The Contessa caught me gaping at her and gave me a smile that made my knees weak.
I realized then that I had utterly failed to appreciate the extent to which decadence had eaten into British society, like worms drilling into fine old walnut paneling and oak posts, disfiguring and weakening a house until it is on the verge of collapse. And Shaftbury had built his reputation as a crusader against prostitution, yet openly consorted with London's leading madam. It was impossible to imagine a high political figure in the United States frolicking shamelessly with ladies of the night.
"Woolf is a flash girl off the streets?" the Contessa asked with a slight lifting of the lip. "You know I won't have trash working here, monsieur."
"But of course not."
"You are very welcome to inspect the premises and fully avail yourselves of our services. And if there is anything I can do for you personally, Professor Cotswold…"
"Perhaps some other evening," Blackley said. With a bow of the head, he grasped me firmly by the elbow and squired me into a salon off the main hall. I am embarrassed to admit it, but if Blackley hadn't been there, I would have been sorely tempted to take the French fox up on her offer.
We sat down on a divan in a salon. A liveried servant delivered us two whiskeys, either responding to some signal from the physician or out of habit.
"The look on your face," Blackley said with a shake of his head.
"Did the others know about the Contessa—at the ball, I mean?"
"You are green as the grass, old boy! Of course they knew. The proper women won't speak to the Contessa, of course, but the men all do. And she was hardly the only mistress or concubine at the party. I must say, Cotswold, you are the naive one."
"I guess I am."
"This is not Boston, you know. London is not full of bluenoses, though we put on a damn fair show of it to suit old Queen Vicky. I expect all that will change when Bertie is king."
A young woman opened a door across the salon, giving me a brief glimpse inside. Her customer, a portly man with gray hair and beard, swung naked from the ceiling, trussed up in some depraved contrivance of a leather harness. Beneath him was a second woman, dressed only in a pair of black stockings, spanking him with a bamboo cane.
Blackley poked me with his elbow. "Something for every taste," he said with a wicked grin.
"This isn't Boston," I said. "It isn't Cheyenne. It isn't even New Orleans."
"Then they are especially depraved in New Orleans?" he asked with enthusiasm.
"Especially."
"I shall have to visit New Orleans one day," Blackley said, and threw back his whiskey.
Not finding Kate Woolf at the Hellfire Club, and braced by our whiskeys, we made our way into the slums. The streets narrowed as we progressed into the older, medieval part of the city. The bricks and stonework on the buildings had long since turned black with soot. Years of neglect had denigrated the facades, though signs of former glory could be seen in certain architectural fancies that had managed to resist centuries of dereliction.
The gaslights were more distantly spaced in the East End.
At times the lamp behind us disappeared completely before the next flickering light came dimly into view, making it difficult to walk on the irregularly paved cobblestones. There was a certain lack of logic to scrimping on streetlights where crime was rampant. Blackley informed me there was no city government in London, at least not in the sense that there is in the United States. Important services are provided by parish councils, which tend to be no richer than the neighborhood they govern. Even when money is available for improvements, and corruption does not siphon it off into politicians' pockets, the difficulty of negotiating agreements and plans between parishes makes it all but impossible to coordinate municipal improvements on any scale.
When we turned down a particularly dark stretch of street—reeking with the smell of sewage and rotting garbage—my sense of danger, already in a state of alert, pricked up. There were scores of places on such a street where ruffians could hide to waylay the hapless passerby. Kate Woolf and other supposed vampires were less of a concern than the sort of thugs that make it unsafe to walk through bad neighborhoods at night. As if summoned from my thoughts, five silhouettes emerged from the shadows.
" 'Ello there, governor," said the middle figure, the largest of the band. "I wonder if either of you fine gents could spare a shilling or two?"
Without waiting for an answer, they stepped forward as one, their intent obvious in their postures.
Before I could take my hands from my coat pockets, I heard beside me a familiar enough sound, though I don't think I had heard it since I mustered out of the army: the sibilant hiss of a steel blade being unsheathed. In my peripheral vision—I did not want to take my eyes off the bandits—I saw Dr. Blackley draw a blade from where it had lain hidden within his cane. What small bit of light there was in the street reflected on the rapier blade. The shadows retreated several steps, turned, and broke into a run.
"That's a rather handy tool, Blackley," I said.
Blackley explained that he was frequently compelled to visit his patients at night, and that London, despite appearances, was rife with crime. The shriek of a police whistle interrupted Blackley's disquisition.
"Come on," I cried, and we began to run toward the sound. The signal became louder as we rounded the corner, insistent to the point of panic. Whoever it was needed help and needed it urgently. We hurried to the extent that we overshot our mark, now hearing the whistle behind us.
We turned around and found the place just as the whistle's frantic shriek stopped with abrupt suddenness.
Cloaked in darkness and ominous silence, we found ourselves peering into the dark recess between two one-story buildings. The building on the left was brick, its opposite stone. A third floor had been added between the two, linking them and creating a covered interior courtyard open to the street. A collection of handcarts—the sort merchants used to pedal their wares in the streets of London—were stored in the courtyard, pushed up on their ends, piled one against the other to conserve space. After a moment of looking, I found in the darkness the distinctive rectangle of deeper darkness that indicated a door to the building's interior. The irregular shape on the ground before the door looked as if it might be a body.
Blackley had his police whistle clamped in his teeth, and he blew several ear-splitting blasts to signal the forces to rally to our position.
"Come on," I said, and moved cautiously forward, scanning the shadows left and right for movement or an indication of an assailant.
The crumpled form was indeed a body—a man of perhaps sixty, bald, thin, with a walrus mustache above a mouth frozen open in the horror of his final moments. The cause of death was evident. His neck had been savagely torn open, as if by a grizzly bear's claw, his thin scarf torn to shreds. Dark liquid flowed freely from the wound. Unlike the others, this victim had not been drained of his blood.
The policeman! I thought with a start, looking up from this unfortunate man's body. It was easy enough to deduce what had happened. One of our policemen searching the neighborhood, either in uniform or plainclothes, had interrupted the killer and sounded the alarm, preventing the fiend from finishing the job of emptying the corpse of its blood. But the policeman was nowhere to be found—a bad sign.
"In there," I whispered, pointing inside. A door standing open in that part of London was in itself a cry of suspicion.
"Shouldn't we wait for the others?" Blackley whispered back.
"Whoever signaled us here with his whistle may need help," I said.
Blackley turned away from me and rushed toward the street. I confess my initial reaction was to think the worst of him, but after blowing three more blasts on his police whistle, he was back at my side.
Stepping over the body, we moved into the building, trying to make as little noise as possible. We found ourselves in a grocer's warehouse, the air a rich mixture of apples, spices, and dust. A light could be seen at the
far end of the room, a dim, flickering glow coming from behind an impromptu wall of stacked flour barrels.
We found the policeman on his side, his head on his outstretched arm, as if he were reaching for the helmet lying a few inches from his hand.
Blackley picked up the candle and moved it back and forth in front of the policeman's staring eyes. His pupils did not respond to the light. He was dead.
Blackley rolled him onto his back, revealing, on the opposite side of his neck, a pair of ragged, gaping wounds an inch or more in diameter, each encircled with an angry ring of discolored flesh. Either the policeman had struggled against his assailant, or the killer had shaken him, the way a dog will shake a rabbit in its jaws. Like the victim outside, the policeman had been incompletely drained. A steady trickle of blood oozed from the fresh wounds, soaking into his woolen tunic.
"Where's his partner?" I whispered.
C.I. Palmer had been adamant that we search for Kate Woolf in pairs. The dead policeman must have a partner nearby, someone who was perhaps being killed as we crouched beside the corpse—an idea that gripped us both at the same moment. We stood and turned so quickly that the candle in Blackley's hand sputtered and nearly went out. It is fortunate the flame managed to stay alive—it is the only reason I am alive.
The instant we turned around, we saw the vampire—for there is no longer any doubt that there are vampires, even if we are far from understanding exactly what these creatures are.
She was standing just within the weak circle of light given off by the candle. Having never seen Kate Woolf, I had no way of knowing it was her. (It was, I later learned.) She was hardly larger than a child—not quite five feet tall, I should think, slight of build, narrow of shoulder, the product of generations of poor nutrition and breeding. Her face was smeared with blood that ran down her neck and soaked into the bodice of her dress. Her long red hair had fallen down around her face; several strands were heavy with blood. But the worst to behold were her eyes: They glittered with a cold, predatory malice I had seen once before—a look that would have been the death of me had I not fired a lucky shot that caught the charging grizzly bear right between the eyes.
I don't know about Blackley, but the vampire so captured my attention that it was only after taking in everything about her that I even noticed the man beside her. He was not a vampire—that much was evident from the way he tried to hold his body away from her, though she had one hand on his arm, the other being stretched up and around him, clamping his mouth so he could not cry out in fear or warning.
It was the Reverend Clarkson. The brass police whistle he had used to summon us dangled by its chain from his right hand.
I surmised that the priest and policeman had surprised the vampire in the act of killing the grocer just outside his warehouse. The policeman had bravely pursued her into the warehouse, only to come to a bad end. When he didn't return, Reverend Clarkson had even more bravely gone inside to try to help.
"Let him go," I said.
The vampire began to laugh.
"Pull yourself free," I urged.
The old priest struggled briefly, but he was as good as caught in a vise. The reports of the vampire's extraordinary strength were, it seemed, true.
"Why didn't she flee when she had the chance?" Blackley asked. The smile on her face answered the question: She had waited for us.
"Aye, lads, what you both are thinking is exactly what is going to happen," she said. "I smelled you coming down the street and didn't want you to miss the fun. I am going to drain you both bone-dry. But first you will watch Reverend Clarkson die."
I thought she started to choke the priest. His face contorted, and he grabbed at his collar with his free hand, as if unable to get his breath. At the same time, he seemed to fall against the vampire, his knees buckling, so that she had to let go of his mouth and hold his slackening body in her arms.
"Bloody hell!" she shrieked, letting go. The priest fell in a heap at her feet.
"He's having a fit or a stroke," Blackley said, sounding shaken, as he put the candle on a crate.
I half expected the physician to go to Clarkson's aid, but instead he drew the sword from his cane for the second time that evening—an altogether wiser course, given the situation. The vampire's eyes narrowed, and she drew back her lips in an awful leer that revealed a wickedly curving set of narrow fangs ideally adapted to puncturing the human jugular vein.
The vampire hissed as she flew at Blackley, her fingers tearing the air like the talons of an enraged eagle. Blackley took half a step forward to meet her and plunged his blade into her stomach, driving it forward until the point, wet with blood, came out her back and the silver handle stopped against her abdomen.
The vampire staggered backward, staring in horror at the darker, wetter stain radiating from where the blade was plunged in her already-blood-soaked dress. The expression on her face was one with which I was familiar from wartime. Somehow, the fact that you are going to die someday never really occurs to you until the moment arrives. It was no different for me. I went through many battles with soldiers dropping around me like flies, never believing it could happen to me.
"I've killed the vampire," Blackley said thickly.
She was still standing, but only just, leaning against a wooden post to keep on her feet. She grabbed the silver handle, which was shaped like a wolf's head, with both hands, and began to draw the blade slowly out of her belly. I could not imagine what kind of strength could enable her to withstand the excruciating pain. And yet, with a grimace distorting her face, she completed the extraction and dropped the slippery blade with a brittle clatter against the stone floor.
Now she will go down, I thought. I had seen men hemorrhage after a blade or shard of steel was pulled from the belly, releasing a torrent of blood.
But the vampire didn't go down.
She stood there almost doubled over against the post, slowly lifting her eyes until they met ours—and she was smiling.
For a moment, Blackley and I stood there in stunned fascination, like deer caught in the glare of a poacher's lantern.
She stood up straight, smoothing the wrinkles from her blood-sodden dress.
"I will give you a quick death. Professor Cotswold," she said. "You will get off easily, so that I might make Dr. Blackley suffer long and horribly."
How did she know our names? And how had she known Clarkson's? It was only then that I realized the strange incongruity of telling us that we were going to die, but only after watching her kill Reverend Clarkson. Did the vampire's powers include the ability to look into our minds and learn the secrets of our thoughts? The total horror of that possibility came flooding into me—we were facing a monster whose strength and infernal powers we had not begun to understand. Confronted, the creature seemed only to effortlessly metamorphose in startling, unexpected ways. The vampire was indeed very much like Dodgson's Jabberwock—its incomprehensible versatility and power seemed to defy logic and understanding.
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The Jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
The vampire's smile became an awful leer. The fangs, which had disappeared when Blackley stabbed her—probably retracted into cavities in the upper jaw—were again in evidence, superior and anterior to the canines.
She was moving toward Blackley as I pulled the revolver from within my coat and shot her in the chest—five times. Each bullet made her body jerk, but slowed her progress toward Blackley only slightly. I tried to put the last shot squarely between her eyes, but she unexpectedly changed course and lunged at me. The slug hit her in the upper skull over her left eye, blasting away part of her head.
I tried to twist away, but I could not escape. Her hands clutched at me, but there was no strength in her grasp. She slid toward the floor, smearing the left arm of my coat with blood and brain tissues. She lay with her face against my boot, motionless. I watched in mute fascination as the supernumerary fangs slowly retracted into her jaw.
"
Good heavens, man, are you all right?"
By way of answering Blackley, I heard myself say: "You'd better see if there is anything you can do for Reverend Clarkson."
* * *
17
Faust's Bargain
JANUARY14, 1880 (7:00 a.m.) Resuming my narrative where I left off in the early morning hours, too exhausted to continue: As Blackley attended to the Reverend Clarkson, I knelt beside the vampire to see what a cursory examination would reveal about the creature and its superhuman abilities. What bizarre adaptations to the human physiology could account for its ability to withstand trauma that would have killed an ordinary member of our species?
I gingerly touched her upper lip. The skin was warm, even feverish. I pushed the lip back. The teeth had retracted completely into the jaw through slits in the gums. I was pressing my finger against the moist tissue, trying to feel for the underlying cavity, when I felt breath against my hand.
I gasped and reflexively pulled my hand away.
"She's alive!"
"Impossible," Blackley said. "You probably felt the natural relaxation of the muscles in the chest and diaphragm."
I nearly said something about needing to drive a wooden stake through the vampire's heart, but my good sense—or what I took for it—returned in time to stop me.
"How is Clarkson?"
Before Blackley could answer, we heard the scream of whistles from outside.
"It's all right," I cried out. "Come in. We need help."
A pair of wary-looking constables appeared in the doorway, breathing heavily.
"There's nothing to fear, men. Professor Cotswold has killed the vampire."
"And Reverend Clarkson?" I asked again.
"It's his heart, I'm afraid. Coronary thrombosis. Surely you noticed how bad his color has been."
"Is he going to…"
"I don't know. It depends on the damage to the heart. Time will tell."
The London Vampire Panic Page 11
