Diamonds & Dust

by Carol Hedges

  Josephine feels the breath leave her body. Instead of a human face beneath the mask, she sees a grey feral muzzle, sharp as a knife, two pointed ears, and two evil eyes that gleam cold and unnaturally green in the flickering lantern-light.

  “Aha, I am right: you are a vlkodlak - a werewolf,” Lilith says triumphantly.

  “But ...” Josephine stutters, “there's no —”

  “... such things as werewolves?” Lilith finishes her sentence. “Really? Are you quite sure about that? Then what do you see before you?” She gestures with the pistol. “Take a good look. Recall the face you saw in the moonlight .... do you recognise it? Recall the wolf that broke into your house ... the wolf that you told me was ‘not afraid’? Do you recognise it?”

  “That was my brother,” snaps the Countess. “I believe you met him that day you called on me.”

  Josephine recalls the big grey man on the doorstep of the house in Russell Square. She’d thought at the time that there was something familiar about him. But not this. Never this, not even in her most terrifying nightmares. Her mind struggles to take it in.

  “I have thought about it, and realised that there was a full moon on the night you saw the strange apparition,” Lilith continues. “Just like there must have been a full moon on the night Herbert died. That is when they turn into wolves. And tonight, there is a full moon once again.”

  As if in confirmation of her words, moonlight suddenly shafts whiteness into the room. It falls upon dark furred hands tipped with wicked curved claws. But before Josephine has time to respond, or Lilith to act, something completely unexpected happens. Oi, who has been crouching under the table almost stupefied with terror, decides to make a break for it.

  As he rushes past her, the Countess reaches out almost lazily, picks him up with one clawed hand as if he were a thing made of feathers, and flings him across the room.

  The crossing-sweeper’s small body thuds into the opposite wall, slides down it, and lies still. The Countess turns and bounds out of the room, slamming the door shut behind her. They hear a key turning in the lock. A second later the dark-lantern splutters and dies, plunging them into pitch blackness.

  For a moment, Lilith and Josephine stand motionless, locked into the shock of what has just happened. Then there is a low groan, followed by a feeble cough. Josephine makes her way across the room, trying to remember where the table is located, treading warily in the thick darkness.

  Eventually she reaches Oi and crouches down beside him.

  “Are you all right?”

  The crossing-sweeper slowly levers himself upright, and is immediately very sick.

  “My head ’urts, Jo King,” he whimpers.

  Meanwhile, Lilith has slid back the glass panel of the lantern and re-lit it.

  “That’s better,” she says. She regards Oi thoughtfully. “Who is this boy? I didn’t notice him before.”

  “He’s my friend,” Josephine says. “He helped me break into the house.”

  Lilith runs her hands expertly across the crossing-sweeper’s shoulders, then down his bony arms and legs.

  “Nothing seems broken. Can you stand, boy?”

  Shakily, and with a lot of coaxing, Oi staggers to his feet. He leans against the wall for support.

  “I don’t feel too good,” he murmurs.

  “You are lucky,” Lilith tells him. “A fall like that could’ve broken your back.”

  “Well, I ain’t feelin’ very lucky, lady,” he mutters.

  “What are we going to do now?” Josephine asks.

  “We are going to get out of here,” Lilith says.

  “How?”

  Lilith regards her levelly.

  “By the only way we can.”

  She walks over to the pistol, which she has set down upon the floor.

  “Cover your ears, both of you,” she says. “This might be a little noisy.”

  ****

  While these events are taking place inside the house, on the opposite side of the Square, Police Constable Evans has made as good a fist as he can of his letter home. Now his feet are so cold he can barely feel them, and his backside is numb with sitting. It is time to leave his Watch Box and indulge in a bit of what his boss back at the police station calls ‘proceeding’.

  He is proceeding in a southerly direction across the square when he hears the hoarse sound of men shouting. It appears to be coming from outside one of the big houses. Drunks, he thinks. Then he notices something curious. There is a tiny light in the upstairs window of the house, as if somebody has lit a candle. But the downstairs is in complete darkness. This is odd, he thinks, as surely a person would have had to light the hall lights first to see their way upstairs.

  Police Constable Evans approaches the house in a cautious and careful manner, exactly as he has been taught. He notices that the shouting seems to have stopped. The next thing he notices, aurally, is the sound of footsteps making off along the pavement in the opposite direction. He proceeds a little further – and almost falls over an enormous grey man in a heavily-gold-braided grey uniform, lying face down on pavement.

  Blood pools from the man’s nose, which appears to be broken, and from his mouth, and there are a couple of huge, wolf-like teeth lying on the ground next to him. His hands and feet are tied together with rope. There is something else very wrong with the man, but PC Evans’ simple Welsh brain can’t deal with what his eyes are telling him he is looking at, so he just loosens the ropes, and steps away.

  Now he notices a pale light flickering through a ground floor shutter of the house. He is just pondering on this new development, when the silence is shattered by a single gunshot. Without a shadow of doubt, some sort of a felony is taking place within.

  PC Evans reviews his options. What should he do? On the one hand, he could view this as a Heaven-sent opportunity to single-handedly prove himself a hero. Although possibly, given the gunfire, the proof might end up being posthumous.

  On the other hand, he is very young, and it is his first time in London, and – most importantly – he has not yet (to put it euphemistically) joined giblets with anybody.

  PC Evans assesses the situation, and decides in the circumstances that there is only one acceptable course of action. He leaves the square, and goes to find back-up.

  While he is gone, the man on the ground will return to consciousness, discover the ropes that bound him have been loosened, and will stagger off to lick his wounds in some dark corner of the city. Which is just as well, because nobody would ever have believed PC Evans anyway.

  ****

  As PC Evans sets forth in search of help, another more frantic search is taking place. In the benighted silence of the shadowy house, Josephine and her companions are hunting the Countess. There is no logic to this decision. Logic screams that their proper course of action would be to get out as quickly as they can, and hand over to the forces of law and order. However, logic has been taken hostage by something darker and more primitive: a desire for confrontation and revenge.

  And so, accompanied by a pistol, a kitchen knife, and a splitting headache, they progress from room to empty room, always keeping close to each other, and close to the flickering dark-lantern that now lights their way up the dark staircase to the next floor.

  Entering the first chamber they come to, they spy an open-lidded trunk piled high with clothes. A four-poster canopied bed is strewn with silk sachets, hatboxes and jewel cases.

  “It is as I thought,” Lilith whispers. “She is preparing to leave. We have arrived just in time. Another day and she’d be gone.”

  Taking the diamond with her, Josephine thinks.

  As if reading her thoughts, Lilith gestures towards one of the leather jewel cases. The top drawer has been flung open and is empty.

  “Wherever she is hiding, she has the diamond with her.”

  “Then we must find her.”

  They search in the wardrobe and behind the curtains, and move cautiously on. But the Countess is not to be found. Th
ey are just on the point of giving up the search, when Lilith suddenly puts her finger to her lips. They freeze, ears straining. Then the other two hear it also. A faint susurration, like silk being drawn along a wooden floor. It appears to be coming from somewhere above their heads. They look up.

  The werewolf is standing on the upper landing, staring straight down at them. She is holding a massive, heavy, marble-topped washstand. Her eyes are the eyes of a beast of prey, nocturnal, red as an open wound. Next second she hurls the washstand over the banisters.

  They cover their faces and cower back against the wall. The washstand hurtles to the ground with a deafening crash. Sharp pieces of wood and shards of shattered marble fly into the air.

  When the dust has settled, they step forward cautiously. The upper landing is empty. They stare in dismay at the gaping hole in the floorboards, and the pile of debris.

  “She could’ve killed us,” Oi whimpers.

  “But she didn’t,” Lilith says firmly, brushing powdered marble from her clothes. “She must be up in one of the servants’ attics. Follow me. And take great care.”

  They clamber over pieces of shattered floorboard and chunks of broken marble, and resume the search.

  ****

  There is a tavern in the town. It is a tavern where young men of a certain class go to drink beer and become acquainted with young women of a certain class, (though not generally the same class, because we’re talking about the sort of young women that the young men’s parents would definitely disapprove of). Right now, there is a fracas taking place at the tavern in the town, and the police have been summoned.

  By sheer chance, Detective Sergeant Jack Cully happens to be in the immediate vicinity, having just enjoyed a nice hot tripe supper at an eating-house around the corner. A couple of local constables armed with truncheons are also in the neighbourhood. They all assemble on the pavement outside the tavern, where they enter into a brief discussion on tactics, before entering the tavern itself.

  Inside the tavern, they find tables overturned and stools upended. People are cowering in corners and behind the long bar. The floor is awash with spilt beer and crunchy with broken glass. At the centre of the fracas is a young man wearing the unlikely costume of a Venetian nobleman. He is whirling about, waving a naked sword – not a good idea in a confined space, and with young women present.

  The young man is yelling at the top of his voice about a certain purse full of guineas, and a gold fob-watch. Items he claims he had upon his person when he entered the tavern, and which he now no longer has about him.

  The absence of these items is being blamed upon a young lady called Jenny Weaver. Cully is immediately informed by another young lady called Pearl, whose dress appears to be a couple of sizes too small, that Jenny is not in the tavern, was never in the tavern, and that she, Pearl, who has only just arrived in the tavern, has not seen Jenny for ... ooh, almost a week.

  “Now then, my girl,” Cully says briskly. “Enough of that gammon. You cut along sharpish, and tell your friend Jenny to bring the stolen articles down to the station toot sweet, and we’ll say no more about it. All right?”

  He gives Pearl a knowing look, whereupon Pearl shrugs and melts silently away into the crowd. Cully turns his attention to the young Venetian nobleman.

  “Put the sword down. Please. Sir.” Cully speaks in a polite-but-with-an-edge-of-menace tone.

  But George Osborne (for indeed, it is he), ignores the request, and continues to wave the sword above his head, slicing several candles from their holders.

  “Do you know who I am?” he demands angrily.

  “No, Sir. Should I?”

  “My father. My father owns a bank. That means I am an important person.”

  Aren’t they bloody all? Cully thinks wearily. As if it matters. As if he gives a damn.

  “That means you cannot lay a finger on me. Not. A. Finger. Unnerstand? None of you can lay a finger on me. Because if you do, my father will — nggh.”

  But Cully is never to know what George Osborne’s father will do, because at this point George Osborne’s head comes into sudden contact with one of the police constables’ truncheons, and he drops like a stone. At some point in the future, this will be called police brutality, and will result in a prosecution being brought. But this is 1860, so it merely results in a loud cheer from the other occupants of the tavern.

  George Osborne is dragged bodily out of the tavern by the two constables and thrown into a waiting horse-drawn police wagon, the floor and ripe air of which bear witness to long usage by equally-drunken men.

  As the wagon trundles away, Detective Sergeant Cully is approached by another officer, this time from his own force. The officer is hot and sweaty, and out of breath.

  “Sir,” he gasps, “Detective Inspector Stride wants you to go to Russell Square as quickly as you can. Something has occurred.”

  ****

  Lilith, Josephine and Oi have reached the top of the house, where at last they find the Countess, crouched like an animal on the floor of an attic room. She is holding the diamond in her mouth. Even in darkness, the clear jewel glimmers softly. Ice-cold and pure and desirable.

  The Countess sees them, gathers herself and leaps gracefully towards a skylight which bursts open at her touch. Before they can grab hold of her feet, she hauls herself up, and disappears.

  Lilith fetches a chair, and places it under the skylight. They help each other to clamber out onto the roof. The vast scoop of sky is vertiginously high and clear, yawning like an abyss. The stars are a wild maze. The three of them stand gasping in the taut, biting cold. There is nothing between them and the infinity of space.

  Casually, as if stepping upon the floor of some elegant society ballroom, the Countess glides over the flat surface until she reaches the edge. There she stops, studying the gap between the house and its nearest neighbour.

  It is clear that she intends to leap across, and from thence make her way along the roof-line to the end of the row of houses. For a brief moment, she stands precariously poised on the very edge, her weird hairy face framed in the moonlight, the diamond in her jaws glittering like the heart of winter.

  Then suddenly and without warning, the flimsy parapet gives way. The Countess stretches out her furred hands as if trying to grip on to empty air. She utters a loud choking cry, and disappears over the edge. Josephine rushes forward, and sees her flying in the air, her long dark cloak billowing around her like black wings, as if in some terrifying dream.

  Except that this is not a dream.

  The Countess falls. Through the air, through the darkness, through every nightmare of the imagination, until she lands heavily upon the iron-tipped railings below. They all peer down. Skewered on the sharp spikes, the werewolf's body lies like a broken marionette. It does not move. The feral muzzle points upwards to the night sky, as if desperately seeking a last soundless gasp of life-giving breath.

  Even from their rooftop vantage point, they can clearly see the sharp point of an iron spike pushing up from the centre of the black-clad chest. For a moment, the three stare in shocked disbelief.

  Then Lilith pulls them back from the perilous edge.

  “It is over,” she says simply. “She has gone. And she has taken the diamond with her.”

  Josephine utters a great shuddering sigh.

  “I don’t care anymore about it,” she says quietly. “It killed my uncle; it nearly killed me. I’m glad it’s gone. Maybe now it has claimed its last victim.”

  “Brave girl,” Lilith says, giving her a brief hug.

  Oi gestures towards Lilith’s pocket.

  “Woz they really silver bullets in the shooter?”

  “Of course they weren’t.”

  He nods.

  “Thought not. What should we do now?”

  Lilith smiles grimly.

  “Not be here.”

  She takes him by the shoulders, and steers him gently towards the open skylight.

  “Leg it out the back way. D
etective Inspector Nosy and his pal have just arrived. We don’t want them asking awkward questions. Like, what are we doing here and how did we get in?”

  Obediently Josephine and the crossing-sweeper swing themselves through the skylight, tumble down three flights of stairs, and race across the dark garden, fear of discovery almost giving their footsteps wings.

  Only when they are beyond the garden gate, gasping and panting in the narrow alley at the back of the house, does Josephine suddenly realise they are on their own.

  “Where’s Lilith?”

  “Dunno,” Oi says. “And guess what? I ain’t waiting around to find out.”

  And like a scrawny cat, he blurs into the shadows and disappears.

  Meanwhile, out in the street, Detective Inspector Stride and Detective Sergeant Cully elbow their way through the usual crowd of gawping bystanders that never fails to materialise out of nowhere whenever something gruesome turns up.

  They are both far too busy trying to impose their authority and create a semblance of order to notice the dark-haired woman wearing a velvet floor-length evening cloak, who steps casually up from the basement area of a house, and makes her way across the square in a northerly direction.

  Had they noticed her, they might have wondered what exactly she was clutching so tightly in one hand, as if she'd never let go of it again. And why she was smiling.

  ****

  London in 1860 is rebuilding itself. Carcasses of ragged houses, fragments of walls, and broken streets have ceded to giant cranes and scaffolding. Vast wildernesses of brick piles have moved in, as the new industrial landscape of rail and road drive relentlessly through old neighbourhoods, disquieting corpses and displacing populations on every side.

  From the ruination of tenement lodgings, dank cellars and freezing alleyways, miserable wretches emerge each morning and stream towards the awakening city. Thousand upon thousand, they move in an endless stream. A treadmill of transitory souls. Food for factory, workhouse, or madhouse, or for charnel-house and the grave, they enter the great gaping maw of the monster, and are swallowed up and lost.