Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Broke every bone in his body,’ returned the vampire calmly, and flung her prisoner down on the grille above the gas cylinders. ‘This time there’ll be no running away.’

  The captive vampire sobbed in agony as Meagher and Francesca dragged his limbs straight, and screamed as they buckled the straps over his arms, his ankles, his forehead. When Francesca stepped aside, Lydia saw that the man’s hair was black, not white.

  It wasn’t Don Simon.

  It was the beautiful Basilio.

  She rapidly calculated the number of people that the handsome vampire must have killed – between thirty and sixty thousand, not counting the dying whose lives he had devoured since the start of the war – but it didn’t make what she watched less horrible. Francesca bent over him, held the left hand that was fastened away from his body, at a ninety-degree angle to his side, gripped his chin in her other hand, forcing his eyes to meet hers. Basilio began to sob, ‘Prego, prego, per favore—’ and Francesca smiled, and kissed his mouth, like a lover, murmuring in whatever Renaissance form of Latin or Italian that both had learned, centuries ago. On the other side of the grille, Lemoine stepped close, and cut Basilio’s throat with a scalpel, catching the blood – which oozed slowly rather than spurted, Lydia observed (of course it would, if his heart doesn’t beat) – in a glass laboratory jar.

  He had no pity on any of his own victims …

  Her eyes still locked on Basilio’s, Francesca stepped back, gripping his hand, and with her free hand signed to Meagher. Lemoine turned a switch and the roar of jerry-built fans in the old air-passages filled the room.

  Basilio screamed, ‘Antonio!’ as flame engulfed him.

  Francesca’s head snapped back, her face convulsed with ecstasy. Greasy black smoke rolled up under the low vaults of the crypt, but the fans could make little headway against the hideous stench.

  Basilio screamed for ten minutes and thirty-five seconds (Lydia timed him). It was another eight minutes before Francesca released his hand – still jutting from the flame and still, as far as Lydia could see, attached to the bone of the arm – and stepped back. Her eyes were shut, her face transformed, like Bernini’s statue of St Teresa in the Vatican. Across the flame that still swathed the blackening corpse (If it IS a corpse – how long WOULD it take a vampire to die in flame?), Meagher and Lemoine watched the White Lady with shocked and fascinated eyes.

  Then – and this interested Lydia almost more than all the rest – she saw both colonel and nurse lose the focus of their gaze, and stand as if in trance as Francesca walked to the door and left. She knew this was what vampires did – put people in that half-dreaming state of inattention, so they couldn’t see the vampire move – but it was the first time she’d seen it done, Francesca obviously having forgotten that Lydia was present on the other side of the storeroom door.

  I’ll have to write all this down for Jamie.

  Under the grille the gas cylinders still spouted flame, the vampire’s singularly tough tissues slowly dissolving into ash. Smoke choked the whole of the room, as if the underground chamber were in fact Hell. Lydia realized she was trembling.

  If I get out of this alive …

  The train from Calais to St-Omer was vile. Even the corridors were crowded with men coming off their leave or shipping in from their training, tense, harried, half-drunk or dog-tired, and all of them, it seemed to Asher – in a first-class compartment with a dozen officers – smoking like chimneys. He’d acquired the uniform of a major in the Second Army as a matter of convenience – everyone would look askance at civilian mufti – and dozed most of the way, wrapped in his army greatcoat. But his dreams were troubled.

  He had, after all, taken passage yesterday, as Stewart had originally wished. He’d turned in the names of the Irish Brotherhood clique who had been in on the revenant scheme, and that of Butler, the German agent who’d bankrolled them; had wired both Josetta and Millward to watch for further sign of new revenants. So far as he could tell, British participation in Lemoine’s project was financial – at a guess the French Army hadn’t told them where they were getting their ‘special troops’ and possibly didn’t know themselves. But with a man like Langham sniffing for a way to take over the project ‘for the good of the Empire’ – and given the agent he was using – that situation could alter in less than a day to something far more deadly.

  How many times, Asher wondered wearily, had he heard men say, ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ or, ‘It’s actually much safer than it looks,’ preparatory to destroying themselves and everyone around them? Including the idiots who’d gotten Britain mixed up in the war to begin with. It’s perfectly safe, in Asher’s mind, ranked right up there with I don’t really see what else we can do, and It will all be over by Christmas.

  His own experience of serving the Queen had been that most things were a great deal more dangerous than people wanted to think – or say – they were, and that anything could go wrong.

  Even in twilight, the streets of the medieval town of St-Omer teemed with men in uniform. VAD nurses in blue and white brushed shoulders with British khaki, French blue, men in the darker ‘hospital blues’. Horse-drawn ambulance wagons and drays of supplies rattled from the train station: tinned beef, crates of biscuits, box after box of ammunition, rumbling field guns. Asher had the horrible sensation of seeing goods going in at one end of some nightmare factory – men, food, weapons – and coming out at the other, discreetly bundled in bandages and dribbling blood. Did vampires haunt the railway station, he wondered, silent in the shadows behind the volunteers who brought hot tea to the men on stretchers being loaded for Calais?

  Or are they all at the Front?

  At Divisional HQ Asher presented his papers, pointed out the ‘at his sole discretion’ and ‘please render all and any assistance requested’ clauses to a harassed clerk and then to an equally exhausted colonel. The colonel ran a jaundiced eye over the letter and said drily, ‘You’re another one of them, then, are you?’ and Asher raised his brows.

  ‘Has he come through, then?’ he asked. ‘I heard he would.’

  The colonel’s mustache bristled irritably and he rubbed a tired hand over his eyes. ‘Don’t ask me. Didn’t see him – didn’t read his papers – don’t know a thing about him …’

  ‘Small chap?’ Asher put a note of sympathy into his voice. ‘Silver hair, though of course he may have dyed it … beaky nose. Face like a raisin and a voice you can’t hear across the room. Hands like a schoolgirl.’

  The officer’s grimace answered his question and Asher thought, He always did get across men in authority …

  And he wondered at himself that he wasn’t surprised to have his suspicion confirmed.

  ‘And I suppose,’ Asher went on, ‘he bagged the best of the motorcars in the pool, didn’t he? Always does.’

  ‘Not my business.’ The colonel sniffed. ‘Good as told me so. And where’ll you be off to, with your precious “at his own discretion”? I suppose you’ll want it first thing in the morning? And a driver?’

  ‘If you’d be so kind.’ Asher inclined his head, and took the requisition the colonel shoved at him across his desk. ‘I’ll be going to Pont-Sainte-Félicité.’

  Because of the weight of the earth that surrounded the crypts of Cuvé Sainte-Bride, Lydia guessed that whatever psychic outcry had poured from Basilio’s mind at his death had gone no further than the stone walls of the laboratory.

  The following night they took Antonio Pentangeli as well.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ‘Be careful out there.’ Captain Niles Calvert touched Asher’s sleeve, staying him in the doorway of the wooden hut designated ‘officer’s mess’. ‘Jerry’s getting ready for something – you’ve been hearing that since you landed at Calais, haven’t you? But every wire-cutting party, every listening post, up and down the line as far as Langemarck, reports the same thing: fresh troops coming up, supplies laid in, artillery moving about behind their lines.’ He glanced out past the dim glow of lantern-light thr
ough tent-canvas, the glimmer of illumination leaked between cracks in the rough board shanties that had been built over Pont-Sainte-Félicité’s shattered foundations. A machine gun chattered – a German MG-04, by the sound – for the sixth time in an hour, and the rumble of the guns vibrated the ground under Asher’s boots. ‘Can’t tell when they’re going to hit.’

  ‘I’ll be careful.’

  The surgeon’s eyes narrowed as he studied Asher’s face, as if he’d have preferred a reply more along the lines of, Heavens, perhaps I’d better stay indoors …

  ‘Mrs Asher goes out like that as well – as I’m sure you know. And she won’t be told either. It always worries me sick,’ he added, ‘even before …’ He hesitated, then lowered his voice. ‘I don’t ask you to tell tales out of school, but … I take it you’re from Headquarters?’

  ‘I passed through Headquarters, yes.’

  Like the colonel in St-Omer, this foxlike little surgeon clearly had his own opinions about people who moved about the battle zone with things like ‘at his sole discretion’ and ‘please render all and any assistance requested’ written on their papers. His mouth twisted a little and he drew a last breath of smoke from his cigarette – the air in the mess behind them was blue with it.

  ‘You didn’t happen to hear anything about these … these whatever-they-are. Madmen—’ His red-gold brows dived down over the bridge of his nose. ‘Only they’re not …’

  ‘Not mad?’ Asher felt cold to the marrow of his bones.

  Calvert’s voice was a whisper. ‘Not men. Not mankind, though they seem male enough. You haven’t heard tell of ’em?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  For a moment Asher was afraid Calvert would balk. It was clear from his eyes that he read absolutely no surprise in Asher’s face, and was angry at it, and no wonder.

  Then he said, ‘Night before last a lone Jerry attacked a listening post near Loos. Didn’t even seem to feel the barbed wire. They shot him, but he wouldn’t die, they said. Just hung there in the wire sort of bleating at them like a dying goat, and the smell of him – it – was something fearful, they said, something the like of which they’d never smelled, and after six months in this section, believe me, Major, that’s something. They doused their lantern and didn’t dare put their heads up for fear of his kameraden, but two of them – good men, I know them, and not easily funked – swear his face was more like an ape’s, or a dog’s, than a man’s. By daylight he was gone. There was blood all over the wires, and over the ground. Their bullets had hit him, all right.’

  Calvert shook his head. ‘Then yesterday Trent, the head of the stretcher-bearers, came to me saying they’d been attacked out in no man’s land, just before dawn. They go out then, if there’s been a dust-up; less chance of Jerry potting at them. They had a hooded lantern with them. Trent said—’

  He winced, and seemed to back himself up on his tracks: ‘Trent’s a good man. Conchy, and steady as a rock. Trent said they’d found a … they’d found a dead Tommy in a shell-hole, and with him what he first thought was a dead Jerry, crumpled up where a shell fragment had hit him. But when they got close, Trent says the Jerry sat up, and came at them – crawling because he’d been blown nearly in half, and his face, when he described it, was like this other thing that Guin from the listening post had seen: ape-like, dog-like, and smelling like Hell doesn’t have words to describe. Trent and his boys were about to go after this … he called it a Jerry … with clubs, when another of ’em came over the lip of the shell-hole. They shot it, but it just got back up again, and I can’t blame ’em for running for it.

  ‘What is it? What’s out there?’ Calvert’s face had such intensity that Asher almost felt the surgeon was about to grab him by the shoulders and try to shake the truth out of him. ‘Trent and his boys went back just after daybreak – and got shot at by snipers for their trouble – and found the wounded Jerry … not just dead. Half-burned-up, Trent said. He said his sister used to work in a match factory, and had got burned once by the phosphorous there. He said these burns looked like that. He said that by the look of him, the dead Tommy had been torn open and partly eaten.’

  ‘Did you report this?’ Shit, bugger, damn … Had Asher not been blessed with ears that didn’t turn red with anger, he knew he would have been scarlet to his hairline. Bastards … BASTARDS …

  Calvert’s mouth twisted. ‘Oh, aye.’

  ‘The matter is in hand …’

  When Asher said nothing, Calvert pitched his cigarette stub to the mud and ground it with his heel. After a time, in a calmer voice, the surgeon asked, ‘Did Mrs Asher see any of these things?’ He held up his hand, as if to stay Asher’s reply of I don’t know, and said, ‘I just wondered. The way she started getting these “special orders” to come and go, and drivers taking her off down to Arras and Amiens, and I never did quite believe it was all about teaching others to use a fluoroscope, although God knows we need that, too … And I know you can’t say. But looking back, she’d take these walks late at night, like you’re off to do. So I just wonder.’

  Keeping himself outwardly calm, as he had long ago learned to do, Asher felt, inwardly, that he was shaking in his whole being like a plucked guitar string. They’re getting out …

  What the hell did those idiots THINK was going to happen, if they started farming these things, growing them like a Hell-crop of monsters …?

  ‘I wonder also,’ he said. ‘And I don’t actually know anything. But tell your stretcher parties – and tell your surgeons – that if they encounter one of these things again, do not make contact with its blood. The condition is transmitted by blood contact, and is irreversible. Those who are infected lose their memories and their minds, and yes, they will eat not only the dead but the living.’

  Calvert stared at him: hardened at everything he had seen and done on the Front since the previous autumn, he was still knocked aghast.

  ‘I hope to catch up with Mrs Asher in Amiens,’ Asher went on. ‘And to find out – I hope – a little more about what’s going on. She may in fact be teaching fluoroscopy.’ He pushed his hat back, and rubbed his face. The thought of fifty miles over the shell-holed roads tomorrow was already a nightmare. ‘If she’s already on her way back – if we miss each other – please let her know that I’m here and I’m searching for her. Don’t let her go off on another of these “special assignments” before she talks to me. And in the meantime,’ he added grimly, ‘I think I need to have a look at whatever she saw out there in the dark.’

  The man they got – the revenant they got – had just begun to turn. Looking through the judas into the lighted laboratory, Lydia thought he looked barely twenty, desperately trying to keep his fortitude in the face of his captors and clearly on the verge of vomiting with terror. She saw him reach up repeatedly to finger his face, his mouth, the sides of his skull where the sutures would be just beginning to deform. He looked wildly from Lemoine’s face to Francesca’s, horrible in their absolute impersonality, as if he were indeed nothing more than the chicken they were going to have for dinner, once they’d wrung its neck.

  Had Lydia had a gun she’d have cheerfully shot them both.

  It was worse, she thought – as the young man balked at the last moment, at the sight of the gas cylinders beneath the grille – knowing that even if he did escape, even if both Lemoine and the White Lady were to drop dead (and go straight to Hell!), he was doomed, damned, infected already with the condition that would eat his brain into nothingness, that would turn him into a walking appetite that spread its horror into any that it wounded but did not kill. Even if I shot them, and Nurse Meagher – who was absent from the laboratory and whom Lydia had not seen all day – I would have to kill him, too.

  She leaned her head against the edge of the judas, and discarded the idea of going to hide her head in the pillow of her cot. Jamie’s going to need to know exactly what happens and how long it takes. And I want to know, too.

  I’m so sorry, Hans or Gleb or Heinrich – even
if you were the person who shot Uncle Richard’s poor footman Ned, I am so sorry …

  She timed it. Nearly seventy seconds elapsed from the moment that the White Lady took the young soldier’s hand – gazing into his eyes, whispering to him in German – and the moment that she signed Lemoine to turn on the flame. Longer, Lydia thought, than it had taken for poor Basilio to surrender his mind into hers. But it was less than a minute before he ceased screaming, and only two and a half, before Francesca let go. Her shoulders relaxed just before she did, and her head dropped back a little, as Josetta’s sometimes did when she’d sipped really, really good champagne.

  Nothing of the paroxysm that had shaken the whole of her body, with Basilio’s death.

  ‘How do you feel, Madame?’ asked Lemoine.

  Francesca looked at him, and smiled. ‘Not bad at all.’ She moved her shoulders, as if readjusting to the decrease in tension. Ran a hand through her flaxen hair. ‘Certainly I’m not hearing voices in my mind, if that’s what you mean. To be honest,’ she added, ‘’twas a concern of mine as well. Let me—’ Her smile widened. ‘Let me adjust … digest … contemplate …’

  ‘Of course.’ Colonel Lemoine’s stiffness spoke worlds for his own impatience, his own barely-concealed apprehension that something might still go wrong with his mission, his project—

  He turned his head, regarding the burning corpse on its bed of blue flame. ‘And there will be no trouble – no danger – in destroying these things, once the fighting is over?’

  ‘Mmm … I shouldn’t think so.’ She made a little rippling movement of all her muscles, like a cat stretching, as if feeling for some change within herself. ‘If I am able to control them – as I feel, I think, I must be …’ Her velvety voice was barely audible over the roaring of the ventilator fans. ‘What can be simpler than ordering them all into a walled enclosure open to the sunlight, and waiting for dawn? If in fact,’ she added casually, ‘you want to get rid of them when the fighting is done. Someone in your government might want to keep them around a little—’