James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (8 page)

On the high backbone of the downs, he stopped and turned to look back on the green valley, the far-off glitter where half a dozen streams met amid a lingering suggestion of damp mists and dark clouds of trees. He could pick out the towers of the colleges, not as the crystal company of dreaming spires that dawn or sunset made them, but gray, lichen-stained, familiar—the ogee cupola of Tom, Magdalen seeming to float above its trees, Merton's spires and the square proportions of his own New College Tower, like the faces of friends lined up on a railway platform to see him off—the place that had been his home, on and off, for the better part of twenty-seven years.

Abroad, he remembered, he had lived in constant danger, to the point where he could almost forget about it; there had been times when he could have been killed as easily as a candle being snuffed out. But through it he had always had this place, the memory of this gentle haven, at his back. He had always thought: If I can make it back to Oxford . . . And latterly had been the knowledge that Oxford had included Lydia.

Half the women he knew, he thought with an inward grin, would have swooned at the story he'd told her this morning or else gone into feverish speculation on how Asher had been hoaxed. Beneath her occasional and wholly illusory facade of scatter-witted loveliness, Lydia had a doctor's cool practicality and a willingness to deal with facts—however bizarre—as they stood. He was reminded of himself, with his own life and hers at stake, concerning himself with the archaic pronunciation of the vampire's speech.

Perhaps that was one reason why, out of all the men—mostly younger than he, and all a good deal wealthier than he—who had been captivated by her waiflike charm, it was he who lived with her now, and would, he hoped, for the next forty years.

Ysidro would be sorry, he thought grimly, that he had dragged Lydia into this.

He squeezed the throttle lever, startling a dozen larks into swift, slanting flight; turning the 'bike, he began to make his way down the long slopes toward Beaconsfield and Wycombe and, eventually, toward the distant smear of gray-yellow smoke that was London.

His journeys through the back blocks of Europe in quest of Latin roots or stranger things had given Asher a good deal of practice in finding lodgings quickly. He settled on two lodging houses in Bloomsbury, not far from the Museum, facing onto different streets, but backing on the same alley; the rear window of the small suite of rooms he engaged for Lydia at 109 Bruton Place could be seen from his own solitary chamber at 6 Prince of Wales Colonnade. They weren't as close as he would have liked, and there would be a good deal of shinning up and down drain pipes and climbing fences in the event of a real emergency, but it was as good as he could get in the time. Even so, it was getting perilously close to dark when he stumbled once more onto the Oxford train.

He slept all the way up. As he had feared, his dreams were troubled by the image of the coffin full of ashes in Highgate Cemetery and by the dim sense of dread that, if he went there and listened, those ashes might whisper to him in a voice that he could understand,

Lydia was waiting for him, simply but beautifully dressed and carefully veiled to hide the fact that she was far less wan and pale than he. On the train down, fortified by yet more of the black coffee that had latterly kept his body and soul together, Asher explained the message-drop system he'd worked out at the cloakroom of the Museum's reading room, and the signals between Bruton Place and Prince of Wales Colonnade: one curtain open, one shut, if a meeting was necessary, and a telegram to follow; a lamp in the window in case of an emergency.

“I'd suggest you start at Somerset House,” he said as the leaden dusk flashed by the windows. Coming over the hills that afternoon had been pleasant; but, as the cold of the night closed in, he admitted there was a great deal to be said for the cozy stuffiness of a train after all. “You can match information from the Wills Office and Registry with the old Property Rolls in the Public Records Office—it's my guess that at least some of the vampires own property. I can't see Ysidro entrusting his Bond Street suits, let alone his coffin, to the care of a ten-bob-a-month landlady. Get me records of places where the leasehold hasn't changed ownership for—oh, seventy years or longer. Reader's Passes are easy enough to get. All the records of the original estate ground-landlords should be available. You might also see what you can get me on death certificates for which there was no body. We're eventually going to have to check back issues of newspapers as well for deaths which could be attributed to vampires, but, from the sound of it, those may be concealed. God knows how many cases of malnutrition or typhus were really Ysidro and his friends. I suspect that, during epidemics of jail fever at Newgate and Fleet, a vampire could feed for weeks without anyone being the wiser or caring. Poor devils,” he added and studied in silence that clear-cut white profile against the compartment's sepia gloom.

More quietly, he asked, “Will you mind learning what you can about Albert Westmoreland's death? I'll look into that, if you'd rather not.”

She shook her head, a tiny gesture, understanding that she was affected, not because she had particularly cared about the man, but simply because it brought the reality of her own danger closer. Without her spectacles, her brown eyes seemed softer, more dreamy. “No. You're going to need your time to follow the main trail. Besides, I knew him and his friends. I don't suppose I could look up Dennis Blaydon again without him pouting and fretting because I married you instead of him, but I could talk to Frank Ellis—Viscount Haverford he is now—or to the Equally Honorable Evelyn—Bertie's brother. He was a freshman, I think, the year Bertie . . . died.”

“I don't like it,” Asher said slowly. “Having you do research in London is one thing; when I send a letter to my leftover Foreign Office connections on the Daily Mail, it won't introduce you under your own name. Ysidro spoke of vampires knowing when a human—a friend or relative of a recent victim—is on their trail; they go about interviewing people or loitering in churchyards, and the vampires eventually see them at it. I don't want them to see you, Lydia. That would surely be the death of us both,”

Her back stiffened--“I don't see how, . .”

“Nor do I,” he cut her off. “But for the moment, I'm going to have to assume that it's true--They have powers we do not; until we know more about them, I'm not disposed to take chances.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But they also have weaknesses, and the more we learn about them—the more we can talk to people who have actually dealt with a vampire—the more we may be able to put together a means of dealing with them if , . . if worse comes to worst. As long ago as Bertie's death was, it isn't likely there's a connection, but at least we'll have another view of them.”

“I still don't like it,” he said again, knowing she was probably right. “I'd rather you didn't, but if you do, please be careful. Take every precaution, no matter how foolish it seems. As for what you may learn . , . Have you ever tried to piece together an account of an accident from witnesses, even ten minutes after it happened? And Bertie's death was . . . when?”

“Nineteen hundred.” Her mouth twitched in an ironic smile. “Turn of the new century.”

“That was seven years ago.” He'd been in Africa then, riding across tawny velvet distances by the light of the swollen and honey-colored moon. He sometimes found it difficult to believe it was any longer ago than seven weeks. He leaned across and kissed her, her hat veils tickling the bridge of his nose; it was odd to remind himself once again that she was, in fact, his wife. He went on, “Even had Lotta been the first victim instead of the fourth, that's a long time between. But we need any background, any leads we can get. Can you look up all that?”

“Certainly, Professor Asher.” She folded her gloved hands primly in her rose twill lap and widened her eyes at him sweetly. “And what would you like me to look up in the afternoon?”

He laughed ruefully. “Gas company records for private residences that show abnormally high consumption? I'd like to get at banking records, but that means pulling F.Q. or Yard credentials, and that might get back to Ysidro. Leave whatever notes you make in the message-drop at the Museum—I'll keep them in a locker at Euston rather than at my rooms overnight. At the moment, I'd rather Ysidro and his friends have no idea the way my research is tending. And, Lydia—let me know if you run across any evidence that someone else is following the same trails.”

“The killer, you mean.” By her voice she'd already thought of it; he nodded.

“Will you kill them, then?”

Something in her tone brought his eyes back to her face; its look of regret surprised nun. She shook her head, dismissing her reservations. “It's just that I'd like the chance to examine one of them medically.”

The concern was so typical of Lydia that Asher nearly laughed. “Yes,” he said, and then the lightness faded from his face and his soul. “I'll have to for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that if I don't catch the killer, sooner or later they're going to suspect me of killing them anyway, and using the original murders to mask whatever I may do. They have to be destroyed, Lydia,” he went on quietly. “But if—and when—it comes to that, I'd better get them all, because God help both of us if even one survives.”

Asher got off the train at Reading, taking a slow local to Baling and then the Underground the long way round, through Victoria and the City, and thence back to Euston Station, to avoid being anywhere near Paddington when Lydia debarked. It was now fully dark. Staring through the rattling windows at the high brick walls and the occasional flickering reflection of gaslight where the Underground ran through cuts rather than tunnels, he wondered whether the vampires ever took the Underground, ever hunted its third-class carriages. Could they use its passages as boltholes, emergency hiding places safe from the sun? How much sun was fatal to that white, fragile flesh?

Not a great deal, he thought, crossing the platform and ascending the steps that led upward to the open square of night outside. Even with its door open, the crypt in Highgate wouldn't be brightly lighted, looking as it did into the gloom of the narrow avenue of tombs.

As he reached the flagway, he felt a pang of uneasiness for Lydia, disembarking by herself at Paddington. Not that she wasn't perfectly capable of looking out for herself in the crowd of a railway station, where she would undoubtedly have six or seven handsome young men fighting to carry her luggage, but his brush with Ysidro had frightened him.

How much were the vampires capable of knowing or guessing about those who began to piece together their trails? Perhaps Lydia was right —perhaps the warning was only intended to keep him away. There must be very few relatives and friends of victims who looked past the comfort of the “logical explanation,” particularly, as Ysidro had pointed out, if there was no second set of suspicious circumstances to link it with. And yet ...

He reminded himself firmly, as he joined the crowding throng on Euston Road, that Ysidro would have no way of knowing that he had gone up to Oxford and returned twice that day, instead of once. He might have guessed . . .

Asher shook his head firmly. He was exhausted past the point, he was beginning to suspect, of rational thought. He'd been without unbroken sleep for over thirty-six hours; he was starting at shadows. That queer prickling on the back of his neck was nerves, he told himself, not the instincts of years of the secret life whispering to him. His uneasiness was simply the result of knowing he might be watched, rather than a certainty that he was.

He slowed his steps. Casually, he scanned the hurrying line of traffic, the crowds jostling along in the glare of the gaslights—clerks and shopgirls bustling toward the Underground to catch the next train to whatever dreary suburb they called home, laborers eager for a cheap dinner of bubble and squeak and a few beers at the local pub. The gaslight was deceptive, making all faces queer, but he could see no sign of any whiter and more still than the rest.

Why, then, he wondered, did he have the growing conviction of missing something, the sensation of a blind spot somewhere in his mind?

At the corner, he crossed Gower Street, walking down its western side, casually scanning the stream of traffic passing before the long line of Georgian shops. There were a number of motorbuses and lorries, an omnibus and motorized cabs, and horse trams with gaudy advertising posters on their sides, but for the most part it was a crowding melee of horses and high wheels—delivery vans drawn by hairy-footed nags, open Victoria carriages, the closed broughams favored by doctors, and high-topped hansom cabs. He was very tired and his vision blurred; the glare of streetlight and shadow made it all the worse, but it would have to be risked. The traffic was thick and therefore not moving fast, except where an occasional cabby lashed his horse into a dash for a momentary hole. Well, there was always that chance . . .

Without warning, as he came opposite the turning of Little Museum Street that led to Prince of Wales Colonnade, Asher stepped sideways off the curb and plunged into the thick of the melee. With a shrill neigh, a cab horse pulled sideways nearly on top of him. Hooters and curses in exotic dialect—What was a Yorkshireman doing driving a cab in London? he wondered—pursued him across the road. The macadam was wet and slippery with horse dung; he ducked and wove between shifting masses of flesh, wood, and iron, and on the opposite side turned suddenly, looking back at the way he had come.

A costermonger's horse in the midst of the road flung up its head and swerved; a motorcab's brakes screeched. Asher wasn't sure, but he thought he saw a shadow flit through the glare of the electric headlamps.

Good, he thought, and turned down Little Museum Street, still panting from his exertions. Pit your immortality against that one, my haemophagic friend.

At Prince of Wales Colonnade he turned up the gas, leaving the window curtains open. He shed coat, bowler, scarf, and cravat and opened the valise he'd brought down from Oxford strapped to the narrow carrier of the motorcycle, now safely bestowed in a shed in the yard —half a dozen clean shirts, a change of clothing, clean collars, shaving tackle, and books. Whatever else he would need of the arcane paraphernalia of vampire-hunters, he supposed, could be purchased in London, and his ill-regulated imagination momentarily conjured a small shop in some dark street specializing in silver bullets, hawthorn stakes, and garlic. He grinned. With harker and van helsing painted above the door, presumably. Keeping himself in the line of sight of the window, he turned toward the dresser, frowned, and looked around as if something he had meant to bring were missing from its chipped marble top, then strode impatiently from the room.