Opium and Absinthe: A Novel

by Lydia Kang

  “What you want?” he said gruffly.

  “George. We’d like to look at the book.”

  “Eh, what for?”

  “Looking for someone we lost,” Ian said. He took a small bag out of his pocket and shook it softly. “I’ve one good cigar in there and a pouch of shag.”

  George’s eyes lit up, and he grinned. The absent teeth made a keyhole in his smile.

  “Very well, my friend! Come this way.”

  As they followed him down a dark hallway, Tillie whispered, “That’s all it took? Some tobacco and a cigar?”

  Ian smiled. “I get the feeling I saved you from spending a few dollars.”

  “You did.” She was impressed. “I should take you with me the next time I go to the hat shop.”

  “Are we walking, or are we shopping for a new wife?” George shouted. He was several paces ahead of them already. The hallways smelled of sickly sweet rot and a biting chemical scent, as if the floors had been scrubbed with Lysol.

  “Why is he shouting?” Tillie asked.

  “Because it’s dead o’ night! Keeps the ghosts away!” George shouted again.

  Ian rolled his eyes. It made her less afraid, and she laughed instead of shivering. They reached a darkened room. George hit a switch on the wall, and suddenly electric lights blazed on.

  Tillie covered her mouth immediately.

  The room was only about twenty square feet. It was divided by a partition of glass and iron so visitors could view the dead on the other side, either as a pastime for the curious or for those trying to claim their lost. Four stone tables sat on iron legs. Bodies lay upon them, covered in sheets. A steady stream of water poured from a spigot, soaking the sheets. The water collected in drains in the floor.

  “What is the water for?” Tillie asked.

  “Makes ’em rot slower,” George said. “This way.” He unlocked a door, and they entered the chamber with the bodies. Clothing and accessories hung near each table so viewers could identify the dead using their possessions. Bare feet protruded from beneath the nearest sheet. One foot was pointing down, and one foot pointed up. George hooked a thumb in that general direction.

  “That one had his pelvis run over by a train. Nasty way to go. He was talking until they got the train off ’im. And then he bled a gusher and died in seconds. Ah, here’s the book.”

  He flipped through a large ledger. Names, descriptions, and dates were written on page after page. This lady, dead from typhus; another, from consumption. Another, drowned. The list went on forever.

  “Wachoo looking for, eh?” George asked.

  “How often do you hear of someone coming through here with bites on the neck, drained of blood?”

  “Oho, you’re on de vampire search, ain’t ye? I told de doctor here what I’ll tell you, but he wouldn’t listen to me.” George took the ledger and flipped back what seemed fifty or so pages. “Here. One month ago. The first ’un, a lady, ’bout sixteen. They found her near de reservoir, before dey tore it down. Coroner said it was from de fall, but dem holes in her neck ain’t from a fall.”

  Tillie read the ledger.

  16 year old female, Caucasian

  Multiple contusions on face, arms, back, neck. 1 cm left temple, 1 cm right cheek, punctures on left neck, 0.25 cm x 2, 4 cm apart. No livor mortis present. Licorice odor noted. Recent granulomata of lungs, possible healed consumption.

  Time of death, est. two days prior to coroner exam.

  Cause of death: suicide via fall.

  A separate note in red ink added a name, Annetta Green, and that the body had been claimed by family.

  Tillie took out her notebook and began scribbling quickly. “What does livor mortis mean?”

  “No purple on de backside,” George said. When he received a blank stare, he said, “After a body dies, de blood pools below. Gravity. Turns de backside purple, if dey be on de back. Tells you what position dey died, an’ how long ago. This gal, no livor mortis.”

  “So she was found soon after she died?”

  “Naw. Said she was out dere two days before she was found. It was June. She was cookin’ a good ways by then. No livor mortis means no blood.”

  Ian and Tillie glanced at each other.

  “She also had consumption, it looked like,” Ian said.

  “True, but not so much. If she died from consumption, she’d look it. I see dem ones all de time. Look like livin’ skeletons, if dey got de galloping consumption. She was lucky, till she wasn’t.”

  Tillie suddenly began flipping the pages again, closer to the current date, looking for something.

  “What are you looking for?” Ian asked.

  Tillie said nothing, concentrating. Her fingers passed down the lists, one after another. And then she stopped and took a deep breath.

  “Here. Albert Weber.” They read the coroner’s notes, and Tillie’s fingertip stopped where the description of the puncture marks was. “Look. Point two five centimeters, two of them, four centimeters apart.”

  This time, Ian flipped the pages in reverse and found the entry for Lucy Pembroke. “Puncture marks, point two five centimeters, anterolateral neck. Four centimeters apart.”

  “Hmm, hmm.” George raised his eyebrows in a question. He seemed rather amused and had taken the new cigar out and was sucking on the end, like a baby with a lollipop. “The neck bites. I keep telling dem doctors at Bellevue.”

  “Why haven’t they said anything? Reported it?”

  George shrugged. “They dunna got a penny, most of dem dead folks.”

  “No one pays attention when the poor die,” Ian said quietly to Tillie. “Your sister . . . she was lucky enough to be born rich and born beautiful.”

  Lucky. Yes. She was, and Tillie was lucky enough to be in a position to help, even though she was but a woman. It hadn’t stopped Nellie Bly from finding out the truth, had it? Nellie Bly had duped physicians into thinking she was mad and had unearthed atrocities in the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island. She had sped around the world in a mere seventy-two days wearing one plaid traveling outfit and carrying a small bag.

  If Nellie Bly could do all that, surely Tillie could find a killer.

  Tillie peered back at the book in front of them. “We know that whatever is biting these people, it’s the same . . . thing.”

  “Or person,” Ian said. “Someone just stabbing and bleeding, they wouldn’t be this exact. They either want it to look like one vampire has been biting them or . . .”

  “Or it really is a vampire or animal,” Tillie finished. “And the note about the woman said there was a licorice smell. Absinthe again—found with my sister and with Albert Weber.”

  “Since when do vampires kill absinthe drinkers?” Ian said.

  Tillie snorted. “Maybe it’s the vampires drinking the absinthe. Either way, we have to work faster. This vampire is going to strike again, and soon, based on these three. We have to find it.”

  George listened to them, his head toggling back and forth and eyes agog. “If’n dere was a vampire, it’d be in de Wood Museum.”

  “What’s the Wood Museum?” Ian asked.

  “Pathologic cabinet. Over in de medical school. If dere was a vampire, de teeth would be in de Wood Museum.”

  Tillie and Ian looked at each other, before Tillie inclined her head toward George.

  “By any chance, would you have the keys to the medical school building?” she asked, sweet as can be.

  George smiled broadly, his teeth clamping down on the cigar. It fit perfectly in the hole provided by two missing teeth.

  “I surely do not.” Tillie frowned deeply, but George wasn’t done. “But I know who does. Better yet, I can get de doctor to show you, if you can bring me here half dozen of dese fine cigars.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

  —Van Helsing

  Since Ian and Tillie were out of all tem
pting tobacco products (“I don’t carry cigars in my dress!” she had told Ian, after he asked if she had any up her sleeve, like her notebook), they departed the morgue with no name and no immediate way to get into the Wood Museum. Tillie was home again within an hour.

  As she put a hand on the big brass knob of the back door, a voice spoke from the thin darkness.

  “This was the last time, right?”

  Tillie turned to see John leaning against the house, behind some looming shrubbery.

  “You could get hurt,” he said.

  “I am fine, John.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “I thank you for your discretion. And thank you for the information on Betty.”

  “Have you spoken to her yet?” He left the shelter of the shadows and walked closer. Though he was there to protect the grounds, and hence the family, she felt an urgent need to get inside immediately and put a locked door between them. The morphine was wearing off, and her anxiousness and discomfort were returning like a wave.

  “No,” Tillie said. She attempted to turn the knob. “Oh. It’s locked.”

  “Here you go.” He ascended the steps and leaned toward her, pulling a key from his pocket. Tillie caught a scent that was like lemon polish—like Ada. And something else too. A salty, musky scent, like the ocean. “If I wasn’t stuck patrolling this house, I’d be happy to watch you too.”

  “Thank you, John,” Tillie said, slipping inside and feeling thoroughly unclean.

  As soon as she went upstairs, she felt ready for sleep. Her mother wouldn’t expect her until midday, which still gave her seven hours to slumber. Long enough for her to dissolve into another realm altogether. She went to the walnut box on her dresser, filled the glass syringe, and plunged the medicine into her thigh.

  But her mind was not quiet as she slept. There was a jumble of images and voices in her head—the smell of the morgue, the smell of John O’Toole, images of puncture holes in necks, Ian’s words of apology to her for the article, and the excitement and fear of writing one herself.

  And John’s voice, a purr with a sliver of menace within it.

  “I’d be happy to watch you too.”

  Her family’s anger remained warm and simmering when she awoke for luncheon. But Tillie had dosed herself just before heading down. With the opiate in her, everything felt proper and correct again.

  It had been a while since she’d felt severe pain in her collarbone, but perhaps Dr. Erikkson was right, and she did need the quieting normalcy of the morphine. Not so much for an irksome womb but for a mind that desired far more activity—nay, demanded it. And now, when she was forbidden from her opinions, the deprivation caused intolerable suffering.

  Her mother and grandmother hardly spoke to her over the delicate salad and beef aspic. But Tillie, content and quiet, must have passed some test, because in the midafternoon as she was drowsing on a chaise in the salon, her mother came and touched her elbow.

  “Tillie,” she began.

  “Mmm.”

  “Is the food all right?”

  “Mmm.” It was tolerable, but she was craving paprika hendl, the chicken dish that Jonathan Harker ate in Dracula. It sounded delicious.

  “Are you feeling well?”

  She opened one sticky eyelid. “Delightful, actually. Dr. Erikkson’s treatments are quite soothing.”

  “Well. I don’t wish for you to use them too much. Temperance . . .”

  “I’m not drinking whiskey. It’s medicine. You sent me to the doctor, and he said it was necessary.”

  Her mother sighed. “Well, you do seem so much better.” She furtively glanced toward the other end of the salon, where Grandmama was pretending to read but snoozed with her bottom lip sagging low. “In fact, I have an invitation. Bradley Martin is having a small soiree.”

  Tillie opened her other eyelid and raised an eyebrow. “Small? Bradley’s last soiree was seven hundred people and twenty-eight courses at the Waldorf. We all dressed as kings and queens. He doesn’t do small very well.”

  “No, it won’t be quite so big. Probably seventy or eighty guests. I asked, as I knew something grander would be too much for you. And after our mourning period, it’s not appropriate to revel in such gay festivities. I have a new dress laid out for you, in a dark-purple silk. Quite suitable. Dorothy promised she would be at your side all night.”

  “No cotillion?” Tillie asked.

  “No, no dancing.”

  “Very well,” Tillie said with satisfaction. “So long as James isn’t there. I couldn’t bear to see him.”

  “James Cutter? Why?” Her grandmother had woken up and was listening intently.

  Wasn’t it obvious? “He hit Lucy,” Tillie said, incredulous. “He’s a suspect in her death! I can’t ever see him again.”

  Her grandmother stood from her chair and ambled over. “Victoria, leave us. Bring the servants with you.”

  Tillie’s mother hesitated, her focus traveling from mother to child, but it lasted only a moment. She left the salon, followed by the two servants. Tillie was alone with her grandmother.

  “Grandmama, I can’t,” Tillie implored. “Not after he treated Lucy that way.”

  “Listen to me, Mathilda.” She sat down next to Tillie on the chaise. Tillie tried not to flinch, remembering how her grandmother had nearly struck her. But she only petted Tillie’s head gently. She even tried to smile a little. “It’s a lie. I’ve spoken to James myself. He never so much as touched her in such a way. Lucy lied, and that is the end of the matter.”

  “No, she didn’t. She was writing in a diary. She had no idea anyone would read it. There was no reason to lie to a diary!”

  “Mathilda, you must try to speak to James. Kindly, as if the article was never written. It’s the best thing to do.”

  “No. I won’t.” She looked up at her grandmother, all her sullen anger suffusing her body. The hand that was petting her head swiftly slipped into Tillie’s knot of hair and yanked her head painfully back.

  Tillie screamed. Her grandmother twisted the knot harder. The pain of her hairs being torn out was like a searing fire all over her head. She screamed again.

  “Hush, child. Hush,” her grandmother crooned.

  Tillie shut her mouth, letting her protest decrescendo into a whimper.

  “Better. You will see James Cutter, and you will receive his attentions,” she said, as calmly as if she were speaking of the weather. “Your sister may have ruined her prospects, but you will not. Do you think your life is your own?” She pulled again, and Tillie gagged on the phlegm gathering in her throat. “All of our fortunes, all of our reputations, are one and the same. James did nothing that your sister didn’t deserve. But he says he is not responsible for her death, and I believe him. More than your sister, who lied relentlessly about that thief of a maid.”

  Suddenly, the fingers released her hair. Tillie’s head came forward, and she choked into her hands, gasping for breath.

  “Clean yourself up. You and your mother are to leave in a few hours. You’ll be on your best behavior, and you will give James the attention he deserves. Do you understand?”

  Tillie nodded.

  “Answer me like a proper lady.”

  “Yes, Grand . . . ma . . . mama,” she hiccupped, unable to control her voice. “Y-y-yes, ma’am.”

  Her grandmother leaned in, and Tillie recoiled reflexively. Grandmama kissed the top of her head. “You are a sweet girl, but we have grossly neglected you, and for that I am truly sorry. It’s time you received the attention you deserve, no matter what your father was. You’re a Pembroke, not a Flint. Never forget that.”

  She didn’t know her grandmother had left the room until Ada was at her side, smoothing her hair and rubbing her back.

  “Oh, Miss Tillie. Come upstairs. Let’s get you cleaned up. Come now. Everything will be all right.”

  She let Ada pull her off the chaise, guide her upstairs, where Ada carefully brushed her hair and finger combed all the l
oose strands that had been torn out. Without asking, Ada gave Tillie a large injection of morphine, and the throbbing of her scalp subsided. All the while, Ada plied her mistress with the same words: “It’s going to be all right. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

  The words weren’t a balm, though. As Ada put her into a shimmering aubergine gown, lustrous with gold embroidery at the bodice, Tillie watched Ada and thought to herself, Oh. My maid is a liar too. Because it’s not going to be all right. It never will.

  By six o’clock, Tillie was deadened to the coming event. Whether it was due to the medicine or her bruised and numbed heart, she wasn’t sure. Ada had dusted fragrant powder over the bump of her broken collarbone, décolletage, and shoulders. Her skin shone satiny under the electric lights of her vanity. Long kid gloves went up to her elbows, and a tasteful amethyst-and-gold collar went on. It would be a suitable follow-up to her sober jet jewelry of mourning. No brilliants tonight.

  Her mother said little on the carriage ride. Had she heard what had happened? Watched from a distance? All Tillie knew was that she’d allowed it to happen. Tillie promised herself, as fiercely as she could under the softening influence of the morphine, If I ever have a child, I shall never let anyone hurt them.

  They traveled only a few blocks down Fifth Avenue, not far from Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s enormous abode and William K. Vanderbilt’s Petit Chateau. The Martins’ mansion was smaller than its neighboring behemoths but still grand enough to comfortably hold two hundred guests in the main ballroom. A carpet led from the street to a temporary awning over the entrance, complete with policemen and countless drivers and footmen attending to their passengers.

  Tillie entered the foyer, ablaze with electric lights and the squawking of no less than three macaws—green, scarlet, and gold and yellow—and dipped a bow to Mr. Martin. He appeared a bit worn out. Even his enormous handlebar mustache drooped. Perhaps the bad press after his ball two years ago still made him melancholy. He’d transformed the Waldorf-Astoria into Versailles (including five thousand roses and three thousand orchids, a decadent twenty-eight-course menu, and guests dressed as Egyptian princesses and Pocahontas), but the extravagance had been sharply criticized. Tonight’s event was a shadow of the prior, though wealth still spoke in the splendorous decor.