Authors: Robert R McCammon
Two.
Trevor Lawson saw the two men ahead on Royal Street. First the top-hatted stalker and then David Kingsley, derby-hatted and freighted down with his burden of worry. The stalker was following Kingsley to his hotel, which Lawson knew from a previous letter was the very luxurious St. Roman on Dumaine Street. Lawson figured the stalker might be also going to report to someone else that the meeting between Kingsley and himself had taken place, and thus in time the unknown Christian Melchoir would know that ‘the adventurer’ was on his way.
Lawson realized of course what he was walking into. He knew what they wanted. But if it meant finding out
anything
about LaRouge…then it was a risk worth taking.
The problem was not getting into Nocturne. Oh no, they would welcome him there. The problem would be in getting out.
As they said in Alabama, his home state,
if you’re gonna jump into that fryin’ pan, make
sure you’re plenty oiled up
.
He intended to be.
He kept himself at a leisurely pace. The stalker had long legs, but was also holding himself back as not to get too close to Kingsley’s shadow as thrown by Royal’s ornate green gaslamps. As they strolled deeper into the Vieux Carré, the traffic of pedestrians and carriages dwindled. The St. Roman was only a block ahead. Lawson had smoked his cheroot down to its nub, and now he paused to flick it into a puddle of rainwater. The hiss that followed—as soft as it was—made Kingsley’s stalker suddenly look back over his shoulder. Lawson saw the deep-sunken eyes glint. The man darted away onto St. Ann Street in a black swirl, heading northwest toward Dauphine.
Ah!
Lawson thought, with a measure of satisfaction.
He wants a chase!
Being a gentleman, Lawson could not refuse such an invitation. He tied the leather chinstrap of his hat into place, for he’d lost valuable Stetsons before and this one suited him very well.
He propelled himself forward and turned onto St. Ann. How this was done was child’s play to him, but to anyone else he would have appeared a phantom figure in a blur of clothing, passing by like a cool breeze with breathtaking speed. He was not running, nor was he expending a great amount of energy; he was moving with the night, as part of the currents of the night, and using the power that had been given to him by the woman—the creature—he so desperately sought.
He would go to the ends of the earth to find LaRouge. He would assault the gates of Hell itself to get at her, for he knew that territory very intimately. He had lived there, since the month of April in the year of 1862.
But for now, he was determined not to let his quarry slip away…for the man ahead was also a phantom figure in a blur of clothing, but Lawson’s eyes—red-centered now, and shining like a cat’s—marked the stalker’s progress as if they were still strolling, as if other passersby were frozen in place like so many full-sized daguerreotype photographs.
Lawson saw the man turn swiftly to the right upon Bourbon Street, one hand up to hold the tophat from flying off his head. Lawson kept pace, a blur following a shadow. They crossed Bourbon and turned left onto Dumaine. At the corner they frightened a carriage horse that snorted and reared and made the already-besotted driver think he’d caught a quick glimpse of French Quarter specters that called for another cup of rum.
Halfway between Dumaine and Burgundy, where patterns of ivy decorated yellow walls and lamps of many colors flickered in garret windows, the top-hatted man suddenly turned to his right and leaped a seven-foot-tall wrought-iron gate with speartips at the top. It was done smoothly and soundlessly, but a gray cat saw it and, scrowling, scrambled for the cover of a maidenhair fern. Lawson reached the gate within three seconds. A courtyard lay beyond with a fountain at its center. There was a scrabbling noise from above, and Lawson’s red-centered eyes caught sight of the top-hatted man climbing up over a balcony twenty feet above the courtyard and then springing up like a spider to catch the roof’s gutter and pull himself over the edge. By that time, Lawson was already going over the gate in a smooth leap of his own. He sometimes snagged clothing doing this, leaving tatters of shirts or—more regrettably, bits of trousers—left behind, for no one was perfect all the time…but in this case he came over the speartips into the courtyard still fully clothed, and next he sprang up off the bricks to grasp hold of the balcony’s railing and haul himself over. A small dog began to bark furiously beyond the window curtains. Lawson was already going up onto the roof, and crouching there to smell the air for the friction of movement.
He had not been born this way. No one was. It was lost in the mists of time who the first one had been and what agreement had spawned such a condition, but now they were legion. It had occurred to Lawson on many occasions just such as this, when all his senses quivered on the alert, the black ichor burned in his veins and his eyes saw through the dark as if they themselves were spirit lamps, that he had never felt more alive. As a lover of the night, he caressed with his senses the sinuous dark. He had been torn apart as a man in 1862 and reformed as something both more and less. He had no choice about what he was; his choice lay in what he was to do with himself, and in what he sought. But even in his darkest moments, when he felt so distant from humanity and so lonely for a warm touch that he might scream to wake the dead, he had to think that this was a gift. Sent from Satan, yes…but indeed, a
gift
.
He wished to return it to its sender, as the riverboat gamblers might say…“in spades”.
He looked out across the sea of roofs beneath the vault of stars, where the last of the surly rainclouds were drifting into tatters. There was no sight of the top-hatted stalker, in among the sharp peaks and edges and the multiple chimneys. But Lawson knew he must be here somewhere, for the spy had brought Lawson up to this high place for them to be alone. Lawson figured the man intended to kill him. It was a matter of pride for some.
Lawson moved forward, cautiously and carefully, along a roof’s peak. A carriage passed by on Dumaine Street about sixty feet beneath him, the horse’s hooves clip-clopping on the cobbles. Somewhere below, a bottle shattered. Lawson wished he had something to drink, and not just the little weak “tea” from his Japanese bottle that had once held the ashes of a warlord’s heart. No, tonight he desired the stronger elixir.
He had crossed the apex of one roof and was continuing across a second, past a pair of darkened garret windows in the shape of diamonds, when a figure rose up from behind a red brick chimney to his right.
Lawson stopped his advance. The tall thin man in the top hat stood staring at him, a faint breeze stirring the folds of the man’s ebony duster. Lawson caught the red centers of the man’s eyes; they were brothers, of a fashion.
“I suppose you know me,” said Lawson, his voice easy.
The stalker did not speak for a few long seconds. Then, in a rasp as if from a parched throat: “I know you. What you are. And I will tell you that Christian Melchoir will reward me very well for your death.”
“Your reward, sir,” answered the vampire in the Stetson hat, “will be delivered to you in Hell.”
The other removed his top hat to reveal slicked-back black hair and an elongated and strangely pointed head. When he grinned, the fangs slid out like those of a rattlesnake. “You may go first, sir,” he hissed, “and prepare the way.”
So saying, he revealed himself further. He was still grinning as his legs and arms lengthened and thinned and the black duster flew away from the changing body like the wings of a raven. The flesh darkened to the color of a bruise in the space of several seconds. There was the noise of bones cracking and reshaping. Ripples of pain shot across the shapechanger’s damp face because nothing in this world—or even the world to which this creature belonged—was born in the absence of agony. The features flattened, the chest bulged and grew large as an armor plate, the hands became dark-nailed claws and the feet on the ends of the grotesque spidery legs stepped out of their boots. The face was still barely human, the red-centered eyes narrowed to slits. As the body shook off its trousers and shirt and black silk ascot and became yet more spider-like the lower jaw unhinged and thrust forward and the vampiric fangs in the upper jaw snapped and tore at the air.
By instinct Lawson’s own face tightened, his mouth opened and the fangs slid out. He was already reaching in a blur for the derringer beneath his jacket. He brought the gun out and cocked the hammer, and just that fast the man-spider scrabbled forward and a dark forelimb stubbled with spiky growths whipped out. It caught Lawson’s forearm and knocked the weapon aside just as the derringer fired. Trailing blue flame, the bullet shot away toward the stars.
And then the nightmare was upon him.
It enveloped him with its foreclaws and, gripping him around the back, lifted him up off the roof. The fanged mouth in the misshapen face came at Lawson’s throat, going for the ichor that gave life to death; Lawson got his left elbow up and slammed it against the creature’s jaw with a force that would have broken the neck of an ordinary human, but this was a member of the Dark Society and so was both far beyond and far beneath humanity. Still, the man-spider blinked and fell back, stunned. A claw shifted position and grasped the wrist of Lawson’s gunhand before he could put the weapon to action again. Lawson’s arm was trapped by tremendous strength, his body still lifted into the air, and with his other fist he struck desperately into the creature’s face with all the power given him by the Devil’s brood.
It was not enough.
Though Lawson was a creature of the night himself, and some might—certainly
would
…say he was a monster, he was still human enough to possess organs and bones, and these could be ruptured and broken. He would not be killed in this way, but the pain would be fierce and he would be debilitated for a time until everything healed together again. He was hard to kill, but he was not invulnerable. He was aware of this as his body was squeezed by the thing’s other spidery foreclaw and he felt the vertebrae of his spine pop. He felt the pressure at his ribs and at his chest. He took a breath of the heated air between himself and the monster and held it. The head darted forward again, the fangs questing for his throat. Lawson kicked into the monster’s midsection with a force that would’ve knocked a carriage onto its side, interrupting that particular attempt to draw ichor. The man-spider staggered back to the edge of the roof above Dumaine but still wouldn’t let Lawson go. He kicked into its midsection once more, like kicking into a chunk of concrete. They danced back and forth atop the roof in a macabre roundabout. Lawson heard the Japanese bottle in his coat pocket shatter. Wetness spread. The smell of blood was overpowering, a heady incense, and for an instant the man-spider blinked and its hold on Lawson’s gunhand faltered.
Lawson cocked the derringer, held its barrel against the thing’s dark forehead and pulled the trigger.
The creature’s head snapped back, its jaws opened and the rattlesnake vampiric fangs were exposed in all their gleaming glory. But Trevor Lawson knew they would not be tasting blood—or in his case, ichor—ever again.
Still, the man-spider didn’t fully understand yet. Its strength was still undiminished. The narrow red-centered eyes stared at him with something akin to humor and ablaze with hatred. Then the head began to swell and the face to warp, and one of the eyes imploded and went black like a dying comet. The open mouth gasped around the fangs, which began to turn the color of cinders.
The creature’s grip loosened enough for Lawson to fight free. He dropped to the roof, thinking that if anyone was in the room below they had gotten a noise like a drum parade over their heads. He crawled up to the roof’s apex and sat there, watching the creature shiver and writhe and begin to crack apart like old pottery. Cracks rippled across the agonized face and crisscrossed the chest. Between the cracks glowed a pulsing red heat like a glimpse beyond the iron gates of Hell. The monster held its claws before the fissured face, as the single eye sought to fathom what was happening; the left claw was already falling apart in whorls of gray ashes. The remaining eye went dark. With a high-pitched shriek that was no longer the sound of any human being, the dissolving man-spider scrabbled toward Lawson as if to take a last bite of revenge, but its knotty legs were coming apart. Lawson kicked the thing in the chest as it reached him.
It staggered backward, and backward again, and as it flailed at the air it fell from the rooftop and, falling toward the stones of Dumaine Street, it cracked into dozens of small pieces. There was a fall of ugly gray ash upon Dumaine. All that remained for the streetsweeper to find and wonder about was the pair of black socks that lay mysteriously full of ashes.
Lawson pulled a few deep breaths into lungs that were losing their power to draw air. He put the empty derringer away and removed a cheroot from the inside of his coat. He found it half-crushed. Tearing it in two, he threw the crushed half aside and lit the survivor with a friction match. He sat and blew smoke rings and listened to dogs howling in the aftermath of the creature’s eerie shriek. He decided it wouldn’t do to sit here too long. Some of the windows would surely be opening soon. It was time to descend into the shadows, his home away from home.
Lawson got up. His vertebrae popped back into place; it was a good feeling. His chest felt a little smashed and the muscles of both shoulders throbbed, but he was all right. His cream-colored jacket, however, was a bloody disaster from the broken Japanese bottle, which had cost him a pretty gold piece from a Royal Street antiques vendor.
Damn,
he thought. But what he was trying to do was keep his mind from the fact that he’d never seen a member of the Dark Society quite like that one before, and it was more than a little disturbing to realize how their shapechanging was becoming so…the word would be
advanced
. Then with the cigar between his teeth and his fangs back in their sockets where polite vampire gentlemen kept theirs, Lawson took a first step and nearly fell on his southern comfort. He had to get his balance and his focus back before he went any further. It took him a minute or so. He had somewhere to be, and continuing across the roof to find the nearest balcony and the easiest way down he left puffs of smoke behind him like the trail of ghosts that haunted his memory.