The London Vampire Panic

by Michael Romkey

  "But how can you understand what I have become if you do not understand what I was?"

  (S. impatiently tells her to get on with it, no doubt anxious to hear about her experiences as a vampire. P. looks at S. and gives him a small shrug, as if to indicate it will be easier to let the madwoman tell the tale in her own fashion.)

  "As I later learned, Dietrich Morse's willingness to work for small wages in our parish was not at all unconnected with his tendency to overwhelm girls and women with his passion. This was something of a cross for Dietrich to bear.

  He did not wish to proceed from scandal to scandal, yet he seemed unable to escape trouble for long. Which was hardly surprising. You cannot escape your inner nature. Like me, Dietrich was a creature of his passion, and in many ways a slave to it.

  "You can imagine how it ended for us. It was only a matter of time before we were found out. Dietrich lost his position, again, and left town in disgrace. As for me, I was packed off to live with an aunt and uncle in Colchester. My arrangements there proved unsatisfactory. Uncle Howell also had an eye for young girls, and found a niece of questionable character rather too much of a temptation to be resisted. While I found his attentions exceedingly distasteful, my only recourse to submitting would have been to bring the matter to my aunt Katharine's attention. I knew enough of human nature to guess she would likely blame me, already disgraced at a young age, rather than admit the harder truth about her husband.

  "After an appropriate period of resistance, I gave in to my uncle. The business brought me little pleasure, I can assure you, but what was done was done. And worst of all, my uncle became totally besotted, his lust making him completely reckless. He would take me in the garden, in the carriage, or at night, in my room, while his wife sat downstairs sewing."

  (L. interrupts the sluttish litany—and not a moment too soon!)

  "Do not presume to tell me what is improper, Captain Lucian," the vampire said sharply. "Young women do not turn themselves into whores without help from men, who often escape any consequences. Perhaps one day men and women will be on somewhat more equal footing."

  (Dr. B. urges her to continue. He has become transfixed with the story; his experiences as a physician have no doubt accustomed him to hearing the scandalous details of sybaritic lives.)

  "My uncle made me pregnant."

  (This proves too much for young Captain L.! He gasps and jumps to his feet, looking helplessly around, seemingly unable to decide on the proper course. After a moment he retakes his seat. The vampire patiently waits, as if knowing he has no recourse but to hear the rest of this sordid tale.)

  "Despite my experience in certain matters, I was not the first to realize my condition. My aunt developed the odd habit of staring at my belly. At long last she took me into her parlor, sat me down, and demanded I make an accounting of myself. She summoned her husband, who of course denied everything. Neither my tears nor my aunt's rage could get him to admit the truth. He put my condition off on a soldier who had been staying in the neighborhood on leave from his regiment. The officer had, by then, decamped for Africa and was thus conveniently unavailable to deny the story.

  "My belongings were put into trunks and I was put onto a train to London with a one-way ticket, a few bob in my purse, and instructions to never again show my face in Colchester. My aunt arranged for me to live in a home for girls in my particular sort of trouble. I didn't stay long. I lost the child and was put out on the street.

  "Alone, friendless, nearly penniless—and I couldn't have been happier. London was the most wonderful place on earth to a girl from the provinces, a glittering, sophisticated city full of fancy ladies and handsome gentlemen on their way to balls and receptions. There was a hum to the place I could feel. I got the best lodging I could afford, in a barely respectable East End boardinghouse. I shared a single room with three other girls about my age, though none with as much finishing as I had, growing up in a rectory. We slept three of us in the single bed, the odd girl taking turns on the floor. It seemed like a grand adventure to me. I was young and filled with expectations, despite my disappointments. Such is the misguided glory of youth!

  "I intended to find a position as a governess, but work was harder to come by than expected, especially for a girl without references. It wasn't long before my money was close to gone. I had heard other girls talk about the labor of last resort for desperate women in the city. While I had my own ideas about living the life of a glamorous courtesan, I was resolved to succeed in my original plan even if it meant resorting to subterfuge. With the help of a man I knew, I managed to obtain a supply of stationery belonging to a prominent family. The Osbournes had conveniently decamped to their plantation in Africa, and were, therefore, unavailable to consult concerning a certain young woman claiming to have worked for them. My forged letter of recommendation enabled me to get a position in a household in Mayfair."

  (Vampire smiles.)

  "This is hardly a reason for thinking 'Eureka!' My connection with Mayfair played a role in what I was to become, but it was only one piece in the puzzle. Causes are extremely difficult to assign. How are we to know that such-and-such is a result of this, when it might just as easily have been because of that? My position in Mayfair has as much to do with my status as a fallen woman as it does with my becoming a vampire.

  "Some of you are no doubt acquainted with Nathan Brill, the Earl of Tesberry. I was hired to look after his son, Clifford. I am partial to children, as many women are, though I could take or leave young Clifford, a graceless, crude little lout who will no doubt fit in well with the other sons of lords at Eton or whatever prestigious school ends up saddled with him. I had even less affinity for his father, the Earl. He came into my room one night and raped me, tossing a gold sovereign on my bed by way of recompense.

  "I can tell what you're thinking, Professor Cotswold: I did go to the authorities. I gave them the sovereign as evidence. For my trouble, I was threatened with prison for libeling the Earl of Tesberry. It goes without saying that I lost my position. I didn't even get the gold sovereign back. The police kept it.

  "I couldn't agree with you more, Lord Shaftbury. I did only get what I deserved. After all, I had gotten the job through false pretenses, using stolen stationery to forge documents. That was when I began to think seriously about the merits of a life of ill fame. At least I would be paid for it. As it was, I was penniless and homeless in London, surrounded by people living in the most comfortable of circumstances. In my heart of hearts I did not see myself working at a modest and honest job until I could settle into a marriage with a clerk or minor bureaucrat. I wanted a grand house, beautiful gowns, rich jewelry, and a white carriage drawn by a matched team of horses, carrying me to the opera. London had done nothing but inflame the improvident passions I carried with me. And so I sought to make my fortune by the only means available.

  "In brief, gentlemen, I surrendered to the obvious if not the inevitable fate, and became a whore. I had hoped to take a wealthy man as a lover, someone who would keep me in a town house and call on me for tea or when his wife was away visiting friends in the country. It did not occur to me I would end up taking a vampire as a lover. Is it not curious that my precipitous descent to ruination was the agency by which I have become so much more than merely mortal? The Bible is right: The meek shall inherit the earth. Look at me, lads. I am all the proof that any of you should require."

  * * *

  21

  The Music of the Spheres

  I HAD MY sights set on the high life. I wanted to become the kept lady of a wealthy gentleman. I began working the streets, but I saved my money and bought a good dress, decent boots, and a cheap but acceptable necklace and earrings. Then, scrubbed clean, sprayed with perfume, my hair carefully done up, I presented myself to Madame Le Beau. She is not one of your first-rate madams—she is certainly no Contessa Saint-Simon—but it was a start. I met many fine gentlemen, and, unlike most of Le Beau's other girls, I could carry on a conversation without bruta
lizing the Queen's English or swearing like a sailor. Yes, I had great expectations at first.

  "The work was almost a lark in the beginning. It was every bit as much fun as you are imagining, Dr. Blackley. But only at first. After a time, working in a brothel begins to wear on you physically as well as spiritually. The human soul can only take so much degradation, though perhaps my own debasement was what prepared me for the strange transformation that was to come.

  "Madame Le Beau was an excellent businesswoman, and as such she realized the advantage of offering her customers something special. Her establishment specialized in the exotic and extreme. You could find the same sport at Contessa Saint-Simon's house, but Madame Le Beau specialized in an altogether rougher sort of play. The name 'Hellfire Club' makes the Contessa's house sound like a fountainhead of damnation. Next to the brand of wickedness practiced at Le Beau's, the Hellfire Club's variety of sin seems almost innocently naughty.

  "It was hard work. I would be up all night, whipping and being whipped, engaging in perversions even I could not speak of without blushing with shame. By the time I fell asleep in the weak early morning light, sore and exhausted, I would feel as faint as poor Captain Lucian looks at this moment. God designed the mind and body to withstand only so much. I had pushed myself to the extreme. I began smoking opium with a certain bishop who is a regular at Madame Le Beau's. Then Madame Le Beau introduced me to injections of tincture of cocaine as a means of waking myself up so I could start taking on another day's worth of customers. Before long I was injecting myself throughout the day and night, staying up sometimes for days on end. I used morphine to sleep.

  "The hard use began to show in my face. That meant I would never work for the Contessa or attach myself to a wealthy benefactor. Eventually, it spelled an end for me at Madame Le Beau's. I was twenty-one but I looked twice my age. Madame Le Beau sold me to Angus MacGregor, a Scot whoremonger. His house was a far cry from Le Beau's, but still infinitely preferable to the street. The Scotsman had a lesser sort of clientele—merchants, barristers, even a smattering of tradesmen and servants from the better houses. One man I had become acquainted with during the brief period of my employment in Mayfair—a butler—became a regular customer. He was infatuated with me. He liked to say I had the manners of a lady, which appealed to him, and rather made me suspect he was in love with the lady he was employed to serve. He was like the rest of us, poor sod, trying to improve himself in the world without a clear idea how to go about it or, truth be known, much chance of making it out of his class.

  "A time came when my caller didn't visit. This was strange, since it had been his habit to stop by every Monday evening, his regular night off, for a bounce on the bed. When he visited again, I could tell he'd been ill. He had a peculiar look in his eyes, as if he had a fever, and his skin was hot to the touch. It put me off a bit, to be perfectly honest. The worst thing that can happen to a girl who makes her living the way I did is to get a case of something catching. I know girls who've had their throats slit for giving one of their customers a social disease. Funny thing, though. He usually was keen to get to his business straight away and then talk a bit afterward, with a glass of whiskey. But this time he seemed to want to sit and talk.

  " 'The most extraordinary thing has happened to me,' he said.

  "I asked him what he meant, but he didn't say anything for the longest time. He sat staring at me, like the cat that ate the canary, silent as a mummy. I had a peculiar sensation in my stomach—a tingling, as if I was being pricked there by hundreds of tiny pins. I found myself sliding off the divan and getting onto my knees in front of him. He made me get on my knees like that, though I probably would have done it willingly enough if he'd asked me, because I was desperate for the money to buy a pipe of dreams. He got inside my head somehow and forced me to kneel in front of him.

  " 'How would you like to have the power to make men do whatever you want?' he asked. 'To love you, to give you money, to do your bidding no matter what it may be?'

  "I nodded. Who wouldn't like to have that kind of power?'

  " 'And would you like to live forever, Kate?' he asked. 'I don't mean in the other world, but in this one.'

  "Who would not want to receive such a miraculous gift? To have power over men and immortality—to be like God. I nodded again. I don't know whether I realized what I was getting into. Of course, I didn't know. How could I? And yet on another level, in a way that it is possible to know something without knowing how you know, I had a sense of it. And still I nodded. Willingly, gentlemen. I was not forced into this. I somehow knew this would work where the other things I tried had failed, and that the result would be a magnificent flowering of all the passions bottled up in my heart, which not even years of prostitution and drug addiction had been able to kill. Perhaps passion is as immortal as the vampire, and it is the individual's sensuality that leads him toward its crimson secret, like a moth drawn to a flame, which is at once deadly and yet utterly irresistible.

  "His hands were on my shoulders, drawing me to him. I remember feeling incredibly dreamy, as if I was heavily under the poppy's influence, though I hadn't had anything that night except a small absinthe. He pressed his lips against mine. My tongue felt something hard and sharp and out of place in his mouth, but I was unable to imagine what or even care. He kissed my eyes, my cheeks, my neck. I remember laughing softly as he sucked at the soft flesh in the hollow where my neck meets my shoulder. He blew on my moist skin there, his hot breath cooling me. I suddenly wanted him more than I had ever wanted a man. The dim outline of a melody floated through my mind. It was something I had not heard since those golden afternoon interludes with Dietrich Morse. It was Bach, of course, glorious Bach: the Prelude in C Major.

  "I can remember wondering: What is happening to me? Magical, frightening, irresistible, sensual. It was all these things and more. Words do not exist to frame the pleasures and passions one enjoys with a vampire—and as one. Imagine hearing all the world's greatest symphonies at once, not as a jumble of noise but as a single explosion of bliss that fills you with total ecstasy. Your joy begins with the physical, but spills over into your entire being—your spirit, your mind—possessing you completely.

  "There, trembling in the arms of a simple serving man, the universe was about to open itself to me. I was about to hear the music of the spheres, those first faint measures the tantalizing promise of what was to come.

  "And then, without a word of warning or reassurance, he sank his teeth into my neck."

  * * *

  22

  Retribution

  "SUCH LOOKS OF deliverance on your faces! Have you ever considered how little patience men have compared to women? This need to have what you want the instant you want it—with all due respect, it is your sex's most childlike attribute. Alas, it is not an endearing characteristic, in either little boys or men.

  "I have reached the point of the story you wanted most to hear, yet do not forget this is my story. I shall tell it as I wish to tell it. Each of you has your own parochial interests. Professor Cotswold, you wish mainly to know about the process by which one becomes a vampire. It is the vampire's power that interests Lord Shaftbury. C.I. Palmer, you are concerned only about the criminal activity. Blackley, you, sir, are almost equally attracted and repulsed by the twisted nature of my tale, but more attracted than otherwise, I should think. Only Captain Lucian is completely horrified. Be forewarned about the remainder of my story. What has come so far is a lamb frolicking in the summer pasture compared to the rest of it."

  (P. asks Woolf to name the man responsible for her becoming a vampire.)

  "Unmask my benefactor, Chief Inspector? I am not at all sure I am prepared to reveal that part of my story. God knows I have inflicted my share of pain since making the change, but I see no reason to bring trouble down on someone who has given me a gift of inestimable value. But perhaps it would do no harm, for I am sure there is nothing you can do to hurt him. Let me consider it, and we shall see.

&n
bsp; "You're staying to hear the rest of my story, Captain? Very well, then. I will continue.

  "Unfortunately, Professor Cotswold, I cannot tell you in any great detail about the change that befell me after my lover sucked out my blood and the better measure of my life. At times, the individual involved in an experience is the least suited to describe what has happened. A baby knows birth firsthand, but we must leave it to others to detail the stages and actions that bring a child into the world. The birth of a fledgling vampire—for it is birth of a kind—is no different.

  "I can tell you I was gripped by a terrible fever. For days I knew nothing of what was going on around me—neither where I was, nor how long I lay wasting away with my flesh on fire. I began to dream. At first my dreams made no sense, a jumble of images and fragments of scenes, the disordered product of a feverish mind. Imagine trying to extract the story from a manuscript made of random pages from a hundred novels. There was no pattern to the chaos of my fantasies, but with time a man emerged and gave a pattern to my fever dreams. I can see him perfectly in my mind—flowing black hair, full lips, a Roman nose, a strong brow, fierce burning eyes. At first he had only a face, but he gradually acquired a body. Though mostly hidden beneath purple robes, his form was as perfect as a marble statue. At length I realized he was no mere creation of my delirium but a guide to escort me as I walked along the edge of death on a path so narrow that one misstep would have meant my end.

  "A hallucination. Professor? No, he was more than that. You are a man of faith. You believe in angels. This was my angel. Captain Lucian thinks I speak blasphemy. Then perhaps he was a fallen angel. Is your understanding of Creation too narrow to see the good and the bad are all part of the same vast clockwork devised by the Creator for His own unknowable purpose?

  "My dark angel escorted me through the dangerous mountain labyrinth and down the arid passes, whispering poetry to me in a language I could understand only in my soul. I opened my eyes and found myself in the East End room my lover had rented for me to lie in during my change. You might think I would get up for a drink of water—I was very thirsty after who knows how many days of lying abed with the fever—or to look about me to reacquaint myself with the world. But I was too taken with the rich sensations washing over me to attend to mere physical concerns.