"And how are you going to keep Dennis from killing him the mo-ment 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."
Twenty
"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, color-less 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. Be-fore 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 men-tion 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 facili-tate 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 hun-grily 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 com-prehensible now. "I've listened-don't you think I'd hear another vam-pire, 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..."
"Check anyway," Blaydon ordered sharply, Dennis' naked brow ridges pulled together into a horrible frown. "Do it!"
"I'm hungry, Dad," the vampire whispered sullenly. As he moved nearer, his monstrous shadow lurched over the low plaster of the ceiling and the claustrophobic narrowness of the walls. "Hungry-starving- my hands are burning me, and the craving's on me like fever..."
Blaydon swallowed nervously, but kept his voice commanding with an effort. "I understand, Dennis, and I'm going to get you well. But you must do as I say."
There was a long, ugly silence, Asher, lying at Ysidro's feet, could see the struggle of wills reflected in Blaydon's haggard face as he met his son's glare.He's slipping and he knows it, he thought, watching the
sweat start on the old man's face.How long before Dennis makes him a victim, as well as Ysidro and myself?
And Lydia,he added, with a chill of fear. And Lydia.
Then Dennis was gone. Asher realized they must all have had their consciousnesses momentarily blanked as the vampire moved, but it was so quick, so subtle, that he was not even aware of it, merely that Dennis vanished into the crowding shadows. He did not even hear the closing of the steel-sheathed door.
Blaydon wiped his mouth nervously with the hand that wasn't hold-ing the gun. He was still wearing the rather countrified tweed suit he'd had on that morning-that he'd had on for days, by the smell of it. Not, Asher reflected, that he or Ysidro could have passed for dandies either, both in shirt sleeves, himself unshaven and splotched with soot stains from climbing the wall last night. At least they'd slept, albeit uncom-fortably. Once, when he'd wakened in the afternoon, there had been a tray of food there, undoubtedly brought by Dennis-an unsettling thought. He'd eaten it and searched the room again, but it had yielded nothing but reinforced brick walls and door and Sheffield silver-plated steel window bars.
Blaydon waved his pistol at Ysidro. "Don't get any ideas, my friend. While you're in this room with me, you're safe. Dennis would pull you down before you got out of the house, as easily as he brought you here in the first place."
There was an annoyed glitter behind Ysidro's hooded eyelids-a grandee, Asher thought, who did not care to be reminded that he'd been overpowered and manhandled by the hoi polloi. But he only regarded Blaydon levelly for a moment and asked, "Do you really believe that any of this will do you any good?"