by J. S. Barnes
Lord Arthur took his wife’s hand in his and held it. She gave not the slightest indication of knowing that he had done so, so pliant was she and uncomprehending. Nonetheless, the gesture was a kind one, meant to offer comfort. I wondered if Jonathan might do the same for me. He did not.
Quincey cast his eyes towards the ground and clutched his book. I thought how saddened would the dear old Dutchman have been to see us so fractured and reduced. Those respectful murmurings which had filled the air turned to silence as the priest walked up the little aisle and approached the lectern.
He seemed unsteady on his feet, and when he reached the place from which he was to address us his face was damp. His voice was high and ill at ease. At the sound of it, I saw, to my surprise, that Carrie leaned forward, her posture now one of apparent concern, the first movement of her own accord which I had seen her make that day.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘We are gathered here today for the saddest of reasons, yet must there be joy also. We mourn the passing of a dear friend, just as we celebrate the consequences of his life and seek comfort in the resurrection which is coming and which surely shall be his.’
He passed the back of his right hand across his forehead, no doubt to wipe away the perspiration that still gathered there.
‘Yet today we shall give thanks for the mercy of the Lord. He has seen fit to gather our friend into heaven where, even now, he sits bathed in love and in light. For Abraham Van Helsing did the Lord’s work upon earth, so it is only fit and just that he should now be receiving his true reward.’
Something struck me as peculiar in the phrasing of that last sentence which, in combination with the odd nervousness of the man, served to accentuate my anxiety. He spoke on for a few minutes more, careful in his dispensation of platitudes. As he did so, it seemed to me that he could meet no individual gaze within the congregation and that his eyes slid often towards the floor.
In time, he finished and bade us stand.
‘We shall now sing the first of our hymns,’ he said, and for an instant I thought that I detected in his voice a note of suppressed exultation. ‘The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended.’
Music began to sound from the church’s pipe organ, at which we all got to our feet. For a very short time after that, I began to feel more settled in my heart. There is to that hymn a stolid sort of comfort, and as the words rang out something of my anxiety began to ebb away. We sang the first verse:
The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended
The darkness falls at Thy behest
To Thee our morning hymns ascended
Thy praise shall sanctify our rest.
I glanced to my right to observe my family and saw that both Jonathan and Quincey were singing with diligence. At the sight, I allowed myself the frail hope that damages might yet be repaired, misunderstandings and injustices overturned.
We sang the second verse:
We thank Thee that Thy church, unsleeping
While earth rolls onward into light
Through all the world her watch is keeping
And rests not now by day or night.
It was only at the conclusion to this stanza that the occasion moved swiftly towards tragedy. Carrie stepped forward a single pace, her head cocked exaggeratedly to one side, as though she were an animal sniffing the air. She turned and began to make her way along the pew, towards the aisle. Her husband reached out to her but she shook off his hand quite easily. With weird determination, she pressed on.
Everything was performed with an energy and vigour of which I would have thought her incapable. All this happened with extreme speed, yet does it seem to me in recollection to have happened also with a horrible leisureliness, an all but balletic sense of deliberation.
Carrie reached the aisle and looked wildly about her. The music ground on, but plenty now were no longer singing and were instead staring at the aristocrat’s wife. There were the seeds of a commotion.
The Reverend looked at her with an emotion in his eyes which one would not have expected – not concern or surprise or irritation, but panic. Lady Godalming ran to the back of the church.
Arthur followed, as, more hesitantly, did Jonathan. No more than seconds had gone by.
Caroline ducked beneath the last, untenanted pew. She was at that moment a study in indignity, a half-crazed riposte to all those antique notions of how a lady ought to be.
She emerged from the darkness with a brown battered suitcase. Her mourning dress was covered in dust and cobwebs. Her pretty face was daubed with dirt. The organ ceased to play and the singing stopped.
There was a moment’s absurd silence in which all present stared at Lady Caroline. She opened her mouth as though she meant to speak, to offer some explanation for all this eccentricity, only to close it again and run from the chapel.
‘Carrie!’ Arthur cried. She did not look back or show any indication of having heard him, but only ran on.
Arthur and I were the first to follow her out onto the street. She was before us, still clutching the suitcase, loping ahead. She moved not towards the road but out into the patch of waste ground. She reached the centre of it – I realise now, to minimise the danger to the rest of us – and called out seven desperate words.
‘Stay back! All of you, stay back!’
Something in her voice meant that we all, unthinkingly, obeyed.
‘Darling—’ Arthur began.
‘Carrie!’ I called out.
Her next words cut us short; it was by this time already too late. ‘Don’t you understand?’ she cried. ‘Don’t any of you see? He is returning. He wants his revenge and he wants – he wants his boy.’
As these words were spoken I felt a hand brush against mine. I looked down. It was Quincey, gazing at me with a childish fearfulness in his eyes such as I have not seen there for years. His sketchbook was clasped tightly beneath one arm.
Carrie held the suitcase high about her head.
Arthur shouted: ‘Carrie, please! Stop this. Come back to me.’
‘You are the vessel,’ she shouted, nonsensically. ‘Poor child – you are to be the vessel.’
* * *
There was surely more that she would have said, but at that moment two things happened simultaneously. The first was that Quincey fell suddenly to the ground, his eyes pivoting, drooling from the mouth, in the grip of one of his terrible fits. The second was more fearsome still.
The suitcase which Lady Godalming held above her head exploded. The bomb that was within it did its vile work. And all then was fire and smoke and terror, as if every evil thing that we had ever dreaded was coming now to pass.
FROM THE PRIVATE DIARY OF AMBROSE QUIRE,
Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis
11 January. * Later. When the distant sound of that explosion roused me to uneasy consciousness, I felt at once more entirely awake than I had done for weeks, since before the time when I first embarked on this dark path. It occurred to me with sudden yet undeniable force how derelict I have been in my duties, how far I have allowed myself to fall and how entirely I have been seduced by a creature who is very much less than human.
At the memory of my collusion and betrayals, I felt only a burning shame. I knew at once where I had to be and what I had to do – back at my desk in the Yard, at the helm of the ship, leading and inspiring my men.
At the time I mistook this clarity of thought for a form of liberation. Only now, at the very end of things, have I understood that it was only ever a part of the trap.
I stirred from my bed. I rose. I called for my valet, I rang my bell and received no response to either summons. Puzzled, I called out again and still heard not a thing. Indeed, the house struck me as being far quieter than it ought to have been at such an hour.
Feeling a growing certainty of disaster, I had no choice but to wash and dress myself. Examining myself in the mirror I thought I looked a little better, though I was still unshaven and there was about me a quality of the unkempt and unloved (h
er residue, I suppose, her mark).
Thinking of that muffled conflagration which had roused me, I felt again the necessity of action. For had not Ileana, her soft, yielding flesh mere inches from my own, spoken of some double-event?
I hastened to leave my quarters. Before I did so I called out once more for my valet, or for any of the servants. No answer came. Perhaps I ought simply to have left the house straightway, hailed a cab and gone at once to my offices. Maybe then I might have eluded her. I doubt it, but I must at least acknowledge the possibility. Instead, at the resurgence of my old and, I should like to think, inherent decency, I chose to search the house before I left.
I do not now have time, for the clock is surely running down, to recount in any detail that increasingly frantic quest. There are no hours remaining in which I might delineate my hunt through every room and every hallway, or to itemise my dread. It must suffice simply for me to state that I found them in the end, all together in the scullery. All four of my servants were dead and had been stacked, in a parody of neatness, one atop the other. Each was pale, their skin quite white, all drained of blood. I saw that the floor about them was unmarked and that wherever was now that life-stuff which once had coursed through their veins, it was no longer upon my premises. I tried (truly, I did) to say a prayer for those poor lost souls but nothing would come. The words simply died in my mouth.
I turned away and fled, out into the day.
In the street I was overcome by a sensation of fearful bewilderment which would once have been anathema to me but which in recent times has become too familiar.
I should have called for somebody to take me to the Yard. Instead, I yielded to instinct and began to walk in the direction of the heart of the city. I knew the way of old. I was as a homing pigeon, my head and feet and soul all knew best where I belonged – these, I suppose, were my foolish and ruinous thoughts as I began the final trek. I hoped that something might yet be done to invert my treachery and that justice could still be carried out. If hopes they were, then they were empty ones: empty, frail, meritless.
I hastened on through the streets in the grudging light of a January afternoon. It was still daytime, yet the darkness seemed to possess a sinister eagerness to fall earlier even than is the case in the very deeps of winter. Shadows lengthened all around me with unnatural speed, as though minutes were ticking by faster than science allows. Even the temperature seemed to decrease and, though I had dressed myself well, I began to shiver in my coat.
I pressed on. The going began to grow harder and more difficult, the act of forward motion itself more strenuous. Every step was a struggle. The phenomenon is not easy to describe to one who has not undergone it, except, perhaps, to say that it felt as if there were some great cord, elastic but invisible, wrapped about my midriff, and that the more I struggled forward the more insistently I was pulled back. I cannot say for certain how long this sensation went on, but I do know when it was (dusk) and where I stood (at the corner of Bleighley Avenue) when the true cause of it was revealed to me.
As the shadows clustered around I heard in my ear a voice I had come to know well, with its European vowels and foreign insinuations, its promise of the dense forest and the deserted high road.
‘My Quire, my Ambrose, you will not be running now.’
Ileana was present and she was not present. She was absent yet she was by my side. She seemed like smoke, or like the sound of a distant melody. Her voice was a whispering hiss.
‘I am to be giving you your final duty, this thing you will perform for us in exchange for all our boons.’
I fought against it. If ever there is some account to be made of these sad events, I wish it to be known and understood that I tried at the end to fight them. I attempted to run but I made no progress. I endeavoured to call out but my mouth would make no sound. I did all that I could to push her from my mind, only to discover that she had taken up residence there long ago and now controlled it utterly.
‘You will be taking this,’ she said, ‘and you will be placing this beneath your desk and you will be waiting for your…’ She paused, the spectre of Ileana, as if to relish some moment of amusement. ‘Your martyrdom.’
At the end of this sentence I felt something heavy arrive in my arms, I cannot say from whence – a large brown suitcase. Quite how this was achieved I am unable to say, except to remark that I am reminded of sundry claims by certain psychics and table-rappers to do with the possibilities of materialisation.
I knew what it was, that case, and what it signified. Had we not, after all, received accounts from previous attacks of the blast being preceded by the entrance of some unfortunate with just such a receptacle in tow?
‘Be going now,’ said Ileana. ‘Be going to do His work.’
There was a period of brief, thick darkness and the next thing that I knew I was alone again. Ileana was gone and I was mounting the steps to Scotland Yard.
I walked indoors, my men parting before me. I must have cut a strange, dazed figure, and I dare say there was many a glance of surprise, distaste or incredulity thrown in my direction. It was only then, I think, as late as that miserable promenade into my office where I sit now and write these last words, that I finally understood how absolute has been her tenancy in my mind and how entirely lacking I have become in matters of free will. For with every step I took, although I was raging and screaming within, I could make not a sound, nor could I dissuade my feet from moving so much as a fraction of an inch from their preordained path. I have become a silent prisoner in my own body. This is the price for the pleasures that the Transylvanian brought to me. This is the vampire’s bargain.
The brown case is beneath my desk. I know with what industrial malice it seethes. I know how this must surely end and there is in that a certain, black-hearted freedom.
I shall have this journal taken from me to the post room and sent at once to George Dickerson in the hope that he may yet circumvent their plans. I am resigned to the fact that I shall never be forgiven, by him or by anybody. But I seek no redemption. I am damned and, worse than that, I understand that I have been so for a long, long time.
FROM THE TIMES
11 January (late edition)
LONDON ROCKED BY DOUBLE OUTRAGE
The city is tonight deep in mourning following the successful detonation of two separate bombs, both thought to be part of that sequence which has already sown so much fear and horror. The first, seemingly smaller, device exploded at a memorial service for the late Dutch professor Abraham Van Helsing in the church of St Sebastian in the West. That many more casualties did not result is thought to be due to the courage of the attack’s sole victim, Lady Caroline Godalming. Further details and a full obituary will follow as the facts become established.
The second incident occurred late this afternoon and though, at the time we go to press, details remain elusive, reports would seem to indicate that a substantial portion of the offices of Scotland Yard have been destroyed, numerous casualties being sustained within the ranks of our constabulary. The Commissioner himself, Ambrose Quire, remains amongst the missing. The very worst is feared.
We shall present to you at the earliest possible opportunity a full account of this most nefarious of outrages. In the meantime we pray for the souls of all those who perished, and we pray also that vengeance may soon be wrought upon those malefactors who would commit such evil deeds.
DR SEWARD’S DIARY,
(kept by hand)
11 January.* The first thing that I knew when I came at last – after who knows how long? – back to full consciousness was that I stood alone in some abandoned field. The sky was growing dark, the earth was cold and barren, and it seemed impossible to me that anything at all might grow here. Nothing human was with me. Rooks and crows overhead. The sighing of the wind.
Have I been mad? I think so, or at least I have existed in a state not far from that condition, one allied also to dreaming. I have read of such things in certain obscure journals but had alw
ays dismissed them as a combination of superstition and misdiagnosis. My own recent experiences have proved me quite wrong. Even after all the horrors that I witnessed as a young man, it would seem that my mind still remained closed to the worst extremities of the world.
I can recollect the journey which led to me this place only dimly. Much of it was done on foot, though there were trains also and people. There were odd conversations which I cannot recall and an inexplicable urgency which lingers with me still. Yet there is little else. I have not been myself, I think. No, I have not been myself at all.
The diary was a trap, I see that now, meant to remove me from the board. Yet I sense another hand at play also, one which offers much wisdom and support if only I can find the strength to help myself.
I have been sent here, to this place, for a reason. And so I will go on. I have a journey to make. And a crucial part to play.
It may be my imagination but I do believe that I can hear now, from somewhere far away, the sound of the distant sea.
* The date is an estimate. The doctor was not in his right mind when he wrote these words. I reproduce them here with his express permission.
FROM THE PALL MALL GAZETTE
12 January
SALTER SAYS: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH – THESE HORRORS HAVE TO CEASE
Another horror has been forced on us all, another miserable occasion for tears and for prayers. This time the enemies of our nation have struck twice in one day.
My friends, this state of affairs cannot continue. Why was our police force so thoroughly inadequate as to actually find itself the successful target of this latest outrage? How can such evil-doers roam free? How is it that the wife of a peer of the realm is executed, in all but name, in broad daylight at the very heart of London and nothing at all can be done?