Opium and Absinthe: A Novel

by Lydia Kang

  She did not want to take the chance that she was going to fall asleep again, so she jumped out of bed. She grabbed her copy of Dracula, reading some of her favorite quotes over and over again.

  “And oh, my dear, if it is to be that I must meet death at any hand, let it be at the hand of him that loves me best.”

  How romantic. To trust someone that deeply, to lay her heart upon them, to charge them with such care.

  Near midnight, Tillie felt more awake than ever. The last injection of morphine was fading, and this one would have to last all the while she was out of the house. She took the walnut case and carefully drew up a dose for herself that was the same amount Dr. Erikkson had given her. Surely she was well rested enough that it would not affect her too strongly. She lifted up her nightshirt and plunged the needle into the flesh of her outer thigh.

  Tillie did her best to dress herself quickly. She wore one of her older dresses, a challis in pink-and-brown paisley, and tied on some soft ankle-high boots. Her blisters had scabbed over. This time, she would not be walking much. She needed her feet to take her only the few blocks to confront Ian.

  By the time she opened the front door, euphoria thrummed through her chest. Everything felt possible right now. Though the opiate begged her to succumb to slumber, she shook her head and stepped into the warm night. It was drizzling ever so slightly. The streets were misted with gray.

  “Miss Pembroke.” John saw her from the corner of the property. He came forward, worry etching his forehead. “I heard what happened. You mustn’t go out again. That fellow has nothing good to offer.”

  “I must. This one last time, at least. Please, promise to say nothing.”

  He sighed. She knew he was torn between keeping the well-paying job and protecting her. After thinking for a minute, he dug into his pocket and removed a slip of paper. He handed it to her.

  “This is the last time I help you. You cannot keep going out, Miss. I’ll lose more than my job.”

  “What’s this?” Tillie unfolded the paper.

  Betty Novak

  Arrested for theft

  Awaiting trial in the Tombs

  “I had trouble finding her. There was an address, but then some people said she disappeared, and it turns out she was arrested. I think they’re questioning her about what was written in the paper.”

  “I guess it did help to get the word out,” Tillie said.

  John shrugged, then tipped his hat. “Don’t stay out all night again.”

  She nodded and headed for the gate. There wasn’t a single splinter of pain in her body, and aside from the desire to lie down and sleep, she felt wonderful. Even better than when she was on the laudanum. She walked across the avenues as quickly as she could.

  A figure stood on the corner of Second Avenue. The sight of Ian doused all of Tillie’s warm sentiments. She had prepared a whole host of accusations and demands for explanation. She would ask slowly, carefully, so she could understand why he had lied to her so many times. He would be contrite, no doubt. But when he greeted her with a smile, her composure evaporated instantaneously.

  “I have a surprise for you,” he said, grinning.

  “So do I,” she said.

  Tillie pulled back her right arm and punched him square in the nose.

  CHAPTER 14

  Alone with the dead! I dare not go out . . .

  —Lucy Westenra

  With a painful crunch, Tillie’s fist connected with Ian’s nose. The swing took her off balance, and she stumbled to the side. Ian immediately covered his face and staggered backward.

  “Ow!” Tillie yelped. “Ah, God, that hurt!” She did a jig, shaking the pain out of her knuckles. Now she had pain on both sides of her body. Wonderful.

  “Why are you saying ow? I’m the one who got hit!” Ian said, still holding his nose. He sounded muffled and congested. When he took his hands away, blood trickled from a nostril.

  “Oh my goodness, you’re bleeding!” Tillie said.

  “And this is surprising? You just hit me!”

  “I’ve never struck anyone before.”

  “First time for everything,” Ian said, gingerly touching the bridge of his nose.

  Tillie rubbed her sore hand and scowled at him. “Aren’t you even going to apologize?”

  “But you hit me!”

  “I’m talking about that article! For lying to me! You never said you were trying to use me to get your name on a byline. I thought you were interested in helping me find my sister’s murderer. I need Lucy’s diary back immediately.”

  “I don’t have it!” he said. “I gave it to the police like we planned, remember?”

  “There was nothing about writing an article! My family is livid!”

  “And so are the police! You know how bad this makes them look?” He held up a hand when she stepped closer. “Just listen to me. I brought the diary to the police. They weren’t interested. They said it wouldn’t change their investigation because they’d already spoken to James Cutter, and the maid wasn’t a person of interest. I figured an article would be the best way to light a fire.”

  “You should have told me!”

  “I tried! I would have written it with you and shared that byline! I sent a message, and it probably got thrown in the fire. Ask your mother. I sent three messages, and I never heard back.”

  Tillie stared at him. She remembered her mother’s words yesterday. “Every message you’ve received from strangers, I’ve burned. How could you, Mathilda?” He was right. There’d been no way to contact her.

  “I did lie, though. There’s an editor at the World who told me he’d let me write for them if I had a good enough story. This was the story. I guess I’d hoped something would come out of it, but I always thought—” He dabbed the blood from his nostril. “I thought we could write it together. I didn’t want to go behind your back. But this was the goal, wasn’t it? To find the killer? Now the police are taking the leads more seriously. You can expect your boyfriend is going to be questioned again, and that maid too. We did good.”

  Tillie deflated. “You did good. But I’m in trouble. They sent me right off to the . . . never mind.” She didn’t want to talk about Dr. Erikkson. The morphine was humming under her skin, and the pain in her knuckles had already softened. This stuff was wonderful. “Anyway, they’re so angry, and I don’t blame them.”

  “Why is anyone angry? I don’t get it. We just found out more information, and the police are asking the right questions. You know, they already have that maid in the Tombs.”

  “I know. I just found out too.” Tillie walked unsteadily over to the edge of the sidewalk and sank down to the curb. Ian sat next to her, still touching his nose.

  “Now I’ll be so ugly—I should bill you for the loss of my looks.”

  “That’ll be a small bill,” Tillie said sourly.

  “Ouch. That hurt more than the punch.”

  Tillie sobered. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe I did that. The most violent thing I ever did was eat an entire plum pudding at Christmas before it got sent out to the table.”

  Ian laughed, but he sobered too. “I never lied and said I wasn’t writing an article,” he said. “I only said I was helping you, and I was.”

  “Oh, Ian,” Tillie said, sighing. “A half truth is still a whole lie.”

  Ian chortled. “A halber emes iz a gantser lign.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s Yiddish for what you just said. You’re speaking the advice of my grandmothers.” He sighed. “You’re right, and my grandmothers were right too. I was lying. But you have to forgive me, Tillie, because it’s all for the right reasons. Let me tell you a story.” He stood and started pacing in front of her, the darkened brownstones a quiet backdrop. In the distance, the Third Avenue train steamed by over its elevated metal legs. “Two years ago, off the pier on East Eleventh Street, some boys found parts of a body floating there. A torso and arms. And then at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Harlem, the legs washed up.
No head. The police investigated, but they couldn’t find the killer. They had no leads.”

  “I remember that story,” Tillie said. “They called him ‘the Scattered Dutchman,’ didn’t they?”

  “Yes. It turns out Ned Brown—a journalist at the World—figured out that his fingers were wrinkled, like a masseuse at the Murray Hill bathhouse. From there, they found that a masseuse named William Guldensuppe had been missing for days, and between Brown at the World and George Arnold at the Journal, Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s journalists battled it out to find the killer in only a few days.” He paused there and crossed his arms.

  Tillie tapped her foot. Her anger still simmered deeply, but she was also curious. She wondered if he knew Nellie Bly and if they’d met. “Well, are you going to tell me who did it?”

  “Guldensuppe had a lover named Augusta Nack. But she had another lover, a barber named Thorn. And Thorn was jealous. He and Nack planned the murder, then hacked up the body and threw it into the East River.”

  Tillie shivered. “So you’re trying to be a regular Ned Brown, are you?”

  Ian nodded. “Don’t you see? The coroners, the police—they’re deluged with murders. People die every day, and the world does not give one whit. It just keeps turning. It’s up to us to find the answers sometimes. If I knew what I did now, I could have thrown that lady in jail, the one who killed my brother. I’d track her down, but all the leads are gone because it’s been ten years. I won’t let that happen again. Don’t you see? This isn’t just about a story people want to read.”

  “What is it about, Ian?” She crossed her arms.

  “It’s about light versus darkness. It’s the primordial battle . . . good and evil, innocence against rotten hearts. Christ and Satan, if that’s your take. That’s why the Dracula angle is everything to this story. We all want to destroy the evil.”

  The clouds had scurried past the moon, and they could see each other like it was twilight. Fairy tales and monsters and dragons. She had a dead sister too. That was no fairy tale. She was suddenly so very tired. “You could have just told me you were on the cusp of writing an article,” Tillie said. It sounded like a whine.

  “I didn’t think it would actually happen, to be honest. I hoped but doubted.” He took a huge breath. “I am so sorry, Tillie.”

  She stayed silent for a long time. Her family was furious with her; that was no surprise, though. But she was glad that the police would do something as a result. Maybe Ian’s story would stop another murder.

  She sighed. “I know you are.”

  “I promise I’ll make it up to you. I’m in this halfway world between being a newsie—which I’ve been since I was six—and being a writer, on staff. My editor wants a follow-up article, soon. The Journal is already trying to get more information on the maid. They’re crawling all over the Tombs right now. That will come out tomorrow. But you and I can get a lead on something else.”

  “James.”

  “Yes, and this whole vampire business. It sells papers, Tillie. But I know something that will sell it even better.”

  He reached out a hand, and Tillie let herself be pulled to her feet. Ian grinned. By God, he was irresistible when he had an idea. “Solving this crime and having your name next to mine on the next byline.”

  They took the Second Avenue elevated instead of the Third. Ian said where they were going was a surprise, but given that Tillie hadn’t said no to anything yet, she followed.

  “You’ll have to organize your notes and start writing. You need a typewriter—you have one, right? One of those portable index ones?”

  Tillie shook her head, but her pulse thrummed. Mina Harker had one like that. She could be like Mina, writing down her notes all the time, organizing her thoughts. She loved the idea. Mina had a Traveller typewriter. Maybe she could get one too.

  “Do you read the paper every day?” he asked.

  “Lately, yes, if only to remind me what day it is,” she said, laughing lightly. Her opium habit did make her forget the days, but she wouldn’t say that out loud to Ian. She only scanned the articles, though. She read her dictionary, and she’d gone to the Lenox Library. She’d thought she knew so much. Suddenly her world had spasmed and shrunk. She knew nothing.

  “I’m not a journalist,” she said.

  “I don’t know about that. You’re always carrying around that little notebook.” He touched her arm, and sure enough, the little cardboard-covered notebook dented her shirtsleeve. “You’re always asking questions, and you know the most obscure things, like you’ve been searching for answers your whole life. Surely you write in other ways?”

  “Lately I’ve been writing letters to Nellie Bly,” she said, glad that the dim light concealed her blushes.

  “Really? Does she write back?”

  “Well, no. But maybe Mama has been burning those too. Can I ask if she’ll send her responses to you?”

  “Of course! What do you write to her about?”

  Tillie blushed again and said nothing. It seemed like nonsense in her head.

  Ian nodded. “I guess that’s between you and Nellie, then.”

  “But writing letters is not the same as writing newspaper articles. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Not all writers were always writers. Everyone starts somewhere. But you have the nose for finding out information and thinking it through. I think you’ve been preparing for this your whole life and never knew it.”

  Tillie thought about this for a long time. When the train arrived at Thirty-Fourth Street, she descended the stairs numbly next to Ian. After feeling groggy from the rumbling sway of the train on the tracks, she roused herself, looking about with curiosity.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see. I don’t want to tell you, or else you might not want to come.”

  Tillie was intrigued enough to continue walking. But there was one question she couldn’t resist any longer.

  “Do you . . . know Nellie Bly?”

  “Of course. I mean, I’ve read her. Never met her, though. She hasn’t been writing as much since she got hitched to that rich fellow.”

  “Oh.” She tried to hide her disappointment. They walked down First Avenue, and soon, Bellevue Hospital lay before them, with its redbrick buildings and sloping slate tile roofs. A wall enclosed the hospital compound, with an arched gateway on Twenty-Seventh Street. Inside the walls, the hospital’s iron balconies were filled with sleeping patients hoping the fresh air would rid them of the consumption that plagued them.

  They walked along the compound’s wall toward the East River. Tillie could smell the stench of the pier, a mix of garbage and rotting pier stumps and humidity of the river, with the faint scent of the ocean where the briny soup of Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean stirred alongside Manhattan.

  A lone grayish-white building, simple and stark, sat apart from the hospital compound, surrounded by its own brick wall and fence—as if banished from being allowed too close to the sick or the living. THE MORGUE was etched in gilt letters above the front door.

  “What are we doing here?” Tillie asked, recoiling.

  “This is where we’ll find out if there have been more victims of vampires, or if the bites even match each other, or if they look made by a . . . well, not a vampire. Nobody has looser tongues than the morgue attendants. They’re here all night long.”

  “No.” Tillie stepped back, tripping on the edge of the sidewalk. This was far different than when she had been at the cemetery or on Sundays, where the dead lay just outside the stained glass windows of Trinity Church. She didn’t feel awful knowing that Alexander Hamilton and his wife, Elizabeth, lay only feet away. Here, the dead were not yet buried. They were not at peace. They had been pulled from life, in some cases violently so, and were still lost and unclaimed by their loves—if they had any. “No. I want to go home.”

  Ian turned to her in surprise. “I thought you wanted this,” he said.

  “To go to a deadhouse? No.
”

  “I meant, I thought you wanted to learn the truth.”

  “I do, but . . .” She waved her hand at the white building before her.

  Ian’s face went from perplexed to awash with understanding. “Oh. You’re afraid. They can’t hurt you.”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s just . . .” She cleared her throat. “They have no voice. Lucy doesn’t either. And you’re asking me. To be her voice, even as far as writing it in a newspaper. What if I make a complete catastrophe of it all? I’m not Lucy. I’ll never be as good as her, and I’ll never really know her heart or her voice.”

  “You don’t have to be her,” Ian said. He extended her a hand. “You just have to be you. That’s hard enough, don’t you think? What is Tillie Pembroke capable of?”

  Tillie bit her lip. She looked up at the facade. There was a single lopsided window separated from three others, as if the builder had forgotten to place it in the row. It seemed to challenge her. What are you waiting for? I’ll still be here when you are gone forever. But if you’re willing to open the door and be swallowed whole, I’ll tell you all my secrets.

  Tillie knew what she was capable of. Asking questions and seeking answers. It was all her passions always led to. Why does the cricket make such noises at night? Why do people never shed their skin like cicadas do? Why can’t we live forever? Why are we afraid?

  She reached her hand out and let Ian slip his beneath hers. “All right. But I’m still furious at you, you know.”

  “I know,” Ian said.

  “I’m ready. Let’s find some answers.”

  The gate to the property had been left unlocked. Ian pushed it open, but the front door to the building itself was locked. He walked around the building and past a side area that was supplied with coffins ready to be filled. Tillie wanted to shiver, but she did not. This was the geography of the dead. And she must tread here for a while, with respect and without fear.

  A door there was locked, so he went back to the front door and knocked. After several minutes, a young man opened it. He looked hardly older than Tillie herself. He wore a dirty smock, and his boots were filthy from . . . Tillie didn’t want to guess. Three of his front teeth were missing, and his hair was bright orange. It reminded her of Ada’s hair, but even brighter. In the dim light, he seemed afire.