James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night (35 page)

“You created artificial vampirism.”

Asher did not ask it as a question, and Blaydon only blew out his breath in a sigh, as if relieved that he did not have to hide it any longer.

“It didn't start out that way.” His voice was weary, almost pleading. “I swear it didn't. You know, James—of course you know—that it's only a matter of time before war comes with Germany and her allies. The Kaiser's spoiling for it. Oh, yes, I've heard the rumors about you and about where and how you spend your Long Vacations. You know the urgency of the matter. So don't come all righteous with me over what you've only done yourself in a different way. I dare say you've caused the deaths of well over twenty-four men, and in just as good a cause.”

Blaydon took a deep breath, turning the half-filled brandy glass in his hands. "You know—or perhaps you don't—that, in addition to my work with viruses, for a long time my interest has been in physical causes of so-called psychic phenomena. For a time, I believed, along with Peterkin and Freiborg, that such things could be bred in. God knows how many mediums and table tappers I tested over the years! And I came to the conclusion that it has to be some alteration in the brain chemistry that gives these people their so-called powers: a heightening of the senses; an extrasensory awareness; and that incredible, intangible grasp on the minds of other men.

“Now, you can understand the need to be able to duplicate such powers at will. You've worked in Intelligence, James. Think what a corps of such men, dedicated to the good of England, could be in the war that we all know is coining! I tried hard to isolate that factor, to little avail. And then Dennis introduced me to Valentin Calvaire. He'd met Calvaire through a mutual friend . . .”

“Whom you later murdered.”

“Oh, really, James!” Blaydon cried impatiently. “A woman of her class! And I'll take oath Albert Westmoreland's death could be traced back to her, for all his family bribed the doctor to certify it was the result of a carriage accident. Besides, by that rime we had run out of other clues. I needed her blood for further experimentation, and Dennis needed it just to stay alive.”

“You knew Calvaire was a vampire, then?”

“Oh, yes. He made no secret of it—he seemed to revel in astonishing me, in making nothing of the most difficult tests I could set to him. He gloated in the powers that he held. And Dennis was fascinated—not, I swear, with Calvaire's evil, but with his powers. Calvaire was fascinated, too, though for reasons of his own, I dare say. He let me take samples, substantial samples, of his blood, to try and isolate the factors which enhanced the workings of the psychic centers of the brain and to separate them from those which caused the mutation of the cells themselves into that photoreactive pseudoflesh and the physiological dependence on the blood of others. And I would have succeeded, perhaps even been able to alter Calvaire's condition. I know I would have . . .”

“You wouldn't have.” Asher glanced across at the hulking, glowering shape by the door, guessing already what had happened. Pity and disgust mingled in him like the taste of the blood and brandy in his mouth. “According to the vampires themselves, those powers come from psychically drinking the deaths of their human victims. It's the psychic absorption of death that gives them psychic powers, and without it, they lose them.”

“Nonsense,” Blaydon said sharply. “That can't be true. There's no reason for it to be true. What do the vampires know of it, anyway? They aren't educated. Calvaire never said anything . . .”

“I'm sure Calvaire never ceased killing humans long enough to know whether it was true or not.” The only way Ysidro could have known or the only way Anthea could have known, he thought, was to have tried it themselves, “Calvaire wanted power. He wasn't going to tell you anything more than he had to before he got it.”

“I'm sure that isn't the case.” Blaydon shook his head stubbornly, angry even at the suggestion that what he had done had been for nothing and that he had been, in fact, Calvaire's dupe. “There are physical causes for everything—unknown organisms, chemical changes in the brain fluid itself. In any case, I evolved a serum which showed great promise. I—I made the mistake of telling Dennis about it. He demanded to test it, demanded to be the first of this corps of—of psychic heroes. I refused, naturally . . .”

“And naturally,” Asher said dryly, “Dennis broke into your laboratory and took matters into his own hands.” It was, he reflected, exactly the sort of thing that Dennis would do. He was the perfect storybook hero, the perfect Sexton Blake, who could experimentally drain beakers of unknown potions and come off with, at most, prophetic hallucinations that coincidentally advanced the plot.

Poor Dennis. Poor, stupid Dennis.

Dennis' eyes narrowed viciously, as if, like Brother Anthony, he could see Asher's thoughts. “What would you have done?” he mumbled, his voice deep and thick, as if his very vocal cords were loosening. “Snugged back in your nice comfy study and let another man take the risks, as you'll do when those damn sauerkraut eaters finally force us to fight? What did you tell her, Asher? What did you tell Lydia about me that made her choose a sly old man over someone who would love and protect her as I will? But you made her work for you, made her put herself in danger. I'd never have let her come here to London.”

You'd have left her in ignorance of her danger at Oxford, wouldn't you? Asher thought, feeling strangely calm. You 'd have told her it wasn 't her affair. Knowing Lydia, that would have run her into danger three times quicker and without the knowledge of what she was dealing with.

Dennis stepped forward, holding up his hands. All around the edges of the bandages that covered the palms, Asher could see rims of green-black flesh, like a spreading stain, puffy, malodorous, foul against the ice-white skin. “I was fine until you did this,” he said thickly. “I'll enjoy drinking you like a sucked orange.”

And he was gone.

Rather shakily, Blaydon said, “He wasn't, you know. Fine, I mean. His—his condition was deteriorating, although the infection caused by the silver seems to have greatly advanced the process. I wasn't able to isolate that factor, it seems—as I said, the serum was far from perfect. And he needs the blood of vampires, as ordinary vampires need human blood. It seems to arrest the progression of the symptoms for a number of days. He killed Calvaire the first night this happened—I was quite angry at him, for Calvaire would have been a great help. But Dennis had a—a craving. And he was disoriented, maddened by the alteration in his senses; he still is, to a degree. I didn't even know until it was done ...”

Asher wondered whether Calvaire had tried to control Dennis, up in his attic in Lambeth, as he'd controlled Bully Joe Davies.

Blaydon wet his lips again and threw another nervous glance over his shoulder toward the shut door. “After that, we searched Calvaire's room for notes to tell us where we could find other vampires. Dennis knew some of Lotta's haunts and followed her to the Hammersmith mansion in Half Moon Street and to the haunts of another vampire she knew. I went with him—I wanted desperately to take some of their blood, not only to perfect my serum, but to find a cure for Dennis' condition. More than anything else, I wanted a whole vampire, unharmed, but it was impossible to get them away in the daylight hours, of course. So I—I had to destroy their bodies, lest the others take fright and hide. I had to be content with as much blood as I could take . . .”

“And Dennis got the rest?” With shaking fingers Asher took the brandy glass from Blaydon's hand and drained it. The gold heat of it reminded him that he hadn't eaten since a sandwich at the Charing Cross precinct house last night—he couldn't even recall what before that.

“He needed it,” Blaydon insisted. A little testily, he added, “All those who were killed were murderers, those who had killed again and again, for hundreds of years, I dare say . . .”

“Those Chinese and 'young persons,' as the paper called them, as well?”

“He was fighting for his life! Yes, he shouldn't have taken humans. It got in the newspapers; the hunt will be on for us if it happens again. I told him that after Manchester. And it doesn't really satisfy him, no matter how many he kills. But it helps a little . . .”

“I dare say.” Asher drew himself up a little against the coffin, knowing he was a fool to anger this man who was demonstrably balanced on the ragged edge of sanity and yet too furious himself at such hypocrisy and irresponsibility to care. “And I expect he'll 'do what he needs to' in order to 'make himself comfortable,' as I believe you phrased it . . .”

Blaydon lunged to his feet, his hands clenching into fists, though they shook as if with palsy. Color flooded unhealthily up under the flaccid skin. “I'm sorry you feel that way about it,” he said stiffly, as if he had long ago memorized the phrase as the proper end to any interview. “In any case it won't be necessary, not any longer. I can keep Dennis alive and have enough vampire blood, from a true vampire, to experiment with until I can find an antivenin . . .”

“And how are you going to keep Dennis from killing him the moment your back is turned?” Asher demanded quietly. “You're going to have to sleep sometime, Horace; if Dennis gets another craving, you're going to be back to square one . . .”

“No,” Blaydon said. “I can control him. I've always been able to control him. And in any case, that will no longer be a problem. You see, now that I have this vampire, he can make others—a breeding stock, as it were, for Dennis to feed upon. And I'm afraid, James, that you're going to be the first.”

“What you want is not possible.” In the upside-down glow of the oil lamp Blaydon had set on the floor, Ysidro's face had the queen stark look of a Beardsley drawing, framed in his long, colorless hair. His rolled-up shirt sleeves showed the hard sinewiness of his arms; like his throat and chest, visible through the unbuttoned collar, they were white as the linen of the garment. He sat cross-legged, like the idol of some decadent cult, on his own coffin, with Asher lying, bound hand and foot, at his feet.

Blaydon and Dennis had come in and done that toward sunset. Before he'd fallen asleep again that morning, which he'd done shortly after Blaydon had left him, Asher had heard Blaydon go out, with muffled admonitions to Dennis to remain in the house, to guard them, and on no account to harm them. Don't eat the prisoners while Daddy's away, he had thought caustically. Straining his ears, he'd heard Blaydon mention the Peaks, that sprawling brick villa on the Downs near Oxford that had belonged to Blaydon's wife, where she had lived, playing the gracious hostess on weekends to her husband's Oxford colleagues or her son's friends from London or the Guards.

They must be keeping Lydia there, Asher thought, the rage in him oddly distant now, as if the emotions belonged to someone else. No wonder Blaydon had the look of a man run ragged. Even if he had kept a staff there after his wife's death three years ago—and Asher knew he'd simply shut the place up when he'd moved his residence to London —he still wouldn't have been able to trust them. The Peaks might be isolated; but, as the vampires had always known, servants have a way of finding things out. Once Blaydon had taken Lydia prisoner, he had to keep her someplace and look after her. That meant an hour and a half by train to Prince's Risborough and another forty minutes to an hour by gig over the downs to the isolated house in its little vale of beechwoods, then back again, at least once, perhaps twice a day. And on top of that, the vampires were deeper in hiding, and Dennis was getting physically worse and more difficult to control. No wonder Blaydon looked as if he had not slept in a week.

As he had said, he and Dennis both had been a month in Hell.

If it hadn't been Lydia who was in his power, Lydia who was lying drugged and helpless in that empty house, Asher would have felt a kind of spiteful satisfaction at the situation. As it was, he could only thank God that Dennis still had sufficient twisted passion for Lydia to keep Blaydon from harming her.

Although, Asher thought, as he fruitlessly searched the barren room for anything which could conceivably be used as a weapon or to facilitate escape, he wasn't sure whether Blaydon would have killed a stranger to protect Dennis' secret. At least, he added with a shiver, he wouldn't have four days ago, when they'd caught her snooping around.  That had been before he'd learned what a desperately time-consuming inconvenience keeping a hostage was. And that had been while he and Dennis were far more firmly anchored in sanity.

Looking at them now—Blaydon in his soiled collar and rumpled suit, with his silver-dust stubble of whiskers that glittered like the mad, fierce obsession in his eyes, and Dennis, hulking, restless, and fidgeting hungrily in the background—Asher was uncomfortably aware that both were stretched to the snapping point. However long father and son might have been able to go on undisturbed, Lydia's imprisonment had thrown a strain on the situation, which his own wounding of Dennis had then made intolerable. They had the look of men who were fast losing their last vestiges of rationality.

With forced mildness, Blaydon said, “Dennis is going to want to feed on some vampire tonight, my friend. Now it can be you, or it can be James. Which way do you want it?” He still had the revolver with silver bullets in his hand, which was steady now—he must have gotten a little sleep in the train, Asher thought abstractedly. And as a doctor, of course, he'd have easy access to enough cocaine to keep him going for a while, at least.

Behind him, Dennis smirked.

Looking perfectly relaxed, Ysidro set one foot on the floor, folded his long hands on his knee, and considered the pair of them in the flickering lamplight. “It is clear to me that you do not understand the process by which one becomes vampire. If, when I drank James' blood, I forced him to . . .”

Blaydon raised his hand sharply. “Dennis?” he barked. “Have you made a patrol? Checked for searchers?”

“There's no one out there,” Dennis said, his gluey bass barely comprehensible now. “I've listened—don't you think I'd hear another vampire, if any came looking for these two? Don't you think I'd smell their blood? They're hiding, Dad. You've got to dig them out or let me . . .”