"Can you get through that?"
Asher gauged the resultant gap. "I think so."
It was a difficult wriggle, with one arm barely usable and nothing on the other side but the narrow ledge. The vampire steadied and braced him through as best he could, but once his arm inadvertently brushed one of the remaining bars, and Asher felt the grip spasm and slack. "It's all right, I've got a footing," he
said and received only a fault gasp in reply. He slipped as quickly as he dared along the ledge to the labora-tory window, the cold air biting fiercely through his shirt-sleeved arms and stockinged feet, and through the house as he had before, to undo the bolts of the steel-sheathed door.
Ysidro had resumed his creased waistcoat, but his long, slim hands were welting up in what looked like massive burns. The fingers shook as Asher knotted both their handkerchiefs around the swellings, to keep the air from the raw, blistering flesh. As he worked, he said rapidly, "Blaydon will have money in the study. We'll get a cab to Bloomsbury -there's a stand on Harley Street..."
"It is past midnight already." Ysidro flexed his hands carefully and winced. "You will be taking your lady away with you on this motorcy-cle of yours. Is there a place on these downs where I can go to ground, if the daylight overtakes us while we are there?"
Asher shook his head. "I don't know. The nearest town's eight miles away and it's not very large."
Ysidro was quiet for a moment, then shrugged with his mobile, color-less brows. "The village church, perhaps. There are always village churches. James..."
He turned, as Asher strode past him into the prison room again and over to the window where the detached window bar lay shining frostily in the square of moonlight on the floor. It was two and a half feet long, steel electroplated with silver, and heavy as a large spanner-or crow, as Ysidro called it-in his hand. Asher hefted it and looked back at the vampire who stood like a disheveled ghost against the blackness of the doorway.
Picking his words as if tiptoeing through a swamp, Ysidro said, "Did Dennis bring you here, as he did me? Or did you come of your own accord, looking for me at daybreak?"
"I came looking for you."
"That was stupid..." He hesitated, for a moment awkward and oddly human in the face of saying something he had not said in many hundreds of years and perhaps, Asher thought, never. "Thank you."
"I'm in your service," Asher reminded him, and walked back to the door, silver bar like a gleaming club in his hand. "And," he added grimly, "we haven't scotched this killer yet."
Twenty- one
"Could he have beaten us here?" Asher kicked the Indian's engine out of gear as they came around the side of the hill into full view of the Peaks' wall and lodge gate; as on most motorcycles, the brake wasn't very strong. The moon had set; it was hard to keep the tires out of ruts only dimly seen. He didn't bother to whisper. If Dennis was there already, he'd have picked up the sound of the engine miles away.
"I'm not sure." Ysidro's arms were like whalebone and thin cable around Asher's waist, his body a skeletal lightness against the leather of the jacket. Asher wasn't sure whether a living man could have kept his seat on the narrow carrier as they'd come up the winding road from Wycombe Parva, "As Burger-quoted by the invaluable Mr. Stoker- has observed, 'Die Todten reiten schnell'- the dead travel fast."
Asher braked gently, easing the machine to a stop in front of the iron spears of the locked gates.
Through them he could see the house, a rambling pseudo-Gothic monstrosity of native brick and hewn stone appropriated from some ruined building closer to Oxford, dark against the dim shapes of the naked beeches of the park and the vast swell of the down behind. The unkempt lawn was thick with weeds, and the woods that lay to the south and east of the house were already making their first encroachments of broom sedge and elder saplings. The place had probably housed no more than a caretaker since Blaydon had closed it up after his wife's death three years ago, and it was obvious that not even a caretaker dwelt here now.
He'd probably been turned off when Dennis first began to change, Asher thought, and anger stirred him again at Blaydon's stupid irre-sponsibility. Had anything gone amiss, from a gas leak to an omnibus accident in London, Lydia would have been condemned to death here without anyone being the wiser.
Except Dennis, of course.
"So in other words, he could be waiting for us in the house?" He dismounted, and Ysidro sprang off lightly. Behind the long, wind-frayed curtain of hair, the vampire's eyes were sparkling, and Asher had the impression that he had found this mode of travel greatly to his taste.
"Or hard upon our heels." Ysidro stooped, bracing his bandaged hands on bent knees. Asher pushed up his goggles, leaned the bike against the wall, unlashed the silvered steel bar from the handlebars, and hung it around his own neck. Using Ysidro's back as a step, he could reach the top corners of the rustic stone gateway, to scramble over the six-foot palings. He had scarcely dropped to the drive on the other side when Ysidro appeared, palely silhouetted against the uneasy darkness, and sprang down without a sound to his side. At his lodgings, Asher had paused only long enough to don his boots, goggles, and leather jacket, for the night was freezing cold; Ysidro in his open shirt seemed to feel nothing.
"Thus I do not suggest we divide to search."
"Can you hear anything from here?" Asher asked.
The vampire shut his eyes, listening intently to the half-heard mutter-ing of the wind in the autumn woods. "Not clearly," he murmured at last. "Yet the house is not empty-that I know."
Asher used his good hand to unsling the bar from around his neck. Scudding overcast was beginning to cover the sky. Through it, the house was a barely seen shape of gray, dotted with the black of win-dows, disturbingly like some monster's misshapen skull. "If he's behind us, he may arrive on top of us before we'd finished reconnoitering," he said grimly, striding up the ghostly stripe of the drive. "And if he's there already-would you or I be able to see or hear him?"
Asher knew the floor plan of the Peaks, though he'd never been more than a casual acquaintance of Blaydon's. But most of the dons had received invitations at one time or another, and Asher had a field agent's memory for such things. Every atom of his flesh shrank from entering the dark trap of those encircling walls without the usual pre-liminary checks. But there was no time, and they would, in any case, be useless.
They skirted the lawn and garden to the kitchen yard, Ysidro leading the way across the leaf-strewn pavement. At this point, concealment was of no more use to them than whispering; they were either perfectly safe or beyond help. And if Dennis had not arrived before them-if they were, for the moment, safe-outdoors there was a remote chance that Ysidro's vampire senses could detect his coming.
In any case, the cellars were reached from the kitchen.
The wind was rising, groaning faintly over the tops of the downs and stirring the dark hem of the woods a hundred feet from the house in a way Asher did not like. The stables stretched along one side of the yard, every door shut and bolted; the kitchen door was locked as well, but Asher drove his elbow through the window pane next to it and reached through to wrench over the latch. Beside him, he was aware of Ysidro listening, turning his head this way and that, the stray gusts flicking at his long hair, trying by some leap of the senses to detect the undetectable and to hear what was no more audible than the slow falling of dust.
The darkness of the kitchen stank of mildew and spoiling table scraps. As Ysidro found and lit a lamp, there was a flurrying rustle of tiny feet, and the primrose kerchief of light caught the tails of mice as they whipped out of sight. Asher cursed again, softly. Open tins and dirty dishes lined the old-fashioned soapstone counters, like sleeping tramps below the Embankment on a summer night. Blaydon, of course -in too great a hurry to pump and heat water to clean up. The vampire raised the lamp to shed a greater light; in its glow, Asher could see his fastidious nostrils flare.
"He may be here, covering our minds from his presence, but I do not think he has b
een and gone. There is a smell of decay about him which lingers in still air."
"We'll check the cellars first," Asher said, crossing the worn stone floor to the narrow door beside the stove. "Upstairs we can always bolt through a window." He pushed the door open. The smell of dust, coals, and mice almost choked him. "You lead. If he's here, he's likelier to be behind than before."
He kept his back flattened to the worn, slatted wainscot of the stair-case, his left hand with the silver bar on the upstairs side, while Ysidro edged swiftly down the steps before him. There was a wine cellar, stripped of everything but the racks, and a coal hole, half-filled with coals and dirt.
"There's another cellar off the butler's pantry," Asher said as they swiftly ascended the stairs back to the kitchen, their shadows reeling drunkenly in the lamplight. "You'd never know the door wasn't just a cupboard. I've never been down there-it may be just a boot hole, but it might be large enough to keep someone in."
The butler's pantry was more like a closet than a room, filled with shelves and family silver. The door, tucked away behind a cupboard, was bolted from the outside. "She's down there," Simon murmured, even as Asher slipped the bolts. "At least someone is, and the breathing sounds like hers."
"Lydia?" Asher called softly down the dark twist of the stairs, but kept his post at the top until Ysidro had edged his way down them. There was a door at the bottom, too; between them, the brick-walled slot of the staircase smelled like a death trap. The door at the bottom was bolted, as well. "Lydia, it's James! Don't be afraid..."
The door burst open as Ysidro slid the bolts, the violence of it taking him almost totally by surprise. The swerving lamplight showed Asher the whiteness of Lydia's face, under a carnelian whirlwind of unbound hair, Her spectacles flashed in the light, and there was the thin slip of something silver in one of her hands as she stabbed at Ysidro's eyes. The vampire was out of her way before Asher could see where he moved; Lydia whirled, confused, and Asher called out, "Lydia, it's James!"
She'd already begun to pelt up the stairs and now stopped short at the sight of the dark form looming at their top; Ysidro, with considerable presence of mind, raised the lamp to shed its rays as far as the top of the stairs. "James...!" she sobbed, and then swung back, looking at the vampire who stood, lamp aloft like Liberty's torch, just beside the door.
"Oh..." She looked momentarily nonplussed, the silver hatpin with which she had attacked him still glinting sharp and vicious in her hand, "Iam sorry. You must be Don Simon Ysidro..." She held out her other hand to him, and he took it and kissed it with antique grace. "It was my pleasure," the vampire replied, and she laughed shakily at this patently mendacious platitude as they hastened up the stairs. "I am at your service, Madame."
At the top, she caught Asher violently around the waist, burying her face in his leather-clad shoulder and hugging him hard enough to drive the breath from him. Through the ferocity of the embrace, he felt her trembling with cold and shock and reaction to her attack on what she had thought were her captors. He wrapped his good arm reassuringly tight around her shoulders, silver bar and all.
Typically, she broke from him almost at once, so as not to tie up a hand with a weapon in it. Ysidro had somehow moved past them-Asher never did figure out how, given the narrowness of the door-and was leading the way swiftly through the close confines of the pantry; Asher was aware of the clinical avidness with which Lydia watched his slender back.
"Are you all right?"
She nodded, pulling tighter around her the snagged gray cardigan she wore over shirtwaist and skirt-Blaydon's, he noted, and far too big for her. "That was the butler's apartments. Have we time to pump some water? I didn't drink the last pitcher Professor Blaydon brought me; I knew he must be putting the drugs in it..."
"No," Ysidro said briefly. "I don't like the smell of the night-I don't like the feel. There's something about..."
Asher started to protest, but Lydia said, "No, it's all right, the pump here always took forever. What happened to your arm?"
"Dennis."
They halted just within the kitchen door. In the uncertain starlight the yard and the woods beyond seemed alive with the sinister move-ment of the wind. Asher hated the look of them and hated still more the dark house which seemed to be closing around them like a fist.
"Stay close to the house wall," he breathed. "We won't be able to see him in the open. At least, near a wall, he'll have to come at us from one direction."
Taking a deep breath, he stepped outside. Lydia followed, holding the lamp. Ysidro brought up the rear. Seeing them standing together for the first time, Asher realized with a start that the vampire stood no taller than she.
Softly, she whispered, "Have you-seen him?"
The wind moved his hair against the strap of the goggles still pushed up on his forehead-he nearly started out of his skin. "Did you?"
She shook her head. "But I assume there's a reason why he-he only spoke to me through the shut door." She glanced back at Ysidro and wet her lips. "His father's serum must have done something other than make him... like you."
"Indeed," the vampire responded, never taking his eyes from the lawn and shrubbery around them. "Dennis is not like me."
They reached the front of the house. Seventy-plus feet of rutted gravel drive stretched before them to the iron bars of the gates. The wind drove a swirl of dead beech leaves over it, like the whirling souls of Dante's damned, who could not forgo the pleasures of the living. The motorcycle was just beyond the gate, and Asher's whole soul revolted at that nebulous vista of dark. He glanced quickly back at Ysidro, who was turning his head, listening with fear in his eyes to the night.
"Can you make it back to London afoot?"
"Not before dawn. But I have boltholes nearer than that-property purchased too recently to show up on your precious lists, my dear Mistress Asher. Go back to London. Stay awake and stay always around people in some public place. He cannot take you there; he dare not let his existence be suspected. I will come as soon as I can in the night..."
Together, the three of them stepped from the sheltering shadows of the house. The wind swirled Lydia's dark skirts and the tangle of her hair and made all the weed stems caught in the platter-sized blob of the jiggling lamplight jerk and tremble erratically. Iron gloom stretched in all directions; Asher felt naked before it. Lydia whispered, "Shall we run?"
"It wouldn't make us any safer," he murmured back, "and running, we'd be less likely to see a threat."
It would, however, have made him feel better, as they moved slowly and cautiously through what felt like the Great American Desert of blowing darkness. The wall loomed before them-stone gateposts, shut and boarded lodge, and weeds shivering thick around the open iron-work of the gate.
Ysidro's hand touched his arm suddenly, staying him, drawing him back toward the house. There was a gray flutter of movement some-where beyond the gate...
Asher saw Dennis come over the gate, though his mind stalled on the detail, with a sense ofjamais vu as in a dream, as if he had momentarily forgotten the significance of that bulking form dropping like a cougar from the top of the stone gate pillar, eyes glinting in the reflected light of the lamp. The next second, it seemed, it was upon them, though later Asher had clear memories of standing, staring like an idiot, and watch-ing it rush at them with horrible speed. Ysidro must have already started to move, for Dennis caught him, not full-on, but by one arm in an unbreakable grip.
Asher brought the silver bar down with all his strength on Dennis' wrist, even as the mutant fledgling ripped at Ysidro's throat. From the tail of his eye, Asher caught the black glitter of blood. It streamed down from Dennis' fangs as he drew back with a glottal roar of pain, and Asher backhanded him with the bar across the face, hearing as well as feeling the facial bones crunch. Dennis screamed. Blood splattered Asher's face like gouts of hot syrup. Then the vampire was gone, and Lydia and Ysidro, blood streaming from his torn shoulder, were drag-ging Asher, stumbling, across the open lawn to
ward the woods. Behind them, the dropped lamp was guttering erratically in a pool of kerosene-
"Chapel ruins!" Lydia gasped. "Shelter without being closed in!" Blood was splattered liberally over one side of her white shirtwaist and the sweater, droplets of it beading even on her spectacle lenses; it cov-ered the first four inches of the silver hatpin still in her hand. She must have stabbed Dennis from the other side. Ysidro's shoulder had been opened to halfway down his back, a dark stain spreading with terrible speed over the torn rags of his shirt.
Long weeds tangled at their knees as they cut through the overgrown garden. Their feet skidded on mud and wet leaves. Behind them as they ran, Asher could hear Dennis shrieking in pain, as if the impact of the silver still burned. On his right, Ysidro's bony grip on his swollen arm was excruciating, but he hardly cared. They had to reach shelter of some kind, a wall or enclosure at their backs, or they were dead.
The chapel ruin stood in a little dell perhaps a hundred yards from the house, its ivy-draped walls sheltered by a sizable copse of beeches. It offered, as Lydia had said, ideal shelter without the potential imprison-ment of the house, the roofless chancel providing cover on most of three sides and greatly narrowing the potential field of attack.
"What about the crypt?" Ysidro leaned against the stump of a broken pillar, half doubled-over with pain and dizziness, as Lydia worked a birch sapling loose from among the fallen stones. With an effort, the vampire straightened and cast a quick glance to the moss-covered altar behind them. "If there's another
way in, he can..."
"There isn't a crypt." Lydia hauled her skirt to untie one of her several petticoats. The lowest flounce was saturated from the grass but the one above it was dry. With unsteady fingers Ysidro ripped it free and bound it around the wood as a makeshift torch. Never taking his eyes from the rough expanse of hillside that lay between chapel and lawn, Asher tossed them the box of lucifer matches he always kept in his jacket pocket; there was the sharp hiss of sulphur, and the fabric licked into flame. "Dennis' grandfather had the whole ruin put up at the same time as the house was built-an architect from Birmingham designed it. It's desperately picturesque in the daylight. This wall, those arches over there, and the tombstones on the hillside are all of it there is."
01 Those Who Hunt The Night ja-1 Page 29
