’ the vampire murmured again. And, stepping back into the shadows, he was gone.

  SEVENTEEN

  Lydia darted to the electric bell the moment Cochran was out of sight in the opposite direction, gave the order to Bahadir, the princess’s butler, to have cocoa and tea brought to the séance room (presumably Her Illustrious Highness’ cook was still awake also). Though she was overwhelmed by the desire to remain and listen to what Madame Izora had to say about her vision – or whatever it was – she hurried back into the chamber and said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but … I’m going to go back to our suite, Aunt. I can’t – after what Madame said – I don’t want Miranda to be alone.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ snapped Aunt Louise, who had pre-empted the seat beside the still-shaken Madame Izora the better to solicitously coax from her whatever revelations might be pending. ‘For Heaven’s sake, Lydia, this maniac that’s prowling the ship – and I refuse to believe it’s some sort of vampire or werewolf! – isn’t going to come up to First Class.’

  Had she been confronting her aunt alone, Lydia knew that tears would have been useless. But with Her Highness and Mrs Cochran present, she let her face crumple a little – she’d prudently removed her glasses on her way back across the parlor – and said, in her most quavery voice, ‘I … I just don’t want her to be alone.’ And threw in the tiniest sniffle, for effect.

  Aunt Louise looked as if she were about to tell her not to be silly – she didn’t disbelieve the tears, simply regarded them as a sign of weakness. But the othe
r two women crossed swiftly to her in tenderest sympathy. ‘Of course, sugar,’ said Mrs Cochran, and the princess put her arm around Lydia’s shoulders in a warm hug.

  ‘Bien sûr, you must go, dearest,’ murmured Natalia Nikolaievna. ‘We shall be here until Monsieur Cochran returns, which I think must not be until nearly daylight. Otherwise, send me word the moment – the very moment – you wake, and I will tell you everything. Though in truth –’ she sank her voice to a whisper, and glanced back at the very pale woman beside Aunt Louise – ‘my dear Izora never remembers what Phyleia speaks through her mouth. And if that weasel Barvell comes near her – I would not put it beyond Cochran to try to give poor Izora hyoscine or paregoric! – I shall have Samson and Zhenya throw him overboard. Alors, my little ones,’ she added, as the anxious Monsieur and Madame pattered into the room and crowded to her ankles. ‘All is well, mes enfants! All is well!’

  ‘Dear Dr Barvell always prescribes morphia for my nerves …’ Mrs Cochran was hinting to Dr Yakunin.

  ‘There is something fanatic – did you not think? – in the man’s pursuit of the vampir,’ the princess went on in a hushed voice, picking up Madame la Duchesse in her arms. ‘The way he insists that it be he, and no other, who finds this terrible thing. Like a trophy hunter, who will let a lion go on killing villagers rather than see another man slay it. Did he not seem so to you?’

  ‘He did indeed.’ Lydia gave the princess a quick kiss on the cheek. ‘But please don’t tell him I said so. We may need him.’ She put on her glasses, and slipped out into the night.

  Don Simon fell into step with her, halfway down the promenade. He murmured, ‘Dios,’ when Lydia described Madame Izora’s vision, and waited while Lydia slipped into her stateroom and fetched the long, drab garment that she thought of as her ‘vampire hunting coat’ and a woolen cap, for the night was now bitterly cold. She also snatched up her satchel, which Don Simon regarded with raised brows when she emerged onto the promenade again. Can he sense the silver, the garlic, the Christmas rose inside? She had removed the necklace and wrist-chains of silver that she habitually wore after dark – Cochran would almost certainly have noted them – but carried them, too, in the bag.

  But he only said, ‘What think you, Mistress?’ as he guided her to one of the many narrow gangways that led down to the bowels of the ship.

  ‘Do you mean, do I believe a child really was killed tonight?’ She shivered as she said it. Someone’s child. Someone’s little boy …

  He shook his head. ‘I am certain that one was. What think you of this vampire?’

  ‘She said,’ recalled Lydia quietly, ‘there are two. I thought she meant you were one of them, but … What you said about there being more than one. You’ve often told me that the Undead can go many days, sometimes weeks, between kills—’

  ‘Heaven knows,’ agreed the vampire quietly, ‘there are places enough on this ship for a dozen to hide.’

  Lydia wondered if the princess might be prevailed upon to volunteer her dogs.

  ‘If it were someone who has been on the Front,’ she said. ‘Who has been killing – as I know most of you have been – two and three times a night … Does it become habit-forming, like a drug? Having … having gotten used to that level of feeding …?’ (I can’t believe I’m talking of this, of the murders of three people, two of them children, so calmly … Though I can’t imagine that me having hysterics would help matters.)

  ‘There could be that, also.’ Don Simon paused at the foot of the stair, where it opened into the corridor communicating with the lesser First Class suites, and consulted the map of the ship which he’d taken from his pocket. He wore, over his rather frayed evening clothes, the officer’s coat that was part of his persona as ‘Colonel Simon’ at the Front. It was the first time Lydia had seen him less than completely assured of where he was going. But after a moment’s study, he led the way a few yards down the corridor to another gangway, this one leading straight down what looked like a shaft of sixty or seventy feet. Even with electric bulbs burning, in the silence there was an eerie horribleness to it, like a place visited in a dream.

  ‘They are people of no account, these victims,’ he said. ‘A woman with no family of her own; a gypsy’s child. Even as I, for many years, killed only Protestants, knowing their souls to be damned in any case.’ He looked around him. The corridor was silent, save for the distant heartbeat of the ship’s engines. John Palfrey, Lydia knew, had a room halfway along this corridor; she shivered at the thought of encountering him. Madame Izora’s suite lay only a few doors from where they stood. ‘It may be their only sin was that they were weak, and poor.’

  Lydia wondered if the stylish Mr and Mrs Allen, or the overbearing Mr Bowdoin of Massachusetts – another casual Promenade acquaintance – or his gentle little wife, who’d admired Miranda’s prettiness yesterday – did they sleep the sleep of the just and wealthy? Were they secure in the knowledge that, as Aunt Louise said, this maniac that’s prowling the ship isn’t going to come up to First Class!

  The reflection made her deeply grateful, and profoundly ashamed.

  ‘Does it become habit forming?’ she repeated, as they descended again.

  ‘I know not, Mistress. In the days of Napoleon’s wars in Spain, I was in London, or in Paris for a little time. As at the Front today, those who hunted the night upon the peninsula killed with absolute impunity, and the Peace of Paris did not bring peace to Spain. ’Tis difficult to know whether the Undead who had followed the battles left off indiscriminate killing, in the years when the liberals and the Carlists fought one another all over the countryside. The vampires of England – of all Europe – visited the place. Myself, I think not. One heard rumors …’

  She remembered the last glimpse of the green coast of England, as it vanished into the silvery haze. ‘Have you never been back to Spain, then?’

  She had traveled a good deal in the past nine years – to Constantinople, to Russia, to China. But on every journey, on every day that she’d watched the desert on the banks of the Suez Canal or marveled at the low-built grubby labyrinths of the Peking streets, there had been in her mind, in the very marrow of her bones, the green quiet of England. The smell of rain in her garden on Holywell Street. The knowledge that she had only to get onto a train, to return to Willoughby Close where she had been born.

  He said, in that soft uninflected voice, ‘Never. And the vampires of Spain – if any survived those years of war – do not cross the Pyrenees. Perhaps for that reason.’

  He was silent for a time, and around them – save for the throb of the engines, and the muted clank of their footfalls on the metal stair – the City of Gold was quiet, too. ‘Yet there were some in France, and in the German lands, in the wake of the Wars of Religion, who did indeed go mad in those years of horror. They became so used to killing when and how they pleased that they did not or could not leave it off. There were at least two such in Paris, and Constantine – the Master of Paris – spoke of them to me. One, he said, called such attention to herself with the number and indiscretion of her kills that the men of the St-Antoine quarter banded together to hunt her systematically, under the command of a cattle drover.’

  In the open doorway at the stair’s foot they stopped again, the shadowy space before them throbbing louder, smelling of coal and oil and steam. Metal walls crossed between boiler rooms. Steam pipes hissed softly in the darkness overhead.

  ‘They killed three people, I was told, ere they located the vampire. One man they burned for a sorcerer, and a woman they drowned because her husband and children had all died of the smallpox that had left her unscarred. They killed also a moneylender – though not, I think, because anyone actually thought him Undead. Constantine commanded this woman to leave Paris, for the hunters were coming too close to others of the Paris nest. He said she did so, but killed with such frequency in the countryside that she was obliged to return to the city, and so was found at last and dragged from her coffin, to burn like a torch in the light of d
ay.’

  ‘Because she could not stop killing?’

  ‘That also I know not. She did not stop, when ’twas clear to her that her life was at stake for it. Not long after that another came into Paris from the battlefields of Germany, where he had followed in the wake of the Protestant armies and slew three and four victims a night among the villages and in the woods, and none noticed nor cared. This man also Constantine warned, and, Constantine told me, the man begged him, weeping, for mercy, saying that he could not help what he had become. A sort of frenzy seized him, he said, and he could not go a night – nay, not half a night – without the ecstasy of a kill. The vampires of Paris themselves killed this man, lest there be another hunt. Yet others, Constantine said, had also followed the armies through Thuringia and Bohemia, and had suffered no such madness.’

  ‘A sort of frenzy,’ echoed Lydia softly, and followed Don Simon into the shuddering gloom. ‘I suppose,’ she added, almost shouting as they neared the huge turbine room, ‘that if a vampire traveled to the United States, he – or she – could find places where he could kill like that. From what Mr Cochran has told me, there are strikes and lockouts in factories and mines all over the country. People being killed every day. Heaven knows, in the South, if one moved about enough, one could feed off the poor Negro children every night and no white sheriff would turn a hair.’

  ‘The difficulty being,’ said Don Simon, ‘moving about. What you describe is in essence what Cochran has offered me.’ The vampire paused before the metal doors of a coal bunker, spread his long fingers and held his palm an inch from the door, yellow eyes half-shut. Then he moved along to the next. Lydia saw the fine-cut nostrils flare, and knew that though Don Simon did not breathe, his sense of smell was acute.