Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  Helping her was simply an entertainment, like the opera.

  He went on, ‘Though surely the French government—’

  ‘The French government is desperate for soldiers,’ returned Don Simon calmly. ‘’Tis now no mere matter of spies and secrets. They seek soldiers to throw at their enemy – men who will walk without question into machine-gun fire. Who better than the mindless, if they can be controlled from afar off? Men moreover who can be taken from the enemy himself and rendered to such a state without consequences and without questions being asked, not even by this Lemoine’s own conscience, assuming that he has one. Who has not read a thousand posters on every street corner and hoarding in Paris, on the walls of every hospital and railway station and officer’s mess from here to the sea? Crush the Germans, Destroy This Mad Brute. Pictures of German nurses pouring water on the ground rather than moisten the lips of wounded British prisoners.’ His dismissive shrug was barely more than a movement of one finger. ‘Of course they deserve it. Your king has said so, so it must be true.

  ‘What think you then, Mistress? Walking into that place alone puts the White Lady at this Lemoine’s mercy. He has but to hold her until sunrise – not far off now, as I have said. Once she sleeps, he can take from her as much blood as he will, upon which to perform his experiments. Or he can inject her with the blood of these revenants, making her one of their communal mind, willy-nilly. For what would you put yourself in such peril?’

  Antonio, looking over the back of the seat, raised his fair brows, his opinion of the ridiculousness of such a question clear on his face.

  To any vampire, thought Lydia, the answer to that question would be, self-evidently, Nothing …

  But she knew that to be not quite true.

  Slowly, she said, ‘If she is human – if she remained human, through her transformation to the vampire state – she might do such a thing for love. You say she has been a vampire for a long time …’

  ‘She had become one not many years before I visited Strasbourg during the great Wars of Religion – 1610, perhaps?’

  ‘So it isn’t likely she would be protecting her child, for instance. I know … I have met …’ Her voice faltered and she found she couldn’t look at the thin pale figure beside her. ‘Some vampires do retain the capacity to love …’

  Not being able to look at Don Simon, she was gazing straight ahead of her, and saw, at her words, Antonio’s gloved fingers tighten, very slightly, on Basilio’s shoulder. The fair vampire agreed quietly, ‘Some do, indeed. I know not if the Lady is one of them. For all our years of proximity I do not know her well. In Venice, she would carry on long courtships with living men, sometimes for years – alluring them, bedding them … For you are no doubt aware, bella donna, that while the organs of generation in the male vampire become nonfunctional, a woman can of course receive a living man, provided she feeds beforehand so that her flesh will be warm to his touch. And indeed, this was how these courtships ended, for her. Her favorite sport was to kill her lover in the act.’

  ‘Unlikely, then,’ remarked Don Simon, ‘that she would put her mind, her life and her freedom into anyone’s hand, for the sake of a man she loved.’

  ‘And yet,’ mused Antonio, ‘the lady has proven herself indifferent to the sweet seductions of power—’

  ‘And whatever her reason for going in there was,’ added Lydia, with a frown, ‘I expect she could get out, as long as it was dark. Would barbed wire stop a vampire?’

  ‘We are flesh and bone, lady.’ Don Simon spread his hands. ‘And that is what barbed wire is designed to catch. A frightened vampire would be less likely to let the pain of the barbs stop him – or her – but they would be able to tear their flesh free only a little more quickly than a living man. And though we can survive the loss of blood better than the living, it renders us – as it does you – weak, and in time unable to flee or seek shelter. Of a certainty barbed wire would hold them, until their captors could come up to them with stouter bonds … if capture is the aim of their enemies. Did you see what was in those trenches, which surround the whole of the camp and the convent?’

  Lydia shook her head, though the recollection of the smell returned to her, horrible and with echoes more dreadful still.

  ‘They are floored with barbed wire, as well as fenced with it on both sides. From which I can only deduce the presence, somewhere in that camp, of a hive of revenants sufficiently large to permit the formation among them of group-mind, group-thought. A group will be capable,’ he concluded, tenting his thin fingers, ‘of controlling the local population of rats for their own defense. And I should imagine this close to no man’s land, there is no shortage of those.’

  Lydia thought that one through, and said, ‘Oh, dear.’

  TWELVE

  26-3

  Jamie

  Cuvé Sainte-Bride x Former nunnery x Nord x nr Haut-le-Bois x Dr Jules Lemoine infecting German POWs x Others x work w vampire Francesca Gheric of Strasbourg x How ?? x Tuathla (not real name) Meagher x heavily fortified x how get in? x any information x promise I will be careful x you be careful too

  All my love

  The letter was postmarked Paris, Friday 26 March, at the Gare St Lazare. The hand was undoubtedly Lydia’s, though Asher guessed Ysidro had posted it. It was topped and tailed by addresses and names not Lydia’s own, encoded as a rambling complaint about the difficulties in obtaining sugar and decent coffee in Paris, and the cipher it contained raised the hair on his scalp.

  He was still working on an innocuous missive whose coded text read Don’t you DARE investigate ANYTHING until you hear from me (knowing full well that this wouldn’t reach her for three days at least) when a brisk rap sounded at his door, which he recognized as belonging to Josetta Beyerly.

  Late-afternoon sunlight lay across the foot of his bed from the room’s single window. He knew Lydia’s friend had pupils, most mornings – French language, or piano – and on those she didn’t, she drove an ambulance-wagon from the docks to First London General Hospital. This was just as well, for through the past three nights he had hunted with Lionel Grippen, following Regent’s Canal and its ramifications into Hackney Marshes and Hampstead Heath. They sought as much for the places where a revenant might be hiding, as for sight of the thing itself, and so far had found little. Most of those evenings had been foggy, as well as pitch-dark from the blackout, and Asher could feel his energy seeping away from night to night, never returning, after sleep, to quite what it had been before. Hoggett would flay him alive if he knew.

  Josetta wouldn’t have come to Faraday’s Private Hotel like this unless it was important.

  ‘There’s something very, very queer happening over in Brabazon Street.’

  ‘His daughter won’t call the police,’ the teacher explained, when she and Asher stepped from the overcrowded bus at the junction of East and West India Docks Roads. Men – women, too, now – crowded the flagways at this hour, and the bus had been jammed, for the docks, the chemical works and the gasworks all lay nearby. The raw air was rank with coal smoke and the sewery smell of outhouses. The flat-fronted brick rows of two-up two-downs were nearly black with years’ accumulation of soot, and Asher had to stop beside a lamppost and cough for some minutes. Josetta took his arm worriedly, and he waved her off.

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ This was a lie. ‘Is there some reason he doesn’t want the police searching the house?’

  ‘The neighbors think he receives stolen goods,’ she replied matter-of-factly. ‘He may well – he owns a pawnshop in the Limehouse Road. But I think the main reason is that he’s involved with buying guns for the Irish Volunteers.’

  Asher’s jaw tightened grimly. On the omnibus from Kensington he’d picked out, as was his habit, the different accents of his fellow-passengers, and ever since they’d crossed the Regent’s Canal he’d been swimming in a sea of elongated vowels and dentalized t’s. In the shabby jacket and down-at-heels shoes he’d changed into when Josetta had spoken of their destination, he
guessed he wouldn’t stand out, and the VAD uniform of his companion would pass pretty much anywhere in London. Depending on how deeply the Mayo family was involved with those willing to use violence to obtain independence for Ireland, this probably wasn’t a neighborhood in which to be heard asking questions.

  Josetta climbed two steps – washed two or three days ago, by the look of the grime accumulated since – and rapped at the door, her sharp one-and-two characteristic knock. The house smelled of cooked cabbage and poverty, the areaway below, of decaying vegetables and piss. No alley behind. Areaways usually meant back-to-backs. In this neighborhood, probably a yard …

  The woman who opened the door a crack looked as if she hadn’t slept in several nights.

  ‘I’ve brought someone to see Bert,’ said Josetta simply.

  The woman closed the door a few inches, her eyes like shuttered windows. ‘Nuttin’ wrong with Da.’

  ‘There is,’ said Josetta. ‘You know there is, Katie. This man can be trusted.’

  Tears flooded the woman’s eyes and she clamped her lips hard.

  Grieved, thought Asher. And scared for her life.

  ‘His mouth?’ he asked softly, and hardened the final ‘th’ just slightly, a whisper of the accents of Katie’s own land. You can trust me … I’m one of your own … If the danger hadn’t been so desperate he’d have been ashamed of himself. ‘His teeth? Bruisin’ here—’ His fingers traced on his own head where he knew the sutures of the skull would be deforming – ‘an’ here?’

  Katie began to cry, and opened the door.

  A younger woman, still dressed for factory work, put her head out of the kitchen door at the back (and yes, by the window behind her there was a yard). From the other door on the narrow hall two tow-headed boys peeked, in their early teens and also, Asher noted, still in the grimed overalls of dockhands. None of them looked like they’d slept.

  Katie led them up the stair without a word.

  Asher had seen before what greeted him in the tiny rear bedroom. The figure huddled in the room’s darkest corner was a man in his sixties, balled together with his arms around his knees and his body leaned against the wall. Sheets and blankets had been stripped from the bed and draped over the single window, packed tight in every cranny in a desperate attempt to shut out all light. He winced and made a sound of protesting pain as Katie lit the old-fashioned gas: ‘Da, there’s a man come to see you. We’ll be needin’ a bit of light.’

  He made a strangled sound, as if clearing something out of his throat. Then, ‘Don’t want to see nobody, Kate.’

  ‘He knows what’s wrong wit’ you, Da.’

  Looking at the bruises on the face where the skull was elongating, the bloody smears on the old man’s hands and mouth where his teeth were starting to grow, Asher knew exactly what was wrong with him, and his heart turned sick inside him. Sick with pity and dread.

  Damn it, he thought. Damn it.

  And damn whoever brought the first of those things over here. Damn them to the bottommost smoking crevice of Hell.

  Gently he took Katie’s arm, led her back into the hall and shut the door.

  ‘Does this door lock?’ he asked softly. She shook her head. She looked to be in her forties, though hard work and childbearing had aged her face. She stood no higher than his shoulder, thin as a twig-doll. Her hair was streaked with gray and she’d lost several of her teeth.

  ‘You need to get a bolt and lock it,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back—’ He calculated times, and of course there wouldn’t be a shop in town open at this hour … ‘I’ll come back tomorrow, wit’ your permission, and put it on, if you’ve no one else—’

  ‘Terry’ll do it.’ Katie seemed to pull herself together a little. ‘Kerr. Next door. He’s a foreman at Lavender Wharf.’

  ‘Do it tonight, if you can.’ He kept his accent the one she’d unconsciously connect with home, South Ireland: those predominantly Catholic counties where resentment burned strong against the Empire which for centuries had shut the Irish themselves out of owning or ruling their own land. ‘An’ get your boys – them two I saw downstairs? – out of the house, find somewheres else for ’em to sleep. Your da’s ill,’ he went on, seeing her shake her head, as if disbelieving that such a thing could be happening to them. ‘And he’s not gonna get better. I’m sorry to be the one tellin’ you this, I’m so sorry, but there’s nuttin’ to be done. He’s gonna go off his head soon, an’ try to harm anyone he sees. Katie—’ He tightened his grip, gently, on her shoulders as her face convulsed with tears, and he glanced quickly at Josetta.

  ‘Reilley,’ she mouthed back at him, knowing what he sought.

  ‘Mrs Reilley … I’m sorry, but I need to know this. When did this happen, and where? Somethin’ attacked him, didn’t it? Tom the Ogre? Bit him? Tore him up?’

  The woman nodded, clinging now to his arms and shaking with her effort to control her sobs. ‘Comin’ home. Last Tuesday night. He’d been at the Green King over in Tildey Street—’

  On the other side of the Limehouse Cut. He’d have had to cross it, coming back, late and in the fog …

  ‘Will he eat? Drink?’

  ‘He ain’t all day. He did, up to yesterday—’

  ‘Do you have laudanum in the house? Good—’

  ‘I’ll ask Polly for it downstairs.’ Josetta clattered off, to return a few moments later with a substantial square black bottle in one hand, a smaller green one in the other labeled ‘Infants Quietness Elixir’.

  Quietness indeed, reflected Asher grimly. Will opiates work on one of Them? They certainly didn’t on vampires, not unless they were mixed with some of those ingredients inimical to vampire flesh: silver, aconite, tincture of Christmas rose. He’d seen nothing concerning the Others in the medieval text which seemed the most accurate, the notorious Book of the Kindred of Darkness. From what Don Simon Ysidro had told him, that volume had supposedly been written in Spain only a few years after the first of the Others had appeared in Bohemia. As little as anyone knew about vampires, the knowledge was vast compared with what anyone knew about these filthy cousins of theirs.

  ‘We’re goin’ to try to sedate him.’ He turned back to the terrified woman beside the shut bedroom door. ‘Put him to sleep. He’ll be a danger to you, Mrs Reilley, an’ soon. I’m sorry, but that’s what this is, this sickness that he caught from the thing that tore him up. It spreads by blood, so don’t let him bite you or tear you, don’t let one drop of his blood mix with yours. That’s why I’m tellin’ you, get your family outen this house. I wish I could make it different—’

  She was weeping again, his hands strong on her arms.

  ‘—but I can’t. You got to be strong, M’am. There’s nuttin’ can be done for him now but keep him asleep if we can. You got to be strong.’

  Shuddering, she wiped her nose and her eyes. ‘I’ll be strong.’

  ‘Good lass.’

  He glanced at Josetta again.

  ‘I got the rest of the family out of the house.’

  ‘Wait for us—’ he turned back to Mrs Reilley – ‘down the foot of the stair. I swear to you we’ll do him no harm, but by the saints, there’s nuttin’ to be done for him. And I swear,’ he added, turning to Josetta as the little woman slowly descended the stair to the darkness which had now gathered thick in the house below, ‘I wouldn’t ask this of you, Miss Beyerly, if I had any choice in the world about it.’

  ‘That’s a pip of a brogue you’ve got there, Professor,’ she returned, unruffled. ‘Better than the halls.’ Then her expression darkened, and she said softly, ‘What’s happening to him? What you were asking about – looking for … How did you know?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  For a moment the young woman stared at him in the dimness of the narrow hallway, as if she couldn’t believe what she saw in his eyes.

  ‘We have to get him to hospital. I can get an ambulance-wagon—’

  ‘Let’s get him sedated first.’ Asher’s mind was racing, Langham’s co
mplicit smile returning to him: The matter is in hand …

  You bastard. You know that thing is in London and you’re watching the hospitals, aren’t you? And if you get hold of this poor sod … What? ‘Infecting German POWs …’

  Use them against the Germans? And then later against the Irish who demand rule of their own lands, or riot against the threat of conscription for England’s war?

  Use them against Indians who want independence?

  Sick cold went through him, like the onset of fever. (And maybe it IS the onset of fever …)

  First things first.

  He signed to Josetta to remain in the hall, stepped into the bedroom.

  The gas was out. There was no smell of it in the room, so presumably Bert Mayo retained enough recollection of who and what he was to have turned the gas off rather than just dousing the minimal flame. A weak reflection of light from the hall picked up a red glint from the corner where the man had been huddled earlier, and, near him, the tiny, vicious sparks of the eyes of rats.

  Four or five rats, all within a few feet of him.

  Damn it …

  Asher struck a match. Mayo hid his eyes. The rats fled.

  So far, so good.

  ‘Get out of it,’ whispered the stricken man, the words dribbling from his lips like the mutter of delirium. ‘Put out the bloody light. Make ’em shut up. Katie …’

  ‘Make who shut up, Bert?’ Asher lit the gas and turned it down as far as he safely could.

  Bert covered his face with his arms, then scrabbled to the bed and grabbed the pillow to further block the light from his eyes. The walls around him were smeared with blood where his mouth had touched; the mattress, and the bedclothes hung over the window, streaked with it.

  DO NOT let that blood touch you …

  ‘Rats,’ whispered Bert Mayo hoarsely. ‘Chatterin’. Voices in me conk. Make ’em shut up!’ He lurched to his feet. Seen full-on for the first time his face was a horror, the flesh a mass of bruises where the mouth and jaw had lengthened out like an ape’s, blood from his bitten lips stringing into the gray stubble of his chin. Behind him in the doorway Asher heard Josetta gasp, and he reached back and took the laudanum bottle from her hand.