by Kim Newman
I have chosen to work in Whitechapel because it is the ugliest region of the city. The superficialities which some say make Dracula’s rule tolerable are at their thinnest. With vampire sluts baying for blood on every corner and befuddled or dead men littering cramped streets, one can see the true, worm-eaten face of what has been wrought. It is hard to keep my control among so many of the leeches but my vocation is strong. Once, I was a doctor, a specialist in mental disorders. Now, I am a vampire killer. My duty is to cut out the corrupt heart of the city.
The morphine is making itself felt. My pain recedes and my vision becomes sharper. Tonight I shall see through the murk. I shall slice the curtain and face the truth.
The fog that shrouds London in autumn has got thicker. I understand all manner of vermin – rats, wild dogs, cats – have thrived. Some quarters of the city have even seen a resurgence of medieval diseases. It is as if the Prince Consort were a bubbling sink-hole, disgorging filth from where he sits, grinning his wolf ’s grin as sickness seeps throughout his realm. The fog means there is less distinction between day and night. In Whitechapel, many days, the sun truly does not shine. We’ve seen more and more new-borns go half-mad in the daytime, muddy light burning out their brains.
Today was unexpectedly clear. I spent a morning tending severe sun-burns with liberal applications of liniment. Geneviève lectures the worst cases, explaining that it’ll take years for them to build a resistance to direct sunlight. It is hard to remember what Geneviève is; but at moments, when anger sparks in her eyes or her lips draw back unconsciously from sharp teeth, the illusion of humanity is stripped.
The rest of the city is more sedate, but no better. I stopped off at the Spaniards for a pork pie and a pint of beer. Above the city, looking down on the foggy bowl of London, its surface punctured by the occasional tall building, it would be possible, I hoped, to imagine things were as they had been. I sat outside, scarfed and gloved against the cold, and sipped my ale, thinking of this and that. In the gloom of the afternoon, new-born gentlefolk paraded themselves on Hampstead Heath, skins pale, eyes shining red. It is quite the thing to follow fashions set by the Queen, and vampirism – although resisted for several years – has now become acceptable. Prim, pretty girls in bonnets, ivory-dagger teeth artfully concealed by Japanese fans, flock to the Heath on sunless afternoons, thick black parasols held high. Lucy would have become one of them had we not finished her. I saw them chattering like gussied-up rats, kissing children and barely holding back their thirst. There is no difference, really, between them and the blood-sucking harlots of Whitechapel.
I left my pint unfinished and walked the rest of the way to Kingstead, head down, hands deep in my coat pockets. The gates hung open, unattended. Since dying became unfashionable, churchyards have fallen into disuse. The churches are neglected too, although the court has tame archbishops, desperately reconciling Anglicanism with vampirism. When alive, the Prince Consort slaughtered in defence of the faith. He still fancies himself a Christian. Last year’s Royal Wedding was a display of High Church finery that would have delighted Pusey or Keble.
Entering the graveyard, I could not help but remember everything again, as sharp and hurtful as if it had been last week. I told myself we destroyed a thing not the girl I had loved. Cutting through her neck, I found my calling. My hand hurt damnably. I have been trying to curb my use of morphine. I know I should seek proper treatment, but I think I need my pain. It gives me resolve.
During the changes, new-borns took to opening the tombs of dead relatives, hoping by some osmosis to return them to vampire life. I had to watch my step to avoid the chasm-like holes left in the ground by these fruitless endeavours. The fog was thin up here, a muslin veil.
It was something of a shock to see a figure outside the Westenra tomb. A slim young woman in a monkey-fur-collared coat, a straw hat with a red band on it perched on her tightly-bound hair. Hearing my approach, she turned. I caught the glint of red eyes. With the light behind her, she could have been Lucy returned. My heart thumped.
‘Sir?’ she said, startled by my interruption. ‘Who might that be?’
The voice was Irish, uneducated, light. It was not Lucy. I left my hat on, but nodded. There was something familiar about the new-born.
‘Why,’ she said, ‘’tis Dr Seward, from the Toynbee.’
A shaft of late sun speared through and the vampire flinched. I saw her face.
‘Kelly, isn’t it?’
‘Marie Jeanette, sir,’ she said, recovering her composure, remembering to simper, to smile, to ingratiate. ‘Come to pay your respects?’
I nodded and laid my wreath. She had put her own at the door of the tomb, a penny posy now dwarfed by my shilling tribute.
‘Did you know the young miss?’
‘I did.’
‘She was a beauty,’ Kelly said. ‘Beautiful.’
I could not conceive of any connection in life between my Lucy and this broad-boned drab. She’s fresher than most, but just another whore. Like Nichols, Chapman and Schön...
‘She turned me,’ Kelly explained. ‘Found me on the Heath one night when I was walking home from the house of a gentleman, and delivered me into my new life.’
I looked more closely at Kelly. If she was Lucy’s get, she bore out the theory I have heard that vampire’s progeny come to resemble their parent-in-darkness. There was definitely something of Lucy’s delicacy about her red little mouth and her white little teeth.
‘I’m her get, as she was the Prince Consort’s. That makes me almost royalty. The Queen is my aunt-in-darkness.’
She giggled. My pocketed hand was dipped in fire, a tight fist at the centre of a ball of pain. Kelly came so close I could whiff the rot on her breath under her perfume, and stroked the collar of my coat.
‘That’s good material, sir.’
She kissed my neck, quick as a snake, and my heart went into spasm. Even now, I cannot explain or excuse the feelings that came over me.
‘I could turn you, warm sir, make royalty of you...’
My body was rigid as she moved against me, pressing forward with her hips, her hands slipping around my shoulders, my back.
I shook my head.
‘’Tis your loss, sir.’
She stood away. Blood pounded in my temples, my heart raced like a Wessex Cup winner. I was nauseated by the thing’s presence. Had my scalpel been in my pocket, I’d have ripped her heart out. But there were other emotions. She looked so like the Lucy who bothers my dreams. I tried to speak, but just croaked. Kelly understood. She must be experienced. The leech turned and smiled, slipping near me again.
‘Somethin’ else, sir.’
I nodded, and, slowly, she began to loosen my clothes. She took my hand out of my pocket and cooed over the wound. She delicately scraped away the scabs, licking with shudders of pleasure. Shaking, I looked about.
‘We won’t be disturbed here, doctor, sir...’
‘Jack,’ I muttered.
‘Jack,’ she said, pleased with the sound. ‘A good name.’
She tugged her skirts up over her stocking-tops, and tied them around her waist, settling down on the ground, positioning herself to receive me. Her face was exactly Lucy’s. Exactly. I looked at her for a long moment, hearing Lucy’s invitation. I became painfully engorged. Finally, it was too much for me and, greatly excited and aroused, I fell upon the harlot, opening my clothes, and spearing her cleanly. In the lea of Lucy’s tomb, I rutted with the creature, tears on my face, a dreadful burning inside. Her flesh was cool and white. She coaxed me to spend, helping me almost as a nursing mother helps a child. Afterwards, she took me wetly into her mouth and – with exquisite, torturous care – bled me slightly. It was stranger than morphine, a taste of rainbow death. Over in seconds, the act of vampire communion seemed in mind to stretch on for hours. I could almost wish that my life would drain away with my seed.
As I buttoned myself up, she looked elsewhere, almost modestly. I sensed the power she now had o
ver me, the power of fascination a vampire has over its victim. I offered her coin, but my blood was enough. She looked at me with tenderness, almost with pity, before she left. If only I had had my scalpel.
Before making this entry, I conferred with Geneviève and Druitt. They are to take the night shift. We have become an unofficial infirmary and I want Geneviève – who, though formally unqualified, is as fine a general practitioner of medicine as I could wish – to be here while I am out. She is particularly concerned with the Mylett child, Lily. I fear Lily cannot last out the weekend.
The journey back from Kingstead is a blur. I remember sitting in an omnibus, lolling with the movement of the vehicle, my vision focusing and unfocusing. In the Korea, Quincey got me, in the spirit of experiment, to smoke a pipe of opium. This sensation was similar, but much more sensual. Every woman I chanced to see, from skipping golden-haired children to ancient nurses, I desired in a vague, unspecifiable manner. I would have been too spent to act upon my desires, I think, but they still tormented me, like tinily ravenous ants crawling on my skin.
Now, I am jittery, nervous. The morphine has helped, but not much. It has been too long since I last delivered. Whitechapel has become dangerous. There have been people snooping around all the time, seeing Silver Knife in every shadow. My scalpel is on my desk, shining silver. Sharp as a whisper. They say that I am mad. They do not understand my purpose.
Returning from Kingstead, in the midst of my haze, I admitted something to myself. When I dream of Lucy, it is not of her as she was when warm, when I loved her. I dream of Lucy as a vampire.
It is nearly midnight. I must go out.
22
GOOD-BYE, LITTLE YELLOW BIRD
The director had left her in charge of the night shift, which put Montague Druitt in a black mood. When Geneviève wanted to stay by Lily’s bedside, Druitt harrumphed about the inconvenience, unsubtly indicating she should delegate the general authority if she wished to devote herself to this specific case. In the small downstairs room where the child’s cot was, Geneviève dispensed instructions. Druitt stood at his ease, and affected not to notice the sawing of Lily’s lungs. Long, agonising down-cut rasps came with every exhalation. Amworth, the newly-engaged nurse, fussed around the patient, rearranging the blankets.
‘I want you or Morrison in the foyer at all times,’ she told him. ‘The last few nights, there has been a stream of people coming through. I don’t want anyone in who has no business here.’
Druitt’s brow wrinkled. ‘You perplex me. Surely, we are for all...’
‘Of course, Mr Druitt. However there are those who would exploit us. We have medicines, other items of value. Thefts have been heard of. Also, should a tall Chinese gentleman present himself, I would be grateful if you could refuse him admission.’
He did not understand; she hoped he would not be made to. She did not really think the man could keep the hopping creature out when it resumed its persecution of her. The elder was yet another of the problems pressing around her, jostling for solutions.
‘Very well,’ Druitt said, and left. She noticed his one good coat was trailing strands along the bottom, and was almost through at the elbows. With these people, good clothes were armour. They separated the genteel from the abyss. Montague John Druitt, she thought, had more than a passing acquaintance with the depths. He was polite to Geneviève but something behind his reserve worried her. He had been a schoolmaster, then half-heartedly embarked on a law career, before coming to Toynbee Hall. He had achieved no distinction in any of his chosen professions. His special project was the raising of public subscriptions to fund a Whitechapel Cricket Club. He would run the side, recruiting likely players from the street, instilling in them the values and skills of the game he, not alone of his countrymen, regarded as almost a religion.
Lily began coughing up a red-black substance. The new nurse – a vampire with some experience – wiped clean the child’s mouth, and pressed on her chest, trying to get the blockage cleared.
‘Mrs Amworth? What is it?’
The nurse shook her head. ‘The bloodline, ma’m,’ she said. ‘Nothing much we can do about it.’
Lily was dying. One of the warm nurses had given a little blood but it was no use. The animal she had tried to become was taking over, and that animal was dead. Living tissue was transforming inch by inch into leathery dead flesh.
‘It’s a trick of the mind,’ Amworth said. ‘Shape-shifting. To become another thing you must be able to imagine that other thing down to the smallest detail. It’s like making a drawing: you have to get every little working thing right. The raw ability is in the bloodline, but the knack doesn’t come easy.’
Geneviève was glad that those of the bloodline of Chandagnac could not shape-shift. Amworth smoothed Lily’s wing like a blanket. Geneviève saw the disproportionate growth as a child’s crayon drawing, bending the wrong way, not fitting together. Lily yelled, a stabbing pain inside her. She had gone blind on the streets, the sun burning out her new-born’s eyes. The dead wing was leeching substance out of the bones of her legs, which crumbled and cracked in their sheaths of muscle. Amworth had put on splints, but that was just a delaying action.
‘It would be a mercy,’ Amworth said, ‘to ease her passing.’
Sighing, Geneviève agreed. ‘We should have a Silver Knife of our own.’
‘Silver Knife?’
‘Like the murderer, Mrs Amworth.’
‘I heard this evening from one of the reporters that he has sent a letter to the newspapers. He wants to be called Jack the Ripper, he says.’
‘Jack the Ripper?’
‘Yes.’
‘Silly name. No one will ever remember it. Silver Knife he was, and Silver Knife he’ll always be.’
Amworth stood up and brushed off the knees of her long apron. The floor in the room was unswept. It was a constant struggle to keep dirt out of the Hall. It had not been meant for a hospital.
‘There’s nothing more to be done, ma’m. I must see to the others. I think we can save the Chelvedale boy’s eye.’
‘You go, I’ll stay with her. Someone has to.’
‘Yes ma’m.’
The nurse left and Geneviève took her place, kneeling by the cot. She took Lily’s human hand and gripped tight. There was still un-dead strength in the child’s fingers, and she responded. Geneviève talked to the girl softly, reverting to languages Lily could not possibly understand. Nestling in the back of her skull was a Medieval French mind that broke through sometimes.
Trailing around with her true father, she had learned, even in her short lifetime, to attend the dying. Her father, the physician, tried to save men their commanders would as soon have buried half-alive to get out of the way. The battlefield stink was in this room now, flesh gone rotten. She remembered the Latin droning of the priests and wondered whether Lily had any religion. She had not thought to call a pastor to the deathbed.
The nearest clergyman must be John Jago and the Christian Crusader would not consent to attend a vampire of any stripe. There was Reverend Samuel Barnett, Rector of St Jude’s and founder-patron of Toynbee Hall, a tireless committee-member and social reformer, agitating for the cleaning-out of the vice dens of the ‘wicked quarter-mile’. She remembered him spluttering red-faced with fury when preaching against the practice of women stripping to the waist to fight each other. Barnett, even without the unreasoning prejudice of Jago, disapproved of Geneviève and was openly suspicious of her motives for joining the East End Settlement Movement. She did not blame the Warriors of God for their distrust of her. Centuries before Huxley coined the term, she had been an agnostic. When Dr Seward had interviewed her for this position, he had asked: ‘you’re not Temperance, you’re not Church, what are you?’ ‘Guilty,’ she had thought.
She sang the songs of her long-ago childhood. She did not know if Lily could hear. The waxy red discharge from her ears suggested she might be deaf as well as blind. Still, the sound – maybe the vibrations in the air, or th
e scent of her breath – soothed the patient.
‘Toujours gai,’ Geneviève sang, voice breaking, hot bloody tears welling, ‘toujours gai...’
Lily’s throat swelled up like a toad’s and brackish blood, brown streaks in the scarlet, gulped out of her mouth. Geneviève pressed the swelling down, holding breath still in her nostrils to fend off the taste and smell of death. She pressed urgently, song and memory and prayer babbled together in her mind, leaking out of her mouth. Knowing she would lose, she fought. She had defied death for centuries; now the great darkness took its revenge. How many of Lily had died before their time to compensate for the long life of Geneviève Dieudonné?
‘Lily, my love,’ she incanted, ‘my child, Lily, my dearest darling, my Lily, my Lily...’
The child’s boiled eyes burst open. One milky pupil shrunk minutely, reacting to the light. Through the pain, there was something close to a smile.
‘Ma-ma,’ she said, first and last word. ‘Mma...’
Rose Mylett or whoever was the child’s human mother, was not here. The sailor or market porter who spent his fourpence to become her father probably didn’t even know she had lived. And the murgatroyd from the West End – whom Geneviève would track down and hurt – was passed on to other pleasures. Only Geneviève was here.
Lily shook in a fit. Drops of sweated blood stood out all over her face.
‘Mma...’
‘It’s mother, child,’ Geneviève said. She had no children and no get. A virgin when turned, she had never passed on the Dark Kiss. But she was more this child’s mother than warm Rosie, more her parent-in-darkness than the murgatroyd...
‘It’s mama, Lily. Mama loves you. You’re safe and warm...’
She took Lily from her cot, and hugged her close, hugged her tight. Bones moved inside the girl’s thin chest. Geneviève held Lily’s tiny, fragile head against her bosom.
‘Here...’
Pulling her chemise apart, Geneviève thumbnail-sliced a thin cut on her breast, wincing as her blood seeped.
‘Drink, my child, drink...’
