Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  Can he smell the child’s blood?

  ‘If the vampire is killing down here,’ she ventured, ‘why not leave the corpse hidden in one of the bunkers? One from which the coal has already been taken? It wouldn’t be found, probably, until we reached New York. Or why not throw it overboard? Although I suppose since it’s four decks up to the outside air …’

  Somewhere in the maze of metal-walled corridors large and small, Lydia heard light footfalls running, and a girl’s voice called out, ‘Kemal? Kemal, where are you? Can you hear me?’ The sound was swiftly lost in the noise of the engines, but as they moved on other sounds whispered to them, other voices. Women’s voices, mostly, though Lydia thought she heard the man Vodusek shouting. Then, like a flurry of bird-cries, from another direction, those of children again: ‘Kemal? Kemal?’

  Don Simon said softly, ‘Even so.’

  Together they hunted through the lower holds until shortly before daylight. Don Simon would sometimes pass his hands across the doors of the coal bunkers, or along the walls of the vast, dark, crowded baggage holds, but frustration and discontent flickered in his eyes, and Lydia recalled what he had said about the effects of the living magnetism of the sea. Other times he would stop, as if listening, or his nostrils would widen, like a dog’s trying to scent the elusive trace of prey. But the lower holds of the City of Gold held in them all the clammy dankness of air that has been years away from sunlight or wind. Does he smell all those years? wondered Lydia. The exhalations of thousands of crewmen, the sweat of their pores mixed with the stink of the bilges, the dry foetor of coal and the oily reek of the steam?

  How could you tease out even the coppery trace of blood from all of that?

  We are as other men, he had said, saving – Lydia guessed – that he had the hyper-acute perceptions of the Undead state. In the lightless cavern of the deepest baggage hold he had moved about, his hands on her waist and on one of her hands, as if they were ice-skating, picking his way unerringly among trunks and crates and (Lydia presumed – such was the darkness that she was literally and absolutely blind) mail sacks. Only once or twice did her shoulder brush the edge of something, or her foot briefly touch a corner, to tell her that this hold contained the same jumble of objects she’d already encountered by Georg Heller’s lantern-light in the First Class Baggage Store on the deck above. Twice, moving silently among the cacophony of metal walls that enclosed the engines and boilers, the vampire stopped, and drew her aside into the darkness, half a minute before her own less powerful hearing detected the footfalls of a crewman.

  Once she heard a man – in a party of clattering feet – grumble, ‘Mohammedan brat … all a prank …’ and deduced that the missing boy was one of the little group of Bosniak Muslims, shunned by Catholics and Orthodox alike.

  He had her wait in the darkness in the very stern, while he slipped down a final ladder into the deepest belly of the ship, the bilges beneath the orlop where, Lydia knew, the rats bred in the blackness and the great black beetles and roaches hid – creatures she’d already glimpsed among the engines, bunkers, and lockers of the orlop deck. In the few minutes that he was gone she shuddered at the nearness of the abyss – we must be thirty feet beneath the surface already! – and of its black depths falling away below her. Though neither fanciful nor timid, Lydia found herself wondering how thick the hull plates were: just under two inches, she read later, but layered and re-enforced so that the actual hull was nearly two feet. Even that information didn’t remove the terrible sensation that she had, of being inside a bubble, deep and inescapably far down in the world of airless, deadly water, a curtain’s breadth from death. If something happens I can never get out …

  Nothing’s going to happen, she told herself firmly. And you’ve had casualty clearing stations shelled over your head and you came through that just fine. And anyway the City of Gold has been crossing back and forth for six years without mishap.

  Movement in the corridor. Close to the floor, the pin-light flicker of reflective eyes. Lydia was able to tell herself, I’ve seen bigger rats at the Front, but she was still revolted. Even the trenches hadn’t served to eradicate her horror of the vermin.

  Don Simon emerged from the ladder, and stood for a moment, leaning one hand against the wall. In the dim light he looked ghastly, half stooped-over, his face set against a wave of agony.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Lydia, shocked, and the vampire shook his head.

  ‘Serum,’ he whispered. ‘Poison. Takes hold … thus …’

  He was shaking all over, unable even to draw away from her, when she put her hand on his arm. He managed to say, ‘Cold …’ and then set his jaw hard, until the trembling ceased.

  ‘’Twill come on worse,’ he said after a time. ‘Best we return to the regions above, Lady. First light will stain the sky in less than two hours. They inject me with antidote once I sleep, with daylight – I think they fear I will somehow learn where they keep it, rather than fearing me. They know that unless I have that physic, I will quickly be rendered helpless. They have but to stand back, and watch me scream. For as long as they find it amusing.’ So bitter was his voice that she guessed this was precisely what Cochran, and the smooth-mannered Dr Barvell, had done, at least once, to convince him of the poison’s efficacy.

  She felt her ears get hot with rage.

  ‘Curious,’ he went on, as he took her hand and guided her toward one of the inconspicuous gangways, ‘that we have found nothing so far. Not coffins, or travel trunks, or places secured as hideouts. Myself, I should not care to travel so.’ He looked around him at the great greasy cylinders of the steam pipes overhead, the huge steel turbines and gears. ‘One could never get the coal smell out of one’s clothing. Yet did I so, I should at least take pains to make for myself a sleeping place secured alike from rats and from chance discovery by stokers and mechanics going about in pursuit of their duties.’

  ‘Not to mention,’ commented Lydia, ‘thieves looking for places to cache their goods.’ Their search had revealed half a dozen bottles of the American Line’s best liquor, cigars, and tins of caviar and foie gras, tucked in corners of lockers and storerooms. Lydia wondered if these were all Vodusek’s gleanings, or if there were several petty thieves at work.

  ‘I have seen a dozen likely places, on which no mortal eyes have looked I daresay since these walls were riveted in place.’ He frowned, following her up the metal steps to the quieter regions above. ‘Yet I see nothing that would offer protection from rats, during the hours when we sleep perforce, and cannot wake.’

  ‘I suppose one could travel First Class – the cabins in Second are all shared – and hunt in Third.’

  ‘Too many servants in First.’ His slight gesture dismissed the whole of non-Promenade First. ‘If there is one thing I have learned in three-hundred-and-sixty years of being dead, Lady, ’tis to beware of servants. Bribe them as you will, threaten them as you might, yet they will talk, and for us, a whisper can mean death. Here upon the ocean, I have not the whole of a night in which to mold their dreams. Only for those few minutes before and after the hour of midnight can I whisper to them the impression that they saw me walking on the Promenade Deck in the full of the day. Can I make them think they did not truly see what they saw. Some might attempt it.’ He shrugged. ‘I would not.’

  ‘It’s true,’ agreed Lydia slowly, ‘that Ellen, or Tania – the Princess Gromyko’s maid – the one who hasn’t been laid up from the start of the voyage with sea-sickness – would have heard, had one of the First Class passengers been locking his cabin during the daytimes. I understand that it’s general knowledge in the servants’ dining hall that Mr Cochran locks up one room of his suite.’

  ‘Did I travel upon the ocean –’ Don Simon stepped past her at the top of the flight, to open the door that led onto F Deck – ‘for no consideration would I hunt, nor yet permit others to hunt for me. Six days is—’

  ‘Vampír!’ shrieked a voice in the corridor. ‘Vrkolak!’

  Don Si
mon moved back immediately into the shelter of the doorway, but Lydia, stepping forward, saw in the hallway no one near them, only a scrimmage of men and women with their backs to them. Others were emerging from the cabins that lined the corridor, women with their long hair plaited down the backs of patched and shabby nightgowns, men in undershirts and pants with braces dangling.

  ‘They’ve found him,’ breathed Lydia.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘Go.’ She caught Don Simon’s hand. ‘I’ll see what’s happening.’

  Without a word he touched her fingers to his lips, and was gone, even on the metal stair his swift ascent soundless. Lydia shivered at the thought of his being taken by another convulsion, being trapped, unable to flee, by those who would see him as he was.

  But even as the thoughts went through her mind she was running along the corridor, hearing before her the jumble of shouting. Meaningless words, mostly, but charged with the hysterical venom of hatred. Now and then a Belgian or a German would shout to some compatriot words that Lydia understood.

  ‘Bosniak boy—’

  ‘Deck well—’

  ‘Mohammedan—’

  ‘Bled dry—’

  ‘Blood on her dress—’

  ‘Whore—’

  And a woman screaming.

  Lydia dashed along the corridor as hard as she could pelt, following the mob and joined on all sides by hard-faced, old farmers, half-crippled soldiers, carrying hammers and wrenches from toolkits, knives and screwdrivers which they held like stilettos – a couple of genuine stilettos as well, and a couple of guns. The women who surged among them bore ropes, or clutched the crucifixes that dangled from their necks.

  The mob bunched up suddenly, jammed tight in the narrow space in front of the doors of the Third Class dining saloon. Lydia could hear a man shouting in German and then in French, and recognized Heller’s voice. Others yelled to drown him out, ‘Vrkolak. Upír. Vampire.’

  Lydia pushed and wriggled through the press, slithering along the wall until she reached the front. A woman crouched in a corner of the hallway near the doors of the Third Class dining room. Heller stood in front of her, a huge pipe wrench in his hand, facing outward to the mob. One of the older men – a farmer with muscles like an ox – had fallen back before him with blood streaming down his face and another sat slumped against the wall holding his head, ghastly pale and sweating.

  Oh, dear, I hope his skull isn’t fractured …

  Heller shouted at the crowd, ‘Who is this woman? What language does she speak?’

  ‘She’s a whore!’ yelled a woman in German, and someone else howled something that ended in ‘vampira’.

  The woman crumpled to the floor, hiding her face in her long black hair. Her nightgown had been torn nearly off her – it was close to two in the morning. Lydia could see scratches and bruises on her arms, and blood on the front of the tattered linen garment.

  Father Kirn pushed his way to the front, demanded something sternly of the woman in what Lydia thought might be Czech, then in halting Greek.

  One of the Slovene women yelled in bad German, ‘She kill little boy! Drink blood, leave body in stairs place—’

  ‘Nikogda,’ sobbed the woman. ‘Ya nikogda—’

  ‘She is a whore who sleeps with good men and makes them bad!’ another woman yelled. ‘And now she murders this little boy!’

  Heller knelt beside the woman, turned her face to him and looked at her for a moment, then stood again. ‘You’re idiots,’ he said to the crowd. ‘You say she’s a vampire, no? I have seen her walking about the deck well in the daylight.’

  There was a pause, and an angry ripple of translation. Then Vodusek said, his voice pitched to carry, ‘Everybody knows vampire can walk about in daytime. Just they have no power in sunlight, being children of Satan. There was man in my village, in Malareka, that was vampire. Everybody see him walk about by daylight. Then in night, he turn himself into wolf, into bat. Slavik here saw him do this—’

  ‘With my own eyes, myself!’ One of Vodusek’s friends stepped forward, pockmarked and limping a little on a wooden leg, but muscled with a lifetime of farm work.

  Heller turned to Father Kirn. ‘They found the child, then? The boy who was missing?’

  The old priest nodded, and his lined face was harsh. ‘Kemal Adamic. He was in the deck well—’

  ‘Where everybody had been running about since the boy was found gone?’ demanded Heller.

  ‘She stand by his body—’

  ‘That blood on her hand—’

  ‘She is a whore,’ repeated the German woman. ‘A witch, Satan’s servant—’

  ‘Somebody,’ shouted Heller over the din. ‘Someone Russian. You say she’s a vampire, eh? Can a vampire speak the scripture? You …’

  A golden-haired boy had emerged from the crowd. Twelve or thirteen, thought Lydia. Just too young to be conscripted. In German he said, ‘I Russian.’

  ‘You want to see justice done?’ Heller laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder, looked gravely down into his eyes.

  ‘Da, Gospodin.’

  ‘Good. Good man. You ask her, speak Lord’s Prayer. Can vampire do that?’ This last he addressed to the mob, his pale blue eyes singling out first Vodusek, then the German woman. Then he turned to the priest. ‘Can vampire do that? Say prayer?’

  Somebody in the mob shouted, ‘What you know about prayer, you Communist?’ Heller ignored her.

  ‘No,’ said Father Kirn. ‘Walk about in daylight – so I have sometimes heard. But never can the Devil speak the words of Our Lord.’

  ‘You tell me.’ Heller looked back at the Russian boy. ‘Tell me true, does she speak the words of the prayer.’

  The boy knelt beside the woman, asked her something in her own tongue. After a moment, the woman stammered, so faintly that she could barely be heard, ‘Otche nash, suschiy nah nebesakh …’

  When she had finished, the boy stood up, nodded, and said, ‘She say it all, every word.’ He glanced from Heller to the mob, and looked scared – understandably, Lydia thought. They were ready to turn on anyone who kept them from ending what they saw as the cause of their fear.

  Father Kirn took the Russian woman’s hand, helped her to her feet. The mob growled, and shifted about, reminding Lydia of the horses penned for transport to the Front. Terrified of new sounds, new smells, of a threat they couldn’t define. The man sitting beside the wall had slipped over and lay on the floor, breathing stertorously. No one gave him a glance. From around his own neck the priest removed his crucifix, and holding up the woman’s hand, pressed the silver cross first against her palm, then against her forehead.

  ‘That’s Eastern Church!’ yelled someone within the mob. ‘Eastern heretics, like her! Not real Christian!’

  And a woman shrilled furiously, ‘And she’s still a whore!’

  ‘Oh, put a sock in it, Gertrude!’ retorted Heller. ‘Whose fault is it if your husband wants to stay out of your bed? It’s no reason to kill someone.’

  The man Vodusek stepped forward, heavy eyebrows bristling, and looked from Father Kirn to the dark-haired woman. Then he turned back to the crowd. He called out something in his booming voice, spreading his arms as if making a speech, making a point. He held up the woman’s hand, to show it unmarked by the touch of the Cross. Lydia heard him say something and recognized the word vrkolak. Then he said it again, declaiming, his single dark eye blazing with anger. Heller stepped forward and grabbed him by the arm with an impatient word, and Vodusek shook him off.

  The mob began to disperse. The pockmarked Slavik said to someone beside him, ‘Well, the brat’s only a heathen.’ Father Kirn led the woman away, murmuring something to her. Probably, reflected Lydia, Go thou and sin no more. Somewhere, far off in the corridors, she could hear a woman wailing, ‘Kemal! Kemal!’

  She went to kneel beside the injured man, but Vodusek and Slavik thrust Lydia aside and gathered the man up, and helped him away.

  Lydia stood up again, in her battered overco
at and the green silk dinner frock she’d worn to Madame Izora’s séance, her red hair coming undone from its pins and trailing down over her shoulders. She felt suddenly exhausted, and wanted only to go into some dark corner and not see or speak to anyone and particularly not Aunt Louise. She wanted the voyage to be done.

  She wanted Jamie.

  ‘He should see a doctor,’ she said, as Heller came to her, his wrench still in his hand. Like the other men, he was clothed only in his undershirt and in trousers hastily donned, the braces dangling about his thighs. His feet were bare. She saw two scars where bullets had torn into his collarbone and shoulder, not more than a few years ago. There was a much older knife-scar on his chest.

  ‘They’ll make up some muck of duck-shit and herbs,’ he said. ‘They don’t trust doctors. They – Slavik and those others – don’t trust anyone that’s not from Malareka. Don’t trust Catholics, don’t trust Jews. They are villagers, ignorant – frightened. Don’t even trust those from the next village. It isn’t their fault but it’s maddening to deal with. They’ve got one of them who was a doctor back in Malareka; there’s about six of them, all from the same village. Vodusek and Slavik served together on the Eastern Front.’

  He shook his head. ‘Did you come down here hunting for the little Bosniak boy, Madame? That was good of you. It is a maniac, a madman, that we deal with here, but sometimes I wonder if that gang from Malareka aren’t just as mad. Why make it into a monster? People are frightened enough, waiting every day to be torpedoed, not knowing if each hour – each minute – is going to be your last.’

  ‘What did he say, there at the end?’ asked Lydia. ‘Oh, drat, here come the stewards …’

  The clatter of feet echoed in the corridor, men’s voices asking in hesitant Italian what was going on. Heller padded swiftly to the one open door left on the hallway – his own cabin, Lydia guessed. Someone called out a question to him in German from within, and she had a vague impression of movement, and of the smell of male sweat. He called out over his shoulder, ‘Bulles on the way. You heard nothing, saw nothing.’ Then he dropped the wrench inconspicuously around behind the door jamb and said to Lydia, ‘You must go … Vodusek said, There is a servant of Satan on this ship, and we shall find him. Heaven help the man they pick on, when they do. Because they are ready to kill.’