The London Vampire Panic

by Michael Romkey

  When we arrived at the Prime Minister's residence, Algae bustled me into the Green Drawing Room, leaving me in eclectic and not altogether respectable company. The first person I clapped eyes on was Charles Darwin, the notorious bald-headed crank who believes us all descended from monkeys. Even if we are, I am sure it is part of God's plan. Keeping company with the Lord of the Apes was a strapping man who exuded an air of health and rawboned physical strength. He had the erect posture of a cavalry officer and the bronzed face of a common crofter. He wore his trousers tucked into the top of high riding boots, an eccentric sort of thing to do, I thought. In the journal I kept during this period, I wrote that I was convinced the fellow was a plantation owner just in from Africa—which turned out to be completely wrong.

  Chief Inspector Palmer, Dizzy's pet policeman, nodded to me when I glanced his way. He seemed to be keeping an eye on a rumpled little man whose hair and beard were badly in need of grooming, and who had sallow, jaundiced skin. Liver trouble, I guessed, probably the result of an excess of drink or narcotics, perhaps both. The possibilities were equally likely. London was a gurgling cesspool of sin—which is what gave the city its charm.

  Lord Shaftbury stood before the fire, holding a match to his cigar. The game was afoot if Shaftbury was involved. He was an ambitious fellow, drawn to power the way a drunkard is to cheap gin. Dizzy employed Shaftbury as his political cat's paw, using him to catch and dispatch insubordinate mice at the master's bidding. Shaftbury fancied himself Dizzy's political heir. In those early days of 1880 few would have doubted he would be the next Tory prime minister.

  Captain Lucian, the young equerry to the Prince of Wales, lounged against the mantle near Shaftbury, smoking a cigarette with typical insouciance. He lifted his chin at me, an inquiring expression in his eyes. I made a small, almost imperceptible shrug in reply to the unspoken question. Neither of us had the slightest idea why we'd been summoned to Downing Street. We had been together at Skittles a few days previous. I seemed to recall something about Lucian, Bertie, and I throwing empty champagne bottles off the roof. I hoped we hadn't hit someone on the head. I cast a glance at the policeman, but he continued to be preoccupied with the disreputable man in the abominable suit.

  The doors opened and the dyspeptic C. A. Cross entered, followed by a priest. To be honest, I would have been less surprised to see the Home Secretary lead a nanny goat through the door. Dizzy was not known for excessive piety. In all the times I had visited him at Downing Street and Beaconsfield, I do not recall there ever having been a member of the clergy among the party.

  Cross and I were friendly but not friends. He was an able Home Secretary but a tremendous bore. Dizzy called him the Lancashire Swami for his otherworldly knowledge of the mechanics of administration—which translated to an almost supernatural ability to manipulate important votes with parliamentary hocus pocus. Cross obviously knew what was up. He caught my eye and gave me an arch look, as if to say, "You're not going to believe this!"

  I stifled the impulse to let out a deep sigh. Whatever Dizzy's problem was, I knew then that it was going to require substantial jiggery-pokery to set it right. Another Aylesford Affair was in the making, I feared.

  The priest struggled to keep his eyeballs from falling out of their sockets. I'd seen the look before on the faces of ordinary men summoned into the halls of greatness. He was pale, rather like an unhealthy plant that has seen insufficient light. An Oxford bookworm, I guessed—this time correctly.

  Dizzy made his entrance, dressed in his usual foppish manner. He dressed the part of a literary dandy—bottle-green breeches and, beneath his coat, a richly embroidered canary-yellow waistcoat. He walked with the aid of a golden-headed cane, wheezing a bit as he came into the room. He had applied rouge to his sallow cheeks for a bit of color, and his hair was an unnatural shade of black, dyed to conceal the gray. It appeared that his bronchitis had mostly cleared up. I had convinced the Prime Minister to augment his medication with generous doses of the finest Chateau Lafite. Regular doses of this tonic had plainly done him good. Dr. Kidd, the old butcher who had treated him for years, had him on a mild course of arsenic to clear the bronchial tubes. I did not approve of the regimen, but I did not think the arsenic would hurt him much in such minute doses.

  Cross began his introductions with what seemed a bit of sarcasm. I was presented as "the eminent physician," which was, of course, completely accurate. But Palmer was "the distinguished detective," which I thought was painting it on a bit thick. The man with his britches tucked into his riding boots was Professor James Cotswold, the noted American anthropologist.

  Dizzy, smiling, interrupted Cross to confess he was unfamiliar with the field of anthropology.

  "I study dinosaur fossils at Harvard," Cotswold said. "Think of me as a professor of old bones at Harvard."

  Cross added that Cotswold had been invited to London to address the Royal Society on his research. The papers had written it up, although I had missed his speech and do not think I read more than a few paragraphs about it in the Times. The subject was of very little interest to me.

  So much for my theory that Cotswold was fresh off a plantation near Nairobi.

  The priest was the Reverend Christopher Clarkson from Christ College, Oxford. "Reverend Clarkson is a theologian," Cross said. "He should be able to assist us in the event—in the unlikely event—that this affair touches on aspects of the demonic."

  I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The beady eyes of Wellington's beastly portrait stared down at me. They seemed to follow me as I shifted in my seat. I somehow knew where we were going by that point, but I tried to put it out of my mind, as I had since that day in Hyde Park when the policemen roughed up the absurd Indian boy who yelped about his "rights" as they beat him.

  The only intercourse I want to have with the Great Beyond is in church on Sundays and, inevitably, when the time comes for me to pass from this world into the next. At Black Friars, the ancestral Blackley home, I learned to dread the spirit world. Black Friars is haunted by the specters of monks put to the sword when Henry VIII confiscated the ecclesiastical property. My boyhood was peppered with ghastly encounters with ghosts. I would come around a corner and glimpse a malevolent presence—a suggestion of rough brown cloth and mournful countenance—which invariably disappeared the moment I looked in its direction. I cannot begin to count the nights my sleep has been disturbed by strange footsteps, disembodied moans, and phantom tappings. Late on nights when the winds howl around the battlements, you can hear faint strains of ghostly chanting. Little wonder I am seldom in residence at Black Friars!

  Cross's introductions got to the most disreputable one of our company. "And this," he said, indicating the rumpled little man, "is Dr. Van Helsing, the professional vampire hunter from Budapest."

  I looked at Dr. Van Helsing with new respect.

  "As some of you know and the rest of you have no doubt guessed, I have invited you here to discuss the widening plague of vampire attacks in London," the Prime Minister said. "Among the fiend's victims is a friend of the Prince of Wales, indeed, an intimate friend. His Royal Highness must be protected from any hint of scandal."

  "If you will permit me to be so bold," Dr. Van Helsing interjected in his heavy Hungarian accent, "it would be far better for you gentlemen to concern yourselves instead with protecting Prince Edward Albert from the vampire. The monster must be hunted down in his lair and destroyed."

  The Prime Minister's chin jerked up, as it often did when he was about to pounce. I had a sinking feeling, already knowing what he was about to say.

  "That is precisely why I have asked you all here today," Dizzy said.

  I entertained a brief hope of slipping discreetly out of the parlor, but Darwin and the dour Scotland Yard inspector blocked any chance of a quiet escape. I was trapped.

  * * *

  6

  Inspector Palmer's Macabre Catalogue

  PERHAPS WE COULD begin by you giving us a precis of the vampire'
s depredations to date. Chief Inspector Palmer," Dizzy said. The P.M., never one to sit back and watch events unfold, was impatient as ever to take matters by the shank.

  The policeman withdrew a notebook with a black leather cover from his waistcoat pocket and paged deliberately through his notes as if preparing to give evidence at the Old Bailey. Policemen tend to be cautious and methodical, I have noticed, two traits lacking from my own mercurial humors.

  "The first victim was Annie Howard. She was a fifteen-year-old serving girl at Moore House in Mayfair."

  The poor benighted Moore family, I thought. The Moores had seen more than their share of tragedy. I recollected how, through one of those strange peregrinations of fate, I had happened to see Sir Brendan's daughter, Lady Olivia, at the opera several weeks earlier, in the company of that old satyr, Franz Liszt.

  "Miss Annie was found dead in the kitchen there at approximately 10:00 p.m., November first. There were two puncture wounds in her neck, just here."

  C.I. Palmer indicated on his own neck where Miss Howard had been injured, pressing the skin over his jugular vein with his fore and middle fingers.

  "She was pale as milk when discovered. There was a distinct puckering of the skin in the lips and fingertips. The wee lass had been almost completely drained of blood. But even more unusual than that was the matter of the wounds." Palmer glanced up to meet Dizzy's steady gaze. "By the time the body got to the morgue, the wounds in her neck had completely disappeared."

  "That is impossible."

  We all looked around. The words had come from Professor Cotswold.

  "No wound can heal that quickly," Cotswold said in a tone of stark disbelief. "And if the girl was dead, they would not heal at all."

  Alas, the cheeky American was dead on right.

  "If I'd not seen it with me own eyes, I would find it difficult to believe myself, Professor," Palmer replied. "A total of three residents of Moore House witnessed the oddly disappearing wounds, along with the surgeon summoned to the house, and six policemen. I was one of the aforementioned policemen, Professor. I can attest personally to the fact that the punctures in the girl's neck disappeared in a little over an hour."

  "The vampire is capable of many subtle and sinister tricks," Dr. Van Helsing intoned in a grim voice thick with his Hungarian accent.

  Cotswold looked hard at Van Helsing for a moment, then shook his head and turned toward his friend, Darwin. "It is preposterous," he pronounced.

  "Perhaps not." Darwin's retort seemed to catch Cotswold off balance. "It could be that some hitherto unrecorded enzymatic action was responsible for what I will be the first to agree is an altogether unprecedented phenomenon."

  "I'm afraid I don't really understand what is being proposed here," Cotswold railed. "You think a series of murders is the result of a monster that sucks out people's blood without leaving a wound? I don't know these other people, but you, Charles—how could you fall for such a wagonload of claptrap?"

  "An open mind is the first requisite of scientific inquiry," Darwin said to his young American counterpart. "Certainly this is difficult for us to accept, but people once found it impossible to believe that the earth was not the center of the universe, with the sun and stars revolving around its stationary position in the cosmos."

  "It is fortunate for you, Professor Cotswold, that you have had little experience with the nosferatu in America," Dr. Van Helsing said. "The creature is indigenous to Transylvania, or, according to one theory—to which I do not happen to subscribe—the Russian steppes. It is the ultimate embodiment of evil and must be destroyed at all costs."

  "You talk as if it is some kind of devil or hobgoblin."

  "But that is precisely what it is, Professor Cotswold. A vampire is a living corpse. By day the nosferatu must lie in a coffin containing at least one handful of the soil of its native land. It cannot bear the sunlight. If touched by the sun's rays, the vampire bursts into flame and is destroyed. The vampire's only other weaknesses are garlic and the sight of the cross. The monster can abide neither. The nosferatu rises at sunset to drink the blood of the living. Every person it kills becomes a vampire, and in doing so loses its immortal soul to become a member of the undead. This is why we must be zealous about finding this monster and killing it by driving a wooden stake through its lifeless heart."

  I expected Cotswold to scoff, but instead he stared at Dr. Van Helsing with his jaw fallen open. His level of incredulity was such that he could not even respond.

  "There are elements of truth in most folk beliefs," Darwin said, talking mainly to the American. "For the moment, let us consider that Dr. Van Helsing is at least partly correct in his assertions. Something we don't understand happens to people, giving them the need and means to drink the blood of living human beings. The condition changes them in other significant ways. Given what we know, it appears their saliva contains an agent that promotes rapid healing. I suppose that means that if they do not drink too much blood, their host survives—and the vampire escapes detection because he hasn't left behind any evidence of his activity. It is therefore possible that the population of vampires is much greater than we suspect, that there is not a single vampire preying on London, but hundreds, or even thousands."

  The room had become very still as Darwin spoke, his scientific perspective somehow even more chilling than what Dr. Van Helsing had said.

  "And what if the vampire is not a supernatural creature, not the embodiment of ultimate evil, but a genetic adaptation, a mutant in the continued natural selection of our species?" Darwin went on. "If so, these beings could threaten the existence of the human race. A superior species preying upon us like cattle presents a frightening picture, gentlemen. Homo vampirus could be in the process of replacing Homo sapiens, the same way Cro-Magnon man overtook and wiped out the more poorly adapted Neanderthal."

  The room lapsed into nervous silence as we considered the prospect of bands of vampires playing the hounds to us as foxes. None of us would sleep very soundly after hearing such a thing. It was the vampire hunter who spoke next, bringing us back to the matter at hand.

  "Moore House was the site where the vampire first claimed a victim in England?"

  "I would not go so far as to say tha', Dr. Van Helsing," the policeman said. "Annie is the first victim we know about. There might be others."

  "There might indeed," Dr. Van Helsing agreed. "But I am most interested in Moore House. What does anyone know about the family?"

  Dizzy's eyes settled on me, so I felt compelled to offer the first testimony to the vampire hunter. "I was off in India with Sir Brendan," I said. "We were once quite close, but that was many years ago."

  "Sir Brendan Moore was one of the finest diplomats to have ever served Her Majesty," Dizzy said. "Unfortunately, he met with a tragic end. He was on station in Budapest when he was blown up by anarchists. His young wife was killed in the blast, along with a Hungarian cavalry officer. It was a cowardly crime and a great loss to the Foreign Service. Surely you read about it in the Budapest papers this past autumn."

  "For the past year I have been engaged wiping out a band of nosferatu deep in the Carpathian Mountains, without recourse to newspapers or other civilized amenities," Van Helsing replied. "Still, the fact that Sir Brendan was stationed in Budapest is significant. Hungary is infested with vampires. And the other members of the Moore family? There were children with them in Budapest? A niece or nephew perhaps?"

  "There are two children in the household," C.I. Palmer said, glancing down at his notebook. "A daughter, Lady Olivia Moore, age eighteen, Sir Brendan's child by his late first wife. And there is an infant boy named Andrew. They reside at Moore House."

  "Were they with their father and mother in Budapest?"

  "They were, Dr. Van Helsing," Dizzy said, giving him a curious look.

  "Surely you don't think they are mixed up in this," I said, remembering how delicious Lady Moore looked that night at the opera.

  "Of course not," Dr. Van Helsing said. "But ther
e could be a tangential connection, since they are just returned from Budapest. Did they bring any Hungarian servants with them?"

  "Lady Olivia and the boy, Andrew, returned in the company of Andrew's Hungarian nurse," Dizzy said. "I called on them when they returned to London to express my condolences. Lady Moore was bearing up well, like a proper English girl."

  "A nurse?" Van Helsing said, perking up. "Then the child is ill?"

  "In Britain, a 'nurse' is a governess for a young child."

  "Just so, I must speak with the Magyar woman," Dr. Van Helsing said in a voice somewhat commanding for such an unprepossessing creature. He used the stub of a pencil to scribble in a cheap notebook.

  "As you wish, Doctor," Dizzy said. "And after Annie Howard, Chief Inspector?"

  "The second victim was one Fannie Turner." I felt as if I'd just been hit in the stomach, but I must have done a good job of concealing it since nobody acknowledged my discomfiture.

  "She was a cook's helper at Sir Richard Graham's house. Not long in his employ, but reported to be an obedient and capable girl of nineteen. Sir Richard's residence is adjacent to Moore House. Miss Turner was not attacked at Sir Richard's residence, however. A constable found her body early on the morning of November fifteenth in Hyde Park."

  "She was ensanguined?"

  "Begging your pardon, Mr. Darwin?"

  "Had she, too, been drained of blood, Detective?"