Anno Dracula ad-1

by Kim Newman

  ‘Where is Mademoiselle Dieudonné?’

  ‘She is filling in for the director, sir. She should be in Dr Seward’s office. Shall you be wanting to be announced?’

  ‘No need to bother, thank you.’

  The matron frowned and mentally added another complaint to a list she was keeping of Things Wrong With That Vampire Girl. He was briefly surprised to be party to her clear and vinegary thoughts, but swept the passing distraction aside as he made his way to the director’s first floor office. The door was open. Geneviève was not surprised to see him. His heart skipped as he remembered her, close to him, body white, mouth red.

  ‘Charles,’ she said.

  She stood by Seward’s desk, papers strewn about her. He found himself embarrassed. After what had passed between them, he did not quite know how to act in her presence. Should he kiss her? She was behind the desk, and the embrace would be awkward unless she made room for it. Looking about for a distraction, his attention was drawn to a device in a glass dust-case, an affair of brass boxes with a large trumpet-like attachment.

  ‘This is an Edison-Bell phonograph, is it not?’

  ‘Jack uses it for medical notes. He has a passion for tricks and toys.’

  He turned. ‘Geneviève...’

  She was near now. He had not heard her come out from behind the desk. She kissed him lightly on the lips and he felt her inside him again, a presence in his mind. He was weak in the legs. Loss of blood, he supposed.

  ‘It’s all right, Charles,’ she said, smiling. ‘I didn’t mean to bewitch you. The symptoms will recede in a week or two. Believe me, I have experience with your condition.’

  ‘Nunc scio quid sit Amor,’ he quoted from Virgil. At last I know what Love is like. He could not think along a straight line of reasoning. Butterfly insights fluttered in the back of his mind, never quite caught.

  ‘Charles, this might be important,’ she said. ‘It’s something Colonel Moran said, about the Ripper.’

  By an effort of will, he concentrated on the pressing matter.

  ‘Why Whitechapel?’ she asked. ‘Why not Soho or Hyde Park or anywhere. Vampirism is not limited to this district, nor prostitution. The Ripper hunts here because it is most convenient, because he is here. Somewhere near...’

  He understood at once. His weakness washed away.

  ‘I’ve just pulled out our records,’ she said, tapping one of the piles on the desk. ‘The victims were all brought in at one time or another.’

  He remembered Moran’s reasoning.

  ‘It all comes back to Toynbee Hall by so many routes,’ he said. ‘Druitt and you work here, Stride was brought here, the killings are in a ring about the address. You say all the dead women were here...’

  ‘Yes, and in the last year or so. Could Moran have been right? Could it have been Druitt? There have been no more murders.’

  Beauregard shook his head. ‘It’s not over yet.’

  ‘If only Jack were here.’

  He made a fist. ‘We’d have the murderer then.’

  ‘No, I mean Jack Seward. He treated all the women. He might know if they had something in common.’

  Geneviève’s words sank into his brain and lightning swarmed behind his eyes. Suddenly, he knew...

  ‘They had Seward in common.’

  ‘But...’

  ‘Jack Seward.’

  She shook her head but he could tell she was seeing what he saw, coming quickly to a realisation. Together, their minds raced. He knew her thoughts and she knew his. They both remembered Elizabeth Stride grasping Seward’s ankle. She had been trying to tell them something. She had been reaching out to identify her murderer.

  ‘A doctor,’ she said. ‘They’d trust a doctor. That’s how he got close enough to them, even when the scare was in full flood...’

  She was thinking back, a thousand tiny details leaping at her. Many small mysteries were solved. Things Seward had said, had done. Absences, attitudes. All were explained.

  ‘“Something is wrong with Dr Seward”, I was told,’ she said. ‘Damn me for a fool, damn me for not listening, damn me, damn me...’ She made fists against her forehead. ‘I’m supposed to see into men’s minds and hearts, and I even ignored Arthur Morrison. I’m the worst fool that ever lived.’

  ‘Are there diaries around here?’ Beauregard asked, trying to draw her out of her fit of self-recrimination. ‘Private records, notes, anything? These maniacs are often compelled to keep memorabilia.’

  ‘I’ve been through his files. They contain only the usual material.’

  ‘Locked drawers?’

  ‘Only the phonograph cabinet. The wax cylinders are delicate and have to be protected from dust.’

  Beauregard took a good hold and wrenched the cover off the contraption. He pulled open the drawer of the stand. Its fragile lock splintered. The cylinders were ranked in tubes, with neatly inked labels.

  ‘Chapman,’ he read aloud, ‘Nichols, Schön, Stride/Eddowes, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Lucy...’

  Geneviève was by him, delving deeper into the drawer. ‘And these... Lucy, Van Helsing, Renfield, Lucy’s Tomb.’

  Everyone remembered Van Helsing; Beauregard even knew Renfield was the Prince Consort’s first disciple in London. But...

  ‘Kelly and Lucy. Who are they? Unknown victims?’

  Geneviève was going again through the papers on the desk. She talked as she sorted. ‘Lucy, at a guess, was Lucy Westenra, Vlad Tepes’ first English get. Dr Van Helsing destroyed her, and Jack Seward was in with Van Helsing. He was always expecting the Carpathian Guards to come for him. It is almost as if he has been in hiding.’

  Beauregard snapped his fingers. ‘Art was in that group, too. Lord Godalming. He’ll be able to fill in details. It comes to me now. Lucy Westenra. I met her once, when she was warm, at the Stokers’. She was part of that set.’

  A pretty, silly-ish girl, not unlike a young Florence. All the men mooned around her. Pamela had not liked her, but Penelope, a child then, doted on the girl. He realised that his former fiancée styled her hair like Lucy’s. It made her look less like her cousin.

  ‘Jack loved her,’ Geneviève said. ‘That was what drew him in with the Van Helsing circle. What happened must have driven him out of his wits. I should have realised. He calls her Lucy.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘His vampire mistress. It’s not her real name, but it’s what he calls her.’

  Geneviève was sorting through the extended drawer of a stout filing cabinet, flicking past individual files with a nimble finger.

  ‘As for Kelly,’ she said, ‘we have lots of Kellys on our books. But only one who fits Jack’s requirements.’

  She handed him a sheet of paper, the details of a patient’s treatment. Kelly, Mary Jane. 13 Miller’s Court.

  Geneviève’s face was ash-grey.

  ‘That’s the name,’ she said. ‘Mary Jane Kelly.’

  54

  CONNECTIVE TISSUE

  On November the 9th, 1888, Geneviève Dieudonné and Charles Beauregard left Toynbee Hall at almost precisely four ante meridiem. Dawn was still hours off, the moon clouded over. The fog, although slightly thinned, was sufficient to impair even a vampire’s night-sight. Nevertheless, their journey was accomplished swiftly.

  Geneviève and Beauregard proceeded along Commercial Street, turned west into Dorset Street by the Britannia, a public house, and sought out the address they had for Mary Jane Kelly. Miller’s Court was accessible through a narrow brick archway on the north side of Dorset Street, between Number 26 and a chandler’s shop.

  Neither took much note of a rag-wrapped personage huddled just inside the court, assuming him to be a tramp. Dorset Street was referred to locally as ‘Dosset Street’, because of the number of vagrants attracted to the temporary lodgings, or ‘doss houses’, offered there. It was common for those who lacked the fourpence for a bed to sleep rough. In actuality, the personage was Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming, and he was not sleeping.

  G
eneviève and Beauregard expended a few moments on determining which doorway gave entrance to Number 13, a single-room dwelling at the ground-floor back of 26 Dorset Street. They were drawn by a line of thin red firelight spilling on to the doorstep.

  The quarter-hour had not yet sounded. By the time of their arrival, Dr John Seward had been at his work for more than two hours. The door of 13 Miller’s Court was not locked.

  55

  FUCKING HELL!

  Charles swore, fighting to keep his breath. Geneviève, no shock to spare for his surprising vocabulary, had to agree with him.

  The greasy smell of dead blood hit her like a bullet in the belly. She had to hold the doorframe to keep from fainting. She had seen the leavings of murderers before; and blood-muddied battlefields, and plague holes, and torture chambers, and execution sites. 13 Miller’s Court was the worst of all.

  Jack Seward knelt in the middle of a ruin barely recognisable as a human being. He was still working, apron and shirtsleeves dyed red. His silver scalpel flickered in the firelight.

  Mary Kelly’s room was cramped: a bed, a chair, a fireplace, and barely enough floor to walk around them. Jack’s operation had spread the girl across the bed and the floor, and up the walls to the height of three feet. The cheap muslin curtains were speckled with halfpenny-sized dots. There was a mirror, its dusty glass marked with bloody splashes. In the grate, a bundle of clothes burned, casting a red light that seared into Geneviève’s night-sensitive eyes.

  Jack was not overly concerned with their intrusion.

  ‘Nearly done,’ he said, easing out something from a pie-shaped expanse that had been a face. ‘I have to be sure Lucy is dead. Van Helsing says her soul will not rest until she is truly dead.’

  He was calm, not ranting. He performed his butchery with a surgeon’s precision. In his mind, there was purpose.

  ‘There,’ Jack said. ‘She is delivered. God is merciful.’

  Charles had his pistol out and aimed. His hand was trembling. ‘Put down the knife and step away from her,’ he said.

  Jack placed the knife on the bedspread and stood up, wiping his hands on an already-bloody patch of apron.

  ‘See, she is at peace,’ Jack said. ‘Sleep well, Lucy my love.’

  Mary Jane Kelly was truly dead. Geneviève had no doubt about that.

  ‘It’s over,’ Jack said. ‘We’ve beaten him. We’ve defeated the Count. The contagion cannot spread.’

  Geneviève had nothing to say. Her stomach was still a tight fist. Jack seemed to notice her for the first time.

  ‘Lucy,’ he said, alarmed. He was seeing someone else, somewhere else. ‘Lucy, it was all for you...’

  He bent to pick up his silver scalpel and Charles shot him in the shoulder. He spun around, fingers grasping air, and slammed against the mantel. He pressed his gloved hand to the wall and sank downwards, knees protruding as he tried to make his body shrink. Jack was huddled, holding his wound. The shot had gone completely through and torn the murder out of him.

  Geneviève snatched the scalpel away from the bed. Its silver blade made her itch, so she shifted to hold it by the enamelled grip. It was such a small thing to have done so much hurt.

  ‘We have to get him out of here,’ Charles said. ‘A mob would tear him apart.’

  Geneviève hauled Jack upright and between them they managed him into the courtyard. His clothes were tacky from the drying gore.

  It was nearing morning, and Geneviève was suddenly tired. The cold air did not dispel the throbbing in her head. The image of 13 Miller’s Court was imprinted in her mind like a photograph upon paper. She would never, she thought, lose it.

  Jack was easy to manipulate. He would walk with them to a police station, or to Hell.

  56

  LORD JACK

  It had been dizzyingly hot inside Mary Jane Kelly’s room; the chill of the court was sobering. Once out of the charnel house, Beauregard realised that though the mystery was solved, he was faced with a quandary. The women were dead, Seward hopelessly mad. What justice would be served by turning him over to Lestrade? In whose interests was he to act now? Sir Charles Warren’s, by letting the police take credit for an arrest? The Prince Consort’s, by turning over another vanquished foe to the spikes outside the Palace?

  ‘He bit me,’ the Ripper said, remembering some trivial incident, ‘the madman bit me.’ Seward held out his gloved, swollen hand. Blood was pooled in the palm.

  ‘Vlad Tepes will make him immortal, just so he can torture him forever,’ Geneviève said.

  Someone came out of the chandler’s shop and stood in the archway. Beauregard saw red eyes in the dark and made out the silhouette of a big man in a check ulster and a billycock hat. How much had this vampire witnessed? He stepped into the court.

  ‘Well done, sir. You’ve put an end to Jack the Ripper.’

  It was Sergeant Dravot from the Diogenes Club.

  ‘All along, sir, there were two murderers, working together,’ said Dravot. ‘It should have been obvious.’

  The world was spinning again, the cobbles beneath him falling away. Beauregard did not know where it would stop.

  Dravot bent down and whipped a ragged blanket away from a human bundle that had been shoved into a corner. A dead white face stared up, lips drawn back in a last snarl.

  ‘It’s Godalming,’ Beauregard exclaimed.

  ‘Lord Godalming, sir,’ Dravot said. ‘He was in it with Dr Seward. They fell out last night.’

  Beauregard could not make all the pieces fit. He knelt by the body. There was a large patch of black blood on his breast, soaking his shirt. In the patch was a ragged wound, over the heart.

  ‘How long have you known all this, Dravot?’

  ‘You caught the Rippers, sir. I’ve just been looking out for you. The cabal set me up as your guardian angel.’

  Geneviève was standing apart from them, holding Jack Seward’s arm. Her face was shadowed.

  ‘And Jago? Was that you?’

  Dravot shrugged. ‘Another matter, sir.’

  Beauregard stood, pushing the cobbles with his cane, and brushed off his knees.

  ‘There’ll be a fearful scandal. Godalming was well-thought-of. He had a reputation as a coming man.’

  ‘His name will be entirely blackened, sir.’

  ‘And he was a vampire. That will cause a stir. The assumption was that the Ripper was warm.’

  Dravot nodded.

  ‘I should think the cabal will be delighted,’ Beauregard continued. ‘This will embarrass a great many people. There will be repercussions. Careers will be smashed, reputations overturned. The Prime Minister will look foolish.’

  Geneviève spoke bitterly. ‘It’s all very tidy, gentlemen. But what about Jack?’

  Dravot and Beauregard looked at her. And at Seward. The Ripper was propped against the wall of the court. His face was wearily free of expression. Blood dribbled from his wound.

  ‘His mind is gone completely,’ Geneviève said. ‘Whatever glue held him together is dissolved.’

  ‘It would be best if Mr Beauregard did the honours.’

  Geneviève looked at Dravot with something approaching loathing. Beauregard felt he had no choice. His actions had been directed by others. He was almost at the end of his duty. With a great weariness, he realised he had done little but leap hurdles on a course set out for him.

  ‘Hold him up,’ Beauregard said. ‘Against the wall.’

  Geneviève’s hand was at Seward’s throat, her nails extending. ‘Charles,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to. If it must be done, I can...’

  He shook his head. She could not spare him this. It had been the same with Elizabeth Stride. He had simply been merciful. ‘It’s alright, Geneviève,’ he said. ‘Just hold him.’

  She knew what he was about and gave her consent. She took her hand from Seward’s throat. ‘Good-bye, Jack,’ she said. He gave no sign of understanding.

  Beauregard drew his sword-cane. The rasp cut through the tiny nigh
t-sounds. Geneviève nodded and Beauregard slipped his blade through Seward’s heart. The point scraped brickwork. Beauregard withdrew the sword, and sheathed it. Seward, cleanly dead, crumpled. He fell beside Godalming. Two monsters together.

  ‘Good work, sir,’ Dravot said. ‘You cornered the murderers and Dr Seward became frenzied. He destroyed his confederate and you bested him in single combat.’

  Beauregard was irritated to be treated as if he were a schoolboy being tutored by his fellows in an excuse.

  ‘And what of me?’

  Beauregard and Dravot both looked at Geneviève.

  ‘Am I a “loose end”? Like Jack, like Godalming? Like that poor girl in there?’ She nodded to Mary Jane Kelly’s doorway. ‘You let him butcher her, didn’t you?’

  Dravot said nothing.

  ‘You or Jack killed Godalming. Then, knowing what he was, you stood back in the shadows and let him account for her. It was tidier that way. You didn’t even dirty your hands.’

  Dravot deferred. Beauregard was sure the Sergeant had a revolver about him, loaded with silver bullets.

  ‘We came along at a convenient time,’ she continued. ‘To finish off the story.’ Geneviève held out Seward’s scalpel. ‘Do you want to use this? That would be neater.’

  ‘Geneviève,’ Beauregard said, ‘I don’t understand...’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. Poor Charles. Between bloodsuckers like Godalming and this creature,’ meaning Dravot, ‘you’re a lost lamb. Just as Jack Seward was.’

  Beauregard stared long at Geneviève before he turned to Dravot. If it came to it, he would protect her with his life. There were limits to his devotion to the plans of the Diogenes Club.

  The Sergeant was gone. Beyond the archway, the fog was dispersing. It was nearly dawn. Geneviève came to him and he embraced her. The world stopped tilting and turning. Together, they were the fixed point.

  ‘What happened here,’ she asked, ‘what truly happened?’

  He did not yet know.

  Together, bone-tired, they emerged from Miller’s Court. On the other side of Dorset Street, a pair of constables strolled, chatting together on their beat. Geneviève whistled, to get their attention. Her trilling was not a human sound. It pierced his eardrums like a needle. The coppers, truncheons out, trotted towards them.