Supping With Panthers
Page 46
Nor has it ever done. I have the sample before me now. I am never parted from it. Sometimes, when my depression grows too great, I will inspect it again, just to check that it is truly unaltered – truly unchanging – a true immortal’s blood. Lilah’s, in other words – for it could have come from no one else’s veins. It was what Lord Byron fought her for, after all – fruitlessly, as it now proves, since his blood remains a vampire’s, and I still do not know how its structure can be changed. For the sample of Lilah’s own blood resists my every effort to fathom its secrets; it has offered me no illumination, no breakthrough, no cure. Instead, it offers me only one thing I did not have before – the certainty that immortal cells can indeed exist. It is, after all, Lilah’s final parting gift; her most refined and delicious torture: the torture of hope.
I have not told Lord Byron, since I know that Lilah intended me to. One day, perhaps, when I am nearer the source of her joke; but not until then. For, on him, the torture would be infinitely worse.
Help me, Huree – help me, please. Use what I have told you to warn those you can. And meanwhile, I am waiting.
As I have waited these past seven years.
As I will always wait …
For ever, it seems.
For now, and all time.
JACK.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Detective Inspector ‘Steve’ White’s report on pages 423–4 is taken from Donald Rumbelow’s The Complete Jack the Ripper (W.H. Aden 1975). My thanks also to Dr Ric Caesar and Captain Damien Bush for our many late-night discussions on a possible pathology of vampirism.
* Calcutta, I have been informed, was built on such a site. The name of this second city of the British Empire was originally Kali-kata.
* I am indebted to my friend Francis Younghusband for pointing out to me the existence in former times of similar practices elsewhere in India. In the Deccan, for instance, victims were bound, not to the image of a goddess but to the proboscis of a wooden elephant Those who are interested may care to read Major-General Campbell’s Narrative, pp. 35–7.
* I have been able to find no record of such a plant. The Kirghiz Desert, however, is the home of garlic. I wonder if Professor Jyoti’s plant was a variant of that noxious-smelling bulb?
Table of Contents
Also by Tom Holland
Copyright
Preface
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Author’s Note