‘My daughter thinks a great deal of her experiments. I hope you will not encourage her. She quite frightens me at times; she says such dreadful things.’
I sipped my tea and smiled. ‘I don’t think there is much cause for fear.’
‘No cause for fear when she tells one that she might commit a murder; that a hundred thousand people might see her do it, and that not by any possibility could the crime be brought home to her!’
‘Perhaps she exaggerates a little.’
‘Do you think that she can hear?’ The old lady glanced round in the direction of the bedroom door.
‘You should know better than I. Perhaps it would be as well to say nothing which you would not like her to hear.’
‘But I must tell someone. It frightens me. She says it is a dream she had.’
‘I don’t think, if I were you, I would pay much attention to a dream.’
The old lady rose from her seat. I did not altogether like her manner. She came and stood in front of me, rubbing her hands, nervously, one over the other. She certainly seemed considerably disturbed. ‘She came down yesterday from London, and she says she dreamed that she tried one of her experiments – in the train.’
‘In the train!’
‘And in order that her experiment might be thorough she robbed a man.’
‘She robbed a man!’
‘And in her pocket I found this.’
The old lady held out my watch and chain! It was unmistakable. The watch was a hunter. I could see that my crest and monogram were engraved upon the case. I stood up. The strangest part of the affair was that when I gained my feet it seemed as though something had happened to my legs – I could not move them. Probably something in my demeanour struck the old lady as strange. She smiled at me. ‘What is the matter with you? Why do you look so funny?’ she exclaimed.
‘That is my watch and chain.’
‘Your watch and chain – yours! Then why don’t you take them?’ She held them out to me in her extended palm. She was not six feet from where I stood, yet I could not reach them. My feet seemed glued to the floor.
‘I – I cannot move. Something has happened to my legs.’
‘Perhaps it is the tea. I will go and tell my daughter.’ Before I could say a word to stop her she was gone. I was fastened like a post to the ground. What had happened to me was more than I could say. It had all come in an instant. I felt as I had felt in the railway carriage the day before – as though I were in a dream. I looked around me. I saw the teacup on the little table at my side, I saw the flickering fire, I saw the shaded lamps; I was conscious of the presence of all these things, but I saw them as if I saw them in a dream. A sense of nausea was stealing over me – a sense of horror. I was afraid of I knew not what. I was unable to ward off or to control my fear.
I cannot say how long I stood there – certainly some minutes – helpless, struggling against the pressure which seemed to weigh upon my brain. Suddenly, without any sort of warning, the bedroom door opened, and there walked into the room the young man who, before dinner, had visited me in my own apartment, and who yesterday had travelled with me in the train. He came straight across the room, and, with the most perfect coolness, stood right in front of me. I could see that in his shirt-front were my studs. When he raised his hands I could see that in his wristbands were my links. I could see that he was wearing my watch and chain. He was actually holding my watch in his hand when he addressed me.
‘I have only half a minute to spare, but I wanted to speak to you about – Mary Brooker. I saw her portrait in your room – you remember? She’s what is called a criminal lunatic, and she’s escaped from Broadmoor. Let me see, I think it was a week today, and just about this time – no, it’s now a quarter to nine; it was just after nine.’ He slipped my watch into his waistcoat-pocket. ‘She’s still at large, you know. They’re on the lookout for her all over England, but she’s still at large. They say she’s a lunatic. There are lunatics at Broadmoor, but she’s not one. She’s no more a lunatic than you or I.’
He touched me lightly on the chest; such was my extreme disgust at being brought into physical contact with him that even before the slight pressure of his fingers my legs gave way under me, and I sank back into my chair.
‘You’re not asleep?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not asleep.’ Even in my stupefied condition I was conscious of a desire to leap up and take him by the throat. Nothing of this, however, was portrayed upon my face, or, at any rate, he showed no sign of being struck by it.
‘She’s a misunderstood genius, that’s what Mary Brooker is. She has her tastes and people do not understand them; she likes to kill – to kill! One of these days she means to kill herself, but in the meantime she takes pleasure in killing others.’
Seating himself on a corner of the table at my side, allowing one foot to rest upon the ground, he swung the other in the air. ‘She’s a bit of an actress too. She wanted to go upon the stage, but they said that she was mad. They were jealous, that’s what it was. She’s the finest actress in the world. Her acting would deceive the devil himself – they allowed that even at Broadmoor – but she only uses her powers for acting to gratify her taste – for killing. It was only the other day she bought this knife.’
He took, apparently out of the bosom of his vest, a long, glittering, cruel-looking knife. ‘It’s sharp. Feel the point – and the edge.’
He held it out towards me. I did not attempt to touch it; it is probable that I should not have succeeded even if I had attempted.
‘You won’t? Well, perhaps you’re right. It’s not much fun killing people with a knife. A knife’s all very well for cutting them up afterwards, but she likes to do the actual killing with her own hands and nails. I shouldn’t be surprised if, one of these days, she were to kill you – perhaps tonight. It is a long time since she killed anyone, and she is hungry. Sorry I can’t stay; but this day week she escaped from Broadmoor as the clock had finished striking nine, and it only wants ten minutes, you see.’ He looked at my watch, even holding it out for me to see.
‘Goodnight.’ With a careless nod he moved across the room, holding the glittering knife in his hand. When he reached the bedroom door he turned and smiled. Raising the knife he waved it towards me in the air; then he disappeared into the inner room.
I was again alone – possibly for a minute or more; but this time it seemed to me that my solitude continued only for a few fleeting seconds. Perhaps the time went faster because I felt, or thought I felt, that the pressure on my brain was giving way, that I only had to make an effort of sufficient force to be myself again and free. The power of making such an effort was temporarily absent, but something within seemed to tell me that at any moment it might return. The bedroom door – that door which, even as I look back, seems to have been really and truly a door in some unpleasant dream – reopened. Mrs Jaynes came in; with rapid strides she swept across the room; she had something in her right hand, which she threw upon the table.
‘Well,’ she cried, ‘what do you think of the secret of the mask?’
‘The secret of the mask?’ Although my limbs were powerless throughout it all I retained, to a certain extent, the control of my own voice.
‘See here, it is such a little thing.’ She picked up the two objects which she had thrown upon the table. One of them was the preparation of some sort of skin which she had shown to me before. ‘These are the masks. You would not think that they were perfect representations of the human face – that masterpiece of creative art – and yet they are. All the world would be deceived by them as you have been. This is an old woman’s face, this is the face of a young man.’ As she held them up I could see, though still a little dimly, that the objects which she dangled before my eyes were, as she said, veritable masks. ‘So perfect are they, they might have been skinned from the fronts of living creatures. They are such little things, yet I have made them with what toil! They have been the work of years, these two, and just one o
ther. You see nothing satisfied me but perfection; I have made hundreds to make these two. People could not make out what I was doing; they thought that I was making toys; I told them that I was. They smiled at me; they thought that it was a new phase of madness. If that be so, then in madness there is more cool, enduring, unconquerable resolution than in all your sanity. I meant to conquer, and I did. Failure did not dishearten me; I went straight on. I had a purpose to fulfil; I would have fulfilled it even though I should have had first to die. Well, it is fulfilled.’
Turning, she flung the masks into the fire; they were immediately in flames. She pointed to them as they burned.
‘The labour of years is soon consumed. But I should not have triumphed had I not been endowed with genius – the genius of the actor’s art. I told myself that I would play certain parts – parts which would fit the masks – and that I would be the parts I played. Not only across the footlights, not only with a certain amount of space between my audience and me, not only for the passing hour, but, if I chose, for ever and for aye. So all through the years I rehearsed these parts when I was not engaged upon the masks. That, they thought, was madness in another phase. One of the parts’ – she came closer to me; her voice became shriller – ‘one of the parts was that of an old woman. Have you seen her? She is in the fire.’ She jerked her thumb in the direction of the fireplace. ‘Her part is played – she had to see that the tea was drunk. Another of the parts was that of a young gentleman. Think of my playing the man! Absurd. For there is that about a woman which is not to be disguised. She always reveals her sex when she puts on men’s clothes. You noticed it, did you not – when, before dinner, he came to you; when you saw him in the corridor this morning; when yesterday he spent an hour with you in the train? I know you noticed it because of these.’
She drew out of her pocket a handful of things. There were my links, my studs, my watch and chain, and other properties of mine. Although the influence of the drug which had been administered to me in the tea was passing off, I felt, even more than ever, as though I were an actor in a dream.
‘The third part which I chose to play was the part of – Mrs Jaynes!’ Clasping her hands behind her back, she posed in front of me in an attitude which was essentially dramatic.
‘Look at me well. Scan all my points. Appraise me. You say that I am beautiful. I saw that you admired my hair, which flows loose upon my shoulders’ – she unloosed the fastenings of her hair so that it did flow loose upon her shoulders – ‘the bloom upon my cheeks, the dimple in my chin, my face in its entirety. It is the secret of the mask, my friend, the secret of the mask! You ask me why I have watched, and toiled, and schemed to make the secret mine.’ She stretched out her hand with an uncanny gesture. ‘Because I wished to gratify my taste for killing. Yesterday I might have killed you; tonight I will.’
She did something to her head and dress. There was a rustle of drapery. It was like a conjurer’s change. Mrs Jaynes had gone, and instead there stood before me the creature with, as I had described it to Davis, the face of a devil – the face I had seen in the train. The transformation in its entirety was wonderful. Mrs Jaynes was a fine, stately woman with a swelling bust and in the prime of life. This was a lank, scraggy creature, with short, grey hair – fifty if a day. The change extended even to the voice. Mrs Jaynes had the soft, cultivated accents of a lady. This creature shrieked rather than spoke.
‘I,’ she screamed, ‘am Mary Brooker. It is a week today since I won freedom. The bloodhounds are everywhere upon my track. They are drawing near. But they shall not have me till I have first of all had you.’
She came closer, crouching forward, glaring at me with a maniac’s eyes. From her lips there came that hideous cry, half gasp, half yelp, which had haunted me since the day before, when I heard it in my stupor in the train.
‘I scratched you yesterday. I bit you. I sucked your blood. Now I will suck it dry, for you are mine.’
She reckoned without her host. I had only sipped the tea. I had not, as I had doubtless been intended to do, emptied the cup. I was again master of myself; I was only awaiting a favourable opportunity to close. I meant to fight for life.
She came nearer to me and nearer, uttering all the time that bloodcurdling sound which was so like the frenzied cry of some maddened animal. When her extended hands were all but touching me I rose up and took her by the throat. She had evidently supposed that I was still under the influence of the drug, because when I seized her she gave a shriek of astonished rage. I had taken her unawares. I had her over on her back. But I soon found that I had undertaken more than I could carry through. She had not only the face of a devil, she had the strength of one. She flung me off as easily as though I were a child. In her turn she had me down upon my back. Her fingers closed about my neck. I could not shake her off. She was strangling me.
She would have strangled me – she nearly did. When, attracted by the creature’s hideous cries, which were heard from without, they forced their way into the room, they found me lying unconscious, and, as they thought, dead, upon the floor. For days I hung between life and death. When life did come back again Mary Brooker was once more an inmate of Her Majesty’s house of detention at Broadmoor.
THE LAST OF THE VAMPIRES
Phil Robinson
Born in Chunar, India, the son of an army chaplain, Philip Stewart Robinson (1847-1902) was educated in England at Marlborough College, after which he was employed as a war correspondent by the Daily Telegraph. He wrote a number of books reflecting his interest in natural history and humorous Anglo-Indian literature, but among connoisseurs of weird fiction he is chiefly known for his trio of vampire tales, ‘The Man-Eating Tree,’ ‘Medusa,’ and ‘The Last of the Vampires,’ which were collected in Tales by Three Brothers in 1902, the year of his death. ‘The Man-Eating Tree’ was subsequently reprinted in Dracula’s Brood (1987), and ‘Medusa’ recently appeared in Vintage Vampire Stories (2011). The third story, ‘The Last of the Vampires,’ which is our next offering, was originally published in the March 1893 issue of The Contemporary Review, and features a most unusual vampire.
DO you remember the discovery of the ‘man-lizard’ bones in a cave on the Amazon some time in the sixties? Perhaps not; but it created a great stir at the time in the scientific world; and in a lazy sort of way, interested men and women of fashion. For a day or two it was quite the correct thing for Belgravia to talk of ‘connecting links,’ of ‘the evolution of man from the reptile,’ and ‘the reasonableness of ancient myths’ that spoke of Centaurs and Mermaids as actual existences.
The fact was that a German Jew, an india-rubber merchant, working his way with the usual mob of natives through a cahucho forest along the Maranyon, came upon some bones on the river-bank where he had pitched his camp. Idle curiosity made him try to put them together, when he found, to his surprise, that he had before him the skeleton of a creature with human hands and feet, a dog-like head and immense batlike wings. Being a shrewd man, he saw the possibility of money being made out of such a curiosity; so he put all the bones he could find into a sack and, on the back of a llama, they were in due course conveyed to Chachapoyas, and thence to Germany.
Unfortunately, his name happened to be the same as that of another German Jew who had just then been trying to hoax the scientific world with some papyrus rolls of a date anterior to the Flood, and who had been found out and put to shame. So when his namesake appeared with the bones of a winged man, he was treated with scant ceremony.
However, he sold his india-rubber very satisfactorily, and as for the bones, he left them with a young medical student of the ancient University of Bierundwurst, and went back to his cahucho trees and his natives and the banks of the Amazon. And there was an end of him.
The young student one day put his fragments together, and, do what he would, he could only make one thing of them – a winged man with a dog’s head.
There were a few ribs too many, and some odds and ends of backbone, which were superfluous; b
ut what else could be expected of the anatomy of so extraordinary a creature? From one student to another the facts got about, and at last the professors came to hear of it; and, to cut a long story short, the student’s skeleton was taken to pieces by the learned heads of the college, and put together again by their own learned hands.
But do what they would, they could only make one thing of it – a winged man with a dog’s head.
The matter now became serious: the professors were at first puzzled, and then got quarrelsome; and the result of their squabbling was that pamphlets and counterblasts were published; and so all the world got to hear of the bitter controversy about the ‘man-lizard of the Amazon.’
One side declared, of course, that such a creature was an impossibility, and that the bones were a remarkably clever hoax. The other side retorted by challenging the sceptics to manufacture a duplicate, and publishing the promise of such large rewards to any one who could succeed in doing so, that the museum was beset for months by competitors. But no one could manufacture another man-lizard. The man part was simple enough, provided they could get a human skeleton. But at the angles of the wings were set huge claws, black, polished, and curved, and nothing that ingenuity could suggest would imitate them. And then the ‘Genuinists,’ as those who believed in the monster called themselves, set the ‘Imposturists’ another poser; for they publicly challenged them to say what animal either the head or the wings had belonged to, if not to the man-lizard? And the answer was never given.
So victory remained with them, but not, alas! the bones of contention. For the Imposturists, by bribery and burglary, got access to the precious skeleton, and lo! one morning the glory of the museum had disappeared. The man half of it was left, but the head and wings were gone, and from that day to this no one has ever seen them again.
And which of the two parties was right? As a matter of fact, neither; as the following fragments of narrative will go to prove.
Dracula’s Brethren Page 25