by Kim Newman
Thirty-foot diaphanous silk curtains parted in the draught, and they passed through. The effect was of a giant cobweb, billowing open to entice the unwary fly. Servants appeared, under the direction of a vampire lady-in-waiting, and Charles and Geneviève were relieved of their cloaks. A Carpathian, his face a mask of stiff hair, stood by to watch Charles hand over his cane. Silver was frowned on at the Court. She had no weapons to yield...
... he had tried everything to dissuade her from accompanying him, short of disclosing to her the duty he must perform. Beauregard knew he would die. His death would have purpose, and he was prepared for it. But his heart sickened at what might become of Geneviève. This was not her crusade. If it were possible, he would help her escape even at the cost of his own life. But his duty was more important than either of them.
When they were together, warmed by their communion, he told her what he had told no other woman since Pamela.
‘Gené, I love you.’
‘And I you, Charles. I you.’
‘I you what?’
‘Love, Charles. I love you.’
Her mouth was on him again and they rolled together, getting comfortable...
* * *
... an armadillo wriggled by her feet, its rear-parts clogged with its own dirt. Vlad Tepes had raided Regent’s Park Zoo and had exotic species roaming loose in the Palace. This poor edentate was merely one of his more harmless pets.
The lady-in-waiting who guided them through the cathedral-like space of the reception hall wore black velvet livery, the Royal Crest upon her bosom. With tight trews and gold-buckled knee-boots, she looked like the principal boy. Although handsome, her face had lost any feminine softness it might have possessed when its wearer was warm.
‘Mr Beauregard, you have forgotten me,’ she said.
Charles, involved in his own thoughts, was almost shocked. He looked closely at the lady-in-waiting.
‘We met at the Stokers’,’ she explained. ‘Some years ago. Before the changes.’
‘Miss Murray?’
‘The widow Harker now. Wilhelmina. Mina.’
Geneviève knew who the woman was: one of Vlad Tepes’s get. After Jack Seward’s Lucy, the first of the Prince Consort’s conquests in Britain. Like Jack and Godalming, she had been in with Van Helsing’s group.
‘So that fearful murderer was Dr Seward,’ Mina Harker mused. ‘He was spared only to suffer, and to make others suffer. And Lord Godalming too. How Lucy would have been disappointed in her suitors.’
Geneviève saw into Mina Harker, and realised the woman was condemned – had condemned herself – to exist with the consequences of failure. Her failure to resist Vlad Tepes, her circle’s failure to trap and destroy the invader.
‘I had not expected to find you here,’ Charles blurted.
‘Serving in Hell?’
They were at the end of the hall. More doors loomed above them. Mina Harker, eyes like burning ice, looked at them both as she struck a panel, the rapping of her knuckles as loud in the echoing space as shots from a revolver...
... Beauregard remembered the warm Mina Harker, unfussy and direct when set beside Florence, Penelope or Lucy, siding with Kate Reed in the belief that a woman should earn a living, should be more than a decoration. That woman was dead and this white-faced court servant was her pale ghost. Seward had been a ghost too, and Godalming. Between them, the Prince Consort and the skull on the pike had to account for a great deal of human wreckage.
The inner doors opened in noisy lurches and a startling servant admitted them to a well-lit antechamber. The extensive and grotesque malformations of his body were emphasised by a tailored particoloured suit. He was not the new-born victim of catastrophically failed shape-shifting, but a warm man suffering from enormous defects of birth. His spine was drastically kinked, loaf-shaped excrescences sprouting from his back; his limbs, with the exception of the left arm, were bloated and twisted. His head was swollen by bulbs of bone, from which sprouted wisps of hair, and his features were almost completely obscured by warty growths. Mycroft had prepared Beauregard for this, but he still felt a heart-stab of pity.
‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘Merrick, is it not?’
A smile formed somewhere in the doughy recesses of Merrick’s face. He returned the greeting, voice slurred by excess slews of flesh around his mouth.
‘How is Her Majesty this evening?’
Merrick did not reply, but Beauregard imagined expression in the unreadable expanse of his features. There was a sadness in his single exposed eye and a grim set to his growth-twisted lips.
He gave Merrick a card and said ‘Compliments of the Diogenes Club.’ The man understood and his huge head bobbed. He was another servant of the ruling cabal.
Merrick led them down the hallway, hunched over like a gorilla, a long club-handed arm propelling his body. It apparently amused the Prince Consort to keep this poor creature on hand. Beauregard could not help but feel an additional disgust for the vampire. Merrick knocked on doors three times his height...
... she realised, ridiculously late, that Charles was not afraid of whatever he would face in the Palace. He was afraid for her, afraid of the consequences of something soon to happen. He took her hand and held it tight.
‘Gené,’ Charles said, voice just above a whisper, ‘if what I do brings harm to you, I am sincerely sorry.’
She did not understand him. As her mind raced to catch up with him, he leaned over and kissed her, on the mouth, the warm way. She tasted him, and was reminded of everything...
... her voice was cool in the dark.
‘This can be for ever, Charles. Truly for ever.’
He remembered his meeting with Mycroft.
‘Nothing is for ever, my darling...’
... the kiss broke, and he stood back, leaving her baffled. Then the doors were opened and they were admitted into the Royal Presences.
Ill lit by broken chandeliers, the throne-room was an infernal sty of people and animals, its once-fine walls torn and stained. Dirtied and abused paintings hung at strange angles or were piled loose behind furniture. Laughing, whimpering, grunting, whining, screaming creatures congregated on divans and carpets. An almost naked Carpathian wrestled a giant ape, their feet scrabbling and slipping on a marble floor thick with discharges. The stench of dried blood and ordure was as strong as it had been in Number 13 Miller’s Court.
Merrick announced them to the company, palate suffering as he got out their names. Someone made a crude remark in German. Gales of cruel laughter cut through the din, then were cut off by a wave of a ham-sized hand. The gesture gave the congregation pause; the Carpathian jammed the ape’s face against the floor and snapped the animal’s spine, prematurely ending the contest of strength.
Upon the raised hand, an enormous gemstone ring held the burning reflections of seven fires. She recognised the Koh-i-Noor, or Lake of Light, the largest diamond in the world, and the centrepiece of the collection known as the Crown Jewels. Her eyes were drawn to the shining light, and to the vampire who wielded it. Prince Dracula sat upon his throne, massive as a commemorative statue, his enormously bloated face a rich red under withered grey. Moustaches stiff with recent blood hung to his chest, his thick hair was loose about his shoulders, and his black-stubbled chin was dotted with the gravy of his last feeding. His left hand loosely held the orb of office, which seemed in his grip the size of a tennis ball.
Charles shook in the presence of the enemy, the smell smiting him like blows. Geneviève held him up and looked around.
‘I never dreamed...’ he muttered, ‘never...’
An ermine-collared black velvet cloak, ragged at the edges, clung to Dracula’s shoulders like the wings of a giant bat. Otherwise he was naked, his body thickly coated with matted hair, blood clotting on his chest and limbs. His white manhood coiled in his lap, tipped scarlet as an adder’s tongue. His body was swollen with blood, rope-thick veins visibly pulsing in his neck and arms. In life, Vlad Tepes had been a man
of less than medium height; now he was a giant.
A warm girl ran across the room, pursued by one of the Carpathians. It was Rupert of Hentzau, his uniform in tatters, a ruddy flush on his face. The plates of his skull dislocated as he shambled, distorting and reassembling his face. He brought the girl down with a swipe of a paw, scraping silk and skin from her back. Then he began to tear at her back and sides with triple-jointed jaws, taking meat as well as drink. As Hentzau fed he became wolfish, wriggling out of his boots and britches, his laugh turning to a howl. The girl was instantly dead.
Dracula smiled, yellow teeth the size and shape of pointed thumbs. Geneviève looked into the broad face of the King of Vampires.
The Queen knelt by the throne, a spiked collar around her neck, a massive chain leading from it to a loose bracelet upon Dracula’s wrist. She was in her shift and stockings, brown hair loose, blood on her face. It was impossible to see the round old woman she had been in this abused creature. Geneviève hoped her mad, but feared her well aware of what was happening about her. Victoria turned away, not looking at the Carpathian’s meal.
‘Majesties,’ Charles said, bowing his head.
An enormous fart of laughter exploded from Dracula’s jaggedly fanged maw. The stench of his breath filled the room. It was everything dead and rotten.
‘I am Dracula,’ he said, in surprisingly unaccented and mild English. ‘And who might these welcome guests be?’
... his head was in the eye of a nightmare maelstrom. In his heart was steel resolve. All he saw made him justum et tenacem propositi virum, a man upright and tenacious of purpose. Later, if he still lived, he might succumb to nausea. Now, in this vital moment, he must have complete control of himself.
Never entirely a soldier, Beauregard had learned strategy at school and in the field. He knew, without seeming to notice, the relative positions of all in the throne-room. Few of them mattered, but he was especially aware of Geneviève, Merrick and, without quite knowing why, Mina Harker. All, as it happened, were behind him.
The man and the woman on the dais were the focus of his attention; the Queen, whose visible distress gripped his heart, and the Prince, who sat at his ease on the throne, embodying the chaos about him. Dracula’s face seemed painted on water; sometimes frozen into hard-planed ice, but for the most part in motion. Beauregard discerned other faces beneath. The red eyes and wolf teeth were fixed, but around them, under the rough cheeks, was a constantly shifting shape; sometimes a hairy, wet snout, sometimes a thin, polished skull.
A fastidiously dressed vampire youth, an explosion of lace escaping at his collar, mounted the dais.
‘These are the heroes of Whitechapel,’ he explained, a fluttering handkerchief before his mouth and nose. Beauregard recognised the Prime Minister.
‘To them we owe the ruination of the desperate murderers known as Jack the Ripper,’ Lord Ruthven continued. ‘Dr John Seward of infamous memory, and, ah, Arthur Holmwood, the terrible traitor...’ The Prince grinned ferociously, moustaches creaking like leather straps. Ruthven, Godalming’s father-in-darkness, was plainly put out at the reminder of the ghastly deeds in which his protégé was popularly believed to have collaborated.
‘You have served us well and faithfully, my subjects,’ Dracula said, his praise sounding like a threat...
... Ruthven stood by Prince Dracula’s side, completing the triptych of rulers, the elder vampires and the new-born Queen. There was no doubt that Vlad Tepes was the apex of this trinity of power.
Geneviève had met Ruthven nearly a century previously, while travelling in Greece. He struck her then as a dilettante, desperately amusing himself with romantic trifles but oppressed by the aridity of his long life. As Prime Minister, he had exchanged ennui for uncertainty, for he must know the higher he was raised the greater was the likelihood that he would eventually be dashed down to the depths. She wondered if any other could see the fear that nestled like a rat in the bosom of Lord Ruthven.
Dracula looked Charles up and down, almost benevolently. Geneviève sensed her lover’s blood boiling, and realised she had adopted an aggressive posture, teeth bared and fingers hooked into claws. She forced herself to stand demurely before the throne.
The Prince turned his attention to her and raised a thick eyebrow. His face was a mass of healed-over scars which swarmed about his smooth features.
‘Geneviève Dieudonné,’ he said, rolling her name around his tongue, trying to squeeze meaning from the syllables. ‘I have had word of you before, in earlier times.’
She held out her empty hands.
‘When I was new to this blessed state,’ he continued, gesturing expressively, ‘you were spoken of highly. It has been a wearisome task, keeping abreast of the peregrinations of our kind. The occasional report of you has come to me.’
As he spoke, the Prince seemed to swell. She suspected he chose to go naked not simply because he was able to, but because clothes could not contain his constant shifting of shape.
‘You counted a distant kinswoman of mine as a friend, I believe.’
‘Carmilla? That is so,’ said Geneviève.
‘A delicate flower, sadly missed.’
Geneviève nodded agreement. This monster’s solicitousness was sickly-sweet, hard to swallow without choking. As fondly and without thought as a master pets an old hunting dog, the Prince stretched out a hand and caressed the Queen’s tangled hair. Panic bloomed in Victoria’s eyes. At the base of the throne-dais clustered a knot of shrouded nosferatu women, the wives Dracula had set aside. Beauties all, they rent their garments immodestly, exposing limbs and breasts and loins. They hissed and lusted like cats. The Queen was plainly in terror of them. Dracula’s enormous fingers encircled Victoria’s fragile skull and squeezed slightly.
‘My lady,’ he continued, ‘why have you not come before to my court? We should have welcomed you to our sadly missed Castle Dracula in Transylvania or to our more modern estate here. All elders are welcome.’
Dracula’s smile was persuasive, but behind it were his teeth.
‘Do I so offend you, my lady? You wandered from one place to the next for hundreds of years, always in fear of the jealous warm. Like all un-dead, you were outcast on the face of the earth. Was this not injustice? Harried by inferiors, we were denied the succour of church and the protection of law. You and I, we have both lost girls that we have loved, to peasants with sharpened spikes and silver sickles. I am named Tepes, and yet it was not Dracula who pierced the heart of Carmilla Karnstein, nor that of Lucy Westenra. My dark kiss brings life, eternal and sweet; it is the silver knives that bring cold death, empty and endless. The dark nights are ended and we are raised to our rightful estate. This have I done for the good of all who are nosferatu. None need hide his nature among the warm, none need suffer the brain fever of the red thirst. Daughter-in-darkness of Chandagnac, you share in this; and yet you have no love for Dracula. Is this not sad? Is this not the attitude of a shallow and ungrateful woman?’
Dracula’s hand was about Victoria’s neck, thumb stroking her throat. The Queen’s eyes were downcast.
‘Were you not alone, Geneviève Dieudonné? And are you not among friends now? Among equals?’
She had been un-dead a half-century longer than Vlad Tepes. When she turned, this prince was a babe in arms, shortly to be delivered into a life in captivity.
‘Impaler,’ she declared, ‘I have no equal.’
... as the Prince glowered at Geneviève, Beauregard stepped forward.
‘I have a gift,’ he said, his hand inside the breast of his tailcoat, ‘a souvenir of our exploit in the East End.’
Dracula’s eyes showed the philistine avarice of a true barbarian. Despite lofty titles, he was barely a generation away from his mountain bully-boy ancestors. This prince liked nothing more than pretty things. Bright, shining toys. Beauregard took a cloth bundle from his inside pocket, and unwrapped it.
Silver light exploded.
Vampires had been feeding in the shadows, n
oisily suckling the flesh of youths and girls. Now everyone was quiet. It must be an illusion, but the tiny blade gleamed, a miniature excalibur illuminating the whole room. Fury twisted Dracula’s brow, then contempt and mirth turned his face into a wide-mouthed mask. Beauregard held up Jack Seward’s silver scalpel.
‘You think to defy me with this little needle, Englishman?’
‘It is a gift,’ he replied. ‘But not for you.’
Geneviève edged away, uncertain. Merrick and Mina Harker were too far off to affect this action. Carpathians detached themselves from their amusements and formed a half-circle to one side. Several of the harem stood, red mouths wet and eager. No one was between Beauregard and the dais, but if he made a move towards Dracula, a wall of solid bone and vampire-flesh would form.
‘For my Queen,’ Charles said, tossing the knife.
Tumbling silver reflected in Dracula’s eyes, as anger exploded dark in the pupils. Victoria snatched the scalpel from the air...
... it had all been for this moment, to get Charles into the Royal Presence, to serve this one duty. Geneviève, the taste of him in her mouth, understood...
... the Queen slipped the blade under her breast, stapling her shift to her ribs, puncturing her heart. For her, it was over swiftly. With a moan of joy, she fell from the dais, blood gouting from her fatal wound, and rolled down the steps, chain rattling with her as it unravelled. Sic transit Victoria Regina.
The Prime Minister beat his way through the harem, pushing the harpies aside, and clutched the Queen’s body. Her head flopped as he extracted the scalpel with a single pull. Ruthven pressed his hand over her wound as if willing her back to life. It was no use. He stood, still gripping the silver knife. His fingers began to smoke and he threw away the scalpel, admitting with a yelp to his own pain. Surrounded by Dracula’s wives, their faces transforming with hunger and rage, the Prime Minister shook inside his murgatroyd’s finery.