James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (13 page)

And yet, she saw, the vampire was having his own problems. Part of this was because people simply did not look at him, or apparently did not see him when they did, with the result that they did not move aside, as people did for her. The irony of that entertained her a good deal as she moved along, hands in pockets—she'd mislaid her gloves and had no tune to hunt for them—in his wake. She herself had no trouble following him when the ever-growing crowds permitted, but, then, she knew what to look for. He was tall. The cheap black bowler floated over the general crowd like a roach in a cesspool.

He turned one corner and another. The crowds thinned out, and Lydia had to fall back again, glad that her coat was of a nondescript color—unusual for her, and in this case deliberate—and wishing her hair were, too, where it showed beneath the brim of her hat. The vampire was moving slower now, and Lydia observed that people now moved aside from him, and treated him as if he were there.

So it was something that came and went, she thought.

And there was something else.

They were near Covent Garden, a tangle of little streets and alleys, the cramped, cheap lodgings of servants and seamstresses, costermongers hawking at half price from carts what they couldn't get rid of earlier in the day, and the smell of rotting vegetables piled with the dung in the gutters. A couple of loungers outside a pub whistled admiringly and called out to her. She ignored them and hoped the vampire did, too. Though she vastly preferred the quieter life of Oxford for her work, at her father's insistence she'd spent a certain amount of time in London, but the graceful houses of Mayfair, the green spaciousness of Hyde Park and St. James, and the quiet opulence of the Savoy and Simpson's might have been in another city. This tangle of wet cobblestones, loud voices, and harsh lights was alien to her experience; though she wasn't particularly frightened—after all, she knew she had only to summon a cab and return to Bruton Place—she knew she would have to go carefully.

She saw the vampire turn into a little court whose broken cobbles leaked black water into the wider street; she ducked her head and passed its entrance swiftly, not daring even to look. In this part of London, circling a block was always a chancy business, but she took the next turning and hurried her steps down the insalubrious and deserted court until she found a dirty alley that seemed to lead through.

She hesitated for a long time—nearly a minute, which, given her quarry and the danger she knew she would be in, was long. The alley, what she could see of it, was dark and crooked. Though the houses of the little court at her back gave evidence of life in the form of lights burning in the windows and shadows crossing back and forth over the cheap curtains or baldly uncurtained glass, all the ground-floor shops had been locked up, and the wet, narrow pavement lay deserted under the chill drift of evening mist. She shivered and huddled deeper into her coat, for the first time conscious of why so many people disliked being alone. The vampire was in the next court. She had a strong suspicion that he had gone there to seek his prey.

Her hand closed tighter on the sheath of the amputation knife in her pocket. A six-inch blade seemed like a broadsword in the dissecting room; she wondered if, put to it, she could bring herself to use it against living flesh.

Or even, she added with involuntary humor, Undead. One way of getting a blood sample, but risky. If the other vampires didn't know of her connection with James, they would have no reason for sparing her life.

And James would be furious.

Like the whisper of a breath, of a footfall, or of the half consciousness of the smell of blood, she knew there was someone behind her.

She swung around, her heart hammering, galvanized into terror such as she had never felt before, the knife whipping out of her pocket, naked in her slim hand. For a moment she stood, flattened to the brick of the corner of the alley wall, the scalpel held before her, facing . . . nothing. The court behind her was deserted.

But, she thought, only just.

Her glance dropped instantly to the wet pavement behind her. No footprint but her own little smudges marred its moist shine. Her hand was shaking—it, her mouth, and her feet all felt like ice as all the blood in her body retreated from her extremities in reaction to the shock. She noted the effect with a clinical detachment, at the same time conscious of the heat of her breath, and how it smoked as it mingled with the mists that had begun to drift through this dark and tangled part of the city. Had it been this misty before?

There had been something there. She knew it.

A smell, she thought, her mind taking refuge in analysis while her eyes swept here and there, to the shadows which suddenly clotted blacker, more twisted, beneath the doorways and shutters of the locked and empty shops—a smell of blood, of rot, of something she had never smelled before and never wanted to smell again ... A smell of something wrong.

And close to her. So terrifyingly close.

It was perhaps forty seconds before she gained the courage to move from the protection of the wall at her back.

She kept as close to the wall as she could, making her way back swiftly to the populated noises of Monmouth Street; she felt every doorway and every projection of the shop fronts concealing invisible threats. As she passed the entrance to the next court movement caught her eye. She turned her head to see a girl, fourteen or fifteen and dressed in secondhand finery from the slop shops of the East Side, an exuberantly trimmed orange and blue frock standing out in the darkness. She heard the nasal voice say, “Well, Mister, wot yer doin' 'ere, all by yourself?” It was young and coaxing and already with a professional's edge.

She stood for a long moment, sickened, the knife still in her lowered hand, wondering if she should call out. Beyond the girl's form, in the black darkness of the court, she could see nothing, but half felt the gleam of eyes.

She quickened her steps, cold and shaking, and hailed the first cab she saw to take her back to Bloomsbury.

What little sleep she achieved that night was with the lamp burning beside her bed.

The morning post brought Asher an envelope without return address, containing a blank sheet of paper in which was folded a cloakroom ticket from the British Museum. He packed up the precis of yesterday's findings, the list of relatives of Lotta Harshaw's victims, and the measurements of tracks and footprints taken at Half Moon Street and put them in a brown satchel, which he took with him to the Museum and checked in to the cloakroom. After half an hour's quiet perusal of court records of the brief reign of Queen Mary I in the vast hush of that immense rotunda, he slipped an envelope from his pocket, addressed it to Miss Priscilla Merridew, sealed his own cloakroom ticket in it, affixed a penny stamp, and left, presenting the ticket he'd received by post and receiving another brown satchel whose contents, opened in his own rooms after posting his missive to Lydia, proved to be several folded sheets covered with his wife's sprawling handwriting.

Even a preliminary list of houses in London which had not changed hands, either by sale or by testamentary deposition, in the last hundred years was dauntingly long. Given the vagaries of the Public Records Office, there were, of course, dozens of reasons why a piece of property would have no records attached to it—everything from bequests by persons living outside Britain to purchase by corporations—but Asher was gratified to note that 10 Half Moon Street was on the list. And it was a start, he thought, a preliminary list against which to check . . .

A name caught his eye.

Ernchester House.

For a moment he wondered why it was familiar, then he remembered. One of the names Lotta had used on old dressmaker's bills was Carlotta Ernchester.

Lydia was not at the Public Records Office in Chancery Lane when Asher got there, a circumstance which he thought just as well. Though by daylight he knew he had nothing to fear from the vampires of London, he was uneasily conscious that the man he was stalking was not of the Undead and, like himself, was able to operate both in the daytime and the nighttime worlds.

He established himself at a desk in the most inconspicuous corner of the reading room and sent in his requests with the clerk, aware that the killer could, in fact, be any of the nondescript men at the various desks and counters around the long room, turning over leaves of laborious copperplate in the old record books, searching the files of corporation and parish records for houses which had never been sold, or bodies which had never been buried. The chap at the far side of the room with the graying side whiskers looked both tall enough and strong enough to have wrenched loose the shutters from Edward Hammersmith's window. Asher leaned idly around the edge of his desk and studied the man's square-toed boots with their military gloss. Far too broad for the single clear track he'd been able to measure.

A tall man and a strong one, he thought, staring abstractedly through the long windows down at the courtyard and at the frilly Gothic fantasies of the roof line beyond. A man capable of tracking a vampire? Even an inexperienced fledgling like Bully Joe Davies? Or was Bully Joe, disoriented and maddened by the flood of new sensations and now further confused by his master Calvaire's death, merely prey to a chronic case of what Asher himself had occasionally experienced abroad—the conviction of perpetual pursuit. God knows, Asher thought, if even Ysidro had picked up the trick of glancing continually over his shoulder, what shape would Davies be in after—a month, had he said, since Calvaire's death?

And he made a mental note of the fact that Bully Joe seemed in no doubt that Calvaire had, in fact, been “done for,” and had not merely disappeared, as Ysidro had once hypothesized.

It was likelier that the killer, like himself, was a man of education, able to track by paper what he could not track in the flesh.

Arguably, he was a man of patience, Asher thought, running his fingers along the dusty leaves of the St. Bride's parish roll book; a man willing to go through the maddening process of sifting records, names, deeds, and wills, checking them against whatever clues he might have found in the vampires' rooms before he—or someone else—burned it all.

Certainly a man of resolution and strength, to slice off the head of the blonde woman in Highgate Cemetery with a single blow.

And—perhaps most odd—a man who had sufficiently believed in vampires in the first place to make his initial stalking, his initial kill, which would conclusively prove to him that his prey, in fact, existed at all.

That in itself Asher found quite curious.

For that matter, he thought uneasily, turning back to his work, it might be Ysidro or the mysterious Grippen whom Bully Joe sensed on his heels. If that were the case, Asher knew he stood in double danger, for if Bully Joe realized it was Ysidro on his trail, he would never believe Asher had not betrayed him.

After a tedious examination of ward records and parish rolls, he ascertained that Ernchester House had been sold in the early 1700s by the Earls of Ernchester, whose town house it had once been, to a Robert Wanthope. The house itself stood in Savoy Walk, a name only vaguely familiar to Asher as one of the innumerable tiny courts and passageways that laced the oldest part of London in the vicinity of the Temple. Oddly enough, there was no record of any Robert Wanthope having ever purchased any other property in London, in St. Bride's parish or any other.

Ten minutes' walk to Somerset House and a certain amount of search in the Wills Office sufficed to tell Asher that Mr. Wanthope had never made a will—an unusual circumstance in a man who had sufficient funds to buy a town house. A brief visit to the Registry in another wing of the vast building informed him, not much to his surprise, that no record existed of Wanthope's death or, for that matter, his birth.

In the words of Professor Dodgson, Asher thought, curiouser and curiouser. Almost certainly an alias. Ernchester House had not surfaced in any record whatsoever since.

It was nearly five when he left Somerset House. The raw wind was blowing tatters of cloud in over the Thames as he crossed the wide, cobbled court, emerging on the Strand opposite the new Gaiety Theatre. For a few minutes he considered seeking out Savoy Walk, but reasoned that there would be no one stirring in Ernchester House until dark—and in any case there was something he very much wanted to buy first.

So he turned his steps westward, dodging across the tangles of traffic in Piccadilly and Leicester Square. Lights were beginning to go up, soft and primrose around the wrought-iron palisade of the public lavatories in Piccadilly Circus, brighter and more garish from the doors of the Empire and Alhambra. He quickened his pace, huddling in the voluminous folds of his ulster and scarf as the day faded. He had no idea how soon after sunset the vampires began to move, and above all, he did not want Ysidro to spot him now.

The fashionable shops were still open in Bond Street. At Lambert's he purchased a silver chain, thick links of the purest metal available; he stopped in a doorway in Vigo Street to put it on. The metal was cold against his throat as it slid down under his collar. As he wrapped his scarf back over it, he was torn between a vague sensation of embarrassment and wondering whether he shouldn't have invested in a crucifix as well.

But silver was spoken of again and again as a guard against the Undead, who far transcended the geographical and chronological limits of Christianity. Perhaps the crucifix was merely a way of placing a greater concentration of the metal near the big vessels of the throat. He only hoped the folklore was right.

If it wasn't, he thought, he might very well be dead before morning.

Or, at least according to some folklore, worse.

Now that was curious, he mused, jostling his way back through the thickening press of young swells and gaily dressed Cyprians around the Empire's wide, carved doors. The folklore all agreed that the victims of vampires often became vampires themselves, but at no time had Ysidro spoken of his own victims, or those of the other mysterious hunters of the dark streets, as joining the ranks of their killers. Bully Joe Davies had spoken of a vampire “getting” fledglings, as Calvaire had “gotten” him—evidently against the commands of the master vampire Grippen.