I Travel by Night Read online

  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, wh
ich 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.

  Three.

  When Lawson reached the wooden gate that had an image of a kneeling Jesus carved upon it, his mouth was bloody. The blood had run down his chin; he’d used a handkerchief to try to clean up, but it was useless. His willpower was going. It was a battle he had fought long and hard, every day of this cursed life, but he knew that—like Shiloh in that Bloody April—it was a battle he was bound to lose.

  The gate was unlocked, and opened onto a stone path that led through a garden. Crickets chirped in the grass and other insects whirred and sang softly in the trees. It was a place of peace, but there was no peace in what remained the human part of Trevor Lawson’s soul. He followed the path past a white-painted church with a steeple and belltower and then to a small house next to the church, where he walked up upon the darkened front porch and pulled a cord that rang a little silver bell within. He waited, smelling the blood that stained him. His stomach lurched, but his veins sang. In another moment gas lamps came on inside the house, showing through the windows, and a figure in a dark blue robe with a red sash approached the door. The figure held a pair of tapers in a candleholder. When the door was opened, the candleglow fell upon Lawson’s gore-smeared face.

  “Oh,” said the elderly man, with a pained frown. His hair was a white cloud, his face deeply wrinkled, his chin wide and square and his nose a magnificent statement of God’s ability to create an oversized monument out of flesh. “I’m suspecting that’s not blood from a cow, is it?”

  Lawson shook his head.

  “Come in,” said the man. “Don’t drip.”

  “It’s mostly dried.” Lawson answered, as he crossed the threshold. The door was closed behind him. Lawson stood in a comfortable sitting-room with several overstuffed chairs and a brown sofa. Above a fireplace was hung a white crucifix, the sight of which made Lawson’s eyes burn and water, so he chose to look away. That, too, was getting worse.

  “You,” said Father John Deale, “look a mess.” He sighed heavily. “We’ll get you cleaned up, but…oh Lord, your jacket. Ruined, of course. Do I dare to ask…who supplied your meal tonight?”

  Lawson took his Stetson off. He ran a hand through his shaggy blonde hair. He felt a hundred years old, but in truth he was only fifty two. Though he appeared to be nearer thirty, his age before his rebirth had been twenty-seven. “There was a drunkard lying in a doorway on Dauphine Street,” he said, his gaze cast to the smooth-planked floor. “A middle-aged man, sleeping. I wanted to walk past. I tried.”

  “Not very successfully, I see,” said Father Deale, setting the candleholder on a sidetable.

  “No, not very.” Lawson hung his hat upon a wall rack. His eyes were flinty. “He just…was there, and he smelled of bourbon and cigar smoke, and his blood was fresh. I did try to walk past, but…” His gaze, imploring, went to the priest. “Yes, I nearly killed him. Dragged him into an alley and drained him almost dry, so that I could live. And that’s my story, isn’t it?”

  “For now. But you have the power to write a new one.”

  “With red ink?” asked Lawson. His bloody smile would have terrified anyone in New Orleans, but Father Deale knew him. Father Deale supported Lawson as he could, for Lawson in spite of all appearances was on the side of the angels.

  “Blue ink, in time. With a regular pen and not…these.” The priest waved an age-spotted hand in front of his own mouth, indicating the eye teeth. Of which his were entirely normal. “Come into the bathroom, let’s get your mess cleaned up.”

  When the job was done, the blood wiped away and Lawson’s jacket and shirt removed and replaced by an indigo shirt from Father Deale’s closet, the priest guided Lawson back to the sitting room. He poured Lawson a glass of Medoc, and himself the same. Lawson sank into a chair, recalling the first time he had staggered to this man’s door nearly two years ago, in a similar bloodied condition, to fall upon his knees and beg for forgiveness. The priest had listened in silence to the vampire’s story, and at last had given him a prayer not only of forgiveness but also of strength. And thus had their friendship—and partnership, in a way—begun, as Father Deale had become Lawson’s connection to the daytime world, his support in tribulations like this one, and his hope that one day he might throw off this heavy burden and find his way back to the sun.

  But to do that, Lawson would have to find—and kill—the vampire he knew as LaRouge. There had been many trails, but always she slipped the moment. The Dark Society protected her, for she was their deathless and beautiful Queen.

  “Christian Melchoir,” said Lawson, after a few sips of the Medoc. “Whoever he is, he knows me. He has a young woman in a swamp town called Nocturne. Kidnapped her. I’m to deliver the ransom.”

  “A trap, of course.” The priest had situated himself in another chair across from his visitor.

  “I have to go. Into what…I don’t know. But I have to.” Lawson drank from his glass again. It wasn’t the exlixir of life for him but it was a very good substitute, just as were the bottles of cattle blood that Father Deale supplied to him from the slaughterhouse in Algiers across the river. For religious purposes, the priest told the slaughterhouse manager. Nobody asked any questions, the blood was bought and paid for. Cattle blood served its purpose of keeping Lawson alive, b
ut after a time of that he found his senses dulled and his appetite for the human substance as demanding as the need for any opiate, yet the drinking of human blood awakened his senses to their fullest. The longest he’d ever gone without opening a human vein was three months, which had reduced him nearly to a hobbling husk.

  “Will you come out of there, is the question,” said Father Deale, with a lifting of his thick white eyebrows. “And you know the Dark Society will never let a human woman go free. She’s likely already been turned.”

  “Possibly.” Lawson saw some blood under the fingernails of his left hand that the washcloth had missed. Now that he was full, the sight was repellent. He closed the hand into a fist. The priest’s understanding of the Dark Society was not just through Lawson’s experience. He had had his own encounter with otherworldly forces when he was a younger man, in the now-forgotten town of Blancmortain, in western Louisiana. Over the long hot summer of 1838, John Deale had been witness to the deaths of ten townspeople due to snakelike bites on the throat and the draining of blood. That had caused the citizens of the little farming community to panic and pack up, leaving Blancmortain for whatever force wished to live there.

  “Something happened tonight,” Lawson went on. “I know I almost murdered someone. That’s not what I mean. I had…an encounter with something. A vampire, yes…but more. I’ve seen shapechangers before, but never one like that.” He took one more drink and set the glass aside. Across the room, a pendulum clock chimed the hour of two. “I think as they age, they become more adept at it. I think…something of their spirit…their essence…is involved. This one…was very strong. If I hadn’t had the bullets…well, thank God—and you—for those.”