Opium and Absinthe: A Novel

by Lydia Kang

  “Are you?”

  “I admit I was surprised. I didn’t know it was such a dedicated hobby.”

  “You never asked.”

  “People who love each other share things, Tillie.” He said the words like an accusation. “I understand you’re to stay here for four weeks. I can have you released early, if you promise to comply with the treatments and show progress.”

  She inhaled deeply, stifling a cough. “I am showing progress, James. Ask Dr. Catsp—Dr. Millspaugh.”

  “Not just with your treatment here. Ada and John spoke to your grandmother. She knows about your going out after hours. Some weeks, they said you were out every single night. Every single night. What were you doing, Tillie?” He looked more hurt than astonished.

  “I was researching the article.”

  “Alone?”

  “With Ian.” At the expression of alarm on James’s face, she put up her hand. “No, it wasn’t like that. Ian works for the newspaper. For the World. He helped me get access to their archives.”

  “Well. Now that it’s out of your system . . .”

  “I thought you encouraged me to have an occupation.”

  “Something to do, Tillie. Like embroidery or church work. Not a job. You don’t really need employment.”

  So that’s what he’d meant? What a disappointment. And of course, James wouldn’t outright say that Tillie didn’t need the money. It was utterly gauche to say the word money out loud. “Is that why you were angry with Lucy? Because she was so preoccupied with helping the children at the asylum?”

  “That was dangerous work, just as what you’ve been doing has been dangerous.”

  Good God, James had a talent for making every argument seem like Lucy and Tillie were in the wrong.

  “Still, it made you angry. It made her angry, too, to be told to stop.”

  James smiled and leaned forward. “I know what you’re trying to do. I won’t admit to hurting your sister in this squabble, because I did not.” He leaned back. “You are remarkably gregarious today. You’re usually so quiet and timid. It’s not like you.”

  He was correct; Tillie wasn’t the same person she’d been when she’d broken her bone, quaking with fear at every situation that thrust her into societal scrutiny. She also knew this: she wanted to write more. And she still did not have a killer to blame for Lucy’s death. She couldn’t accomplish a single thing while she was stuck here.

  She leaned closer. “James. I would love to leave this place and be back home with my family. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  “No more leaving the house to meet with that newsie?”

  “No more,” she lied.

  “No more morphine?”

  “No more,” she lied.

  “No more articles?”

  “I’m finished with them,” she lied again. This was enormously easy. She smiled. “It was helpful for me to get some rest and fresh air to think about everything.”

  “Did you think about our engagement? I’ve yet to hear a bona fide yes.”

  Tillie let a cloud of smoke obscure her face. “I’m not in a good place to consider this right now,” she said. Not a lie.

  “What if I was to get you out of here? So you felt more like yourself.”

  “Can you do that?” She mashed out her cigarette in a crystal ashtray. She had another two hours or so until her next injection. Luckily, Mrs. Ricker came by with her tonic, and she drank that down. It did help her feel better. But it had an odd side effect of making her face feel tense and twitchy and her mouth dry.

  “I can. I have an idea too. But I’ll have to discuss it with your family.” He stood, and Tillie stood too. “It’s too bad they couldn’t have Ada stay with you. Then at least you’d have your maid to look after you. Your hair is a disaster. But they think Ada was too lenient with your wants.”

  “When can you visit again?”

  “Next week. By then, it’ll be ten days you’ve been here. Enough to show you’re dedicated to improving yourself.”

  Ten days! That would be another week at the institute. She would go mad. But she had a thought. She should write down her experience here in Keeley’s. It would be so different from Nellie Bly’s article in the World five years ago. Nellie had taken only one shot and didn’t describe how it really felt. She hadn’t even professed to be a drunkard or a morphinomaniac. Tillie was one. An article from the perspective of someone who truly didn’t want to be here, perhaps looking into whether these tonics and shots were actually helpful or a sham, would be news indeed. Nellie Bly had described the process but couldn’t know if it truly worked. Tillie could write an article with a fresh perspective.

  First, she had to take notes.

  “James? Can you send me paper and ink so I can write you?”

  He smiled. “Of course.”

  Tillie got busy right away. She wrote all sorts of notes, between her doses of medicine and dishes of sand-dry food.

  What was in the shots? The tonics? Why the different colors?

  How would she manage to get doses so she could have their contents tested? Who would test them?

  She wrote to Dr. Biggs at Bellevue to see if he would be able to contact chemists to do this work.

  And she wrote to James and Dorothy and her mother and grandmother. Bland letters that spoke of the good fresh air, plain food, and plenty of sleep that allowed her to think clearly. Which they did. And she wrote to Ian, too, but Mrs. Ricker informed her that she’d confiscated that letter. Apparently she was following strict orders about sanctioned communication.

  Tillie queried the manager, Mr. Brown, one afternoon (he was so inundated with paperwork that when she offered to organize some files, he accepted). The manager was a quiet bald man who was only strong willed when it came to demanding the hundred-dollar four-week down payment from future clients. Otherwise, he was sweet as a lamb. There was much she learned about fees, the volume of patients, whether the medicines made a decent profit from the mail order, and if the recipes for the mail order were the same.

  She was in the middle of writing down her notes in the parlor, when a shadow passed over her pages. She looked up.

  It was Ian.

  “Ian!” She stood up quickly, nearly knocking over the glass of tonic that sat on the table. “What are you doing—how did you find out I was here? They tore up my letter to you!”

  “Oh, I snuck by your house, and Ada told me. Been up here a week, huh?”

  “Yes. But,” she said, looking over her shoulder, “surely Mrs. Ricker will throw you out in a few minutes. She is attending to Mrs. Porter upstairs, who’s having a fit without her morphine.”

  “How are you?” Ian took off his hat and sat in a chair opposite her.

  “I’m well.”

  “Ada told me what happened at Dr. Erikkson’s. You cannot go back there, ever.”

  “But we must go back! What if Tom was the one who attacked Lucy?”

  Ian shook his head. “Somehow I think Lucy wouldn’t have allowed herself to get in that situation. Why did you take so much morphine there?” Tillie ignored his question. After a long silence, he added, “And you know that you reeked of absinthe when they found you. Ada said so.”

  “John gave me absinthe,” she said. “I don’t know why he had it. What happened after he gave it to me? Perhaps I might have been killed if Hazel didn’t know that he’d gone to find me. Perhaps—”

  Ian looked flustered. “You’re ignoring my question. You were out of your mind with that morphine.”

  “Tom gave me too much!” Tillie said, her voice rising.

  “Not just that day. You were taking too much, all these weeks. All the time. God, everyone knew it except your family, since you hid it so well. Ada said you kept it in your perfume bottle. They found the whole lot.”

  Tillie went quiet and cold. She put her pen down, her fingers ink stained from writing so intensely all morning. Her morphine stash was gone. Fine, she could get more. But it felt like an attack. No, it was an
attack. She was here, wasn’t she? She was off her morphine just fine.

  A meek voice inside her spoke: But you thought yourself, the injections probably have morphine. That’s why you’re doing so well.

  Ugh. Tillie waved it all away.

  “I have a new story idea,” she said, ignoring Ian’s last words. “It’s about Keeley’s. I’m gathering information firsthand, as a patient. With a different perspective from Nellie Bly’s.”

  “Not sure what the point of that is. We’re all on strike. Didn’t you hear?”

  For the first time, she noticed that Ian seemed weary. “No. My family told the lady here I wasn’t allowed to read newspapers. What strike?”

  “It started in Long Island City yesterday, but today, we joined in.”

  Tillie thought of how hungry Piper, Sweetie, and Pops had been that night on the roof. “Where are they?” She didn’t have to say who; Ian seemed to know.

  “They’re pestering the other kids who are still selling papers to join the strike. It’s getting violent already. I told them to stop, to stay out of it. Say, there’s going to be a rally at Irving Hall in five days. Maybe you could come?”

  Tillie went quiet. Unless James got her out, she’d be here for a full month. At the thought, her belly twisted and rumbled. When was her next dose again?

  “Are you listening to me?” He looked at the empty glass at her elbow and frowned. “What is that stuff? Are they just giving you opium in your drinks to keep you happy?”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out. But I’m not happy being here.”

  He stared at her. Tillie tossed her head, looking out the window instead of meeting his eyes.

  “You’re going to keep taking morphine after you leave here, aren’t you?” he said.

  “I made some mistakes I won’t make again. But the morphine made me feel better. All the time. I was hardly able to think after Lucy died.”

  He shook his head. “There are other ways to deal with grief. Opiates are for broken bones, not broken hearts.”

  Tillie stood up. She could feel her face burning, and she was so angry everything seemed blurred. “You don’t understand anything.”

  Ian rolled his eyes to the heavens, muttering, “Meshuggener. I understand too much. You need to think with a clear head for once.”

  “You should probably leave.”

  “I will.” He took something out of his shirt pocket and slapped it on the table. A copy of the World. Ian strode to the door and looked back, his face downcast with anger. “It’s your article. It’s good. Really good. But it would have been brilliant if you’d been sober when you wrote it.”

  THE WORLD

  New York, Wednesday, July 12, 1899

  TRUTH REVEALED

  ABOUT

  “VAMPIRE” KILLINGS

  ________

  TILLIE PEMBROKE

  TRACKS DOWN THE FACTS

  ________

  Her Heiress Sister Was Brutally Slain

  but Not Forgotten

  ________

  MURDERER STILL RUNS LOOSE

  ________

  Other Slayings Ignored by Police

  ________

  WHY THE KILLER

  IS NOT “DRACULA”

  My sister, Lucy Pembroke, was mercilessly slain on June 8, 1899. Her death haunts everyone who mourns her, not only because she is sorely missed, but because of the brutal nature of her death. The police have told us there is no suspect being held at the Tombs, and we hear no news about leads on her killer. For those of us who demand justice, it is almost harder to bear than Lucy’s absence.

  We know that she was killed by exsanguination. Her very lifeblood was taken from her, drop by drop, from two puncture wounds to her neck. Anyone who has heard tales of vampires, or read the newest thrilling horror tale “Dracula,” by Bram Stoker, is all too familiar with the similarities.

  Who has seen this killer? No one. He is a shadow. He leaves no traces, except empty bottles of absinthe that bear no relationship to the folktales or Stoker’s vision of the monster. Who has caught this killer? No one. How can one catch that which is inhuman?

  The death of a young woman, from a bite to the neck, is terror unto itself. But what is worse is the truth, THIS truth. Lucy Pembroke, my sister, is not the only victim in this very real story that refuses to exist within the pages of fiction.

  THREE VAMPIRE DEATHS, NOT ONE

  Three deaths have occurred in the span of one month, on the island of Manhattan, that speak to a grisly killer thirsting for victims. And there may be more.

  Lucy Pembroke was the second victim. The first victim was Annetta Green, found one and a half months ago by the Croton Reservoir. She was also found with little blood left in her body and puncture marks at the neck on the left side. Her death was blamed on a fall, but a Bellevue Morgue coroner’s assistant could not explain why a fall would produce such deep punctures so close together, and nowhere else on the body. She, too, smelled of absinthe.

  The third and most recent victim was young Albert Weber, whose death was similar in nature to both Miss Pembroke’s and Miss Green’s. All three bodies were found somewhere in the vicinity of Central Park. All with exactly the same-size puncture holes, and exactly the same distance apart. One thing seems clear—the similarities indicate a single killer, not many.

  THE VAMPIRE VS. THE SCIENTISTS

  Why such painstaking care to kill an innocent, if it is not a vampire?

  One possibility: to make the murder appear to be caused by vampires. The undead are bloodthirsty, drinking only human blood. From lore and from Mr. Stoker, we know that they prefer night goings; they cannot cast a reflection; they can slip through impossibly small cracks in doors; they cannot enter a household without being invited; they can take the shape of the creatures of the night; they can be killed by beheading and by burning. But these are all “facts” as told to us by creators of fiction and by mothers who intended to frighten their children into their best behaviors.

  Speaking on the subject of vampires, we go to the good doctors of this fine island, who were interviewed under anonymity, as good doctors ought not to be consulting on the undead. They are, after all, fairy tales in the professional realm. One doctor noted, “A person who bit and drank human blood might do so to remedy a dietary deficiency. But why prey upon humans? It would be easier to drink the spilled, wasted blood from the beef slaughterhouses.”

  Another famed pathologist noted, “No pathologic specimens have ever been found of humans having such canines or the ability to bite with such precision.”

  I had the good luck to interview a well-known zoologist who noted that any animal who wished to drink blood for food would not bite so neatly and without a ragged tearing of the neck, or at minimum without bite marks from the underjaw.

  Taken together, the good scientists of this modern day cannot see to a sensible conclusion that a vampire could be the killer. Alternatively, we must go to actual vampire hunters in history.

  GALLOPING CONSUMPTION AND INSANITY—ILLNESS, NOT MONSTERS

  Within the archives of the newspapers accessible to myself, I found several instances of vampire “hunts” and cases of family members who wasted away under the fear that an undead family member was awaking from the grave to suck their very essence.

  There is the story of a Portuguese sailor who was said to have killed his captain and drunk his blood. He assaulted no less than twenty-six others, with witnesses aplenty. He paced back and forth like a “tiger in a menagerie” and was committed to life imprisonment in 1867 for insanity. This is not the type of killer who has killed so cleanly in these instances.

  There is the famous case of Mercy Lena Brown, who died of galloping consumption months after her mother and elder sister. When her hapless brother became ill, the townspeople of Exeter, Rhode Island, sought out Mercy’s dead body, convinced she was awaking nightly to feed upon him. Her dead body was not decomposed, but her mother’s and sister’s were. Would that not allude to the u
ndead nature of Mercy?

  The truth is, the cold of winter likely preserved her in death, while Mercy’s mother’s and sister’s bodies had ample time and warmer weather to let nature take its course. The final evidence is thus: after her corpse was burned, and her brother Edwin fed her heart’s ashes, he died as well. This logic defeats the possibility that Mercy was a vampire.

  The true killer in this case? Consumption, which consumes its victims in its own macabre way.

  MANHATTAN’S TRUE KILLER

  Where is he? And more importantly, why are no further investigations being made to bring to justice the cold-blooded murderer of these innocents?

  Blaming their deaths on smoke and shadows is poor detective work, and it is an insult to the scientific discoveries that bloom around us like beacons into the darkness. We must keep searching.

  This terrible killer is no “vampire” of lore and popular novels. Let us leave that theory behind, for it does nothing but hinder us. The true killer is still out there, puncturing necks and bleeding victims, using our terror of fairy tales to prevent us from engaging our most valuable organ—our mind—and our most valuable modern asset—our logic.

  We must speak for those who can no longer—Lucy Pembroke, Annetta Green, and little Albert Weber. Let us give THEM voices from beyond the grave to demand justice!

  CHAPTER 22

  The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me; with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of.

  —Jonathan Harker

  Tillie read it, stunned. It was a good article. A great one. What was Ian complaining about?

  She reread it carefully, sipping her tonic. Dr. Millspaugh arrived later with his greasy hair and his dirty syringe; she pushed up her sleeve and didn’t even stop reading when he slid the needle in her arm.

  The article was good. But the strange thing was she didn’t recognize herself in it. True, she was a novice writer. She had written and rewritten parts of it several times, trying to get it right. But oddly, she couldn’t remember what she’d written. She remembered the gist of it, but the essence of the article—the voice—seemed far away. And now that she read it more closely, there were passages that were a little slipshod, a little heavily drawn. It didn’t quite have the energy of a Nellie Bly article.