The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  “The Professor flatters me.”

  Beauregard had heard of the Professor too. “With two of the three most dangerous men in the world in one room, I have to ask myself where the third might be?”

  “I see our names and positions are not unknown to you, Mr Beauregard,” said the Chinaman. “Dr Nikola is unavailable for our little gathering. I believe he may be found investigating some sunken ships off the coast of Tasmania. He no longer concerns us. He has his own interests.”

  Beauregard looked at the others in the meeting, those still unaccounted for. Sikes was a pig-faced man, warm, short, barrel-chested and brutal. With a loud check jacket and cheap oil on his hair, he looked out of place in such a distinguished gathering. Alone in the company, he was the image of a criminal.

  “Professor, if you would care to explain . . .”

  “Thank you, doctor,” replied the man they called “The Napoleon of Crime”. “Mr Beauregard, as you are aware, none of us in this room—and I include you among our number—has what we might call common cause. We pursue our own furrows, and if they happen to intersect . . . well, that is often unfortunate. Lately, the world has changed, but whatever personal metamorphoses we might have welcomed, our calling has remained essentially the same. We are a shadow community, and we always have been. To a great extent, we have come to an accommodation. We pit our wits against each other, but when the sun comes up, we draw a line, we let well enough alone. It grieves me greatly to have to say this, but that line seems not to be holding . . .”

  “There was police raids all over the East End,” Sikes interrupted. “Years of bloody work overturned in a single day. ’Ouses smashed. Gambling, opium, girls: nuffin’ sacred. Our business ’as been bought and paid for, and the filthy peelers done us dirty when they went back on the deal.”

  “I have nothing to do with the police,” Beauregard said.

  “Do not think us naive,” said the Professor. “Like all the members of the Diogenes Club, you have no official position at all. But what is official and what is effective are separate things.”

  “This persecution of our interests will continue,” the Celestial said, “so long as the Whitechapel Murderer is at liberty.”

  Beauregard nodded. “I suppose so. There’s always a chance the killer will be turned up by the raids.”

  “He’s not one of us,” snorted Colonel Moran.

  “’E’s a ravin’ nutter, that’s what ’e is. Listen, none of us is ’zactly squeamish—know what I mean?—but this bloke is takin’ it too far. If an ’ore makes trouble, you takes a razor to ’er face not ’er bleedin’ froat.”

  “There’s never been any suggestion, so far as I know, that any of you were involved in the murders.”

  “That’s not the point, Mr Beauregard,” the Professor continued. “Our shadow empire is like a spiderweb. It extends throughout the world, but it is concentrated here, in this city. It is thick and complicated and surprisingly delicate. If enough threads are severed, it will fall. And threads are being severed left and right. We have all suffered since Mary Ann Nicholls was killed, and the inconvenience was redoubled tonight. Each time this murderer strikes at the public, he stabs at us also.”

  “My ’ores don’t wanna go on the streets wiv ’im out there. It’s ’urtin’ me pockets.”

  “I’m sure the police will catch the man. There’s a reward of fifty pounds for information.”

  “And we have posted a reward of a thousand guineas, but nothing has come of it.”

  “Mr Beauregard,” said the Chinaman. “We should like to add our humble efforts to those of the most excellent police. We pledge that any knowledge which comes into our possession—as knowledge on so many matters so often does—shall be passed directly to you. In return, we ask that the personal interest in this matter, which we know the Diogenes Club has required you take, be persecuted with the utmost vigour.”

  Beauregard tried not to show it, but he was deeply shocked that the innermost workings of the Diogenes Club were somehow known to the Lord of Strange Deaths. And yet the insidious Chinaman evidently knew in detail of the briefing he had been given only hours earlier.

  “This bounder is letting the side down,” the amateur cracksman said, “and it would be best if he stripped his whites and went back to the bally pavilion.”

  “We’ve put up a thousand guineas for information,” the Colonel said, “and two thousand for his rotten head.”

  “Do we have an understanding, Mr Beauregard?”

  “Yes, Professor.”

  The new-born smiled a thin smile, fangs scraping his thin underlip. One murder meant very little to these men, but a loose cannon of crime was an inconvenience they would not brook.

  “A cab will take you to Cheyne Walk,” the Celestial explained, smile crinkling his eyes and lifting his thin moustaches. “This meeting is at an end. Serve our purpose, and you will be rewarded. Fail us, and the consequences will be . . . not so pleasant.”

  With a wave, Beauregard was dismissed.

  As the amateur cracksman took him back through the passage, Beauregard wondered just how many Devils he would have to ally himself with in order to discharge his duty to the Crown.

  His hat, cloak and cane were waiting for him inside the cab.

  “Toodle-oo,” said the cricketer, red eyes shining, “see you at Lords.”

  VII

  When the sun came up, the new-borns scurried to their coffins and corners, Genevieve trailed alone through the streets, never thinking to be afraid of the shrinking shadows, wandering back to Toynbee Hall. Like the Prince Consort, she was old enough not to shrivel in the sun as the more sensitive new-borns did, but she felt the energy that had come with the blood of the warm girl seep away as the first light of dawn filtered orange through the swirling fog. She passed a warm policeman on the Commercial Road, and nodded a greeting to him. He turned away, and kept on his beat. There were more policemen in Whitechapel even at this hour than there would be in six weeks’ time at the Lord Mayor’s Parade.

  In the last week and a half, she had spent more time on the Ripper than on her work. Druitt was pulling double shifts, juggling the limited number of places at the Hall to deal with the most needy first. She had been seconded to a Vigilance Committee, and had been to so many meetings that even now words still rung in her ears as music rings in the ears of those who sit too near the orchestra. The socialists George Bernard Shaw and Beatrix Potter had been making speeches all over the city, using the murders to bring attention to the conditions of the East End. Toynbee Hall was momentarily the recipient of enough charitable donations to make Druitt propose that it would be a good idea to sponsor the Ripper’s activities as a means of raising funds, a suggestion that did not amuse the serious-minded Jack Seward. Neither Shaw nor Potter were vampires themselves, and Shaw at least had been linked, Genevieve understood, with one of the Republican factions.

  A poster up on the wall of an ostler’s yard promised the latest reward for information leading to the capture of Jack the Ripper. It bore a photographic representation of the letter the Central News Agency had received, covered in a spidery red scrawl. Nobody had recognised the handwriting yet, and Genevieve guessed that tracing the prankster with the red ink would get the police no nearer the Whitechapel Murderer than they already were. Which was to say, not very near at all.

  Rival groups of warm and new-born vigilantes had roamed the streets with billy-clubs and razors, scrapping with each other and setting upon dubiously innocent passersby. Since the last killing, the street girls had started complaining less about the danger of the murderer and more about the lack of custom noticeable since the vigilantes started harassing anyone who came to Whitechapel looking for a woman. Genevieve heard that the whores of Soho and Covent Garden were doing record business, and record gloating.

  A lunatic—almost certainly not the killer—had written to the Central News Agency, wittering on in scarlet. “I am down on whores and leeches and shan’t quit ripping them till
I get buckled . . . I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle to write with but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope, ha ha . . . My knife is silver and sharp and I want to get to work straight away if I can.” The anonymous crank’s letter had been signed “yours truly, Jack the Ripper”, and the name had stuck.

  Genevieve had heard Jack was a leather-aproned shoemaker, a Polish Jew carrying out ritual killings, a foreign sailor, a degenerate from the West End, the ghost of Abraham Van Helsing or Charley Peace. He was a policeman, a doctor, a midwife, a priest. With each rumour, more innocent people were thrown to the mob. A shoemaker named Pizer had been locked up in the police cells for his own protection when someone took it into their heads to write “Jack’s Shack” on his shopfront. After a Christian Crusade speaker argued that the killer could walk unhindered about the area killing at will because he was a policeman, a vampire constable was dragged into a yard off Coke Street and impaled on a length of picket fence.

  Genevieve passed the doorway where Lilly slept. The new-born child, who might grow old but never become an adult, was curling up for the day with some scraps of blanket that had been given to her at the Hall. Genevieve noticed the girl’s half-shapeshifted arm was worse, useless wing sprouting from hip to armpit. Changing was a trick the Prince Consort kept to himself, and there were too many imperfect freaks about. Lilly had a cat nestled against her face, its neck in her mouth. The animal was still barely alive.

  Abberline and Lestrade had questioned dozens, but made no arrests. There were always rival groups of protesters outside the police station. Genevieve heard rumours that psychic mediums like Lees and Carnacki had been called for. Sir Charles Warren had been forced to explain himself in private to the Prime Minister, and Ruthven would have the Commissioner’s resignation if there was no action soon. Any number of consulting detectives—Sexton Blake, Max Carados, August Van Dusen—had prowled Whitechapel, hoping to turn something up. Even the venerable Hawkshaw had come out of retirement. But with their acknowledged master in Devil’s Dyke, the enthusiasm of the detective community had ebbed considerably, and no solutions were forthcoming. The Queen, young again and plump, had expressed concern about “these ghastly murders”, but nothing had been heard from the Prince Consort, to whom Genevieve assumed the lives of a few streetwalkers, vampire or not, were of as much importance as those of beetles.

  Gradually, as she came to realise just how powerless she was to affect the behaviour of this unknown maniac, she also sensed just how important this case was becoming. Everyone involved seemed to begin their arguments by declaring that it was about more than just two dead vampire whores. It was about D’Israeli’s “two nations”, it was about the regrettable spread of vampirism among the lower orders, it was about the fragile equilibrium of the transformed kingdom. The murders were mere sparks, but the British Empire was a tinderbox.

  She spent a lot of time with whores—she had been an outcast long enough to feel a certain identification with them—and shared their fears. Tonight, nearing dawn, she had found a warm girl in Mrs Warren’s house off Raven Row and bled her, out of need not pleasure. After so many years, she should be used to her predator’s life, but the Prince Consort had turned everything topsy-turvy and she was ashamed again, not of what she must do to prolong her existence, but of the things vampirekind, those of the bloodline of Vlad Tepes, did around her. The warm girl had been bitten several times, and was pale and fragile. Eventually, she would turn. Nobody’s get, she would have to find her own way in the darkness, and doubtless end up as raddled as Cathy Eddowes or as truly dead as Polly Nicholls.

  Her head was fuzzy from the gin her warm girl had drunk. The whole city seemed sick. Dawn shot the fog full of blood.

  VIII

  Dr Seward’s Diary

  September 28, 1888. Today, I went to Kingstead to lay the annual wreath. It is three years, to the day, since Lucy’s death. Her destruction, rather. The tomb bears the date of her first death, and only I—or so I thought—remember the date of Van Helsing’s expedition. The Prince Consort and Lord Protector, after all, is hardly likely to make it a national holiday. Then, we trailed along with the old Dutchman, not really believing what he had told us of Lucy. My load of grief at her death had been more than enough to bear, without being told that she had risen from her coffin and was the dark woman who had taken to biting children on Hampstead Heath.

  I still dream of Lucy, too much. Once, I had hoped to take her for my wife. But Arthur’s charms—not to mention his title and his wealth—prevailed. Her lips, her pale skin, her hair, her eyes. Many times have my dreams of Lucy been responsible for my nocturnal emissions. Wet kisses and wet dreams . . .

  Lucy was the first in England of the Prince Consort’s get, and the first to be destroyed. I only regret now that it was Arthur Holmwood—Lord Godalming—who did the honours, driving the wooden stake into her heart, setting her free of her unwelcome condition. I helped decapitate the hissing corpse, and filled her mouth with garlic. If only Van Helsing had been as quick to lead us to the second new-born, the third, the tenth, the hundredth. There was a point, I suppose, when Dracula could have been driven from these shores, could have been hounded back to his Transylvanian fastness, could have been properly dispatched with wood and silver and steel. But I don’t know when that could have been.

  I have chosen to work in Whitechapel because it is the ugliest part of the Prince Consort’s realm. Here, the superficialities which some say make his rule tolerable are at their thinnest. With vampire sluts on every corner, baying for blood, and befuddled or dead men littering the cramped streets, it is possible to see the true, worm-eaten face of what has been wrought. It is hard to keep my control among so many of the leeches, but my vocation is strong. Once, I was a doctor, a specialist in mental disorders. Now, I am a vampire killer. My duty is to cut out the corrupt heart of the city.

  The fog that shrouds London in autumn has got thicker since Dracula came. I understand all manner of vermin—rats, wild dogs, cats—have thrived, and some quarters of the city have even seen a resurgence of the medieval disease they carry. It is as if the Prince Consort were a bubbling sinkhole, disgorging filth from where he sits, grinning his wolf’s grin as it seeps throughout his kingdom. The fog means there is less and less distinction between day and night. In Whitechapel, many days, the sun truly does not shine. That excites the new-borns. We’ve been seeing more and more go half-mad in the daytime, muddy light burning out their brains.

  The rest of the city is more sedate, but no better. On the way to Kingstead, I stopped off at an inn in Hampstead for a pork pie and a pint of beer. In the gloom of the afternoon, gentlefolk paraded themselves on the Heath, skins pale, eyes shining red. It is quite the thing, I understand, to follow fashions set by the Queen, and vampirism—although resisted for several years—has now become more than acceptable. Prim, pretty girls in bonnets, ivory-dagger teeth artfully concealed by Japanese fans, flock to the Heath on sunless afternoons, thick black parasols held high. There is no difference, really, between them and the blood-sucking whores of the Ten Bells and the Vlad IV in Whitechapel.

  The gates of Kingstead hung open, unattended. Since dying became unfashionable, churchyards have fallen into disuse. Most churches are empty too, although the court has its tame archbishops, trying desperately to reconcile Anglicanism with vampirism. When he was truly alive, the Prince Consort slaughtered thousands in the defence of the faith, and he still fancies himself a Christian. Entering the graveyard, I could not help but remember . . . Lucy’s “sickness”, her funeral. Van Helsing’s diagnosis, the cure. We destroyed a thing, not the girl I had loved. Cutting through her neck, I found a calling.

  My hand hurt damnably, a throbbing lump of tissue. I know I should seek treatment, but I think I need my pain. It gives me resolve.

  At the start of it, some new-borns had taken to opening the tombs of their dead relatives, hoping by some strange osmosis to return them to vampire life.
I had to watch my step to avoid the chasm-like holes left in the ground by these fruitless endeavours. The fog was thin up here, a muslin curtain.

  It was something of a shock to see a figure outside the Westenra tomb. A young woman, slim and dark, in a velvet-collared coat, a straw hat with a dead bird on it perched on her tightly-bound hair.

  Hearing my approach, she turned and I caught the glint of red eyes.

  With the light behind her, it could have been Lucy.

  “Sir?” she said, startled by my interruption. “Who might that be?”

  The voice was Irish, uneducated, light. It was not Lucy.

  I left my hat on, but nodded. There was something familiar about the new-born.

  “Why,” she said, “’tis Dr Seward, from the Toynbee.”

  A shaft of late sun speared through the fog, and the vampire flinched. I saw her face.

  “Kelly, isn’t it?”

  “Marie, sir,” she said, recovering her composure, remembering to simper, to smile, to ingratiate. “Come to pay your respects?”

  I nodded, and laid my wreath. She had put her own at the door of the tomb, a penny posy now dwarfed by my shilling tribute.

  “Did you know the young miss?”

  “I did.”

  Arthur had beat me out with Lucy, as he beat me out with his hammer and stake. Lord Godalming was a vampire himself now, a sharp-faced blade and the ornament of any society gathering. Eventually, I must take my silver to his treacherous dead heart.

  “She was a beauty,” Kelly said. “Beautiful.”

  I could not conceive of any connection in life between my Lucy and this broad-boned drab. Mary Kelly—our records say Mary Jane, but she sometimes styles herself Marie Jeanette—is fresher than most, but she’s just another whore, really. Like Nicholls, and Schön . . .