The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl

by Theodora Goss

  Sometimes, Beatrice could not help being amused by the incongruity of it. He walked between her and the street, so her skirt would not be splashed by passing carriages. And yet she could, with her breath, poison everyone on the sidewalk! Nevertheless, she could not help feeling pleasure at being cared for in this way—she, who had always cared for others, whether her father, or his poisonous plants, or the patients for whom she so carefully concocted medicines.

  They emerged into Károlyi Mihály utca, into the warmth and sunlight of Budapest. Yes indeed, she would miss this city, which reminded her just a little of her own Padua, arranged along the Bacchiglione River, as Budapest was arranged along the Danube. The streets of Budapest were busy with carts and wagons, as they always were at midday. Clarence held his arm out to her. As usual, she did not take it. Instead, with a small shake of her head, she started down the street toward the theater. Although her arms and hands were thoroughly covered, and he could not, even by accident, have come into contact with her skin, she did not want him to get used to being close to her. That would not be good for him—or her, either. Her heart had been broken once—she did not want it broken again. She had found so much in this new life of hers: freedom and friendship and a purpose. Love was not necessary.

  MARY: Are you quite sure about that? I would not say love is necessary—but perhaps life is not quite the same without it? We all need to be loved, in some way.

  DIANA: I don’t.

  MARY: I think you need to be loved more than anyone I know! Stop that—you can’t hurt me, kicking me through a petticoat. See? If I didn’t love you, I would never put up with such behavior. Of course, I don’t always like you very much.

  BEATRICE: That does not change the fact that I am poisonous. I cannot be with any man without endangering his life. Lucinda would understand—she is not poisonous, but her hunger for blood also separates her from mankind.

  MARY: Where is Lucinda, anyway?

  CATHERINE: Playing the piano. Can’t you hear it? Good Lord, why do you primates have ears if you can barely hear with them?

  At that moment, Lucinda Van Helsing was eating a rabbit. Or, more accurately, she was sucking its blood—later, Persephone and Hades, the Countess Karnstein’s white wolfdogs, would eat the carcass. Magda was standing beside her in the forest glade, looking down at her approvingly.

  “Jó, jó,” she said, which Lucinda had come to understand meant “Good, good,” in Hungarian.

  “You’re doing very well,” said Laura, who always came along on these hunting expeditions—“To translate,” she said, but Lucinda had quickly realized it was as much to comfort and reassure. The first time she killed a rabbit with her own hands, she had cried so hard that she almost vomited up all the blood she had drunk. Laura had taken Lucinda in her arms and stroked her hair, saying, “Hush, hush, my dear. You’ll get used to it in time.”

  “I do not wish to kill,” she had said between sobs, stroking the bloodstained body of the dead rabbit as though it were her childhood doll.

  “But you must learn to,” Laura had said. “Here at the schloss, if you wish it, we could have blood brought to you in a glass—you would never have to learn how to hunt for yourself, or confront the death inherent in your mode of obtaining sustenance. But that would be both dishonest and unwise. You don’t want to be dependent on others. And you are a predator—it is important for you to both understand and accept that fact. Carmilla would tell you the same herself, if she were here.”

  However, Carmilla was not there, but at Castle Karnstein. She had spent most of that first week at her ancestral estate, dealing with the mess Hyde had left behind. Evidently, he had left without disposing either of his chemicals or the corpse of Adam Frankenstein, which had been left lying under a sheet in the small, dark chamber where he had spent his final days. “At least I can tell Justine that he is well and truly dead,” Carmilla had said to them on one of her brief visits. She had arranged for a proper burial in the graveyard behind the castle. Hyde had also neglected to pay his debts. He still owed money to the Ferenc family, which had served him so loyally while he had rented the castle. “Miklós and Dénes deserve to be horsewhipped for kidnapping Mary, Justine, and Diana on Hyde’s orders,” Carmilla had added angrily. “But I want to make sure Dénes can pay for his university tuition, and Anna Ferenc needs her medicine. The Ferencs have been tenants of the Karnsteins for two hundred years—I cannot let them starve. I’m sorry, Laura, but finances may be tight for a while.”

  Laura had just sighed—she was all too used to finances being tight, partly through Carmilla’s extravagance. Now, she sighed again, but it seemed to be in relief that Lucinda had dispatched the rabbit so neatly. Lucinda simply nodded. What could she say? She was trying, as best she could, to live this new life her father had imposed on her through his experiments. She was a vampire—she would always be a vampire. She would always be able to hear the rabbit’s heart beating as she tracked it in the long grass; she would always be able to climb the tallest trees, hand over hand, as though she were a squirrel. She would never grow old or become ill from the diseases to which men are prone. She would not die unless her head was completely severed from her neck or she was burned so that her body could not regenerate itself. She would always have to drink blood.

  She had thought of taking her own life—she still thought of it sometimes as she lay awake, late into the night, for she no longer seemed to need as much sleep. She had thought of somehow lighting herself on fire, burning herself down to ash. She had not told Laura about these thoughts, and she could not tell Carmilla. The Countess was too formidable—she seemed old and distant, although she looked no older than Lucinda. But Lucinda could not have told her anything so personal.

  Now, she followed Laura back toward the schloss. Magda came behind with the carcass of the rabbit dangling from her hand. It would provide a meal for Persephone and her brother, Hades.

  As they approached the back of the schloss, which had a long terrace, Carmilla came out through the French doors. “Telegram!” she called. She was holding a piece of paper in one hand.

  “Who from?” asked Laura. “And when did you get back? I didn’t hear the motorcar. But then, we were pretty far into the forest.… Köszönöm, Magda,” she said, nodding to the—what was Magda exactly? A coachman, a gamekeeper, a protector of the household. She seemed to serve multiple functions. And, of course, she was a vampire—the only one created by Count Dracula who had managed to retain her sanity, or most of it. Sometimes she still imagined that she was on the battlefield, and then only Carmilla could subdue and restrain her. At first, Lucinda had been frightened of her, but Magda had been so kind—they had all been so kind to her. She was grateful for that.

  Nevertheless, she was so very tired, and she smelled of blood. She would go up to her room, which had been Laura’s father’s room, once. She sometimes wondered what her life would have been like if her father had resembled Colonel Jennings—an ordinary man who liked his books and pipe, who wore the hunting jackets that still hung in the wardrobe or the slippers in a row beneath them. But no, her father had been the celebrated Professor Van Helsing, with appointments at several European universities and a desire to breach the boundaries of life itself, to make himself and men like him immortal. With a logic that still made her so furious she clenched her fists thinking about it, he had started by experimenting on his wife. Lucinda tried not to think about her mother too often—the memory was simply too painful. Her mother had died to save her from her father’s henchmen. Someday, the two of them would be reunited in Heaven, if vampires went to Heaven. If not, then in Hell. Until then, Lucinda would have to live somehow. At least, for the first time since her mother had been taken to the mental asylum, she was among friends.

  Who seemed, at the moment, to be quarreling.

  “But we just got home!” Laura was saying. “And you haven’t even been here most of the week, but at that wretched castle—”

  “I can’t let Mina go into such a
situation by herself, can I?” said Carmilla. “The Count won’t be able to leave Budapest until after the Emperor’s visit, so she’s going to Vienna alone. Do you want her confronting Van Helsing’s vampires without support?”

  “First of all, she’s not going by herself,” said Laura. “She has Irene Norton there, and Irene has—well, a sort of gang, from what Mary told us. And second of all, that’s an excuse, and you know it. You just want to go off on your own, in that damned motorcar of yours, like some lone figure of righteous vengeance, to fight vampires. Must you be so dramatic? Honestly, sometimes I think you’re more like the Count than you realize.”

  “Not alone. I want to take Magda with me. She’s so good at smelling out our kind. Kedvesem, I know you’re angry with me, don’t deny it—”

  “Who’s denying it? Of course I’m angry with you,” said Laura angrily, as though to emphasize her point. “And you can’t take Magda. Lucinda needs her, particularly if you’re going to go off on a vampire hunt.”

  “—but you also know I’m right. Do you really want Mina and Irene, and a group of girls who may be very capable but have no experience hunting such monsters, to go up against a nest of vampires without our help? All right, I’ll leave Magda here, but I at least need to go.”

  Carmilla was holding Laura’s hand. Lucinda did not want to interrupt such an intimate scene—she felt a little shy even watching it. She would go up to her room, rinse her mouth out thoroughly with lavender water, and perhaps rest for a while. She still felt so awkward and ashamed about drinking blood. Would she ever get used to this new life as a vampire?

  She entered through the French doors into the music room. Perhaps, before proceeding upstairs, she would play the piano for a few minutes. She sat down on the stool, which was adjusted to her height—she was the only one who played with any consistency. Ten minutes later, she did not even notice Laura tiptoeing across the room so as not to disturb her. She was so completely lost in the melodies of Shubert.

  MARY: As she seems to be right now!

  JUSTINE: Forgive me, Mary, but that is Chopin.

  MARY: Oh. What’s the difference?

  JUSTINE: Why, they are not at all alike! That is like asking what is the difference between Ingres and Renoir, between Delacroix and Monsieur Monet.…

  CATHERINE: Are you seriously interrupting my narrative to argue about composers? “Lucinda was playing something or other on the piano.” There, I fixed it. Satisfied?

  As the cab drew up to 11 Park Terrace, Mary could not stop looking out the window in all directions—at the gray, rainy streets of London, the Georgian houses on either side, and the trees waving over the housetops, reminding her that Regent’s Park was still there and now that she had returned, she could walk to it whenever she wished.

  “Stop shoving me!” said Diana, who was sandwiched between Mary and Justine. She was awake but tired, and therefore especially cross.

  The horse stopped right in front of the Jekyll residence. “Whoa, Caesar!” shouted the cabbie. It was lovely to hear a cockney accent again!

  At Charing Cross Station, they had stopped for tea and currant buns in a tea shop—the first proper English tea Mary had been able to order since leaving for Europe. How welcome and familiar it tasted, although Diana complained that the buns were stale. And then they had caught a cab. Now here they were, at 11 Park Terrace once again, a month after they had left. In that month, she had experienced so many things! Sometimes they had been wonderful, sometimes terrifying, sometimes merely tedious. She would, she was sure, have such adventures again. But this was where she belonged—no matter how far away she traveled, it was the home to which she would always return.

  She paid the cabbie, almost handing him francs by accident and reminding herself that she would need to exchange them as soon as possible at the Bank of England. Justine, in her incarnation as Mr. Justin Frank, helped the cabbie carry the trunk to the front stoop. Diana rang the bell an unnecessary number of times. Over it was a polished brass plaque on which was written THE ATHENA CLUB. Mrs. Poole should be expecting them—Mary had telegraphed from Calais.

  But it was not Mrs. Poole who answered the door.

  “What the hell?” said Diana.

  Standing in the doorway was a boy—short, with ginger hair and a strange, angular face. His wrists stuck out of his suit jacket and his arms seemed strangely long.

  “You rang, miss?” he said in what sounded like a foreign accent.

  With a start, Mary realized who he must be: the Orangutan Man that Catherine had rescued from the British headquarters of the Alchemical Society in Soho. What had she called him? Archimedes? Archi—

  “Miss Mary! Welcome home!” Ah, there was Mrs. Poole, hurrying down the hall behind him. She still had a white apron over her black housekeeper’s dress. “Miss Justine! I’m so glad to see you again. And even you, Miss Scamp!” She looked just as she always did: entirely reassuring. All Mary’s life, Mrs. Poole had been there, to guide and teach and sometimes reprove. She, more than anything else in that house—Dr. Jekyll’s books, Mrs. Jekyll’s portrait—made the Jekyll residence feel like home. Mary wondered how Mrs. Poole would respond if she kissed the housekeeper. She did not think Mrs. Poole would approve at all.

  MRS. POOLE: I most certainly would not have. I know my place, I assure you. And I trust Miss Mary to know hers.

  Instead she said, as heartily as she could, “Mrs. Poole, I’m so very, very glad to see you again. It’s so good to be home.” But even as she said the word, she realized how different her home was now from the house in which she had grown up as the proper Miss Jekyll. Here she was standing in the front hall with her sister Diana, who was glaring suspiciously at the Orangutan Man. Beside her stood Justine, and in a few days Catherine and Beatrice would be home as well. They had all changed that house—for the better. The Jekyll residence had become the Athena Club.

  And Mary herself, returning after almost a month on the continent, was not the same Mary Jekyll who had left. She had heard different languages, tasted different flavors, paid in different currencies—she had met men like Dr. Freud and Count Dracula, women like Ayesha and Mrs. Norton. She had wandered the streets of Vienna and Budapest. No wonder she felt different. Perhaps travel did that to you. Mary had come home, but she was not the same Mary who had left—not quite.

  However, this was no time for reverie. They had coats and hats to take off, luggage to unpack, and friends to find—or, if Mrs. Poole’s fears were justified, to rescue.

  MARY: I worry that readers who begin with this volume will not understand who we are, how we formed the Athena Club, and why it was so important to rescue Alice. I know you should begin a novel in medias res, Cat, but perhaps this is too much in medias and not enough res?

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: Reader, if you have not yet read the first two adventures of the Athena Club, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter and European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, I encourage you to do so before proceeding further. However, I understand there may be reasons why you are unable to do so at this time. For example, if you have lost your fortune, must work as a governess, and cannot afford the first two volumes. Or if you have been kidnapped by bandits who possess only this third volume in their hideout, no doubt stolen from a person of discernment and literary taste. For readers in such circumstances, I shall briefly summarize our previous adventures, in which Mary Jekyll, impoverished after her mother’s death, discovered that her father, the respectable Dr. Jekyll, had engaged in experiments that turned him into the disreputable Mr. Hyde. When he fled England as a known murderer, he left behind a child, Diana Hyde, who was raised by the Society of St. Mary Magdalen, where Mrs. Raymond presided as the redoubtable director. Mary had taken the poor, defenseless girl home with her.

  DIANA: Defenseless, my arse!

  But her investigations had not ended there, for her father had been a member of the secretive Alchemical Society, some of whose members had also produced monstrous offspring: Beatrice Rappacc
ini, as poisonous as she was beautiful; Justine Frankenstein, taller and stronger than most men; and your author, Catherine Moreau, a puma transformed into a woman who retained her feline swiftness and cunning. Together, these remarkable young ladies had formed the Athena Club. These events are described in The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, in which our heroines solved the Whitechapel Murders with the help of Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson. In the thrilling sequel, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, they rescued Lucinda Van Helsing and confronted the Alchemical Society with its crimes. While its formidable president, Ayesha, would not agree to halt experiments in biological transmutation entirely, she had agreed to form a committee to evaluate such experiments, with Beatrice as a member.

  BEATRICE: It does not sound very impressive when you put it like that, and yet the committee has done some very good work. The research protocols I drafted have been adopted by the society, and I believe they have changed how such experiments are carried out. What Dr. Raymond did to Helen, for example—he could not do that, under our current structure.

  All of these adventures and more can be found in the first two books, offered for the very reasonable price of two shillings a volume, in an attractive green cloth cover. Copies may be purchased in most fine bookstores.

  MARY: This was supposed to be a synopsis, not an advertisement!

  CATHERINE: Well, I don’t earn royalties on a synopsis, and we need money, especially now that Lucinda is staying with us.

  MRS. POOLE: Remarkably cheap she is, compared with you lot! Even goes out and gets her own food, now she’s gotten the hang of it.

  MARY: About which the less said, the better.

  CHAPTER II

  Return to Baker Street

  Come in, come in,” said Mrs. Poole. “It’s terrible damp out, and the nights are growing colder. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you all safely home! Archibald, shut the door and lock up tight. He’s an excellent footman, miss,” she said to Mary, “but sometimes forgetful about things like locks. I don’t suppose orangutans have much use for them! Do take the ladies’ hats while I take their coats—you see how nicely he does it? Now, I have a fire laid in the dining room, and I’ll bring up dinner straight away. I’ve made pork chops for dinner, with creamed Brussels sprouts and a jam roly-poly. I’ll just need to heat it up in the warming oven. I didn’t know what time you’d be here, you see.”