The London Vampire Panic

by Michael Romkey

  Thomas helped me into a surgical gown and gave me a pair of rubber gloves. I nodded that I was ready to begin, and he pulled the sheet off the body. I was peripherally aware of a tensing of posture among my colleagues. Lucian's hands came up to his mouth.

  "If you are feeling light-headed, sit down and put your head between your knees," I said a bit curtly. Palmer was looking at Lucian with particular harshness, a comment on the young man's squeamishness, I thought.

  On the table was a lovely young woman stretched out on her back, entirely naked, as helpless as only the dead can be. The vampire was obviously attracted to beauty, damn him, I thought. Her face was comely even in death, her full bluish lips parted slightly as if her last act had been a gentle sigh. To wipe out the pleasure those lips would have given and known was an act of wanton criminality that richly deserved to be repaid with a swift trip to the gallows, though Dr. Van Helsing had an even harsher punishment in mind. I recognized the slight puckering to the lips and fingertips I had seen before with the poor girl in Hyde Park, all indicative of blood loss.

  Her cheekbones, her high, intelligent forehead, her perfect nose, her jawline—such divine artistry! Her breasts had achieved the perfect fullness of womanhood; children would make them larger, but never would they have been more firm or curve with such exquisite lines. If she was a domestic—at that point I knew neither her name nor her social position—she would have almost certainly become the mistress of some wealthy older man. Beauty seldom went to waste in London in those days.

  I walked slowly around the body, giving it a cursory inspection.

  "The subject is a female of perhaps sixteen or seventeen years, with no readily apparent outward sign of injury. The body is well-developed and outwardly healthy in appearance."

  Thomas took down my words in shorthand. They would later be transcribed as my formal report.

  "There is some outward evidence of ensanguination. This is noteworthy given the absence of any trauma to correspond with the apparent blood loss."

  I probed the girl's neck on either side, looking for evidence of puncture wounds.

  "There is no evidence of injury to the subject's neck. There is no sign of any kind of animal bite."

  Thomas gave me a questioning look, but I did not stop to explain. If he did not know about the vampire already, he would have to learn as we went. He had good reason to wonder what sort of game was afoot. My cursory exam of the girl's neck, and my comments about the absence of dental cannulation, were entirely outside the usual autopsy sequence.

  "The body shows a degree of rigor expected approximately twenty-four hours after death. Please help me turn her, Thomas. The back and posterior of the arms and legs show light signs of lividity, but not at all what one would find under typical circumstances."

  I pushed the chestnut tresses up off the girl's neck. If the vampire had bitten the girl, the wounds had healed themselves. We turned her back over and Thomas handed me a scalpel. I positioned the blade and then hesitated, but not for myself or the job I was about to do. It was at that moment I realized that the American had come forward to have a closer look at the girl's neck.

  "Have you ever witnessed an autopsy, Professor Cotswold?" I asked, balancing the scalpel in my hand.

  "I've dissected cadavers in anatomy class."

  It was scarcely the same thing, I thought, but did not say so aloud. If anatomy classes in the Colonies were taught the same way they were in Britain—and I suspected they were—over the course of weeks you took apart the body of some poor old pauper whose skin had turned leathery soaking in a huge vat of formaldehyde. Working a little at a time, with a partner or two, going slowly and being able to joke quietly about it, was an altogether different experience from cutting into the flesh of someone who had, until a few hours earlier, been a living, breathing human being.

  Giving Cotswold no further thought, I paid a final silent compliment to the poor girl's beauty before I destroyed it with three deep incisions. The time had come for her body to surrender its secrets. Upon the autopsy table, the dead are sacrificed to serve the living.

  I put the scalpel into the girl, the sharp blade penetrating layers of epidermis and muscle as I exerted a moderate downward pressure. I have never been a tentative cutter, though in an autopsy there is certainly little reason to be tentative. My incision was shaped like a Y, extending in classic fashion from either shoulder to the pit of the stomach, and down to the pelvis.

  I folded back the flaps of skin and muscle.

  Thomas handed Lucian a bucket in time to catch the remains of his lunch. The acrid stench of vomitus filled the air. The smell would get much worse before we finished.

  A body on a marble slab loses its humanity the moment you cut into it during an autopsy. For me, from that point on, the flesh beneath my hands becomes a complex but inert object, a specimen to be dissected, weighed, tested, studied; it is no longer a person to be considered tenderly or pitied. I had Thomas saw through the ribs and lifted out the breastplate, revealing the organs for inspection.

  "There is no evidence of internal bleeding," I said. "Indeed, there is a marked absence of blood."

  "Aye," a mystified Thomas said. He finished wiping his hands and resumed his notations.

  I glanced backward at the sound of a stool being dragged across the tile. Dr. Van Helsing, looking very pale, was sitting down. Lucian was on the floor, the bucket between his knees. Cotswold was pale but remained standing a few feet away from me, his curiosity stronger than his revulsion. I caught the policeman's eye and noted a hint of a smile in his eyes.

  When it came time to examine the girl's sexual organs, Lucian excused himself to smoke a cigarette. Dr. Van Helsing lasted until Thomas began to saw through the cranium so I could examine the brain. That left Thomas, Palmer, and Cotswold, for whom I was beginning to have a certain grudging respect.

  We learned two important things from the autopsy. The first was the cause of death. She had died from hypovolemic shock. That explained the absence of lividity markers, the liver-colored spots that appear where gravity pools the blood postmortem. There was little blood in her body to pool. All of this would have been a mystery, with neither external wounds nor internal injuries to account for the bleeding, if we hadn't known that a vampire was probably responsible for the death.

  The second thing we learned during the postmortem was that the girl had had sexual congress shortly before dying. Judging from the degree of tearing, I surmised it was the first time she had been with a man. It did not appear to have been forcible rape, but it was impossible to know conclusively.

  Dr. Van Helsing and Lucian, who for some minutes had been watching from the doorway without trying to actually see anything, came back into the room as I flipped the sheet over the girl's body and pulled off the rubber gloves. Thomas stood patiently by, pen poised over his copybook.

  "This will be a new one for you, Thomas," I said with a grim smile. "List cause of death as—"

  "Undetermined," Palmer interrupted.

  "I was unaware that you are a physician as well as a policeman, Chief Inspector," I said, offended by his effrontery. For a policeman to overrule my conclusions in an autopsy—why, it was damned impertinent!

  "I am acting on Prime Minister Disraeli's express instructions," Palmer said.

  The look Thomas gave me! I owed him an explanation and a stiff drink, but it would have to wait until another time.

  "You have trumped my hand, Chief Inspector," I said. "List the cause of death as undetermined, Thomas. I can always amend the report later, if need be."

  "Do we know the girl's name, C.I. Palmer?" Thomas asked.

  "Maude Johnston—that's Johnston spelled with a T. She was a member of Lucian's household. A maid."

  "Good God, Lucian," I cried, "why did you put yourself through this?"

  "She was my servant. I am responsible for her."

  The wind had completely gone out of young Lucian's sails. Learning that Lady Margaret Burke had been one of
the vampire's victims had been bad enough, but now the monster had claimed one of his own servants as prey.

  "Do you know whether she had a beau, Captain Lucian?" Palmer asked, regarding him with unpleasant closeness. Indeed, I realized we were all staring at Lucian. We were all thinking the same thing: Had he been Maude's lover? I would have had her in bed in a pistol shot if she'd been in my household. Lucian's views, however, had been touched by the wretched rectitude that characterized the later decades of Queen Victoria's reign. For some strange reason, he thought seducing his servants was somehow beneath him, the poor deluded man.

  "Not that I know of, although I suppose it's likely, considering how attractive she is—or was." Lucian began to look green again, but he drew in a deep breath and pulled himself together. "I confess that I pay little attention to my servants' private lives. It does not concern me."

  "Miss Johnston had intercourse shortly before her death," Palmer said, his tone unforgivably blunt. "When a girl loses her virginity and then turns up dead shortly thereafter, the man she has been with usually knows something about the matter."

  "I honestly have no idea who the girl was with. The vampire, I presume."

  "Vampire?" Thomas said, looking at me with a combination of amazement and disbelief.

  "The girl was killed by a vampire," Dr. Van Helsing said.

  "I would appreciate it if you refrain from public speculation," Palmer said in a warning voice.

  "It is not speculation, Chief Inspector," the rumpled little Hungarian said. "She was killed by a vampire."

  "Not officially," Palmer said, squaring his shoulders as if for a fight.

  "What is this all about, Dr. Blackley?" Thomas asked, momentarily forgetting his place.

  "I am afraid none of us are at liberty to discuss the matter further," Palmer said.

  "I will discuss what I want, when I want, with whom I want," Professor Cotswold said, standing up to the policeman. I would not have wanted to tangle with Palmer, but in a fair fight I would have been inclined to give the gangling American odds.

  "Van Helsing claims a vampire killed this girl and several others," Cotswold said. "It's complete hogwash. There is no such thing as a vampire. There's a rational explanation. Given time, we'll find it."

  "A vampire, Dr. Blackley?" Thomas whispered to me, though in the tiled room everybody heard. "Is that even remotely possible?"

  "Good God, man, you've just seen the evidence with your own eyes!" Lucian cried. "We all have."

  "There is one last duty to perform before we leave," Dr. Van Helsing said, getting down on one knee to rummage in a carpetbag that had seen better days. He stood up with a wooden stake in one hand and a maul in the other. "We must ensure she does not rise from the dead."

  "You can't be serious," I said. "We put things back in the general vicinity of where they belong and stitched her back together, but her chest and abdomen are a bag of loose guts and organs. This woman has for all practical purposes been internally dismembered."

  "Even so, we must not take the chance. I have seen entire provinces laid waste by the vampire."

  "The Prime Minister has given Dr. Van Helsing total authority in these matters," Palmer said in a barking voice.

  Dr. Van Helsing drew back the sheet. The girl's bare breasts were crossed with ugly stitches running like a railroad track toward each shoulder. He positioned the spike above where her heart would have been and began to raise the maul. The wooden stake shook a little in his left hand as he held it against the breast. I could smell brandy on his breath. Under the circumstances, I could hardly blame him. I could have used a stiff drink myself.

  When the double-hinged door began to swing, I did not have to look to know Lucian was fleeing this final outrage against his poor servant. I kept my eyes on Maude Johnston's face, watching for evidence of supernatural life the instant Dr. Van Helsing hammered the crude wooden spike into this newborn child of the nosferatu.

  * * *

  8

  The Exhumations

  WE ASSEMBLED THE next day in a private dining room at Bart ley's Hotel. Lord Shaftbury stood us all to bracing glasses of whiskey, except Cotswold, who expressed the absurd opinion that it was unhealthy to drink alcohol at so early an hour. Americans, I have learned, are filled with all kinds of foolish notions.

  With the help of C.I. Palmer, Dr. Van Helsing had outlined our campaign. He had drawn up a list of cemeteries where the bodies of the vampires were interred. Palmer had already sent notice to the sextons, instructing them to keep everybody out of the way as we conducted our secret inquiries. A squad of four young bobbies with thick arms and strong backs stood by to do the actual labor.

  Cotswold was in ill humor that morning—all the more reason he should have knocked back a stiff drink to buck himself up for the work ahead. He sat staring morosely into his coffee cup, saying nothing until Dr. Van Helsing began to brief us on the operation.

  "We must inspect the bodies for evidence of vampiric activity," Dr. Van Helsing said, "and take the steps that are necessary to ensure that the undead do not rise from the grave, going forth into the night to claim more victims."

  "And if we find no evidence of so-called vampiric activity in the corpses," Professor Cotswold said, "then can we stop chasing chimera and get down to the serious work of learning what it was that really killed these women?"

  "We have already gotten down to serious work," Lord Shaftbury said brusquely over the top of his glass. "The facts speak for themselves, Professor Cotswold."

  Cotswold caught my attention and gave me a look. For some reason, he seemed to regard me as the only other sane person in our party. No doubt this was because I was a physician. People think doctors are wiser and saner than other people, which is utter bilge. We're no smarter than other people and often we're a good deal crazier. I have yet to meet a banker or shopkeeper who thinks he is God, a delusion that is all too common among us physicians.

  We left Bartley's in separate carriages to avoid attracting attention. We began with Mary O'Connor, the seamstress and part-time whore killed during the vampire's New Year's spree. She was buried in the Catholic cemetery on Whitechapel Road, where mainly Irish from the East End are laid to rest. The cemetery was small and poorly kept. Many of the headstones had been imperfectly set and leaned in one direction or the other, Celtic crosses stuck in the ground at odd angles as if they'd been as drunk as their owners when they were put in the ground. Life can be small and harsh, but to end up in such a shabby spot seemed especially unfortunate to me. There should be some dignity in death, if nowhere else.

  The four policemen set to work at the dirt with pickaxes. It did not seem possible they could work the frozen earth, but it was still unsettled enough from the burial a week earlier to turn. The dirt came out of the ground in frozen clumps the men heaped up like a pile of coal. The rest of us stood around the hole, stamping our feet and slapping our shoulders to keep warm. I had a silver flask filled with cognac in my pocket, but I wanted to save it until I really needed it.

  Mary O'Connor wasn't buried deep. The men were only down four feet when they started scraping the coffin. I made a mental note to report the sexton to the civil authorities. It was difficult enough keeping disease in check in overcrowded London without burying the poor in shallow graves. It hadn't been so many years since an outbreak of typhus was traced to a similar cemetery that had been so monstrously overused that decaying limbs would jut up out of the soil after a heavy rain, pools of the most foul kind of corruption collecting in the low spots.

  The coffin was a cheap pine box in the usual shape, broad in the shoulder, pinched at the head and feet. The policemen worked the foot end loose and hoisted the coffin out of the ground with a grunt, dropping it unceremoniously on the frozen turf.

  "You can see the coffin remains sealed, Dr. Van Helsing," Cotswold said with evident satisfaction. "Unless vampires are magicians, Miss O'Connor remains within her coffin, as one would expect of a dead person."

  'There is an
incubation period, Professor. Once that period has eclipsed, she will rise from the grave and go in search of the people to satisfy her unnatural cravings for the blood of a living human being."

  "Open her up, boys," Palmer ordered.

  The policemen glanced nervously at one another but set about it, probably more terrified of the Chief Inspector than they were of any vampire. One of the men took a pry bar out of a burlap sack of tools they'd brought. He inserted the bar between the walls and roof of the coffin, tapping it in with the heel of his gloved hand. This was accomplished easily, for the coffin was very poorly joined. I jumped a little as a shriek split the air, thinking it the vampire crying out in horror of the sunlight, dim as it was on that overcast day. However, it was only the sound of nails protesting being dragged from their seats.

  The body had suffered little deterioration during the short time it had been in the ground. I knew the temperature made it likely that the more recent victims we examined would be relatively well-preserved. This would frustrate Cotswold, who wanted nothing more than to see rotting corpses, yet I said a silent prayer of thanks for it. Anyone who has ever had to examine a decomposing body knows it is one of the more singularly unpleasant tasks imaginable.

  Mary O'Connor's face was lifeless gray and a bit puffy, as if the wake had been in an overheated room. While she was not an especially attractive woman, one could imagine how, with the artful application of rouge, she would have been rather fetching, especially in an alley dimly lit with flickering gaslights. Her glory was her hair. Mary O'Connor had a thick head of hair of the sort that would have driven a man mad with desire to see falling down about her naked shoulders. She wore a green velvet dress, no doubt her finest, the "working" dress she wore out whoring. I tried to remember if I had ever seen her in my visits to the sporting houses, but I could summon no recollection of her. She wouldn't have been in any of the nicer houses, of course, but I did not always go to the nicer houses. I have always had a taste for the common trade, but that is a subject left for another time.