Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  Since the night he’d lain, half-freezing in the damp, in the crypt where Millward and his disciples had pinned him as bait for the vampire they were trying to trap, he had hated the man – a hatred revived every time his ankle hurt him in winter. Now the hatred washed away in a wave of pity, seeing what the scholar had made of himself. He’d heard – he’d forgotten from whom – that the parents of Millward’s wife still made him a tiny allowance.

  This was what it was, he thought, looking around him, to be obsessed.

  For years he’d seen Millward as an ageing Don Quixote, tilting at windmills invisible to sane eyes. But now, strangely, the person that came to his mind was his old teacher, the master-spy Crowell. The single-minded hunter in pursuit of his prey. A weapon in the hand of the Cause. Everything geared and tuned, like the engine of a motorcar, for one purpose and one purpose only.

  And something else …

  The box that Millward set on the table before him was fairly new, and labeled neatly – all the boxes were labeled – Regent’s Canal. The clippings – Asher noted automatically the typefaces of The Times, the Telegraph, the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Illustrated London News among others – were arranged chronologically; among the papers on the table at his elbow he identified Le Figaro, l’Oeuvre, der Neuigkeits Welt-Blatt and several German, Italian and American journals as well.

  ‘It killed first on the thirtieth of January.’ The vampire-hunter plucked a clipping from the envelopes within the box. ‘A prostitute in Lampter Street near the Southgate Road. People said it was Jack the Ripper returning to his old haunts – if the Ripper’s under sixty nowadays he must have been little more than a schoolboy his first time round! – but the details of the crime weren’t the same. And the Ripper, whoever he was, never made the attempt to hide his victims. A frightful deed.’ He laid the article on the table before Asher – barely two paragraphs, an afterthought to the German submarine attacks in the Irish Sea. Asher glanced over the specifics of the horrible remains and shivered.

  ‘The body of a man was found – or what remained of one – on February eighth, on Dee Street near the gasworks. Police estimated that he hadn’t been dead more than twenty-four hours. An elderly man was reported missing at about that time near Victoria Park—’

  ‘By the Union Canal.’ Asher mentally identified the place. ‘And Dee Street is where Bow Creek joins the river. Water, both times.’

  ‘I noticed that.’ Millward laid out his clippings with a slow flourish, as if proving Asher wrong somehow or vindicating himself. Asher reflected that the man had fought so long to be believed – by his wife, by the police, by the King’s College authorities when challenged about his disappearances – that the faint, arrogant look of defiance had become habitual, though Asher was one of the few men in England – or probably in the world – who understood that Millward was in fact telling the truth.

  Those windmills really were giants.

  ‘I thought it curious,’ the vampire-hunter added. ‘They usually avoid running water. And it is more savage than the other vampires. They kill, but do not molest the bodies afterwards, even when they conceal them. I can show you—’ He turned back toward the stacks of boxes, and Asher lifted his hand.

  ‘You don’t need to,’ he said. ‘I know this one is different.’

  Wary contempt gleamed in the other man’s dark eyes. Aye, YOU would know, who consort with such beings …

  Asher sorted the little squares of newsprint, moving them around on the tabletop, as he had with the bits of information about the time and place of German so-called ‘archaeological’ expeditions in Mesopotamia back in the eighties, or where all those extra Legation ‘clerks’ had been seen, and at what times. Ysidro had surmised that Millward’s brother, who had died young and unexpectedly, had been the victim of a vampire (Carlotta? Asher wondered. The Lady Anthea Ernchester? Grippen himself?) It was this, in the vampire’s opinion, which had turned the scholar’s already-extant belief in vampires to obsession … But sometimes Asher wondered whether it was Millward’s belief in vampires that had caused him to probe into matters concerning the world of the Undead – possibly with his brother’s help – and thus bring that young man into peril in the first place.

  As he himself had brought Lydia. And their daughter.

  Enough to drive a man a little mad.

  But he was not wrong, to seek those silent killers …

  He took one of his Ordnance Survey maps from his pocket, and with his pen marked the places where kills had occurred. He marked also neighborhoods where people had been reported missing, often vagrants who slept rough, little regarded by the police. ‘Nothing further south than Dee Street,’ he commented after a moment. ‘Nor further north than Leyton Marsh. Nothing more than a dozen yards from navigable water: creeks, canals, basins.’

  ‘It’s where the fog gathers thickest.’ Millward sank into the other chair, leaned to look over his shoulder. ‘Legend has it that they can summon fog …’

  ‘They actually can’t.’ Asher moved another two-line clipping, put another X on the map. ‘But there’s waste ground along the canal, and buildings that stand deserted for days at a time: gasworks, the India docks, Hackney Common. The goods yards and tracks of the Midlands Railway. The pattern of this thing’s hunting is different. It’s an animal we’re tracking, not a man.’

  ‘It’s a man,’ retorted Millward grimly. ‘A woman in Canal Road glimpsed it in the fog. Or it was a man once. The Undead—’

  ‘This isn’t one of the Undead.’ Asher tilted his head a little to one side, still intent on the map. ‘The pattern is similar, as the thing itself is similar. It’s a revenant, what the early English called a wight: nearly mindless, and hungry. The vampires call them the Others. Like the Undead, it can to some extent fool the perceptions of the living. And like the Undead, it can transmit its condition through contamination of the blood, like a disease.’

  ‘You’re sure of this?’ The scholar’s silver-shot brows drew down. ‘How do you—?’

  ‘I’m sure. I have seen them cut to pieces, and the cut pieces continue to crawl about with what appears to be conscious volition. Sunlight destroys them; more slowly than their cousins, I’m told, but I’ve never seen it. But the thing is alive, and it can be killed. Vampires hunt all over the city – or they did,’ he added with a grimace, ‘until most of them left for the Front. This revenant – this Other—’

  His finger traced the gray line of the Regent’s Canal, with its myriad of auxiliary cuts and basins, curving through the East End like an old-time moat among a patchwork of industry and building yards. ‘It hunts along here. And I intend to find it – or them. By this time there may be more than one.’

  ‘You will have whatever help I – and those who help me, who believe in this war that we wage against the forces of Evil – can give.’

  Asher thought about the young man in the Winchester tie in the Reading Room.

  And about Crowell leaving his agents to die.

  ‘But where did it come from?’ Millward turned the map around, frowned over the neat X’s. Then his sharp dark gaze cut back to Asher. ‘And how did you learn of it? Did the Undead create it, then? Do they control it?’

  ‘Not that I know of. I understand the vampires of Prague have tried for centuries to exert mental control over the Others that haunt the crypts beneath that city, without success.’

  Millward’s silence made Asher glance at him. He read in the dark eyes loathing and distress, tinged with admiration. Almost the same feelings, he reflected, that he himself had felt towards Pritchard Crowell.

  ‘Prague …’

  ‘The only city I’ve heard of so far,’ said Asher, ‘where these Others nest.’

  ‘How did it come to England, then?’

  ‘That,’ said Asher, ‘is one of the several things I intend to find out.’

  Millward saw him down four flights to the door, through a front hallway whose dirty lino was cluttered with bicycles, coal scuttles and baby pr
ams. The sun had just dipped behind the smoke-grayed line of brick houses opposite. It was a long walk to the nearest bus stop, and Asher guessed few cabs cruised these dismal streets. Dank fog was already rising from the river. On the way downstairs, Millward spoke of the young men who believed, as he did, in the Undead, who worked for him as secretaries and gatherers of information – ‘Only Donnie’s left of them. The rest are at the Front.’ (Presumably Donnie was the young man in the Winchester tie.) ‘Donnie isn’t strong, but he and I will patrol the canal—’

  But when Asher stepped across the threshold and the door shut behind him, he automatically cleared every thought from his mind, and scanned the street: wide flagways bustling with housewives, children running home from school, voices shrill in the air. A woman brought a birdcage and a wicker basket up from a nearby areaway, chirruping to her canary in alternation with some of the most hair-raising oaths Asher had ever heard – Islands Scots, what’s she doing here? An old man with an elaborate cart and equipment for the repair of umbrellas called ‘Brollies to mend!’ in a quavering voice. Asher’s eye touched the areaways of the houses nearby, the bleared windows across the road, as if he were in Berlin or St Petersburg, seeking anomalies or …

  There.

  He didn’t turn his head. His sidelong glance passed across the sunken kitchen entry where he thought he’d seen a man’s face, but there was nothing, and he turned away at once. One of the first rules was, If you think you’re being followed, don’t let on. Maybe later you can see who it is, and take a guess at what they want.

  He thought he’d seen something, some anomalous shadow, outside the Reading Room.

  And now here.

  The Department? He trudged down Charlotte Street toward the Great Eastern goods yard where the omnibus would stop on its way to Charing Cross. Or someone who, like Millward, has his own freelance disciples?

  Someone who thinks Millward may know something … About the Other? Someone who, like me, knows that Millward will at least have information about where the Other has been?

  If it is the Department, he reflected, taking into account that he’d barely gotten a glimpse of Millward’s watcher, shame on them. If Stewart wasn’t lying, and they need every man to gather information in the battle zones, why waste a good agent keeping an eye on a vampire-hunting crank who isn’t even aware that every vampire in London is now at the Front?

  Unless of course, Asher thought – without looking back – I’m the one who’s being followed.

  Lydia saw the vampires outside her tent in a dream: Antonio and Basilio, Red Cross armbands pale against the dark rough coats of stretcher-bearers, Don Simon in his British Army khaki. In the gibbous moonlight, their eyes gleamed like the eyes of the bloated trench rats, and Lydia was at once aware that the sporadic gunfire in the distance had stilled.

  In her mind she heard Simon’s voice whisper, ‘Mistress …’

  Waking, she knew they were there still.

  Waking, the sound of the guns seemed very far away. The fretful cluck of the Lys over the remains of the broken bridge came startlingly clear.

  In the next cot, Danvers slept like a dead woman. Brickwood’s cot was empty. Lydia pulled on as much as she could of her clothing under her nightgown – brassiere, chemise and blouse – before getting out of bed in the freezing cold. Hastily pulling on skirt, boots, petticoat and coat, she put on her spectacles and stepped quietly to the tent’s entry, and looked out into the night.

  And there they were.

  Simon touched his lips for silence, and took her hand. The other two vampires soundlessly following, he led her to his staff-car at the edge of the camp – no Palfrey this time, she noticed – and helped her inside; Antonio took the wheel and drove off in the direction of the Front. Just short of the reserve trenches they stopped, left Basilio with the car and, as they had before, went on afoot, descending first into an abandoned reserve trench and then following the half-flooded mazes of the communications trenches: icy water underfoot, scuttling rats, the stench of death and latrine holes. Sometimes Simon or Antonio would lift her bodily in their arms, with the preternatural strength of the Undead, and carry her swiftly, like being borne by angels in a dream.

  The stillness around them was the hush of nightmare. Her arms around Antonio’s neck, as Don Simon clambered like a colorless spider up the side of the trench to look over at the hideous wasteland above, Lydia thought, for the thousandth time, I shouldn’t be doing this …

  Yet she felt no fear.

  And, after a very short time, she understood that it was the silence that lay on this portion of no man’s land that had drawn their attention, which had sent them to fetch her. Such absolute tranquility wasn’t natural. No crackle of rifle-fire. Not a murmur from the front-line trenches, though they lay within yards. Once they passed a dugout, where half a dozen Indian infantrymen slumped around a makeshift stove and a tin of still-steaming tea. Not dead – she could see them breathing – but dozing. This was often the case with men in the trenches, but she understood that someone had put that illusion of inattention, that haze of sleepiness, on the sentries of both sides, and on the men hereabouts, for a reason.

  And that someone has to be a vampire.

  Simon scrambled up onto the fire step, looked over the sandbags. Lifted his gloved hand. Come. Carefully.

  When she cautiously put her head over the sandbags – something that could get one killed, even at night – Don Simon passed her binoculars. The moon was a few days yet from full, but gave enough light to let her see the nurse Tuathla Smith – or whatever her name really was – crouched on the lip of a shell-crater, less than thirty feet away.

  Nurse Smith wore the khaki coat of a British soldier, and had, like Lydia, left off her cap. Dark curls twisted into a loose knot at the back of her head, and framed the pale blur of her face as she looked around her. Aboveground in no man’s land was not the place to be, even on a quiet night … and perhaps she also was aware, thought Lydia, that the silence hereabouts wasn’t natural.

  That someone had laid this silence on this small portion of the lines for a purpose.

  And that purpose was to meet her without either of them getting shot.

  And if a vampire were coming to speak to this young woman, thought Lydia, that vampire would be listening, with the uncanny sharpness of Undead perceptions, for the smallest whisper of sound.

  And thank goodness that even in the cold like this the whole place stinks so that a vampire can’t smell living blood.

  She felt rather than saw Don Simon glance sidelong at her, nodded very slightly: Yes, it’s she. And squeezed his cold fingers: Thank you.

  Movement in the moonlight. Walking, like the bean sí of poor Corporal Brodie’s nightmares, as lightly as a ghost over the torn soil of this unspeakable hell.

  As Corporal Brodie had said, she wore the uniform of a nursing sister under a dark cloak. Her hair, like Smith’s was uncovered, the flaxen hue of raw silk in the moonlight and lying, like silk, loose over her shoulders. Her face was an exquisite oval.

  ‘Meagher,’ she said, as the young nurse stood up.

  ‘I’m she.’

  ‘You seek me?’

  ‘If you truly are one of the Undead – one of the vampire kind – I do indeed.’

  The vampire looked around her, scanning the ruined landscape with those darkness-piercing eyes. Lydia remained perfectly still, her own eyes cast down, praying Don Simon and Antonio were vampires of sufficient age and power to turn aside this woman’s glance.

  ‘I am called Francesca Gheric.’ The vampire’s voice was a soft contralto, with an accent to it that Lydia guessed would have told Jamie of some other time, some other place. ‘By some called Francesca Brucioram, or Francesca the White. And I am what is called a vampire.’

  ‘Tuathla Meagher.’

  The vampire merely looked at her extended hand, then back to her face, one butterfly-wing eyebrow atilt. ‘That isn’t the name your father calls you, when you dream.’

>   Meagher straightened her shoulders, chin lifted defiantly. ‘It’s the name I took for myself when I left his house and his chains forever.’

  Francesca the White’s mouth flexed a little, like a birdwatcher identifying the whistle of some rare species. Oh, one of those …

  ‘It’s true, then,’ Meagher went on, ‘that you can touch the dreams of the living? Can weave spells in them to control their thoughts, and guide them where you will? That you can control the thoughts of certain beasts – the wolf, and the rat, and the bat – and command the actions of the mad?’

  Through the binoculars, Lydia saw the vampire’s red lips curve … (Red, she has fed, she has killed once, or several times, tonight …) ‘You seek a demonstration, pretty child?’

  What Francesca Gheric did then, Lydia didn’t see, but Nurse Meagher jerked as if at some startling sound, and threshed the air before her face with her hand. Then she fell back a step, staring at the vampire in shocked respect.

  Francesca raised one eyebrow again: Satisfied?

  ‘Will you help us?’ said Meagher eagerly. ‘In return, we can—’

  ‘I know who you are,’ the White Lady cut her off. ‘And I know who you work for, and what you do in that compound of yours. Don’t think I haven’t watched you, walking about these deadly lands in the darkness, and speaking to my brothers and sisters of the night. This man Lemoine, this physician, this dabbler in chemicals and blood. I would speak to him.’

  ‘I’m here,’ said Meagher, barely able to contain her triumph, ‘to take you to him.’

  And with a sudden move she raised her hand to her throat, tore loose the silver cross she wore, and cast it away into the mud.

  ELEVEN

  ‘Francesca Gheric.’ Antonio Pentangeli gazed thoughtfully into the distance as Basilio guided the staff-car down the shell-holed road in the moonlight. ‘Well, well.’

  He now shared the back seat with Lydia and Don Simon, and spoke barely to be heard over the growl of the engine. Basilio, Lydia guessed, had located Meagher’s motorcar while she, Don Simon, and Antonio had been in the trench, and was following it now by the sound of its motor, audible to his Undead senses over the rumble of the guns to the south. Unless of course he’s just reasoned they can’t leave the road at this point. The land on both sides was a pitted ruin, laced with the water that had leaked from demolished drainage canals and stitched across and across with barbed wire.