by J. S. Barnes
‘Have you eaten supper yet?’ Arthur asked at length.
I said that I had not, to which he at once replied with an unpersuasive sort of bonhomie: ‘Well, then you must dine at the club. The food there is really quite adequate.’
I began to protest. ‘Really, I ought to… Mina will be…’
The noble lord raised a hand. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Besides, I should tonight appreciate some company and some friendship. And…’ He paused and touched his temples as if to ward off the approach of a headache. ‘Some necessary conversation also.’
* * *
Arthur’s club (this particular one, at least) was entirely as I would have expected: a place of luxurious exclusivity. The food was first rate, the wine excellent and the conversation, though at the outset halting and uncertain, grew increasingly easy. Arthur spoke at some length of his regret that his commitments in the House had kept him from spending a greater deal of time by his wife’s side.
He seemed quite implacable in the matter of his opposition to the Emergency Bill and the role to be played by the Council of Athelstan. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘a piece of absolute chicanery – and dangerous chicanery at that.’
I wished him well with the enterprise, though I admit that the whole business seems to me to be rather academic in nature. We spoke then of other things – of Caroline, of Mina and Quincey, of the poor Dutchman who languishes still upon the precipice of death.
As to the whereabouts of Jack Seward we are both quite baffled. Such behaviour, for all the doctor’s burgeoning eccentricity, is most out of character. Together, we pledged to do everything within our power to find him. As the evening wore on and as our consumption of strong drink increased, we spoke again even that old and terrible name – that of the asylum inmate who, it now transpired, had once been employed by His Majesty’s constabulary.
Arthur sighed. ‘Can’t you feel it?’ he asked.
‘Whatever do you mean?’
‘This sense of something closing in. Like a net. Pulling tight about us.’
I only nodded, not daring, I suppose, to examine the implications of my agreement. Wearily, Lord Godalming tried to rally and to brighten.
‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘I had almost forgotten.’
‘Forgotten what?’
‘The season.’ He raised his chalice, still half full of dark red wine. ‘Merry Christmas, Harker.’
I mirrored the gesture. ‘Merry Christmas,’ said I, more dolefully than I had meant.
And in that place of age and privilege, we touched glasses and tried to toast our future happiness, as all the while we were compassed round by the evils of the past and by a mighty fearfulness as to the coming days.
* I have been unable to find any trace of this correspondence.
FROM THE PRIVATE DIARY OF AMBROSE QUIRE,
Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis
24 December. A mere handful of hours before Christmas, and who do you think is still a-labouring at his desk when half the force is lost to revelry? None other than your own correspondent. Such are the demands of leadership. Such are the wages of command.
My duties now seem more numerous than ever. Something is rising amongst the criminal classes and there is inexplicable vexation amongst the trinity of London gangs.
I have read of a similar phenomenon on the plains of the far-distant Serengeti. Carrion birds fight amongst themselves at the approach of a greater predator. Vultures gather when lions do battle.
Quite why so colourful an analogy should occur to me now, I have not the slightest notion.
More than three dozen reports have reached me in the past fortnight of violent fracas and extended scuffles between rival gang members.
None of those felons whom we have at present in custody are able to shed any particular light on the matter. Dickerson is working hard, I know, for all that he seems to have allowed himself to become distracted by some missing alienist who has no doubt run off with his mistress or houseboy.
As ever, Parlow’s knowledge and expertise are sorely missed. The only villain who seems at all willing to confide in us is young Thom Cawley – that smallest of fish – still in our custody following an incident in the cells. He speaks about that which his more hardened compadres will not, namely that at least something of the skittishness which is sweeping his fraternity has to do with some recurrent dream or nightmare from which (he says) they are all of them suffering.
He sees a shadow. A dark figure approaching. White teeth gleaming in the moonlight.
Of course I thought it the purest melodrama. Yet here – aha! – yes, here is a curious thing indeed. Shortly before penning this entry, hard at work upon a stack of bureaucratic necessities, I suffered a momentary loss of concentration and drifted into something like a doze. There is much that I cannot now recall, but I can remember that as I dreamed, the images which flitted through my mind were the same in every way as those which young Cawley had described.
Coincidence, I am sure. Nothing more!
And yet.
A new year soon. Perhaps then these cobwebs and unhappy thoughts will be driven away. Yes. Surely? Surely they will.
FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNAL OF MAURICE HALLAM
25 December. The flower of jealousy I have never before permitted to bloom within me. The seeds of envy I have rejected and the spore of covetousness has never once taken root in my soul. Naturally, it is Mr Shone who has reshaped these life-long habits, who has fractured the old disciplines and who has within me nurtured ‘the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on’.
Our wanderings have brought us to Paris, where Gabriel has made a new friend.
The fortunate gentleman’s name is Jules Dumont and he possesses even, symmetrical features and a pleasantly muscular physique. He is to Gabriel as is a dray horse to a thoroughbred. Nonetheless, he seems to bring my friend considerable delight. Dumont is a police inspector in the Parisian gendarmerie, a fact which appears to add some perverse additional lustre in the eyes of my companion.
We are staying in an agreeably rackety hotel, within sight of the Notre Dame, a place devoted to discretion, institutional incuriosity and the absolute guarantee to make no enquiry of a personal nature. It was in consequence of these policies that, having woken late this feast-day morn, I sauntered into Mr Shone’s boudoir to discover my associate all but in flagrante delicto with the brawny peeler. Although Dumont covered himself with alacrity, I glimpsed upon his left thigh the raw red mark of a recent incision.
Gabriel laughed. He reached to the cabinet beside the bed and threw me a single gold coin. ‘Merry Christmas, Maurice. Here’s your present. Now be a good fellow, won’t you, and leave us be? Why not go out and find one of your own?’
Monsieur Dumont gave a jackal’s grin and Shone dabbed absently at the healing socket of his left eye.
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I shall.’ I nodded. ‘The compliments of the season to you both.’ And I walked with as much dignity as I could muster from the room.
For a long time I trailed through the streets of the old city, drawn as if by some instinctive magnetism to its seamiest reaches.
Even on a day such as today I had only a trifle more trouble than is usual in locating that oasis from which I meant, a little disconsolately, to drink.
The boy was one and twenty. A firm-bodied loafer who stood at the corner of a cat’s cradle of dreary streets and alleyways, eating an apple with shameless theatricality.
He caught my eye at once and favoured me with a wink of experience. He turned and walked away onto a nearby boulevard, moving in such a fashion as somehow to suggest a beckoning. Pushing away all thoughts of loyalty to Gabriel, I followed. Hearing my footfalls, he glanced backwards and fixed me with an expression of salacious coquetry.
Yet I was destined never to reach him. All at once I felt a terrific surge of agony, deep in my gut. I stumbled, fell and sprawled face first in the filth and dirt of the street. I believe that the inexplicable pain
may even have caused an instant’s unconsciousness.
When the torture ended I looked up and staggered to my feet. My boy had vanished. I breathed in deeply but shakily. It was only then that I realised there was blood about my lips and chin.
It dripped with a horrible insistence. From far away I heard the angry howl of a wild dog.
Trudging home in wretched defeat, I thought that I could not easily recall any more miserable Christmas Day.
MINA HARKER’S JOURNAL
25 December. I cannot recall any more miserable Christmas Day. We have all rallied, we have all done our best, yet there is scarcely any joy still to be found in our home.
Quincey has returned to us from school in a sad and meditative mood. I am quite certain that the oppressive atmosphere of this place will already have affected him. Pensive and cast down, he has yet to speak more than a sentence to Miss Dowell, for all that he still casts stray glances in her direction.
Absences are keenly felt – the Professor who lies shrunken above us, our dear friend Jack whose whereabouts remain unknown, and that sad absence of a different kind for poor Caroline Holmwood.
Melancholia hangs about us like a shroud, though I have tried to make the day as full as is practicable of the jollity of the season. Jonathan sought solace once again in his usual recourse. He drank too much before our luncheon and stuttered as he spoke the grace. I note that, even when half in his cups, he cannot bring himself to set his eyes upon Sarah-Ann.
Later, after the girl was gone, and when Quincey had finally been persuaded to go to bed (for flashes of his old self were at times tonight quite heart-wrenchingly visible), I tried my best to speak to his father.
‘Jonathan…’ I began. ‘There is a certain matter I have, for a while now, been meaning to discuss with you.’
‘Oh?’ There was an undercurrent of belligerence to his voice which I have not often heard in it before. I blame the festive drink (although not, in truth, entirely) for its appearance.
‘It has to do,’ I went on, as though I had not detected at all the altered timbre, ‘with poor Caroline.’
At first, at these words, an odd sort of relief seemed to me to pass across his face. ‘It’s most regrettable to be sure. A great tragedy.’
‘But – what – I mean, dear Jonathan, what if it is more than that?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’
‘Her symptoms… her behaviour… Do they not remind you of anything?’
My husband shook his head. ‘I’m not sure that I quite follow your logic.’
‘You know,’ I murmured. ‘You know of what I speak.’
At this, his voice turned very cold. ‘Poor Caroline has never been well. We’ve always known that. Such behaviour as she has of late exhibited was only ever a matter of time. Some people are broken early in their lives and can never be put back together again. It’s very sad, but there it is.’
‘But what…’ I went on, ‘what if there was some other force, something outside her, pushing her on? Making each fracture worse. Driving her into madness.’
There was a very long silence between us after that. When Jonathan spoke again, his words were quiet yet angry. ‘That is quite impossible.’
‘Who knows,’ I said, ‘what’s possible where…’ I paused, unwilling to say the words aloud.
‘Yes?’
‘Where he is concerned,’ I finished, as firmly as I could.
Jonathan rose with furious vigour to his feet. ‘He is dead,’ he said. ‘He is dead and gone and that is an end to it. All this – your concerns – are so much nerves and imagination.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Listen to me. On the train home, I had a dream. More than a dream. Lucy came to me. With a message…’
With a single gesture of his hand, Jonathan cut me off. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Enough of this nonsense. I will not hear another word of it. You understand me?’
I surrendered. ‘Go to bed,’ I said. ‘Sleep it off. We’ll talk again.’
‘Indeed we will. But not,’ he insisted, ‘of this.’
He turned and strode out of the room. And so in this most unhappy fashion have matters been left between us.
FROM THE ST JAMES’ BUDGET
27 December
STRANGE TRAGEDY IN RUPERT STREET, W1
At noon on Boxing Day police were called to the premises of the Antelope Hotel on Rupert Street, W1, to investigate reports of screams and a violent dispute. The scene that awaited them was a grisly one: a man of middle years dead upon his bed, evidently the victim of a savage assault. His skin was torn and lacerated and his face so badly disfigured that his features were barely recognisable. He had few possessions save for a valise of clothes and a great wooden case, which had been shattered and broken as if from within.
Sub-Divisional Inspector George Dickerson of Scotland Yard spoke to this reporter, stating that the victim has been identified as the prominent naturalist Mr Haskell Lynch.
Lynch had been travelling abroad for some months and was returning home in order to announce the consequences of his most recent research. The inspector theorised that Lynch had with him a specimen capable of unprovoked violence and that it was this animal which had escaped the container and committed the atrocity.
London Zoo has been informed and Mr Dickerson has appealed for persons in possession of any additional facts about the death to come forward at once.
On the question of Lynch’s presence in a district which has in recent weeks been subjected to increasing outbreaks of gang violence, Dickerson would not – for now – be drawn.
FROM THE PRIVATE DIARY OF AMBROSE QUIRE,
Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis
28 December. Until today, in the course of a more than averagely distinguished career, I had come to believe that I had seen pretty much all that there is to be seen. In that surmise I have this very evening been proved – and I am perfectly comfortable in making the admission – entirely wrong in every way.
Crime is no respecter of the season. The past few days must presumably have been as busy as their immediate predecessors, though, oddly enough, I find that I cannot recall them in any detail, discovering in my memory only a certain haziness.
Not that there is time left now for self-justification. Instead, I shall simply state the facts, while I can.
I suppose I must have fallen asleep at my desk, although I can’t think quite how this could have come about. I woke at twilight, perspiring and with a start, as though from another corker of a nightmare. I had been slumped over a cache of papers and I was dressed in clothes which – unpleasant as it seems to admit it – felt to me as though I had worn them for several days, at the least.
My head swam as if in the wake of too generous festive consumption, though I had no recollection of such a debauch. My skin prickled and felt clammy.
For the record, I should state that I was not woken at my desk in this regrettably dishevelled state entirely of my own volition. Rather, I was woken by a noise – by a persistent tapping on my window. Not a thing, you may mark my words, which one ever expects to hear when one’s office is upon the third floor. I wrenched myself from the chair and all but stumbled over to the glass. I peered into darkness and at first I could spy nothing there at all.
Then I saw it – emerging from the dusk – the hideous form of an enormous black bat. It beat its wings with a horrible fury against the pane and I realised that this nocturnal beast was the source of that which had interrupted my slumber. I cannot explain now why I did what I did next, except to say that some new compulsion had started even then to work upon me.
I reached out and opened the window and I allowed the creature, as willing as a house cat, to slip silkily inside. The bat glided to the floor where it seemed to crouch, and looked up at me with a baleful invitation.
I ought also to make clear that in all of this I felt nothing in the least like fear, but only a distance from my experience, as though mesmerism had rendered me quite numb. I
watched the intruder and the bat watched me, and then a thing occurred that remains wholly inexplicable, being both marvellous and awful: the animal seemed to quake and shimmer and, in my very office, to be transformed into the figure of perhaps the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.
She is tall and raven-haired, physically remarkable in every way. For a time, she seemed still to have great wings upon her back, though those swiftly faded. She was entirely naked. She smiled, revealing sharp white teeth.
‘Commissioner,’ she said, her voice a purr inflected by the accent of some faraway kingdom.
I nodded dumbly, then croaked out: ‘Hello.’
‘I have travelled a great distance,’ said the lady, ‘from a land of forests. My exertions have been many and now I hunger.’
‘I see.’
‘And so I ask you: may I feed?’
I did not hesitate. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Take whatever it is that you need.’
She drew closer, the effect of it all so utterly dreamlike that I wondered whether in some fashion I still slept. She moved nearer, then nearer again. The glorious scent of her. She reached out her arm and took me by the shoulder. She leaned so close to me, so tantalisingly close.
‘Who…’ I asked, my breathing ragged, ‘are you?’
‘My name is Ileana. I am being the prophet. I come before one who is greater than me. And I ask, Ambrose Quire – will you serve us?’
No longer having the slightest semblance of self-control, I managed a second, still weaker nod.
And then she was upon me. Her hands were on my form, her face was close to mine and – with a savage joy which I had never before that hour known that I craved – her sharp teeth were cutting at my throat. There was a sweet release and a state of dark bliss. There was a happy suckling. After it was done, her ruby lips still slick with my blood, she took me to the window, her arms about me, supporting me as though I were an invalid.
