The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life

by Talbot, Michael

  “Cletus, please tell me where the virus is.”

  He regarded me with childlike sadness. His eyes teared as if he were about to cry. The same inner struggle seethed within him. He was coming out of it. Somewhere deep within his weathered skull he was summoning the full force of his will to speak. A fearful recognition flickered in his eyes. “Gladstone—” His head was wrenched suddenly to one side as if possessed by a demonic force. His deformed old frame was shaking as he tightly clenched his teeth and struggled to watch me out of the corners of his eyes.

  His trembling ceased abruptly. For a few uncanny moments he held the contorted position, and then slowly a smile crept across his face. “Oh, no....” he chuckled throatily. “You can’t fool me.”

  “Cletus!”

  He stared at me vacantly for a moment.

  In a single deft movement he kicked something and there was a resonant gurgling sound as of a can emptying. A liquid began to trickle down the banisters. The smell of kerosene permeated the room. In an instant he was up and bolted through the doorway behind him.

  I tore up the stairs, stepping carefully over the spreading puddle, and then froze. He stood in the disheveled laboratory. The remains of what had been my papers were scattered all around him. On tlie lab table were my shredded notebooks and a number of the Petrie dishes containing what I assumed to be the remaining cultures of Camillus influenzae in various stages of incubation. Also on the table was an empty glass cage and in the little man’s arms was a black-and-white rabbit. It was familiarly lethargic.

  Its heart beats so very fast, Niccolo had said.

  What was he going to do?

  Cletus smiled at me, depraved. “Is this what you want?”

  “Cletus, you must not do this.”

  “Little bunny,” he purred. “Do you want to pet my little bunny?”

  I gaped in horror at the pathetic little man. Was this really the great Dr. Hardwicke, the wily and deceitful blackguard who had once so intimidated me, who had caused me so much grief? There was a time I had hated him. But now, seeing him reduced so totally and so heartlessly by creatures of greater cunning, I could feel only pity for him. I lunged forward to stop him.

  In a flash he struck a match and threw it into the puddle of kerosene. Flames surged up, spreading, moving like the wind into the hall. I jumped back and shielded my eyes.

  It was then I became aware of Dr. von Neefe.

  “No, you mustn’t!” she said and the thunder of her voice was deafening. But somehow, in some way, my life was being consumed. My work. My papers. Half crazed myself, I felt my legs begin to carry me into the room. Dr. von Neefe’s voice faded into an indecipherable drone. It was as if I were trapped in a dream. I no longer possessed any volition. My legs moved. The heat was intense. My head lolled about scanning the table, my papers, a closed Petrie dish. My hand reached out. The glass of the Petrie dish seemed unreal. Rubbery. My legs moved.

  Impossibly, I made it back into the corridor. I turned to see Cletus dancing in the flames, a cackling, twisted Rumpelstiltskin. The rabbit squealed as it slid weakly and piteously from his arms. In horror I watched as snake tongues licked his face, crackled away the thinning hair, and bubbled the yellowed skin. His eyes were wide and crazed. His ecstatic hands quivered and blackened. Even as he crumpled to the floor he laughed.

  Outside in the street the gingerbread windows began to glow like ovens, and fire bells rended the London night. We nervously scanned the street. They were not back yet, but they might reappear at any moment. For the moment we had foiled them. The fact that Cletus still had both the rabbit and the Petrie dish meant that they had not yet been able to get the virus. They would be doubly angry at us for intervening. We had not a second to lose. As we crossed the street a feeling of such intensity descended upon me I had to pause. It was unlike anything I had ever felt before. It was a spiritual emptiness, as if for a moment all the life and air had been sucked out of the world and nothing was left but the cold stars and the black and infinite void. I had never been clairvoyant, but for a moment I felt that I had entered a timeless netherworld, the dream time of the aborigines. Somehow I sensed that a moment of awesome importance had just passed. A sphere of destiny had somehow played itself out and we were in that brief interim where for one mote of a second there was nothing, nothing until the massive forces and machineries of fate shifted into a new gear, and all the air rushed back into the world. I glanced down at the remains of a life, the Petrie dish. The smear of agar contained a living colony of the virus. If properly maintained it could survive a short time outside of the laboratory. A very short time.

  Once back in the carriage Dr. von Neefe started pelting me with questions and I told her everything I had learned from Cletus of the vampire and their intentions to engineer the release of the virus.

  “Is it true?” she cried.

  “How can you doubt it?” I returned.

  “It’s just too incredible. I can’t believe—”

  “You must, damn it! You must! You have been laboring under a romantic vision of the vampire. How much more evidence do you require?”

  Her face aglow in the lambent light, she at last seemed to understand the import of the virus and a presage of what might lie ahead. “You should have let it burn,” she said savagely.

  I had just seen my oldest enemy burn to death. I was in no mind to accept criticism. I would have snarled something back had my thoughts not been reeling with the more urgent matters at hand—how to preserve the last living strains of the virus, and first and foremost, how to combat the vampire. If the virus was as important to them as I thought it was, there was no telling what they would do to get it back. We needed help, but I was at an utter loss as to how to persuade the authorities, let alone any national sovereignty, that there were creatures of a different blood among us and plotting our overthrow. Any normal institution would think we were raving lunatics. I feared even my closest colleagues would never believe such an incredible tale. We were alone and helpless.

  There was only one human faction that might consider our case, one small minority who would not immediately dismiss the terrible plot we had uncovered: the mysterious network of the vampire hunters. We had to get in touch with Dr. Leberecht Weber and get him to mobilize what meager resources we had.

  As for the virus, as long as it was safely in my hands there was one other matter that restrained me from seeking out a safe place to hide and maintain it. Again I could not leave it with a colleague because I feared the vampire would take him unaware. Further, I could not go into hiding with it myself because of the one other matter, and that was my little Camille. While Cletus had had the virus and there was danger of its being released upon the world I had been able to forsake her. But now that I had reclaimed it, my voracious desire to rescue her had returned. There are some who might consider my rash willingness to rush into the very lair of the enemy to be the height of folly, but to them I can only say that they have not experienced blind and selfless rage. Every second of captivity in the home of des Esseintes had only fomented my anger. Every trick and torturous manipulation of the vampire had only increased my desire to spare her even one more second in their grasp.

  Dr. von Neefe did not dare argue with me.

  When we reached Victoria Station we discovered it unusually busy for the hour. The street was dark. The gaslamps shimmered, and yet out of the inky blackness came a slow but steady stream of hansoms. Was there some reason for it? Were the vampire here? We eyed the crowd. Families gathered in front of the rambling wooden Terminus building. A woman in gloves and an ornately embroidered dress fluttered her fan. Children played, as wide awake as if it were afternoon. A woman with a hat of egret feathers stepped into the traffic and caused a cab to swerve to one side. I wondered if it were the stifling heat that caused so many upright Londoners to travel in the dead of the night.

  I drove on past the Terminus and parked the brougham a block away. I took the precaution of hiring a porter to purchase our tic
kets, and prepared a makeshift carrying case for the Petrie dish from a canvas satchel in the hansom.

  “I will enter first,” I told Dr. von Neefe. “If I do not signal for you within ten minutes you must get out of here. You must understand what danger we are in.” I looked at the virus, wondering if I should leave it with her. I looked at her and for the first time since the shock of seeing Cletus die in the flames, a hint of her former strength returned. I decided against giving her the virus. If the vampire did catch me I might be able to destroy it before they could reach it.

  “You’re not going to leave me?” she gasped.

  “Only until I go into the station. If I don’t come back out I want you to promise me you will try to get Camille back. You must get Dr. Weber’s help. Do you hear me?”

  She straightened. “I hear you quite plainly.” She glanced toward the station. “They’re in there, you know. They won’t have enlisted the police this time. You’re on your home ground. Your name is well known in London, and no officer in his right mind would believe any charges they might have brought against you. Besides, their purpose in using the authorities in Paris was to keep you from getting to the virus. Now that you have it, it is their game alone. How do you propose to get through to the trains?”

  “I have to go in there. Perhaps they won’t recognize me. We would not have been recognized at the Gare du Nord if it had not been for Grelot.”

  “What about the photographs?”

  “Photographs?”

  “The photographs des Esseintes took just before he showed us the orchid conservatory for the first time.”

  But of course. I had forgotten. What had he said? He was taking them simply as a precaution? No doubt he had already considered the necessity of such identification should we ever happen to escape. “Surely the photographs will not arrive until the morning post.”

  Almost tauntingly she said, “What makes you think he has not already distributed the photographs throughout the vampire population of Europe? If he had the forethought to take the photographs in the first place, why wouldn’t he have posted them the very next morning?”

  I did not know. I only knew that I had to cling to one hope. “Possibly he did,” I retorted. “And possibly this very moment there are a hundred sets of eyes examining those very pictures, memorizing details that aren’t even visible to our human eyes. But possibly, just possibly, Monsieur des Esseintes’s gargantuan ego caused him to feel that the chances of our outwitting him were so small that the mere taking of the photographs was precaution enough.”

  She looked at the station worriedly and shook her head again. All of her anger and exasperation bubbled up in her face as she turned to me. “I told you,” she said bitterly. “I warned you at the very beginning that you were blind and did not see what others would see.” She looked sharply at the canvas satchel and then back at me. Her resentment melted and once again she took on a tenderness not normally present. It was a warmth, even a sensuousness, although this time there was something different about it, a hidden sorrow. Once again I was astonished to find it thrilling, and she was aware of this. If it had not happened so spontaneously, so passionately, I’m sure we would have both felt denuded by it. “You did not take my advice then. I will implore you one last time. Won’t you please destroy the virus?”

  I felt empty “I cannot.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you know what you are asking? You are a scientist and a scholar. Don’t you see that civilization would not advance if we destroyed our discoveries?”

  “Advance!” she laughed shrilly. “And how, pray tell, does your saving that debased virus advance civilization?”

  How could I explain to her everything the virus was to me? It was my memorial to Camille, the result of five years of anguish and hard work. “It is the principle that concerns me here. It is principle that furthers civilization; not the virus. Don’t you see? We cannot destroy knowledge. I have come to question many things, but one thing I cannot question, one truth I hold above all others is that knowledge is good. To destroy the result of years of work and study, to blot out a discovery would be censorship of the most odious kind. To destroy the virus would be to destroy the quintessence of myself I cannot do it.”

  After I finished speaking there was a ringing silence. It was as if we had touched fingertips in the darkness, speechless with expectation, only to recoil once again to our own desolate islands. I, for the first time, realized the virus was the quintessence of myself. She, for the first time, realized how vast and immutable the emotions that divided us were. In other women I might have expected perplexity or denial, but not in her. Once again she revealed her singular character, for she seemed to understand. In fact, that was the source of her sorrow. She had comprehended my answer all too well.

  Suddenly I felt another rush of something black and measureless. It was as if the same sixth sense were trying to tell me that unseen forces were working around us, but the message was indistinct. All I knew was that the cantilevers of destiny had swung into place. I did not know what that destiny was. I only knew that I was a part of it, a part of some quivering web.

  “Very well,” she said, as if it were a decree. “Then we have one hope, that we will not be recognized.” She slipped off the telltale cloak and ulster and left it in the brougham. “We will go into the station separately. I will go first.”

  I was about to say something when she slipped down from the carriage. “We must stand together;” she repeated as she strode toward the station. I had no choice but to follow. I held the satchel unobtrusively at my side. I pretended not to know her and trailed a safe distance behind. I was certain she observed me out of the corners of her eyes. She remained quiet and dignified. We entered the station.

  Inside, the concourse was a hubbub of activity Perhaps it had been a long time since I had been in Victoria Station at such a late hour. Perhaps it was the tension of the situation, but again it seemed peculiarly crowded. People milled everywhere, fashionable ladies and dowdy matrons, slithering and struggling, a hodgepodge of carpetbags, portmanteaus, and parrot-head umbrellas. Near one end of the immense chamber and standing behind several large palms was a delegation of Punjab Indians in turbans. At the opposite end of the concourse and framed by a waiting locomotive gathered several hussars in their white dress uniforms and spiked and tasseled white pith helmets. A hiss of steam pushed them on. Metal clanked. Cylinders keened. It could be any one of them.

  With a pang I realized again that my world had unalterably changed. A few months ago this would have been the most harmless of sights, a crowd of people. Oh, it might have held some secrets—a diplomat, an illicit affair—but it was an artless backdrop, the middling swarm. Now these were no longer my fellow beings. They were out there. It was incredible, but it was true. There moved among us creatures who were not quite human. They had been out there my entire life. They had been out there during my father’s life, my grandfather’s—walking, smiling, mingling brazenly, and no one knew it. We were utterly alone in our knowledge. If we tried to tell anyone they would think we were mad. They were out there, and now that I knew it I could never look at the evening crowd again without wondering. Which face? Which smile conceals the jackal teeth?

  Were their eyes upon us now? I looked at the dusty satchel swinging casually at the end of my arm. Knuckles too tight. That was just the sort of thing they would be looking for. I relaxed. They would also be looking for two of us. I allowed Dr. von Neefe to draw still farther ahead.

  The woman with the hat of egret feathers brushed by us, now accompanied by a little girl in puffed sleeves and a straw boater. I paused at a newsstand and pretended to be interested in a notice. My head was facing the paper, but my eyes gazed beyond. Across the concourse the Punjabs had begun to edge toward the pier. Was it they? The boarding whistle blew and I glanced up to see that Dr. von Neefe had reached the train.

  I too made my way toward the platform.

  In my casual efforts to maintain a loo
kout I bunglingly walked right into one of the hussars.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said.

  I nodded in apology. I searched his eyes suspiciously as I walked quickly away. Gentle periwinkle eyes.

  And then through the crowd I saw him, a massive gentleman. Bowler hat. Patriarchal beard. Gold watch chain and a panatela in an amber holder. So des Esseintes had been scrupulous enough to post the photographs weeks before. The massive gentleman’s gaze was fierily determined, even trancelike. He strode with incredible speed and grace for his size, weightlessly, like a wraith swiftly cutting through the crowd. He might have been any arbiter of elegance were it not for the eeriness of his gait.

  Dr. von Neefe did not visibly glance at the fellow, but her own increase in speed indicated she was aware of his approach. She lifted her skirts and paced rapidly by the waiting passenger cars. I too had reached the train and hastened my step. Until we stepped up into the cars he had no way of being certain we were taking this particular train. I looked behind and saw he was closing the remaining thirty feet between us. The final whistle sounded. We continued moving along the pier as the gentleman bore down upon us. I turned to see he had cut the distance in half. The engine driver opened the valve to clear the boiler, and every sound in the station was blotted out by the rushing screech of escaping steam. The train started to move.

  His gaze remained unchanged. Dr. von Neefe stepped up on the train. He was only a few steps behind me. It would soon be too late. In an instant I leaped upon the accelerating train and turned, expecting to see hands closing in upon me.

  But the gentleman maintained his forward gait as we swiftly passed by him.

  It was an odd reprieve. Was he truly unconcerned, just a peculiar gentleman in the crowd? Or had he simply maintained his demeanor; not wanting us to realize he had failed? Not knowing was even more psychologically devastating than if we had actually seen his fangs, or felt his icy grip upon our flesh, for we were forced into an unreasoning paranoia. We had to work from the premise that the portly gentleman had been a vampire, and they now knew which train we were on. It would be easy for them to wire ahead and have us intercepted at the next stop. We were not even sure that the man with the panatela had been a vampire, and still we had to dodge every suspicious stranger.