01 Those Who Hunt The Night ja-1
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Ysidro laughed, his fangs flashing white in the glare of the flame. Lydia came over to them, a second firebrand in one hand and her silver hatpin in the other. The ruddy glow illuminated the weed-curtained stone of the walls, the spurious Gothic corbels, and the shadows of the altar. Behind her spectacles, her face was scratched like an urchin's, smudged with dirt, and spotted with Dennis' blood. To Asher's eyes she was utterly beautiful.
She tucked the matches back into his jacket pocket. Quietly, she asked, "Are you more or less all right?"
Dennis' screams of pain and fury had ceased; the wind had fallen. The naked beeches and the thick clumps of elder and hawthorn around the walls seemed, like themselves, to be waiting. The silence was worse now than any sound.
"You mean, aside from a broken hand and assorted bites, contusions, and abrasions, and a mutant vampire fifty feet away who's going to kill us all?"
Her lips twitched. "Aside from that, yes."
"Yes."
"I was worried." Her voice sounded very small; he knew she could see the half-healed red bites that tracked his jugular from ear to collar-bone. In the torchlight, her breath blew as a tiny puff of gold.
"Not as worried as I was, believe me."
There was a moment's silence. Then: "Was that... that thing we saw... Was that Dennis?"
She'd told him once that Dennis had proposed marriage to her for the first time here at the Peaks. Dennis had never gotten it through his head that she could actually not want to be his wife. It occurred to Asher that Dennis had undoubtedly done so here in the ruins. In the slanting light of a summer's evening, there would be no more romantic spot in twenty square miles. He sighed and said, "Yes."
Ysidro moved closer to them, holding his torch aloft. "Can you feel it?" Through the rip in his shirt, Asher could see the wound in his shoulder, still tracking a sluggish trickle of dark blood. A mortal man would have been in shock. The vampire was only shivering as if with deadly cold, his face strained and sunken-looking. The mark of Dennis' grip was visible on his arm between the rolled-up shirt sleeve and the wrappings on his hands, blackening bruises and five claw rakes where the nails had ripped the colorless flesh. "There's movement out there, on the lawn. I can't see exactly..."
For a moment there was nothing, the whole night holding its breath.
Then Dennis was there, appearing with terrible suddenness just be-yond range of the torch's light, as, long ago in the dark of the cata-combs, Brother Anthony had seemed to fade into existence from the grinning shadows of the bones.
Beside him, Asher heard Lydia's breath hiss in pity and horror.
Dennis Blaydon had always been of heroic build and proportion; a golden Hercules in cricket whites. Now his size seemed monstrous, the breadth of his shoulders and chest, visible through his ripped and open shirt, like some maddened bull's. Blood tracked down his side and blot-ted his shirt above his ribs-had it been anyone but a vampire, the puncture wound administered by Lydia's hatpin would have been a serious matter-and where the bar had struck his face the flesh had puffed up like rotting meat. He was barely recognizable; the straight nose was flattened and spread now. Drool and blood dripped from the outsize fangs; the leprous skin gleamed like a snake's back in the moon-light. The glaring blue eyes were no longer even remotely human.
"Professor Asher," he whispered, in a sticky decay of a voice. "Lydia, get away from him. I won't harm you, I swear it. You know I'd never harm you, Lydia; I kept Dad from harming you..."
"Only because you wanted her for yourself!" Asher called into the flickering darkness. "Because you wanted to make her like yourself, infect her with that foul malady in your veins, so she'd be yours for-ever."
"That isn't true!" Dennis' glaring eyes widened with hate. "Dad will find a cure-Dad will make me better! And why shouldn't I have her? She should have been mine. Now she'll be mine forever. I'll make her love me! It's him I want-the vampire. I need him. I need him! "
"Since we're easy prey without him," Asher said quietly, "I'm afraid we need him, too."
Then he blinked, trying to keep the vampire in sight-trying to focus his mind on where he had last been. But Dennis was no longer-quite- visible. Asher had the impression he would still be able to see him if he knew where to look, but he could not find him now. A breath of move-ment stirred the ragged clumps of thorn and elder, catching now here. now there-the whole night seemed to quiver, shifting as soon as he moved his eyes from any given spot.
"He's a killer, Professor Asher," a voice breathed out of that dark-ness. "Killed women, killed sweet little children-he'll kill Lydia if you'll let him. You know he's killed..."
He called into the darkness, "And you haven't?"
"That's different. That's for a good cause. I had to take the risk-this country needs men with my power, my strength. And anyway, it wasn't me that killed all those people. It was the vampires. Calvaire and Lotta..."
"Calvaire and Lotta were dead by that time and you know it."
"It was still them," Dennis insisted, with the kind of logic Asher remembered from having the young man in his classes. "They did it, not me, and, anyway, I did it for a good cause. I need the blood. I NEED IT!"
Something blacked Asher's mind, a blurring cloud of faintness and exhaustion. He thought he saw movement, a rustle in the long weeds that carpeted the fabricated gravestones far to his left, but the next second Ysidro swung the torch as Dennis came surging out of the darkness almost on top of him, Asher lunged at them, slashing with the metal bar at the mutant vampire's broad back, but Dennis was gone again, and Ysidro was on his knees, clutching at the big muscle between neck and shoulder, blood welling dark between his fingers. His torch lay guttering out on the damp ground.
"Killer," Dennis' voice whispered out of the dark, as Asher, never loosing his grip on the bar, held his arm down to help Ysidro to his feet. "Both of you, killers. Spies, sneaks, cowards, and killers of real men when their backs are turned," Holding on to his shoulder, Ysidro was shuddering all over, his hand like ice, even through the leather of the jacket, his thin body oddly weightless against Asher's. The fine bones of his face stood out like a skull's with shock and fatigue-Asher won-dered if it were possible for a vampire to faint.
"You never deserved Lydia. You lied to her, cheated me of what should have been mine. You made her leave me alone. She would have loved me if it hadn't been for you. But I won't be alone. When I've killed you both, she'll be mine. I know how to make a vampire now..."
Asher swung toward where he thought the voice was coming from, but there was nothing. Ysidro straightened up a little and staggered, fighting to remain on his feet. "Where is he?"
He shook his head. "I don't know." Oddly enough, his voice sounded as cool and disinterested as ever. "I thought he was over among the tombstones just before he came at me..."
"How long can the three of us hold him off?"
"Long enough for the silver poisoning to take effect on him?" Lydia came up beside them, the flickering brand in her hand making her spectacle lenses seem like rounds of fire.
"No." The vampire's light hand tightened over Asher's shoulder, "It has only made him more frantic than ever for my blood. He has a great deal of strength still. It will be days, maybe weeks... If he takes me or another vampire or sufficient human lives, he may prolong his life indefinitely. In any case, it will be dawn soon."
She pushed her spectacles more firmly up onto the bridge of her nose. "The room where I was kept had no windows," she said. "If we can make it back to the house we can guard you..."
"You'd never even see him strike." The vampire straightened slowly away from Asher's grip, removed his hand from the wound in his neck; the thin fingers were dark with gore, and the handkerchief that
bound the silver burns saturated and dripping. His voice was expressionless, "The dawnlight will kill me-and then he will have you..."
Lydia whirled sharply, raising her torch. "What's that?"
Something white flickered and moved among the tombstones.<
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Threads of milky hair caught the lift of the night wind. There was a fluttering tangle of black over limbs colorless as bone, like dead ivy cloaking marble. The unearthly, unmistakable gleam of vampire eyes showed.
Asher breathed, "Anthony,.."
Tiny, skeletal-white hands lifted to the cloud-patched sky. Asher had a glimpse of a white skull-face, the tonsure framed in pouring streams of filthy white mane; he seemed to hear on the night wind the whispered cry: "In Nomine Patris, et Filti, et Spirtius Sancti.. ."
Ysidro shouted, "Antonius, non!" as the dark shape of Dennis rushed out of the night and fell like storm cloud upon that lonely, fragile shape among the tombstones.
If the little monk could have avoided his attacker or fought him, he did not-it did not even seem that he tried. Dennis caught him up like a snake seizing a bird, even as Asher plunged out of the safety of the chapel ruin, pain jarring his broken hand with every step on the uneven ground. He heard Lydia call his name, Ysidro shout, "You fool...!" A deep, sticky groan of satiation broke from Dennis, and somewhere he thought he heard, perhaps only in his mind, a frail drift of voice: "In manus tuas, Domini ..." as the two vampires locked together in the obscene parody of a kiss.
Then Dennis flung the broken body aside and turned, blood running down his fangs, swollen lips, and rutted chin. With a bestial snarl, he fell upon Asher like a charging bear.
Asher knew it was blood frenzy beyond caution and swung the silver bar with all the strength he had. But Dennis' weight smashed into him with full force, throwing him backward. He had a confused glimpse of the bloody mouth gaping wider and wider, the blue eyes suffused, not with hatred, but with astonishment and agony. In the split second as they collided, Asher realized that Dennis died even as he sprang.
The impact of the corpse knocked the breath out of him as they hit the ground; the broken edge of an imitation tombstone gouged him in the back. He lay for a moment stunned, under the stinking and inert mass of infected flesh that had been Dennis, and in that moment it came to him what must have killed him.
Painfully, he rolled out from under the body. Torchlight splashed jerkily over him; he heard the swish of Lydia's skirt in the long weeds and Ysidro's voice saying, "James...?" For a moment, he stood swaying over the monster carcass, the silver bar dangling uselessly from his hand. Then he dropped it and stumbled a few feet away to the body of Brother Anthony, like a broken marionette among the frilled Victo-rian gothic of the pinchbeck tombs.
The little Minorite lay crumpled together, a shrunken tangle of old bones, rotting robes, and white hair bound together with a filthy rosary, clotted with his own blood and that of six centuries of kills. His bare feet were scratched and bloody. The big veins of his throat had been ripped open by the violence of Dennis' attack, not merely punctured- there was very little blood left. Though sunken and fallen in upon the skull, his face wore a look of strange serenity and the faintest hint of a smile.
Behind him, Lydia and Ysidro were silent, Asher raised the dead vampire's left arm and pushed back the decayed shreds of the sleeve. The torchlight showed clearly the line of dark-stained punctures that tracked the big vein. Rising to his feet, he stepped around behind the tombstone to the place where he had first thought he'd seen movement.
His own ulster lay there, its nubby brown tweed still flecked with the hay from the bales in the Queen Anne mews where he'd left it with Ysidro's cloak. On top of it lay the velvet box that had contained the hypodermic needle and its ten ampoules of silver nitrate.
The ampoules were all empty.
Twenty- two
"He was the only vampire who could have done it." Pausing in the act of trying to do up shirt buttons one-handed-as he had paused already half a dozen times that afternoon-Asher looked again at the brown velvet box where it lay on a corner of the dressing table, with its empty ampoules and its bloodstained needle. "I don't think a living man, much less a younger vampire, would have survived to inject himself a second time."
Lydia shook her head. "How did he know?" Frowning with concen-tration, she stood before Asher's shaving mirror to construct a running Windsor knot in one of his ties around her own neck. The last of the evening sunlight, falling through the cheap lace curtains of Asher's rooms on Prince of Wales Colonnade, sprinkled the ghosts of shadow flowers over her white shirtwaist and freckled her auburn hair with gold.
"About the ampoules themselves? If he'd been following us from Paris, he could easily have listened through the windows of your room when Ysidro and I spoke of it. Ysidro tells me vampires often listen for days to the conversations of their prey. And he wasn't unfamiliar with the activities and technology of modern men, you know-merely apart from them, as the other vampires, the so-called 'good' vampires, were not. If he was following me the day Dennis attacked me at Grippen's house, he would have seen Dennis and guessed that only something as -as heroic as the measures he took-would have served."
"Poor Dennis." Lydia loosened the tie, stood for a moment, looking into Asher's eyes in the mirror before them. "He used to say the most horrid things about the other girls at Somerville-about them wanting to act like men because they couldn't get men-absolutely without thinking. And whenever I'd point out it was what I was doing, he'd be so patronizing, as if I were only at University until I could find a husband and a home and have children. 'You're different,' he'd say... He could be so sweet to me, so kind, and yet..."
She shook her head. Removing the tie from her own neck, she turned to slip it over Asher's head. "He wanted so much to be a hero, but the fact is that I never took him seriously at all."
He took her wrist in the fingers of his good hand as she adjusted his collar. "You have to admit that, in my place, he never would have let you endanger yourself by coming to London."
"I know." The expression of sorrow that was more pity than grief faded; she smiled ruefully up into his eyes. "That's why I never took him seriously. He couldn't conceive of anyone being able to save a situation but himself." She sighed and fixed her attention for a few moments on the placing of his stickpin and the minute adjustments in the set of his tie. "The awful thing is that I'm sure that's why he injected
himself with his father's serum-because he couldn't stand the thought of such powers as Calvaire had going to anyone but him."
They had burned Brother Anthony's body before the coming of dawn on a pyre hastily assembled from the Peaks' woodshed-Anthony's, and Dennis' with him. The flames were searingly hot and blue, and Asher had been wryly amused to see Lydia studying the atypical blaze with interest, clearly taking notes in her head. But she hadn't, he no-ticed, suggested preserving either of the vampires for further experimen-tation. Whatever alien pathologies lingered in their tainted blood, she had no desire to permit them further existence, even in the allegedly controlled conditions of a laboratory.
Ysidro had been gone long before the fire began to sink. By the time the police arrived, drawn by a shepherd's report of the blaze, it was sunup, and Asher and Lydia were far down the road to Prince's Ris-borough, looking like a couple of tinkers and walking the motorcycle Dennis had disabled between them, the grimy brown ulster thrown round both their shoulders for warmth. The fire had been reported in a minor article on a back page in that afternoon' sDaily Mail, There was no mention of human remains in the blaze.
"In any case," Lydia went on after a moment, turning back from gazing rather abstractedly out at the sunset maze of rooftops and chim-neys, "if the positions had been reversed, Dennis would have told me nothing of what was going on-merely not to worry myself about such things. And it wouldn't have answered. Because the killer, the day stalker-Dennis-knew me, and wanted me. He did see me once, while he was stalking Bully Joe Davies. And he'd been-calling me, tracking me-in my dreams. He wasn't as good as the other vampires were at it, but... And then again, sooner or later, whether you or I or anyone did anything about it or not, he would have learned somehow about how to make another vampire like himself and he would have come after me." She wiped her
eyes almost surreptitiously and shoved her spectacles more firmly up onto the bridge of her nose. "My going to snoop about Blaydon's place in Queen Anne Street only speeded things up."
She picked up his coat from the bed and came over to help him on with it again. By the time they'd waked up after their return from the Peaks, the short autumn afternoon had been far advanced, and a goodly portion of what remained had been spent at Middlesex Hospital, getting Asher's battered arm reset. He could cheerfully have gone back to bed now and slept the clock round, but there remained one thing yet to do.
"Are you sure you want to?" Lydia asked.
Asher glanced past her at his own reflection in the mirror. Shaved and bathed, he no longer looked like a tramp, but his face had a drawn, exhausted look he hadn't seen there in years. He knew it, however, from his missions abroad-the familiar, soul-deep ache he associated with climbing tiredly onto the boat train for home.
"No," he said. "But with Dennis gone, I don't think there's any danger. And someone has to tell him. Just promise me you'll stay here -stay indoors-'til I come back. All right?"
She nodded. Asher cast one last glance at the sky, visible through the windows, satisfying himself that, before full dark fell, he would be well away from these rooms. Grippen knew about Lydia's rooms in Bruton Place, but he didn't-or at least Asher thought he didn't-know about 6 Prince of Wales Colonnade,
Unless, of course, Ysidro had told him.