01 Those Who Hunt The Night ja-1

by Barbara Hambly

  And why should they watch? The doors were locked, and who in their right mind would wish to break into the Empire of the Dead?

  Luck and human nature seemed to be in full operation that afternoon when Asher reached the inconspicuous back door of the catacombs through which they had entered last night. It was locked. Although a sign instructed him to apply for information in the Place Denfert-Ro-chereau several streets away, still he thumped for several seconds on the door.

  Only silence greeted him, which was as he had hoped. The keys Jacques la Puce had made for him that afternoon worked perfectly- even on this quiet street, picking the lock would have been noticed by someone. He slipped inside, appropriated another tin lantern, and made his way down the stair, locking the grille again behind him. It was just past three in the afternoon; these days darkness was complete by about six. If nothing else, he thought, he might ascertain whether vampires past a certain age were free of

  the leaden trance of the daylight hours. Beyond that...

  He didn't know. As a mortal it was laughable to think he could locate Brother Anthony in the haunted maze. But it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that his presence there, alone and unprotected, might pique the ancient friar's curiosity and draw him out of hiding, as it had done last night.

  After a long inner debate he had left his silver chains back at his hotel, since in all probability they would afford him no protection should Brother Anthony turn against him, and might very well be con-strued as a gesture of bad faith. In last night's case it had been merely manners-like carrying a gun to a wedding reception, Ysidro had said; Asher hadn't mentioned that he'd done that upon occasion. But he was uncertain how much Brother Anthony would sense, and it was vital that he speak to the old man this afternoon.

  Six hundred years, he thought, as the first of Ysidro's chalked arrows came into the wavery circle of the lantern's light. The last of the Capets had been on the throne when Anthony had first refused to die-when he had made the decision to accept immortality upon any terms. Asher wondered whether the monk had been hiding all that time, or whether he had been driven gradually to it and to madness, living among the corpses in the crypts of the Holy Innocents.

  His breath puffed in faint smoke in the glow of the lamp; it was cold in the endless galleries. The only sounds were the soft scrunching of wet pebbles underfoot and the occasional creak of the lantern's handle. It had been unnerving to come here last night, with Ysidro as protection, even though at that time they had expected to encounter no one. It was terrifying now, absolutely alone with the darkness under the earth wait-ing just beyond the glow of the lamp. Oddly enough, Asher's fears turned less upon the vampire he sought and more upon the occasional, illogical fits of dread that the roof should cave in and bury him alive in the darkness.

  He saw the dark gates with a kind of relief-for he had feared, too, lest he miss one of Ysidro's chalked arrows. The ranked walls of brown bones and staring skulls seemed less dreadful to him than those silent aisles of empty rock.

  It took him longer than he had counted upon to find Brother Antho-ny's private haunts in the ossuary. He missed his way twice and wan-dered-he did not know how long-among the brown walls of bones, searching for the branching tunnel, the tiny altar. At last he thought to trace Ysidro's slender bootprints in the watery mud among the pebbles of the floor, and after that found the arrow fairly easily. It came to him then that the psychic miasma that the vampires were capable of throw-ing around themselves had extended itself to Anthony's entire territory. Simply, it was easy to miss the place, easy to be thinking of something else. No wonder none of the guards came near here. They were proba-bly not even aware of avoiding the place at all. They merely did. It explained certain things about Ernchester House as well.

  He passed the chaos of the fallen bones, then the neat rows of pel-vises, the decaying skulls assembled against the eventuality of final Judgment. With a kind of medieval morbidity, the ossuary had been established, like the ancient enamel houses, to turn the mind to man's mortality; in spite of himself, Asher found his reflections drawn to the men he had killed, and, disturbingly, the men who would undoubtedly die in any future war because of all those charts and plans and informa-tion he had smuggled out of Austria, China, and Germany, tacked away in his socks or his notes on consonantal shift.

  From what he knew of some of them, he had the uncomfortable sensation that in terms of ultimate responsibility, his personal death toll might well end up rivaling poor Anthony's, who only killed to prolong his guilt-riddled Unlife.

  Before the steps of the altar, scattered with drifts of bone fragments, Asher stopped, listening to the terrible silence all around him. Banked along the walls, decaying skulls watched nun with mournful eyes.

  His whisper ran like water along the bones, vanishing into the stony darkness. "Frater Antonius .,."

  The sibilance of it hissed back at him,

  "In nomine Patris, Antonius..."

  Perhaps he did not sleep near this place at all. Asher sat gingerly down on the bare stone of the step, setting the lantern beside him. He took out his watch and was both surprised and vexed at how much time it had taken him to reach this place-it would be difficult to tell, now, whether a sufficiently ancient vampire would be awake in the daylight hours. But it could not be helped. He pulled his coat more closely around him, rested his chin on his drawn-up knees, and settled down to wait.

  The lantern's metal hissed softly in the absolute stillness. He listened intently, hearing nothing but now and then the far-off slither of a rat picking its way across the bones. The cold seemed to deepen and inten-sify with his inactivity-he rubbed his hands over the lantern's heat, wishing he had thought to bring gloves. Once the red eyes of a rat glinted at him from the darkness beyond that tiny pool of light, then vanished. Ysidro had said vampires could summon certain beasts, as they could humans-how long, he wondered, had Brother Anthony depended upon that ability for his dinner?

  That led to the unnerving reflection that he might be doing so now. Howdid the vampire glamour work, once the vampire's eyes had met those of his chosen victim? Was that why it had seemed to him such a good idea to come here, alone and in daylight? I could have summoned her from anywhere on the train... Ysidro had said, unwinding the purple scarf from the poor woman's throat, drawing the pins gently from her h air .Do you believe I can do this to whomever I will?

  True, he felt no sleepiness, none of the dreamy unreality of that epi-sode on the train, but that might only mean that after centuries of practice, Brother Anthony was very, very good.

  The craving becomes unbearable.,.

  He remembered the newspaper headline and shivered.

  Still Brother Anthony did not appear.

  The kerosene in the lantern's reservoir was now almost gone. He realized he'd have to leave if he were to find his way back out of the dark; the thought that the light might fail him while he was yet in the tunnels was terrifying and made him curse himself for not searching the vestibule for the stubs of the tourists' candles while he was about it. He straightened his back and looked around him in the darkness. "An-thony?" he whispered in Latin. I'm here to talk to you. I know you're there."

  There was no response. Only the skulls, staring at him with blank eyeholes, a hundred generations of Parisians, their bones neatly sorted and awaiting the final collation of Judgment Day.

  Feeling a little silly, Asher spoke again to the empty dark. At least, if what Ysidro and Bully Joe Davies had said was true, Anthony could hear him from a great distance away. "My name is James Asher; I am working with Don Simon Ysidro to find a renegade vampire in London. We think he can hunt by day as well as by night. He is a killer, brutal and indiscriminate, of men and vampires, bound not even by the laws that your kind make among themselves. Will you help us?" There was no movement in the darkness,

  only stillness, like the slow fall of dust.

  "Anthony, we need your help, humans and vampires alike. He has to be one of your contemporaries, or
older yet. Only you can track him, can find him for us. Will you help us?"

  A rhyme singsonged its way around in his head, turning back on itself like a child's chant:

  But the silence was unbroken,

  And the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken

  Was the whispered word, "Lenore." This I whispered, and an echo

  Murmured back the word, "Lenore." Merely this and nothing more,

  Poe, he thought, and totally appropriate for this waiting hush, this darkness that was not quite empty, and not quite dead.

  Merely this and nothing more... merely this and nothing more.

  On impulse, he took the newspaper from his pocket and laid it on the steps of lie altar, folded open to the article about the murders. He lifted the almost-empty lantern, and the moving light twisted over the dead faces like a sudden shriek of mocking laughter, the laughter of those who have learned the secret of what lies on the other side of the invisi-ble wall of death.

  "I must go," he said to the darkness. I'll be back tomorrow night, and the night after that, until you speak to me. Please help us, Anthony. Nine humans and four vampires have died already, and now we know there will be more. We need your help."

  Like a curtain swinging to, the darkness closed behind him as he passed along the corridors; and whether any watched him out, he did not know.

  Fourteen

  How did one destroy a vampire who had passed beyond vulnera-bility to daylight? he wondered. Or presumably to silver and garlic and all the rest of it? He wished he could talk to Lydia, to hear her speculations on the problem, and he tried to think what they might be.

  If Anthony did not help him...

  Did this mutation in the course of time open other vulnerabilities-to cold, for instance? Simon had mentioned an extreme sensitivity to cold in the very old vampires. But short of luring the killer into a giant refrigerator, he didn't see how that knowledge, even if it were true, would be of any assistance. He grinned wryly at the thought of himself and Ysidro, Eskimo-like in furs, grimly driving an icicle through the renegade's heart, cutting off his head, and stuffing the mouth with snowballs. And, of course, the monthly bill for ice would be prohibitive.

  Perhaps, if Lydia was right and vampirism was simply a pathology of the blood, there might be a serum which could be devised to combat it,More applied folklore, he thought wryly. Maybe a concentration of

  whatever essence was in garlic, injected straight into the blood-stream...

  By whom? You and Sexton Blake?

  And in any case, vampirism was not simply a physical pathology. It had its psychic element, too, and that, like the physical abilities, seemed to increase with time. Could it perhaps be fought on psychic grounds?

  As he walked down the empty back streets toward the lights of the boulevards, he shivered at the thought of those slow-ripening powers, vampire pawns advancing powerlessly across the chessboard of time, until they could become queens...

  In the deserted darkness of the street ahead of him, a figure faded from the mists. A dusky face stood out above the white blur of a dress, framed in loose masses of thick, black hair. Small, soft hands reached toward him, and he felt himself go cold with dread. There was another reason, he remembered, for wanting to leave the catacombs while day-light lingered in the sky.

  The white figure drifted toward him, with that same almost unbear-able slowness he'd seen in Elysee's drawing room, as if propelled only now and then by a vagrant breeze. But if he took his eyes from her, she would be on him like lightning; that much he knew. The murmur of that soothing-syrup voice was so low it was impossible that he should hear it at this distance as clearly as he did: "Why, James, there's no need to run away. I just want to talk with you..."

  She was already much closer than she should have been, drifting that slowly; he could see the smile in her sinful eyes. Feeling naked, he began to back slowly away, never taking his eyes from her...

  Granite hands seized him from behind, pinning his arms, crushing suffocatingly over his mouth and twisting his head back. The foetor of old blood clogged his nostrils as other hands closed around him, drag-ging him into the darkness of an alley, cold and impossibly strong. His body twisted and fought like a salmon on a line, but he knew already that he was doomed.

  They pressed closer around him, white faces swimming in the gloom; he kicked at them, but his feet met nothing, and their laughter was sweet and rippling in his ears. A hand tore his collar away; he tried to cry "No!" but the palm over his mouth was smothering him, the brutal grip that dragged his head back all but breaking his neck. Against the naked flesh of his throat, the night air was cold, cold as the bodies pressing closer and closer...

  Slashing pain, then the long, swimming drop of weakness. He felt his knees give way, the massive grip on his arms holding him up. He thought he heard Hyacinthe's husky laugh. Small hands, a woman's, stripped back his shirt cuff and he felt her rip open the vein and drink. Darkness seemed to flutter down over his mind, a dim consciousness of chill, bright candles seen far away, spinning over a terrifying abyss; for a moment, he had the impression that these people had been there with him when he had shot Jan van der Platz in Pretoria and played croquet with Lydia in her father's garden.

  A woman's arms were around his body. Opening his eyes he saw Elysee's face near his, her auburn hair tickling his jaw as she bent to drink. Beyond her was Grippen, bloated and red, blood smudging his coarse, grinning lips. Others crowded up-Chloe, Serge, the dark-haired boy, and others still-clamoring in sweet, thin voices for their turn. He tried again to whisper, "No..." but his breath was gone. Red darkness swallowed him and turned swiftly black.

  "I'm sorry, dear." Mrs. Shelton came out of the narrow little dining-room door beneath the stairs, wiping her hands on her apron-she must have been watching, Lydia thought, looking quickly up from the little pile of the evening's post on the hall table. "Nothing for you, I'm afraid."

  In the face of that kindly sympathy, Lydia could only smile back and, tucking her book bag awkwardly under her arm, start up the stairs, groping one-handed to unpin her hat from her hair. Mrs. Shelton fol-lowed her up a few steps and laid an anxious hand on her arm. "It's hard, dear," the landlady said gently. "Your young man?"

  Lydia nodded. Disengaging herself, she went on up the stairs, think-ing. I'll strangle him. And then,He's got to come back soon.

  Reasons why he didn't-or couldn't-crowded unpleasantly to her mind. She pushed them away, letting herself think only, I've got to get in touch with him somehow...

  I've got to let him know...

  The note to the charwoman was still pinned to the door with a blue-headed drawing pin: research in progress. please do not clean. She had half expected to have to fight for unviolated space, as she had always had to fight with every woman with whom she'd lived from her nanny down to Ellen, but evidently Dolly, the woman who did the cleaning for Mrs, Shelton, valued her own leisure far above "what was proper." Lydia was confident the woman hadn't so much as crossed the threshold.

  She dumped her book bag on the floor beside the stacks of journals already there, removed her hat, and turned up the lamp. Though she knew James would have communicated to her in some fashion if he had come back to London at all, she walked through to the bedroom and looked out, down the grimy slit of the alley, to the window of 6 Prince of Wales Colonnade.

  Both curtains were closed. No lamp burned behind them.

  Drat you, Jamie, she thought, turning back to the sitting room with a queer, terrible tightness clenching inside her,Drat you, drat you, drat you, WRITE to me! Come back, I have to tell you this.

  She leaned in the doorway between the two rooms, scarcely aware of the headache she'd had since two or three in the afternoon-scarcely aware, in fact, that she'd eaten nothing since breakfast-gazing at her desk with its heaps of journals, its notes, and its books: Peterkin's Ori - gins of Psychic Abilities, Freiborg's Brain Chemistry and the Seventh Sense, Mason' sPathological Mutation, On top of it lay the
hastily writ-ten note from James, telling her he was dreadfully sorry, but he and Ysidro were leaving for Paris; beside it was the letter he had written from Paris itself, telling her he had arrived safely and was going to visit the Paris vampires that night.

  Her heart seemed to be jarring uncomfortably beneath her stays. She understood, with the possibility of a day-stalking vampire, that he could not have met her to say farewell; it was her safety he was trying to protect, and she had guessed that he felt the vampires' nets closer than ever about him. Anger at him was irrational, she told herself calmly; anger at the situation was irrational, because it was how it was and there were far worse things to happen to one; anger at him for not writing was irrational, because God only knew where he was, and he would write when he could. Screaming and kicking the walls would not help either him, her, or Mrs. Shelton's charlady.

  But I know the answer,she thought, and the steel-spring coil of knowledge, fear, and dread twisted itself

  a notch tighter within her. I know how we can find them. Jamie, come back and tell me I'm doing this right.

  Jamie, come back, please.

  Mechanically she shed her coat and her hat and pulled the pins from her hair, which uncoiled in a dry silken whisper down her back. For a time, she stood over the mounds of papers, the articles on porphyria, that hideous and deforming malady of anemia and photosensitivity, on plague, on vampires-there were even two of James'-and on telepathy. She'd been working at Somerset House, at the newspaper offices, at Chancery Lane all day for days, then coming back to the lending librar-ies to get medical and folkloric journals, and returning every night to this.

  From among the papers, she lifted something small and golden, like a flattened flower, soft and dry in her hands-the lover's knot, braided by a shop which specialized in such things, from Lotta's no-longer-human hair. As the tiny bud of knowledge had opened before her eyes like a rose, she had thought, I have to check this with James. It made perfect sense to her, but she didn't know whether it was, in fact, practicable, and now there was literally no one to whom she could go.