Supping With Panthers

by Tom Holland

  ‘Get out your revolver!’ he screamed in my ear.

  I must have frowned, for he reached into my pocket and took it from me; he looked around as he returned it, then he gestured with his arm. I too looked down; I was staring at the side of the crypt; I now saw for the first time how the entrance way had been smashed into pieces, so that an oblong of darkness was waiting, jagged like bared teeth, grinning at us.

  Above the shrieking of the wind, I heard a sudden giggle. ‘Who goes first?’ asked the Professor from behind my shoulder; he giggled again. I glanced round at him and smiled grimly; then I crawled in through the gap.

  The darkness, after that of the storm, seemed unbearably still. I reached in my pocket for a box of matches, struck a flame, then cupped it in my hands, at the same time struggling to keep hold of my gun. But when I looked around, I could see no trace of anyone else in the crypt; there were tombs in a melancholy line along the edge of the wall, but none of them seemed disturbed, nor could I make out any hint of fold play. Eliot and the Professor had both joined me by now; they too stared around the crypt, and I could see the disappointment on Eliot’s face mingled with relief. Then suddenly he started. ‘What’s that?’ he asked. He stepped forward, then knelt down by one of die tombs. There was an envelope, I saw now, propped against its side. With feverish haste Eliot picked it up; he ripped it open; he removed a single sheet of paper, read it, then closed his eyes.

  ‘I had dreaded this,’ he said in a distant voice.

  ‘Why, what in God’s name is it?’ I asked.

  He turned round slowly. Never had I seen etched upon a human face a look of such ghastly agony. ‘See the date,’ he said, pointing. The fourth of August,’ His shoulders slumped. ‘That was when she came here. I remember her at the time telling me she had to visit Whitby on business. And now we know what that business was.’

  ‘But the guards,’ I protested, ‘the guards at King’s Cross. They saw her on the train last night! Her and Lucy’s child.’

  At the mention of Arthur, Eliot seemed to flinch. ‘She – they – may have embarked on the York-bound train,’ he said slowly, ‘but they never arrived in York. No,’ he went on, scanning the note once again, Our quarry would have been off at the first stop and back to London – leaving us to head on and find nothing but this long-prepared taunt. See how confident she was that we would swallow her bait.’ He brandished the note despairingly. ‘Why, she has even signed it!’

  ‘Let me see,’ I said. Eliot shrugged and turned away as he handed me the note. ‘A good try, Jack,’ I read out loud, ‘but not quite good enough. You are too late. Rosamund, Lady Mowberley, nee C.W.’ I looked up. ‘What does C.W. mean?’

  Eliot glanced round at me. ‘Why, it can only be the true initials of the woman we have been pursuing. She has no need to hide her identity now. Our pursuit was in vain.’

  ‘Not altogether,’ said the Professor, who had been silent until now. He reached for the pick.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I cried, seeing that he intended to force open the tomb.

  The Professor glanced up at me. ‘There is still some good we can do in this place.’

  ‘It is Mrs Harcourt’s tomb?’ Eliot asked.

  The Professor strained with the pick; then he gestured at a name on the coffin lead and nodded. ‘Here,’ said Eliot, ‘let me help. Stoker, please. You are stronger than any of us.’

  ‘I will not be a party to this desecration.’

  The Professor looked up at me. ‘Mr Stoker, it is not desecration we are about but an act of the profoundest mercy. Help us, and I will explain everything. But I could not tell you before – you would not have believed me – not until you had seen the full horror for yourself,’ He handed me the pick. ‘Please, Mr Stoker. Trust me. Please.’

  I hesitated, then took the pick; with ad the strength I had, I began to lever up the tomb’s stone lid. The weight was prodigious; but at last I felt it start to give, and, with a groan of effort, shifted it across. A stench of rottenness and death rose up from the blackness I had exposed; I bent down to inspect it closer; and as I did so the match that Eliot had been cupping in his hand flickered and went out. I heard him scrabbling with the match-box as he hurried to light a second one; and then I froze, for there was suddenly a second sound in that crypt – a clicking – and it was rising from the tomb I had just opened up. We none of us made a sound; there was another dick, amplified by the silence; and then a spurt, as Eliot lit the match.

  Cupping it in his hands again, he held it over the open tomb. I stared; and as I did so my heart grew cold as ice. There was a skeleton there, not yet wholly decomposed, lying amongst the mouldy rags of her shroud, her eyeless sockets staring up at us blindly. But the corpse of Mrs Harcourt – for such I judged it to be – was not alone, for there was a second body lying alongside hers – not a skeleton, but withered and incalculably lined, and her eyes were open and gleaming bright She was alive! The creature – I say creature, for she bore no resemblance to the girl she must once have been – the creature was alive! Her mouth, as she stared at us, was open wide, her teeth as sharp as an animal’s fangs, and when she closed them, I recognised the clicking we had heard before, and knew instinctively that she was hungry for blood. How I knew, I am still not absolutely certain: the cruelty in her eyes, perhaps, or the dryness of her skin which wrapped her bones like centuries-old parchment – but whatever the reason, I knew – yes, I knew – with horror and the utmost certainty – what it was we had found … what nature of thing.

  I turned to the Professor. ‘It is Rosamund Harcourt?’ I asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘She is a…?’ I could not pronounce the word.

  ‘Vampire?’ The syllables echoed from the cold stone walls. The Professor repeated the word; then he nodded to himself. ‘Yes. Two years she must have lain here, since that night before her wedding. You remember, Mr Stoker, what the Harcourts’ old housekeeper said about the disturbance at the crypt? That must have been when Rosamund was brought here, her place to be taken by the fiend we still pursue. A cruel fate,’ he whispered, ‘doubly cruel. Incarcerated with the body of her mother, dreaming of blood, withering slowly into the creature you see before you now. Too weak to rise up, too weak even to stir,’ Again there was the clicking from the vampire’s hungry jaws. The Professor gazed at her almost with tenderness as he reached for the pick. ‘This is not death we give her – she has that already – but release. Release again into the flow of life.’ He placed the point of the tool over the creature’s heart. His hands never trembled, nor even quivered. He raised the pick; then he swung it down with all his might.

  The Thing in the coffin began to twitch, and a hideous blood-curdling screech came from the lipless mouth. The body shook and twisted in wild contortions; the white teeth champed together till the gums were torn, and the mouth was smeared with an oozing black foam. The Professor raised the pick and swung it down again; a thin spume of black slime rose from the wound and trickled over the creature’s withered flesh. The Professor reached for the spade; his face was set as he raised it, then brought it down hard so that the creature’s neck bone was snapped and its head quite severed by the single blow. The body bucked and writhed; then at last it lay still. The terrible Thing was dead at last. Our grisly business in that place of death was done.

  But not in the broader world. I need not describe our urgency as we left the churchyard and hurried through the town. Cruel was our wait at the station; not until seven were we bound at last for York, and once arrived there we had a further hour’s wait for the London train. Eliot used the time advantageously to wire a telegram to Westcote; but no reply was sent back to us, although Eliot had expressly asked for one, and so our dread of the mysterious C.W. and our fears for Lucy and her missing child grew ever more profound. I remembered Eliot’s doubts, his reluctance to leave for Whitby; and as I did so I felt an especial guilt, for it was I who had persuaded him to accompany us. For I could see now ad too clearly what he had most feared
, how C.W.’s flight had been nothing but a ruse designed to draw us away from London, so that our hellish adversary – returned long ahead of us to the capital – might practise God knew what terrible designs. I doubted we would see little Arthur Ruthven again, for C.W. would now have had a day to dispose of him, and cover her tracks; any leads we might find would now be long cold. And as for Lucy – dearest Lucy! – I dreaded to think what might be threatening her…

  The journey back to London appeared to last for ever. We dozed fitfully, and when we could not manage to sleep die Professor would tell me of the nature of our adversary, the vampire, that terrible creature of superstition and myth, risen to haunt us from the mists of time, stalking even through London, even through our scientific, sceptical age, our matter-of-fact nineteenth century. I still found it almost impossible to believe; and yet I could not doubt the reality of what I had seen that previous night. ‘For it is certain,’ the Professor said, ‘that the vampire has been known everywhere that men have ever been. Why should he not still be abroad? What makes you think our own age so privileged?’ Eliot listened, and nodded; but he said nothing himself. He was brooding, I knew, on what he counted as his mistake; the taunt of C.W. had seared deep into his heart.

  We pulled into King’s Cross at last, just before five o’clock. Within a quarter of an hour we were knocking on the door in Myddleton Street. Westcote himself answered it; his face was nervous and drawn. ‘Your telegram,’ he said, ‘I returned here too late to answer it. Is everything ad right?’

  ‘That is what you can tell us,’ replied Eliot. ‘Lucy…’

  ‘Is well. She is being tended by my sister even now.’

  ‘Your sister?’ exclaimed Eliot.

  ‘Yes.’ For the first time in a long while, I saw Westcote smile. ‘That is where I was this morning when your telegram arrived – meeting my sister at Waterloo. She arrived in England last night, and in London at nine today. Dear girl, she has been with Lucy almost ad afternoon. They are already as fond of each other as if they had been friends for years. My sister has herself been through terrible suffering, of course. But just like Lucy, Charlotte was always strong.’

  ‘Charlotte.’ Eliot suddenly staggered.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ said Westcote, ‘are you feeling all right?’

  Eliot stared at him, and his expression was a ghastly one. ‘Your sister,’ he said softly, ‘Charlotte – she wrote you a letter, no doubt, a note telling you she would be arriving at Waterloo?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Westcote, looking puzzled now. He felt in his pocket and drew out an envelope. Eliot snatched it from his hand. A single glance at the handwriting satisfied him. ‘C.W.,’ he whispered; then he turned and sped from the room. The Professor had understood too; he followed Eliot up the stairs at once. It took me a second, though; and then I too understood. ‘C.W.!’ I exclaimed. ‘Charlotte Westcote!’

  ‘What is it?’ Westcote asked desperately. ‘What on earth is going on?’

  I took him by the arm and we ran as fast as we could up the stairs. By the entrance to Lucy’s bedroom, I saw Eliot checking his revolver; then he slid open the door and passed inside. One by one, we all followed him.

  For what seemed an eternity, we stood frozen by the scene we saw displayed for us there. Words cannot describe the horror of it, nor the sense of disgust that rose up in my breast. Lying on the bed was the naked figure of Lucy; she was moaning softly, and writhing on her sheets. Her breasts were smeared with blood; her belly and hips as wed. Bending over her, her knees between Lucy’s thighs, was a young woman; her lips were pressed close to one of Lucy’s breasts while with her free hand, she … no … I blush even to remember it. Had I not seen the vileness of her practices with my own eyes, I would have deemed them impossible, nor shad I pollute this narrative by describing them now. For several seconds, as we ad stood there, this woman continued as we had discovered her – pressing herself close against Lucy’s naked flesh and drinking from her bloodied bosom; then, with a slow deliberateness which seemed almost mocking, she raised her head and turned to look at us. There was a gloating voluptuousness about her expression which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched back her neck she licked her lips with an almost sensual delight. She paused; then she smiled, and I saw the trace of Lucy’s blood on her sharp white teeth.

  ‘Hello, Jack,’ she said. She swept back her hair, then rose to her feet. ‘How was Whitby? Not too boring, I hope?’

  ‘My God!’ exclaimed Westcote, finding his tongue at last ‘Charlotte! What is this?’

  She smiled again, and glanced down mockingly at Lucy as she continued to writhe on the bed. ‘I congratulate you on your wife, Ned. I could never understand what you saw in her, the rude little trollop, but now I’ve had her I can almost understand. Who knows? I might even keep her for myself.’

  Westcote suddenly screamed something, an unintelligible cry of horror and rage. He wrestled the gun from Eliot’s hands and, aiming it at his sister, fired at once. The bullet hit her in the shoulder; as the blood flew up from the wound, I imagined that she laughed; and then she was fading before our very eyes, turning into a vapour which rose up on the blood and spilled out through the window, vanishing into the night so that nothing of her was left behind. The Professor hurried across to the window, while Eliot and Westcote ran to Lucy’s side. She touched her breast, then raised her gore-stained fingers to her eyes; at the sight she gave a scream so wild and so despairing that it seems to me now that it will ring in my ears till my dying day. Westcote tried to hold her; but she would not allow it, writhing instead as though terrified of him, gazing out at the window and moaning ad the time. Her face was ghastly, with a pallor which was accentuated by the blood which smeared her lips, and cheeks, and chin; ad across her body more blood was smeared, or trickled from her wounds in a ruby flow.

  ‘Did I shoot her dead?’ screamed Westcote, still struggling to hold down his wife. ‘For God’s sake, Professor, is my sister dead?’

  The Professor locked the window; then he slowly shook his head.

  ‘I will hunt her down!’ Westcote cried. ‘My God, I shad see her pay for this if it is the last thing I do.’

  Again the Professor said nothing; but he glanced at Eliot, and I saw the perturbation and horror in his eyes. I wondered if he knew how the vampire might be killed. I wondered if he thought we had any hope at ad.

  Later that evening, once Lucy had been tended to and sedated, we met for a conference in the drawing room. Eliot described to Westcote our pursuit of the woman we had known as Lady Mowberley; then, in response to the poor man’s disbelieving questions, the Professor explained the nature of vampirism and its prevalence in a land of which I had already heard much, die kingdom of Kalikshutra where his sister had been lost ‘Lost in every way,’ muttered Westcote. ‘Lost in hell.’ He glanced at the Professor. ‘Is there any hope for her, do you think?’

  The Professor reached for Westcote’s hand. The gesture spoke louder than any words.

  ‘The letters, then,’ asked Westcote, ‘the ones I received from my father’s subaltern – fakes, you think? All of them – fakes?’

  The Professor nodded, still wordlessly.

  Westcote buried his head in his hands. ‘So there was never any need for her to have been found in India – for she had been in England ad the while. What an idiot I have been!’ he cried. ‘What a dupe! But how could I have known?’ He lifted his head and stared round at us imploringly. ‘How could I ever have guessed it? – that my sister was… that she had become…’

  ‘A vampire?’ It was Eliot who had spoken. ‘Yes, that is the word you must use. It is difficult, I know, even to utter it, still less to contemplate the full horror of its meaning. You must, though. For they thrive on their victims’ scepticism, as I know to my own cost ad too well.’

  Poor Westcote ran his fingers through his hair. ‘But why? What has been her purpose? Why this adoption of the role of Lady Mowberley?’

  ‘She has been acting as anoth
er’s agent, I believe.’

  ‘Another’s?’

  Eliot nodded. ‘The solution is regrettably self-evident Your sister was lost in Kalikshutra, where she was presumed to be dead; but in fact, as we now know, she had come to England to serve the purpose of those who had made her what she was – a vampire – a creature of their will. And it was as such a creature, no doubt, that she travelled to Whitby, where she destroyed and took the place of Sir George’s bride-to-be.’

  ‘But why such interest in Sir George?’ asked Westcote in disbelief. ‘Why go to these remarkable lengths?’

  ‘Because Sir George, at the time, had just entered the India Office, with responsibility for the Indian frontier – on which, as you will remember, Kalikshutra lies. Do not forget also the peculiar circumstances of Sir George’s engagement: he had not seen his wife-to-be for almost seven years and it was this, I am certain, which sealed both their dooms, for it ensured that an imposter would be able to pass unrecognised. Clearly, your sister had been seized and bent to the will of someone who had needed just such an imposter, as part of her scheme to protect Kalikshutra from possible annexation. She had wanted an agent in the Minister’s very bed.’

  ‘She?’ exclaimed Westcote. ‘But who is this “she”?’

  Eliot made no reply; instead, he rose and stared out into the darkness of the street.

  ‘Answer me, Eliot! Who is this person? Damn it!’ he exclaimed in sudden fury. ‘This “she” may have Arthur, my child!’

  Eliot turned to face him again. ‘No,’ he said slowly.

  ‘What do you mean, no?’

  ‘Lady Mowberley … Charlotte … it is she who has your child. Forget this other person. She is beyond our reach. It is your sister we must hunt down.’

  ‘But how can you be so certain that she is the one who has Arthur?’

  ‘Because Charlotte has an interest in your son which is hers alone.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Eliot approached Westcote; he touched him on his shoulder. ‘When Lucy married you,’ he continued gently, ‘she presented Charlotte with an unexpected problem. Clearly, your sister could not allow herself to be seen by you – that would have exposed her identity utterly. Hence the refusal even to meet with you once. But Lucy’s marriage also presented her with a source of unexpected pleasure. You will recall, perhaps, how eager she grew to see Lucy once your child had been born?’