“George. When you and I visited Judith Cloonan on that fateful night and I left the doss with the midwife... Something transpired in the time that I was unconscious. Something you hid from me. Something only Henry knew. And together you hid it. Am I correct?”
I nodded.
“Judith bore a child, did she not? One horribly disfigured, so disfigured you spirited it away?”
“No. The child… she was beautiful.”
“Was?” Charlotte asked, shifting her position on her chair.
“She has grown somewhat in the last three years. She appears to be what I imagine is the juvenile to adult of her kind.”
“Not a human, then?”
I shook my head. I was surprised that Charlotte did not accuse me of madness or lies then and there.
“She drinks blood, this monstrous child?” Charlotte stated this; it was not posed as a question.
I confirmed that she was correct, still amazed that she remained parallel with me in the conversation.
“She drank Henry’s blood.”
I nodded.
“She drank Margaret’s. And Father Haddon’s, I presume?”
“Yes.”
“She drank the blood of some of our patients at the clinic, did she not?”
“She did.”
Charlotte’s eyes took on a sheen that keenly reflected the light of the fire. “She did the killing?”
“I think so. Most of it.”
“The George Blessing I knew was a gentle man. A healer. He would never have hurt another living soul. Then came the time that I no longer knew you, and a secretive George Blessing came about. One who seemed heartless and who can not say for certain that he did not kill with his own hands. Yet here he stands before me, this man, this Doctor George Blessing. I can see he has the same face, those same beautiful, kind eyes and the heart… still there. Your heart is still there. Why else would you risk yourself to save that little girl?”
“Niamh is the child that Margaret and I could not have together. She wanted so badly to have a child – even to take Niamh into our home and I denied her that!” My voice cracked, tears flowed down my cheeks and I fell to my knees.
“They can control your mind, George! It is not your fault. She made you do these things. See how you behave while you are away from her? You have conscience! You are yourself once more!”
Charlotte rose from her chair at great effort and rested a hand upon my head as I wept uncontrollably, lamenting my part in the deaths of my wife, my friends and those strangers who had stepped out into the path of destruction.
“I feel as though I have been in a nightmare for the last three years, Charlotte. Some of it comes back to me in sleep; some of it has been struck from my mind completely. Some days I can not tell memory from imagination… I have been unable to tell anyone…”
Her fingers pressed my head to her swollen belly. I felt the movements, the life within. “I forgive you, George. I forgive you. I wish you had told me all those months ago, before you ran away.”
“It was impossible, Charlotte. She would not allow it.”
“Had you been at the end of a rope, George, how could you have fed her? And in feeding her, you placed yourself in line with the hangman. She would have been forced out into the open without you. While you studied her, and thought that you were on the brink of a discovery, you were under her spell. She used you, George.” Charlotte seemed to understand the situation remarkably well, but then I remembered Mary Brigham and wondered at the conversations they had enjoyed in my absence.
“It is too late, Charlotte. See our families… destroyed… see our city… fallen! It takes only a few rats on a few ships and I have wrought the end of the civilised world!”
Charlotte soothed me, as tenderly as if I was the child upstairs who lay at death’s threshold.
I spent some welcome moments basking in the warmth of Charlotte’s forgiveness. How good it felt to be in the company of an old and trusted friend.
Before long, I thought it best to check on Niamh to orientate myself to purpose once more. As I stepped out into the reception, a great commotion erupted. Giles was red-faced, pulling on a heavy coat as two armed guards held the front door open.
“Surely he would not have simply abandoned his station!” Giles cried.
“Is there a problem, Giles?” I called.
“We fear that one of our guards, Ernie, has taken his leave unexpectedly!” Giles announced, his face a picture of fury. He made for the door, and then turned to me once more, calling, “And if you should see Miss Pinchstaff, please ask her to attend Charlotte at once, Doctor.”
“Certainly,” I said, turning my attention back to Niamh.
The sickroom was cold. I tutted and shook my head when I realised that Miss Pinchstaff had neglected to request a fire as I had instructed. A sheen of perspiration glistened on the child’s forehead. I checked her temperature with my palm. She was deathly cold.
I inspected the wound. Immediately upon removing the bandage, the smell of decay struck me. The wound had not only become septic, but Niamh’s skin had begun to rot.
I raced back to the samples I had been working on, cursing my own negligence. Shifting the samples under the microscope, I found that the first three samples had been ineffective. There had been no significant change. The fourth sample showed signs of the diseased blood abating. In my excitement I reached for the last sample, with the strongest concentration of Panacea’s venom. Immediately I could see that it was too potent, and that Niamh’s blood had been corrupted – turned vampire like so many of those animals I had experimented on.
I picked up the sixth sample then compared it to the fifth and seventh.
The sixth was perfect. The disease was gone. Niamh’s blood was cleansed and not corrupted.
Using the goose fat I had collected from the kitchen earlier, I prepared an ointment with the correct concentration of Panacea’s venom. After a thought I added the sixth sample itself, where the reaction I desired had already taken place, hoping that it would spur on the process.
I hurried along the landing to the sickroom and almost collided with Miss Pinchstaff, who emerged from that room. I almost dropped the jar containing the ointment. “Watch where you are going, damn you, woman!” I cried.
Miss Pinchstaff scurried past me, saying not a word. I thought her to be the most rude woman I had ever encountered and raised my voice to her, saying, “Did I not request a fire in that child’s room?”
I then remembered Giles’ request and called after her, as she descended the stairs, “Mrs Burton wishes to see you immediately!” Still there was no response from her.
Tutting my disapproval, I entered the sickroom. The room was in complete darkness save the light from the landing that followed me into the room. There was no hiss of gas, so I knew that the jets had been turned off rather than the flames alone extinguished.
I could not see well enough to carry out my work and so returned to the landing where I took a candle and matches from a side table. I lit the candle and returned to the sickroom when a series of gunshots sounded outside, giving me such a fright as I nearly dropped the candle and the precious ointment I carried.
Opening the curtains with some trepidation, it took some moments for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the grounds. I realised that the gunshots had not come from this side of the building and that the shots had been fired to the rear.
I was about to close the curtains once more, when I noticed a shape, almost invisible in the blackness, flitting across the path below. The shape vanished, absorbed by the darkness of the trees and plants. I wondered if it was the guard Giles and his men were looking for. Perhaps he had become separated from his fellows, I reasoned. As I closed the curtains, a nagging doubt persisted in my mind; I was sure the shadowy shape had been wearing a dress.
The front door burst open and another commotion erupted in the reception.
Peering down the stairs I saw two armed guards ushering Giles back
into the house. Giles clutched his neck, which bled profusely. “My God, Giles!” I cried, racing down the stairs towards him. “What happened?”
“We found a vagrant… hiding in the woodshed… bloody bit me!” he gasped. “Doctor, when you find yourself with a moment, could you grant me… your blessing?”
I ignored the request. “Let me see the bite, Giles.”
He moved his hand, and hot sticky blood dribbled down his fingers, his clothes and onto the reception rug.
Producing a kerchief I wiped at his injury, fearing what I would see. With the blood momentarily clear, I saw two puncture marks, as of two sharpened, elongated canine teeth. Fangs. “Giles. I have grave news for you,” I growled.
The front door opened once more, interrupting me.
Two more guards appeared, dragging a scruffy man between them. The man was either dead or unconscious. They dropped him on the rug and rolled him over. The gunshot wounds in his chest were fatal, of that I was certain.
“My God, it was Ernie!” Giles gasped. “Why would he bite me?”
The gathered guards evidently realised before Giles did. One of them tore at Ernie’s shirt, exposing the scar on his neck. The mark of a healed bite.
The guard who had touched Ernie cursed and inspected his fingers. A string of mucous connected his fingers.
I knelt beside Ernie’s corpse and pressed my fingers against his flesh. It was liquefying. “He is one of them,” I muttered.
“We know it, see the bite!” one of the guards cried.
“No… he is one of these half-breed, diseased vampires that plague the city.”
“A vampire all the same,” cried the guard.
“But why did the bullets stop him?” I asked.
Giles smiled and gestured to one of the rifles. “Silver bullets, George. When I sent arms to the militias, I armed our men, too.”
“Giles, but you have been bitten!” one of the men cried, not daring to finish his thought out loud.
I noticed that the men began fidgeting with their rifles.
“And yet I feel I am in rude health.” Giles became aware then that others nearby were perhaps not as convinced of his condition as he was.
One of the guards raised his rifle so that it no longer stood with the stock against the floor, it was across his midriff. The others did the same.
Giles started to protest that perhaps he had not been infected. The guards kept looking at Ernie on the floor. I knew, and Giles must have known, that they avoided eye contact with Giles because they liked him, and they no longer wanted to see him as himself – they needed to depersonalise him, make him inanimate in their minds. That would make killing him easier. They also stared at Ernie so that they could associate Giles with him; a vampire, worthy of the same treatment as Ernie.
As Giles moved from man to man, touching coats, gripping hands, assuring them he was still one of them, something ticked away in my mind… The ointment I had prepared for Niamh, from Panacea’s venom… it needed to bond with blood to be effective. Using it as a topical cream would work on her open wound, and it would be drawn into her bloodstream. My use of the initial sample would hopefully only speed matters up… but then I considered a similar process I had been using for some time. In every bottle of Hong’s Blessing was a sample of Panacea’s venom, but also a quantity of blood!
Those drops of human blood I added to every bottle were the element that triggered Panacea’s venom and unlocked its healing properties… the venom was not in great enough concentration to cause colonisation… Panacea’s venom was a class above the common vampire venom and, I thought, two classes above the venom of the diseased specimens, such as Ernie.
One of the guards’ nerves snapped. He grabbed Giles and cried, “I am sorry, boss! I am sorry beyond words, but we can not leave this to chance!”
One of the other guards, with tears streaming down his cheeks, held the front door open. “We have to protect Mrs Burton!” he wailed, justifying his involvement.
The others grabbed Giles and started to move to the door with him, each crying out that they were sorry, but that it had to be done.
“Stay your hands, gentlemen!” I boomed.
The men stopped in their tracks and turned to face me.
I asked Giles, “What happened to the pharmacist? Edward told me the man Sacks was attacked. What happened to him?”
Giles sobbed, “He lives. He will take a while to heal fully, but I heard this morning that he makes progress.”
“And Edward told me he was found bitten dozens of times.”
“Indeed.”
“But he did not change… And this is the pharmacist from whom you bought Hong’s Blessing?”
“The same.”
“Unhand him at once!” I commanded.
The men looked at me, confused.
“If you have any sense, unhand Giles at once. Giles, share your bottle of Hong with them!”
One of the guards stepped away from Giles, approached me and asked, “What are you talking about?”
“Giles has a medicine which makes him impervious to these vampires! He can not be turned. If you drink it, you will be immune, too!”
The men trusted my theory. One of them reasoned that Giles had been “swigging that stuff” every time he looked at him.
Giles produced his bottle, took a sip for himself, and then passed it among the men.
“Do you have any more of the medicine, Giles?” I asked.
“I may have a bottle or two somewhere…” Giles said, glad to be free of the guards.
“Doctor,” one of the guards said, “what should we do with Ernie?”
I was, at that point, ascending the stairs, anxious to get the ointment onto Niamh’s hand. I turned back to the men and informed them of the only effective way I knew of destroying such creatures, “Take him outside. Burn him.”
Giles added, “You may wish to consider beheading him first.”
“It might be prudent,” I agreed.
I entered the sickroom once more, armed with a candle in one hand, and the jar containing the ointment in the other. I needed plenty of light in order to study the effects of the ointment properly and so moved to the gas jets to ignite them once more. It was when I approached the fireplace I noticed the smell of damp soot. I knelt by the hearth and used the candle to light the immediate area. Thick soot had spilled from the chimney and onto the floor. I had already stepped in it, and regretted that I would doubtless trail it throughout the house.
I thought it quite careless of Charlotte not to have her chimneys regularly swept. No matter, I thought, it will clean, but Niamh must be saved!
I ignited the gas jets once more and moved to the bedside. I expected to remove the dressing from her hand, but found that it was already gone. Niamh’s hand was dark and glistening, and at first I had thought the whole appendage to be completely given over to rot. I held Niamh’s arm so that her hand caught the gaslight better. The darkness was not rot, it was blood, and Niamh’s clothes and bedding were marked with dark crimson spots.
Immediately, I knew that her wound had been agitated, opened up on purpose, and not by me. My mind leapt back. Before Giles entered the house injured, Miss Pinchstaff had left the room and her behaviour had been strange to say the least. I began to wonder if it had been her I had noticed wandering the grounds.
With all haste I applied the ointment to the child’s wounded hand, certain that Panacea’s venom would mend her, disease, wounds, everything.
I wiped at her hand to remove some of the blood staining, in order that I might better view the effects of the ointment, but I expected that it would take some time for any change to be discernible.
“Have you heard a word I said at all?” Charlotte cried.
“Charlotte, you are here!” I exclaimed, glancing about me to discover I was still in the sickroom. At the time I wondered if I had fallen asleep, watching over Niamh, but I was standing up.
“Your nose is bleeding,” Charlotte said, t
hrusting a handkerchief in my face.
I took the handkerchief and dabbed my nose, inspecting the bright red blood. Blood. I was reminded of what I wanted to say to Charlotte. “Miss Pinchstaff… I believe she is in thrall, a servant to the vampire found hiding here earlier.”
Charlotte appeared to be furious with me and shouted, “I have just told you twice! Miss Pinchstaff is dead!”
“In what circumstances?” I asked.
“Suspicious circumstances, George! Most suspicious circumstances!”
I was urged to the reception once more, which one began to think of as a mortuary, this being the second corpse to be seen there in a night.
Miss Pinchstaff had been left to lie on the floor, overlooked by Giles and several of the house guards. The indignity shocked me at first, in a way that it had not, with the man Ernie. Miss Pinchstaff’s neck was angled at what appeared to be a merely uncomfortable angle, but the deformity of the bone structure, and livid bruising, told me that her head had been twisted to the point of breaking her neck. Someone, presumably one of the guards, had already checked her destroyed neck for bites.
“Bitten?” I asked.
“Not on her neck,” Giles said. “But I could not swear to the rest of her.”
“Then dismiss your men. I shall make a more thorough examination.”
From the top of the stairs, Charlotte voiced her disapproval.
“I beg you, dear Charlotte, permit me. This may mean the difference between a proper burial, and a headless cremation.”
She nodded her reluctant approval to me, and the guards left. Giles remained to assist me. I noted that his neck wound had stopped bleeding, and two small scabs were forming.
“Coagulation. A good sign,” I said, unfastening the buttons of Miss Pinchstaff’s dress.
“What is that you say, George?”
“Coagulation. That is to say that the vampires, in their bite, deliver an anticoagulant. It stops your blood from thickening as your body tries to heal the bite. This enables them to feed more freely, to bleed you more effectively. That your bite has a scab on it is a good sign.”
The Cabinet of Dr Blessing (The Dr Blessing Collection Parts 1-3): A Gothic Victorian Horror Tale Page 25