Colonel Stewart shut the buff folder on his desk with a little hiss of annoyance, and scowled across at James Asher as if what he’d read there were all Asher’s fault. ‘Damn medicos won’t clear you for service till you can run three times round Piccadilly Circus and shin up the Monument with a rope. Got no idea there’s a war on and we need every man.’
Asher suspected that the damn medicos, up to their hairlines in shattered and dying men, were as cognizant of the war as Stewart was and were seeing it a damn sight closer. But he only returned, ‘I can’t say I’m surprised. Or entirely disappointed. Just coming down here knocked me out. I’d hoped to go back up to Oxford tonight and I’m staying in town instead.’
‘You look perfectly fit to me,’ grumbled the colonel, rising to show Asher from his office. ‘Damnit, man, you’d only be sitting in a cell with a lot of Jerries listening to ’em talk! How hard can it be?’
Asher, who’d had three relapses of pneumonia since his return to Oxford in September – after nearly dying of it in Paris – reflected that the last thing his lungs needed was to be surrounded by forty German prisoners of war, all coughing themselves blue. He made noises of commiseration, shook hands and promised to notify the War Office the minute he was fully recovered, and descended the steps of the rambling labyrinth on Whitehall feeling as if he’d personally swum the Channel after battling half a regiment of Roman gladiators, single-handed and armed with a golf club.
Definitely in no shape to deal with Paddington station and two hours standing in the corridor of an overcrowded railway car, much less a trip to the Front.
A younger man – and on that cold March night, though not quite fifty Asher felt like a septuagenarian at least – would have leapt at the chance, if not for glory then because his beautiful young wife, Lydia, was also at the Front. But seventeen years on Her Majesty’s Secret Service had cured Asher once and for all of any possible craving for glory, and of even a moment’s belief that if such a thing as glory existed (something he had always very much doubted) it could be achieved in war. And though he would without hesitation – even at his age (or the age which he felt) – have re-swum the Channel and fought those hypothetical Roman gladiators a second time with his seven iron in the hopes of even an hour in Lydia’s astonishing company, he was sufficiently familiar with the workings of the War Office to know that were he to volunteer to gather information from captured German prisoners, he would undoubtedly be assigned to do so in Serbia, not Flanders. (Lydia’s letters were censored but before her departure last November they had worked out a dot code, so he knew she was in Pont-Sainte-Félicité, near Neuve Chapelle.)
Whitehall was nearly dark. The pavement was thick with foot traffic from the government offices, though it was close to seven. Asher’s years of sneaking in and out of foreign countries with information about naval emplacements, border fortifications and orders for new weaponry had given him a permanent watchfulness of all those around him, an awareness of faces and details of dress which, in Berlin or Vienna, could mean the difference between making it back to his hotel safely and being found dead in a storm drain. Thus, despite the swift-thickening twilight, he was very much aware that most of the men hastening to catch the 7:10 from Charing Cross had white or grizzled hair beneath their Homburg hats, and that the home-going crowd – thinner by half than it had been the year before – was at least a third female. Women and older men moved to take up the positions of men at the Front.
Or of the men who’d gone to the Front six months ago and were already dead.
Buildings loomed against the cinder sky like a black necropolis. Since January, when German Zeppelins had rained bombs on coastal towns, the government’s orders to black out windows and streetlamps had assumed a new seriousness – Asher had read recently of a movement afoot to drain the Serpentine and the lake in St James’s Park, lest the glitter of moonlight on their waters serve as a guide to the night raiders. Though the traffic – both motorcars and horse-drawn – was far lighter these days, Trafalgar Square was a nightmare of jostling dark shapes swimming through the gloom, and had Asher not known the place like the back of his hand he would not have been able to locate the Underground station. Below ground the lights were bright, but the crowds were such – reduced bus service and an almost total absence of cabs more than made up for the shortage of men in city offices – that Asher had a long wait for a train to Bloomsbury.
By the time he reached the small lodging house near Euston Station his head was swimming with fatigue. He had already telegraphed Mrs Grimes – the cook back at the Oxford house – that he wouldn’t be home, and briefly toyed with the notion of sending a second wire to bid Miranda a special good-night. At three, and with her mother now gone, his daughter set great store by good-night kisses, even by remote proxy. But the extreme likelihood that the Oxford Post Office wouldn’t deliver the greeting until the following morning put the idea from his mind, and he ascended five flights of stairs to what had been the servants’ quarters of the tall, narrow house – rooms of any kind were another thing extremely difficult to come by in London in the spring of 1915 – and dropped onto the cot in the penitential little chamber without undressing.
This turned out to be a fortunate circumstance, because twenty minutes later the landlady’s daughter thumped loudly on the door with the news that a message had come from the War Office, and it looked to be important.
It was from Colonel Stewart, begging him to return. Sir Collin Hayward of Intelligence was on his way to Paris first thing in the morning, but having heard that Asher was in town, wanted very much to speak to him about assisting in the vetting and training of agents to be sent to the Continent.
Asher roundly cursed both Stewart and Sir Collin, but resumed his coat, tightened his tie (which he hadn’t taken off – tired as he was, he assumed he’d have slept in it), and made his way downstairs and back to the Underground.
He spent the next three and a half hours in conference with Sir Collin, who, to do him justice, looked like he hadn’t had more than a few hours’ sleep in the past week.
Then because of a breakdown on the Northern line – it was past midnight, and the Underground nearly empty – Asher had to take the Piccadilly line and walk back to Grafton Place from King’s Cross. And, owing to the completely unlighted condition of the streets, and a moderately thick fog which had settled over the city, he found himself, uncharacteristically, lost.
This was what he was doing, wandering among the nameless streets east of King’s Cross Station, when he encountered the revenant.
The fog confused the way sounds carried from the railway yards. It was too dark, even, to see the street signs, many of which seemed to have been taken down or taped over (in an effort his landlady had told him to thwart German spies). Likewise it was difficult to determine in which direction Regent’s Canal lay. In places the fog was thick enough – reeking with the smoke of the munitions factories across the river – that Asher had to feel his way along the house walls and area railings. He could only be glad that at this hour, nobody was operating a motorcar, not that anyone in this neighborhood (if he was where he thought he was) could afford such a luxury (or the petrol to put in it) …
Then he smelled it. Sudden, rank and horrible, like rotting fish and the urine of rats mixed with the peculiarly horrible stench that oozes from human beings who have washed neither their bodies nor their clothing for months on end. Unmistakable.
He had smelled it in Peking, two years before. A thousand times stronger, for the things had been forty and sixty strong by the time their hive was destroyed. Don Simon Ysidro had told him that the only other place where such monsters were to be found was Prague, where they had spawned and multiplied for nearly three centuries in the old Roman sewers beneath that city. The Others, Ysidro had called them, though they were related, in some way, to vampires. Undead, mindless, nearly impossible to kill, they would devour anything they could catch, and presumably lived for much of the time upon rats, with whose minds they had a curious affinity.
Here.
In London …
Shock and horror smote him like a physical blow.
Damnit—
Horror chilled him.
In London …
Listening intently, he could hear it, a slow soft dragging as the stink grew stronger. The canal can’t be more than a hundred yards off. The Others hid under the bridges in Prague, when night cloaked that city. Down in the bed of the rivers, and in half-flooded sewer vaults, for their flesh would slowly dissolve from exposure to sunlight.
Their minds – if they could be said to have such things – were joined by a sort of mental telepathy, something the older vampires were adept at, though no vampire, so far as he knew, could control the actions of the Others.
And their condition, like that of the vampires, was spread by ‘corruption of the blood’.
The vampires, whose mental powers of illusion were lessened by the movement of running water, kept away from them. Lydia had written to him months ago of the vampires at the Front: Are these things there as well?
One could reason with vampires.
Not with the Others.
The Others, one could only flee from, and the thought of such things at large in London iced him to the marrow.
Asher felt his way along the wall – the brick gritty under his fingers – until he reached the corner he knew had to be nearby. The smell nearly made him gag. A faint plish of water, around the corner to his left. By the feel of the broken pavement underfoot he guessed this was an alley. A few feet further on he trod in something squishy that smelled of rotten vegetables. Ahead, the slight metallic rattle as the Other brushed a dustbin.
Then the furious squeal of a captured rat, followed by the sudden pong of blood. The rat shrieked again – being eaten alive, presumably – and there was a loud clang as either another rat, or a cat, fled the scene in panic. Yellow light bleared suddenly in the fog with a man’s shape silhouetted against it:
‘’Ere, then, what’s … Bloody ’ell!’
Pressed to the brick of the alley wall, Asher was shocked at how close he stood to the thing, close enough to see it clearly through the fog once the light from the open door streamed out. It was indeed such a creature as had bred in the mines west of Peking, the human face deformed and bruised where the jawbones had elongated and the sutures of the face opened. The mouth, human no longer, was raw where its new-grown teeth had gashed the lips. It held the dying rat in one hand – still thrashing – and blood ran down its arm and its chin. The creature’s eyes, as it swung toward the open doorway’s light, flashed like mirrors.
It dropped the rat and sprang.
The shirtsleeved and unshaven watchman who’d opened the door let out a yell and tried to slam it again between them, but the creature already had him by the arm. It yanked him through and into the wet murk of the alleyway. Asher caught the lid off a dustbin and struck with its edge at the revenant’s face. With a grunting bleat the Other struck it aside, staggered back, still holding the shrieking watchman; Asher slammed at it with the lid again and, when it was knocked away, caught up the dustbin itself and rammed it at the monster like a clumsy battering ram.
The revenant hurled his quarry from him and Asher heard the man’s skull crack against the brick of the wall. Then it lunged at Asher, who struck with another dustbin – Do NOT let the thing’s blood touch you, do NOT … The creature made one more lunge at the watchman, who lay crumpled where he’d fallen at the foot of the wall, then doubled like a rat and darted into the blackness. Asher plunged after it, one hand to the wall to guide him, and thirty feet on collided with more dustbins, falling over them as the light of two other doors opened in the murky abyss and men’s voices shouted about what the ’ell was goin’ on ’ere … (Only one of them, the philologist in Asher noted automatically, used a Southern Indian’s sharper terminal ‘g’ …)
By the time Asher was pulled to his feet the creature was gone.
‘What the hell is that stink?’ demanded the white-haired Indian. ‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘He attacked a man,’ panted Asher, pointing back into the solid wall of fog. ‘One of the watchmen—’
The men looked at each other – three of them, a sailor and two watchmen in this district of small shops and warehouses. ‘That’ll be ’Arry,’ said the other watchman, a silvered bulldog of a man, and as one they all ran back along the alley, Asher thinking, What the hell will I do if the victim is alive but infected? What the hell can I say?
The door still stood open. A fat man, balding, with a publican’s apron around his waist was just moving to close it; the stouter watchman called, ‘What ’appened ’ere, Tim? This gennelman says as ’ow ’Arry was attacked—’
Tim the publican’s heavy-browed face creased in a frown. ‘They took him away.’ Sharp little blue eyes studied Asher and he added, ‘You want to come on round the corner to my place, guv, an’ have a sit-down. You look done up like a kipper.’
‘Who took him?’ Asher leaned suddenly against the wall, trembling in a wash of fatigue.
The publican’s frown deepened and he put a steadying hand under Asher’s arm. ‘Dunno, sir. Looked like a plainclothes ’tec ter me. Skinny little feller. I’d just tied a towel round ’Arry’s conk – bleedin’ like a pig, ’e was – an’ the feller says, “I’ll take him. Cut along and get some water, ’fore we have every cat in the neighborhood lappin’ at the blood.” That’s where I was off to now, and to get word to Weekes who owns the shop here.’
‘He’s right about the blood,’ agreed the Indian. ‘You take the gentleman inside, Tim, I’ll get that water and send off to Weekes.’
Asher was led off down the alley to the back door of the Wolf and Child (which, he reflected, had no business still pouring out brandy at this hour of the night). He glanced back, his heart hammering, and he saw that, yes, the wet, black brick of the wall opposite the warehouse door glistened with a dark smear of blood. More blood was dribbled on the pavement where Harry the watchman had fallen.
I have to find him. Find where he was taken. If the creature too was wounded, and its blood found its way into Harry’s open flesh, in a few days he’ll begin to change …
The Indian guard emerged from Harry the watchman’s door with a bucket of water, and doused the blood in a soapy torrent.
When Asher returned to the place on the following morning, slightly light-headed and shaky from the fatigue of the night before, and inquired of Mr Weekes – the owner of the silk warehouse Harry had watched – the shop owner had no idea to which hospital Harry had been taken. Nor had Tim the publican, just washing down the front steps of the Wolf and Child and readying to start the day’s business, after seeing Asher back to his room in Grafton Place the previous night. ‘No, he’s got no family here in town.’ The fat man shook his balding head. ‘Lives in lodgin’s somewhere in Camden Town, I think … No, I never did hear the name of his landlady. Not that it sounds like she’d care tuppence if he was brought back home cut to pieces in a sack …’
‘If you do hear of where he might be found—’ Asher handed the man his card, containing his Oxford address – ‘please telegraph me here at once. I have reason to believe that the man who attacked Harry suffered from a contagious disease – spread through blood contact – and it’s imperative that I at least make sure Harry wasn’t infected.’
Which in its way was the truth. Neither Weekes nor Tim had been contacted yet by the police, and when Asher inquired at the Holborn Police Station later in the day he learned that the attack had not been reported. Though it was now four in the afternoon and he felt as if his bones had been ground down to the snapping point with weariness, Asher made his way to the Foreign Office.
Langham, to whom he’d reported in his days of mapmaking and rumor-sniffing in the Balkans in the 1880s, was delighted to see him. He clucked worriedly over his haggard appearance (‘They told me you’d dashed nearly gone to join the choir invisible in Paris, old fellow – Stewart’s an idiot for saying you should be passed as fit for a listening post …’), and poured out for him some indifferent sherry from a cache in the bottom of his office bookcase. He listened to Asher’s carefully-tailored account of the events of the previous evening: that there had been an attack in the service alley behind the Wolf and Child in Chalton Street, that Asher had heard repeated rumors of German plans to spread an infectious disease in London, that he had reasons to suspect that the man attacked – Henry Gower – had been so infected.
‘The men who work in the same street tell me that someone came, almost at once, and took Gower away, presumably to hospital.’ Asher sipped his sherry – it didn’t help in the least. The thought of trying to deal with the train back to Oxford that night filled him with sickened dismay. ‘But it turns out that as of this morning, neither Weekes – Gower’s employer – nor any of the witnesses were contacted by the police, and no report was filed. Yet we must find Gower, and more than anything else we must find the – man – who is potentially spreading the disease.’
‘And what are the symptoms of this disease?’ Langham spoke calmly, but his weak blue eyes were fixed on Asher’s face.
Asher felt himself go perfectly cold, with a chill that had nothing to do with the onset of fever.
‘High fever,’ he replied promptly. ‘Rash and virulent irritation, especially around the mouth. What appears to be bruising of the capillaries of the face.’ Keeping his face bland, he observed that his former boss was watching him closely, with an expression of studied nonchalance.
He knows about it already.
‘Hm.’ Langham folded his ladylike hands. ‘I’ll get a report out to the hospitals, of course … and thank you for reporting this, old man. I’m sure it’s nothing – some men are being sent home from the Front with quite gruesome cases of shell shock lately – but would it be asking too much for you to write up a report when you get back home? You are going up to Oxford this evening, are you not? That’s good,’ he added, when Asher nodded as if the matter were a foregone conclusion. ‘You look like the very devil, old man. By all means, go to bed and stay there … And don’t worry.’ He permitted himself a secret, and slightly patronizing, little smile. ‘Think no more about it. The matter is in hand.’
Asher felt the hair prickle on the nape of his neck.
‘I’m glad to hear it, sir.’ He smiled, rose, donned his hat – it took all his remaining strength to do so – and got out of the office, and the building, as casually as he could.
And kept an eye out behind him, all the way to Paddington Station.