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TWO

‘Lydia?’

The shadows of the stairwell sed up the sound of her name, and in the silence of the house – death-still but not eer flooded hie that he had stood here once before

A foggy evening in the autumn of 1907 The house chill The clip of hooves in Holywell Street loud in the silence Standing in the front hall in his dark acadeown, Asher knew that if he went downstairs to the kitchen he’d find Mrs Grimes, Ellen the maid, and Sylvie the tweeny – who had married the butcher’s son last year and been replaced by the equally feckless Daisy – crumpled asleep at the table, like a tableau in a cheap melodra unconscious on the divan in the upstairs parlor, fingers clasped around her spectacles where they rested upon her breast and hair hanging in a pottery-red coil to the floor Don Si at Asher’s desk, just out of the line of sight of the door, long hands folded, like a skeletal whitehis prey ‘My name is Don Simon Xavier Christian Morado de la Cadeña-Ysidro, and I am what you call a vampire’

And despite half a lifetime of research into the folklore of a dozen cultures, Asher had not believed him until he had listened to his chest with Lydia’s stethoscope and satisfied hiuest had neither heartbeat nor breath

He whispered, ‘Damn you--’ and strode up the stairs

But when he threw open the door of the upstairs study, the divan – though it was back in the sa four years before, visible through the half-open connecting door – was eestion, as there had been on that occasion: I can kill your wife, your servants, and all those you care for, if I chooseif you do not do as I say The laentle to his shoulders and his eyes like crystallized sulfur, and the faint lilt of archaic Spanish still lingering in his soft voice

The papers at the desk had been splattered with droplets of blood

And in blood ritten – on Lydia’s stationery, damn his effrontery! – in a sixteenth-century hand:

James,

We must speak

It took Asher a day to find the court he had seen in dreams

He kneould be near the river, in the le of streets that had been spared by the Great Fire He kneould be towards the east, between Whitechapel Street and the filthy, sprawling mazes of the docks He knew to look for the half-ruinous spire of a pre-Wren church and a sled square surrounded by houses of blackened brick and ancient half-ti: homes that must once have been the pride of wealthy Elizabethanhouses and the tenements of the poor

The March afternoon was arctic, and by three – when he finally identified the place – fog was rising fro with the mephitic stinks of coal sures stumbled on the worn cobblestones of the alleys, or clustered around the glowing stoves of the chestnut vendors, their coughing like that of the restless ghosts Odysseus had encountered on the banks of the Styx--

Bodiless, until you gave them blood

Ysidro wouldn’t make his appearance until the sun was out of the sky

Having located the square, Asher repaired to the nearest public house for a surprisingly good dinner of bangers and hs who populated the Fish and Ring on Marigold Walk neither troubled Asher nor indeed seemed to notice him Oddly for aAmericans as the quintessential Oxford don, Asher had perfected the appearance of the equally quintessential out-of-work laborer Had he not been a chae of forty-six as a Secret Servant of the King

When full dark caer Court

In his dream that narrow, crooked space had been e of aith a lake of blood In waking reality, at six o’clock on a raw spring evening the place swar rocks and calling to one another with piping ghostly voices in the fog Slatternly women spoke to Asher from the darkness of alleyways as he passed Men jostled past hiar only the relative shelter of overcrowded roo to their work Somewhere an old man’s quavery voice wailed, ‘Scissors, brollies, fix ’em all, fix ’em up--Scissors, brollies’

Contrary to the assertions of Bram Stoker (Ysidro had informed him) and most other writers on the subject, vampires lived prie or even locate if they should disappear As he crossed the court, Asher scanned the darkness (the street la which whore, which child, which gin-fuddled drunkard would fail to co he or she had a ho if Grippen – the Master Va those huddled bundles of rags fro a victih, of course, it was no more possible to see Grippen when he hunted, than it was to see smallpox or cholera or starvation, before they struck

And it crossed Asher’s mind – not for the first time – to wonder if it was Ysidro at all who had put those ies in his dreams, and not Grippen or one of the others, who considered that one mortal who kne to find vampire lairs – one mortal who truly believed that such creatures existed – was one entle voice said, ‘Jaood of you to come’

He felt the hair on his nape rise as he turned ‘Had I a choice?’

‘My dear Jae of expression, a stillness that had nothing in it of the immobility of a corpse The death was inside and had happened long ago ‘One always has choices’ They passed frolow of a ; shadow veiled Ysidro’s thin face once irl’s, though the fingers could have crushed the bone In the e and dead fish, a woents, ever ’ad the two of you turned off at once?’

Ysidro responded politely, ‘There is nothing we have not had, Mada, deeper into the darkness

Asher felt icy water slop against the outside of his boots, and then the plank of a liht, then left, Asher counting strides He felt Ysidro’s ht itthree, four, five, sixAnother right, the creak of a hinge, and a cold up-rushing stench ofdown An old kitchen at the botto a dusty rue of burst sacks and broken bins around the wall A door on the facing wall; the smell of more water beyond

‘Not ht a slat-backed chair for Asher and perched hi of a court doublet, on the table beside the lamp ‘Mistress Lydia is entirely too clever in the study of deeds of conveyance I trust she is well?’

‘She is well, yes’

Ysidro’s silence lasted a few er than it had to, the only indication that he had met – much less traveled with, or loved, or deliberately deceived – Asher’s young wife It was only with careful attention – va as they did upon the misdirection of huhtful scars that Ysidro had taken on his face and throat in Lydia’s defense and his own Undead flesh healed slowly, and differently frohteen es of dried sticking-plaster on the colorless flesh How long would it – did it – take vampire flesh to heal?

Lydia would have asked outright

He remembered her silence and the words she would sometimes cry out in sleep

Or maybe not

‘Yourself?’

‘I’m well,’ said Asher ‘You?’

‘Is this politeness?’ Ysidro’s head tilted a little to one side ‘Or do you truly wish to know?’

Asher considered for a moment, then said, ‘I don’t know’ And after another moment, ‘I truly wish to know, Don Simon’

‘Another time, then’ Ysidro drew a folded paper froray coat – only a vaarment in the East End and remained unnoticed – and passed it across

It was in English:

St Petersburg

3 February 1911