by Kim Newman
The first mention I saw of the concentration camp at Devil’s Dyke was in a smuggled anti-Dracula pamphlet, Red Sunset. That included a list of the casualties of the Ascendancy. At the head of the roll were Abraham Van Helsing, Quincey Morris and Lucy Westenra – though, technically, newborn Lucy was murdered by Van Helsing’s crew of light before she could do anything wicked enough to earn impalement and decapitation. Had Dracula or her warm suitors cared enough for Lucy to look after her on her first nights as a vampire, things might have gone very differently for the world. She became a martyr for both sides: Dracula’s first victim, Van Helsing’s last. The habit of distortion for propaganda purposes is not confined to the Prince.
And yet…
The British Empire did not explode in flames. Lightning did not destroy London.
Dracula was Prince Regent, but Victoria still reigned. And was restored to the pink of health and youth.
She photographed, unlike her new husband. And glowed, almost as Christina does.
* * *
Viscount Lyons, the British Ambassador, was recalled. Lord Drewe Bennett, his replacement, arrived in a coffin.
At this, I was assailed by yet another liveried messenger. I thought my call-up papers had come, but it was an invitation from the office of President Jules Grévy. The pleasure of my company was requested at a reception for Lord Drewe. I might be a non-person so far as the university was concerned but the Third Republic needed me to demonstrate a lack of prejudice. With Eva Van Meerhaegue and her like tidied away, rocks were turned over to find presentable French vampires who could be produced to greet our brother-in-darkness from perfidious Albion. The messenger circumvented my instinct to decline on the grounds that I didn’t have anything to wear by handing me a parcel containing an organdie evening gown. It was a perfect fit, quashing any notion that I wasn’t being closely watched.
The reception was held in the cupola ballroom of the Paris Opera House. Bennett, reputedly, was keen on the entr’acte ballets. Were strong-hearted, supple-limbed dancers made available for his amusement? He wouldn’t be the first diplomat to make that demand in Paris though he would be first to be more interested in bleeding than bedding the corps de ballet.
I saw torn-down posters for Don Juan Triumphant.
After being directed to the appallingly gold-encrusted ballroom, I was commandeered by a fellow who turned out to be the President’s sonin-law, Daniel Wilson. He was my escort for the evening – which meant he was to ensure I didn’t bite anyone in public. Later, Wilson was caught trafficking offices of the Légion d’Honneur, a scandal that brought down the Grévy government. He didn’t strike me as any shiftier than anyone else at the reception. Government ministers and civil servants strutted, sporting all their medals and decorations, whether earned or bought, accompanied by wives whose dresses were more spectacular than mine and mistresses whose figures were more spectacular than anyone’s. The opera lover Hippolyte Modéran was there, with his homely wife. He ignored me for, after all, I did not exist.
Also gathered were the respectable – or semi-respectable, or asyet-unarrested – vampires of Paris, each with their personal attentive escort. Princess Addhema, famous for a faddist diet of ‘aetheric spirit’, was squired by Grévy. It did look as if she drained something vital out of him. An extremely pretty ancient youth whose suit cost more than my house required several policemen in tailcoats to keep him on a leash. He tittered at everything, made eyes at the boys and girls of the ballet, and kept wiping cherry-red smudges from his beestung lips with a frilly yard-square handkerchief.
I was presented to the Ambassador – who showed no interest at all. Elder vampires often complain – at length – of dreadful ennui. Lord Drewe was the most impossible example of the breed I’ve ever come across. He sighed at my curtsey and flapped his wet fish of a hand at me. He might have been embalmed before turning. Every movement was great effort and his face was frozen like a statue’s. If a diplomatic ploy, it was ill-judged. It just made the French even less interested in talking with him.
‘Only England could produce such a sport,’ wrote the tittering dandy in his later-published diary, ‘a boring vampire.’ You’ll remember the acute observation comes just before twenty-five pages describing (accurately) the clothes he wore that evening and a lengthy aside about how sad and lonely he was in that crowd as in all crowds on every night throughout eternity. The dapper diarist doesn’t mention the twin blonde girls I saw him spooning with on a divan in the powder room or the handsome gendarme he lured behind a potted palm tree in the lobby for some activity that involved twanging braces and strenuous gurgling.
After an agonisingly protracted minute or so, my audience with Bennett was at an end. The next French vampire – Comte Hubert de Sinestre, soon to become the Third Republic’s unofficial Minister for Undead Affairs – was brought forward to replace me. He was received with just as much enthusiasm. I predicted a declaration of war before the carriages arrived. What would I look like in a major’s uniform?
A resentful string quartet played English tunes they couldn’t have heard before rehearsal. Selections from H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. Country airs and ‘D’ye Ken John Peel’. The performers were contemptuously note-perfect, but rigid, strident and in a seethe about abandoning real music for the evening.
Lord Drewe might well be tone deaf.
It goes without saying that he didn’t drink wine. Or care for cakes. He’d seen everything in the Louvre and wouldn’t give any of it space on the walls of his town house. The Seine was very inferior to the Thames. Haussmann’s boulevards were too straight and the wheels at the casinos too crooked. And these vaunted French beauties could all do with a good wash behind their ears and between their toes.
I wasn’t above being bitterly amused at the efforts of la belle France to make the British boor welcome.
Diplomatic duty discharged, Wilson abandoned me. He might have been sent off to find dancers willing to be bled. With so many starved predators about, there was likely to be a shortage.
None of the hors d’oeuvres presented on gold platters were vampire fare. Most involved nougat, which gets caught in my gums. I drifted, pondering architectural features of the Palais Garnier. An outrageous amount of gold was stuck to the walls, the ceiling and the furniture. Even the mirrors I didn’t reflect in were backed with gold not silver. I felt more at home with the penniless, nameless dead on bare slabs in the cold, dark morgue than in this riot of overdecoration.
A fellow in a skull mask, feathered hat and red pantaloons made a grand entrance under the impression that this was a costume party. He was barred by attendants and skulked off, swearing revenge on the prankster who so misinformed him. ‘Write an opera about this, ha ha!’ shouted someone from the crowd. Comte Philippe de Chagny. The booby in the fancy dress was my acquaintance, Erik de Boscherville – composer of Don Juan Triumphant, voice trainer to notorious adventuresses, and a famous grudge-holder. The waggish Comte would do well not to walk under chandeliers.
I was hissed at from a golden alcove.
It was de Coulteray, in a taller wig and shoes with wooden bricks for soles. ‘His wife’s the coldest creature in Europe,’ he said, nodding at Ambassador Bennett. ‘Marie Sanglante. His virile member went flop on his wedding night and no amount of blood will bring it to attention again.’
I hadn’t known whether the liveried messengers would trawl so widely as to haul in the Marquis. Or if he would poke his head out of his hole to attend.
‘They found you, then?’ I said.
He looked this way and that. His wig tottered.
‘It’s a trap,’ he said. ‘We are to be rounded up and herded into the sub-cellars. They did it before, in the commune. We are dancing on the tombs of tortured men, Gené. There’s a secret guillotine down below, with a silver blade. We are to be got rid of. I shan’t be taken.’
Since I’d last seen him, the Marquis had contracted a fungus condition. Blotches on his face were inexpertly powde
red over. Damp patches on his white gloves betokened weeping sores. He was missing several teeth.
‘I have a plan to get to England – with the apples,’ he said. ‘Trade is resumed, and I have found a boat which will take us as cargo. But we shall need money. Much of it.’
I had some savings left, but decided not to mention them. I might want to buy myself a ribbon d’honneur. It should be protection enough from the guillotine.
I noticed Hippolyte Modéran loitering within earshot.
I thought of telling de Coulteray that the assistant clerk of admissions was an agent of the Congregation – but I worried he’d believe me. The way the world was, I worried I’d believe me.
At the end of the evening, it was made clear that vampire guests should leave. There were seven or eight of us, including several unknown to me. I half-expected Grandmère Melissa to be among us, but she had gone to ground. The dandy diarist pinched my organdie shoulder ruffle as we were descending the stairs, and rubbed the material between his fingers – then sneezed as if the gown were impregnated with garlic. Up close, I saw he was much older when turned than he claims. His boyishness is as preserved and brittle as a glacé cherry. He is another gentleman of modest stature, too. As Dravot would say, ‘a shirty short-arse’.
‘They’re not taking us to the sub-cellars,’ I said to the Marquis, trying to be kind.
We were escorted out through a side door.
Three gendarmes awaited in Rue Gluck: two with drawn silver swords, one with a warrant made out for the arrest of Louis-Jean-Marie-Chrysostome, Marquis de Coulteray. He was accused of sundry offences under the Code Pénal – including eight counts of common assault, three of indecency in a public place and seventeen of theft of objects from the person. De Coulteray shrieked and tried to run but two more sword-wielding gendarmes sprang from hiding places either side of the door. The four policemen held sword-points to the Marquis’ tubby torso, pricking his brocade. He couldn’t move without being skewered from one direction or another.
De Coulteray whimpered, hemmed in by four points of silver.
All other vampires decided to vanish and did so. Last out of the Palais Garnier was a tall, beautiful brown woman in a silk sari and shimmering cloak. She had a blood-red dot on her forehead and a necklace of jewel-eyed gold skulls. She looked with something like disgust at the Marquis. He made a pitiful, imploring face as she walked into the night.
He should have built her bloody temple!
I was the only vampire to stay.
Out from under an awning came another old acquaintance, Inspector Daubert of the Sûreté. He was on the Marquis’ case well before the fool owned up to being a vampire. When de Coulteray declared himself a blood-drinking monster, he essentially signed a blank confession.
Daubert had lit a cigar to signal his men to pounce. He threw it away.
‘Mademoiselle Dieudonné,’ he acknowledged.
‘Doctor Dieudonné,’ I insisted. Since we were being open about what we were, I was getting insistent about the title I’d earned several times over. ‘Where are you taking the Marquis? La Santé? When will he be up before an examining magistrate?’
‘He won’t be, Doctor. This man died in 1745. We cannot put a corpse on trial…’
M. Modéran, sans madame, poked his head out of the door. I’d suspected he held a wider brief than assistant clerk of admissions.
‘You can’t arrest him, then,’ I said.
‘He isn’t being arrested, Dr Dieudonné,’ said Modéran. ‘We are picking up a body. You should know who has claim on the corpses of criminals with no living relatives.’
Two other men stood by an unmarked coach. Professor Cataflaque and Dr Gheria. Professional ghouls.
‘For the advancement of science, such remains are at the disposal of the School of Anatomy,’ said the Inspector.
De Coulteray fainted.
* * *
I dug up the last of my savings, which were buried in my tiny garden. A chest once filled with Louis d’ors now held barely enough coins to stuff a purse. I stung my fingers on an écu – a Louis d’argent – which had got in among the gold. Degradation of coinage means modern money doesn’t have enough silver in it to give me an itch.
I spent a frantic day trying to find a lawyer to act for the Marquis – and, by extension, other vampires potentially in the same situation (including me). I was turned away from many offices – one firm had a secretary brandish a crucifix in my face and threaten me with a spittoon supposedly blessed by a priest.
Invading a café near the Palais de Justice, I descended on startled groups of lunching jurists. I made an appeal to the contrarian vanity of the profession. Surely, someone saw a percentage in arguing for the rights of the most downtrodden of all clients, the living dead? Vampires were an accepted fact. Changes in legislation must come. Inheritance law would be up for revision. Wealthy newborns would rise invigorated from the grave and sink their sharp fangs into lengthy lawsuits over property prematurely claimed by grasping heirs. The definition of homicide would have to be altered. Risen murder victims might testify against fathers-in-darkness. Judges would set precedents. Famous rulings would be made. Ramifications would earn fees for generations to come.
I reminded my audience that the first thing Dracula did when executing his plan to conquer Britain was engage a firm of solicitors.
No one was tempted to sign up for a doomed crusade, though a sharp court reporter suggested Émile Zola might be prevailed on to write an editorial – even a pamphlet – on the vampire issue. I would have appealed to the author directly, but there wasn’t time to start a debate and wait for public opinion to change. The Marquis de Coulteray was already on a slab, awaiting dissection.
At sunset, I returned to the morgue. I wore a hooded cloak and hoped to be mistaken for a bereaved relative but instead was hailed cheerfully by the doorkeeper, who said he’d missed my cheerful face lately and I best hurry because the lecture had already begun. So, my non-existence hadn’t been impressed on everyone attached to university, hospital and morgue.
I thanked the doorkeeper and made my way to the dissecting theatre.
That I didn’t hear screams as I neared the room gave me a spasm of hope – dashed as soon as I slipped in at the back.
The Marquis de Coulteray – wigless and stripped bare – was tethered to the table, showing his patchy scalp, withered legs and swollen stomach. A contraption like a scold’s bridle was fitted over his head. His mouth was filled by an iron flange that pressed his tongue far back into his gullet. Talking was impossible. No lecturer of anatomy liked to be interrupted in full flow – especially if heckling came from the specimen not a student. De Coulteray could make only small, shrill sounds. His watery, wide, panicked eyes were exposed by the muzzle’s straps.
The device was newly made. Shiny metal and supple leather. That appalled me almost more than the torture. Someone – I suspected the practical Cataflaque rather than the pompous Gheria – saw a need for such a thing and commissioned an artisan to manufacture a usable prototype. Was a patent pending for the vampire gag? Would many more of the vile instruments be needed?
Gheria wielded the post-mortem knife, while Cataflaque lectured.
A deep incision in de Coulteray’s torso – the Y-cut favoured by all autopsy surgeons – was made, but healed over before the chest flaps could be pulled back to lay the ribs bare. Cataflaque talked about the process of accelerated (if not instant) healing. A desirable aspect of the vampire condition, he conceded.
The doctors’ audience wasn’t just ghouls and medical students. Taller, silkier hats outnumbered student caps on the writing ledges. Greyer heads were present. The first public dissection of the common vampire – though pishacha was not that common a bloodline – drew a crowd of medical men, academics, priests, politicians and interested parties. Inspector Daubert was there, representing the Sûreté, and M. Modéran, representing whomever he represented. A masked man and woman – the Great Vampire and Irma Vep – made
a showing for respectable, decent, non-blood-drinking criminals. Comte de Sinestre sat alone at the back, resolute in his lack of empathy for the man on the table. It wasn’t his blood in the runnels.
I was gladder than ever to have refused Professor Cataflaque’s offer of collaboration. I knew, without question, that I would be on the next available train, apple boat, hot air balloon or pneumatic tube out of the country. London, the most dangerous city in the world, was currently the safest place for a vampire. We could shelter behind the cloak of Dracula and the skirts of Victoria.
Having repeated the incision three times, exciting gasps with each magic-seeming closure, the Professor produced more new-made implements: a silver scalpel – the first I ever saw, but sadly not the last – and a set of custom surgical retractors. With some effort, Gheria made a serious Y-incision. Cataflaque fit the retractor into the wound, exposing the thoracic cavity. Flaps of flesh tried to knit together, but shrank from silver like slugs from salt.
Even with the gag in his mouth, the Marquis de Coulteray keened in agony.
A gentleman pushed past me to leave the theatre, hand clamped over his mouth. The ghouls hissed. Gheria looked furiously at the audience. His black gloves were slick with vampire blood. It rolled and balled like mercury, trying to flow back into the open wound.
With bone shears – tempered steel, plated with silver, he explained – Cataflaque cut through the subject’s ribs. With his hands, he bent the bones upwards to expose a beating heart. The organ did not look healthy.
Gheria touched the point of his silver knife to the heart.
‘A simple puncture and the processes of pseudo-life will end,’ he said. ‘At least, this is what tradition tells us. Eventually, that theory must be put to the test. For the moment, many more avenues remain to be explored with this subject. In the second stage of the lecture, we shall examine the mouth, assessing the unusual formation of the throat, investigating these sacs of unknown purpose, laying bare the bones of the jaw and skull. And, of course, the famous teeth.’
