I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye—a faint movement, as if the vampire had taken a shallow breath. I stood up and took a step backward. Was it as Blackley had said, that the body was settling into the quietude of death? I stared down at the female body, unable to take my eyes off it—in truth, afraid to take my eyes off it. I was aware of others coming into the warehouse, of murmuring voices crowding around us. I blinked against the lanterns, my eyes not accustomed to the light. Reverend Clarkson was lifted onto a stretcher, covered with a blanket, and carried out.
"Blackley, come over here for a moment, if you please."
He came, but without much enthusiasm. His instinctive caution about coming near the vampire was, I thought, especially appropriate.
"See if she is really dead."
"Your imagination is running away with you," he said, and squatted beside the body. He placed his fingers on the woman's throat to feel for a pulse. His mouth opened as if to make some remark, but he said nothing.
"She's alive," I said. "Look!"
I used the toe of my boot to indicate the cranial wound, no longer raw but covered with a strange milky tissue that appeared to have the consistency of a spider's web. There was a scalpel in Blackley's hands. I suppose he carried it in his jacket, as I have known other physicians to do. He lifted the wet fabric of the dress between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, carefully cutting it with the scalpel so he could pull back the material and examine the chest wound.
The hole was closed, as if it were an old wound in the process of mending.
"What in the name of the devil…" he said, his voice trailing off.
"Blackley!"
The physician looked up at Lord Shaftbury, who had come into the warehouse unnoticed. With him was Dr. Van Helsing. Apparently they had been together, a team, hunting for the vampire. Van Helsing had his filthy carpetbag of tools with him.
"She's alive," Blackley said, although he sounded as if he doubted his own words.
I felt a chill go up my spine. It wasn't the monster that put the scare into me so much as what it represented. I don't have any truck with the supernatural. Even at that sobering moment when we realized that almost nothing we could do to the vampire would kill her, I still did not think the supernatural played any role in explaining her powers. I didn't need thoughts of "the undead" to make my blood run cold. Whatever science explained the vampire was horrifying enough without involving ghosts and devils in the matter. Darwin had been almost presciently correct: A creature with superior powers of body and mind that preys upon the members of our species could be the real-life angel of the apocalypse. The body at our feet, I thought with an inward shudder, could be the harbinger of humankind's end.
"Is that Kate Woolf?" Shaftbury asked.
"That it is, sir," Palmer's voice boomed out, although I didn't see his face.
"Did you see her kill the man outside and the policeman?" Van Helsing asked. He gave me a curious look, as if something about the scene surprised him, as if the pieces of the night weren't fitting together to make a convincing whole.
"No, but she as much as admitted it," Blackley said. "She said she was going to kill Reverend Clarkson and then the two of us. I ran her through with the blade of my sword cane. She pulled it out and threw it away as if it hadn't bothered her any more than the bite of a gnat. And Cotswold here emptied a revolver into her. He had to blow half her head off to stop her. But she's not dead."
"Saints preserve us," a voice behind me said.
"Will she make it?" Shaftbury asked.
"It appears her body is beginning to heal," Blackley said. "Do you notice how the chest wound has already sealed itself? And this white tissue covering the cranial wound? I've never seen anything like it. It was fine as gossamer a few minutes ago. Now, it is almost as if someone has draped a cheesecloth over the exposed gray matter. I think she's going to survive."
"This is quite remarkable," Shaftbury said. "Monstrous, of course, yet remarkable."
Van Helsing threw down his carpetbag and began to frantically fumble with the clasp.
"What do you think you're doing?" Lord Shaftbury asked.
"I am going to drive a wooden stake through the vampire's heart while there is still time."
"You will do nothing of the sort," Shaftbury said. "The vampire will be taken to the Vicarage, where it will be put under special guard while it is examined and studied. The Prime Minister has already given the order, swayed by Professor Cotswold's eloquent argument."
An argument I almost wished I had never made! I think I would have preferred to throw science out the window to see whether a wooden stake would succeed where six lead bullets had failed. But I said nothing, frozen into inaction by the incalculable threat that rose up from the London night, its shadow darkening the entire world.
"We must do as Professor Cotswold suggested and study our patient to learn her strengths and vulnerabilities," Shaftbury said. "And her strengths—if only some of her strange, superhuman strengths could be transferred to our race, think of what it would mean for Britain!"
The slightly mad look in Shaftbury's eyes did not escape my attention—or Dr. Van Helsing's.
"Be careful what you wish for," Van Helsing warned. "You do not want to end up like Faust. One must never try to bargain with the Devil."
"That could never happen. Faust was German," Shaftbury said with a sharp laugh, amused at his own grim humor.
* * *
18
Experiments
JANUARY 15, 1880 (1:00 a.m.). What a bloody awful affair this has turned out to be! And God knows I had enough blood on my hands before this…
But enough self-pity, the most ignoble of emotions to commandeer one's intellect. The only escape for me is through work. And since there are no rocks for me to split open in search of fossils, I have no recourse but to pick up my pen and detail the most despicable of what has turned out to be a long series of despicable episodes.
I should never have let Darwin talk me into serving on the Special Committee.
I should never have come to London.
But here are the facts, the narrative, the accumulated detail of fear and violence that characterizes this enterprise. When our souls have grown sick with our clumsy, cruel, stumbling attempts to find the truth, we can take refuge in the easy harbor of what happened, recounting deeds that can, like the words of some poem, be taken to mean anything we want or nothing at all.
Feeling numb, the way I do when I haven't had enough sleep, and ragged and frayed, as if I had indulged in too much coffee, I went to join the others at the Vicarage the morning after our encounter with the vampire.
The remains of our committee gathered in the warden's office. Blackley looked more animated and alert than he had a right to, perhaps with the aid of some self-prescribed medication. Lord Shaftbury was impatient to gain access to the secrets behind the vampire's power to defy death and to read men's thoughts—indeed, to control them. Lucian and Palmer both looked grim.
Reverend Clarkson was, of course, absent. His condition was very grave, Blackley said.
Equally ominous was Dr. Van Helsing's mysterious absence. A policeman was sent around to Van Helsing's hotel, but there was no sign of the Hungarian. The policeman returned carrying Van Helsing's carpetbag, which Shaftbury accepted with distaste, as if he might contract a social disease from touching the portmanteau. We all regarded the carpetbag as a bad talisman. Van Helsing never went anywhere without it. Although no one said it out loud, we all feared the vampires had gotten hold of their nemesis. (I later overheard Palmer give orders to search the city for Van Helsing. No doubt his corpse will be found crumpled in some attic, his body drained of its blood. While I never overcame my instinctive suspicion of the Hungarian, I am sorry for the fate that most likely befell him.)
Shaftbury decreed that we would proceed with the examination.
We followed the warden down the dark, cramped passageway, the stone walls streaked with dampness. W
e passed through a series of doors, either steel-barred or solid oak ribbed in iron, each opened with one of the big metal keys on the warden's ring. Kate Woolf was incarcerated in a dungeon at the far end of the secret prison's deepest gallery. The room was roughly twenty feet by forty feet and divided almost in half with a wall of metal bars inset into the stone floor below and the masonry ceiling above. A dozen wooden chairs had been arranged for us on our side of the room. The only furnishings on the prisoner's side were a crude wooden cot in the middle of the space, with a bare mattress and a single blanket, and a battered bucket for a chamber pot.
The prisoner sat on the cot staring at the floor between her legs as we filed through the door. She wore the same clothing as when she was captured, the blouse and skirt stiff with dried and blackened blood. Even in the light of the flickering gas jets, it was evident her body had managed to heal most of the damage done to her skull. The slightly irregular arc to the cranium indicated the repair was either imperfect or as of yet incomplete. The skin over the head wound had a pinkish tinge, like the skin of a baby, and was covered with a downy growth of hair.
The warden said the vampire had been kept alone in her cell at the far end of an otherwise empty corridor. The jailers had not so much as looked in on her since we'd left her there the night before, mindful of Kate Woolf's previous escape. The guards had spent the night playing cards, as instructed, rotating at the prescribed interval, all without incident.
Woolf did not look up or give any indication she was aware of us.
Lord Shaftbury spoke first, calling out in his stentorian minister's voice, as if summoning her to the bar in court: "Kate Woolf."
She did not respond.
"Kate Woolf!"
She seemed about to speak, but instead a long strand of viscous drool spilled out of her mouth and fell toward the floor.
"I would hardly expect the brain to recover after such trauma," Blackley said.
"That will have little bearing on the tests Van Helsing outlined for us last night," Shaftbury said.
He held the carpetbag out to Palmer, who accepted it after the slightest hesitation.
"Open the cell."
One of the two guards who accompanied us—both hulking men who had the look of violence about them—inserted a heavy iron key into the door. They were to stand by with truncheons in case things got out of hand. Palmer went into the cell, followed at close hand by the guards. The rest of us trailed behind.
Up close, the vampire's head wound looked worse than it had from a distance. I could see her pulse beating against the pink skin. I wanted to press my fingers against the wound to see if the underlying structure was bone or the soft cartilagelike substance one finds in a baby's head. The physical examination, it seemed, would have to wait.
"The unholy undead are said to be unable to withstand the sight of a crucifix," Shaftbury said. "Let us begin there, Chief Inspector."
Palmer rooted around in Van Helsing's bag and came out with a crucifix. He held it by its chain and swung it back and forth in front of the vampire's eyes. She paid it no notice, not even when it was moved closer and closer until at last it rested against her forehead.
"She appears to be in a semicomatose state," Blackley said.
"Still, the crucifix should have some effect," Lucian added.
"Only if vampires are truly supernatural creatures," I said. "I have doubted that all along. Whatever it is that gives them their powers and their strange needs, I would wager it has more to do with science than superstition."
"Try the holy water," Shaftbury said, paying no heed to my words.
Palmer went into the bag and came out with a silver-clad flask of holy water Van Helsing had claimed came from a font in St. Peter's in Rome. The policeman unscrewed the cap and threw a splash in the vampire's face. She startled a little at this, but the reaction was no more than would be expected if you threw cold water in anybody's face. The caustic reaction Van Helsing had led us to expect—an agonizing searing, as if vitriol had been poured on naked flesh—didn't happen.
Palmer found a strand of garlic at the bottom of the carpetbag, which partly explained the bad odor it gave off. With the jailers standing at the ready with their truncheons, he draped it around Kate Woolf's shoulders. She continued to stare at the floor in front of her.
"This is extraordinary," Shaftbury said. "Could it be because she is unaware of what is happening to her?"
"If supernatural laws governing a vampire's existence make it unable to tolerate exposure to crosses, holy water, and garlic, why would mental awareness play any role?" I said. "If you are asleep and I hold a naming torch against your hand, will it not burn you?"
"An excellent point," Blackley said.
"Then what of the things Van Helsing told us about these creatures?"
"Folk tales," I answered, "uneducated and inadequate attempts to explain the mysterious unknown, not through observation and experimentation, but through recourse to fear and superstition."
"And yet you yourself now admit the existence of vampires."
"Yes, although I still have very little idea what these creatures are, besides possessed with unnatural strengths and the compulsion to feed off human blood. I certainly have seen nothing to make me believe vampires are the risen dead, that they sleep in coffins containing a few handfuls of the dirt of their native soil. Kate Woolf doesn't seem to feel the need to crawl into a coffin."
"But she does possess extraordinary powers," Shaftbury said in a frankly admiring tone. "These vampires have superhuman strength and the ability to withstand being stabbed and shot. They even seem to be able to reach into men's minds to read and control their thoughts."
"True enough," I agreed.
"And what of the idea that vampires live forever, unless a stake is driven through their hearts?"
"That is difficult to imagine, yet the subject of immortality is an interesting one. I do not believe any living creature governed by nature could be truly immortal, and yet a being with a body possessing such unusual capabilities for regeneration could live to a great age. Growing old is nothing more than the slow and progressive wearing out of the body. The back goes, the knees, the organs. Good nutrition, exercise, proper medical care, and luck can make the aging process occur more slowly in some people than in others, but it still happens. My guess—and it is only a guess—is that vampires age much more slowly. So perhaps they do live longer than ordinary human beings."
"For how long? One hundred years?" Shaftbury asked.
"Possibly much longer, at least in theory."
"Unlocking such a secret would be like discovering the fountain of youth," Shaftbury said.
"I'm not sure the world would be a better place if people lived forever," Lucian said.
"It certainly would be more crowded," Blackley said.
At this, Kate Woolf looked up through her tangle of matted hair and smiled.
"I will live forever," she said triumphantly.
Only by grabbing the jailers' arms did Shaftbury manage to keep them from coming down on the vampire's head with their truncheons.
"This is most incredible," Blackley said. Then, to Woolf: "Can you hear and understand me?"
"Clear as a bell, governor, although I have a bit of a headache, courtesy of Professor Cotswold."
She gave me a look but continued to smile. I guessed my prospects would be dim if Kate Woolf succeeded in escaping from the Vicarage a second time. I had the most uncomfortable feeling she was inside my head with me, listening to my thoughts. At last I broke her stare and looked away to escape the sensation.
"I have a few questions to pose, Miss Woolf," Palmer said. "Things will go much better for you if you choose to answer properly and politely."
"You want to know all about how I became what I am."
"Exactly."
"It's a somewhat involved story. Perhaps you gentlemen should sit down."
We got our seats and sat down to hear Kate Woolf's extraordinary story. Since I have a
transcript of her remarks, I won't bother repeating what she said here. I will only say that I had a very poor appreciation of the complexity and nuance of Miss Woolf's situation. It would not be entirely accurate to say I pitied her, for a large part of her fate was her own making—as it is for us all. Still, only the hardest of hearts would be able to escape feeling sympathy for the poor wretch's plight. No one is immune from misfortune, yet it is only when we come into contact with someone who has been dealt a truly bad hand that we realize the triviality and smallness of our own problems. None of this detracts from the danger she posed. A moment's delay on my part might have cost us all our lives.
It seemed Van Helsing had gotten only one detail about vampires right: They are burned by daylight and have to stay indoors as long as the sun is in the sky. During a brief consultation in the warden's office after she gave us her deposition, Shaftbury expressed the desire to find out for certain whether the vampire had been truthful on the point. To this end, he proposed an experiment.
Blackley objected, though not strenuously, on humanitarian grounds.
Shaftbury overruled him. Woolf was destined for execution regardless, due to the consequence of her crimes. Whether she was hanged or killed through exposure to sunlight mattered not at all. Furthermore, Shaftbury had been granted plenipotentiary powers in the matter. This was not the United States. The vampire's life was in Shaftbury's hands, and he had already made up his mind to conduct this final experiment.
I remained silent during the debate. Woolf's story had well apprised me of the danger vampires presented to humanity.
We had an obligation to mankind to learn the vampire's weaknesses so that they might be exploited in the defense of our own race.
We returned to Woolf's cell. She was standing with her back to the corner, regarding us warily through the bars. I have no doubt she knew exactly what we planned to do to her.
As I looked up, I saw for the first time the evidence of hinges and a trapdoor from the floor above, hidden among the shadows of the beamed ceiling. It seemed the cell in which the vampire was incarcerated served as the pit where the bodies of the hanged dropped upon execution in the room above. And unlike the dungeon, the gallows room was part of an old tower that remained open to the sky, though its top was heavily barred against possible escape.
The London Vampire Panic Page 12
