The Cabinet of Dr Blessing (The Dr Blessing Collection Parts 1-3): A Gothic Victorian Horror Tale

by Rollins, Jack

  The Chinaman nodded as Edward rose to his feet and left the tent. His heart sank. There was not much chance of saving Niamh, he had already accepted that. But he knew that George loved Niamh, and if this was to be her end, then he would want to be with her, not be laid out insensible.

  Silently, Edward prayed there would be enough time, at least for George to say goodbye.

  George.

  Were it not for the pipe, I might have found it impossible to rest in London. The child, on the other hand, seemed as settled as ever I had known her. At first I had assumed that perhaps she knew she was home, and that this somehow brought comfort to her. By comfort, I should specify that her hunger seemed to temper, she was not as desperate as she had been over the months we had been transient. Her mind still scoured my thoughts, however and suggested actions – willed me to do her bidding.

  Which brings me back to the pipe. The purpose of me commencing to take the opium was to numb my senses when not at my work. I seemed to disconnect from her when under the influence of the drug. I had made the discovery while experimenting with various opium-heavy tinctures. From there it had been only a short hop to the pipe.

  Overall, what it had meant was that for the time being the people of London were somewhat safe. Smokey had brought his travelling sideshow into the city for the winter. It made the bitterly cold months more bearable, although we were still situated on a camp of sorts. The yard and lanes behind and around the Priam Theatre had become something of a village, made up of our tents and bonfires. We were safe from the chill of the wind from the Thames each night at least, and our three shows daily at the Priam brought in more than enough money to keep us well-fed until spring.

  Hong brought me a cup of his beef and herb tea. It tasted foul, but brought me around most effectively. I sat up and smiled through my beard at the wise-looking Chinaman. He smiled back and stood dutifully ready.

  “What is it, Hong?”

  Hong handed me a note. When I opened the scrap of paper, the scrawled handwriting was difficult to make out at first. Then I realised that the note read simply:

  Come Home - Edward

  At first, I almost laughed at the idea. Home? It had taken Smokey a fortnight to convince me to join the show in London, so afraid was I that I would be arrested. I had been busy out there in the countryside, desperately avoiding news from travellers or the papers, but I was aware that the city was in the grip of an epidemic. The desire to know more was quelled by the fear that in picking up a newspaper, I would finally see in writing that I was a wanted man and that a rope was waiting for my neck. It was easier for my mind not to have the fear confirmed, but safer for my life to assume the threat was there.

  You must remember that at the time all of this was happening, I believed my culpability for my wife Margaret’s death, for Henry Burton’s death, and the deaths of dozens of my patients, had become common knowledge. At that point, I was unaware that I was responsible for much, much more.

  Visitors to the shows had muttered and complained something about monsters in the city at night. The only monsters I saw out there were the Londoners themselves, rioting, looting, attacking each other, attacking strangers, attacking sailors, attacking Chinamen, attacking Jews. We had only been encamped in London for eight nights and on three nights deputations of various sizes had come to ‘burn the freaks’. Smokey feared that if the situation did not calm within the week, we would have to move on and take our chances in another town or city.

  I had been in a deep, opium-induced sleep when Smokey had been forced to bribe some sort of militia group on the outskirts of London to let us enter the city at all. Even after the money had changed hands, Smokey had been forced to carry two wounded mercenaries with him into the city. Hong had tended to their wounds early in the morning, gratis, before sending them on their way.

  The beauty of the opium, however, was that the sleep it gives allowed me little time for gossip, less time for reading papers and no time in which to wander the streets. I simply put on the show then returned to my tent, to attend to Panacea, and to work on my medicines with Hong.

  I should tell you a little of my work with Hong, and my work in general. Hong was a brilliant assistant, a skilled apothecary in his own right and coupled with my discipline as a physician with some surgical experience, we were very close to perfecting a true cure-all. Or, at the very least, a cure-many.

  The venom issued forth from Panacea’s mouth was a dangerous and powerful substance. I had discovered, however, that in various concentrations and at various ratios, mixing the venom with blood before consuming it could deliver some of the benefits of the vampire condition – chiefly the enhanced ability to heal. Blending this with other substances had disguised the blood-venom mixture as a patent medicine.

  My experiments with the animals had shown me the pure venom’s function as a colonising agent – converting infected creatures into an almost cannibal state, essentially, creating a vampire variant of any species.

  The venom caused physical changes within animals and humans, but these were more pronounced the more the host consumed blood. It seemed that there was a way back, but only in the early stages and it was a painful starvation, a near-death experience. If the host consumed enough blood, the transformation, and as a result, the benefits and hazards therein, would be permanent.

  The animals in my experiments had shown great variation. These included variations in conversion time from ‘normal’ to vampire depending on the volume of venom discharged at the initial exposure, coupled with the amount of blood consumed in the time shortly after the exposure. It was simple, but crude and I had not been able to calculate an exact ratio. Simply put: less venom delivered, more blood and more time required for the transformation to be completed.

  I had felt first-hand, the rapidity of the change and the painful return from the precipice, in the days following my flight from London. The child’s venom had reacted with blood in my shoulder, which had been wounded with a gunshot. Shortly after this, I had fed upon the blood of one of the child’s victims – an act, I might add, quite out of character for my person. As a result, my recovery had been rapid and thorough, with no signs of infection at all. My physical state on the whole improved, and I found that I could fight for survival against the most deadly opposition – me, of all people,fighting! Never a fighting man in my life, but under the influence of the venom, I had become a warrior!

  Following that fateful night, I was struck by the overwhelming thirst for blood. It was one hundred times worse than any morning that followed my debauched outings with Henry! One hundred times worse, at the least! I had to avoid daylight for three whole days as the combination of the venom and the woman’s blood worked out of my system. Somehow, the child strengthened my will, and helped me overcome the cravings. After all, if I became a creature of the night, how could I protect her by day?

  That was my own limited exposure. What was clear from my body of research was that an animal infected directly by the creature (or from the samples of venom I had extracted from her) would bite and infect other animals around it. If a rat bit a mouse and the mouse survived the initial attack, the mouse may not have the strength and vitality of its fellows who had been infected by another mouse. Cross-species infection does not always create a fully functional vampire – there are mongrel weaknesses that quite often appear. These mainly revolve around the enhanced healing ability and the ability to fight disease.

  Mice who had been infected with the venom and who encountered a female at a point where it would mate rather than attack seemed to produce offspring like the male; that is to say, would spawn a mouse who would feed on its own kind, usually killing the mother minutes after birth. That instant kill and feed sustained the vampire offspring for a considerable period and grant a great surge of growth and development.

  This second generation of mouse would impregnate females who would invariably, whether infected or not, birth vampire progeny. It seemed to me that if both parents were va
mpire at the point of copulation, no offspring could be spawned. I planned to study more complex animals to pursue this theory. For the truest reflection I needed to study infected humans for more than one generation. I feared I would never have the opportunity to complete my research.

  The most interesting variation I discovered was when the first mouse infected by the venom, the prime mouse, as it were, would elect to mate with a female. The prime mouse would appear normal and behave as its vampire kin, but the offspring of the prime mouse would display strange mutations. They were, without exception, born without eyes, without hair, and would hunt in packs, as though highly communicative and predatory. Their instincts seemed almost precognitive.

  The sub-prime mice would bite and infect others, converting those mice into vampire mice, which would bite and convert others creating generations of vampire mice. Where the sub-prime mice mated, however, their offspring shared the sub-prime mutations and carried on a lineage of animals that reflected, quite simply, in mice, what the child in the bell-jar represents when compared to humans.

  From these findings I could deduce much about the child in the bell-jar. I could state with confidence, that the child’s father was a man, who had been converted by some sort of creature like her, with the most potent form of the venom. He himself had become vampire, but in mating, his offspring had carried the mutated appearance of the origin creature. My theory was that if the child’s father bit me, and I proceeded to impregnate a woman, then that woman would bear a vampire child. However, if Panacea’s true father mated with that same woman directly, without infecting her first, I was certain the child produced would be exactly like the one in the bell-jar.

  The human vampire, therefore, was a diluted version of some primary creature, something that resembled the child I harboured. If a human was converted by that primary creature directly, he or she would produce offspring which was either that primary creature, or some sort of hybrid. Without seeing the primary creature, I could not know for certain. I had, however, heard that there was an island off the Northumberland coast, where these creatures dwelled in great number.

  Any human infected by the primary creature, or the hybrid would further procreate and bear more hybrids, yet that same human vampire’s bite would create only human vampire converts.

  All of that was theory, until I could meet the child’s father or at least learn about him. Having met Mary Brigham, a woman so skilled in the art of combat, and trained to aim those skills toward the extermination of vampires, I could only wonder if the child’s father was not long dead, and the opportunity of learning the true story of the child in the bell-jar long passed.

  I snapped out of my mental review of all my research and found that Hong was still standing before me.

  “The child’s father is not dead,” Hong said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You said you wondered if the child’s father was not long dead. But the child’s father is alive. It is you,” Hong insisted.

  “Hong, what is your deranged Chinese tongue babbling at me now?” I snapped.

  Hong shook his head, causing his long, pointed grey beard to wave from side to side. He seemed disappointed that one as intelligent as I should stoop to the level of making crude remarks about his people. Or his tongue, for that matter.

  I shuffled to the edge of my palette bed and glanced at the concealed tank at the rear of the tent. “So, Edward was here?”

  Hong shrugged.

  I sighed and tutted. “Really, Hong? All right then, I am sorry. I am sorry that I insulted your Chinese sensibilities. I can see you have every inch of you the national pride and, of course, intellect, of your average English gentleman… and dare I say, almost the intellect of your average English doctor.”

  “I think you should stop now, Doctor.”

  “Better?”

  Hong rolled his eyes up and nodded.

  “All better, then. So, Edward was here, was he?”

  “I did not conjure up the note with my ‘Chi-nee’ magic,” Hong snapped, exaggerating his own accent.

  “True enough. True enough,” I replied, casting a glance around the tent. “Hong, you could soften your replies… I am, mainly thanks to you, I should add, quite hopelessly addicted to opium, and at this moment am still not quite back from the…. Land of dreams, shall we say?”

  “Hopeless, yes I think that is the correct word you use.”

  “Thank you, Hong. Now, listen! Edward did not chance to look under that cloth, did he?” I asked, pointing at the shrouded tank.

  Hong shook his head. “No, he was going to, but the child… she defended herself.”

  “He recovered, though?” I asked.

  “If he had died, he would be lying right here in front of you, no? Let us say that curiosity made the cat vomit and have nose bleed.”

  I sighed with sheer relief. The corpse of another friend was the last thing I needed on my conscience.

  “Did you hear nothing I said before, Doctor? I told you it was the girl – the little girl you sometimes talk about.”

  “Niamh?” Suddenly I was all ears. “What of her?”

  “She is unwell, she is most unwell, he said. That is why this man wants you to go home. I think she needs your help.”

  A crushing weight seemed to descend upon me all at once as I grasped for my heavy bearskin coat. A protest. She was angry. Wherever Niamh was, whatever was wrong with her, I knew that I would go; I did not require the use of the opium to help me overcome Panacea’s control on this particular matter.

  Of course, that meant confronting Charlotte. I wondered, would she have me arrested? Would my letter of months ago, and my provision for her and Niamh have softened her at all? Would she accuse me of Margaret’s murder, or had Edward gone some way to explaining things?

  There was no way that I could take Panacea with me. She would have to remain in her tank under the guardianship of Hong and Smokey. The very moment I had completed that thought, I felt a mental projection of claws being scraped down the inside of my brain.

  I glanced at Hong, he stood with his eyes closed, fingers poised at his temples, breathing heavily and deeply through his nose. The expansion and contraction of his chest continued in an unbroken rhythm – he seemed to have overcome the pain she tried to inflict on him. I was able to tell the very moment her attack on Hong ceased, for he snapped out of his trance and began to ready my Gladstone bag. “Wait outside. I bring your things.”

  Still reeling from her psychical tantrum, I managed to sweep aside the flap of the tent door and step outside. I could see that it was early afternoon, and the sun, wreathed in the city’s smoky breath, granted no heat to the earth. I was glad of the bearskin coat and wished I had managed to obtain my hat, hoping that Hong would notice it as he gathered my supplies.

  “Doctor!” one of the show children called. “What do you think of our tree?”

  I checked my nose to see if the child in the tank had caused my blood vessels to rupture again, as she had on many other similar occasions. She had not. I turned to the child who had hailed me and smiled at her.

  “It is marvellous, my darling!” I exclaimed, moving towards her. I ruffled her hair and encouraged her younger brother who had helped her to decorate an evergreen branch with coloured tatters of paper, and flower petals, emulating the German tradition that had caught on in England thanks to Prince Albert’s lineage.

  I reached into my pocket, produced two three penny coins and handed one to each child. “I must say, I have never seen a more beautiful tree than this.”

  “Thank you, Doctor!” the children chimed, marvelling at the gifted coins, before returning their attention to their little makeshift tree.

  Hong cleared his throat behind me, loudly enough for me to hear over the clamour of our camp site. “I take care of her for you until you come back. Never fear.”

  I took my bag from him and silently forgave him for not thinking to bring my hat. It stood to reason that a man so small would h
ave a smaller brain, with a reduced cognitive capacity, by comparison to the Western mind. I outstretched my fingers and touched his forehead, taking a crude estimate of size. I made a mental note to take an accurate measurement on another occasion.

  “That is strange, Doctor. I would really rather you shook my hand,” Hong protested with as much dignity as he could muster.

  Privately, I marvelled at him, looking at him there. Little. And Chinese. How could he possibly think to bring me the hat when all of his cognition must be fixed on retaining all he knew of medicines and potions, as well as desperately clinging to every word of the English language that he could. I knew that I should not remonstrate with him, should not send him back into the tent for the hat, further angering her. I focussed instead on all that was remarkable about him.

  “Doctor, must you stare at me, so?”

  What must his eyes have seen on the way to this great nation?

  “Doctor, you have business to attend to.”

  This jewel of an island.

  “What jewel? Doctor, what are you muttering about?”

  “Precious to me, Hong.”

  “Doctor?”

  “You. The child. Niamh.”

  “Please, Doctor. Let me teach you how to meditate. It blocks out her attacks most effectively. You need to leave the pipe alone.”

  I scowled at Hong. “Those are easy words for you now. It was you who introduced me to it!”

  “A sad day.”

  “And besides, I am a man of science. Your, what is it? Meditation is a mere fiction. You have doubtless been raised on fairy stories and superstition; your primitive mind is, of course, open to all manner of suggestions. Your belief in this meditation serves simply as a distraction, causing you to stand there while her mental attacks do Lord knows what kind of damage to your brain. Were you a rational man, such as I, you would reject such notions and simply flee her attacks or, as I do, protect my mind in a cloud of opiates so dense that she becomes confused and ultimately relents.”