The Seeker

by Martyn Taylor

  He followed her inside the house, or rather, into her library. Every wall he saw in every room was lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and every shelf was crammed to its full capacity. The corridor leading the length of the house had shelves on both sides and could only be navigated by turning sideways, and hardly even then by the professor.

  “In case you are wondering, I have read them all,” she called back to him.

  “Actually, I was wondering whether you had had your floors reinforced, the weight, you know.”

  She laughed. “Yes, I have.”

  He filed that away in the ‘possibly interesting but probably useless’ file.

  She ushered him to a seat in a parlour at the back of the house with French windows leading through to a thoroughly unkempt garden. The room was furnished with two battered leather armchairs that looked as though they might be older than he was. Behind one stood a reading lamp that might have been borrowed from the local stadium’s floodlighting system. Beside it as an inclined reading table that could be swung around in front of whoever sat there, although he did not imagine anyone other than the professor used that chair. She took her reading comfort very seriously.

  He sat in the other chair, sinking down so low his knees were practically level with his ears, wondering how he would ever get out of it, while the professor stumped back into the house, returning eventually with a curved bamboo handled Chinese tea pot and a pair of china cups so fine they were practically transparent.

  There was no milk or sugar on the tray, or biscuits. The tea, when she poured it, was the colour of weak urine but had the aroma of unidentifiable exotic flowers. Its taste was light and pleasant, as long as he did not look at it.

  “Well now, Mr Call, what matter of importance is it that has finally brought you to my door to disturb my peace and tranquillity? I have been waiting for you ever since you assumed your father’s duties.”

  Call blinked, rapidly. “You knew my father, what he did?”

  She smiled, obviously remembering, blew on her tea and sipped at it. “I did indeed know your father, very well, although not biblically I hasten to add. I do not believe I was his type and he definitely had the wrong number of chromosomes to be my type.”

  Like most people, he had never considered his parents as sexual creatures in their own right, even though he was the evidence they were, or had been at least once. The concept was vaguely disquieting.

  “I presume you are here because some of our blood-drinking friends have come to your attention without conforming to the customary loud, obvious and stupidly overconfident template and you need some more esoteric information before you hunt them to extinction.”

  He shook his head. “I know exactly where these vampires are, and they won’t be going extinct at my hands, I can assure you.” The professor’s eyebrows rose. “My concern is with who they are.”

  She leaned forward, suddenly energised and interested. Her eyes glittered. “Do these vampires have any names?”

  “I believe their birth names were Mercer, Richard and Elizabeth Mercer. They were born…”

  She waved her hand to silence him. The colour in her face had drained out of it and she sat for a while, thoughtful, as Call grew more impatient by the second. Then she took a sip of tea, only to look quizzically at the cup and shook her head. Eventually, she levered herself to her feet and stumped over to the mantelpiece, where she withdrew a large, old book and reached into the space to bring out an unopened litre bottle of supermarket vodka. She filled her tea cup with the spirit and then tossed it down her throat in a single swallow. She held the bottle out to him.

  “Fancy a snifter?”

  He shook his head. “Not at this time of day, thank you.”

  She grinned and shook her head, then filled her cup again. “Oh well, as the blessed Jimmy Buffet might say, its five o’clock somewhere.” She emptied her cup and stood for a moment, shivering, before replacing it on the tray and taking down a large, brass padlocked book from the shelves that resembled nothing less than a Victorian family bible and set it down on the reading stand. After sitting down, she drew the stand in front of her, unlocked the book and carefully leafed through the pages. While Call could not read anything on the pages he saw enough to tell him the pages were illuminated like a medieval gospel and were handwritten. Eventually she found the entries she wanted.

  “Ah yes, the Mercer twins, or as they came to be known, as De Merlay twins.” She ran her finger just above the lines of writing as Call grew steadily more uncomfortable. “They cannot be the vampires you know now. They vanished in Elizabeth’s time after a brief period of wild activity that earned them the most intense notoriety. It is my understanding that they died centuries ago.”

  He sipped at his tea. “You may have been misinformed.”

  She quickly crossed herself and muttered something indistinct that he took to be a prayer. He had never known prayer to be any help against a vampire, but what business was it of his if it helped someone else cope? “What makes you say that?”

  “I have actually met a vampire who appears to be several hundred years old, calling herself Roxane. She tells me her brother calls himself Cyrano and that their family name is Mercer. She appears to have a personal knowledge of the Elizabethan court.”

  The professor shook her head. “You will pardon me for doubting you, Mr Call. From what I know of the De Merlay twins if you have survived meeting one of then then you are a remarkably fortunate man, the more so if she knew you are the Seeker.”

  “Nasty pieces of work, then.”

  “The worst, Mr Call, the worst. Even by vampire standards they were wanton, rapacious, ruthless killers without a shred of compunction or compassion for their victims. They would – they did – take babies from their mothers’ breast, drink the child in front of them, and then drink the mother too. Absolutely nothing and no-one was safe from them when the mood was on them. They could not even spell ‘discretion’, much less exercise it. They knew no boundaries. There were even tales that one or both of them tasted the Queen herself.”

  He remembered Roxane’s veiled suggestions that both of them had bedded Elizabeth at one time or another. Would they have drunk her blood at the same time? In terms of vampiric counting coups that had to be as flamboyant as it could get, short of turning the Pope himself. He believed that he would not put it past them.

  “They made such a thorough nuisance of themselves, an exhibition of themselves, quickly exhausted any good will they had built up at court while they were still alive that they could no longer hide away. The pressure on them was unbearable, and whichever genius had turned them without giving them any rules to live by just left them to it.”

  “That would have been Paul the Roman.”

  She gazed at him, eyes wide. “Paulus Antonius Drusus, he turned them?”

  “That’s what Roxane told me. Special, was he?”

  She flicked backwards through the pages of her ledger until she came to the very first entry. “To the best of my knowledge, Paul the Roman is the oldest vampire still alive. If he turned them that would explain their behaviour. If it was him, his blood would be so potent it is a wonder they survived and no wonder at all they should behave as they did.”

  “Where can I find him, this Paulus Antoninus Drusus?”

  She shook her head vigorously. “Believe me, Mr Call, you do not want to find that man.”

  It was his turn to shake his head. “’Want’ is possibly the wrong word. ‘Need’ would be better.”

  “There is no living creature on this earth that needs to meet that thing.”

  Call shrugged. “I know someone who would disagree with you about that.”

  The professor snorted. “And exactly who might that be?”

  He did not reply for a long while. Eventually the professor clapped her hands together and shook her head. “Dear Lord, it is her, isn’t it, Elizabeth de Merlay, or whatever it is she calls herself these days. Roxane, is it?” She laughed, a
short, bitter, mirthless sound. “And you are in love with her, aren’t you, you poor, deluded man.”

  “Was,” he said. “Was in love with her. Not anymore.” He hesitated, looking into places within he had tried to avoid most of his life. Perhaps I still am, could be… but she’s decided she wants to die because she cannot bear the loneliness how her brother is gone.”

  “Gone? I didn’t know that. When? How? Who?”

  Call told the tale of the last hours of The Russia House. “And now Paul the Roman is the only vampire strong enough to end her life.”

  “So, she has sent you to find him. Why?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t. I just felt I owed her that much.”

  “He will kill you. You know that.”

  “Every time I leave the house there is a good chance someone is going to kill me, or at least try. As you can see, nobody has yet succeeded, so I still leave the house. I refuse to allow that prospect to deter me. I will not give anyone the satisfaction of taking a step back. I am a Seeker. I did not ask to be one, but a Seeker I am, and death comes with the territory. Now, are you going to help me or not?”

  He could almost hear her brain whirring, weighing up her answers as she stared at him, studied him. “The best help I could give you would be to lock you up until you’ve got rid of this insanity.”

  He shook his head. “Not an option, professor.”

  She took a deep breath, held it for a while, and then began to talk. “I have no current, verifiable evidence that Paulus Antoninus Drusus is even still alive, even less as to his whereabouts if he is still alive. You know what they are like…”

  The retort that ‘they’ were just like everyone else, individuals, each one discretely differing from the next, almost made it past his lips but he managed to bite down on it. After all, there was nothing to be gained from antagonising the professor, of whom he was asking a favour. Then there were the uncomfortable facts that, unlike everyone else, vampires drank blood and could cheat death for millennia. “Anything you’ve got, I shall take it and be grateful.”

  She hesitated a little longer, then pushed her reading table away, levered herself very slowly to her feet and then picked up a lap top computer from the sideboard. Sitting down again so heavily Call feared for the armchair, she opened up the computer and hit the ‘Enter’ key to restore it to life.

  “I try to maintain an up to date database for exceptionals, Mr Call, but I do not have anything like an exact address for Paul the Roman. What I believe is that he gave up travelling quite some time ago. The last I heard was he was living in the Old Town, in Edinburgh, near the castle, using the name ‘Breck’.”

  Call spluttered trying to keep in his laughter. “It has to be ‘Alan Breck’, doesn’t it? A vampire with a sense of humour.” Well, there had to be a first time for everything, he supposed.

  “The Roman is the polar opposite of amusing, Mr Call. I will advise you once again to give him the widest of berths you possibly can, unless you want to have your daughter take your place at her tender age.”

  Anger surged through him, so hot that, had he been armed, there was a danger he would have killed her where she sat. “How do you know about her?”

  She glared at him until he felt his head of steam decline. “I did not know about her, until you told me. I made an informed guess. And if you cannot disguise your feelings any better than that, Mr Call, I can only repeat my advice about avoiding the Roman at all costs.”

  “The Old Town it is, in Edinburgh.” He got to his feet, levering himself up with some effort using both arms in the chair. “Edinburgh at festival time, just where any sane person doesn’t want to be. Thank you, Professor. If he’s there, I’ll find him.”

  Doubt remained written all over her face.

  “There’s not a vampire born who can hide from me if I really want to find them,” he lied to her, with a confident smile and a casual wave of farewell. “Don’t get up, I’ll see myself out.”

  “You’re a fool, Robert Call, and you’ll be a dead fool soon.”

  He didn’t reply to that because it was probably too true for comfort.

  Call knocked on the door and waited, then knocked again and waited some more. He was just about to knock again when the door opened and the largest woman he had ever seen stood there, filling the doorway, leaning heavily on two black walking sticks.

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Call mistrusted general celebrations as a rule, and Edinburgh en fete for the festivals was particularly untrustworthy, that grim, Calvinist Scottish city devoted to business pretending it was Rio to palm the tourist pound, as false as a paper umbrella on a toothpick put in a glass of watered-down blended Scotch.

  Which did not prevent those who had poured themselves into the city for the uncomfortable performances and impenetrable exhibitions enjoying themselves with the adamantine determination of people who had paid a lot of money to have fun and – by God – fun they would have, or someone would know all about it.

  The city had been uncomfortably crowded when he got off the first train from London in Waverley, struggled to find a city A-Z and then walked to the Old Town, taking in the architecture that had come down from the time when Edinburgh was one of Europe’s richest cities and whose city Fathers still seemed to do their best to keep carbuncles from being built by profit obsessed developers. He imagined some of those steep streets and wynds and closes had not changed very much since Dr Jekyll had his practice there.

  He quickly found his way to the sandstone tenement with the name ‘Breck’ printed in thick black capitals between a letter box and a bell push. It had been a surprise to find the address so easily with a computer search. Who would have guessed that an ancient vampire would want his name on the Electoral Register? He felt no chill as he pushed the note inviting the vampire to meet with him through the letter box.

  Did that mean the Roman was aware of his presence and was hiding himself, or was he just elsewhere? Unable to answer those questions, he turned and walked away briskly, before finding a coffee shop on Market Street and indulging himself with a cup of coffee and slice of possibly the best Dundee cake he had ever tasted. After a while he got up and walked to where he had suggested to the vampire that they meet.

  He sat on a bench in the Princes Street Gardens, watching the passing parade, the buses and the trams on the Mile, the granite shining in the bright sunshine on the Scott Memorial. The gardens were packed with all manner of people enjoying themselves in all sorts of ways – from pale, bare chested youths kicking a football around in between necking mouthfuls of Superlager or cheap wine – to not quite as young as they wished couples pushing buggies and dreaming of being empty nesters with enough money to buy tickets to a show, any show, to couples of all ages and sexes who wished they were alone together in a room, any room.

  Then there were the dog walkers with animals ranging from a sandwich sized hairy Chihuahua to an Irish wolfhound they could have saddled and ridden rather than walked. The thick afternoon sun and the heavy perfume of the blossoms would have sent Call to sleep had he not ground his teeth together and used all the mental agility techniques he had learned to maintain his alertness.

  The first indication he had that the Roman might have accepted his invitation was a sensation of almost glacial coldness on his exposed skin, the reaction he always felt when approaching a vampire multiplied a hundred fold.

  In a moment he was shivering uncontrollably, his teeth chattering, and he had to exert all his will power to keep from toppling off the bench and lying on the pathway, knees pulled up to his chest, arms wrapped around them, gibbering incoherently. So far as he could see, nobody else appeared to notice any change in temperature, and he sat where he was, surveying the gardens through his dark glasses.

  He saw a short, thick-set man wearing an old fashioned three piece lovat tweed suit and a crisp, cream Panama hat strolling towards him with a dog at his heel that could have doubled for Greyfriars Bobby if required. The
man did not glance in his direction, but halted beside his bench, took a long look around himself and then sat down, carefully hitching up his trousers as he did so, crossing his right leg over his left.

  The dog sat beside him, the picture of canine obedience. The man took a biscuit from his jacket pocket and gave it to the dog, looped the lead around the silver topped ebony cane he carried and then sat bolt upright with his hands outstretched on the top of the cane. When he turned his head Call saw he wore the darkest, most impenetrable glasses he had ever seen.

  “I believe you want to speak to me, Mr Call.” His voice was measured and low, sounding the way Call imagined pebbles did as they ground together in a fast running Highland stream. All sorts of questions bubbled up spontaneously inside him, never to be asked.

  “If you are Paulus Antoninus Drusus then I am indeed searching for you.”

  The man pursed his lips and blew through them, whistling silently, it seemed. The dog cowered down and covered his eyes with his paws. “It has been so long since anyone called me by that name I had almost forgotten it was ever attached to me.”

  “What should I call you, then?”

  “Other than ‘Monster’, ‘Damned’, ‘Vampire’ you mean?”

  Call chuckled. “I’ve found that bandying about words like that in public tends to attract the sort of attention I really could do without.”

  The vampire snorted, a sound that could have come from a horse. Nobody paid them any attention. “’Bandying about’ indeed. I see you are a man with a sense of humour, Mr Call. I like a man with a sense of humour. In my considerable experience, when you get right down to essences, the ability to laugh at ourselves is what distinguishes us from the lower animals.”

  Call shrugged. What was this ‘us’ of which he spoke? There was a school of thought, to which he subscribed, that ranked this thing before him alongside those lower animals, perhaps even lower seeing as he had had a choice about becoming an animal, once.