Supping With Panthers

by Tom Holland

  Letter, Professor Huree Jyoti Navalkar to Mr Bram Stoker.

  16, Bloomsbury Square.

  20 September 1888.

  Dear Mr Stoker,

  I must thank you most gratefully for the loan of your narrative. I believe it to be accurate in all the essentials. If you wish to pursue vampirology further, perhaps I could recommend a book of my own, The Vampire Myths of India and Roumania: A Comparative Study. Although I say it myself, it is excellent. However, beware! – although the nature of the vampire is unchanging, different cultural understandings of this nature can be exceedingly varied. As a Britisher, you will be more familiar with the Roumanian as opposed to the Indian breed. May I suggest in particular the chapters on Transylvania? Jody interesting.

  I have also been remembering our conversation, where you discussed with me your intention of adapting your narrative into a novel or a play. It was very kind of you, I must say, to consider me as a model for the hero of such a work. Please, though, Mr Stoker, I must insist that you abandon that particular idea; if you can make of me the hero of a romance, then I am a Dutchman. Invent, Mr Stoker – always invent. Otherwise, no one will believe you at ad.

  I will, of course, inform you at once if I hear any news. My hopes for our dear friend, though, are fading by the day.

  Guard yourself, Mr Stoker,

  Your colleague,

  HUREE JYOTI NAVALKAR.

  Reminiscence composed by Detective Inspector ‘Steve’

  White, relating to the events of 30 September 1888.

  For five nights we had been watching a certain alley just behind die Whitechapel Road. It could only be entered from where we had two men posted in hiding, and persons entering the alley were under observation by the two men. It was a bitter cold night when I arrived at the scene to take the report of the two men in hiding. I was turning away when I saw a man coming out of the alley. He was walking quickly but noiselessly. I stood aside to let the man pass, and as he came under the wall lamp I got a good look at him.

  He was about five feet ten inches in height, and was dressed rather shabbily, though it was obvious that the material of his clothes was good. His face was long and thin, nostrils rather delicate, and his hair was jet-black. His complexion was inclined to be sallow, as though he had been for some time in the tropics. The most striking thing about him, however, was the extraordinary brilliance of his eyes. They looked like two very luminous glow-worms coming through the darkness. The man was slightly bent at the shoulders, though he was obviously quite young – about thirty-three, at the most – and gave one the idea of having been a student or professional man. His hands were snow-white, and the fingers long and tapering.

  As the man passed me at the lamp I had an uneasy feeling that there was something more than usually sinister about him, and I was strongly moved to find some pretext for detaining him; but the more I thought it over, the more was I forced to the conclusion that it was not in keeping with British police methods that I should do so. My only excuse for interfering with the passage of this man would have been his association with the man we were looking for, and I had no real grounds for connecting him with the murder. It is true I had a sort of intuition that die man was not quite right. Still, if one acted on intuition in the police force, there would be more frequent outcries about interference with the liberty of subject, and at that time the police were criticised enough to make it undesirable to take risks.

  The man stumbled a few feet away from me, and I made that an excuse for engaging him in conversation. He turned sharply at the sound of my voice and scowled at me in surly fashion, but he said ‘Good-night’ and agreed with me that it was cold.

  His voice was a surprise to me. It was soft and musical, with just a tinge of melancholy in it, and it was the voice of a man of culture – a voice altogether out of keeping with the squalid surroundings of the East End.

  As he turned away, one of the police officers came out of the house he had been in, and walked a few paces into the darkness of the alley. ‘Hello! what is this?’ he cried, and then he called in startled tones to me to come along.

  In the East End we are used to shocking sights, but the sight I saw made the blood in my veins turn to ice. At the end of the cul-de-sac, huddled against the wall, there was the body of a woman, and a pool of blood was streaming along the gutter from her body. It was clearly another of those terrible murders. I remembered the man I had seen, and I started after him as fast as I could run, but he was lost to sight in the dark labyrinth of the East End mean streets.

  Telegram, Professor Huree Jyoti Navalkar to Mr Bram Stoker.

  8 November.

  Join me at once, ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’, Highgate Hill. Urgent. Extraordinary developments. Will tell ad when I see you.

  HUREE

  PART THREE

  Letter, Professor Huree Jyoti Navalkar to Mr Bram Stoker.

  Mahadevi,

  Clive Street,

  Calcutta.

  31 October 1897

  My dear Stoker,

  It was good to hear from you after so many years. My thanks for die copy of Dracula, which I read last night. It is nonsense, of course – but entertaining nonsense. I predict that it will survive. The market for such stuff seems as enduring as your vampire Count himself.

  It is because of this intuition – that Dracula will still be read in fifty, maybe even a hundred years – that I am sending you die enclosed bundle of manuscripts, and a book just published, With Rifles in the Raj. Read together, I trust they will provide an adequate record of those terrible events of almost a decade ago. It had always been my intention to preserve the papers, so that they might serve as a warning to those menaced by a similar threat; yet the very existence of such a record must inevitably endanger those who keep it, and I have been much troubled by the need to advertise what must at the same time be kept secret.

  The publication of your novel, however, presents us with a possible solution: for while Dracula is clearly tinged throughout with melodrama and fantasy, yet for ad that it is not so distant from the truth. It is my hope that those we aim to reach – those poor unfortunates menaced by the Living Dead – will recognise in your novel an echo of the dangers which they are facing themselves, and will consult your papers to discover what you know. Therefore – do this: deposit the enclosed collection of manuscripts with your lawyers; keep the collection’s existence concealed; but leave instructions that those who claim to be menaced by creatures such as your Count, and seem truthful, are to be shown the papers. Such an arrangement is hardly perfect, I know; but I can think of no alternative. It is vital that the papers themselves should survive.

  I have thought it best to leave their ordering to you. Quite apart from your novelist’s eye, you experienced some of the events described and should be familiar with the narrative. An episode which will surprise you, however, is detailed in a letter I received a couple of years ago. It provides a solution to many of the mysteries which puzzled us at the time and remained unanswered, even after that terrible night on Highgate Hill – as wed as some other mysteries besides. I have placed the letter directly beneath this.

  Good luck, Stoker. May die blessing of your god be with you.

  Your old comrade in arms,

  HUREE JYOTI NAVALKAR

  Letter, Dr John Eliot to Professor Huree Jyoti Navalkar.

  August 1895.

  Huree,

  Are you surprised, I wonder, to have this letter in your hand? It has been a long time since we were last together that night on Highgate Hill – I suppose you might have forgotten me. But I doubt it, somehow; just as I doubt you are surprised to be reading this, for I did promise you ad those years ago that one day I would tell you everything. I like to think that I am a man of my word.

  It was the box which persuaded me to go to Rotherhithe. I had not intended to confront her; not intended to flout your advice. You were right, of course, Huree: I should never have gone; it was folly, not courage, which took me there. And yet
… I repeat – there was the box as wed, which I could never have ignored.

  It was waiting for me that night of Westcote’s death, waiting on my desk. It was made of rough wood and painted red; there were Chinese letters down one of the sides; clearly it had once been used for the transport of opium, but not now, I knew – not now. With trembling hands, I removed the lid. Inside, the box was empty save for a piece of stiff card. I inspected it. I had observed the handwriting at once, of course, purple like that on the card sent to George; a cursory inspection proved the ink to be water and blood. The script, also as before, was clearly feminine; this time, however, there had been no attempt to disguise the hand, for it was of a quite remarkable elegance and not clumsy at ad. Indeed, in the beauty of its style it seemed almost to belong to a different age. Its message was one you may recognise. ‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?’ Literature records this as a saying of Sherlock Holmes; but it was in truth a maxim of Dr Joseph Bed, the teacher of both Conan Doyle and myself, and one which I had often mentioned to Suzette. She, in turn, had answered me by phrasing my own growing fear. ‘But what if the impossible is the truth?’

  As I held that card, alone in my room, I knew for certain she had written it. I saw quite clearly – suddenly understood – the web of evil which had been woven around me, ad those long past months, by the darkness lurking like the spider in its heart – spinning, endlessly spinning, sensitive to every thrashing movement I had made, binding and drawing me in ad the time. And now, I knew, that darkness was very close. The crisis had arrived. How could I escape it? There was no escape. I could only face it and play the game to its end.

  I left that night. I took a gun with me, and the bulb of Kirghiz Silver worn in a pouch concealed beneath my shirt. I had expected to discover Lilah’s warehouse straight away, but although I searched I could not find the streets which led to its door. Frustrated, I returned to the High Street and thence to Coldlair Lane. Polidori’s shop, as before, was boarded up. I knocked on the door; there was no reply. I tried to force it, but the lock was too strong. I took a couple of steps back into the street and stared up at the top-floor window, but there was no light that I could make out, not even the flicker of an opium pipe, and just as on our previous visit it seemed as though the place had been utterly abandoned. Disappointed thus a second time, I turned and began to walk from the shop; then – on an instinct, I suppose – I glanced round again and, as I did so, for a second saw a face. It was pressed against a window pane, staring wildly from the top floor down into the street, and although it was gone as soon as I had glimpsed it I had recognised it immediately. The face at the window had been Mary Jane Kelly’s.

  I realised I would have to break through the front of the shop. Fortunately the street was deserted, and my efforts at pulling down the boards were not observed. Once I had smashed the window and passed inside, I hurried upstairs, braced for anything, but when I pulled aside the curtain it was to find that the room was empty after all, wholly denuded of people and furniture, with nothing to suggest they had ever been there. Only when I inspected the window pane did I discover evidence that I had not indeed been hallucinating, for fingerprints in blood had been left smeared upon the glass, and when I studied the floor carefully I found further traces of blood in a line of tiny dots. These ran towards the door in the far wall – beyond which, you will remember, was the bridge across the water to the warehouse door. Naturally I tried to force my way through, but the door had been secured too wed and this time, unfortunately, there seemed no other way of breaking through.

  To my intense frustration, therefore, I found I had little choice but to leave the room and go back into the street, as distant from my goal as I had been before. I began to wander down the High Street. A mist was rolling in from the Thames. At first, such was my self-absorption, I was scarcely conscious of it, until I suddenly realised that it had blotted out not only the lights, but also the noise from the taverns and pubs, the rattle of vehicles, the footsteps of other men on the road. I stared about me but I could see nothing, hear nothing: I seemed utterly alone. I called out; my voice was swallowed by a bank of brown fog. I stopped, and after a few minutes there came a gap in the mist, but as I stared along the street I realised that I was still alone, for although the lamps were flickering the street was quite deserted and the windows of the houses and taverns were dark. I called out again; still there was no reply. Then the mists began to thicken again and I felt their dankness sucking on my skin.

  Suddenly, I felt a touch on my shoulder. I spun round. There was a man behind me, but his face was hidden beneath a muffler and cap. ‘Looking for something?’ he asked. Beneath the folds of his scarf, he seemed to wink at me. ‘Looking for some fun?’

  ‘Fun?’

  ‘Fun!’ The man began to laugh. He pointed back up the street. I stared, but could see nothing. The man was still laughing like an idiot. I reached for his scarf, I pulled it away. His eyes were quite dead, his skin like a corpse’s; I remembered how the riverman had shot him on die Thames. ‘Fun!’ he kept repeating, over and over, and pointing with a bleached finger back up the street.

  From the muffled depths of the fog, I heard the rolling of a carriage’s wheels. Slowly, I began to walk towards the noise. The fog seemed to be dizzying my brain, much as I remembered the opium had done when I had gone with Stoker into Polidori’s den. I peered back through the wreaths of brown haze. The dead thing was still watching me, laughing ad the more. Then shadows of spokes began to wheel through the mist, and I turned again. There was a whinnying and a clattering of hooves, and I heard the carriage rumble to a halt. I could see it now, a blot of darkness waiting for me in the shadows beyond the street lights’ yellow gleam. I walked past the horses and stood by the carriage’s side. The silence, like the mist, was thick ad around me; the very horses seemed frozen by it. Then suddenly there was a click from the carriage door, and I saw it hang ajar. I felt desire in a hot flush reach into my bones.

  ‘Come to me.’ The whisper seemed to arise from nowhere and seep through my every emotion, my every thought.

  ‘Lilah,’ I answered. ‘Lilah.’ I reached for the door; I opened it… I stepped inside.

  I knew her at once. She was just as I had always glimpsed her: Lilah, and yet not Lilah: skin as pale as the gleam of ice, lips as red as a venomous flower, eyes cold, bright with lust and malignant pride. I reached out in wonder to stroke the cods of blonde hair that framed her deadly, perfect face, more beautiful than it was possible for a woman’s to be, fairer than heaven, crueller than hell, lovely beyond terror and human belief. ‘Lilah,’ I whispered again. It was not a question but a shudder, rather, of comprehension and need. She smiled; her bright lips parted and I saw the gleam of teeth behind the flaming red. She stroked my neck; her touch was a wonderful, impossible thing.

  ‘Come to me.’ The words were like caresses, scorching my mind. ‘Come to me.’

  I gasped. I turned, seeking her mouth, but her finger was on my chin and I felt her lips touch my throat, and then my skin seemed to be melting – absorbed into the moisture and warmth of her kiss, oozing and running in a stream across my chest, a sticky, fleshy brew that was mingling with her own. I reached to touch the flow; and as I did so my fingers brushed the bulb in its pouch.

  I heard a snarling, stinging hiss, like a cat leaping back from a singeing flame; and then I was alone again. I looked about me. I was lying on a dark comer of pavement, my head against a wall. I heard the sound of distant laughter, the chink of bottles from noisy pubs; wheels were rumbling across cobblestones; footsteps hurrying. The air was quite clear; the mist was gone; of the carriage and the woman, there was no sign at ad. Slowly I rose to my feet; I rubbed my eyes. I began to walk down the High Street again.

  The turning which led to the warehouse was where I had expected to find it. As I entered the unlit street, the noises behind me faded again; soon there was no sound at
ad but that of my own feet, taking me towards the warehouse door. It was open. I passed through it.

  Inside, Suzette was waiting for me. She raised her arm, and pointed. ‘Very close now,’ she whispered.

  ‘I know,’ I replied. I walked across the hall, I opened the door. Inside the single candle was burning as before, beneath the picture of Lilah where it hung on the wall. I stared at it without looking to either the left or the right; then I shut die door behind me. As I did so I heard a splash: liquid hitting liquid. Slowly I turned. I stared into the darkness… and found that I could see.

  A body was hanging from a hook, skewered through the feet. It was quite naked, and very white. I recognised the corpse from its face: one of the addicts from the opium den. A droplet of blood was welling out from the nostrils; it stretched; it fed. Then another: blood on blood. There was a bath, filled with blood. The bath was made from jewel-emblazoned gold, but the blood was even richer – even more lovely than the finest gold. It shimmered; if I stared long enough, I knew, I might see beauties undreamed of by the human mind. There was another splash. How wonderfully it was received, and stilled, and absorbed. Ad the world might be so absorbed … all the universe … stilled into blood. I took a step forward. The blood and gold seemed to merge, then pulse and ripple like waves of purest sound. I wanted to be a part of it, I wanted its mystery. Another splash – I looked up at the addict’s frozen, drained face: his eyeballs were bulging like skinless grapes. I shuddered suddenly, and reached for the bulb in its pouch around my neck.