From his pocket Asher took one of the silver-tipped rifle bullets, flung it full-force at the vampire’s face. The silver itself would have stung him, not even penetrating the flesh, but Zahorec, exhausted already, reacted without knowing what had been thrown. Turned his head, his attention, his focus, and in that split-second Armistead struck.
Cece screamed, pulled herself free as Zahorec grappled with the American. Fell to her knees and scrambled to put her back to the stone of the wall, away from the sixty-foot drop below the stair. The two vampires grappled on the narrow steps. Had Armistead tried to wound or kill or even hurl Zahorec down as Ippolyta had been hurled, he probably could not have done so, even weakened as the older vampire was. But he only held on to his opponent, by the wrists, by the arms, by the throat, heedless of the other vampire’s claws and teeth. He shouted, ‘Cece, run!’ but she didn’t move, only stared up at them as they writhed against the paling sky. Trapped at the top of the tower, Asher backed against the parapet, put a hand over Miranda’s eyes, knowing what was going to happen.
Far below him he heard a bestial scream, and the roar of fire at the foot of the tower.
Armistead was burning, too, the oily heat of the flames beating on Asher’s face. Screaming – but hanging on.
Asher didn’t know whether it was the flames that sheathed Armistead that ignited Zahorec’s flesh, or the still-distant sun’s light suffusing the sky. Whether the older vampire would have been able to make it to shelter, had not the cleansing fire spread from the flesh of his opponent into his own. Cece screamed, ‘Daddy!’ as both vampires fell to their knees, a doubled spout of flame, then tipped sideways off the stair. Plunged into the central gulf within the tower like Lucifer plunging into darkness.
Asher kept tight hold of Miranda, but Lydia crawled from the parapet where she had lain, went to the edge of the broken floor and looked down through the tangle of shattered joists at the blaze below.
It was Asher who said, ‘We’d better go.’ He would have carried Miranda if he could, but it was all he could do to keep himself on his feet. The sturdy toddler held his hand, stepped carefully down each step of the long stone curve unassisted. Though it was Asher who was lamed and bleeding, it was Cece, doubled over in sobbing hysterics, whom Lydia had to assist down the steps, through the ruined upper floor of the house, down the stairs into the house’s hall and – at long last – to the bench outside.
Limping far behind them, Asher paused in the hall. Through a doorway he could see into the bottom of the tower, where the two locked forms had subsided into a sullen mound of charred bone still flickering with blue flame. He doubted there would even be enough left of Titus Armistead’s clothing and effects for anyone to identify. He kept his hand on his daughter’s head, kept her face turned away. Then, still holding to the wall, he dragged himself around to the dining room, where the candle was guttering out on the table and the blue twilight of morning trickled through the shuttered windows, gleamed gently on the gilt trim of four old books.
Asher supported himself on the table’s edge as he emptied the picnic basket Cece Armistead had left there: sandwiches, apples, a pocket flask. He opened the books one by one, briefly, and put three of them into the basket.
The fourth he concealed under his jacket.
The sandwiches in his pockets – Miranda carrying the Thermos – he made his agonized way to the door. On the bench beside it Cece wailed like a beaten child. Asher watched her impassively, feeling very detached from himself – like a very old spider, he reflected, that has been stepped on many times.
Lydia fell to her knees, crushed Miranda against her chest, shaking with shock and cold and reaction. Asher sank down on to the end of the bench, put his arms around both of them.
We’re all alive, he thought, and it was the only thought that would go through his mind. We’re all alive …
Public-school chivalry and common decency told him he should comfort Cece but all he wanted to do – for the rest of his life, if possible – was hold his wife and his daughter against him, feel the softness of their hair against his lips.
At length Lydia asked, ‘What’s in the Thermos?’
‘Probably coffee.’ Smoke filled the air, and the smell of charred flesh.
Lydia unscrewed the cap, gave Cece a drink, and took one herself before returning the flask to Asher. ‘I’ll be back.’ She clung for a moment more to Miranda, then kissed Asher, stood up, and walked away around the corner of the house.
He rested his head against the stone of the wall behind them. Miranda, with the simple healing miracle of childhood, had fallen asleep in his lap; Asher wished he had the option of doing the same. Instead, a little awkwardly, he put his arm around Cece Armistead’s heaving shoulders, patted her gently, but could find no words of comfort, no words at all. She kept sobbing, ‘Oh, my God – oh, Daddy – oh, Damien,’ and turned her face to weep into Asher’s chest. It had not been her fault, he understood, that Damien Zahorec had made her his target, and she would have had to be an extraordinary woman to resist his seduction. Still, he felt infinitely distant from her and from all the sweet stillness that surrounded them. Mostly all he could think of was that there was still the hill to get down, to the chaise and the horses at the bottom.
Lydia came back around the corner of the house, a long stick still in her hand. The end was charred, as if she’d used it to probe through an ash-heap.
‘There’s only one skeleton there at the foot of the wall,’ she said. ‘It’s still burning, but the pelvis is definitely a woman’s. I think the bones should be consumed,’ she added, ‘by the time anyone gets here.’
THIRTY-ONE
It took three weeks for the cracked bone in Asher’s ankle to heal. He spent the time quietly in his study in Holywell Street, preparing his notes for the start of Trinity term, studying fourteenth-century Spanish verb tenses, and playing finger-puppets with Miranda. He limped up the stairs to her nursery three and four times a night, but Nan Wellit – with whom, for the first week, the tiny girl insisted on sharing a bed ‘like we did downstairs’ – reported neither nightmares nor disturbed sleep.
Evidently Miranda had inherited Lydia’s phlegmatic temperament. Asher’s own sleep was not so restful.
Lydia sent word to her Aunt Isobel that Miranda had been taken ill and that she was no longer at liberty to chaperone Emily to regattas, ballets, and the races, thus missing the spectacle of one of Josetta Beyerly’s suffragist compatriots who threw herself – fatally – beneath the hooves of the King’s horse just before the home stretch at Ascot. She did go up to London to attend Emily’s engagement party to Terence Winterson, and heard her aunt exclaim from her bath-chair throne, ‘I do not grudge one moment of the labor and trouble I went to this Season, to bring this about …’
For the first week of term Asher used a cane, and told sympathetic students he’d stepped off a curb in Padua.
Just before midsummer a back-page advertisement in the Telegraph mentioned that The Scythe pub in Stepney was up for sale, its owners – Mr and Mrs Henry Scrooby, and both of Mr Scrooby’s brothers – having disappeared. A day or two later a small paragraph remarked on the suicide of bank clerk Timothy Rolleston, in whose rooms the hair ribbons of at least twelve little girls were found, tidily pasted into a scrapbook.
Shortly after that, when the days were longest and everyone who was anyone was flocking to Henley on the Thames, Asher quietly set about gathering syringes and ampoules of silver nitrate, stakes of hawthorn-wood, and a surgical saw. Since 1907, when first he had become acquainted with the reality of the kindred of darkness, he had been aware also that to become a vampire hunter – to follow in the literary footsteps of Abraham Van Helsing or the actual ones of Osric Millward – was to become obsessed. To enter into the world of the Undead himself, pursuing their shadows to the exclusion of the world of the light.
If the vampires, in their quest for eternal life, ended by shrinking that eternity to nothing but the search for prey and the efforts
to control all things around them in order to remain safe, so, he had observed, did the vampire hunters of his acquaintance also live for nothing but the hunt.
Still, on the third of July, starting when first daylight flushed the sky at five and moving where he could through sewers, Underground tunnels, and London’s submerged network of rivers and ancient crypts, he visited every one of Lionel Grippen’s lairs. Asher had killed vampires before. Mostly it was a matter of dragging their decapitated bodies to where light would fall, if a shutter or a door or a manhole-cover were opened, and then opening it. Only a few seconds of direct sunlight would suffice to ignite the Undead flesh. Heads severed to separate the central nervous system, hearts staked and veins injected with silver nitrate, they would then go on burning in the darkness as he walked away.
He found in Grippen’s lairs the lovely Penelope, the foxlike Jerry, and Sir Geoffrey Vauxhill.
In none of them did he find either Mrs Raleigh or Lionel Grippen.
In the house to which Lydia gave him directions in Spaniard’s Lane, he found no trace of Don Simon Ysidro, nor even of the sub-cellar and crypt which she described. He wasn’t entirely certain he had the right house.
He rode his motorcycle back over the hills to Oxford. And dreamed that night of Africa.
There was a camp he’d make on the veldt, on the land of a Boer farmer named Van Der Platz. The only son of the household, sixteen-year-old Jan, would ride out in the evenings, to talk with the man whom he knew as Professor Leyden of Heidelberg, about what life would be like beyond the confines of chores and church, about places where black men weren’t assumed to be cattle and women weren’t treated like brood-mares, about books to read that weren’t the Bible. Then Jan would ride home, and Asher would sit sometimes for hours outside his tent, listening to the far-off lunatic yikking of hyenas, gazing at the gold African moon.
He often dreamed of the place, as he did tonight: the glow of his lantern catching in the long grass, the humming of insects in the twilight. On the camp table before the tent lay the Book of the Kindred of Darkness, and across the table from him, on the other camp chair where young Jan had sat (Asher knew) earlier in the evening, perched Don Simon Ysidro, elegant as always in Savile Row gray.
‘Do you think it an accident,’ the vampire asked, ‘that Lionel’s disloyal fledglings all happened to be sleeping in Lionel’s lairs today?’
Disgust swept Asher, and anger that even his vengeance had been used for the Master of London’s convenience. He pushed aside the scribbled notes of old Spanish morphology that littered the table, flung his pencil at Ysidro, who didn’t even bother to dodge. ‘Is he watching me?’
‘I don’t think so.’ The vampire shrugged. ‘Are you watching us? Once la niña was safe I suggested to Lionel that you’d do something of this nature, as soon as you were on your feet again. He’s been rearranging his holdings all month. It vexes him, but I pointed out to him that ’twas no more than what he had asked for, and all for the best. Even the dead must move with the times.’
‘Does he think he’ll escape the reckoning for what he’s done? That any of you will?’
‘Yes, in fact, we do. You sound like your friend Dr Millward – who has, by the way, disowned that poor bonachón Seabury when Seabury and his friend left together for the South of France. Do you really want to turn into him? To hunt us is to hunt smoke, James, as I have said to you before. Prior to the death of his young brother in 1882 Millward did quite good work in the translation of proto-Jewish inscriptions. Once he became a vampire hunter, he became as you see him. A fanatic, and a bore, incapable of having a relationship that does not turn upon the Undead in some fashion. Not a happy man and not a particularly effective vampire hunter either.’
‘That’s no reason to let you go on killing.’
The Spaniard raised colorless brows. ‘You do not “let” us, James. We do as we must. We do as we do. ’Twas Lionel who returned to London that night and made Armistead vampire, you know. Guessed – or recalled under the goad of Mistress Asher’s words – the man’s true purpose in seeking for a vampire. It takes a devil to deal with a devil, Armistead said, and we all of us underestimated him. From reading the books he understood what was happening to his daughter, weeks before. It was, as he said, the only thing that he could think to do, to save her. Would you do as much, to save Miss Miranda?’
Asher recalled the man’s screams, and how even as his flesh was consumed he had not released his grip on his daughter’s predator.
‘Yes. Yes, I would. And to save the children of other men, from Grippen … and from you.’
‘All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies / Despair, law, chance hath slain,’ quoted Ysidro. ‘Can you save them? Earth’s face is but thy table, there are set/ Plants, cattle, men, dishes for Death to eat. If saving the world from death were truly your heart’s calling, James, you would have remained in the Department. The Kaiser will kill more than ever we did – he, and your Prime Minister, and Messires Poincaré and Clemenceau in France and all the rest of them.’
‘That’s the answer of a thief who wants to go on helping himself to other men’s goods.’
‘’Tis the only answer I have. Will you publish this?’ The long nails brushed the brittle brown paper of the book between them.
Asher shook his head. ‘I know as well as you do that to prove to the authorities that vampires exist would only set them hunting them to hire them, like Armistead told his men he was doing. Do you think these Americans – these Vanderbilts, these Rockefellers, these Fords – wouldn’t try it, if they knew?’
For a time there was only the hiss of the lantern’s hot metal, and the sough of wind through the veldt. Then he asked, ‘That one is the original, isn’t it?’
‘How did you guess?’
‘Because the language is right. The date of publication is 1494 – one of the oldest editions, though the earlier Latin one is substantially different. But that’s fourteenth-century Spanish: when Johanot of Valladolid supposedly lived. It has to be a direct copy of what he wrote.’
Ysidro smiled. With lantern light giving color to the pallor of his flesh, he looked, Asher guessed, as he had in life: a young Spanish gentleman who traveled to London for a little diplomatic spying, and who never found his way home again.
Asher thought, He has a copy, too. Somewhere in that dusty library that Lydia described …
‘What will you do with it, then?’
‘I’ll keep it,’ said Asher. ‘In a silver reliquary, like Armistead did. Possibly the same one he had. I’m told Cece is selling up his collection before going back to the States. And I’ll study it. And use its knowledge, to destroy whichever of your kind crosses my path. Including yourself.’
‘James …’ The vampire held out his hand to him. ‘I have known this of you for many years now … and I will endeavor, as I have for many years now, not to cross your path. Might I bid Mistress Lydia, and la niña, farewell ere I go?’
Asher recalled Ysidro’s thin form locked in the grip of lady Ippolyta, as he’d pulled the other vampire away from Lydia on the parapet against the growing light of dawn. Knew in his heart that it was only luck that the Spaniard had been able to either catch some window-ledge or projection of the tower, or that he had not broken his neck or his legs in the fall and had been able to crawl to safety before the sky grew bright.
Had he been, he reflected, a true vampire-hunter, a true champion of what was right instead of a man used to compromising with shadows in order to win achievable goals, he would have said, I’ll kill you before I’ll let you touch my daughter. Get you back into darkness where you belong.
And he knew Ysidro would have gone.
‘Of course.’
Ysidro turned toward the tent and lifted the mosquito-bar, and sure enough, as Asher had guessed would be the case, Lydia lay asleep on his cot, dressed in one of her lace tea-gowns, her spectacles laid down on a copy of Weismann’s Germ-Theory of Heredity, Miranda curled up asleep in her arms.
The vampire knelt beside them, gently kissed Lydia on the brow, and laid his clawed hand on Miranda’s cheek.
‘Don’t abandon your treasures, James, to chase shadows you never will catch,’ he said quietly. ‘I did so once, and have for three hundred and fifty-eight years regretted it. They need you, as your heart needs them in order to go on beating.’
Bending, he kissed Miranda’s cheek, eyes shut, like a man breathing the scent of a rose.
Then he straightened, and stepped out into the darkness, holding the mosquito-netting aside for Asher to follow.
‘Light and warmth are very brief, James. Darkness is long.’
And he melted away into the warm African night.
Asher stood for a time, looking out over the veldt; the place, perhaps of all places on earth, that he had loved the most. It was a part of his heart and his bones that he could never share with Lydia, for he had known it before they were wed: the smell of the grasslands, the dry softness of the nights. Across the sandy wash, in its stand of willows, he could see the Van Der Platz farm, and knew that behind the barn among the trees Jan’s body lay in a pool of blood, killed not by a vampire, but by Asher himself, in the name of King and Country.
He went to the table, where the Book of the Kindred of Darkness lay, and remembered what Sophister had told him about Johanot of Valladolid: that he’d died caring for others in a season of plague. He had been a servant of vampires. Had this been his penance, to record all that he knew of their secrets, for whoever needed in future to chase shadows?
He closed the book, carried it back into the tent, laid it beside the cot. Then he stretched out at Lydia’s side – in waking life of course the cot would never have accommodated two, but in his dream it did so easily. His wife and daughter wrapped in his arms, he lay long, listening to the darkness, and waiting for sleep, and daylight.
The Kindred of Darkness Page 30
