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 shop-girls bustling toward the Underground to catch the next train to what-ever 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 miss-ing 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 Lon-don?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 sud-denly, 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 head-lamps.
Good, he thought, and turned down Little Museum Street, still pant-ing 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 nar-row 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 parapher-nalia 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. Withharker 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 some-thing he had meant to bring were missing from its chipped marble top, then strode impatiently from the room.
He descended two flights of curving stairs at a silent run, and another to the basement. His landlady looked up, startled, as he passed the kitchen door, but he was already out in the tiny, sunken well of the areaway, standing on the narrow twist of moss-flecked stone steps to raise his eye level just above that of the pavement of the alley behind the house.
Evidently taken in by his feigned exit, the dark shape in the alley was still watching his lighted window. It stood motionless, nearly invisible in the dense gloom between the tall rows of houses; even so, he could make out the almost luminous whiteness of an unhuman face raised toward the light above. For a moment he kept his eyes on that dark form, scarcely daring to breathe, remembering the quickness of vampire
hearing. Then, as if he had blinked, the figure was gone.
Thirty minutes later he had unpacked and put away the last of his things, changed clothes, and shaved. Though this refreshed him slightly, he still ached for sleep, feeling half-tempted to leave Ysidro to wait in his damp alley, if that was what he wanted to do, while he went to bed. But in that case, he was certain, the vampire would simply break in, Don Simon having apparently never heard that vampires could not enter any new place save at the bidding of one of its inhabitants.
On the other hand, Asher thought as he stepped from the lighted doorway of Number Six and strolled slowly up the pavement through the foggy darkness, what place in London could be called new? Six Prince of Wales Colonnade had obviously been standing since the latter days of George IV's reign; his own house in Oxford since Anne's, Don Simon Ysidro had been quietly killing in the streets of London since long before either place was built.
It crossed his mind to wonder about that ancient London-a thick gaggle of half-timbered houses, tiny churches, old stone monasteries near the river, and a dozen conflicting legal jurisdictions whose officers could not cross the street to apprehend criminals-a London whose jammed houses spilled across the bridge onto Southwark, with its cheap theaters where Shakespeare was learning his trade as an actor and cobbler-up of plays, and taverns where men who sailed with Francis Drake could be found drinking to the health of the red-haired queen...
"We cannot continue to meet this way," purred a soft, familiar voice beside him. "People will begin to talk."
Asher swung quickly around, cursing his momentary abstraction of mind. He was tired, true, but ordinarily he was more aware of someone that close to him.
Ysidro had fed; his face, though still pale, had lost the cold gleam that had caught Asher's attention in the gloom of the alley. His black cloak half concealed sable evening dress; his stiff white shirt front was of silk, and several shades paler, now, than the skin tailored so deli-cately over his cheekbones. As always, he was bare-headed, the high horns of his forehead gleaming faintly as they passed beneath the lamps of the houses round the square. Pearl-gray gloves clasped the crystal head of a slender ebony stick.