The Last Vampire (14 page)

She grabbed the remnant, invisible in its heap of clothes, and pulled it behind the loom. As she untangled the dry, emaciated remains from the clothing, she heard a ripple of laughter. The tour guide had said something that amused her audience. The click of other looms went on. Quickly, quickly, Miriam put the clothes on — black jeans, a black turtle-neck, shoes that fit her, unfortunately, quite badly. Then the blue smock. No hat, and that was not good because her hair would take time to regrow. She needed a wig, but that could not be had here. She stood up.

“Noelle?”

It was the guide, curious about why she was not at her loom. They would know each other perfectly, of course.

“Noelle, what are you doing? Why are you back there?”

She could not speak. She had no idea what Noelle’s voice sounded like. If the woman came around the loom, she would see something impossible — a skeleton covered with skin, and standing over it, a hairless and eyebrowless creature, its skin flushed bright pink. The burns were probably still very much in evidence as well, making her the stars knew only how grotesque. She picked up the remnant and crushed it. The cracking, splintering sounds were appalling.

“Noelle!”

“I’m fixing it!”

“Who is that?”

“It’s me, please.”

The guide began her spiel again, but her uneasy tone told Miriam that she was not satisfied with what she had heard, just unable to understand what was going on. She’d send a guard around in a moment, almost certainly.

Staying behind the looms, trying to avoid being glimpsed by the workers or the tour group, she went quickly back to the door. She slipped through and down into the basement. She went to the furnace and opened the grate, stuffing the remnant inside. Never again would she be so foolish as to leave one of these little calling cards behind. In this new world of aggressive, smart human beings, one more mistake like that would be her last.

She looked around for a doorway to the outside, saw one marked
Sortie,
with a red light above it. She went out, finding herself in an alleyway. In one direction, there was a blank wall, in the other, an entrance into a rather quiet street. It was early evening now, and the shadows were growing long.

She immediately noticed a curious flickering effect against the walls and roofs of the street ahead. Each time the flickering got brighter, there would be an accompanying roar.

She moved forward cautiously, knowing that she had to go out into that street in order to escape. The closer she got to the opening of the alley, the brighter the flickering became, the louder the roaring. Now she could also hear crackling and smell a smell of burning petrol. The flicker-ing reflected against her black clothing. She held out her hands, looking down at them, at the orange light dancing on them. Then she stepped forward and immediately looked to the left, toward the source of the light.

The first thing she saw was the gutted ruin of her mother’s house. The Castle of the White Queen was streaked with soot, its every window black and dark, its roof collapsed into the shell of the building.

Before it there were dozens of police and fire vehicles and milling gendarmes. The light was not coming from their vehicles, though, it was coming from a bonfire in the middle of the street, which was being fed by men with flamethrowers. At the mouth of the Rue des Gobelins a high barrier had been erected. No member of the public could see over it. She did not think that she could easily get around it. In fact, going out into the street would cause an immediate reaction, given all the police and the care with which they were preventing sight of this place.

In the center of the fire, she saw black bones and bones glowing red. It was Martin, of course. Obviously, the humans knew enough about the Keepers to take extreme care that they were really dead. A gendarme glanced at her, made a clear gesture:
stop there, come no closer
. His glance lingered for a moment, then he turned away.

The ring of people around the bones were different from the gendarmes. They were dressed casually; they looked brutal. Nearer, stood a small knot of others whom she took to be the supervisors. These people around the fire, making sure that the very bones of their quarry were reduced to ash, were the killers of the Keepers.

It was possible, if she listened intently, to make out snatches of conversation — a gendarme muttering about overtime, one of the murderers saying something about the temperature of the fire. Then the voice of a tall supervisor boomed out. “Fine ash,” it said, “then hose down the street.” That was to be the fate of her kind, then, to be reduced to ash and sent down the sewer.

Silence fell. More orders were given and one of the
pompes
was started up. Soon, water was pouring from its hoses and sluicing along the street. She watched it come toward her feet, watched as it reached the drain. It carried floating bits of burned material and chips of bone. A button came tumbling and bobbing along, and she saw that it was her own button, from the suit she’d had to leave behind in order to squeeze down the pipe that had saved her.

“Excusez-moi, mademoiselle.”

One of the gendarmes was coming toward her. He smiled slightly, then took her arm, but quite gently. “I will conduct you out.” He drew her forward. He blinked, seeing her bald head.

“What has happened?” she asked, trying to deflect his concern.

“Vagrants set fire to the White Palace. There were deaths.”

“Why were they burning the bodies?”

He shook his head. “It’s what the authorities said. Who knows why.”

She let the gendarme conduct her along. His body was loose, his breathing soft, his expression indifferent. Obviously he knew nothing of the Keepers and only assumed that she was a rather unusual looking woman. Her eyes were on the men who knew.

Closer she came to them, marching beside her policeman. They were engaged in intent conversation. She passed just behind the two supervisors. Then she saw one, a female, suddenly turn and face her. The creature was beautiful, with swaying blond hair. But its eyes, almost black, appeared as hard as chips of obsidian.“Excuse me,”it said in American-accented English.

As instinct prepared Miriam to fight, her body became tight beneath the restricting clothes. There were still many burned and injured areas, especially in her limbs, and the pain tormented her like the persistent hacking of slow, dull blades.

The creature followed her a few steps.
“Pardonnez-moi,”
it said, now in French. This creature was concerned and it was curious. It was not sure, though, of what to do. So it could not be certain of what she was.

Then the gendarme was letting her out onto the street. He asked her if she felt well enough to keep on. Instead of answering, she slipped into and quickly through the sparse crowd of onlookers. She did not look back, did not want to delay another moment her escape from the deathtrap.

Now that she had fed, her body wanted to sleep. She knew that it would be the deep, deep sleep of her kind, and that she had to find a place in which to lie safely for the helpless hours it would bring. But she could not afford it. She had an urgent mission to perform. The French Keepers must be warned, their Book of Names protected.

She walked quickly along the busy Avenue des Gobelins. She would go to a hotel somewhere, using the credit cards in this woman’s pocketbook. Or no, there was a better idea. She would go to the woman’s flat. It was a risk, of course, but she had the keys and the driving license with the address.

A little farther down the street, she saw a taxi at a stand. She hailed it with the same sort of casual gesture she had seen others using. She would also update her language as best she could. Any fool would remember a passenger who spoke like Voltaire.

As she got into the taxi, she opened the pocketbook. Noelle Halff, 13 Rue Léon Maurice de Nordmann. “Treize Rue L. M. Nordmann,” she muttered, slurring her words like a modern Parisian.

The driver made a strange sort of a face, then drove on. He rounded the corner into Boulevard Arago, and then they were there. It had been idiotic to take a taxi. The place was barely a quarter of a mile away. “I injured my foot,” she said as he stopped in front of a lovely artist’s atelier.

“Too bad,” he responded as he took her money. She seemed to have done perfectly well. He hadn’t noticed anything about her. Perhaps baldness was not unknown among women in Paris. Some
outré
fashion, perhaps.

She went through the bag, looking for keys, soon finding a set. There were four of them, and rather than tumble the lock, she found the correct one. She let herself in, then turned the timer that lit the foyer. As it hummed through its few minutes, she located the next key and entered the atelier itself.

The room was furnished with another Gobelins loom and more tapestries, medieval reproductions that the woman must have been selling in the tourist market.

“Hello,” she said. There was no answer. She went across the studio to its small kitchen, and beyond it into an equally tiny
salle de bains
and
toilette
. For sleep, a
couchette
had been installed at one end of the studio.

She searched the
salle de bains,
looking for makeup, but also trying to determine if more than one person lived here. The results were ambiguous. There was a man’s razor, also two toothbrushes.

Somebody moved. She glimpsed in the shadows a strange, dark creature. She reeled back out of the tiny room, raising her arms, preparing to defend herself.

But nobody came leaping after her. The only sound was her own breathing, that and a trickle of water from the toilet.

She turned on the light and saw in the mirror a Miriam Blaylock so profoundly changed that she’d thought herself a stranger. The head was bald, the face sunken, the eyes black sockets. She raised a finger to her cheek, felt the skin. It ought to be pink and soft right now, glowing with the life she had just consumed. But it revealed another surprise. She was not sallow, but covered with fine gray ash. The outer layer of her skin seemed to have been carbonized, at least on her face.

She splashed some water on it, then dried it with a serviette. It came up muddy white. The sink was full of gray. She stripped off her clothes and looked down at herself. She had sustained tremendous damage, more than she had realized. There were great rifts in her skin, filled with raw, angry flesh. Her hips were scraped almost to the bone. In one place, she could see actually see some bone.

She drew a bath, watching as the wonderful, steaming water gushed into the big tub. When she sat in it, the ash clinging to her body soon turned the water dark gray, tinged pink with the blood of her wounds.

Soon her whole body was tickling as her blood raced to repair the damage. She closed her eyes. How lovely. How much she needed to sleep. So easy it would be, so warm was the water.

No! No, she had to find stimulants — coffee, pills, anything — and she had to locate the woman’s passport, call an airline, and buy a ticket to New York, go to the mines, warn the other Keepers.

She rose from the tub and threw open the medicine chest. There were three bottles of pills — vitamins, an herbal remedy for colds, nothing of any use. The poor young creature had been healthy and clean of even simple drugs. Miriam could not avoid a sense of waste when she destroyed a vital, young life like this. The girl had been not unlike her Sarah.

She had given up telephoning Sarah. All that mattered now was getting home. She was afraid that the disaster had already crossed the Atlantic and that was why Sarah couldn’t respond. Would she find her beautiful home in Manhattan a ruin, just like the Castle of the White Queen, and Sarah’s very bones burned to ashes? There was no way to know that. It was not given to her.

She peered into the mirror. Actually, her face wasn’t so bad. A little makeup here, a little there, a bit of lip gloss, and she would be a girl again. She would be —

She stopped. Like the fall of evening or a black cloak dropping over her, a shroud, a sorrow so great fell upon her heart that it inspired not the usual gnashing anger, but a deep questioning of her own value as a creature, and indeed of the worth of the Keepers as a species upon the earth.

Look around you, she thought, at the complex life that had been unfolding in this atelier, at the wonders in the looms, their colors glowing in the faint light that came in from the street. Look at the book beside the bed, thumbed, earmarked, a book of poems with which Noelle Halff had put herself to sleep at night.
Les Fleurs du Mal
— “The Flowers of Evil.” Miriam knew the poems, appreciated them as well.

The girl might not have any pills in her cabinet, but she kept lip gloss and other cosmetics of the very highest quality. Miriam started to make up her face, to return to it an approximation of the endless youth that lay beneath her wounds.

She felt the weight of sleep urging at her brain, at her exhausted muscles, increasing the weight of her bones. She tossed her head, her eyes gleaming with a kind of fury. Even without drugs, she would not sleep. She could not, must not.

For she knew without question, if she lay down in this atelier — if she slept — they would certainly catch her.

T
he lower condyles of human femurs lined the walls, joint-end out. Above them were stacked skulls. Paul had known about the Denfert-Rochereau ossuary, but only vaguely, as the sort of grotesque that tourists of a certain kind — fans of horror movies, say — might visit. For ten francs you could spend as much time as you wanted to with the bones of seven million Parisians.

“What’s that smell?” Becky asked.

“Maybe there’s a fresh corpse.”

“Thank you, Charles.”

“No bodies were ever buried here. Just skeletons,” Colonel Bocage said.

Still, there was a certain smell, and smells were important to this work. Paul inhaled carefully. They all knew the fetors of the vampire — the sour, dry odor of their unwashed skin and the appalling stink of their latrines. Their waste was dead human plasma.

Colonel Bocage and Lieutenants Raynard and Des Roches walked ahead. The two lieutenants had interesting histories. Raynard was not French but Algerian. He had been a Foreign Legionnaire. Des Roches, a solemn-looking man with a quick sense of humor and what looked to Paul like a whole lot of physical power, had been a GIGN officer. The Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale was France’s elite terrorist intervention unit. These were the guys who stormed planes being held by madmen. These were also the guys who were sent in when the government didn’t want prisoners, only bodies.

Because of the catastrophe that had just occurred, these were the last two men Bocage had. Signing people on was just as difficult for him as it was for Paul. They had to be excellent, they had to be clearable to a high level, and it was just damn hard to find people like that.

As they moved forward, everybody was quiet. The French were grieving over the decimation of their team, and everybody was well aware of how this hole had chewed up people in the past. Theirs was brutal, extremely dangerous work. Vampires died, but it cost. God, it cost.

They were passing rows and rows of bones, an incredible sight. They were still in the ossuary itself.

“No teeth,” Charlie observed, “no lower jaws.”

Des Roches said, “The teeth were sold to button makers to help finance the ossuary.”

“Was that legal?”

“Perhaps, at the time,” Colonel Bocage replied, “although not politically correct, I am embarrassed to say. But old France — it was not politically correct.”

“Madame de Pompadour,” Becky said, pointing to a sign.

“Who was?” Charlie asked.

“She was the executive secretary of King Louis XV,” Raynard said.

“And the mistress,” Bocage added, “of course.”

“How’d she end up down here?”

“After the revolution, the bones of aristocrats were no longer held sacred.” The tone of Raynard’s voice suggested that he did not entirely approve of the revolution. Like many men engaged in extremely difficult military pursuits, he was ultraconservative.

“Stop, please.” Des Roches consulted his PalmPilot, which contained a map not only of the ossuary, but of the entire system of mines beneath the streets of Paris. The mines were more extensive even than the legendary Paris sewer system. The map, provided by the Inspectorate General of Quarries, covered the two hundred plus miles of tunnels and shafts that were interconnected. This was estimated to be roughly three-quarters of the total. The rest of it, among the most ancient of the shafts, were either completely detached from the main body, or connected only by openings too small for a human to enter.

Given the danger of entering the tunnels, ground-based radars and sonars had been used to complete the maps, so they were not nearly as accurate as the hunters would have liked. Paul had spent the night with Charlie and Becky studying them. Each had committed a section of the complex to memory. They had quizzed one another on twists and turns, blind alleys and unexpected crossings, until dawn.

They reached a dead end in the ossuary, which was blocked by a gate and marked with a sign,
Entrée Interdite
. Over the past hundred years, the Prefecture of Police had recorded sixty disappearances from the ossuary. It wasn’t many, but the points at which these people had last been seen were all closest to this particular connection with the abandoned labyrinth of mines. It was here that Bocage’s teams had entered in the past.

“Regard,” Bocage said, “beyond this point, we must assume that we are, at all times, in peril of our lives.”

Raynard opened an aluminum case that he carried. He distributed lightweight Kevlar body armor. “Remember that they are experts with knives. They can throw a knife almost with the speed of a bullet, because of the arm strength.”

Paul remembered the Sinha Vampire. It had killed Len Carter with a knife thrown so hard it went completely through his body and struck Becky, who was standing ten feet behind him. She’d taken thirty stitches in her neck. Had she not been turned slightly away from him at that instant, her carotid artery would have been severed.

Bocage gave out pistols, weapons unlike anything Paul had seen before. “This pistol will fire five of the fifteen special rounds that it carries with a single pull of the trigger. There is no sight because laser sights are useless. They see it and they are too fast. The bullets are designed to fracture into millions of tiny bits of shrapnel. A burst will pulverize everything in a five-meter square. Remember please, to assume that the creature, no matter how badly damaged it appears, is only stunned. Do not get near the mouth, and bind the hands immediately with your plastic cuffs. Is this clear?”

They all knew the drill by heart. But they all listened as if they’d never heard it before in their lives. A professional never ignores a chance to get an edge. Maybe hearing it again just now would speed up reaction time by a hundredth of a second. Maybe that would save a life. Miriam paid her ten francs and passed through the entrance to the catacombs. She’d spent an hour at the Galeries-Lafayette buying casual clothes and a wig, so the person who came into this place did not appear much like the one who had passed the Castle of the White Queen yesterday evening. All that remained of her ordeal were angry red areas on various parts of her body. Her right hip was still somewhat stiff, as well. But this gum-chewing teenager with black, close-cut hair bore almost no resemblance to the pallid, sunken horror of twelve hours ago. She was soft, her pale eyes sparkling with the eager innocence of eighteen or twenty sheltered years. Any man would want to protect her, even to cherish her. The little gold cross around her neck suggested religiosity. A man, managing somehow to penetrate the mysteries of this sweet child, would not be surprised to hear her murmur, “But I’m a virgin.”

Moving as swiftly and carefully as a cat, she descended the spiral stair that led into the crypt. The touristic map she had gotten with her ticket covered only the ossuary itself, but she knew the ancient signs that would indicate the route from the public area to the lairs and, above all, to the Keep where would be stored the Book of Names and whatever other things the French Keepers owned collectively.

Her intention was to warn the other Keepers if she could, but without fail to take their Book of Names with her. She could not risk leaving it here, no matter how they felt about that. If they resisted, she would fight.

There were two sightseers at the foot of the stairs. She shifted her body language, becoming a casual girl, a little nervous. The tourists were German, plump and smelling of their recent lunch of ham. The man had ugly, narrow veins. She loved the woman’s carotid. A charming nibble, she would be.

She sniffed the faint wind coming out of the corridor. None of the lovely, infinitely subtle scents of other Keepers. Each Keeper had his own particular scent, mixed of skin and the dust of ages. Miriam longed to smell the skin of a robust male Keeper just after he had fed, when he was warm and moist, his muscles like flowing iron, his odor overlaid by the creamy, intricate scent of fresh human blood.

The rankness of the couple was strong, mixed with the rather sandy, musty odor of the bones. Again, she inhaled, flaring her nostrils. Yes, there were other human beings within, also, all stinking of their foods and perfumes and the orifices they had secretly neglected. She smelled the damp biscuit odor of little boys, the soft cheese fragrance of girl children, and a bit of an older woman’s perfume. A class of mixed sex between the ages of six and ten was a short distance ahead, with their female teacher, who was thirty, no younger, and healthy. Miriam tested the air for new odors, filter-ing out those she had already identified. Some sort of exotic foodstuff came to her, spices of the East mixed with the odors of skin and spent cigarettes — a couple from Asia.

She entered the corridor. Her glance at the map had left her with a memory of precisely the number of steps she would have to go in every passage in the ossuary. In childhood, every Keeper was trained to use measured gaits, so she knew exactly how many inches she traversed with every step she took, no matter how fast her stride.

The entrance to the ossuary was marked by a group of thick, square columns painted white with black borders. She passed them, entering the earliest of the crypts. The most recent bones, quite naturally, were deepest. By human terms, they were ancient, but she remembered Paris perfectly clearly when there had been no catacomb full of bones and gawking tourists. In those days, the Keepers had the entire system of mines to themselves. One could ascend by an unknown stair into the street, take a victim down, and enjoy it at leisure, then have a nice sleep in the safety of the depths. The Paris Keepers had a pleasant life then.

She moved forward cautiously, seeking a certain spot that led from the ossuary into the deep shafts. There were other entrances, but this one was what you took if you knew what you were doing. Anyone coming down another tunnel would be assumed to be human.

The entrance was signaled, she knew, by a great cross. It would not be difficult to find. But to know its true meaning — that would be very difficult indeed . . . if you weren’t a Keeper. When she was certain that she was alone, she sprinted along the galleries. Here was Madame du Pompadour — that hideous old crank who reeked of sour milk and had somehow captured the heart of one of the later Louises, a prancing unwise fellow who blew farts and stank horribly himself from a fungal infection of the skin. Madame de Pompadour, indeed. Her real name was Jeanne Poisson — Jenny Fish. Well, so much for that marble tomb of hers. This was far more appropriate. Philippe Vendôme had made fervid, ratlike love to her, hadn’t he? Miriam recalled watching some sort of entertainment like that.

She’d been down here in the early eighteenth century with — which one — was it Lollie? Yes, poor Lollia, she’d been on her last legs then, frantically trying on powdered wigs and loading her face with leaded creams. No use, any of it.

Now another turn — and there was the great cross. But would the entrance still be behind it? Had the French found it and walled it up, also? She looked at the cross, refocusing her vision so that the glyphs that were invisible to the human eye stood out clearly. There was a word to utter in Prime, according to the instructions, that would open the wall. It would also alert the Keepers inside that she was there. She was instructed, as well, to append her name. She drew a deep breath, expanded her lungs, and released the call. It vibrated against the stone, its echo fluttering off down the corridors. Now, the instructions told her, press thrice the upper corner of the left tine of the cross.

The hidden door swung inward. Beyond was absolute dark. From within there came the odor of many lairs.

“Halte!”
Everybody froze. “Do not move,” Colonel Bocage said. “Listen.”

It came again, a sound so deep that it was more a sensation than a noise.

“Could it be the Métro?” Becky asked. “Are we under a tunnel?”

Des Roches laid his arm around her neck, drew her close, uttered a breathy, almost-silent whisper. “That was a vampire.”

The French were in some ways far advanced in their knowledge. Becky and Charlie and Paul had been down many a dark tunnel, but they had never had to face anything this elaborate.

The place stank of wet stone and the musk of bats. The group had stopped its march and was clustering together in a low gallery. Becky shone her light on a stone where graffiti had been carved.
“Merci à Dieu, m — ”
and there it stopped, as if the carver had run out of strength or light or time. The letters were formed in an old script, perhaps from the last century or the one before.

“Listen — again,” Charlie said.

It was eerie, that sound — so deep that you wouldn’t notice it unless you were trained to. Paul had heard it echoing off the walls of the night in Beijing, in Osaka, in Bangkok. As a boy, he had heard it mixing with the sullen hoot of the owl and the barking of the fox.

After some moments, there was no sound but their breathing and the busy scuttle of rats. The roar of the great city above them was a bare whisper. Water dripped, echoing as if somewhere deeper there might be a hidden pool or even a small lake.

“Lights out,” Paul said. “We go to light-amplification goggles.” Their equipment packs rattled as they put the night-vision goggles on.

You could see perhaps fifty feet. Beyond that was the haze of a darkness so deep not even the goggles could gather enough light to be of use.

“Do you wish to go to infrared,” Bocage asked his men, his voice, in its softness, sounding curiously as if he’d meant to utter words of love.