Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  This was what he was doing, wandering among the nameless streets east of King’s Cross Station, when he encountered the revenant.

  The fog confused the way sounds carried from the railway yards. It was too dark, even, to see the street signs, many of which seemed to have been taken down or taped over (in an effort his landlady had told him to thwart German spies). Likewise it was difficult to determine in which direction Regent’s Canal lay. In places the fog was thick enough – reeking with the smoke of the munitions factories across the river – that Asher had to feel his way along the house walls and area railings. He could only be glad that at this hour, nobody was operating a motorcar, not that anyone in this neighborhood (if he was where he thought he was) could afford such a luxury (or the petrol to put in it) …

  Then he smelled it. Sudden, rank and horrible, like rotting fish and the urine of rats mixed with the peculiarly horrible stench that oozes from human beings who have washed neither their bodies nor their clothing for months on end. Unmistakable.

  He had smelled it in Peking, two years before. A thousand times stronger, for the things had been forty and sixty strong by the time their hive was destroyed. Don Simon Ysidro had told him that the only other place where such monsters were to be found was Prague, where they had spawned and multiplied for nearly three centuries in the old Roman sewers beneath that city. The Others, Ysidro had called them, though they were related, in some way, to vampires. Undead, mindless, nearly impossible to kill, they would devour anything they could catch, and presumably lived for much of the time upon rats, with whose minds they had a curious affinity.

  Here.

  In London …

  Shock and horror smote him like a physical blow.

  Damnit—

  Horror chilled him.

  In London …

  Listening intently, he could hear it, a slow soft dragging as the stink grew stronger. The canal can’t be more than a hundred yards off. The Others hid under the bridges in Prague, when night cloaked that city. Down in the bed of the rivers, and in half-flooded sewer vaults, for their flesh would slowly dissolve from exposure to sunlight.

  Their minds – if they could be said to have such things – were joined by a sort of mental telepathy, something the older vampires were adept at, though no vampire, so far as he knew, could control the actions of the Others.

  And their condition, like that of the vampires, was spread by ‘corruption of the blood’.

  The vampires, whose mental powers of illusion were lessened by the movement of running water, kept away from them. Lydia had written to him months ago of the vampires at the Front: Are these things there as well?

  One could reason with vampires.

  Not with the Others.

  The Others, one could only flee from, and the thought of such things at large in London iced him to the marrow.

  Asher felt his way along the wall – the brick gritty under his fingers – until he reached the corner he knew had to be nearby. The smell nearly made him gag. A faint plish of water, around the corner to his left. By the feel of the broken pavement underfoot he guessed this was an alley. A few feet further on he trod in something squishy that smelled of rotten vegetables. Ahead, the slight metallic rattle as the Other brushed a dustbin.

  Then the furious squeal of a captured rat, followed by the sudden pong of blood. The rat shrieked again – being eaten alive, presumably – and there was a loud clang as either another rat, or a cat, fled the scene in panic. Yellow light bleared suddenly in the fog with a man’s shape silhouetted against it:

  ‘’Ere, then, what’s … Bloody ’ell!’

  Pressed to the brick of the alley wall, Asher was shocked at how close he stood to the thing, close enough to see it clearly through the fog once the light from the open door streamed out. It was indeed such a creature as had bred in the mines west of Peking, the human face deformed and bruised where the jawbones had elongated and the sutures of the face opened. The mouth, human no longer, was raw where its new-grown teeth had gashed the lips. It held the dying rat in one hand – still thrashing – and blood ran down its arm and its chin. The creature’s eyes, as it swung toward the open doorway’s light, flashed like mirrors.

  It dropped the rat and sprang.

  The shirtsleeved and unshaven watchman who’d opened the door let out a yell and tried to slam it again between them, but the creature already had him by the arm. It yanked him through and into the wet murk of the alleyway. Asher caught the lid off a dustbin and struck with its edge at the revenant’s face. With a grunting bleat the Other struck it aside, staggered back, still holding the shrieking watchman; Asher slammed at it with the lid again and, when it was knocked away, caught up the dustbin itself and rammed it at the monster like a clumsy battering ram.

  The revenant hurled his quarry from him and Asher heard the man’s skull crack against the brick of the wall. Then it lunged at Asher, who struck with another dustbin – Do NOT let the thing’s blood touch you, do NOT … The creature made one more lunge at the watchman, who lay crumpled where he’d fallen at the foot of the wall, then doubled like a rat and darted into the blackness. Asher plunged after it, one hand to the wall to guide him, and thirty feet on collided with more dustbins, falling over them as the light of two other doors opened in the murky abyss and men’s voices shouted about what the ’ell was goin’ on ’ere … (Only one of them, the philologist in Asher noted automatically, used a Southern Indian’s sharper terminal ‘g’ …)

  By the time Asher was pulled to his feet the creature was gone.

  ‘What the hell is that stink?’ demanded the white-haired Indian. ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  ‘He attacked a man,’ panted Asher, pointing back into the solid wall of fog. ‘One of the watchmen—’

  The men looked at each other – three of them, a sailor and two watchmen in this district of small shops and warehouses. ‘That’ll be ’Arry,’ said the other watchman, a silvered bulldog of a man, and as one they all ran back along the alley, Asher thinking, What the hell will I do if the victim is alive but infected? What the hell can I say?

  The door still stood open. A fat man, balding, with a publican’s apron around his waist was just moving to close it; the stouter watchman called, ‘What ’appened ’ere, Tim? This gennelman says as ’ow ’Arry was attacked—’

  Tim the publican’s heavy-browed face creased in a frown. ‘They took him away.’ Sharp little blue eyes studied Asher and he added, ‘You want to come on round the corner to my place, guv, an’ have a sit-down. You look done up like a kipper.’

  ‘Who took him?’ Asher leaned suddenly against the wall, trembling in a wash of fatigue.

  The publican’s frown deepened and he put a steadying hand under Asher’s arm. ‘Dunno, sir. Looked like a plainclothes ’tec ter me. Skinny little feller. I’d just tied a towel round ’Arry’s conk – bleedin’ like a pig, ’e was – an’ the feller says, “I’ll take him. Cut along and get some water, ’fore we have every cat in the neighborhood lappin’ at the blood.” That’s where I was off to now, and to get word to Weekes who owns the shop here.’

  ‘He’s right about the blood,’ agreed the Indian. ‘You take the gentleman inside, Tim, I’ll get that water and send off to Weekes.’

  Asher was led off down the alley to the back door of the Wolf and Child (which, he reflected, had no business still pouring out brandy at this hour of the night). He glanced back, his heart hammering, and he saw that, yes, the wet, black brick of the wall opposite the warehouse door glistened with a dark smear of blood. More blood was dribbled on the pavement where Harry the watchman had fallen.

  I have to find him. Find where he was taken. If the creature too was wounded, and its blood found its way into Harry’s open flesh, in a few days he’ll begin to change …

  The Indian guard emerged from Harry the watchman’s door with a bucket of water, and doused the blood in a soapy torrent.

  When Asher returned to the place on the following morning, slightly
light-headed and shaky from the fatigue of the night before, and inquired of Mr Weekes – the owner of the silk warehouse Harry had watched – the shop owner had no idea to which hospital Harry had been taken. Nor had Tim the publican, just washing down the front steps of the Wolf and Child and readying to start the day’s business, after seeing Asher back to his room in Grafton Place the previous night. ‘No, he’s got no family here in town.’ The fat man shook his balding head. ‘Lives in lodgin’s somewhere in Camden Town, I think … No, I never did hear the name of his landlady. Not that it sounds like she’d care tuppence if he was brought back home cut to pieces in a sack …’

  ‘If you do hear of where he might be found—’ Asher handed the man his card, containing his Oxford address – ‘please telegraph me here at once. I have reason to believe that the man who attacked Harry suffered from a contagious disease – spread through blood contact – and it’s imperative that I at least make sure Harry wasn’t infected.’

  Which in its way was the truth. Neither Weekes nor Tim had been contacted yet by the police, and when Asher inquired at the Holborn Police Station later in the day he learned that the attack had not been reported. Though it was now four in the afternoon and he felt as if his bones had been ground down to the snapping point with weariness, Asher made his way to the Foreign Office.

  Langham, to whom he’d reported in his days of mapmaking and rumor-sniffing in the Balkans in the 1880s, was delighted to see him. He clucked worriedly over his haggard appearance (‘They told me you’d dashed nearly gone to join the choir invisible in Paris, old fellow – Stewart’s an idiot for saying you should be passed as fit for a listening post …’), and poured out for him some indifferent sherry from a cache in the bottom of his office bookcase. He listened to Asher’s carefully-tailored account of the events of the previous evening: that there had been an attack in the service alley behind the Wolf and Child in Chalton Street, that Asher had heard repeated rumors of German plans to spread an infectious disease in London, that he had reasons to suspect that the man attacked – Henry Gower – had been so infected.

  ‘The men who work in the same street tell me that someone came, almost at once, and took Gower away, presumably to hospital.’ Asher sipped his sherry – it didn’t help in the least. The thought of trying to deal with the train back to Oxford that night filled him with sickened dismay. ‘But it turns out that as of this morning, neither Weekes – Gower’s employer – nor any of the witnesses were contacted by the police, and no report was filed. Yet we must find Gower, and more than anything else we must find the – man – who is potentially spreading the disease.’

  ‘And what are the symptoms of this disease?’ Langham spoke calmly, but his weak blue eyes were fixed on Asher’s face.

  Asher felt himself go perfectly cold, with a chill that had nothing to do with the onset of fever.

  ‘High fever,’ he replied promptly. ‘Rash and virulent irritation, especially around the mouth. What appears to be bruising of the capillaries of the face.’ Keeping his face bland, he observed that his former boss was watching him closely, with an expression of studied nonchalance.

  He knows about it already.

  ‘Hm.’ Langham folded his ladylike hands. ‘I’ll get a report out to the hospitals, of course … and thank you for reporting this, old man. I’m sure it’s nothing – some men are being sent home from the Front with quite gruesome cases of shell shock lately – but would it be asking too much for you to write up a report when you get back home? You are going up to Oxford this evening, are you not? That’s good,’ he added, when Asher nodded as if the matter were a foregone conclusion. ‘You look like the very devil, old man. By all means, go to bed and stay there … And don’t worry.’ He permitted himself a secret, and slightly patronizing, little smile. ‘Think no more about it. The matter is in hand.’

  Asher felt the hair prickle on the nape of his neck.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, sir.’ He smiled, rose, donned his hat – it took all his remaining strength to do so – and got out of the office, and the building, as casually as he could.

  And kept an eye out behind him, all the way to Paddington Station.

  THREE

  ‘Well, thank God Jerry’s taking a breather anyway.’ Captain Niles Calvert dunked his hands in the tepid wash water and chivalrously handed Lydia the only dry towel in the wash corner behind the surgical tent. ‘We can get some of this lot mopped up … God, I hate doing surgery under lights.’

  ‘I keep wondering what we’d do if the generator went out.’ Lydia carefully removed her spectacles to wipe the bridge of her nose. Rice-powder was another thing she’d given up when she’d signed her contract with the Army, and without it she felt like a schoolgirl: a blinky-blind, goggle-eyed golliwog (as the other girls at Madame Chappedelaine’s had called her), a carrot-topped skinnybones with a nose like a parrot. On the other hand, it was very nice to see the faces of the men she worked with, to say nothing of not falling into shell-holes.

  ‘And what I keep wonderin’,’ put in Captain Horatio Burke, straightening his own glasses, ‘is how I can be sweatin’ when I’m freezin’ half to death.’ Like Lydia, prior to the war the lumbering, grizzle-haired surgeon had had far more experience with the academic side of medicine, and after a long day of work on men deemed critical – but not violently urgent as yesterday’s had been – his features sagged with fatigue.

  ‘Different set of glands,’ Lydia replied promptly. ‘It’s part of the fight or flight reaction.’

  ‘You mean it’s to do wi’ why I don’t run outen here screamin’? Aye?’ he added, as a tall figure appeared in the darkness of the tent doorway.

  ‘Message for Dr Asher.’ The young man carried a hooded lantern, and by its upside-down glow, and the reflected glare from the surgical tent where the orderlies were cleaning up, Lydia automatically noted the square-jawed earnestness of his features, the brilliantined sleekness of his dark hair and the freshness of his uniform. From Headquarters …

  Her heart turned over in her chest.

  Oh God, Jamie …

  Or Miranda …

  Her hand shook as she took the note.

  It was Don Simon Ysidro’s handwriting. I have found those who have seen the woman.

  She raised her eyes in startled alarm to the face of the messenger – he was taller even than Jamie’s six-foot height – and he merely said in the plumiest of aristocratic accents, ‘If you’d come with me, please, Doctor Asher.’

  Don Simon was sitting in a staff-car some twenty feet from the lights of the camp. The young officer – he wore a captain’s uniform but God only knew if he was entitled to it – helped Lydia into the vehicle, saluted the vampire and retreated. Lydia could see his broad-shouldered, slim-hipped figure silhouetted between the car and the soft glow within the nearest tents.

  It was a still night. The only shelling was miles away, around Vimy, Captain Calvert had said. Shadows moved within the tents as the nursing sisters saw to their charges. When the night wind stirred it brought the stink from the incinerators where the orderlies were burning amputated limbs.

  ‘Is that young man actually in the Army at all?’ Lydia asked, and there was a whisper of amusement in Ysidro’s usually expressionless voice as he replied.

  ‘Dios, no. John – Captain Palfrey – resigned his commission in the First Dragoons last November, under the impression he was being recruited by a branch of the Secret Service so secret that not even the rest of the Department was aware of it – a hoax which has been embarrassingly easy to maintain. Spare me any expression of indignation on his behalf, Mistress: I have certainly saved that young man’s life thereby and most assuredly the lives of at least a quarter of the men who might have found themselves under his command. He is a deplorable soldier. Will you come with me, and speak to those who have had converse with this seeker of the Undead among the Dead?’

  ‘Converse?’

  ‘After a fashion.’ The glimmer of lights from the camp had lit the
cloud of Lydia’s breath when she spoke; no such vapor proceeded from the vampire’s lips. ‘Seeing them, she called out to them, but any vampire in his senses is wary of overtures from the living. They seldom end well. Will you come?’

  ‘It will take me about half an hour to finish with the fluoroscope room. And I’ll need to find something to tell the matron—’

  ‘John will deal with that. Get a stouter cloak. ’Tis cold where we’re going, and wet.’

  Lydia guessed what he meant, and shivered. Under Captain Palfrey’s respectful escort, she swabbed and tidied the x-ray table and made sure the fluoroscope was disconnected and that her own protective garb was laid out where she could find it on the morrow. The lecturers at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary had been fairly blithe when demonstrating this new miracle equipment, but Lydia’s own researches – including at least one article in an American medical journal – had prompted her to encumber her machine with lead shielding (which made it difficult to maneuver and maddening to move) and herself with a lead apron and gloves. Major Overstreet – who handled the most serious cases – would snarl at her for taking too long, when a soldier’s life was at risk on his table, but Lydia was convinced that the dangers of exposure to Röntgen rays were not imaginary.

  It was nearly eight o’clock, and pitch-dark, when she finally returned to the staff-car. It made a lurching turn and set off eastward; a moment later the hooded headlamps splashed across the stones of the bridge that crossed the Lys River. After that Lydia could see nothing beyond the ruts of the road, water gleaming in potholes, and the occasional gleam in the eyes of a rat.

  Most days, one could smell the trenches from the ruins of Pont-Sainte-Félicité, no mean feat, Lydia was aware, considering the olfactory competition from the camp itself. In time the car stopped, and Don Simon stepped down, helping Lydia after him with a gray-gloved hand. Through a break in the clouds the gibbous moon showed her a tortured landscape of what had been, up until last year, some of the most fertile farmland in Europe. Now it was a wasteland of mud, standing water and shell-holes, slashed across and across with trenches, deadly with tangles of barbed wire. Cold as it was, the stench was terrible. From the muffled sounds around them, Lydia guessed these former German trenches were in use now as Allied reserve trenches, with the front-line trenches and no man’s land a few hundred yards further to the east. Ysidro steadied her down a ladder into the maze of communication trenches that connected the reserves with the firing trench: far safer, but hideous with icy water just beneath the half-submerged duckboards. The hands of corpses projected from the mud walls. Once she saw a skull face, flesh entirely eaten away by rats. The rats themselves were a constant scuttering movement, amid a broken debris of battered helmets (both German and British), rusting tins and broken entrenching tools that littered the shadows.