Pale Guardian

by Barbara Hambly

  The cot weighed something over twenty pounds and she was barely aware of it as she up-ended it, flattened against the wall beside the door, holding it in front of her body. The legs are going to tangle in the door so I have to wait till they all get—

  The reek smote her like a hammer as the door was yanked open. Lydia shoved the cot at them, slithered past and out the door and almost into the arms of two more revenants that had entered the lab behind the first group. She flattened back to the wall, threw a fast glance at the door …

  And saw Francesca standing, smiling, against the dark of the corridor.

  Lydia twisted, dodged to another corner as the revenants came at her. One of them, still more man-like than bestial, sprang at her like a panther; she looked for something loose to throw and there was nothing. If I strike at it and miss, it’ll grab me—

  She dodged past and the other four emerged from the cell, surrounding her—

  ‘Stop this!’ Lemoine’s voice shouted from the hall. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  The revenants stopped in their tracks.

  Stood swaying, scratching themselves, looking about them as if she, Lydia, had suddenly become invisible and odorless.

  Francesca’s smile widened. She stepped out of the doorway, angelic eyes glittering with delight. ‘We’re only having a little test.’

  Lemoine pushed past her into the laboratory, in shirtsleeves, clutching his aching arm. He must have been in bed and asleep.

  Lydia began to shake so that she could barely stand. She felt as if she would vomit, as much from sheer terror as because the six revenants stood only a few feet from her – even Lemoine hesitated to approach her, his eyes darting from the creatures to the White Lady, still standing beside him in the doorway. Lydia could almost see his struggle, knowing he should stride over to her and bring her out of the circle of the things and not daring.

  Meagher slipped into the lab behind him, blue eyes sparkling with the mischief of Hell. ‘And here we thought you’d be pleased,’ she teased, and Lemoine swung around to face her. This time he saw what she was, and his eyes bulged with shock.

  He whispered, ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Well, I was hardly going to risk touching those things—’ Francesca gestured toward the revenants – ‘before I’d made sure you were paying me in genuine coin.’ She put an arm around Meagher’s shoulders, and the Irish vampire stepped into the embrace like a cat asking to be stroked. Like sisters. Like school friends. ‘And I’m pleased to say your procedure passed the test, dear man, with flying colors. You should be well pleased.’

  She turned her attention – Lydia didn’t see how exactly she did it, more than just looking at the revenants – back to the creatures, and they shambled into one corner of the lab.

  ‘It is … an extraordinary sensation,’ the White Lady went on. ‘Feeling their minds. Look.’

  She fixed them with her gaze. After a moment a huge gray rat emerged from behind the boxes in one corner of the lab, then another. They ran toward Lydia, who stepped back with a sickened cry. Lemoine said again, ‘Stop that!’ and the rats stopped.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Francesca after a moment. ‘Hit one. It won’t run away.’

  Lemoine stood still for a long moment, then looked around him for something to strike the rat with, but as Lydia had observed a few moments before, there was nothing loose in the lab to use for a weapon. With a laugh, Meagher stepped forward, picked up the rat – which made no move to resist – and grabbed it by head and body, and with a twist broke its neck. In the brightness of the laboratory lights, Lydia could see the rosy pinkness of the Irish girl’s face, the red of her lips: only by the reflective gleam of her eyes, by the fangs that showed when she smiled and the long claws that tipped her fingers, could anyone have said she was vampire. She’d clearly fed.

  Meagher turned her mocking eyes on Lydia. ‘Why don’t you go back into your cell now, dear?’

  ‘They won’t hurt you,’ added Francesca, when Lydia tried to step past the revenants without touching any of them. It wasn’t possible to do, but Francesca was right: they didn’t even turn their heads when Lydia’s shoulders brushed against them as she slipped by.

  ‘You see,’ said the White Lady to Lemoine, as Lydia closed the cell door behind her. ‘Everything you wished to achieve. I stand ready to complete your plan.’ She curtsied elaborately.

  Lemoine drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. Accepting – Lydia could see the shift in his shoulders. Accepting that sometimes evil must be done that good may come …

  ‘I am …’ he began, and then paused. ‘This is astounding. First we must test— How many of these creatures can you control, and at what distances? Not,’ he added warningly, ‘with a test such as this, which, if you will permit me to say so, was inexcusably cruel—’

  ‘And I am inexcusably sorry.’ Francesca curtsied, without an atom of contrition in her voice. ‘I assure you, it will not happen again.’

  Even from the judas of her cell, Lydia could see the White Lady and Meagher exchange a wink.

  A wink which Lemoine didn’t even see. Isn’t he even aware that they can tinker with his perceptions? That they’re altering them – blinding him – even now? Making him see what he wants to see?

  Or doesn’t he even need a vampire’s delusion for that?

  ‘When we have tested – when we have documented what is possible – I will inform the Ministry,’ Lemoine went on, as the revenants filed from the laboratory. ‘No one – NO ONE – knows the extent of what I have sought here: the Germans have spies everywhere. And not the Germans only,’ he added darkly. ‘Even the British poke and pry, and try to find out what isn’t their business—’

  He started to follow the revenants from the lab, when Meagher touched his arm and said, ‘Lock?’

  ‘Ah.’ Lemoine crossed to the door of Lydia’s cell. In one quick stride Lydia was huddled in the corner, knees drawn up to her forehead, arms wrapped around her shins, shaking and sobbing.

  ‘Madame,’ said the French surgeon urgently, and hurried to her side. ‘Madame, be calm. You must be calm. You can see – you have seen – that these creatures are now completely under control. Believe me, I swear to you that what we do here, shocking as it may seem to you, is necessary, for the defeat of Germany and the salvation of France … and of your own country, of course.’

  He knelt on the floor before her, grasped her hand in his. ‘Sometimes one must use shocking methods, to bring about the good of all,’ he said. ‘Germany must be defeated. France – the French people – must prevail. Once this war is won, these things will be utterly destroyed, never to be used again—’

  If I go on shuddering like this he’ll give me a sedative.

  And does he actually believe that seeing what I have seen, the French government is going to let me go and tell people about all this?

  Lydia looked up and straightened her glasses, and tried to give him an expression of dewy-eyed trust. ‘Do you … do you swear it?’ she managed to whisper – Not bad, she thought, considering how badly she wanted to scream YOU IRRESPONSIBLE WRETCHED IDIOT!!!

  ‘Upon my honor, Madame,’ said Lemoine. ‘And upon my honor, as soon as it is safe to do so, you will be released …’

  Lydia gave a sniffle or two (Do NOT scream …) and, a little to her own surprise, succeeded in forcing herself to her feet, and crossing the cell to pick up and right her cot. ‘I just want to go home,’ she whispered, like a beaten woman, and, spreading pillow and blanket back into place, lay down with her back to the door. ‘I just want to go home.’

  She heard the click of the silver padlock, and the creak of the laboratory door.

  Rising swiftly, she crossed to the judas in time to see Francesca leave the lab in Lemoine’s wake. Meagher turned, and with a casually savage stomp, broke the back of the surviving rat that still sat in the midst of the laboratory floor.

  TWENTY-THREE

  ‘Mistress …’

  Lydia jerked awa
ke, as the voice whispered, like a thread of pale mist, at the edge of her dreams.

  She immediately checked her watch. Four thirty. The first threads of light would not yet have begun to stain the sky outside. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep that early and, given the events of the night, hadn’t thought she would. But the fact that Simon’s mind could touch her dreams meant that he was somewhere close by, underground as she was and near enough that he could read her dreams.

  Damn it, she thought. Damn it, revenants or no revenants, I have to sleep …

  Her heart was hammering and she debated about getting changed for sleep – she had fallen asleep again fully dressed – and then decided against it. If he’s down here it may be that he has a plan to escape now, before sunrise, and she wasn’t about to undertake it in a pair of French Army pajamas.

  She lay down again, closed her eyes, tried hard not to see the laboratory door opening, the circle of revenants closing around her. Tried not to see the tickled delight in Francesca’s eyes, like a child at the cinema waiting to watch Ben Turpin get a custard pie in his face. ‘There was a kind of spite to her,’ Szgedny had said …

  Fall asleep! Simon will have to retreat, will fall asleep himself soon …

  Miranda sleeping in her tiny cot back on Holyrood Street, silk-fine red hair spread over her pillow. Princess, the nursery cat, sleeping at Miranda’s feet. Jamie asleep … Jamie … the recollection of waking somewhere in the deeps of her wedding night and lying there looking at the shape of his shoulders in the moonlight, the way slumber smoothed the lines of his face and left it like a young boy’s …

  ‘Mistress …’

  In her dream (Do NOT wake up …!) she sat up (Aunt Lavinnia would FAINT if she knew I dreamed about Simon standing at the foot of my bed …) and caught him against her as he perched on the cot’s edge, cold and skeletal in uniform trousers and braces, the sleeves of his shirt wet with dirty water: ‘Simon, where are you?’

  ‘Hush – near. Near enough to see what happened tonight. Forgive me, lady – I would have come from hiding had things gone any further. But I heard Lemoine coming and gambled that he’d be able to stop her. Had I shown myself—’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Lydia. ‘We would both have been killed, and you at least have to get out of here and warn somebody – Jamie, if you can do it—’

  ‘Hush,’ he said quickly, and the cold, clawed fingers pressed her lips. ‘I’ll sleep soon. Have you still your picklocks?’

  She nodded. ‘I can’t use them on the padlock …’

  ‘Do you still aid this Lemoine in the cleaning of his workroom? Good. Leave them behind the storage boxes where the rats came from tonight. The Irishwoman has a key to the laboratory but regards it little now that she has ceased helping him with his work. I can take it from her room when all have gone out to this test of theirs tomorrow. Revenants—’

  His head nodded suddenly, and the thin white brows buckled over his nose.

  ‘Revenants haunt the crypts.’

  ‘Simon—’ Good Heavens, don’t fall asleep before you can get yourself hidden—!

  She was sitting up in bed, alone.

  His voice whispered, like an ectoplasmic scratching at a dark windowpane: ‘Can’t get out …’

  True waking came then, and the clammy stuffiness of the underground. The smell of the revenants, and of greasy smoke, absorbed into blankets and walls.

  It was late afternoon when Asher reached Army Headquarters at Amiens. The road south of Pont-Sainte-Félicité had been shelled Monday night, and was blocked with supply-trains waiting for the digging parties to get duckboards on the surface. Beyond Haut-le-Bois it was impassable, necessitating Asher’s driver to backtrack half a dozen miles and take a muddy track over a shallow range of hills, to a more protected route.

  Before they reached that point, Asher was able to get a glimpse of the old nunnery of Cuvé Sainte-Bride.

  He didn’t dare stop, but the state of the road and the heavy traffic of mule-drawn wagons allowed him ample time to train his field glasses on the square gray buildings on the slope above the road, the dense snarls of barbed wire that rimmed the trenches around it, the lone sentry at its gate. According to the records unearthed by Josetta’s friend at the War Ministry (Who could easily have been interred under the Official Secrets Act for her trouble, he reflected), there were five French soldiers and five British assigned to the place, as well as Lemoine and five members of ‘staff’, some of whom were almost certainly local cleaners and a cook. But the requisitions for rations were too high, and even without Lydia’s messages Asher would have deduced its use as a prison of some kind by this time. Presumably Lemoine had the French equivalent of ‘at his sole discretion’ and ‘please render all and any assistance’.

  I wonder what he told them back in Paris?

  The truth?

  Or just, I have a plan to win the war.

  He wondered how far Lydia and Ysidro had gotten into the place before they’d slipped out again, and what they had discovered. Was a coded letter even now lying on his desk in Holyrood Street?

  Two miles down the wider road after crossing the hills, the car broke down.

  ‘I don’t blame you for wanting to get a shift on, sir,’ confided the young captain in charge of Field Artillery Battery Twelve, while Asher waited in the makeshift hut for horse-drawn transport to be arranged. Asher had given him a cigarette and expressed his genuine admiration for the battery – four BL-60s that dated back to the Boer War and a number of Woolwich Mk-IX naval guns mounted on railway carriages. Beneath a careful public-school English, the glottalized t’s and disappearing l’s of the West Country still lurked through. ‘There’s weird stories going about this countryside at night – things people see in the woods just lately, or things they’ve found. It’s not some form of shell shock, sir, or nerves. There’s not a man in the battery’ll venture past the perimeter when the light goes.’

  ‘An’ I don’t care what Colonel St-Vire says,’ added Asher’s driver, ‘beggin’ your pardon, sir, I’m sure, an’ no disrespec’ an’ all … But it’s Jerry. It’s got to be. Nick Frampton – my mate back at Félicité – ’e swears the thing ’e saw shamblin’ about the old trenches one night, wi’ a face on it like God’s nightmare, ’ad on a Jerry uniform, an’ eyes glowin’ like a cat’s. The men are spooked, sir.’ He drew on the Woodbine Asher had given him. ‘I’m glad that axle went out ’ere, an’ not further on down the road where we might be stuck when it was growin’ dark.’

  ‘Have you reported this?’ asked Asher. ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘A week?’ The driver glanced inquiringly at the captain. ‘Ten days?’

  ‘A week,’ said the captain. ‘And I think it’s growing worse. As for reporting, what can we say, really? Things somebody says he saw – the state bodies are found in, or that poor horse the lads found in the woods, torn to pieces by God knows what …’

  ‘Me dad’s a gamekeeper,’ put in the driver. ‘An’ I never seen an animal what could do that. But beyond that …’ He spread his hands.

  ‘You write a report, you send it to your colonel,’ went on the captain, ‘who’s got his own plate full of grief just keeping shells coming for the guns and food for the men, and he sees it an’ thinks, Hrm, well, somebody going a bit shell-shocked, this’ll wait. But if you were to know anyone, sir …’ His casual finger brushed the War Ministry papers, which, Asher was well aware, had ‘Spook’ written all over them.

  ‘I might have a friend or two who’d be interested in this.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it, sir.’ The captain touched his hat brim. ‘Because God’s honest truth, sir, it’s giving me the jim-jams.’

  A corporal came in then, with word that transport had been found, and Asher did the last ten miles to Amiens in a wagon-load of wounded drawn by two of the beautiful copper-bay Shire horses that a year ago – like their owner, Asher reflected – had been peacefully plowing some Shropshire rye field. Conscripts who would
lay their faithful bones in foreign earth. As they jogged toward the great cathedral city Asher turned the problem over in his mind, reflecting that the young captain of Battery Twelve was right. ‘You write a report, you send it to your colonel …’ and the revenants slipped from the crypt beneath Sainte-Bride, a danger not because of who they killed, but because of those that survived an encounter.

  And say Lydia and Ysidro did find something, some proof utterly damning, in their visit to the half-ruined convent – proof that presumably had sent them hotfoot to Amiens … What then? What if he himself added to the report the contention that the Irish Brotherhood – and who could tell what other groups within the Empire, or what other groups they’d talked to – once means of controlling them was found – were seeking to breed up their own? Would that stand up against Langham’s bland assurances that ‘everything is in hand’?

  Would everything lock up in some committee or other until it was too late? Until some wounded survivor of an attack was simply sent home to Britain with the infection in his veins?

  No, thought Asher.

  Simply, No.

  No one at Headquarters in Amiens had seen or heard anything of Lydia, with or without a companion whom Asher was fairly certain was masquerading as a British officer. (If the Undead can tamper with human perception he can probably make them believe he’s Sir John French and none of them would think to question the impression …) As a major rail hub and supply depot immediately behind the front lines, the ancient cathedral town was swollen with troops and short on everything: coal, food, petrol, transport and most especially housing. Nevertheless, Asher’s papers got him a somewhat elderly Silver Ghost (plus driver) for the following day, and a garret room on the Rue des Tanneurs near the cathedral, to which he repaired after a sketchy dinner of bread, charcuterie and what he privately suspected was mule meat in the officer’s mess.

  Coming down the steps of the mess, he was just reaching for the handle of its outer door when the door was opened and Pritchard Crowell came in.