Anno Dracula ad-1

by Kim Newman

  Florence asked him his opinion of Clarimonde’s Coming-Out, whereupon Wilde remarked that he was thankful for its existence, for it might spur a canny critic, such as he obviously adjudged himself, to erect a true work of genius on its ruins.

  ‘Why, Mr Wilde,’ Kate said, ‘it sounds as if you place the critic higher than the creator.’

  ‘Indeed. Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so criticism is really creative in the highest sense of the word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent.’

  ‘Independent?’ Kate queried, surely aware she invited a lecture.

  ‘Yes, independent. Just as out of the sordid and sentimental amours of the silly wife of a small country doctor in the squalid village of Yonville-l’Abbaye, near Rouen, Flaubert was able to create a classic, and make a masterpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or no importance, such as the pictures in this year’s Royal Academy, or in any year’s Royal Academy for that matter, Mr Lewis Morris’s poems, or the plays of Mr Henry Arthur Jones, the true critic can, if it be his pleasure so to direct or waste his faculty of contemplation, produce work that will be flawless in beauty and instinct. Dullness is always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent Bestia Trionfans that calls wisdom from its cave.’

  ‘But what did you think of the play, Wilde?’ asked Mr Reed.

  Wilde waved his hand and made a face, the combination of gesture and expression communicating considerably more than his little speech, which even Penelope found off the point, albeit elegantly so. Relevance, Wilde once explained, was a careless habit that should not be over-indulged.

  ‘My Lord Ruthven sends his regards,’ Art said.

  The poet was almost flattered to be so noticed. As he began to say something marvellously amusing but unnecessary, Art leaned close to him and, in a voice so small only Penelope could make it out apart from Wilde, said, ‘and he would wish that you took great caution in visiting a certain house in Cleveland Street.’

  Wilde looked at Art with eyes suddenly shrewd and refused to be drawn further. He escorted Florence off, to talk with Frank Harris of the Fortnightly Review. Since turning, Mr Harris sported goat-horns which Penelope found daunting. Kate tripped off in the poet’s wake, presumably hoping to suck up enough to the editor to place with him an article on women’s suffrage or some such silliness. Even a devoted libertine of Mr Harris’s reputation would presumably think Kate too undernourished a fish to count as worth netting, and cast her back into the seas.

  ‘What an earth did you say to so upset Wilde?’ Mr Reed asked, scenting a story. His nostrils actually did twitch whenever he thought he was on the track of some scrap that might possibly qualify as news.

  ‘Just some craze of Ruthven’s,’ Art explained.

  The news-gatherer looked at Art, eyes like gimlets. Many vampires had piercing gazes. At social gatherings, they could often be found trying to outstare each other like a pair of horn-locked moose. Mr Reed lost the contest and wandered off himself, searching out his wayward niece.

  ‘Sharp girl, that,’ Art said, nodding after Kate.

  ‘Pfui,’ said Penelope, shaking her head. ‘Careers are for girls who can’t get themselves husbands.’

  ‘Meow.’

  ‘Sometimes I think everything is going completely above me,’ she complained.

  ‘Nothing to worry your pretty little head about,’ he said, turning back to her.

  Art tickled her under the chin, and angled her head up to look into her eyes. She thought he might plan to kiss her – here, in public, with all of theatre London about – but he did not. He laughed and let her go after a moment.

  ‘Charles had better realise soon it is not safe to leave you lying around. Or else someone will steal you away and make of you a maiden tribute of modern Babylon.’

  She giggled as she had been taught to do when anyone said anything she did not entirely understand. In the darks of Lord Godalming’s eyes, something glinted. Penelope felt a tiny warmth growing in her breast, and wondered where such might lead.

  12

  DAWN OF THE DEAD

  Dawn shot the fog full of blood. As the sun rose, new-borns scurried to coffins and corners. Geneviève trailed alone back to Toynbee Hall, never thinking to be afraid of the shrinking shadows. Like Vlad Tepes, she was old enough not to shrivel in the sun as did the more sensitive new-borns, but the vigour that had come with the blood of the warm girl ebbed as the light filtered through. She passed a warm policeman on the Commercial Road, and nodded a greeting to him. He turned away and kept on his beat. The feeling she’d had earlier, that someone was just out of sight dogging her footsteps, returned; she supposed it more or less a permanent delusion in the district.

  In the last four nights, she’d spent more time on Silver Knife than her work. Druitt and Morrison undertook double shifts, juggling the limited number of places at the Hall to deal first with the most needy. Primarily an educational institute, the hall was coming to resemble a field hospital. Seconded to a Vigilance Committee, she had been to so many noisy meetings that even now words persisted in her ears as music rings in the ears of those who sit too near the orchestra.

  She stopped walking and stood, listening. Again, she felt followed. Her vampire sensitivities tingled and she had an impression of something in yellow silk, progressing with strange silent hops, long arms out like a somnambulist. She looked into the fog, but nothing emerged. Perhaps she’d absorbed one of the warm girl’s memories or fancies and would be stuck with it until her blood was out of her system. That had happened before.

  George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Potter were making speeches all over the city, using the murders to call attention to conditions in the East End. Neither socialist was nosferatu; and Shaw at least had been linked, Geneviève understood, with a Republican faction. In the Pall Mall Gazette, W. T. Stead was running a Silver Knife campaign, comparable to his earlier crusades against white slavery and child vampirism. In the absence of an actual culprit, the conclusion seemed to be that society at large was to blame. Toynbee Hall was momentarily the recipient of enough charitable donations to make Druitt propose that it would be a good idea to sponsor the murderer’s activities as a means of raising funds. The suggestion did not amuse the serious-minded Jack Seward.

  A poster on the wall of an ostler’s yard promised the latest reward for information leading to the capture of Silver Knife. Rival groups of warm and new-born vigilantes roamed with billy-clubs and razors, scrapping with each other and setting upon dubiously innocent passersby. The street girls were now complaining less about the danger of the murderer and more about the lack of custom noticeable since the vigilantes started harassing anyone who came to Whitechapel looking for a woman. The whores of Soho and Covent Garden were doing boom business. And boom gloating.

  She heard a moan from an alleyway. Her canines shot out like flickknives, startling her. She stepped into the shadowed recess, and saw a man pressing a red-headed woman against a wall. Geneviève was half-way to them, prepared to apprehend the murderer, when she saw the man was a soldier in a long coat. His trousers around his ankles, he thrust hard against the woman with his pelvis, not a knife. He moved with desperate speed but wasn’t getting anywhere. The woman, skirts bunched around her waist like a lifebelt, was braced in a corner, holding him up by his head, pressing his face to her feathered shoulder.

  The whore was a good-looking new-born they called ‘Carroty Nell’. During her turning, she’d called at the Hall, and Geneviève had helped her through, holding her down as she ran cold then hot and new teeth budded in her jaws. Her real name, Geneviève thought, was Frances Coles or Coleman. Her hair had grown much thicker, an arrow-shaped peak almost to the bridge of her nose. Stiff red vixen-bristles grew on her bare arms and the backs of her hands.

  Carroty Nell licked shallow scratches on her customer’s neck. She saw Geneviève b
ut showed no sign of recognition, baring a row of fence-post fangs at the interloper, red-rimmed eyes weeping blood. Quietly, Geneviève backed out of the alley. The new-born was coaxing the soldier with abuse, trying to get him to spend his fourpence. ‘Come on you bastard,’ she said, ‘finish it, finish it...’ Her client’s hand came up and grabbed her hair, and he thrust harder and harder, gasping.

  Back on the street, Geneviève stood still as her eye-teeth receded. She had been too ready to fight. The murderer was making her as jumpy as the vigilantes.

  Geneviève heard Silver Knife was a leather-aproned shoemaker, a Polish Jew carrying out ritual killings, a Malay sailor, a degenerate from the West End, a Portuguese cattleman, the ghost of Van Helsing or Charley Peace. He was a doctor, a black magician, a midwife, a priest. With each rumour, more innocents were thrown to the mob. Sergeant Thick locked up a warm bootmaker named Pizer for his own protection when someone took it into his head to write ‘Silver Nyfe’ on his shopfront. After Jago, the Christian Crusader, argued that the killer could walk unhindered about the area killing at will because he was a policeman, a vampire constable called Jonas Mizen was dragged into a yard off Coke Street and impaled on a length of kindling. Jago was in jail himself but Lestrade said they’d have to let him out soon, since he had a convenient alibi for the time of Mizen’s death. The Reverend John Jago, it seemed, had alibis to spare.

  She passed the doorway where Lily slept. The new-born child was curled up for the day with some scraps of blanket given her at the Hall. She had wound herself up against the sun, making an Egyptian mummy of her tiny form. The girl’s half-changed arm was worse, the useless wing sprouting from hip to armpit. Lily had a cat nestled against her face, its neck in her mouth. The animal was still barely alive.

  Abberline and Lestrade had questioned dozens but made no useful arrests. There were always rival protesters outside the police stations. Mediums like Lees and Carnacki had been called for. A number of consulting detectives – Martin Hewitt, Max Carrados, August Van Dusen – had prowled Whitechapel, hoping to turn up something. Even the venerable Hawkshaw had emerged from retirement. But with their acknowledged master in Devil’s Dyke, the enthusiasm of the detective community ebbed considerably, and no solutions were forthcoming. A lunatic named Cotford was apprehended creeping about in minstrel’s blackface, claiming to be a detective ‘in disguise’. He had been removed to Colney Hatch for examination. Insanity, Jack Seward said, could be an epidemic disease.

  Geneviève found a shilling in her purse and slipped it into Lily’s blanket. The new-born murmured in her drowsiness but didn’t wake. As a hansom rumbled past, she glimpsed the profile of a dozing man inside, his hat swaying with the movements of the cab. Someone going home after a night in the fleshpots, she guessed. Then she recognised the passenger. It was Beauregard, the man she’d noticed at Lulu Schön’s inquest, the man from the Diogenes Club. According to Lestrade, his presence evidenced an interest from very high places. The Queen, young again, had shown public concern about ‘these ghastly murders’, but nothing had been heard from Prince Dracula, to whom Geneviève assumed the lives of a few streetwalkers, vampire or not, were of as much importance as those of beetles.

  The cab trundled into the fog. Again she felt there was something out there, standing in the thick of it, watching her, waiting for a chance to move. The feeling passed.

  Gradually, as she came to realise how powerless she was to affect the behaviour of this unknown maniac, she also sensed just how important the case had become. Everyone began their arguments by declaring that it was about more than just three butchered harlots. It was about Disraeli’s ‘two nations’, it was about the regrettable spread of vampirism among the lower classes, it was about the decline of public order, it was about the fragile equilibrium of the transformed kingdom. The murders were mere sparks, but Great Britain was a tinderbox.

  She was spending a lot of time with whores – she’d been an outcast long enough to feel a certain kinship with them – and shared their fears. Tonight, nearing dawn, she’d found a girl in Mrs Warren’s house off Raven Row and bled her, out of need not pleasure. Warm Annie held her tenderly and let her suckle from the flesh of her throat as if she were a wet-nurse. Afterwards, Geneviève gave her a half-crown. It was too much, but she had to make the gesture. The only decoration in Warm Annie’s room was a cheap print of Vlad Tepes riding into battle. The only items of furniture were a wash-stand and a large bed, its sheets cleaned so many times they were as thin as paper, the mattress dyed with irregular brown patches. Brothels no longer had ornate mirrors.

  After so many years, Geneviève should be used to her predator’s life, but the Prince Consort had turned everything topsy-turvy and she was ashamed again, not of what she must do to prolong her existence, but of the things vampirekind, those of the bloodline of Vlad Tepes, did around her. Warm Annie had been bitten several times. Eventually she would turn. Nobody’s get, she would have to find her own way, and doubtless end up as raddled as Cathy Eddowes, as truly dead as Polly Nichols, as beast-like as Carroty Nell. Her head was fuzzy from the gin her warm girl had drunk. That was why she had hallucinations. The whole city seemed sick.

  13

  STRANGE FITS OF PASSION

  Dr Seward’s Diary (kept in phonograph)

  26 SEPTEMBER

  In the Hall, the mornings are quiet. Whitechapel slumbers between sunrise and what we used to call lunch-time. The new-borns scurry for their earth-boxes. The warm of the area have never been day people. I leave instructions with Morrison that I am not to be disturbed and seclude myself in this office with my supposed work. Records, I tell him. I am not lying. Keeping records is a habit. It used to be so with us all. Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker, Van Helsing. Even Lucy, with her beautiful hand and horrid spelling, wrote long letters. The Professor was strict about the documents. History is written by the victors; Van Helsing, through his friend Stoker, always intended to publish. Like his foe, he was an empire-builder; an account of his successful treatment of a scientifically-corroborated nineteenth-century case of vampirism would have added lustre to his reputation. As it is, the Prince Consort took care to blot out our history: my diary was destroyed in the fire at Purfleet, and Van Helsing is remembered as a second Judas.

  He was not then Prince Consort, just Count Dracula. He deigned to notice our little family; to strike at us again and again until we were smashed and scattered. I have rough notes, cuttings and mementos, kept here under lock and key. I believe it necessary for my eventual justification, to recreate the original records. This is the task I have set myself for the quiet hours.

  Who can say where it began? Dracula’s death? His resurrection? The laying of his colossal schemes against Great Britain? Harker’s dreadful experiences in Castle Dracula? The wreck of the Demeter, washed ashore at Whitby with a dead man lashed to the helm? Or, perhaps, the Count’s first sight of Lucy? Miss Lucy Westenra. Westenra. A singular name: it means light of the West. Yes, Lucy. For me, that was where it began. With Lucy Westenra. Lucy. The 24th of May, 1885. I can scarcely believe the Jack Seward of that morning, twenty-nine and newly appointed to the supervision of Purfleet Asylum, ever really existed. The times before are a golden haze, half-remembered scraps from boys’ adventures and medical directories. I had, I am assured, a most brilliant career: I studied and observed; I travelled; I had eminent friends. Then, things changed utterly.

  I do not believe I truly loved Lucy until after her rebuff. I had reached the point in life when a man must consider the making of a match; she was simply the most suitable of my acquaintances. We were introduced by Art. Arthur Holmwood then, not yet Lord Godalming. At first, I thought her frivolous. Silly, even. After days among the screaming insane, sheer silliness was appealing. The convolutions of complex minds – I still believe it gross error to assert that the mad are simple-minded – led me to consider as ideal the prospect of a girl as open and obvious as Lucy. On that day, I laid out my proposal. I had a lancet in my pocket for some reaso
n and I fancy I fiddled with it throughout the preliminaries. Before my prepared speech – about how dear she was to me, though I knew her so little – was delivered, I knew I’d no hopes. She commenced a giggle, then covered her embarrassed amusement with forced tears. I extracted from her the confession that her heart was not her own. I knew at once I’d been cut out by Art. She didn’t name him, but there was no doubt. Later, with Quincey Morris – incredibly, another of the guileless Lucy’s conquests – I endured an evening of Art’s prattling of future happiness. The Texan was all open-hearted decency, clapping Art’s back for being the better man and all that. Fool smile plastered on my face, I downed tumbler after tumbler of Quincey’s whisky, remaining sober as the good fellows joked towards inebriation. Lucy, meanwhile, packed herself off to Whitby, intent on subjecting Mina to an extended gloat. She had netted the future Lord Godalming, while the best her school-teaching friend could manage was a barely qualified Exeter solicitor.

  I threw myself into work, the standard cure for a broken heart. I hoped poor Renfield would make my name. To be the discoverer of zoophagous mania would mark me as a coming man. Of course, in considering the merits of prospective fiancés, ladies of breeding still unaccountably prefer an inherited title and unearned wealth to the isolation of unheard-of strains of mental disorder. That summer I followed the queer logic of Renfield’s mania as he collected tiny lives. At first he aped the nursery rhyme: feeding flies to spiders, spiders to birds, birds to a cat. He intended to consume the accumulated life energy by eating the cat. When that proved impractical, he ate anything alive that happened by. He nearly choked to death disgorging feathers. My monograph was taking shape when I observed another obsession intermingled with zoophagia, a fixation upon the dilapidated estate neighbouring the grounds of the asylum. As the tourists now queueing for penny tours know, Carfax was the Count’s first home in England. Several times, Renfield made an escape and rushed for the Abbey, babbling of the Coming of His Master and Salvation and the Distribution of Good Things. I assumed, with some disappointment, that he was developing an entirely commonplace religious mania, reinvesting the long-abandoned house with its sacred purpose. I was, for the first fatal time in the case, completely in error. The Count had established dominance over the madman, who was to be his catspaw. If it were not for Renfield, for the cursed clamp of his teeth about my hand, things might have been different. As Franklin has it, ‘for the want of a nail...’