When he wasn’t convincing people, after the sun went down, that he simply was Noel …
‘That’s where all those legends come from,’ she went on chattily, ‘about this woman or that welcoming a vampire into her chamber under the impression that it’s her husband. Or else it’s just the vampire using that illusion that they do – that deception that keeps people from seeing their teeth and claws, or what their faces really look like … I don’t suppose it was very difficult for Damien to get Noel to smoke himself silly in the hours before sunrise, then use drugs to keep himself awake into the daytime while he walked about in Noel’s body, talked in Noel’s voice. No wonder poor Ned thought Noel had changed.’ She brushed gently at the dark lock of hair that fell over the young man’s forehead. ‘Poor Noel …’
And that, she thought, is why Damien Zahorec chose him. They were of a height, with the same coloring, almost the same build …
And of a social position that would make the substitution worthwhile.
Certainly it was by his build and outline and coloring that she’d identified him, at Wycliffe House and in company after dark when she hadn’t been wearing her spectacles. She’d simply had the impression that this was Noel Wredemere, Viscount Colwich. People who had no experience with the illusory powers of a really skilful vampire wouldn’t even be looking for the differences. They simply wouldn’t notice that they weren’t noticing what ‘Colwich’ looked like.
Like me and Simon when we met Hellice Spills in the hallway. At night, Noel simply gets dispatched to his ‘meditation chamber’ and his pipe, and Damien plays games with illusion …
‘We’re not going to hurt him,’ Cece protested, her voice shrill. ‘He’s perfectly happy. And Damien’s situation is desperate. He had to escape, had to get away …’
‘From the war?’
The girl looked nonplussed. Oh, come ON! thought Lydia. Even I know about the war in the Balkans!
‘No – I mean, yes … I mean, I suppose the war had something to do with it.’ Cece stammered, like a schoolchild thrown off her stride in the midst of a recitation. Then her eyes flooded with tears, frantic that Lydia should understand. ‘But it’s worse than that! She’s after him. The woman – the devil – who enslaved him, who forced him into being what he is! She held him prisoner, kept him in the dungeon of her castle for a year, trying to break his spirit … After she forced him to become a vampire, she made him bring her victims, made him hunt with her … Forced him into the state from which he now seeks redemption—’
‘Redemption?’ Lydia had been watching Cece’s gun hand, gauging the distance between them, the size of the tiny room … and the time she had before Damien Zahorec himself appeared. When I didn’t turn up at the ballet he must have gone to see if I was investigating Wycliffe House, and sent her here …
But at the word redemption she blinked, astonished at the degree of naivety. ‘Is that what you think he wants your father’s books for?’
The dim light flashed in Cece’s diamonds as she drew herself up. ‘It is what he seeks! It’s in one of the books – he doesn’t know which. How to return to being a living man. How to recover his soul. He has part of one book; he knows there are others. I’m the only one who can help him …’
‘Which is why he started appearing to you in your dreams, back in Florence,’ said Lydia gently. ‘Because your father had the books. But what he wants isn’t redemption. Just how to escape from Ippolyta, the master vampire who holds power over him. And how to obtain power of his own over the vampires of London.’
‘You know about Ippolyta?’ Her surprise would have been comical, if the entire situation weren’t soaked in blood, and drugs, and madness, and death.
If Miranda’s life – and Nan’s, and Noel’s, and Cece’s, and Lydia’s own – didn’t hang in precarious balance.
Here we go …
In her kindest voice, Lydia asked, ‘Did you think you were the only one he sent those dreams to?’
And in the split-second of disillusioned shock – of immobilized grief at the fissuring of everything she’d assumed was going on, and before outrage and denial and murderous reaction could set in – Lydia, who had hooked her foot around the pedestal of Noel’s laden bedside table, shot it at her with all of her strength and at the same instant ducked sideways, in case Cece fired at her after all.
Cece didn’t. The revolver flew from her hand as she sprawled backwards; Lydia had no idea where it landed, because she launched herself on the younger woman, grabbed her by the hair and one wrist, twisted her arm behind her back. Cece clawed viciously at her but fortunately was still wearing kid opera gloves. The American girl flailed, kicked, screamed curses, but terror gave Lydia focus and strength. She shoved the younger woman headlong into the wardrobe, slammed the door, and turned the key.
Noel hadn’t stirred.
I’ve got to do this … Lydia straightened her spectacles, looked around for the revolver, which had skidded under the divan, caught it up, checked to make sure the opium lamp hadn’t ignited anything …
I’m forgetting something.
She yanked open the door that led back into Damien’s coffin chamber. His pitch-black, windowless crypt of a coffin-chamber …
Candle …
She re-lit it from the hanging lamp, hands trembling so badly she could barely keep it steady.
Inside the wardrobe, Cece was screaming, ‘Damien! Damien!’
Lydia ducked through the door into the coffin chamber, gathered up her skirts, fled upwards through the crypts of the old church. Jamie. He’ll be back at the hotel by this time …
She was in Brompton Road by the time she realized what she’d left behind in the hidden room beneath Dallaby House: her handbag.
She hadn’t a farthing on her.
Queen Street is only a few streets away … And the dead travel fast …
Knees trembling so badly she felt she’d fall, Lydia walked up Brompton Road towards the park. There’ll be a cab stand near Tattersalls …
What the cabbies thought of her – ashen-faced, shaking in her elaborate silken coat, with her long red hair hanging over her shoulders – she couldn’t imagine, but she found one who, after considerable argument, agreed to take her to Finsbury Circus in trade for her earrings. (‘’Ey, Jack, you think them’s really real?’ ‘Better get somethin’ better’n that for collateral, haw-haw.’) The entire journey there, through the worst of the standstill evening traffic, Lydia expected any moment for Damien Zahorec to spring into the cab beside her, to catch her throat in those long, clawed hands …
Jamie … Jamie, please be there …
‘Oh, hell, ma’am, I can’t take your ear-bobs,’ protested the driver, when he helped her to the pavement. ‘You look like you had a bloody night of it as it is. You just send me the money when you can.’
He shoved a grubby fragment of a feed-bill into her hand, with an address in Brixton scribbled on it in pencil. Before Lydia could answer he led her firmly to the door of the Temperance Hotel and opened it, then returned to his cab and climbed, puffing (he must have weighed well over two hundred pounds), on to the box, and a moment later disappeared into traffic.
The room key was still behind the desk. ‘Mr Berkhampstead’s not been in,’ said the clerk, and it took Lydia a moment to recall that Berkhampstead was the alias under which she’d rented the room. ‘No, ma’am, no messages for you.’
Her hand was on the door handle of the room, her key in the lock, when she heard a noise inside. A clack – something falling over …
She felt like her very skin rose up all over her body.
What do I do? Open it? Run screaming down to the lobby?
She stood for five minutes, listening. (If it’s Zahorec, would I even hear anything?)
Another clack. It’s the wardrobe door swinging.
But I closed the wardrobe.
She fumbled in the pocket of her coat for Cece Armistead’s revolver. As if that’s going to have the slightest effect on a va
mpire. She turned the key, thrust the door open with her foot, gun held out before her …
Cold breeze from the window billowed her coat around her. Light from the street lamps below showed her the wardrobe open, every drawer of the little desk gaping, contents scattered. Papers like strewn leaves.
Papers …
He knew where I was staying because he looked in my handbag.
The dead travel fast …
Particularly when they don’t have to argue with cab drivers or sit in traffic jams in Piccadilly Circus …
She set the revolver on the corner of the table, lit the gas.
All the reports of Messrs Teazle and McClennan were flung everywhere. All her own notes, on them and from her interviews with Hellice Spills.
Simon’s note on the Bank of England stationery was missing.
The one on whose margin she’d written: Tufton Farm, St Albans.
He knows where Miranda is.
He’s on his way there now.
TWENTY-FOUR
Simon left London in 1911. He didn’t make new lairs.
Lydia paid off the cab driver in Thames Street (with a mental note to send five pounds to the Good Samaritan of earlier in the evening), turned into the dark mazes of courts that had, in this neighborhood of the City, survived the 1666 fire.
Even after four years, she remembered the way.
A crumbling Gothic church at the end of a narrow yard. A winding alley, lightless in the river fog.
Her gold-and-turquoise shoes, never made for running and leaping and dodging vampires in, pinched her feet: blisters made and blisters torn. She knew she’d pay for this in the morning, but there hadn’t been time to change.
He knows where Miranda is. That’s where he’s going.
The blackened half-timbered house was as she’d first seen it, in the dreary winter of 1909. Simon, please be here …
On the doorstep she called out, softly, ‘Simon?’
It was black as a tomb. She tried the door, with its curiously new locks. Both were fastened. She stepped back, crossed the narrow lane – cobbles slick with the dung of horses and dogs – and looked up at the windows.
Behind the shutters, a thread of candle flame appeared.
‘Simon …’
For several long minutes she shivered on the doorstep, waiting. Then, with a frightened glance up and down the dark street – though she was virtually certain that the last policeman to come by this way had probably been in Queen Victoria’s reign, if not Queen Anne’s – she lit her candle, knelt before the door, and started in on the lock with her picks. I’ve picked this lock before …
In any case, it was not the police that she feared.
The door-handle clicked. Lydia pulled out the picks, scrambled to her feet as it opened, nearly knocking over her candle.
‘Simon!’
The scarred face framed by the long, colorless hair was more like a skull than a man’s. ‘Forgive me, Mistress.’ His voice was barely audible, his touch like frozen bone.
‘Simon, what happened?’
He drew her inside, stooped to gather up the candle. ‘Did you get the list, Lady? ’Tis years since I tampered with elixirs to prolong wakefulness into the day—’
‘He’s found where Miranda is,’ she interrupted. ‘Zahorec. He’s gone to get her.’
Stillness. The yellow eyes with their faint pleatings of gray regarded her over the candle flame. ‘When?’
‘Two hours ago. Jamie’s … I don’t know where he is; he was supposed to meet me this afternoon and didn’t. We have to go; we have to go now …’
‘Upstairs,’ said the vampire. ‘There’s fire there. You’re frozen.’
He wore, she saw for the first time, a quilted dressing gown of dark green velvet over a linen nightshirt, and had wrapped a Paisley shawl over that. She remembered him telling her once that when vampires grew old – or when they were hurt or starved, she had also learned – they suffered badly from cold. A little glow of firelight reflected from the upstairs chamber, a room almost completely walled in books. An armchair of much-worn purple velvet stood before that comforting blaze. She recalled it, from her first visit. Don Simon drew up another for her, and she saw him lean on its back as if his very bones hurt.
‘Is that what it does to you?’ she whispered. ‘The elixir?’
‘’Tis passing off. I’m well.’
He didn’t look well.
‘Can I get you something …?’ She stopped herself, blushing.
He cocked a very human eyebrow at her. ‘Something to drink? ’Tis kind of you. I misdoubt we shall find a train so late, but you’ll need to know for the morrow. There’s a Bradshaw’s Guide there.’ He pointed a skinny forefinger toward the nearest shelf.
‘But how …?’
She turned with the railway guide in hand, and though she’d been between Don Simon and the door, she now found herself alone.
A few years previously, Asher’s old master in Prague, on learning that he was traveling with the Undead, had given him a bracelet with a set of sharp internal teeth, tightened by the turn of a screw. The old man had warned him against ‘that state you are in when you are not thinking of anything in particular. Perhaps you are a little sleepy … and off your guard. Pain will usually serve against the vampire …’
The best remedy against the vampire, the old man had gone on to say, was distance: the more of it, the better.
Pain served.
The night was interminable. Despite his recollection of Wirt’s frightful death, the terror of waiting for Geoff Vauxhill and Penelope and Mrs Raleigh to appear from the darkness exhausted itself quickly. The throbbing pain remained. There was no way to lie, no way to turn himself, that wasn’t excruciating. The weight of the stone blocks pinning his leg brought not only pain but the cold giddiness of shock that came and went. When Millward emerged from his place of concealment to refill the reservoir of the lantern – Asher guessed it must be nearly midnight by then – he asked him, ‘Do you really think they’re not going to know this is a trap?’
The vampire hunter looked so disconcerted that Asher realized, with a kind of weary exasperation, that the thought had never so much as crossed his mind. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you really think they’ll see what looks like some drunken prowler down here – fifty feet below the surface of the ground – who got his foot pinned under a collapsing wall … What did you use to break the wall down, spanners? Levers? You’re lucky the whole arch didn’t come down on you. And you think a vampire is going to say, “What a lucky coincidence, just when I was feeling peckish”?’
‘Men come down here. Seeking shelter, or ancient treasure …’
‘Vampires hunt on the surface, you idiot,’ said Asher. ‘They can’t hear through earth much better than we can, or project their thoughts through it. And the running water of the sewers, and the underground rivers, confuses them.’
‘And you know that.’ He said it as if it were a badge of contempt.
‘Yes, I know that. And while I’m asking, just what,’ he went on grimly, ‘are your plans if one doesn’t come along before daybreak? Are you going to kill me in cold blood?’
‘You deserve it.’
‘I deserved it long before I met my first vampire. Are you going to do it? Or get one of your disciples to? Tell him it’s right because I deserve it? Was this what they thought they were signing themselves up for? Not killing vampires, but killing a man in cold blood because you, personally, on your own suspicions, have decided he should die? Is that the kind of loyalty you ask of them?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Good answer,’ Asher approved.
And, as the theologist stalked back to the round chamber that, as Asher recalled, housed a well, Asher called after him, ‘What time is it?’
‘Time enough,’ retorted Millward. ‘We have the night before us.’
Asher focused his attention on the dim blob of reflected lamplight on the frescoed wall; on the distant r
umble of the Underground; on the pain. Don’t pass out …
He knew how easy it would be.
And he knew, too, that though Geoff Vauxhill, the lovely Penelope, and that ferret-faced vampire Jerry might not hunt underground, Damien Zahorec would, for precisely that reason: because the others wouldn’t. Because beneath the earth, Grippen couldn’t sense his kills.
The Undead cannot pass over running water, Johanot of Valladolid had written (or someone had written, purporting to be him).
Even as the waters, which were the first created substances from the hand of God, will reject the body of a witch when she is cast into them, so will they reject the vampire, to the extent that he stands helpless before a bridge, save at the moment of midnight, or at the turning of the tide. Thus a man pursued by such a creature has but to reach a river or a stream, or run into the fringe of the ocean, to shake such pursuit …
Unless of course the vampire is in a carriage or a motor car, Asher reflected. Driven by someone else.
Or has convinced some hapless mortal to load his coffin on to a train or a trans-Atlantic steamer for him.
He felt cold through to his marrow.
‘Millward,’ he called out after a time.
‘Another word and I’ll chloroform you again.’
‘Vampires have a very good sense of smell. They hunt by making you sleepy, or inattentive. They’re beside you before you know it.’
No reply came from the darkness. Wait until sunrise, Asher told himself, and prayed the man wasn’t sufficiently obsessed – sufficiently crazy – to kill him and then go after Lydia. He couldn’t see Ned Seabury assenting, deeply as he revered his master. But until the night was past – until there was no chance of a vampire falling into the trap – he guessed he’d get no sense out of the man.
He rested his forehead on his crossed wrists, tried to will himself into the pain …
He was dimly aware he was dreaming. Dreaming of Thamesmire. Of fleeing through hazy darkness, of hearing Blackie Wirt screaming. Running, staggering, dizzy and terrified, praying he’d make it to Wirt’s motor car beside the gates.
The Kindred of Darkness Page 24
