Barbara Hambly - 01 Those Who Hunt The Night

After a long inner debate he had left his silver chains back at his hotel, since in all probability they would afford him no protection should Brother Anthony turn against him, and might very well be con-strued as a gesture of bad faith. In last night's case it had been merely manners-like carrying a gun to a wedding reception, Ysidro had said; Asher hadn't mentioned that he'd done that upon occasion. But he was uncertain how much Brother Anthony would sense, and it was vital that he speak to the old man this afternoon.

Six hundred years, he thought, as the first of Ysidro's chalked arrows came into the wavery circle of the lantern's light. The last of the Capets had been on the throne when Anthony had first refused to die-when he had made the decision to accept immortality upon any terms. Asher wondered whether the monk had been hiding all that time, or whether he had been driven gradually to it and to madness, living among the corpses in the crypts of the Holy Innocents.

His breath puffed in faint smoke in the glow of the lamp; it was cold in the endless galleries. The only sounds were the soft scrunching of wet pebbles underfoot and the occasional creak of the lantern's handle. It had been unnerving to come here last night, with Ysidro as protection, even though at that time they had expected to encounter no one. It was terrifying now, absolutely alone with the darkness under the earth wait-ing just beyond the glow of the lamp. Oddly enough, Asher's fears turned less upon the vampire he sought and more upon the occasional, illogical fits of dread that the roof should cave in and bury him alive in the darkness.

He saw the dark gates with a kind of relief-for he had feared, too, lest he miss one of Ysidro's chalked arrows. The ranked walls of brown bones and staring skulls seemed less dreadful to him than those silent aisles of empty rock.

It took him longer than he had counted upon to find Brother Antho-ny's private haunts in the ossuary. He missed his way twice and wan-dered-he did not know how long-among the brown walls of bones, searching for the branching tunnel, the tiny altar. At last he thought to trace Ysidro's slender bootprints in the watery mud among the pebbles of the floor, and after that found the arrow fairly easily. It came to him then that the psychic miasma that the vampires were capable of throw-ing around themselves had extended itself to Anthony's entire territory. Simply, it was easy to miss the place, easy to be thinking of something else. No wonder none of the guards came near here. They were proba-bly not even aware of avoiding the place at all. They merely did. It explained certain things about Ernchester House as well.

He passed the chaos of the fallen bones, then the neat rows of pel-vises, the decaying skulls assembled against the eventuality of final Judgment. With a kind of medieval morbidity, the ossuary had been established, like the ancient enamel houses, to turn the mind to man's mortality; in spite of himself, Asher found his reflections drawn to the men he had killed, and, disturbingly, the men who would undoubtedly die in any future war because of all those charts and plans and informa-tion he had smuggled out of Austria, China, and Germany, tacked away in his socks or his notes on consonantal shift.

From what he knew of some of them, he had the uncomfortable sensation that in terms of ultimate responsibility, his personal death toll might well end up rivaling poor Anthony's, who only killed to prolong his guilt-riddled Unlife.

Before the steps of the altar, scattered with drifts of bone fragments, Asher stopped, listening to the terrible silence all around him. Banked along the walls, decaying skulls watched nun with mournful eyes.

His whisper ran like water along the bones, vanishing into the stony darkness. "Frater Antonius .,."

The sibilance of it hissed back at him,

"In nomine Patris, Antonius..."

Perhaps he did not sleep near this place at all. Asher sat gingerly down on the bare stone of the step, setting the lantern beside him. He took out his watch and was both surprised and vexed at how much time it had taken him to reach this place-it would be difficult to tell, now, whether a sufficiently ancient vampire would be awake in the daylight hours. But it could not be helped. He pulled his coat more closely around him, rested his chin on his drawn-up knees, and settled down to wait.

The lantern's metal hissed softly in the absolute stillness. He listened intently, hearing nothing but now and then the far-off slither of a rat picking its way across the bones. The cold seemed to deepen and inten-sify with his inactivity-he rubbed his hands over the lantern's heat, wishing he had thought to bring gloves. Once the red eyes of a rat glinted at him from the darkness beyond that tiny pool of light, then vanished. Ysidro had said vampires could summon certain beasts, as they could humans-how long, he wondered, had Brother Anthony depended upon that ability for his dinner?

That led to the unnerving reflection that he might be doing so now. Howdid the vampire glamour work, once the vampire's eyes had met those of his chosen victim? Was that why it had seemed to him such a good idea to come here, alone and in daylight? I could have summoned her from anywhere on the train... Ysidro had said, unwinding the purple scarf from the poor woman's throat, drawing the pins gently from her h air .Do you believe I can do this to whomever I will?

True, he felt no sleepiness, none of the dreamy unreality of that epi-sode on the train, but that might only mean that after centuries of practice, Brother Anthony was very, very good.

The craving becomes unbearable.,.

He remembered the newspaper headline and shivered.

Still Brother Anthony did not appear.

The kerosene in the lantern's reservoir was now almost gone. He realized he'd have to leave if he were to find his way back out of the dark; the thought that the light might fail him while he was yet in the tunnels was terrifying and made him curse himself for not searching the vestibule for the stubs of the tourists' candles while he was about it. He straightened his back and looked around him in the darkness. "An-thony?" he whispered in Latin. I'm here to talk to you. I know you're there."

There was no response. Only the skulls, staring at him with blank eyeholes, a hundred generations of Parisians, their bones neatly sorted and awaiting the final collation of Judgment Day.

Feeling a little silly, Asher spoke again to the empty dark. At least, if what Ysidro and Bully Joe Davies had said was true, Anthony could hear him from a great distance away. "My name is James Asher; I am working with Don Simon Ysidro to find a renegade vampire in London. We think he can hunt by day as well as by night. He is a killer, brutal and indiscriminate, of men and vampires, bound not even by the laws that your kind make among themselves. Will you help us?" There was no movement in the darkness,

only stillness, like the slow fall of dust.

"Anthony, we need your help, humans and vampires alike. He has to be one of your contemporaries, or older yet. Only you can track him, can find him for us. Will you help us?"

A rhyme singsonged its way around in his head, turning back on itself like a child's chant:

But the silence was unbroken,

And the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken

Was the whispered word, "Lenore." This I whispered, and an echo

Murmured back the word, "Lenore." Merely this and nothing more,

Poe, he thought, and totally appropriate for this waiting hush, this darkness that was not quite empty, and not quite dead.

Merely this and nothing more... merely this and nothing more.

On impulse, he took the newspaper from his pocket and laid it on the steps of lie altar, folded open to the article about the murders. He lifted the almost-empty lantern, and the moving light twisted over the dead faces like a sudden shriek of mocking laughter, the laughter of those who have learned the secret of what lies on the other side of the invisi-ble wall of death.