The London Vampire Panic

by Michael Romkey

  "Mr. Cotswold is a paleontologist. He was invited to address the Royal Society."

  Dodgson nodded, duly impressed.

  "Any luck with the v-v-v—" He took a gulp of air. "—v-vampire, Blackley?"

  "One woman he killed has risen from the grave. We presume she has become a vampire."

  "Personally, I presume nothing of the sort," I said shortly. "Is it really a good idea to discuss committee business publicly, Blackley?"

  "You needn't worry about Dodgson. He's proven himself enormously helpful to the government. Codes, you know. He says they're all a matter of mathematics. He has the Prime Minister's confidence."

  "You're too k-k-kind. I've always been good at p-p-puzzles. You do not b-b-b-believe in the vampire, Professor?"

  "Not by what I've seen."

  "Then wh-wh-wh-what is the explanation? Is it a h-hoax?"

  "I don't know. The murders are real enough. There may be something unusual going on here, but it is too early to say what. The growing atmosphere of hysteria isn't making it any easier to sort out the facts."

  "You have attended two autopsies," Blackley said. "You saw how the women bled to death without the slightest evidence of a wound."

  "You are trying to use a conclusion to explain the evidence, when you would do better to use the evidence to arrive at a conclusion," I countered. "We are no closer to a scientific explanation than when we started. Perhaps the agent responsible for these deaths is not a vampire, but infection by an unknown tropical virus, some heretofore unidentified pathology that causes the blood to be absorbed by the tissues."

  "You saw how pale their organs were," Blackley said. "There was no blood in the tissue."

  "Then perhaps the virus itself consumed the blood. We're like the proverbial blind men trying to describe an elephant.

  We're grabbing at parts of the creature and mistaking them for the beast in its entirety."

  "It is rather like your Jabberwock, Dodgson," Blackley said.

  I had to ask what a Jabberwock was, since I apparently was the only one of the three of us in the dark on the subject.

  "Dodgson's hobby is writing children's books. Maybe you've read the Alice books. They're very popular. He publishes under his pen name, Lewis Carroll, since it would hardly do for a lecturer at Oxford to write children's stories."

  I said that as a bachelor, I didn't read a great many children's books.

  "Oh, but Dodgson's books are quite marvelous combinations of fantasy, reality, satire, and pure nonsense, and as enjoyable for adults as they are for children," Blackley said. "One of his creatures is a monster called a Jabberwock, which one can't get a picture of no matter how hard one tries. Be a good chap, Dodgson, and recite a bit of it."

  Dodgson swallowed dryly and squeezed his eyes shut. I doubted he had it in him, but from within his private world he began to recite, his voice deeper and more assured than the one he used in ordinary speech, and without the stammering.

  " 'Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

  The Jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

  Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

  The frumious Bandersnatch!'

  He took his vorpal sword in hand

  Long time the maxome foe he sought—

  So rested he by the Tumtum tree.

  And stood awhile in thought.

  And, as in uffish thought he stood,

  The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

  Came wiffling through the tulgey wood,

  And burbled as it came!

  One, two! One, two! And through and through

  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

  He left it dead, and with its head

  He went galumphing back."

  Dodgson opened his eyes, quite pleased with himself. Blackley was inexplicably beaming, as if Dodgson's nonsense had rendered some abstruse and difficult theorem simple and understandable. The British are completely mad, I thought, as Dodgson tottered off in triumph.

  "I wonder what it is like to sit through one of his lectures," I muttered.

  "I understand they are an ordeal. Dodgson is an ordained canon, but so far as I know, he has never preached a sermon."

  "Proof there is a God," I said.

  The music ended and we found ourselves facing Lady Olivia Moore, who had been waltzing with Captain Lucian. She was not dressed to the teeth, like the Contessa Saint-Simon, but in a restrained and elegant manner. Her blue silk gown modestly covered her bosom and arms. Her hair was held up with lacquered combs. The only other adornment she wore was a pearl choker. She was younger and more visibly innocent than most of the others at the ball, a young Diane surrounded by jades, roués, and sodomites—or as they are collectively known, the British aristocracy.

  Blackley asked Lady Olivia for the honor of a dance.

  "If I'm not mistaken, you promised Lady Jones you'd dance with her," I said, lightly touching Blackley's shoulder. It was a lie—though innocent enough. The aristocracy was beginning to rub off on me.

  "I had forgotten," Blackley said, smiling at me.

  "If you'll allow me the honor," I said as I interposed myself between Blackley and Lady Olivia as the music began.

  I felt an inexplicable weightlessness as she placed her hand upon my shoulder, as if I were a nimble sailboat setting up to a rising breeze. Lady Jones—I wished I'd thought of something better, but for all I knew there actually was a Lady Jones at Lord Shaftbury's ball. We joined the pairs of dancers swirling across the floor.

  By the end of that dance, I still didn't believe in vampires. I had, however, forgotten about my intention to resign from the committee and return to America.

  * * *

  14

  Specimens

  JANUARY 12, 1880. Today I went to study the vampire bats at the Zoological Society of London in Regent's Park.

  The bat is a fascinating subject. The only mammals that truly fly, an evolutionary left turn, a weird melding of the mammalian and avian. Their ability to navigate in the dark is noteworthy, listening to their cries echoing against their surroundings—a method of aural "seeing" that is as unique as their capability for flight. The adaptation suits them for habitation in caves, where they sleep unmolested by predators during the day. Of course, bats fulfill an important housekeeping function in nature, eating prodigious numbers of mosquitoes and other insects.

  Of the many species, only one—the vampire bat—is a parasite. And yet it is so wonderfully adapted that I cannot help but admire how well-suited it is to its niche in the natural world.

  The specimen I studied at the Zoological Society was a common vampire bat—the Desmodus rotundus, family Phyllostomidae, order Chiropetra, class Mammalia. Vampire bats are small. This specimen, collected in the tropical lowlands of Central America, was reddish-brown in color, the tips of its wings white. It weighed in at only 1.8 ounces and measured 3.2 inches, but it needed to drink half its weight in blood each night to power its metabolism. The bat had keen eyesight and was as agile on the ground as in the air, able to run and jump with its well-developed rear legs.

  Dr. Poynter, the Society's bat expert, said they had tried to feed the creature beef blood in a bowl, but that the vampire required fresh blood to thrive. I shall have to go back to the Society some night to observe the feeding ritual. A pig is kept in the bat's cage at night. The bat lands or creeps unnoticed onto the sleeping animal. It gently trims away the pig's hair, then licks the skin to soften it before opening a wound with its razor-sharp teeth. The bat doesn't suck blood from its prey but rather laps it as it flows from the wound. An anticoagulant agent in the bat's saliva, as yet unidentified, keeps the blood flowing until the bat has become gorged.

  I cradled the bat in my gloved hands. Its face was amazingly human, until it opened its mouth and hissed at me. Its teeth were tiny porcelain needles.

  Do vampire bats hunt in packs? Poynter said it had never been reported. They roost in groups of a dozen or fewer, one male, the rest females. However, colonies with as many as
two thousand bats have been reported, but that seems to be the exception.

  I asked if the vampire bats were known to have attacked humans.

  Poynter said he had heard accounts of natives sleeping out of doors getting bit on the toe or finger, but the main danger was not the bat itself but infection in the wound and rabies. The vampire bat is tropical, Poynter reminded me, as if I suspected his little pet might be responsible for the crimes the committee was investigating; it wouldn't last long if it escaped the Society's hothouse.

  I said I expected not.

  Poynter got around to the subject I knew he was thinking about. "You don't believe any of this nonsense about a vampire killing women in London, do you?"

  "Of course not," I replied.

  7:00 p.m. Blackley is in my sitting room, agitated nearly to the point of dementia. There's been another murder. And a vampire has been captured. With any luck this will help bring this foolishness to an end. Fortunately, my belated package from New York has arrived. Better late than never, although I do not know if conditions will allow its use.

  Later. At last we start to make some progress in this disturbing matter, though the truth remains as elusive as ever.

  Blackley gave me the details as we hurried down the stairs. A young girl in the slums had just been dragged off the street and drained of her blood. The driver stared at us with wide eyes as we clamored into the hackney. He whipped the horse and it started off at a brisk trot. When Blackley informed me we were on our way to Scotland Yard to interview the vampire, I demanded that the driver stop. The driver looked back at me as if I were mad, clapping one hand on his bowler hat, which the sudden stop had jarred to an odd angle. People in the street were staring at us, pointing, as if they knew our business—and no doubt they did.

  "Take us to Whitechapel," I ordered. The driver looked helplessly at Blackley for confirmation.

  "The vampire isn't going anywhere," I said, "but the physical evidence will quickly degrade. As men of science, our first duty is to ensure that specimens are properly collected and catalogued. There isn't a moment to lose. If what I have been told is true, the wound is disappearing even as we sit here debating the proposition."

  I expected an argument from Blackley, knowing how much he wanted to see the "vampire" with his own eyes, but he surprised me by agreeing.

  The driver turned the hack around in the street, and with a crack of his whip we headed in the opposite direction at a fast clip. The well-mannered streets of London changed, block after block, into as vile a slum as can be found anywhere in the western world. The murder had occurred on Fulson Street, a place of almost unimaginable squalor. Raw sewage ran in the gutters. The big houses overawing the narrow street on either side probably had been built for wealthy traders. The original buildings had been divided and divided again into smaller and cheaper residences, and added onto wherever possible to create more usable space, the air dense with the smoke of coal fires. These were the rookeries, as the worst slums were known, for the individual apartments were little more than squalid nests. Here, the poor were packed like rabbits in an overpopulated warren, living one on top of the next in the most unhygienic of conditions, subject to extremes of crime and disease.

  We approached a widening in the street, a square with a public spigot. A group of women were gathered there, filling water jugs. They stood closely, like cattle when wolves are near. The stone basin was worn low in the center where countless feet had been propped. The runoff feeding the gutters had carved a little depression in the street.

  The authorities were gathered in the next block, their lanterns lighting up the dim street, which was otherwise illuminated only by the flicker of irregularly spaced gaslights. There was a police ambulance, its rear door standing open, awaiting the body. One policeman sat on the stoop, his arm in a sling, talking to Chief Inspector Palmer, who was scribbling in his notebook.

  As we alighted, a police van pulled up behind us, deploying another dozen constables who took up positions in front of the house, each armed with a club. The crowd of onlookers restricted to the opposite side of the street had a distinctly angry character.

  I nodded at Palmer and went past him up the stairs. Blackley following.

  The body of a young girl lay on the floor, covered with a white sheet. A quick glance took in the scene in its entirety. The one-room flat provided the minimum creature comforts, the furnishings consisting of a bed, a dresser, and a single chair. A small stove was vented through the wall. There was no fire in the grate and no coal in the battered scuttle. The light came from a kerosene lamp on the dresser, the ceiling above it blackened with soot. On the floor by the bed was a broken china teacup. It did not seem to belong, a lost bit of finery clashing with the surrounding poverty.

  I got down on one knee and drew back the sheet from the girl's face. It was unnaturally pale even in death. She had been drained of her blood, it seemed. The set of wounds were over the jugular. I opened my valise and removed the ruler. There was an inch and a quarter separation between the wounds. The wounds themselves were barely a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, with a pronounced red swelling around their circumference.

  "They're almost what one would expect to see from a hypodermic needle," I said to Blackley.

  "That's because they are quickly healing, Cotswold," Blackley said, his breath puffing clouds in the frigid room.

  He was right. The twin cavities were knitting themselves together almost visibly. I examined them with my magnifying glass.

  "I've never witnessed anything like this."

  "Let me have a look," Blackley said, taking the glass from my hand.

  There were footsteps behind us.

  "How long has she been here, Palmer?" I asked, guessing it was the Chief Inspector who had joined us.

  "Nearly two hours."

  "I am going to take a small specimen." I glanced over my shoulder at the detective, who shrugged his approval. I pulled a scalpel and glass vial from the valise and carefully removed a half-inch strip of tissue surrounding and including the anterior of the two wounds. I put the specimen into the vial and sealed it with a rubber stopper. I asked Palmer to collect as many police lanterns as he could to illuminate the wound.

  Blackley and Palmer looked on with evident curiosity as I took my device out of its shipping box.

  "This is the prototype of a new invention a friend, George Eastman, is working on. It's called a 'Detective' camera, appropriately enough. Since it's handheld, you can use it unobtrusively, without setting up a tripod and all the usual apparatus."

  "You could use a camera like that to document crime scenes," C.I. Palmer said.

  "That's what I plan to do. It's not available to the general public yet, but I have little doubt these cameras will become quite popular once Eastman perfects the design. I've suggested he call his new company 'Kodiak,' after the Kodiak bear. Ursus arctos middenfoii is a noble beast, and less ill-tempered than Ursus arctos horribilis."

  I pulled the string to open the shutter on the lens.

  "Is there sufficient light?" Palmer asked.

  I confessed that I knew little about photography beyond the basic principles. The result of my efforts wouldn't be known until I exhausted the film in the "Detective" and shipped it back to Eastman for my photographs to be processed.

  As I moved the lights closer to make a second photograph, I asked the policeman to tell me what he knew about the murder.

  "The girl's name is Mary Katharine McGuinn. She had gotten hold of that teacup that's there by the bed, broken. Odds are she stole it. She was working her way up the street, trying to sell it, when she had the misfortune to happen into Kate Woolf. Kate is known to us—a prostitute and a petty thief. It seems Kate offered to buy the teacup but said she needed to get money from her room. She attacked the girl before they were even in the room. The girl cried out for help as she was bitten in the neck. When Constable Gordon arrived, he found Kate with her teeth still fastened onto the girl's neck. The door was wide o
pen. He tried to apprehend her, but she picked him up and bodily threw him out of her way. Kate's a small woman. You saw Gordon on your way in, seated on the stoop with his arm in a sling."

  "The vampire has supernatural strength," Blackley said.

  "It would seem so," Palmer agreed.

  "How many men did it take to subdue her?"

  "Actually, Dr. Blackley, it was three women from the neighborhood that brought her to bay. They had heard the commotion and followed Gordon to the room. They stood at the door holding the crosses they wear about their necks. It's an Irish Catholic neighborhood. Kate hid on the other side of the bed, as terrified of those crosses as the women were of her. We clapped Kate into irons and hauled her away. I can attest to her strength myself. The only way I got her into the wagon was to threaten to put holy water on her unless she behaved herself."

  "All as Van Helsing said," Blackley muttered, his faith in the Hungarian quack growing by the day.

  "Was there any evidence the crosses actually caused Kate Woolf any physical distress?"

  "All I know is she was afraid, Professor Cotswold."

  "Then all we know is that she fears these objects, not that they actually have supernatural power over her."

  "Oh, do let up on it, old boy."

  "I'm afraid I can't, Blackley. Don't you see how much of this is based on conjecture and circumstance? She could have heard the same stories about vampires that Van Helsing has been telling us."

  "The streets are thick with talk about vampires," C.I. Palmer said with emphasis. "I'm a little curious, gentlemen. Why did you two come here instead of the jail? I would have thought you'd want to examine the vampire."

  'The same reason you did," I answered. "I wanted to see the evidence as soon as possible, before it could degrade or become contaminated."

  Palmer gave me a small smile of appreciation. "That accomplished, we should join the others at the prison where they are holding the fiend," Palmer said. "Perhaps you gentlemen could be good enough to give me a ride."