Supping With Panthers

by Tom Holland

  I heard laughter, so mocking and terrible that I had to put my hands to my ears. ‘You clutch and paw at your talisman,’ I heard; ‘but still you come.’

  She stirred in her bath. Her blonde locks were quite unstained; her ice-white arms still gleamed through the red. She washed her breasts with a lazy sweep of her arm; then lolled back again with a languorous sigh. ‘Yes,’ she murmured, ‘still you come.’ She inclined her head and fixed me with her stare. ‘How amusing you are.’ She smiled. ‘So desperate for what I have. So afraid of what you might become. I am really very grateful. It is rare for a mortal to entertain me, you should know.’

  She smiled again, then stretched and laid her head against the gold. With a caress of her hand, she wiped her pale cheeks with blood. When she removed her fingers, not a streak or stain was left: it was as though her flesh were a sponge, I realised, drinking up the blood, gorging on the fluids of another person’s life. With a contented sigh she lowered her head, smoothed out the tresses of her blonde hair through the blood-’More,’ she murmured, ‘more, this one is almost drained.’ She waved vaguely with her hand. ‘Hurry, Polidori, I want a flood of it’

  He must have been standing in the shadows, for I had not observed him previously. Now, as he stepped forward, he fixed me with a twisted leer of acknowledgement and contempt; then he turned and tugged on a golden chain. The corpse began to sway and come swinging down. From the comer of my eye I watched Polidori lay die body on the floor, then start to ease the hook out from the ankle bones – but I could not concentrate on the sight. How could I have done? For she was washing herself again, soaping her breasts and cheeks with the blood; and as she did so her skin seemed to radiate and pulse. It was changing, growing darker; her blonde hair too was shimmering into black.

  ‘Bring her,’ she ordered. The voice was still Lilah’s, but her appearance was now that of an African girl – as terrible, as lovely as she had been before. I remembered Mary Kelly’s description of the negress who had taken her and bled her wrists – a beauty so great that it chilled the very heart. I lowered my eyes before her gaze; and as I did so I heard the negress start to laugh. ‘Bring her!’ she cried; I imagined her laughter rising up within my mind.

  ‘No,’ I muttered, ‘please, no.’ Still she laughed. It seemed as though the noise were flaying me. Louder and louder it grew; and as it did so I heard the chinking of the hook as it swung on its chain. I turned. Polidori had a naked woman in his hands. He gripped her hair, forced her to her knees; with his other hand he reached for the hook. As he did so, his grip on the woman’s hair yanked back her head. Her face was a mask of terror and pain and I scarcely recognised Mary Kelly. ‘No!’ I cried. I took a step forwards; I reached for my gun. ‘No!’

  For a second there was silence. The negress stared down the barrel of my gun; then suddenly she burst out laughing again. ‘Let her go!’ I said desperately. I turned the gun on Polidori. ‘For God’s sake, let her go!’

  The negress tried to speak, but her words were lost on her laughter which broke like a wave, drowning everything she said.

  ‘I will fire,’ I said.

  She only laughed the more.

  Very coolly, I aimed the revolver. ‘Let her go,’ I repeated. Then I fired, once, twice. The bullets tore into her chest; for a second she looked surprised as she stared down at the wounds; then her eyes gleamed with delight.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she exclaimed, ‘quite wonderful!’ She paused, her laughter dying away. ‘It’s starting to bore me, though,’ she said suddenly. She turned to Polidori. ‘You may kid her now.’

  Polidori reached for a knife. As he did so, I felt within my shirt and removed the Kirghiz Silver. At once there was a hissing intake of breath. I looked across the room at Polidori; he had lowered his eyes. He had begun to shake, I could see. I held out the bulb; he shuddered even more. Slowly I advanced on him, holding out the Kirghiz Silver in my palm, and as I stepped towards him so he shrank back and his hands fed by his sides. I reached out to take Mary Kelly’s arm. She was still shivering in dumb amazement; only when I pulled her did she rise and follow me. I reached for her clothes, I handed them to her; with a sudden desperate comprehension, she slipped on her dress.

  ‘Run,’ I whispered in her ear, ‘and keep hold of this,’ I pressed the Kirghiz Silver into her palm. She stared down at it, still seeming utterly petrified. ‘Do you understand?’ I asked. ‘Keep hold of it,’ Mary Kelly looked up at me, her fingers closed around the bulb; then she nodded, and turned, and I heard her start to run. Her footsteps echoed away across the hall; there was the slamming of a door. I breathed in deeply. So she was gone; she had managed to reach the street

  ‘How wonderfully noble of you!’

  The words were so mocking, they seemed like ice down my back. I looked about me. We were quite alone again, as we had been in the carriage in the street. The air of the room now was suffocating: ripe red, heavy with pollen and scent. Despite myself, I breathed it in. There were lilies and white roses, dotted with blood; in golden tripods perfumes burned: ambergris, champak and frankincense.

  ‘But was I supposed to be impressed?’ Lilah asked. ‘Was I supposed to be inspired? Was I supposed to send you forth with my blessings on your head, moved by your offer of sacrifice?’ She paused, smiling up at me lazily. ‘Or did you offer it as I take it – as an amusing joke? Certainly, it makes the fate I have in mind for you even more entertaining. Yes – even more droll!’

  She laughed, glancing at her nails, her bright lips pursed. ‘I have delayed this far too long, I think,’ she murmured. One last time she stretched in her bath; then she stirred, and the whole room seemed to fall away as she began to rise – remorselessly, impossibly high, like Venus born from the foam of the sea. Blood, in a mantle of glistening scales, winked on her naked limbs, then shimmered and disappeared, so that she had the look of a serpent sloughing off its skin, chysalid and glittering in the low burning light She wore only her jewellery, her bracelets and rings, while in her ears and round her neck gleamed the Kalikshutra gold; on her forehead was the mark of the eternal eye; set amidst her hair was the goddess Kali’s crown.

  ‘A Socialist,’ she whispered, gazing at me, ‘a labourer for die good of his fellow men.’ She clapped her hands. ‘How delightfully progressive!’ She reached out and took me, and clasped me to her breast ‘I shad certainly keep you, and add you to my collection.’ She smiled. ‘Yes, for ever, I think.’ She kissed me. Her words seemed to echo down the cods of my ears, ripple in waves through the whorls of my brain. It disoriented me. I could feel myself falling – down, down, into the waiting blood. I clung to Lilah. I was still in her arms. I looked about me. We were no longer in the room but running down steps – an infinity of steps, ad different colours, curling in double spirals through space. I had climbed such staircases in the warehouse before; but never had I seen so many, mutating before my very gaze, a web of shifting colours, patterns and shapes. Dimly, I felt afraid of them – as though what I were seeing was mutating me. I had to escape. I had to break free from Lilah, from her twisting, softening limbs. But I was wedded to them; I could not even stir. For the blood she had absorbed was now sucking on me. I remembered how my neck had felt before, in the carriage, when it had seemed to melt and blend with the touch of her lips. But now my whole body was oozing away into a sticky quagmire of humid flesh, and I could gradually feel myself absorbed and then enclosed, sealed utterly within a womb of secretions that were fishy, salt and dank, distorting the distant pulse of my life, so that hearing it my existence seemed scarcely mine at ad. Nor indeed was it – no – my blood was being pumped by another creature’s heart. I was Lilah’s thing now: jelly, placenta, albumen. A teeming mass of algae and buzzing cells … a soup of tiny dots. And then, even they were gone. There was only red, beating with the pulse of Lilah’s blood. Soon that too was silent. There was nothing at ad. Nothing but darkness. Oblivion.

  For how long I was lost, I do not know.

  An eternity.

&
nbsp; A second.

  Both, perhaps.

  The moment came, though, when I opened my eyes.

  ‘She is waiting for you,’ said Suzette.

  ‘Waiting?’

  ‘By the boat.’

  She was smiling, I saw as she bent down and kissed me on my forehead. I stared at her and frowned. She seemed changed. How can I describe it, Huree? She was still Suzette, still the same little girl with party frock and plaited hair – but equally she was something quite different as wed. I saw a face I had never glimpsed before: a woman’s, of perhaps twenty-five to thirty years of age, stately, beautiful, brilliant. Distinguishing her, I would lose Suzette; and then Suzette would return and the other face depart. There are designs, ocular tricks – perhaps you have seen them – where a rabbit is also the head of a duck, or a goblet the profiles of two lovers preparing to kiss; both images are present, but the mind is unable to glimpse them simultaneously. So it was with Suzette, only in a way much more infinite and extraordinary; so it was with everything I saw. For standing by me, with fresh clothes in his hands, was the twisted dwarf; so ugly he was that I had barely been able to endure his presence before, yet when I looked at him now I could see how long-limbed he was, and beautiful; indeed the handsomest man I had ever seen. When I crossed the had, and watched the panther sleeping curled up on the steps, it was not just an animal I saw; a woman was there too, dark and lovely and arrogant, her form and the panther’s at once different and utterly the same. Ad the animals, ad the creatures and beings in that place – I looked at them, and saw how they were ad souls transformed, and I felt, to my surprise, not horror but exultation; not disgust but delight

  I turned to Suzette. ‘And me?’ I asked. ‘Show me. What have I become?’

  Suzette – or rather, the woman who was also Suzette – smiled faintly. ‘Here,’ she said. We were in the conservatory. She led me across to one of the ponds. The water was as still and pure as glass. I stared into it, then I shut my eyes. Opening them, I looked again. ‘I don’t understand,’ I murmured. ‘What has happened?’ For my face, in the water, seemed exactly the same.

  Suzette took my arm. She began to lead me on.

  ‘Has there been no change at ad, then?’ I asked.

  Suzette did not reply. Instead, she paused by a wall of iron and glass; she took out a key and unlocked the door.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘What have I become?’

  Suzette gestured at the darkness that lay beyond the door. ‘Hurry,’ she whispered, ‘Lilah will be waiting for you. She has a game to play, then you will understand.’ She turned and ran; I was left alone. So I did as she had ordered, and stepped out beyond the glass.

  I was in the open again, in the London night. There was a staircase of winding metal ahead of me which clung down the side of a grimy harbour wall. I could hear the lapping of water from below; at the foot of the steps was a tiny boat, and I began to climb down towards it. At the oars was the creature who had rowed it before. Although I stared at him, I could not see what other form he might once have worn. ‘Jack!’ cried Lilah. She was waiting for me in the prow of the boat. She smiled. ‘My very own philanthropist.’ Her smile deepened. ‘Hurry, Jack, hurry,’ I joined her and she folded me in her arms. She gave the order to pull away; the oars began to chop and we glided out from between the narrow walls. Beyond was the mighty expanse of the Thames.

  We joined the river’s flow. As the creature pulled at his oars, Lilah nestled my head on her lap and began gently to stroke my hair. I stared up at the sky. It was a dud and ominous shade of red. For some reason the very sight of it cast a pad across my spirits; my mood of exaltation began to fade, and in its place I felt a gnawing sense of unease. I stirred; I couldn’t bear not to see the stars, blotted out by the glow of the city, as though London were seeping across the sky. I remembered the vision Lilah had shown me – of the city as a creature flayed of its skin, with the Thames as its artery, thick with living blood. I shifted again, stared out up-river; but the waters did not seem like life-blood now. I traded my fingers through them, and they felt as they looked, greasy with ordure, and putrefaction, and death. Beyond their flow I could see the lights of the City winking mockingly at me; bright, they looked, exceedingly bright – but again, I wasn’t fooled. For death was there too, bred from the dung of gold and human greed; death was in everything, everywhere I looked, in the seething darkness of that monstrous, brooding town. I remembered a visit I had made once to a patient’s house, when I had brushed against a wall and knocked out a lump of crumbling brick; I had looked at what lay beneath it, and seen a solid block of swarming, creeping things. I shuddered at the memory; then stared at the river bank ahead of us again. If I were to knock against it, tumble the buildings like plaster to the ground, I would see the very same thing I had seen in that house: vermin, blind and crawling, feeding on dung.

  There was a jolt; I woke from my thoughts. We had reached the quays on the northern bank. I heard drunken, reechy laughter; saw twisted silhouettes beneath shrill jets of flame. I shuddered. The very thought of stepping on to such a place filled me with disgust. I wrapped myself in my long black cloak as Lilah smiled and helped me from the boat. As her own cloak parted, I saw for the first time that she was wearing an evening gown. I too had been garbed in formal attire: top hat on my head, tads beneath my cloak. I wondered where we could be going that night. I asked, but Lilah just pressed a finger to my lips. ‘You are going to entertain me,’ she whispered very softly in my ear. Then she turned back to the boat and took a black Gladstone bag from the oarsman’s outstretched hands.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, as she passed it on to me.

  ‘Why, your medical bag,’ she replied.

  ‘Medical bag?’

  ‘You are a doctor, aren’t you?’ She laughed; then led me, before I could ask more, across the filth-littered quay. A carriage was waiting for us. We both climbed in; the wheels began to turn, slicing through mud. As we jolted, I heard the pulping of rotten vegetables and fruit. I looked out through die window – again, the shudder of physical disgust. The buildings like a fungus, risen from the dirt. People everywhere I looked – greasy, stinking, predatory; quivering sacks of intestine and fat. How was it I had never realised this before – how ugly the poor were, how loathsome, the way they dared to live and breed? We passed a tavern. I heard the smacking of lips and the splash and swirl of liquids down throats, the belching of gas, the animal laughter and slobber of chat. One of the men turned and stared at me. I wanted to vomit. His hair, Huree – his hair was damp with grease; his skin slimy; there was nothing in him, not the faintest spark, nothing at ad that seemed worthy of life. I leaned back against my seat.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I gasped, ‘we must get out of here.’

  Lilah stroked my brow.

  ‘Tell me,’ I insisted, ‘where are we going?’

  She smiled. ‘Why, to Whitechapel, Jack. They are so wretched there. Don’t you remember? They need your help, your philanthropy.’

  ‘No.’ I shook again. Noise, noise ad the time, crowding in on me from the streets outside. The stench and the darkness seeping from the crowds. I could feel my anger on thin, insect legs, crawling across my every emotion and thought. It couldn’t be borne. I had to escape it, it had to be crushed I leaned out from the window. ‘Here!’ I cried. ‘For God’s sake, stop!’ The carriage began to slow. I slumped against the door; it opened and I staggered outside. I was standing on the pavement of Whitechapel Street. I breathed in desperately. Surely the air would cool me? But the beat of life was everywhere – copulating, breeding, defecating life. As remorseless as time, it sounded; as remorseless as the monstrous crawling of my anger, inching forward on its thousand insect legs, prickling the sponge of my livid brain. Each step now was like a needle’s stab. Deeper and deeper; deeper they would spear. The horror was within my skull, piercing behind my eyes. Not just in the street but in my very thoughts – their faces, their laughter, the scent of their blood. It would drive me mad. No
one could survive such pain. And still my anger crawled, and spread, and stabbed.

  I sought darkness. Leading from the main road was a narrow, unlit street. I hurried down it. For a moment, there was almost a silence in my thoughts. I breathed in deeply and leaned against the brick of a warehouse wall. How long would I have to stay there, I wondered? The thought of leaving the silence and darkness was unbearable. Lilah – she must have seen where I had gone. She would come, and drive me back, and take me away from this sewer with its bubbling, foetid life. Otherwise … No, no. I closed my eyes. I ran a hand through my hair. To my faint surprise, I realised that my other hand was still clutching the medical bag.

  Suddenly I heard footsteps. I looked up. At the far end of the street was a solitary lamp. Two figures were standing beneath it, a woman and a man. The woman bent over and raised up her skirts; the man took her with an urgent, quickening grind. I could hear his breathing, very amplified; I could smell the humid stench from his genitals. He had soon finished. He dropped the woman down on to the pavement; then I watched him leave and heard his footsteps fade away. The woman still lay where she had fallen in the dirt; she hadn’t even bothered to smooth back her skirts. She stank: my nostrils were assailed by the odour of rotting fish, of underclothes sticky with semen and sweat. At length, she did stagger to her feet. I knew her: Polly Nichols – I had treated her once for venereal disease. She began to sway towards me. Her tattered dress was covered in filth; I imagined it would cling like a second skin: she would have to peel it off if she were ever to be naked, and clean again. The thought made me nauseous. For her own skin would be greasy, pitted with sores and bleeding spots: that would have to be peeled away as wed. She was big-boned. There was a lot of skin … a lot to be cleaned.

  I stepped out in front of her, and she shrank back, evidently startled; then she recognised my face, and flashed a toothless grin.