James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (16 page)

She sat back in the cab as it jolted along the crowded pavement of Gower Street, staring abstractedly out at the blurred yellow halos of the street lamps where they shone through the mists against the monochrome cutouts of the house fronts behind. The rising fog seemed to damp noises, making all things slightly unreal; omnibuses like moving towers loomed out of it, their knife-board advertisements for Pond's Arthriticus or Clincher Tires—Still Unequaled for Quality and Durability—transformed into strange portents by the surrounding gloom.

When the cab reached Number 109 Bruton Place, Lydia paid the driver off quickly and hurried inside, displeased to find her heart racing with a swift, nervous fear. She found she was becoming uncomfortable at the thought of being outside, even for a few moments, after dark.

The room to which the vampires took Asher was a cellar, not of Ernchester House but of a deserted shop whose narrow door opened into the blackness of the lane. Ernchester produced the keys to its two padlocks from a waistcoat pocket and led the way into a tiny back room, piled high with dusty boxes and crates and boasting an old soap-stone sink in one corner, whose rusty pump, silhouetted against the dim yellowish reflection of the window, had the appearance of some wry-necked monster brooding in the darkness. An oil lamp stood on the side of the sink; Ernchester lighted it and led the way to another door nearly hidden behind the crates, whose padlock and hasp had been ripped off with a crowbar—recently, by the look of the gouges in the wood. The smell of mildew and dampness rose chokingly to engulf them as they descended the hairpin spiral of stairs to a cellar, certainly much wider, Asher guessed, than the building above; probably deeper, he thought, glancing at its far end, nearly obscured in shadows, and beyond a doubt older. Rough-hewn arched beams supported a ceiling of smoke-stained stone; just below them, at the other end of the room, two pairs of locked shutters indicated windows either at street level or set into a light well just below it.

“They're barred behind those shutters,” the Earl remarked, taking an old-fashioned, long-barreled key from a nail beside the door. “So even if you could get the padlocks on them open, it wouldn't do you much good. Chloe, my dear, would you be so good as to fetch Dr. Asher's coat? And mine as well?”

The fair-haired vampire girl shot him a look that was both sullen and annoyed, childish on that angelic face. ''Don't trust me to stay with 'im while you get 'em yourself, ducks?“ she mocked in accents that put her origins within half a dozen streets of the Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow. She threw a glance back at Asher in the flickering light of the oil lamp they'd collected when they'd passed through the room above. ”And don't go givin' yourself airs over that bit o' tin you got hung round your gullet, Professor—we can drink from the veins in your wrists, you know."

She raised Asher's wrist to her mouth, pressed her cold lips to the thin skin there in a smiling kiss. Then she turned and with barely a rustle of her silk petticoats was gone in the darkness.

Asher became aware that he was shivering. Though the cellar was dry, it was intensely cold. Beside him Ernchester, lamp still in hand, was frowning at the narrow black slot of the door through which Asher knew the girl must have gone, though he had not seen her do so. She, like Ysidro, moved largely unseen.

“An impertinent child.” Ernchester frowned, his sparse brows bristling queerly in the shaky light. “It isn't just a question of breeding— though of course I understand that things do change. It just seems that no one knows how to behave anymore.” He set the lamp down on the floor beside him and held thin hands in the column of heat that rose from its chimney.

“Anthea has gone to look for Ysidro,” he went on after a moment. “Neither of us approved of Don Simon's plan for hunting the killer— for reasons which are obvious by your mere presence here. But now that he has hired you, I agree with her that it would be most unfair simply to kill you out of hand, leaving aside the fact that you are, in a sense, a guest beneath my roof.” Those dulled, weary blue eyes rested on him for a moment, as if seeking reasons other than an old habit of noblesse oblige for sparing his life.

Dryly, Asher said, “I take it Grippen voted against it, also?”

“Oh, there was never a question of a vote.” By his tone the elderly vampire had entirely missed the sarcasm. “Don Simon is and always has been a law unto himself. He was the only one of us to think it necessary to hire a human. But he has always been most high in the instep and will carry his humors against all opposition,”

Asher rubbed his shoulder, which ached where Grippen had flung him into the wall. “He might have mentioned that.”

Beneath their feet, the stone floor vibrated; the glass of the lamp chimney sang faintly in its metal socket, “The Underground Railroad runs very close to this cellar,” Ernchester explained, as the nimble died away. “Indeed, when they were cutting for it, we feared they might break through, as in fact they did in another house we own a few streets away. That cellar was deeper than this one, without windows—it had been the wine room of an old tavern, paved over and forgotten after the Fire. There are a great number of such places in the old City, some of them dating back to Roman times. It was desperately damp and uncomfortable, which was why no one was sleeping there when the workmen broke in.”

Asher stroked his mustache thoughtfully and wandered across the uneven slab floor to the coffin against the wall Opening it, he saw the lining burned entirely away at the bottom, only clinging in charred shreds around the upper rim. Nothing but a faint film of scraped-at ash lay over the charred wood of the coffin's floor.

He wondered in what church's crypt they had buried the remains. St. Bride's, beyond a doubt. Odd, that after so many years that should still be a concern to them ... or perhaps not so odd.

He replaced the lid and turned back. “Were the padlocks on the windows open, then, when you found Danny's body?”

Ernchester glanced quickly at the barred shutters of the windows, then back at the empty coffin. For a moment he seemed to be trying to figure out how much he should tell a human; then, with a tired gesture, he gave it up. “Yes. The key was on the sill.”

Asher walked over to the window, stretched his long arm up to touch the tips of his fingers to the lock. He looked back at the vampire. “But the bars were undisturbed?”

“Yes. Had someone—a tramp, or a vagabond—entered this cellar and been looking about, it would be natural for him to open the shutters to obtain light, you see.”

“Was there any sign of a tramp elsewhere in the building? Cupboards open, drawers ajar? Or in the rest of the house? Any sign that the place had been searched?”

“No,” Ernchester admitted. “That is—I don't think so. I really don't know. Anthea would.” Another man—a living man—might have sighed and shaken his head, but, as with Anthea and Ysidro, such gestures seemed to have been drained from him by the passing weariness of centuries. There was only a slight relaxing of that straight, stocky body, a loosening of the tired lines of the face. “Anthea—does such things these days. I know it's the portion of the man to manage affairs, but ... it seems as if all the world is changing. I used to keep up better than I do now. I dare say it's only the effect of the factory soot in the air or the noise in the streets ... it usen't to be like this, you know. I sometimes think the living suffer from it as much as we. Folk are different now from what they were.”

Keyed and alert for the silent approach of some new peril, Asher saw the girl Chloe enter the cellar again, his own jacket and greatcoat and Ernchester's seedy velvet coat over her arm. She was dressed, he saw now, in an expensive and beautiful gown of dark green velvet, beaded thickly with jet; her soft white hands and pale face seemed like flowers against the opulent fabric. Here was one, he thought, who would have no trouble winning kisses from strangers in alleyways. As he took the coat from her arm he said, “Thank you,” and the brown eyes flicked up to his, startled at being thanked. “Did you hunt with Lotta Harshaw?”

She smiled again, but this time the mockery did not quite hide the frightened flinch of her lips. “Still the nosy-parker, then? You saw what it'll buy you.” She reached up to touch his throat, then drew back as the silver of his neck chain caught the lamplight. “You know what they said curiosity did to the cat.”

“Then it's a good thing cats have nine lives,” he replied quietly. “Did you hunt with Lotta?” She shrugged, an elaborately coquettish gesture with her bare white shoulders, and looked away.

“I know you went for dress fittings with her. Probably other shopping as well. I imagine the pair of you looked very fetching together. Personally I find it a bore to have dinner alone—do you?”

The conversational tone of his voice brought her eyes back to his, flirtatious and amused. “Sometimes. But y'see, we don't ever have dinner quite alone.” She smiled, showing the glint of teeth against a lip like ruby silk.

“Did you like Lotta?”

The long lashes veiled her brown eyes once more. “She showed me the ropes, like,” she said, after a long moment, and he remembered Bully Joe Davies' frantic cry: I dunno how the others do it . . . To achieve the vampire state, the vampire powers, was evidently far from enough. “And we—birds, I mean—hunt differently from gents. And that . . .” She stopped her next words on her lips and threw a quick, wary glance at Ernchester, silent beside the lamp. After a long pause for rewording, she continued, “Lotta and me, we got along. There's some things a lady needs from another lady, see.”

And that . . . That what? How would this beautiful, over-dressed porcelain doll of a girl see the quiet antique lady Anthea? As a stiff-necked and uncongenial bitch, Asher thought, beyond a doubt. Mde. La Tour had known at a glance that Lotta and Chloe were two of a kind and that Anthea—for undoubtedly it was she who went by the name of Mrs. Wren—was far other than they.

“Did you know her rich young men?” he asked. “Albert Westmoreland? Tom Gobey? Paul Farrington?”

She smiled again, playing hard to get. “Oh, I met most of 'em,” she said, toying with one of her thick blonde curls. “Lambs, they were—even Bertie Westmorland, so stiff and proper, like it killed him to admit he wanted her, but following her wherever she went with his eyes. We'd go to theatre panics together—Bertie's brother, me and Lotta, and some girls Bertie's friends might have along ... It was all I could do sometimes not to drink one of 'em right there in the shadow of the back of the box. Like smelling sausages frying when you're hungry ... It would have been so easy . . .”

“It's a trick you could only have done once,” Asher remarked, and got a sullen glance from under those long lashes.

“That's what Lionel said. Not when others are around, no matter how bad I want it—not where anyone will know.” She moved closer to him, her head no higher than the top button of his waistcoat; he could smell the patchouli of her perfume, and the faint reek of blood on her words as she spoke. “But no others are around now—and no one will know.”

Her tongue slipped out, to touch the protruding tips of her teeth; her fingers slid around his hand, warm with the evening's earlier kill. He could see her eyes on his throat and on the heavy silver links of the chain. Though he dared not look away from her to check, he had no impression of Ernchester being in the room. Perhaps it was only that the vampire Earl would not have cared whether she killed him or not.

“Ysidro will know,” he reminded her.

She dropped his hand and looked away. A shiver went through her, “Cold dago bugger.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“Aren't you?” Her glance slid back to his, brown eyes that should have been angelic, but had never been so, he thought, even in life. Her red mouth twisted. “You think he'll protect you from Lionel? That'll last just as long as he needs you. You'd better not be so quick about findin' the answers to your questions.”

“And I have already told him he had best not be slow,” the soft, drawling voice of Ysidro murmured. Turning, Asher saw the Spanish vampire at his elbow, as Grippen had appeared earlier that evening; his glance cut quickly back in tune to see Chloe start. She hadn't seen him either.

“So perhaps,” Don Simon continued, “we had best stick simply to things as they are and not attempt to mold them to what we think they ought to be. You should not have come here, James.”

“On the contrary,” Asher said, “I've learned a great deal.”

“That is what I meant. But as the horses are well and truly gone, permit me to open the barn door for you. Calvaire's rooms are upstairs—or one set of Calvaire's rooms. I know of at least two others that he had. There may have been more.”

“Hence all the secrecy,” Asher said, as he preceded the vampire into the dark stair outside. “Any in Lambeth?”

“Lambeth? Not that I knew of,” He was aware of those cold yellow eyes piercing his back.

They ascended the neck-breaking twist of steps to the stuffy back room again; though he listened closely, Asher could hear no footfall behind him from either Ysidro or Chloe and only the faintest of rustles from the girl's petticoats. He thought Ernchester must have left at the same time Ysidro had entered, for the Earl had been nowhere in the cellar as they departed. And, in fact, Charles and Anthea were both waiting for them in the parlor of a small flat which had been fitted up on the second floor, with its Tiffany-glass lamps all lighted, giving their strange, white faces the rosy illusion of humanity, save for their gleaming eyes.

“I trust you're not still sleeping in the building, Chloe?” Ysidro inquired, as they entered and the girl set her lamp on the table.

“No,” she said sullenly. She retreated to a corner of the room and perched there on one of the patterned chintz chairs; the place was furbished up in several styles, fat overstuffed chairs alternating with pieces of Sheraton and Hepplewhite, and here and there a lacquered cabinet of chinoiserie filled with knickknacks and books. The parlor was tidily kept, with none of the decades-deep clutter of other vampire rooms Asher had seen. Through an open door beyond Lady Anthea's chair, he could see a neat bedroom, its windows heavily shrouded and, no doubt, shuttered beneath those layers of curtain. There was no coffin in sight—Asher guessed it would be in the dressing room beyond.