Why, there didn’t seem to be any pores in his skin at all. None!
Again, she pushed away her doubts. Perhaps she was coming down with a fever.
“I’m not certain,” she said, touching her brow. “To be honest, I’m feeling rather faint.”
“It’s getting late. You’re tired,” Lord Venport said with a smile. “Here, take my arm.”
His solicitousness seemed entirely genuine, unlike the performance he had given at dinner. She knew suddenly, and without any doubt, that he was a good man—if man he truly was—and that he would never allow her to come to any harm. Not if he could help it.
Comforted by these thoughts, she allowed him to escort her back to the house.
When Lord Venport and his bestial companion finally departed, Nora raced upstairs to her bedroom, hoping for one last look at the handsome marquis. One last secret look!
She peeked through the curtains like a nosy neighbor, heart in her throat, the tiny hairs on the back of her neck standing straight up. She was too late to see the men climb into their carriage, but she did catch a glimpse of one of them peering from the window of the conveyance before it rolled away… and the sight chilled her to the bone.
It was the briefest of flashes. All she saw were his eyes, and a vague impression of movement in the carriage’s black interior. The eyes, she saw, were glowing faintly in the dark, like the eyes of some nocturnal predator. She did not know to whom the eyes belonged, whether it was the beast-like Duke or charming Lord Venport, but the sight gave her a jolt, and she was seized by an irrational certainty that whoever they belonged to was looking straight up at her bedroom window, that he could see her, and that he was taking her measure, even as she spied upon him from the shadows.
For a moment she stood paralyzed, like a bird frozen by the gimlet gaze of an approaching serpent. Then the eyes blinked and turned away and she was released from their hypnotic spell.
She let the curtains fall back into place. Her entire body was trembling, and her flesh was slick with oily fear sweat. She listened as the carriage rolled from the courtyard, waiting until the clatter of the horses’ hooves had diminished in the distance before she hurried to the windows and made certain of the latches.
She retreated then and stood blinking in the darkness, elbows cupped in her palms, gnawing on her bottom lip. She wondered if she hadn’t gone just a little bit mad, and when her maid rapped lightly at the door—come to help her dress for bed—Nora let out a little squeak of fright.
“M’lady?” her maid said, peeking through the door. “Are you well? I heard a cry.”
“I’m not certain,” Nora confessed, turning from the windows. She imagined eyes out there in the darkness, staring at her from some lightless grotto, and goose bumps rippled down her arms. She was glad the curtains were drawn. “I’m rather out of sorts, I think,” she said with an anxious titter. “I’m afraid I’ve overindulged tonight.”
Her maid chuckled as she strode into the room. She was an intelligent little creature, very competent and discreet. “Haven’t we all,” she said. “A good night’s rest and you’ll feel like a new woman.” She went to Nora’s nightstand and lit the lamp. Nora’s possessions materialized from the gloom, as if they had sprung freshly to existence.
“I hope so,” Nora said, and turned so that her maid could help with her dress. “I feel as though I’ve slipped into some inexplicable dream, and I don’t know when it happened or quite how long I’ve been asleep.”
“A good night’s rest,” her maid reassured her. “That’s all you need, love.”
6
She awoke later that night to the stealthy scrape of her bedroom window.
It was a soft sound, little more substantial than the scurrying of a mouse, but she came awake with a start, her senses jangling. She was a light sleeper, had been since the fire that took her family’s lives. She supposed, on some subconscious level, she was waiting for another such catastrophe to befall her again. Always would be. But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? She felt an indefinable, instinctive dread. The rational part of her brain said, Calm yourself, girl, you’re safe in your bed. But the other half, the animal half, was clamoring, Danger! Danger! Danger!
She sat up, drawing a breath to speak. She wasn’t certain what she intended to say, whether she meant to shout for help or address the presence she sensed slinking through the darkness towards her. For she was certain there was someone in her bedroom now. She could smell the air that had wafted in when whoever (or whatever) it was that had stolen into her bedchamber gained entrance through the window. She could see the curtains subtly rippling in the grainy half-light. But before she could call out, there was a sudden shifting of shadows, and then some hulking shape, which had been standing betwixt her bed and the window, hitherto unnoticed, swelled suddenly in her vision and enveloped her in darkness.
A cold hand clamped over her mouth.
She was shoved roughly onto her mattress, wrapped up in her blankets and lifted bodily from her bed.
Too late, she tried to cry out for help, but her cry was muffled against the hideously cold palm pressed firmly over her mouth.
As she was borne rapidly across the room, she attempted to pry the hand from her lower face, but her attacker’s arm was like stone, his strength implacable. She clawed at the man’s flesh, but her nails found no purchase. Tried to bite but her teeth skidded over the strangely unyielding skin of his palm.
She was being abducted!
Helpless, she recalled stories she had read in the paper of late. Tales of the privileged, usually children, kidnapped from their beds at night. Sometimes they were ransomed back to their frantic parents. Far too often the victims simply vanished, never to be heard from again. The criminals, whoever they were, didn’t often take adults, not unless their victims were important or rich. She was neither of those things, so why was this man kidnapping her? And who was he? She tried to make out a face but his features were a swirl of oily shapes in the gloom, like a painting by Henry Fuseli, nightmarish and inhuman.
Curtains billowed. The windows blew open, tinkling glass. The little balcony outside blurred past. Moon and stars canted overhead, and she realized her abductor had leapt from the balcony.
She clutched at the man with a little shriek, memories of the fire flashing through her mind. The smoke. The heat. The sudden stark terror when she awoke. The knob of her bedroom door had seared her palm when she tried to open it, and she had retreated to her window with a sob, clutching the injured hand to her breast. Coughing. Eyes watering. Too terrified to think. She could hear screams coming from somewhere in the house. Her mother? Or one of her sisters? Oh, daddy, where are you? She opened her bedroom window so she could breathe. When she did, the door on the other side of the room burst into flames, blue fire spreading liquid-like across the ceiling. All this flashed through her mind in a sort of psychic shorthand. Leaping from the window. The way the bones in her ankles and wrist had given with a sound like kindling being snapped over one’s knee. Nora squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for her abductor to hit the ground. Waiting for the snap. Waiting for the pain.
The impact, when it came, was curiously gentle. Somehow her abductor had cushioned their fall.
Before she could even begin to question how he had managed this feat, there was an immediate sensation of acceleration. Now they were moving up, springing into the air. The force of their ascent was like a physical weight pressing down on every inch of her body.
The earth recoiled. House and trees, bathed in moonlight, dropped beneath them with dizzying haste.
I am flying! she thought, and her heart leapt inside her breast. For one shining moment, she forgot her fear. She gaped from the tangle of her bedsheets and could see the roofs of all the neighboring houses, their grounds and gardens and various outlying buildings, spread out around her, silvered by moonlight.
Still higher they rose, until the entire neighborhood was a patchwork of streets and lawns and wooded lots.
She had never been so high up in her life, not even in her dreams. It was like standing over a scale model of her aunt and uncle’s neighborhood, every feature reproduced in painstaking detail. For a moment, the stars seemed so close she imagined she might reach out and pluck them from the heavens, like twinkling jewels scattered upon black felt. For a moment, she was weightless, untethered from all that was ordinary, witness of miracles.
And then she turned her head to see what manner of man or beast had delivered her into this numinous realm, this domain where a girl might fly and pick the stars like diamonds from the firmament.
Stark terror shattered the illusion.
It was Duke Crowden, Lord Venport’s notorious host.
Malice had distorted his features into a terrible caricature of humanity. Nostrils flaring. Hair blown wild by the wind. His mouth was a wound in which fangs as long as her pinky finger erupted from bloodless gums. He looked down at her and grinned, and the moonlight turned his eyes to flashing coins. Nora screamed as they fell to earth.
Down, down, down, screaming all the way, and then an instant later, laughing at her terror, the duke sprang once more into the air.
This time it was not so gentle, and the jolt snatched her breath from her lungs. Nora cringed as they brushed through the canopy of a hoary oak tree, the leaves flapping past her face like a shoal of panicked fish. They shot through the tree in a swirl of tattered foliage, landed on the roof of the Pennelegion’s home, and then bound again into the air.
Crowden did not speak as he spirited her away from her aunt and uncle’s home. He did not utter a sound other than that brief, malevolent laugh, which was more a snarl than any outburst of mirth. And neither, for that matter, did Nora. Her tongue, it seemed, was paralyzed by terror. She could not even think coherently, much less bring her frantic thoughts to speech. All she could do was wonder what had become of her dashing Lord Venport. Was he a conspirator in this nightmarish abduction? Or had he met some terrible fate at the hands of the beast who had stolen her from her bed? Perhaps this wasn’t even the duke but some fiend who had stolen his likeness! She had known Duke Crowden since she was a toddler. He was a lecher, yes, and a bit of a bully, but she was fairly certain he could not fly. Perhaps this was a nightmare and she would wake any moment now, warm and safe in her bed.
If only it were true!
But she knew that it was not. The sensations her faculties reported to her brain were much too vivid, too immediate, to be a sleeping fantasy. She could feel the misty night air prickling her cheeks, the wind lashing her hair and hooting in her ears, even the texture and smell of the blankets that were twisted around her body, holding her immobile. And she could smell the creature that had spirited her away. It was a combination of two things: fine cologne… and the liver-like reek of blood.
The smell of blood was very strong.
All at once, it struck her. The Duke was not kidnapping her for ransom. He had stolen her from her bed to kill her. They were flying now to his secret lair, some dank cave perhaps with rusty iron shackles dangling from the walls and human bones strewn haphazardly across the floor, and there he would hold her captive until it came time to devour her, like some monster in a children’s fairy tale.
A terrible fatalism came over her with the realization. She felt that she was shrinking inside her own body, as if her spirit were contracting into a defensive posture. The Duke glanced down at her, eyes glinting with hunger, fangs jutting out over his lips, but he didn’t seem so frightening anymore. She didn’t care who he was, or what he was, or even what he meant to do to her. Such details were irrelevant. Death had come for her, finally, just as she always knew it would. It had been stalking her since the night of the fire, dogging her steps, staying just out of sight. What did it matter how Death was dressed or what face it wore or how it meant to have her? She had known all along, in her heart of hearts. She was never meant to escape that fire Christmas Eve, and she had been living on borrowed time ever since. Like a man who had been shorted his change at the market, Death had come to collect its recompense. It was futile to resist.
At first, she had some idea what direction the creature was carrying her, but with the speed of their flight, the foggy darkness, and her very limited knowledge of London, she soon lost her bearings. She knew only that he seemed to be carrying her a very long way.
At the beginning of the journey, they bound up and down, up and down, as if she had been kidnapped by some crazed kangaroo, but as they passed into a denser part of the city, where the houses were more closely spaced, her abductor kept mostly to the rooftops.
He zigzagged between smoky chimneystacks. Dropped down into alleys and bound across parks. Then it was back up to the rooftops where they raced up and down the steep roof peaks like a swift ship bounding over the waves of a storm-tossed sea.
She caught a glimpse of the Thames, the city lights glittering on the tranquil waters, before her abductor dropped back down into another squalid alley. He dashed around the corner with her, then bound over a high brick wall into a lot of waist-high grass with a narrow, polluted stream wending through the center of it.
Leaping.
Dashing.
Leaping again.
A name rose unbidden to her thoughts: Spring-heeled Jack.
Duke Crowden’s Christian name, if she remembered correctly, was James. Jack was a bastardization of James. Was it coincidence? Or was her abductor really the infamous Spring-heeled Jack, who had terrorized Londoners in the thirties, forties and fifties?
When she was a child, Nora had harbored a morbid interest in fanciful tales. Some might call it the occult. It was an interest she was careful to conceal from her parents, who would have been appalled if they had known of Nora’s fascination with ghosts and grave robbers and things that go bump in the night. Spring-heeled Jack was just one of the many legends that had piqued her curiosity. But so fascinated was she by the mysterious criminal that the details of his crimes sprang full-blown from her memory, even as her abductor whisked her through the grassy backlot.
In October of 1837, after visiting her parents in Battersea, a young woman by the name of Mary Stevens was walking to a house on Lavender Hill, where she worked as a servant. On her way through Clapham Common, a bizarre figure leapt at her from a dark alley. After immobilizing her with his iron-like grip, he began to fervidly kiss her face, all the while tearing at her clothes with his clawed hands, which were, according to her deposition, “cold and clammy as those of a corpse”. Terrified, the servant had screamed, causing the attacker to flee from the scene. Her cries brought several residents to her aid. They immediately launched a search for her attacker, but the young woman’s assailant was never found.
Several more attacks occurred in the years that followed, and though the details varied slightly from incident to incident, they all shared some common elements: that the creature was roughly human in appearance, that he was immensely strong, that he possessed cold white clawed hands, and that his eyes burned like two hot coals. Some claimed that he had a diabolical physiognomy, others that he was the Devil Himself. He was able, by most accounts, to leap to astounding heights. Some eyewitnesses claimed to have seen him jump a nine-foot wall, and even clear over the roof of a house. That extraordinary capability was the basis for the name the papers bestowed on him: Spring-heeled Jack.
Yes, now that she thought about it, it seemed more and more likely that her abductor and Spring-heeled Jack were one and the same. It seemed, in fact, nearly a certainty.
She had been kidnapped by Spring-heeled Jack!
How many women had been accosted by the lascivious scoundrel, the mysterious Spring-heeled Jack? Poor Mary Stevens, and a few other blameless women, had escaped from his clutches, but how many more had suffered a darker fate? Was Duke Crowden truly his identity, or did the fiend have the power to assume another man’s shape?
She did not have long to ponder the questions.
They came at last to a dark and forbidding neighborhood, a dis
trict with no streetlamps and very few lighted windows. A long line of grim brick houses stood sentinel. Most were dark. All were in a state of terrible disrepair, or falling down altogether, roofs sagging, doors gaping open like the mouths of the insane, windows empty black sockets. The only light, save the moon and stars, was the dim yellow glow of the public house down on the corner.
She believed they were near the river, for she could smell mud and rotting timbers and the sickly-sweet smell of death: fish and drowned rats and whatever else had washed up on the bank to decompose in the open air.
In a series of jolting maneuvers, movements so violent she was momentarily dazed, her abductor leapt onto the balcony of a yawning tenement, yanked open the balcony door, and retreated with her into darkness.
And now I die, Nora thought.
But she did not.
7
The darkness blinded her, but she had the impression that he was carrying her down, deep into the bowels of the tenement. Like hapless Persephone, Nora descended into the earth, passing through musty rooms, labyrinthine corridors and creaking stairs. She smelled wet stone and rot, the dank odor of stagnant water and corpse-white mushrooms growing in black soil. It was a lightless, echoing chamber, and she could hear water dripping steadily into a puddle. The Duke threw her down, tore away the blankets that enveloped her, and began to paw rudely at her breasts.
Nora cried out as he ripped the bodice of her nightgown, and then she felt his icy hands at her bosom. He grasped her nipples and twisted them painfully, then caught her scream inside his mouth, devouring her pained outcry.
He turned his face aside, placing his cheek to hers. “I promised Lord Venport I would not do this again,” he whispered in her ear, “but I will not be denied! I must have you!”
So he meant to ravish her! Nora redoubled her efforts to throw him off, but it was like beating her fists upon a brick wall. Duke Crowden wedged his massive body between her knees, pushing the hem of her gown up her thighs. What tiny bit of bravery remained to her evaporated like a drop of water on a hot skillet. She collapsed back in despair, sobbing like a child.
The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed Page 4
