by G. P. Taylor
Without warning, the man swung the sword through the air and lashed out at Walpurgis. It smashed into the bed, slitting the crumpled sheets and the mattress. Walpurgis rolled forward, grabbing the gun from under the pillow and shooting as he slumped to the floor on the far side of the bed. The silenced bullet smashed into the wall just above the head of the assassin. Walpurgis steadied himself and took aim again.
Before he could fire the man turned and ran into the corridor. Walpurgis looked at Arantez and then gave chase. A deco-glass door halfway along the corridor swung back, but he could see no one. He ran on, pushing his way through door after door, his bare feet sliding on the polished wooden floor. Through one door and then another, he ran until he came to the landing.
The sword came from the darkness, cutting through the air before Walpurgis could see it. The blade sliced into the wall just above his shoulder. It held fast as the assassin kicked at him. Walpurgis fired the pistol. The bullet thudded, the man groaned. He fired again as the sword was pulled from the wall and down his arm.
Lashing out with his hand, Walpurgis aimed blind blows. He felt the pistol smash against flesh. Then there was nothing but a wisp of smoke and he knew he was alone. Back towards his room he could hear pounding footsteps. He chased after them along the darkened corridors. Doors swung back and forth. The footsteps ran on, always out of sight. Then Walpurgis slowed to a walking pace. He knew the man could not have run further than this. He tried each door that he passed until he came to Room 213.
The door was slightly ajar. It was as if it had been purposefully left that way. A a small chink of light came from within, and a radio inside the room whispered some jangling dance music. Walpurgis pushed on the door. It opened slowly. The room was completely empty. He looked at the neat pile of clothes and ebony walking stick on the bed, criss-crossed by slats of light from the window. Standing back, he fought the desire to go inside and find the assassin. He knew the man was hiding somewhere, waiting for him.
Walpurgis pushed the door further open and tried to look under the bed. Like a childhood nightmare, he waited for a hand to dart from the dark underneath and drag him down. He stepped forward, catching his reflection in the mirror.
Suddenly from behind he felt a rush of air. The door of Room 212 opened quickly. He ducked as a blade stabbed the air above him. Falling to the floor, he turned and kicked at the legs of the man. He heard him fall as he grabbed the door and slammed it shut.
The sword smashed through the door again and again with the power of a monster. It ripped at the wood, tearing splinters as it cut the air and passed his face.
‘When will you die?’ the man shouted as he kicked at the door.
Walpurgis waited a split second and pulled the handle. The man fell into the room, sword outstretched, and stumbled across the floor. Walpurgis kicked at him, knocking him further towards the bathroom. The man fell as the sword buckled backwards and pierced his leg.
Standing over him as he gripped the wound, Walpurgis laughed.
‘I think you have some explaining to do,’ he said as he tucked the gun into the belt of his trousers.
‘I will say nothing,’ the man answered as Walpurgis took hold of the sword and the man’s leg and dragged him from the room.
‘Think we should talk in my room. I can introduce you to Madame Arantez – the woman I loved – the woman I would have married.’
The assassin looked up, the pain so intense he could not speak. He could tell from the glare on the face of Walpurgis that he would not live to see another night. Once back in his room, Walpurgis locked the door.
‘What do you want to know?’ the man asked as the pain subsided and he was dumped in the bathroom of Room 203. ‘Words for my life?’
‘Depends what you can tell me.’ Walpurgis took hold of the man by his jaw, forced open his mouth and slid two fingers to each side of the tongue. ‘Thought you were a Vampyre. Why are you after me?’
‘I was ordered,’ the man answered. ‘What about the deal?’
‘Words for life?’ Walpurgis asked as he slipped the sword from the leg of the man and wiped the blade on the towel. ‘Haven’t seen a sword like this in a long time.’
‘Deal?’ the man insisted.
‘If you must,’ he answered. ‘As long as you don’t come back to kill me.’
The man laughed, his brown almond-shaped eyes sparkling at the thought.
‘You are a wanted man, Mr Walpurgis,’ the man panted. ‘There is more than one gathering that would like to see you dead.’
‘And?’ Walpurgis asked.
‘I was told to give you a message and then kill you. The Oracle insisted that I –’
The man made a sudden grab for the sword. Walpurgis snatched the blade and stabbed the man as hard as he could. The body slumped to the floor. Walpurgis lifted the man by his hair and dumped him in the bath. He wiped his hands on the towel and went to the telephone.
‘Room service?’ he asked softly. ‘I take it the Hotel Julius still offers the same service when there has been an accident?’ He breathed hard. ‘Good … well, in fact it is two accidents that need to be disposed of … very well, five minutes.’
Walpurgis sat on the bed and after staring at the body of Madame Arantez he took the envelope she had brought and looked inside. There were several photographs, each marked with a name. Hugh Morgan – Biatra Barnes – Jago Harker. He held the last sepia print in his fingertips and looked at the face, studying each contour and line. It was an old school photograph of a boy in a flat cap. ‘You will be the first. If you had not taken my Arantez this would not have happened.’
Walpurgis dropped the photograph to the bed, sat back against the pillows and closed his eyes. He knew that room service would soon come along. It would cost five hundred pounds for their silence. But this was the Hotel Julius, the Vampyre hotel. People died here all the time and, if rumours were to be believed, blood was their business.
[ 8 ]
Laundry
WALPURGIS LOOKED BACK into his room and checked all was well before he turned the key. It was late evening and already the noise from the street was too loud for him to sleep. Room service had arrived with a laundry basket and taken away the bodies. Taking one final look at Madame Arantez, he had kissed her on the forehead as they wrapped her in a blanket and took her from the room. He had paid them with the money he had taken from the pocket of the assassin.
He didn’t know what to do with the evening. He thought of catching the midnight train to York, hiring a car and then arriving at Whitby in the morning. He thought it would be best to start his search for the Oracle diamond at the place he had handed it to Ezra Morgan before the start of the war. Walpurgis hadn’t liked Hawks Moor. He felt it was cold and murky, always swirling in sea-fret.
As he walked down the narrow stairs towards the lobby, he tried to think of how long it would take to get to the north. Instinctively, he patted his pockets to see if he had everything he needed. Money, pistol, knife – he felt each one. Opening the door from the dark stairway, he stepped into the lobby and saw an old man on the long studded leather seat under the window. The man looked up from his newspaper and stared at him. To his left the redhead behind the counter got up from her chair and smiled at him.
‘Everything to your satisfaction?’ she asked with a smile of her ruby lips.
‘Perfect as always, Julia.’ Walpurgis said. ‘I may not be back tonight, but I have left everything in my room.’
‘I will make sure that it is there when you get back,’ she answered, careful not to say too much.
‘When do you finish work?’ he asked as he leant on the counter and dangled his key in the tips of his fingers.
‘This is the Hotel Julius. I never finish and will always be here for you,’ she said as the door opened.
The lobby filled with the smog of the cold London night. It smelt of cheap diesel and wood smoke. Walpurgis gave no attention to the man now standing on his right. He looked at Julia and then picked
an information card from the rack.
‘We have two rooms booked for tonight,’ the man said. ‘They should already be paid for.’
Julia looked at the large double-paged book on the desk and ran her finger down the list of names.
‘Two rooms in the name of Bathory?’ she asked in her usual way of ending even the most straightforward sentence with a question.
‘I am Nicholas Bathory,’ the man answered, as if he had been rehearsing the words for hours.
With her usual slickness, Julia handed Bathory the keys to the rooms. The man looked at the fob and nodded before turning and walking out of the hotel.
‘Breather,’ Julia said as he went out of the door.
The man holding the paper laughed.
Walpurgis followed, soon engulfed in the fog outside. On the edge of the pavement was a black sedan. Bathory leant into the open window.
‘The rooms are ready. I will take the boy. You go and park in Brewer Street. Usual place.’
There was something about the conversation that intrigued Walpurgis. He looked in the window of the bookshop next door and tried to listen. Like him, the man was human and yet he was allowed to stay at the Hotel Julius. That was a privilege that not many warm-bloods could enjoy. Walpurgis knew that Hotel Julius only accepted those invited and then only once the reclusive owner had agreed.
That made Bathory interesting to Walpurgis, but there was something else about the man that he found intriguing. He wore a long coat that was hand-stitched. His shoes were dirty and scuffed and his face looked drawn, as if he hadn’t slept. Walpurgis thought he looked a mess, and from the bulge under his left arm he knew he was carrying a gun.
He watched out of the corner of his eye as Bathory opened the car door and pulled the boy from within. Walpurgis turned to walk away, having thought he had seen enough. Then he stopped. Standing on the pavement, covered in an old coat and with his hands chained, was Jago Harker. He recognised him immediately. There was no mistake. The boy looked older, almost a man, but it was definitely him.
Walpurgis swallowed hard with excitement. He felt the pistol in his pocket and for a moment thought he could just gun Harker down in the street. He looked around; the mercurial smog would give him plenty of cover. He would just be a vanishing shadow in the thick mist. Walpurgis pulled back the hammer of the gun and made ready.
Harker suddenly looked at him. Walpurgis stopped and turned back to the window of the bookshop. When he looked again, Jago Harker had gone.
Walpurgis stood on the crowded pavement as if he were a stone in the tide. He waited, trying to gather his thoughts. He watched as the driver of the black sedan appeared out of the fog from the direction of Bourchier Street. For the first time in his life he could feel panic twist his stomach. The man passed by without even looking at him. Walpurgis tried to take in as much about him as he could. He could see that the fingers of the man’s right hand were stained with nicotine, that his face was swollen on one side and that he hadn’t shaved for at least two days. Like the other man, he also wore shabby shoes and fine clothes that were in need of repair. They were badly fitting and looked as though they had been borrowed from someone far larger than he would ever be.
The man went inside Hotel Julius. Walpurgis could see that Jago Harker was some kind of prisoner. The clasps of the handcuffs had been easy to see under the cuff of the leather coat.
After waiting several minutes, Walpurgis went inside the hotel. The old man with the white hair and newspaper had gone. Julia stood at the far side of the counter and looked up when he walked in.
‘Back so soon?’ she asked. ‘Couldn’t keep away?’
‘Too irresistible,’ he answered as he looked to the doors of the empty bar. ‘Think I’ll go and try to sleep.’
‘Haven’t done that for half a lifetime,’ Julia answered as she flicked back her hair.
Walpurgis wondered how old she really was. The thing with Vampyres was that they might look young on the outside, but all those years of stolen life made them different inside. Julia looked like the old photograph of his mother that was always on the lid of the piano. She was a woman he had never known. Evie Walpurgis had died three days after he had been born; his father had been arrested for her murder, and from then on Heston had lived with an aged aunt twice removed, sharing his early life with her and a toothless spaniel. They had all lived together in a large and draughty house on the outskirts of Cambridge. It was there that he had looked at the photo of his mother day after day. He wanted to cheat death and find her, be with her again. Great Aunt Poppy had told him that his mother had gone to the other side … She had tried to describe the place and made it sound more like Worthing than Heaven. From then on, he had searched for some way to bring the two worlds together. GAP – as he called Great Aunt Poppy – always talked of death and mostly at breakfast. She would sing, play the piano and try to channel the spirit of some great but dead composer. Walpurgis would sit on the chair by the window and stare at the image of his mother. Now he stared at the receptionist in the same way. She was uncannily similar, even to the way in which her hair fell to the shoulders.
Julia could obviously not read minds. She smiled at him and handed over the key to his room.
‘The guy who checked in, the breather – Nicholas Bathory. What room is he in?’
‘Confidential,’ she replied. ‘You know we never give out the room numbers of our guests.’
Walpurgis reached over the counter and taking her by the lapel of her jacket pulled her closer.
‘I was just interested. Didn’t want us to be disturbed,’ he said in a low breath.
‘Rooms 107 and 109, first floor, opposite the laundry. It is quite cheap and they aren’t having their bill paid by Mr Ozymandias,’ she replied as if that made all the difference.
Walpurgis touched her on the lips, his finger sticking to the gloss momentarily.
‘Good to know where the laundry is,’ he said wryly as he opened the door and walked up the stairs.
Walpurgis turned on the first landing and soon he was outside the rooms. He listened to each door. He could hear Bathory talking inside Room 109. Walpurgis checked the gun in his pocket and tried to think where they would be in the room. He would use three bullets and shoot Jago Harker last. That would be after he had questioned him about where he would find Hugh Morgan and the diamond.
The handle of the wooden door shuddered as someone inside slipped the bolt. Walpurgis jumped back into the dark doorway of the laundry. The man stepped outside and looked up and down the corridor. Walpurgis watched him from the shadows and then, like a cat, struck out. Before the man could scream or even make a sound he was dragged across the corridor and into the laundry.
With a sudden, sharp crack of the neck, the man was on the tiled floor unable to move. Walpurgis dragged him through the room draped with sheets and towels that hung from rails on the high ceiling. A single clear glass bulb lit the room. A small, black fly that had forgotten the season buzzed irritatingly around the bright glass.
He could see the door to another room close by, and he dragged the body within. He flicked the switch and, as the light flickered and grew brighter, he looked around him. There, hanging from hooks on a steel rail, were several bodies. Some were attached to thin, metal pipes connected to a pump. He recognised the bodies of Madame Arantez and the assassin. Walpurgis pulled a hook and chain from the rack above him and slipped it under the neck of the man, then he hauled on the chain until the man hung from the air. The pumps chugged and churned as they sucked the blood from the bodies. Walpurgis followed the clear glass pipes with his eye as they crossed the ceiling and ran down into a boiler on the far side of the room. The room looked like the workings of an elegant Neapolitan ice-cream factory. Everything was meticulously clean and tidy; the bodies hung in order of size, their hair brushed and clothes pressed. Even the body of Madame Arantez looked as though it would come alive.
Leaving the man hanging from the hook, Walpurgis sneaked back to t
he corridor outside Room 109. He listened to the door. There was silence. He thought of what he would do. Then he heard a muffled voice within.
‘There’s a man outside with a gun,’ he heard Jago Harker say. ‘He’s planning to kill you and then me.’
Bathory laughed.
‘You expect me to believe that? You a mind reader? I heard that Vampyres could guess what you were thinking. Perkins will be back soon and he will see him,’ Bathory gloated. ‘Tomorrow I hand you over to the French. Then life gets back to normal.’
‘Why aren’t you taking me?’ he asked.
‘Don’t like crossing water. Superstitious that way, me and Perkins,’ Bathory answered. ‘You’re going all the way to Luna Negri – that’s almost to the other side of the world.’
‘I can hear him, he’s outside. There is someone in the corridor,’ Jago insisted.
‘If I take a look and there is no one there, you will be in trouble,’ Bathory answered begrudgingly, not wanting to look. ‘This is the Hotel Julius – only special people can stay here and it is the safest place for your kind in London.’
Bathory went to the door. He looked through the miniature spy-hole but could see no one. Turning the key and then twisting the handle, he pulled the door open. The corridor was empty; the dim light at the end by the stairs flickered in its oyster glass. ‘Told you, kid. Your mind reading isn’t what it should be.’
‘He was hiding,’ Jago answered as Bathory slowly closed the door.
‘Hiding?’ Bathory asked angrily. ‘See for yourself,’ he said as he pulled open the door. ‘Look – no one.’
Jago shuffled on the bed uncomfortably. His eyes stared into the darkness of the corridor. Bathory could see the reflected image of a man within them. He turned slowly as if a ghost stood behind him.
‘I would always listen to young Vampyres, Mr Bathory. They have yet to learn to lie and will always tell the truth,’ Walpurgis said as he held the pistol with the silencer towards the man.
