After Hours: Tales From Ur-Bar
Page 14
Still I hesitated. Waited. Hoping that Tom or one of the other hunters would find me. In the end it had been too late. Madame had found her prey, a young flower seller, clutching her empty basket in one hand as she made her way homeward.
Madame had struck swiftly, grasping the girl and dragging her into an alleyway, the better to feed undisturbed. She hadn’t heard me approach, but my knife in her back had been warning enough. It had taken three blows to kill her, a bloody butchery that succeeded only because of her arrogance. If she’d been a fraction more cautious, I would have become just one more in the long line of victims.
Any triumph I might have felt had faded when the wounded girl crawled out from beneath Madame’s corpse. Her eyes were wide with fear and why not? To her I was a crazed murderer.
My arm was in motion even before I could think. The bloody spray from her severed throat splashed across the alley as she sagged down onto the dirt. The horror of what I had done should have overwhelmed me, but instead I was strangely calm, as if this were a tale that was happening to someone else.
I knelt beside the girl, waiting for the moment when she died. Then I checked Madame, ensuring that no breath of life remained within that treacherous bosom.
“I am sorry,” I told the girl’s corpse. “But there is no cure for the lamia’s kiss.”
It was only after I had left the bodies behind that the fear and self-loathing had struck. If I had killed Madame as soon as I had realized her errand, the girl would still be alive. But I had been weak. I had hesitated, consumed by doubts, where a true hunter would have had no such misgivings.
I took another sip of chocolate, remembering how the girl’s golden hair had fanned out around her fallen body, the only shroud she would ever wear. Then I glanced down at the cup, and saw that my fingernails were bloody.
I turned and vomited on the floor.
Moments later I was seized by the back of my waistcoat and hauled unceremoniously to my feet. A great hulking brute dragged me to the entranceway and then heaved me onto the cobblestones outside. As I lay there, blinking, I wondered if it was possible to sink any lower.
The brute disappeared for a moment and then returned with my pack, which he tossed out beside me. From my position on the ground he appeared godlike, taller than any mortal man, his curly black hair and dark complexion lit by the rising sun. Strangely, there was sympathy rather than contempt in his light green eyes.
“Next time beer,” he said.
He retreated inside, shutting the door behind him. I shook my head to clear my wits, then slowly got to my feet. It was time to face my uncle’s wrath.
A decade later I was still known as Young George, though now I had a score of kills to my credit. My uncle still frowned when I came into his presence, but gradually he had given me more and more responsibility, as the ranks of the Order dwindled.
Tom Porter was dead, his throat torn out by a vampyr. Quincy Jones might as well be dead—a drooling, bedridden cripple who’d been cursed by a gorgon’s dying gaze. Other men had taken their places, but few lasted more than a season. Either the work drove them mad, or they fell victim to one of the many evils we fought.
A secret war, with no medals, no recognition, nothing except the privilege of serving the Order of Sidon. For centuries the members of the Order had labored in secret, driven underground by papal persecution and a world indifferent to the evils that walked in our very midst.
It was tempting to wonder what would happen if we shrugged off the cloak of secrecy. Would governments give us soldiers to help root out the evils that lurked within their borders? Could men of science find new ways to destroy these monsters, rather than the painstaking rituals passed down from the first knights? How many men would be sacrificed before the great Archibald Harker deigned to ask for aid?
In my mind I heard my uncle’s voice. “You reason as a child,” he would say, as he had said countless times before. “The world is not so simple. For every dozen that would fight these monsters there is at least one Judas who would swear allegiance, and that is a risk we dare not take.”
Twelve to one odds sounded fair to me, but I was merely a hunter. And my uncle’s point about the traitors within mankind’s midst was well taken, as my presence in Paris attested. At least two members of the infamous Monks of Medmenham had fled to Paris, bringing their sacrilegious rites with them. The villains—not content with dressing up orgies as Bacchanalian ceremonies—had plunged further and further into the dark arts until at last they’d summoned up a demon. Henri Brun, the head of the Order in Paris, had sent for help, and I’d been dispatched to assist him.
We’d tracked down and destroyed the demon, then dealt justice to those who had summoned him. But by then my interest had been piqued by the work of Doctor Mesmer, who had taken Paris by storm.
Mesmer claimed to have discovered an essential life force, that he called animal magnetism. I had read his papers and after attending a lecture by one of his colleagues I’d emerged wondering if he had indeed discovered proof of the living soul within us. Many demons fed upon humans, some on blood, but others drained their victims without leaving a single mark. Could they be feeding on this force? And if so, was it possible that we could understand it? Could we find a way to prevent demons from feeding, or perhaps even create a weapon that could be turned against them?
If Mesmer were not such a public figure, the Order would have approached him long ago. Instead we’d been reduced to indirect overtures, carefully interviewing his associates and gathering as much information as possible before making contact.
I’d spent weeks trying to get an appointment with Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a distinguished member of the Faculty of Medicine, recently appointed to the royal commission investigating Mesmer’s claims. Doctor Guillotin was far too important to waste his time on an Englishman with neither rank nor fortune to recommend him, but finally he’d agreed to a brief meeting. He’d chosen the place, a popular café near the opera houses.
In the street outside, brightly-dressed jades plied their trade, but the café was surprisingly civilized. Giving my name to the attendant at the door, I made my way to one of the small tables inside.
A few moments later a serving woman came over. “Une bière pour vous?” she inquired, apparently having recognized me as English by the cut of my coat.
It was surely ignorance rather than an insult, for she had no means of knowing that only uncouth laborers drank beer in the evenings.
“Vin pour deux, s’il vous plait,” I replied. “Un bien port.”
She returned a few moments later with a carafe of port and two glasses. I poured one for myself as the clock chimed the seventh hour.
Around me voices chattered away, speaking too swiftly for me to understand. But the tone was familiar even if the words were not, as the inhabitants argued, gossiped and recounted the news of the day. Looking at the dandies dressed for an evening of leisure, I could not help wondering if one of their number would fall prey to evil’s dark lure. Perhaps the next would-be sorcerer was right before me. There, that man with the wine-flushed face and sober black coat. Was he simply unfashionable? Or had he chosen the color black as a sign of his evil intentions, even now fancying himself in allegiance with Satan?
I swiftly downed the glass of wine and poured myself another, disturbed by the fancies which crowded my brain. I had been away from home for too long, and saw evil everywhere.
The memories of that cellar, and the corpses Brun and I had discovered, still haunted me. Bones jumbled together; men, women, children, even animal bones mixed in as if there were no difference between them. We’d been reduced to counting skulls to try and guess the number of victims.
The irony was that the demon had been responsible for only a handful of deaths. The others had been murdered by ordinary men, as part of their profane rituals.
A second glass followed the first, as the quarter hours chimed past, and still there was no sign of Doctor Guillotin. When the carafe was finished, t
he servant fetched me another.
It was nearly nine o’clock when Doctor Guillotin arrived, full of apologies for his delay. Fortunately his English was quite good, so I did not have to search my wine-soaked wits for what few scraps of French remained.
I introduced myself as an instructor from King’s College in London, who had been sent to inquire into Doctor Mesmer’s methods. Explaining that I was a surgeon by training, I was eager to seek out advice from such an esteemed physician as Doctor Guillotin. Indeed I was as well trained as any English surgeon, having been taught by the Order how to wield a knife to both heal and harm. Guillotin, like most physicians, regarded surgeons as little more than butchers, but he seemed pleased that I recognized my limitations.
“The report must be reviewed by the committee and then presented to the king, of course,” he said.
“Of course,” I agreed. “But surely you must know enough by now to advise me. Is it worth the time and expense to learn Mesmer’s methods and then teach them to others? Or is he deluded as some claim?”
“Mesmer is a fraud,” Guillotin said, without the slightest hesitation. “A fraud of the worst sort, one who preys upon the desperate for his own enrichment.”
He took a sip of his wine, while I took a gulp of my own.
“Evil,” I said.
Guillotin frowned as he considered my remark. “I would not have used that word, but there is some truth in it. By convincing his patients to turn away from proper scientific treatments, he is prolonging their misery, perhaps even condemning them to madness or death. Such a man has to be stopped.”
For a Frenchman, Guillotin was surprisingly insightful. Then again, he had been born in England.
“If you stop one evil, another springs up,” I explained. I leaned forward, pressing both hands against the marble tabletop, which had developed an alarming tendency to wobble. Or perhaps that was me. “The only solution is to cut off its head.”
Guillotin drew back. “Cut off its head?”
I nodded emphatically, then drew my right hand across my throat. “A single blow.”
I thought back to my first kill. My first strike on the lamia would have been a fatal blow to a human, but it had barely slowed her down. It had been luck, not skill, that had enabled me to stay alive long enough to strike the killing blow.
“The trick is to find the monsters among us. Then death should be swift.”
“Your English justice is not as ours,” Guillotin said. “But even the condemned should not suffer from barbarism.”
I blinked, having lost the thread of the conversation. Was he referring to Medmenham’s victims? Or to something else?
Doctor Guillotin rose to his feet. “I have an engagement elsewhere,” he explained. “I hope my information has been useful.”
“Indeed,” I said, standing up in a show of gentlemanly good manners. “I must thank you again for the courtesy of your time.”
The crowded room began to blur, and I blinked my watering eyes to clear them. I caught a glimpse of a figure behind the bar—a tall, broad-shouldered man, with curly dark hair. His eyes met mine, and for a moment I thought I knew him.
Someone bumped into me from behind, and when I looked back at the bar, the man was gone.
Shrugging, I left the café and returned to my lodgings. I had lost my taste for foreign mysteries—let the French tend to their own affairs. Guillotin’s evaluation of Mesmer matched the conclusions I had drawn from my own investigations. My word alone would not have been enough to convince the Order, but Guillotin’s reputation was impeccable.
I spent the next few years in Scotland, dealing with a coven of hags and the nightstalkers they had unleashed. I’d completely forgotten about Guillotin and that night in the café, until news came from France of his terrible invention.
Cut off their heads, I’d suggested and indeed he’d found a way to do just that. But it was of no use to me, since unlike the ill-fated aristocrats, vampyrs couldn’t be convinced to walk calmly to their doom.
Decades passed. I took an apprentice. When he was killed, I took another. Mere survival was enough to earn me a seat on the council. Later, when my uncle died of apoplexy, no one was more shocked than I to discover that he’d named me his heir.
These days the London branch of the Order consisted of men that I’d trained myself, or who had been apprenticed to one of those that I’d trained. When someone referred to The Harker, it was me that they spoke of. Which was better than my other nickname, The Old Man.
I was past sixty now, a ripe old age for any man, for all I looked barely thirty. There were days when I hated the figure that my mirror revealed, hated the unlined skin that showed no signs of what I had endured.
My wife Mary had died in childbirth decades before, and there were none left in the Order who remembered her. None to recollect the babe who had been sent to the countryside to be raised by distant cousins. The child—or rather man, for surely so he must be—had no notion of what it meant to bear the Harker name. It was the one gift I could give him.
As the years passed and my body refused to age, I withdrew more and more from the world. Members of the Order accepted what the rest of society would not. The burdens of leadership were heavy, and it was only now that I finally understood my uncle. Like him, I was obsessed with both preserving the Order, and ensuring that I found a fitting successor who could take my place.
Samuel Forsythe seemed a likely enough lad. Though lad was perhaps not quite the term, since a stranger seeing us together would presume him the elder. I had left Forsythe in charge in London, while I visited the European outposts of the Order, doing my best to renew ties that had been severed by decades of conflict.
Some of the outposts had been welcoming, others less so, wary that I would use England’s recent military triumphs as an excuse for seizing control. When they discovered I had no intention of trying to exert my will, they’d gradually warmed to me. Not enough to share all of their information, of course. But enough to promise cooperation, and to share those bits that they deemed safe.
It would take years to rebuild the network of alliances, and I knew I wasn’t the man for the task. It was all I could do to force myself out of bed each morning. It had been a relief to leave the chapter house in Geneva behind, and to fall back into the guise of an indolent traveler.
When a chill spring rain started falling, I stopped at the first likely inn, rather than pressing on. I was tired, with a weariness that had sunk into my very bones. I’d seen too much, lost too many good friends, and the prospect of enduring endless decades of the same inspired only dull apathy rather than the righteous fervor I had once commanded.
Yet neither could I leave the fight, not while I still had breath in my body.
My host, who spoke French with a German accent, showed me to my quarters, a small room tucked under the eaves. He apologized, explaining that his finer rooms had been bespoken by a party of English travelers. I’d observed them in the courtyard when I’d arrived. There were two ladies accompanied by a solitary gentleman. One of the ladies was clearly with child, but it was the other that the gentleman referred to as his wife, as he asked for rooms in halting German.
In my younger days I would have gone over at once and introduced myself, marveling over the coincidence of discovering fellow Englishmen in a tiny Swiss village. But today I’d lingered off to the side, content to wait as the innkeeper attended to them, knowing that my Italian-made cloak and Prussian cavalry-style boots marked me as a Continental.
The inn’s tiny common room was empty, consisting of one large table, and a smaller one next to the serving station. I rapped sharply on the door that appeared to lead to the kitchen, then sat down at the small table.
A few minutes passed, and I was about to help myself to the wine I could see behind the counter when the door swung open. The man who entered was so tall he had to duck as he came through the door. When he straightened up, I knew him at once.
“You!” I exclaimed.
“Wine, the Rhenish will do,” I said, pointing to the bottle that had caught my eye.
He took down the bottle and poured me a glass. After a moment’s consideration he poured a second for himself, then came over. Setting the bottle on the table between us, he took a seat.
He was still a big man, though not the giant of my youthful recollections. But his appearance was unchanged, as if the years had no power to touch him.
“To long life,” he said, raising his glass in toast.
Habit had me lifting my glass automatically before I realized what he had said. “Life,” I repeated, feeling my lips twist in a wry grin.
We each drained our glasses.
I eyed him warily, still not quite sure what to make of him. Unnaturally long life was often the sign of a pact with the devil, but I’d never yet met such a one who retained a sense of humor.
“You look well for a man of your age,” I said.
“I could say the same for you,” he replied. He spoke excellent English, but no one looking at him would mistake him for an Englishman.
Five years ago I would have pestered him with questions.
Ten years ago I would have made a strategic retreat, gathering allies so I could launch an investigation.
Thirty years ago I would have tried to kill him.
He poured another glass and we drank in silence. After a few moments he rose, making his way back into the kitchen, then returning with a plate of brown bread and goat cheese.
We sat in companionable silence as the rain pounded against the shutters, sipping the pale Rhenish wine.
By my fourth glass I found my voice again.
“Unicorn vomit,” I said.
He raised both eyebrows, great hairy monstrosities that briefly distracted me from my tale.