I stifled the nausea that came upon me suddenly, a reminder that I had abandoned my pipe. The sensation passed, but I knew that it would return, with more vigour, and within the hour.
To my shame, I wasted several minutes more, openly weeping over Niamh’s sickbed. Giles was soon by my side, and he squeezed my shoulder and patted my back. Edward joined him and the pair issued a dozen platitudes and consolations.
“I must gain purchase once more,” I exclaimed, springing to my feet. I strode across the room, putting distance between myself and Niamh. I rummaged with vigour just short of violence, through my bag and returned to Niamh’s side, not as her father, but as a physician.
At the time, I had only a single ear stethoscope. I pressed a finger to my redundant ear, muting the sounds of the house. I heard Niamh’s heartbeat. The pulse was steady, but faint. Her breathing was slow and shallow, but it was clear. I pressed my palm against her forehead and found that the child was clammy and hot. I glanced at my pocket watch and jotted down the time. I had not brought a thermometer with me, mine having broken in transit between one site and another on my travels with the sideshow.
I inspected the wound on Niamh’s hand, removing the dressings that obscured it from view. “The wound, well tended, clear of debris,” I remarked.
Giles wore a concerned face, but allowed himself a shallow breath of relief. I assumed from this that he had helped to manage the cleaning and dressing of the injury. Edward too, showed visible concern.
I realised then that they thought my mutterings were intended for their ears, when in fact I was talking to myself in an attempt to marshal my faculties and focus on the presentation of Niamh’s condition. In essence, I was trying to mute my body’s rising cry for the pipe.
“Signs of an infection, however,” I muttered, and knowing that those assembled may have thought I judged them, I added, “unavoidable in the circumstances.” I probed gently at the angry red tissue within the lacerations. I extracted a sample of the custard-like pus that had settled in the wounds and scraped it into a small vial.
Giles showed me to a guestroom, as the others left the sickroom to give me space to work. Charlotte had instructed her staff to furnish the guestroom with some tables and a chair to give me a makeshift laboratory. The gas lighting allowed me to work unimpeded, despite the rapidly fading day.
The gentle hiss of the gas took me back, back to my study. Back to Henry, back to Father Haddon, back to their screams… I shuddered, and returned to the matter at hand.
With my equipment set up, I began to inspect the mucous in close detail. The cell structure of the infectious material was curious in that it was both unusual and at the same time only too familiar. The structure showed a bonding of germs I recognised as the seeds of rabies, typhoid, yellow fever, cholera and typhus. In the magnification, the cells looked like some malevolent snowflake.
The elements of these diseases in one person would suggest someone living among putrid dead bodies and stray dogs in a sewer beneath the streets, emerging only to sup the filthy water of the Thames! Yet Niamh had been missing only hours.
Looking again at the sample revealed another piece of the puzzle. The germs were locked into a structure only too familiar to me: Panacea’s venom.
The germs were bonded; several diseases moving and behaving as a single unit.
I knew that venom to aggressively colonise the host’s tissues and to promote healing, essentially the venom is the tool through which vampirism prolongs and preserves itself. Niamh’s hand had not healed, and one could reason that this is simply because she had not fed upon blood, but I knew that was not the reason – the transformation had not even begun to occur. The venom and the infection were holding each other at bay.
I stared at the ceiling and pondered this. Niamh had been in contact with vampire creatures that had not, it seemed, bitten her. All the same, venom, from either the saliva or blood of a vampire, had touched an open wound. At the same time, presumably upon the same contact, she had been exposed to the infection which was some mixture of other diseases bonded and changed by the vampire venom. I reasoned from this that the disease that had made Niamh gravely ill, was one to which vampires are susceptible. For her part, she had succumbed to a collection of illnesses which had caused her physiological collapse, but which lay yet dormant, unable to run rampant through her body.
I cried out a long, anguished moan as a physical pain gripped my chest. The pain had nothing to do with the opium withdrawal; it was the effect of the moment that I realised it was all true! This was my doing! The people of London were correct, I was a monster!
I staggered to the sickroom. The other occupants of the house came to see what the commotion was, but stood stock still in fear as I raced along the corridor.
The mice, the rats, the dogs – it all made sense to me at that moment! Over the months since my hasty departure, the strays and vermin had bred and bitten and colonised so much that the venom itself had become tainted! The venom had melted into diseases most prevalent in the shadows of the city, and strengthened them!
The next thing I knew, I found myself at Niamh’s bedside once more, on hands and knees, begging her for forgiveness.
But even through my hysteria, a theory was forming. It took God knows how long for me to collect my emotions once more, but when I did, I raced back to my makeshift laboratory, leaving Charlotte, Miss Pinchstaff, Edward and Giles standing quite perplexed in the sickroom.
I quickly produced two vials from my bag and prepared two glass slides for my microscope.
My hands started to shake and I feared I would drop the vials and slides, and so quickly placed them on the table and tried to master my nerves. I could not proceed without satisfying my addiction. But I needed to keep my wits about me – no time for the Land of Dreams!
“You are quite taken with it, are you not?” came Giles’ voice from the door.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Opium. I recognise the signs. Your body is crying out for it.”
I steadied myself on the table and rose to my feet. “I assure you I am simply fatigued.”
“Try this. It has a little laudanum in it, I think. Perhaps enough to satisfy you, but certainly the mixture is potent enough to grant you some vigour.” Giles handed me a familiar brown bottle. The printed label on the front said ‘Hong’s Blessing’.
I chuckled and collapsed to my chair once more. My laughter rose and my shoulders trembled as I became hysterical.
“Whatever is wrong with you, man? Crying one minute, laughing like a fool the next!”
I uncorked the bottle and took a draught then handed it back to Giles. “Do you enjoy that mixture and find it effective?”
“It has taken years off me, I swear to it, with my right hand to God.” Giles raised his right hand then tucked the bottle away again.
“How long have you been drinking it?”
“A week or so. It appeared at a pharmacy I frequent.” Giles’ face changed and he appeared to be defensive about his consumption of the medicine. “In fact it is the pharmacy from which I recovered dear little Niamh.”
“There have been many variations of that medicine. This last one appears to work well, eh?”
“I could not attest to knowledge of variations, but this agrees with me,” Giles responded. Then his eyes widened. “It is you! Why, your name is on the bottle! I imagined some Chinaman with a mortar and pestle!”
“Hong is real, too,” I assured him. “And he is rather useful with a mortar and pestle.”
By then, the cure-all had taken effect and my tremors had abated. “Stay with me, if you like. Perhaps my work will be of interest to you.”
With my first experiment, I observed that venom extracted directly from my creature could rapidly destroy the disease. In the second experiment, I used venom extracted from a converted vampire mouse. The venom was not effective and the disease destroyed it. I set about a third experiment, this time involving the blood of a converted mouse
. I could see that the disease absorbed the blood cells, transforming them, colonising aggressively.
I pricked my finger and conducted a fourth experiment. The disease did not react with my blood.
The disease, I reasoned, was only truly harmful to vampire creatures.
Had Niamh been bitten, and the colonising process either begun, or completed, I suspected this new disease would have corrupted the colonised cells in her body.
I explained to Giles that the only treatment for Niamh was in the first vial. Giles began to celebrate the discovery.
“Do not celebrate for the moment. I must first fathom a way to introduce this into Niamh’s body without causing her to become vampire.”
“And if she becomes one of them… will she not then be susceptible to the disease?”
I nodded and said, “Basing a judgment on what I have just witnessed through the microscope, I do not doubt that the child would be dead within the hour.” The trick was to introduce the benefits of the venom in the right concentration and through the correct route.
Giles tapped the breast of his jacket, causing the glass bottle to sound a dull chime. “Does this have any of that in it?” he pointed to the vial in my hand.
“It does, but while perfecting this, there had been some… miscalculations.”
Giles looked more concerned by the second.
Edward appeared at the door. “How goes the research?”
“I am trying to ascertain if I am to become a blood-supping demon,” Giles said.
Edward laughed at what he assumed was a joke.
“I am quite serious! Dr Blessing here has been hawking a patent cure-all which has in it a quantity of what drips from the fangs of these creatures of the night!” Giles cried.
Edward smiled at me and said, “Oh dear, George. What have you done?”
“Has all of this started with a medicine?” Giles cried. “The city destroyed for you to line your pocket?”
“How dare you, sir?” I cried, leaping to my feet. “My medicine is not responsible for this.” Then I sat down in a hurry and added, rather sheepishly, “It is my months of meddling with nature in my laboratory that is the cause of this.”
Giles composed himself and grasped my knee. “I apologise, George. I am afraid, that is all. I am afraid for Niamh, I am afraid for this household, I am afraid for myself.”
“I understand. I understand, and I accept the facts. This is entirely my fault. Niamh, London, all of it. All of these deaths.”
“Now you have accepted your lot,” Edward said, “perhaps you can stop the death today. Perhaps Niamh will be the first of many you save. But God forbid, if she is beyond saving, perhaps you can learn something of the nature of this plague.”
“There are two problems.”
“Two?” Edward asked.
“Two problems, because there are two plagues. To the ignorant eye, Niamh’s problem appears to be that she was attacked by a vampire. This is the plague that is commonly recognised at present. Londoners are being attacked and transformed into vampires, who in turn attack and transform others. There is evidence to suggest that there have been creatures of this kind among us for centuries.”
“I thought it impossible until I saw the city brought to its knees, George,” Giles added.
“Vampirism is thought of as a plague in London at the moment because of the sheer scale of the attacks and conversions. This is not merely a handful of creatures killing to survive; this is the wholesale destruction and transformation of a city’s population. It may be true that this particular epidemic stemmed from my hospital. However, I have also discovered that within this known, visible plague, another has emerged, once which kills even the vampire creatures we fear. It is that plague which has infected Niamh, but which can not yet take her completely.”
“It can not kill humans?” Edward asked.
“Or it takes time to kill us… perhaps it is not used to us yet… acquiring a taste for us,” I reasoned.
“Acquiring a taste. Like wine,” Giles mumbled.
Edward cocked his ear towards Giles, attempting to hear him more clearly. “What was that, Giles?”
Giles turned on his heels and left the room with all haste, his face flushed and I am certain I saw tears on his cheeks.
Edward tightened his lips, his face showing sympathy for the likeable old man who, it seemed had become very fond of Niamh. Edward turned to me and asked, “What is next then, Doctor?”
“Next?” I considered the next move. “Next is goose fat.”
Miss Pinchstaff was fast asleep on a chair in the corner of the sickroom. The sun had revoked its offer of light and so the flickering orange of the gas jets was the only illumination. The effect of this was that deep shadows were cast into the corners, including that in which Miss Pinchstaff sat.
Miss Pinchstaff woke in some distress. I imagined she had suffered a disturbing dream, or perhaps the awareness that I was in the room had been enough to cause her fright.
“How is she, Doctor?” Miss Pinchstaff enquired.
“Still asleep,” I said, crouched at the bedside, not looking up from my work. “She has become quite cold. Perhaps you could ask Mrs Burton to arrange for the fire to be set and lit?” I asked, hoping to give Miss Pinchstaff something to concentrate on. Distraction had long been a technique of mine, as one can never tell who might faint at the sight of blood.
My technique, however, had been ineffective, as Miss Pinchstaff presently drifted over to my side, watching my work. “Whatever are you doing, Doctor?”
With my left hand, I squeezed Niamh’s wounded hand and encouraged a steady stream of blood to flow from the lacerations I had agitated with my scalpel. “This is no business for a woman. Your attention is better suited to making arrangements for that fire.”
I turned my head to see that Miss Pinchstaff was still present. Her eyes reflected the gaslight like two orbs of polished Whitby jet at a fireside. Her defiance quite disturbed me at the time, as I recall. At length she muttered her disapproval of my instructions and left me to my work.
I replaced the dressing on Niamh’s hand and returned to my station with the sample. I issued the same quantity of Niamh’s blood into ten small dishes and commenced to offer one drop of Panacea’s venom in the first, two drops in the second, three in the third, etc.
That Panacea’s venom would defeat the infection was not in doubt, but my experiment would help me to gauge a safe quantity of venom to use so that Niamh’s body would not be corrupted, would not become vampire.
Edward entered the room to say his goodbyes, and to wish me well. He feared that he would be unable to reach his lodgings if he delayed his journey any longer what with the militia groups along his route. He said that he would return in the morning to see the results of my labours. Edward assured me that he was convinced of my imminent success.
I considered for a moment how remarkable it was that Edward did not blame me for the loss of his fingers. The torture had only been inflicted on him because he had assisted me. I wished the world could be so forgiving.
Very few people know the secrets of Edward Summerscale. I am one of those trusted few, and I can confirm that some of those secrets would horrify you. However I was resolute in my opinion that the good in the man far outweighed the bad.
I saw him to the door, pleased for the opportunity to stretch my legs. The ground floor of the house was a hive of activity. Charlotte and Giles waved Edward off and returned to the warmth of the fires, the smell of burning pines, roasting chestnuts, hot plum pudding and goose.
A maid took hot tea out to the guards and enquired about Niamh as she passed.
It was then that Charlotte invited me into the parlour so that we could discuss matters of mutual concern.
That was not a moment I had been looking forward to.
“Truths, George. Simple, undeniable truths,” Charlotte started. She seemed to have begun the sentence without me, but I was able to estimate the unspoken words.
I pretended not to follow her line of thought.
Charlotte’s face seemed to take on the intensity of the parlour fire. “Do not play me for a fool, George. The fact that you are here, within my home, the fact that you are still alive, though I have armed men about me in every direction, tells you that you may speak plainly.”
I cleared my throat and reasoned, “It simply tells me that I am useful for the moment.”
Charlotte seemed to think about this for a long moment then blurted out, “You killed him. You killed my Henry.”
I did not reply, but fear my eyes blinked several times, confirming her accusation. Oh, in that moment, I wished that my Panacea had been there to make a strong, cold, hard thing of me!
“You killed the priest, our friend Father Haddon.”
I was gripped on a sudden by a terrible thirst.
“And you killed your own wife, Margaret.”
I leapt from my seat, causing Charlotte to start with fright. I paced to the fireside and grasped the poker. I dare not tell you the actions I considered in that moment. I attacked the hot coals and logs in the fireplace, agitating the blaze, creating a crackling, spitting blizzard within the hearth.
“And the fire, George. You can not deny that you set the hospital alight. You burned down our last three years of work. Of all these charges I know you to be quite guilty. However, I know neither your motive, nor your method of murder.”
I continued stabbing the fire. The heat singed my knuckles, and grew into an irresistible, pleasant burning.
“You did not work alone.”
The searing heat reached a crescendo and at last I withdrew my hand from the fireplace and clattered the poker back onto its brass stand.
“Charlotte, how am I to answer your charges? If I told you the truth, you would think me mad. If you believed me, you would think me evil. And I think… I think that I am neither of those things. I believe that I am a good man.” I turned from the fire and met Charlotte’s gaze.
The Cabinet of Dr Blessing (The Dr Blessing Collection Parts 1-3): A Gothic Victorian Horror Tale Page 24