The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  It cannot possibly be a tissue of petty lies, I told myself. What an adventure the man has had! Even if it has wrecked him, body and soul, has it not been worth it? What traveller ever had such a tale to tell?

  In time, the fit ran its course. It left Copplestone was unconscious, but seemingly at peace. In the meantime, I arrived at certain conclusions, and made certain decisions. From that moment on, whatever the destiny of the world might be, mine was set in stone.

  “I am very sorry,” the doctor said. “You all know how desperate Copplestone was to tell the whole of his story, but I do not think there any possibility of his being able to continue. He must be allowed to sleep. Perhaps those of you who have no other engagements might care to return at eight o’clock tomorrow, so that Copplestone can acquaint you then with the substance of his third . . . shall I say vision?”

  I could not find it in my heart to admire W*****’s pedantry. He was not a fool, but he was blind to the riches of Copplestone’s achievement. They all were, even the most brilliant of them. The men of letters could only see it as a bold fiction, the men of science as a wild farrago of superstitions. I was the only one who could see hope in it.

  Everyone agreed that what the doctor proposed was the best course. The manservant and the doctor removed Copplestone to his bedroom while the rest of us made preparations for our departure.

  “Well,” Wilde said to me, “we have had our money’s worth, have we not? What a magnificent liar the man is! If he had not told us of his long experiments with mind-addling drugs I would immediately have proclaimed him a genius, but I fear that he has relied too much on the power of chemical hallucination to be given all the credit for his accomplishments. Even so, it is a fabulous tale! I wish I had the courage to steal it, but the altercation between our host and young Wells has made me wary. Still, it might be worth doing, given that the deftness of my hand could improve it out of all recognition . . .”

  “Be careful, Oscar,” I said, making a feeble attempt to mimic his witty manner of speech. “You might start a fashion, and then where would we be? Every Tom, Dick and Harry would be producing visions of the future. Within a dozen years we’d have a thousand different fever-dreams to choose from.”

  “True,” he said. “It’s probably best to leave such things to Mr Wells – that way the fad will surely be stillborn.”

  As we put on our coats and hats the conversation continued in a muted fashion. Apart from myself only the British scientist had brought his own carriage, but he and I offered to accommodate all our fellow guests in our spare seats. On comparing destinations it became obvious that the most convenient use of our resources would be for the two young men to travel with Crookes and Tesla while I took the others. W***** and his dour companion were headed for Baker Street, which was very near, and only a little out of my way. I had already resolved to pay a short visit to Piccadilly before returning home.

  There was some delay while the doctor convinced himself that Copplestone could safely be left to the care of his servants, and in the end he had to hurry out to the carriage, where his friend had already taken his seat. I tried to dismount for politeness’ sake but the doctor – who was fumbling at his coat-buttons – cannoned into me and dropped his bag. We both bent to pick it up, and collided yet again. I took advantage of the confusion to pluck the envelope containing Copplestone’s formula out of his jacket, as slickly as the best pickpocket in Paris. I slipped it unobtrusively into my coat. As soon as we were under way, I asked the doctor what he thought of Copplestone’s remarkable adventures.

  “I reserve my judgement,” he said. “But I’ll say this much – if he cannot be persuaded to give up this damnable drug, I fear for his very life. He simply will not understand how ill he is.”

  “And you, sir?” I asked his friend, who had hardly said a word all evening. “What is your opinion?”

  He looked at me very steadily with his solemn grey eyes. “It is the strangest tale I have ever heard,” he said, gravely, “but I pride myself on my scrupulous use of logic, and I find it difficult to accept the reality of the art of prophecy. It is easier by far to believe it the record of a sequence of hallucinations. I would be interested, however, to hear your opinion of what we have heard.”

  “I hardly know what to make of it,” I said, in a calculatedly off-hand manner. “I have neither Wilde’s love of fabulation nor Wells’s intense interest in the distant future of mankind – and I had difficulty following parts of the narrative. English is not my first language.”

  “Nor, I think, is French,” said the doctor’s friend, “although your accent has more of Paris in it than echoes of your native land, and your clothes were purchased there. Some of your consonants sound Slavic, but whatever its origin might really be, Lugard is certainly not a Slavic name. I have known only one other man with a physiognomy similar to yours, and he claimed to be Russian – unfortunately, his name and title proved to be false, and I never did manage to ascertain his true origins. Like yourself, he was an uncommonly fastidious man, who took little or no pleasure in food and wine, and found tobacco smoke distasteful.”

  I was not at all amused by this speech, which seemed more than slightly insulting. It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I hoped he did not suspect my name and title of being false, but I knew only too well that one should never tempt fate in such a fashion.

  “Come come, H*****,” said the doctor, uncomfortably. “This isn’t one of your damned investigations.” He, at least, was conscious that acceptance of the hospitality of my carriage carried a certain burden of obligation.

  “It is ingrained in the nature of Englishmen to dislike everything foreign,” observed Wilde, with mocking disingenuity. “I fear, Count, that you will find many people in London morbidly fascinated by the fact that you hail from somewhere east of Calais.”

  “I meant no offence!” protested the doctor’s friend, with apparent sincerity. “I was merely indulging my curiosity.”

  In order to change the subject, I turned to Wilde and asked him what he made of young Mr Wells and his inordinately bleak vision of the future.

  “Young men often dally with an extreme bleakness of outlook,” Wilde answered. “They think it romantically interesting. In fact, it is merely the measure of their own cowardice in the face of the stings and darts of outrageous fortune. If they are fortunate, they learn to grasp life’s nettle. If not, they gradually transform themselves into pusillanimous old men weighed down by acrid regret – and need no shapeshifting gift to accomplish the metamorphosis.”

  The doctor and his neurasthenic companion would not join in the conversation; their minds were obviously on other matters. It was of no consequence; the carriage was turning and slowing down.

  “Here is Baker Street,” I said, mildly. “Tell me where you want to be set down.”

  Our au revoirs were polite enough, but a trifle frosty.

  XI

  “Forgive them, dear boy,” said Wilde, once we were under way once again, “for they know not what they are. A consulting detective, indeed! I am by no means devoid of conceit, as you know, but such a tedious delusion is hardly worth entertaining – and yet W***** is as famous a literary man, in his own way, as I am. Do you read The Strand at all?”

  I confessed that I did not. “As Copplestone rightly says,” I added, “there are so many periodicals these days.”

  “And the only ones worth reading are in French,” he agreed, mournfully. “Even Lane’s Yellow Book is conspicuously thin-blooded. I wish it were not so difficult to obtain the Mercure in London. Now there one may find dreams which have delicacy of form as well as bravery of vision. The best French writers always display an appropriate nicety, even when they treat such brutal themes as the vampire. The French vampires of Nodier and Gautier are far more beguiling than their English kin.”

  “Are there any English vampires?” I asked.

  “Not so very many,” he replied. “In prose, there is little more than that ludicrous excrescence w
hich Polidori tried to pass off as Byron’s, and the interminable penny-dreadful adventures of the appalling Varney. There is Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ of course, but Le Fanu is yet another Trinity man. I believe Stoker is enthusiastically researching the history and folklore of vampirism, so I dare say the world may soon be over-blessed with Anglo-Irish vampires. You will not understand this, being a civilized man of the world, but Trinity is a Protestant college in the heart of a Catholic country, built on an ancient cesspit, and it provides uncommonly fertile ground for the growth of feverish tales of exotic outsiders. The Anglo-Irish sometimes think themselves more English than the English, because they have to strive so hard to avoid being Irish, but the English will never support their pretence.”

  I could not fully appreciate the bitter undercurrent of feeling which underlay this flippant commentary, but the mention of Stoker reminded me that Copplestone had thought of inviting him to hear the story he had just related. Wilde’s revelation that Stoker might be thinking of writing a vampire story might provide the explanation of that fact, but I was by no means happy to learn it. What unfortunate inspiration, I wondered, might Arminius Vambery have communicated to Stoker?

  “Do you know anything about this project of Stoker’s?” I asked.

  Wilde shrugged. He had turned his face away, as though to look out of the window of the carriage. “Not a great deal,” he said. “I told you earlier – we no longer see one another.”

  “Oh yes,” I murmured, without thinking. “You once liked his wife.”

  “Loved,” said Wilde, acidly. “I would have married her myself, but for the twin fears of poverty and the pox. And now . . .” He trailed off. I was amazed that he said so much. He was tired, and he had had more than a little to drink, but even a man as naturally garrulous as he would surely never have said such a thing in the normal course of conversation with a man he hardly knew. It was not difficult, though, to follow the abandoned line of argument. An Ideal Husband had been running for a week and The Importance of Being Earnest was in rehearsal. Wilde was set fair for great fame and fortune, and his future was surely brighter by far than Stoker’s, whatever their comparative prospects had been ten or twenty years ago. As for fear of the pox, if he meant by that what I thought he meant then he must have overcome that fear by the time he married Constance Lloyd. Conventional wisdom, I knew, taught that a man diagnosed with syphilis must take the mercury treatment and suffer two years’ abstinence from sexual intercourse.

  “Oscar,” I said, on impulse, “I fear that I may not be able to remain in London very long.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because certain rumours will doubtless follow me from Paris. I think your friend Stoker has heard them already, and he is sure to repeat them if he discovers that I am here – and I fear that Mr H*****’s infernal curiosity will easily root them out, if he has the inclination to try.”

  “I wish I could say that I never listen to rumours,” he said, carelessly, “but I always do. I am the subject of so many, and although I pretend to like it . . . as it happens, I am thinking of going away myself. A clairvoyante I know has foretold that I shall make a pilgrimage to Algeria, and now I have Copplestone’s assurance that such prophecies ought to be taken seriously I dare not flout my destiny. Perhaps you ought to come with us.”

  “Us?” I queried.

  “I could not think of going alone to such an uncivilized place,” he said, “and poor Bosie is so cut up about Drumlanrig’s death. His brother, you know. Even Queensberry liked Drumlanrig, a little.”

  “I never go so far south,” I told him. “I cannot abide the sun, and its light is so horribly fierce in those latitudes. I like London’s grey light much better, and I shall be very sorry to leave.”

  “You might stand fast against the rumour-mongers,” he suggested, mildly. “Let them say what they like, and be damned – or haul them into court for libel. Either would be better than a shooting-match, don’t you think?”

  I looked at him long and hard, wondering how much he knew – and how much he cared.

  “Sometimes,” I murmured, “I wish that poor Mourier had fired at my heart, and found his mark.”

  “But only sometimes,” said Wilde, with patient understanding. “We all think ourselves monsters, occasionally – but once we look away from the stubbornly unflattering mirror, there is the world awaiting us, in all its welcoming glory, full to the brim with all manner of lovely lies. If nothing else, a tale like Copplestone’s puts our petty woes into their proper perspective, does it not? A thousand years hence, you and I and all our world will be mere dust, not even a memory – and no one will know or care what we were, or what we did, or even what we wrote. Let us to our playground, my friend, to amuse ourselves while we may. We shall be long enough dead, when the time comes.”

  I wished that I could take matters so lightly, and bring such eloquence to the cure of my own heart’s sickness, but he and I were not the same kind of man.

  “Shall I collect you tomorrow?” I asked him, as he got down from the carriage.

  “I would not miss it for the world,” he assured me. “The same time, the same place. I promise that I shall not be late.”

  Of all his promises, that was worth the least.

  It was so late by the time I reached Piccadilly that the vast majority of the night-birds had returned to their roosts. A few stray wisps of mist drifted about the gas-lamps. The raucous music which spilled from the closed doors of the all-night drinking-dens was muffled by doors and curtains set to keep the winter cold at bay.

  I found the person I sought at her station beneath one of the wrought-iron lamp standards. She smiled as she saw me approach. She was very pale, and her pallor bore the subtly lustrous bloom which was an infallible sign of consumption. She made no attempt to cover it with powder. The smallpox which had visited her in youth, as it visited all the city’s poorer children, had left but a single visible scar on her face: an oddly starlike mark on the cheek beneath the left eye. Her dark eyes were bright, almost luminous as they caught the lamplight. She had lovely hair, which she kept in very neat trim.

  “My Russian Count,” she said, as I halted before her.

  Her voice was low and her pronunciation perfect. I had been attracted to her as much by her voice as her features; I could not abide dropped aitches and revolting pet-names, and could never understand why so many English whores took pride in Cockney vulgarity. I took her hand in mine, and raised it momentarily towards my lips. It was very cold.

  “You should not be outside,” I said, hypocritically. “You should retreat indoors, as your sisters do, and place yourself near a blazing fire.” She had chosen to remain outdoors because she was waiting for me, although she had no reason to believe that I would come to her tonight. She was bound to wait for me, by virtue of the mesmeric spell I had put on her.

  “Will you walk with me, my dear,” I said, and she nodded. We strolled off in the direction of Green Park, whose Stygian darkness masked the commerce of the district. The ground would be iron-hard and icy, and she had every right to expect greater comfort from a man of my station, but it would have required a little more courage than she had to raise an objection. She had nothing to fear; I had not the slightest intention of laying her down upon the frosty turf. I took her along the pavement to a spot equidistant between two of the street-lights. I had no difficulty in making out her features, but she must have been nearly blind to mine. I looked long into her eyes, but it is a cliché of cheap fiction which says that a mesmerist must use the authority of his gaze, and it was more for my sad and sombre pleasure than to extend my dominion over her spirit. I knew that I had only to stroke her cheek a little, and fold my protective arms round her, to make her completely mine.

  “Oh my love!” she murmured. It was not a trick of the trade. Perhaps she did speak softly to more casual acquaintances but there was no dissimulation in her voice now.

  “There is something you must do for me,” I whispered, my lips just
a breath away from her delicate ear. “It should not be difficult.”

  “Anything,” she said, almost imperceptibly. She wanted nothing other than to be my slave. How could she?

  I pressed a sovereign into her hand, but had to close her nerveless fingers around it to make sure that she held on to it. “Do this for me,” I said, “and I will give you everything that is within my power to give.” There was hypocrisy in this, too, but there was a kind of honesty too. For once there was a kind of substance in my seductive promises. “Tomorrow, I will take you home with me. It may be late when I come, but I will come. Trust me, Laura. Trust me.”

  “My name . . .” she began, but I put a finger to her lips to silence her.

  “Your name,” I told her, “always has been, and always will be Laura.”

  She had tilted her head back, bared in that curious instinctive gesture of submission which civilized humans somehow retain: the purely animal gesture of surrender, which offers the throat to a conqueror as a token of faith in the mercy of the strong. She was completely in my power.

  I lowered my head, and kissed her on the throat to seal our pact.

  XII

  Needless to say, Wilde was not ready when I arrived to collect him. By way of apology he explained that he had been run ragged all day, in a hopeless attempt to catch up with his belated start.