Opium and Absinthe: A Novel

by Lydia Kang

  “Do it,” she said.

  She lay back on the bed, and Tom carefully unbuttoned her sleeve and exposed her upper arm. Tillie looked away. She felt a sharp point rest against her flesh, then the prick and pain. She sighed, her other hand clenching the sheet beneath her.

  “There you go. And now, my turn.”

  Tillie turned over and watched Tom reload the syringe. He undid the tie to his robe, lifted his nightshirt. Tillie looked away, looked back. His stomach was firm and taut, with tiny mottles of bruises here and there. When he was done, he put the syringe back into the box.

  “I’ll clean it later. Mother can’t stand to even look at the kit.” He closed the lid before staggering a slight bit. “Poor thing. She likes to be my nurse and spends all her days in the sickroom with me when Father can’t. And yet the sickroom makes her sick!” He stepped toward the door but staggered again and gripped the bedstead.

  “What’s the matter?” Tillie asked.

  Tom steadied himself on the bed. “Dizzy. Again.”

  “It’s not the morphine?”

  Tom laughed ruefully. “No, of all the problems I have, morphine is the least of them.” Tillie patted the edge of the mattress.

  “Sit down, Tom, before you faint. Sit.”

  Tom sank down gratefully, leaning forward and resting his head in his hands. He took shallow breaths, as if trying to make the sensation pass.

  “Your mother can bring you to your room when she’s able. Rest a bit.” Tillie moved over and covered herself decently with the bed linens. Already, she could feel the opiate spreading in her blood. A calm had begun to wash over her. The gooseflesh was retreating, and the sweating had begun to abate. Soon, her knotted belly would untwist and relax. She sank deeper into the feather bed.

  Tom lay next to her, with one leg draped over the frame of the bed, as if a foot on the floor prevented the situation from being entirely improper.

  Tillie realized she had fallen asleep only when she awoke. Mrs. Erikkson occupied a rocking chair in the corner and was busily crocheting a blanket out of gray wool. When she saw Tillie blink, she smiled.

  “I’m glad you’re better. Your friend will be here momentarily to take you home.”

  “How long have I been asleep?” Tillie asked, her voice creaky.

  “Naught but an hour.”

  Tillie raised her head and saw Tom slumbering next to her beneath a gray blanket. She went crimson with embarrassment.

  Mrs. Erikkson looked apologetic. “I would have moved Tom, but he’s twice my size, and once he’s taken the morphine, I can’t even move his leg. But I’ve been watching you both, and nothing improper occurred—I promise.” She got up from her chair and put aside her woolwork. “Come, I’ll help you get yourself ready to go.” She went to Tillie’s side of the bed and gently helped her to sit. “Drink this. It’s water, with a little sugar and salt, to keep you from swooning. There you go. Now, stand slowly.”

  Tillie did as she was told, and Mrs. Erikkson busied herself with brushing her dress to smooth the wrinkles and carefully tucking wayward wisps of hair back into her knot. She brought Tillie to the rocking chair and sat her down. “I’ll get your things. I’ll give you a supply of morphine for the time being. You shouldn’t have stopped taking it so abruptly. You should wean yourself down, slowly, until you don’t need the injections anymore.”

  Tillie nodded. She would stop, once all this business with Lucy was over. But there was too much fraying of her nerves right now.

  Mrs. Erikkson left the room, and a drowsy voice came from the bed. “Are you better?” Tom rose to lean on his elbows, blinking sleepily.

  “Are you?” Tillie asked.

  Neither answered the question. Perhaps neither wanted to speak the truth.

  “You’re lucky,” Tillie said. “Having your mother be your nursemaid and a doctor at your beck and call.”

  “Mother, yes. She’s an angel in darned wool.” He smiled before he sank back to the bed and closed his eyes. “My father is another beast altogether.”

  “I thought he was very concerned for you.”

  “Oh, he’s concerned. Plying me with this medicine and that one, some new poison from the West Indies and another from France and another from Belgium. And all his odd ways.”

  “What odd ways?” Tillie asked, before she realized she probably should not ask. It was rude.

  He gave her a sheepish look. “He refuses to eat in front of any other person.”

  “He won’t eat in front of anyone? Not even his family?”

  Unbidden, a passage came to her from Dracula.

  “He cannot flourish without this diet; he eat not as others. Even friend Jonathan, who lived with him for weeks, did never see him to eat, never!”

  “No, he doesn’t even eat with us.” Tom fidgeted a bit, as if the details he kept to himself had been waiting for the right person, the right moment, to seep out. He glanced at her in shame, then looked down at his lap. “You know my father never bathes? He believes humans were not made to be soaked in water, because we’re land mammals. He only cleanses his skin by rubbing it with sand or a hard brush.” He dropped his voice. “I once saw him having relations with my mother, and he refused to take his clothing off—”

  “Tom!” Mrs. Erikkson had stepped into the room. Tillie’s face flushed crimson, and so had Mrs. Erikkson’s. But Tom seemed rather delighted at how uncomfortable everyone had suddenly become.

  “Well! It’s time for my bath. Goodbye, Miss Pembroke. I am so glad you are better.” He shuffled out of the room, and Mrs. Erikkson shook her head.

  “You must forgive my son. It is our fault he hasn’t been in the company of proper society. He has quite an imagination—” She waved her hand hastily, but her cheeks were still ruddy. “He ought not say such things, and to such a lady as yourself. My deepest apologies.”

  “Oh. It’s quite all right. He’s not well, and he’s to be given some liberties, surely.” Tillie gently stood from the chair. “I ought to go.”

  Mrs. Erikkson stood aside so she could pass, but Tillie paused.

  “I can’t thank you enough for your care, Mrs. Erikkson.”

  She smiled. “It’s my pleasure. There are women doctors today, you know. If I could have had an education—a real education, beyond the schoolhouse, as a child . . . but”—she sighed—“I chose love, and I chose family.” She clasped her hands together. Her passion seemed to blaze bright for a moment, sparking and snapping in her eyes. “We are on the cusp of a new millennium. Who knows what women will do in the next years? Promise me you’ll think of me, when you decide what you shall do with the time you have before you.”

  Tillie didn’t quite know what to say. Did she have a choice about her future? Did she?

  Mrs. Erikkson handed her a small brown parcel of medicine, repeating the advice that she stop the injections as soon as she could, and Tillie was released into the company of Dorothy and Hazel. Soon, she was home to tell her mother about dresses she had bought but not seen and the silks she had raved over but not touched. She was late, she explained, because Dorothy insisted on seeing two newly opened stores on Sixth Avenue.

  At dinner, there was roasted duck with creamed peas. Her mother commented endlessly over the minutes of the Temperance Society, while her grandmama fed Elenora bits of strawberry from her silver fork. Meanwhile, all Tillie could think about were her notes from the library and Mrs. Erikkson’s words.

  Nellie Bly had found fame exposing the realities of Blackwell’s Island Asylum. She’d traveled the world. But Nellie Bly had never exposed a vampiric murderer who had slain her own flesh and blood.

  The brass ring was seemingly out of reach, but Tillie would capture it.

  No matter what the cost.

  CHAPTER 17

  May I cut off the head of dead Miss Lucy?

  —Van Helsing

  So long as Tillie’s behavior remained appropriate, her mother’s direct gaze upon her became intermittent and unfocused. When her dress
es arrived later in the week, Mama praised her taste. Secretly, Tillie fumed at the candy-bright colors that Dorothy had chosen for her. Iced pink satin? Peach, with green silk trim? She must think that Tillie was a petit four instead of an actual person.

  Tillie had begun reading the papers every day—scouring them for any details of fresh murders, yes, but also studying the articles. There was a rhythm to how they exclaimed out their news and how tidy the opening paragraphs were in condensing the information and drawing the reader to the rest of the story. A flow and ebb that was becoming audible music to her.

  James’s words came back to her—“I think everyone needs an occupation.” Had he meant it?

  That night, Tillie waited for Ada and John to occupy themselves, then crept out the front door. By the end of the hour, she was at Newspaper Row. Ian met her on the front step of the World Building, smiling grandly at her.

  “I have something to show you.”

  “More secrets?” Tillie asked, smirking.

  “I deserved that.” But instead of saying anything more, he took her hand and pulled her along Nassau Street, then turned onto Spruce Street. A churning, chugging sound grew louder and louder as they passed by the few brick buildings, before Ian knocked on a nondescript front door. A man in a dirty white smock opened the door and nodded at them.

  “Just five minutes. Don’t touch anything, and don’t leave a smudge!”

  “Thanks, Peter.”

  Down a hallway and through a door, Tillie and Ian descended to a basement. The churning noise grew louder and louder. They entered a vast room, and Tillie gasped.

  Two enormous engines were situated in the space. The large one seemed to be quiet, but the smaller one had a massive flywheel turning at a rapid pace. Metal shafts thicker than her leg were spinning out of it, and black belts were turning and twisting out of the great machine into the walls and disappearing thence. Not a single smudge lay anywhere on the walls or floors.

  “The big one is one hundred and fifty horsepower; the smaller one is seventy-five, and it’s running one hundred and fifty different presses nearby.”

  “Right now?” Tillie asked, watching the machine. “At all the different houses? The Tribune? And the Sun?”

  “The biggest ones, like the Herald and the World, have their own in the basement.”

  They left, with Ian palming some coins into Peter’s hand, before they went back around the corner toward the World Building. The structure was beautiful—a dome-topped skyscraper with an arched opening that made Tillie shrink in consequence.

  “Pulitzer’s office is in the dome. He likes to look down at the street and the other printing houses.” Ian waved at a guard inside, who opened the front doors to the marble lobby.

  To the right, sectioned off with glass plate panels, a main public office was paved with tile and filled with solid walnut desks. They went into the wood-paneled elevator, and Ian showed her the editorial room upstairs, where the men decided upon which stories would be written and published, and in which edition, the morning or evening. There were speaking tubes and a telegraph office and a dumbwaiter that delivered messages to the pressroom, filled with tiny desks and typewriters. Another floor had a library of newspapers bound into gigantic books.

  “Here you go. I can’t get into any other building yet, so we’ll have to make do with this for now.”

  Tillie touched the leather-bound archives on the shelves around her. “Is there an index?”

  “Not a good one.”

  She looked through one handwritten index, which had yet to be typed into a formal one like the other volumes. Ian, meanwhile, took off his jacket, bunched it into a pillow, and lay down on the bare floor. He shut his eyes immediately.

  “What are you doing?” Tillie asked, hands on her hips.

  “You’re going to research. I’m going to sleep. Until they promise to print my next article, I’m depending on my paper sales to pay my rent.”

  “Oh.” Tillie felt awkward. She didn’t have to worry about her housing or food. Now that Ian was motionless on the floor—apparently, snatching rest where he could was a honed skill—she noticed how his elbow patches had been darned multiple times and how the holes in the toes of his boots had gotten larger. A good rain, and his feet would be soaked and at risk for winter chilblains and summer infections.

  All these days . . . where did he eat? What did he eat? Why did he care so much to write these—

  “Tillie, can you stop staring?” Ian said, eyes still shut. “I can’t sleep with an eyeball trained on me.”

  Tillie spun around and marched deeper into the archives, her face stovepipe-hot from shame. She spent the next three hours refusing to even glance at Ian, while she pulled tome after tome filled with the thin pages of the World. It didn’t take long before she was ensconced in stories of blood and death and the undead themselves.

  There was an article in 1882 about Mercy Lena Brown, a young woman dug up from her grave in Exeter, Rhode Island, in order to prevent her from sucking the lifeblood out of her brother Edwin, who was dying from galloping consumption. She looked well preserved after being dead for months. Her heart and liver were burned and her brother made to eat the ashes.

  “Not . . . tasty,” Tillie murmured to herself as she wrote notes.

  Edwin died soon after, nevertheless.

  In 1854, corpses in Griswold, Connecticut, were apparently rising from the dead to feast on the living. They, too, were exhumed and burned so that their “essence” could be consumed by the living to save them.

  There was another young man, a Portuguese sailor. He had already killed a fellow sailor when he was found sucking the blood of another and sentenced to death by hanging. Clearly, if they had been able to read Dracula, they would have known that hanging was not the most permanent way to kill a vampire.

  Beheading was ideal. Tillie bit her lip and thought of Lucy; she shivered and read on.

  At the end of three hours, Ian awoke to walk her out of the building, and they said their goodbyes.

  But one night would not be enough.

  Tillie escaped from her house five nights that week. Ian even opened up the pressroom on the upper floor, where Tillie learned how to use a typewriter, haltingly at first and with slightly more confidence as the hours went on. After an hour or two of reading papers and scribbling notes, she’d go to one of the Remington typewriters and type her notes in a more orderly fashion. She felt like Mina Harker, type-type-typing away. Mina, helping to save her best friend, Lucy, from the dark and unholy nether life. Tillie, helping to solve the violent murder of her sister, Lucy. Mina Harker and Tillie Pembroke, together, every time her fingers touched those typewriter keys. All for Lucy.

  At the end of the night, Ian took her notes home with him so there was nothing to be accidentally discovered by her mother. Maybe it was stupid to trust him so. But Tillie was so desperate for this article to be written that she was willing to risk it. If he asked her to swim in the East River alongside rats and flotsam for the sake of research, she would.

  Every day, Tillie roused herself from her late-morning sleep and morphine stupor to eat luncheon with her mother and grandmother. All the while, she would secretly practice typing on her lap so she could get more efficient. Her mother would notice her arms moving slightly with her hands beneath the table, in between her salad and soup course.

  “What are you doing, Mathilda?”

  “I have an itch,” Tillie would explain and go back to her exercises.

  C-A-T-C-A-T-C-A-T

  D-O-G-D-O-G

  And of course:

  V-A-M-P-I-R-E-V-A-M-P-I-R-E-V-A-M-P-I-R-E

  B-L-O-O-D-B-L-O-O-D-B-L-O-O-D

  But some other combinations kept creeping into her exercises.

  I-A-N-I-A-N-I-A-N

  T-O-M-T-O-M-T-O-M

  On the fourth night—Ian had managed to get her into the archives of the Tribune and the Herald, for the exorbitant cost of a two-dollar bribe each time—she was finishing up her work
at the Tribune and enjoying the use of a fine Munson typewriter, for a change. Ian yawned and asked if she was done.

  “I am, just about. But I feel terrible that you should sleep on these horribly hard floors.”

  “It’s better than work.”

  She smiled. Ian looked exhausted, and it took her smile away. “How are the paper sales going?”

  “Not well. Pulitzer and Hearst have made us pay ten cents more a bundle for months now. I’m barely making what I need just to buy the papers in the first place.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Tillie exclaimed.

  “It is. We’ve been trying to talk to them, but nothing.”

  “How are Piper? And Sweetie and Pops?”

  “They’re up late, trying to sell every paper since the World won’t buy the unsold ones back anymore. Oh.” He winked at her. “And they’ve been watching your Dr. Erikkson. Never leaves the house. They’ve even watched to see if he leaves from a back door. He’s as afraid of the sun as our Count Dracula.”

  “Really!” Tillie said, astonished. “He doesn’t eat in front of people, too, you know. And he doesn’t bathe using water. There’s something quite wrong with him.” She couldn’t bear to bring up how he had his relations with his wife.

  “I’ll say. He’s an odd duck. I hate eating alone!”

  “Speaking of. Are Piper, Sweetie, and Pops getting enough to eat?”

  “They go to the lodging house, and sometimes the nuns give them a free meal. Old, hard bread and coffee barely fit to drink. They donate the best they can.”

  “I should like to feed you all,” Tillie said and bit her lip. “I promised those scamps I would. Mama doesn’t give me much walking-around money. She says that if I’m to buy clothing to just charge it to our account.” Which also meant when she ran out of morphine in two days, she would not have the money to buy it. She still had Hazel’s tincture, but perhaps Dorothy could buy more, for her. “How about I bring a basket tomorrow? I’ll find a way.”

  “Sounds good. But we can’t have a picnic here. I tell you what. Since you’re so sore about me sleeping on these hard floors, how about we go to my place? It’s a luxurious lookout, let me tell you.”