James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (5 page)

The coffin that lay on the hip-high stone shelf was reasonably new, but had lost its virgin gloss. Its lid had been pulled forward and lay propped longways against the wall beneath the niche itself; there were multiple scratches on the stonework, where the coffin had been pulled forward and back, of various degrees of freshness, difficult to determine in the tin lantern's shadows.

He held the light low, illuminating the interior, the hot metal throwing warmth against his wrist between shirt cuff and glove, the smell of burning kerosene acrid in his nostrils. His first thought was how intense the heat must have been; it had eaten at the bones themselves, save for the skull and the pelvis. The long bones of arms and legs were attenuated to bulb-ended rods, the vertebrae little more than pebbles, the ribs charred to crumbling sticks. Metal glinted, mixed with the ash—corset stays, buttons, a cut-steel comb, the jeweled glitter of rings.

“So this is what happens to vampires when the sun strikes them?”

“Yes.” Ysidro's noncommittal features could have been carved of alabaster for all the expression they showed, but Asher sensed the thoughts behind them, racing like a riptide.

He moved the lantern, flashing its beam around the crypt close to the coffin's base—mold, dirt, dampness. “Yet she made no effort to get out of the coffin.”

“I am not sure that burning would have waked her.” The vampire drifted over to stand at his side, looking down over his shoulder into the casket. “Exhaustion comes upon us at dawn; once we sleep, there is no waking us until darkness once more covers the land.”

From the mess in the coffin, Asher picked the stump of a half-decomposed bone, blew sharply on it to clear away the ashes, and held it close to the light. “Not even if you burst into flames?”

“It is not 'bursting into flames,' ” Ysidro corrected in his soft, absolutely level voice, “It is a burning, a corrosion, a searing away of the flesh . . .”

Asher dropped back the first bone he had found, fished about for another. Given the number of murders Lotta had committed over the years, he thought, her remains didn't rate much in the way of respect. “How long does it take, first to last?”

“I have no idea, having never, you understand, been able to witness the process. But I know from my own experience that its onset is instantaneous upon contact with the sun's light.”

Glancing up swiftly, for an instant Asher found himself looking into the crystalline labyrinth that stretched into endless distance behind the colorless eyes,

Ysidro went on, without change in the timbre of his voice, “I was, as you see, able to reach shelter within a second or so—I do not know how long it would have taken me to die. My hands and face were blistered for months, and the scars lasted for years.” After a moment he added, “The pain was like nothing I had ever experienced as a living man.”

Asher studied the vampire for a moment, that slender young man who had danced with Henry VIII's remarkable daughters. “When was this?”

The heavy eyelids lowered infinitesimally. “A long time ago.”

There was a silence, broken only by the faint hiss of the hot metal lantern slide, and by Asher's solitary breath. Then Asher turned back, to pick again through the charred ruin of bones. “So merely the opening of her coffin wouldn't have wakened her, in spite of a vampire's powers. I’m still a bit surprised; by the way the coffin lining is undamaged all around the top, she didn't even try to sit up, didn't even move . . .”

Ysidro's thin, black-gloved hand rested on the edge of the coffin near Asher's down-turned face. “The vampire sleep is not human sleep,” he said softly. “A friend of mine says she thinks it is because the mental powers that waken with the transition to the vampire state weary the mind. I myself sometimes wonder whether it is not because we, even more so than the living, exist day to day by the sheer effort of our own wills. Perhaps it amounts to the same thing.”

“Or perhaps,” Asher said, lifting another small stump of bone from the charred mess, “it was because Lotta was already dead when her flesh ignited.”

The vampire smiled ironically. “When her flesh ignited,” he remarked, “Lotta had already been dead for approximately a hundred and sixty years.”

Asher held the fragment of bone up in the beam of the lamp. “There's not much left, but the bone's scratched. This is one of the cervical vertebrae—her head was severed. Her mouth may have been stuffed with garlic . . .”

“That is customary in such cases.”

“Not in 1907, it isn't.” He set the lantern on the corner of the coffin and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wrap the charred scraps of bone. “It indicates, among other things, that the killer entered the tomb, closed the door, opened the coffin, severed the head, and only then reopened the door to allow daylight to destroy the flesh. So he knew what to expect. I take it Lotta was not the first victim?”

“No,” Ysidro said, looking expressionlessly down over Asher's shoulder as he began once more to sift the ash, gems, and decomposing bones. The saffron light picked splinters of brightness from the facets of jewels and the edges of charred metal.

Asher's probing fingers dug, searched, and tossed aside, seeking for what he knew had to be there. “Were the other victims beheaded also? Or staked through the heart?”

“I have no idea. The bodies, you understand, were nearly as badly decomposed as hers. Is it important?”

“It would tell us—particularly the condition of the first body you found—whether the killer knew initially that he was going after vampires. Real vampires, physiological vampires, and not just lunatics who enjoy sleeping in coffins.”

“I see.”

Asher wondered what it was he did see, veiled behind those lowered eyelids. Certainly something. “What are your theories on this?”

“I'm paying you for yours.”

Asher's mouth quirked with irritation. “There are things you aren't telling me.”

“Many of them,” the vampire agreed evenly, and Asher sighed and abandoned that tack.

“Did she play with her victims?”

“Yes.” Disdain glinted along the edge of his tone. A vulgar Cockney, Asher thought, amused; scarcely to the taste of this fastidious hidalgo from the court of Philip II. “She liked rich young men. She would play them along for weeks, sometimes, meeting them places, letting them take her to supper—since one seldom actually watches one's dinner partner eat, it is a simple enough illusion to maintain—or to the theater or the opera, not that she had the slightest interest in music, you understand. She could not make of them a steady diet—like the rest of us, she subsisted chiefly upon the city's poor. But she enjoyed the knowledge that these silly youths were entertaining their own killer, falling in love with her. It pleased her to make them do so. She savored the terror in their eyes when they finally saw the fangs. Many vampires do.”

“Do you?”

Don Simon turned away, a flicker of tired distaste in his eyes. “There was a time when I did. Are we finished here?”

“For now.” Asher straightened up. “I may come back in the daylight, when there's more chance of seeing something. Where were her rooms?” When Ysidro hesitated, he insisted, “She can't have strung her suitors along for centuries wearing just the one dress.” He held up the latchkey he had taken from the ashes.

“No.” The vampire drifted ahead of him across the narrow vault and mounted the steps while Asher thrust closed the iron-sheeted vault door behind them. The areaway around it was thick with leaves, though they had been swept away time and again by the opening of the door: it had been thirty years since the Branhame family had died out, leaving their tomb to those who slept and the one who, up until the night before last, had not. The air outside was foggy and still. The vampire's caped greatcoat hung about his slender form in folds, like the sculpted cloak of a statue. His head was bare; his eyes were hooded pits of gleaming shadow. "No, and Lotta was one of those women who saw immortality in terms of an unlimited wardrobe.

“I went there last night, after I discovered . . . this.” He gestured behind them, as Asher slid shut the lantern slide and trod cautiously along the utter darkness of the wet, fog-drowned slot of the avenue of tombs. After a moment the light, steel-strong touch of the vampire's hand closed on Asher's arm, guiding him along in the total darkness. Intellectually he understood that he was perfectly safe, so long as Ysidro needed his help, but still, he made a mental note to be careful how often he found himself in this particular situation.

“How did you happen to discover it?” he inquired as they emerged from the end of the avenue under a massive gateway carved by the cemetery's developers to resemble some regal necropolis of the Pharaohs. “If, as you say, you never got along with Lotta, what would you be doing visiting her tomb?”

“I wondered how long it would take me to fall under suspicion.” Asher caught the glint of genuine humor in Simon's ironic glance. “I plead innocence, my lords of the jury—I had, as they say in the novels, retired to my room and was sound asleep at the time.”

In spite of himself Asher grinned. “Can you bring a witness?”

“Alas, no. In truth,” he went on, “I had been—unquiet—for some weeks before any evidence of trouble arose. There was a vampire named Valentin Calvaire, a Frenchman, who had not been seen for two, three weeks. I was beginning to suspect ill had befallen him—he was only recently come to London, by our standards, and might have been unfamiliar yet with the hiding places and the patterns of this city's life. It is easy in those circumstances for a vampire to come to grief, which is one of the reasons we do not often travel.”

Asher had the momentary impression that Ysidro had more to say on the subject of Valentin Calvaire; but, after the briefest of inner debates, he seemed to think better of it and simply went on, "I think now that he was the first victim, though no body, no burned coffin, was ever found. But then, none of us knew all of his sleeping places.

“But eighteen days ago some—a friend of mine—came to me saying that one of the other vampires, a friend to us both, had been killed on the previous day, his coffin left open to the sun. She was distraught, though it is the kind of thing which can happen accidentally—for instance, many of our secret hiding places, the ancient cellars where we had hidden our coffins for years, were broken open and destroyed when they cut for the Underground. This vampire—his name was Danny King—had indeed slept in such a cellar. The window shutters were wide open, as was the coffin's lid.”

Enough thin moonlight filtered through the fog so that Asher could see his companion's face, calm and detached, like the faces of the cold stone children they had passed in the rustling murk of the cemetery around them. The curving wall of tombs that surrounded them like a canyon opened out into a stair, overhung with trees that shadowed again the vampire's white face, and Asher was left with that disembodied voice like pale amber, and the steely strength of the long fingers on his arm.

“Perhaps ten days after that, Lotta and a friend of hers came to me saying they had gone up to the rooms of another vampire, an Edward Hammersmith, who lived in an old mansion in Half Moon Street that his father had owned when he was a man. They had found all the shutters pried off the windows and the coffin open, filled with bones and ash. And then I knew.”

“And neither King nor Hammersmith appeared to have awakened or tried to get out of their coffins?”

“No,” Ysidro said. “But with Calvaire's death the killer would have known what it was that he hunted.”

“The question is,” Asher said, “whether he knew it before.”

“We asked that of ourselves. Whether anyone had been seen dogging our steps, lingering about, as humans do when they are working up their resolve even to believe that one they loved was indeed the victim of a vampire. In Mr. Stoker's interesting novel, it is only the coincidence that the heroine's dear friend and also her husband were victims of the same vampire and that the husband had seen other vampires at their hunt that leads her and her friends to put all the rest of the details together and come up with the correct answer. Most people never reach that stage. Even when the vampire is careless, and the evidence stares them in the face, they are always far more eager to believe a 'logical explanation.' ”

“I find it typical,” he added, as they passed through the softly echoing gloom of an enclosed terrace, a catacomb of brick vaults and marble plaques that marked the modest tombs of its sleepers, “that vampirism is portrayed as an evil only just entering England—from the outside, naturally, as if no true-born Englishman would stoop to become a vampire. It had obviously never occurred to Mr. Stoker that vampires might have dwelt in London all along.”

They left the cemetery as they had entered it, over the wall near St. Michael's Church, Ysidro boosting Asher with unnerving strength, then scrambling lightly up after him. The fog seemed less thick here as they strolled beside the cemetery wall and down Highgate Hill. The woolly yellow blur of the lantern, now that it would no longer bring the watchmen down on them, picked pearled strands of weed and web from the darkness of the roadside ditch, as it had picked the jewels from the coffin ash. Asher's breath drifted away as steam to mingle with the cloudy brume all around them, and he was interested to see that, even when he spoke, Don Simon's did not.

“How long have there been vampires in London?” he asked, and the shadowed eyes flicked sidelong to him again.

“For a long time.” The shutting once again of that invisible door was almost audible, and the rest of the walk was made in silence. Behind them in the fog, Asher heard the clock on St. Michael's chime the three-quarters—while passing through the cemetery itself he had heard it speak eleven. Highgate Hill and the suburban streets below it were utterly deserted, the shops and houses little more than dark bulks in the drifting fog through which the gaslights made weak yellow blobs.

“Thought you toffs was never comin' back,” their cabby began indignantly, struggling up out of the tangle of his lap robes in the cab, and Ysidro inclined his head graciously and held out a ten-shilling note.