The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  Van Helsing would have understood my nightwork. When he was alive. And the others. A family, we were. My friend Arthur Holmwood, the Texan Morris, the clerk Harker, his wife. And the Dutch doctor, mangling the language and tutting over his impedimenta. Only I am left of the family. Alive. I must continue to fight . . .

  I learned from last week’s in Buck’s Row—Polly Nicholls, the newspapers say her name was. Polly or Mary Ann—to do it quickly and precisely. Throat. Heart. Tripes. Then get the head off. That finishes the things. Clean silver, and a clean conscience. Van Helsing, blinkered by folklore and symbolism, spoke always of the heart, but any of the major organs will do. The kidneys are easiest to get to.

  I had made my preparations carefully. For half an hour, I sat in my office, allowing myself to become aware of the pain in my right hand. The madman is dead—truly dead—but Renfield left his jaw-marks, semi-circles of deep indentations, scabbed over many times but never right again. With Nicholls, my mind was still dull from the laudanum I take for the pain, and I was not as precise as I might have been. Learning to be left-handed hasn’t helped either. I missed the major artery, and the thing had time to screech before I could saw through the neck. I am afraid I lost control, and became a butcher when I should be a surgeon, a deliverer.

  Lulu went better. She clung as tenaciously to life, but I think there was an acceptance of my gift. She was relieved, at the last, to have her soul cleansed by silver. It is hard to come by. Now, the coinage is all gold or copper. I kept back a store of sovereigns while the money was changing, and found a tradesman who would execute my commission. I’ve had the surgical instruments since my days at the Purfleet asylum. Now the blades are plated, a core of steel strength inside killing silver. Before venturing out into the fog, I unlocked my private cabinet and spent some time looking at the shine of the silver. This time, I selected the post-mortem scalpel. It is fitting, I think, to employ a tool intended for rooting around in the bodies of the dead.

  Lulu invited me into a doorway to do her business, and wriggled her skirts up over slim white legs. I took the time to open her blouse, to get her collar and feathers away from her unmarked throat. She asked about my lumpily-gloved hand, and I told her it was an old wound. She smiled and I drew my silver edge across her neck, pressing firmly with my thumb, cutting deep into pristine deadflesh.

  I held her up with my body, shielding my work from any passersby, and slipped the scalpel through her ribs into her heart. I felt her whole body shudder, and then fall lifeless. But I know how resilient the dead can be, and took care to finish the job, exposing as well as puncturing the heart, cutting a few of the tubes in the belly, taking out the kidneys and part of the uterus, then enlarging the throat wound until the head came loose. Having exposed the vertebrae, I worried the head back and forth until the neckbones parted.

  There was little blood in her. She must not have fed tonight.

  II

  She rested in her tiny office at Toynbee Hall. It was as safe a place as any to pass the few days each month when lassitude came over her and she shared the sleep of the dead. Up high in the building, the room had only a tiny skylight and the door could be secured from the inside. It served its purpose, just as coffins and crypts served for those of the Prince Consort’s bloodline.

  She heard hammering. Insistent, repeated blows. Noise reached into her dark fog. Meat and bone pounding against wood.

  In her dreams, Genevieve had been back in her warm girlhood. When she had been her father’s daughter, not Chandagnac’s get. Before she had been turned, before the Dark Kiss had made her what she had become.

  Her tongue felt sleep-filmed teeth. Her eyes opened, and she tried to focus on the dingy glass of the skylight. The sun was not yet down.

  In her dreams, the hammering had been a mallet striking the end of a snapped-in-half quarterstaff. The English captain had finished her father-in-darkness like a butterfly, pinning Chandagnac to the bloodied earth. Those had been barbarous times.

  In an instant, dreams were washed away and she was awake, as if a gallon of icy water had been dashed into her face.

  “Mademoiselle Dieudonné,” a voice sounded, “Open up.”

  She sat up, the sheet falling away from her body. She slept on the floor, on a blanket laid over the rough planks.

  “There’s been another murder.”

  Genevieve took a Chinese silk robe from a hook by the door, and drew it around herself. It was not what etiquette recommended she wear while entertaining a gentleman caller, but it would have to do. Etiquette, so important a few short years ago, meant less and less. They were sleeping in coffins lined with earth in Mayfair, and drinking from their servants’ necks, and so the correct form of address for a Bishop was hardly a major consideration this year.

  She slid back the bolts, and the hammering stopped. She had traces of fog still in her head. Outside, the afternoon was dying. She would not be at her best until night was around her again. She pulled open her door, and saw a small new-born, with a long coat around him like a cloak and a bowler hat in his hand, standing in the corridor outside.

  “Inspector Lestrade,” she said, allowing the detective in. His jagged, irregular teeth stuck awkwardly out of his mouth, unconcealed by the scraggly moustache he had been cultivating. The sparse whiskers only made him look more like a rat than he had done when he was alive. He wore smoked glasses, but crimson points behind the lenses suggested active eyes.

  The Scotland Yard man took off his hat, and set it down upon her desk.

  “Last night,” he began, hurriedly, “in Hanbury Street. It was butchery, plain and simple.”

  “Last night?”

  “I’m sorry,” he drew breath, making an allowance for her recent sleep. “It’s the eighth now. Of September.”

  “I’ve been asleep three days.”

  “I thought it best to rouse you. Feelings are running high. The warm are getting restless, and the new-borns.”

  “You were quite right,” she said. She rubbed sleep-gum from her eyes, and tried to clear her head. Even the last shards of sunlight, filtered through the grimy square of glass above, were icicles jammed into her forehead.

  “When the sun is set,” Lestrade was saying, “there’ll be pandemonium on the streets. It could be another Bloody Sunday. Some say Van Helsing has come back.”

  “The Prince Consort would love that.”

  Lestrade shook his head. “It’s just a rumour. Van Helsing is dead. His head is still on a spike outside the Palace.”

  “You’ve checked?”

  “The Palace is always under guard. The Prince Consort has his Carpathians about him. Our kind cannot be too careful. We have many enemies.”

  “Our kind?”

  “The Un-Dead.”

  Genevieve almost laughed. “I’m not your kind, Inspector. You are of the bloodline of Vlad Tepes, I am of the bloodline of Chandagnac. We are at best cousins.”

  The detective shrugged and snorted at the same time. Bloodline meant nothing to the vampires of London, Genevieve knew. Even at a third, a tenth or a twentieth remove, they all had the Prince Consort as father-in-darkness.

  “Has the news travelled?”

  “Fast,” the detective told her. “The evening editions all carry the story. It’ll be all over London by now. There are those among the warm who do not love us, Mademoiselle Dieudonné. They are rejoicing. And when the new-borns come out, there could be a panic. I’ve requested troops, but Commissioner Warren is leery of sending in the army. After that business last year . . .”

  A group of warm insurrectionists, preaching sedition against the Crown, had rioted in Trafalgar Square. Someone declared a Republic, and tried to rally the anti-monarchist forces. Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, had called in the army, and a new-born lieutenant had ordered his men, a mixture of vampires and the living, to fire upon the demonstrators. The Revolution had nearly started then. If it had not been for the intervention of the Queen herself, the Empire
could have exploded like a barrel of gunpowder.

  “And what, pray, can I do,” Genevieve asked, “to serve the purpose of the Prince Consort?”

  Lestrade chewed his moustache, teeth glistening, flecks of froth on his lips.

  “You may be needed, Mademoiselle. The hall is being overrun. Some don’t want to be out on the streets with this murderer about. Some are spreading panic and sedition, firing up vigilante mobs. You have some influence . . .”

  “I do, don’t I?”

  “I wish . . . I would humbly request. . . you would use your influence to calm the situation. Before any disaster occurs. Before any more are unnecessarily killed.”

  Genevieve was not above enjoying the taste of power. She slipped off her robe, shocking the detective with her nakedness. Death and rebirth had not shaken the prejudices of his time out of him. While Lestrade tried to shrink behind his smoked glasses, she swiftly dressed, fastening the seeming hundreds of small catches and buttons with neat movements of sharp-tipped fingers. After all these years, it was as if the costume of her warm days, as intricate and cumbersome as a full suit of armour, had returned to plague her again. As a new-born, she had, with relief, worn the simple tunics and trews made acceptable if not fashionable by the Maid of Orleans, vowing never again to let herself be sewed into breath-stopping formal dress.

  The Inspector was too pale to blush properly, but penny-sized red patches appeared on his cheeks and he huffed involuntarily. Lestrade, like many new-borns, treated her as if she were the age of her face. She had been sixteen in 1432 when Chandagnac gave her the Dark Kiss. She was older, by a decade or more, than the Prince Consort. While he was a new-born, nailing Turks’ turbans to their skulls and lowering his countrymen onto sharpened posts, she had been a full vampire, continuing the bloodline of her father-in-darkness, learning the skills that now made her among the longest-lived of her kind. With four and a half centuries behind her, it was hard not to be irritated when the fresh-risen dead, still barely cooled, patronised her.

  “This murderer must be found, and stopped,” Lestrade said, “before he kills again.”

  “Indubitably,” Genevieve agreed, “it sounds like a problem for your old associate, the consulting detective.”

  She could sense, with the sharpened perceptions that told her night was falling, the chilling of the Inspector’s heart.

  “Mr Holmes is not available, Mademoiselle. He has his differences with the current government.”

  “You mean he has been removed—like so many of our finest minds—to those pens on the Sussex Downs. What are the newspapers calling them, concentration camps?”

  “I regret his lack of vision . . .”

  “Where is he? Devil’s Dyke?”

  Lestrade nodded, almost ashamed. There was a lot of the man left inside. Many new-borns clung to their warm lives as if nothing had changed, Genevieve wondered how long they would last before they grew like the bitch vampires the Prince Consort brought from the land beyond the mountains, an appetite on legs, mindlessly preying.

  Genevieve finished with her cuffs, and turned to Lestrade, arms slightly out. That was a habit born of four hundred and fifty years without mirrors, always seeking an opinion on how she looked. The detective nodded grudging approval, and she was ready to face the world. She pulled a hooded cloak around her shoulders.

  In the corridor outside her room, gaslamps were already lit. Beyond the row of windows, the hanging fog was purging itself of the last blood of the dying sun.

  One window was open, letting in cold night air. Genevieve could taste life in it. She would have to feed soon, within two or three days. It was always that way after her sleep.

  “I have to be at the inquest,” Lestrade said. “It might be best if you came.”

  “Very well, but I must talk with the director first. Someone will have to take care of my duties.”

  They were on the stairs. Already, the building was coming to life. No matter how London had changed with the coming of the Prince Consort, Toynbee Hall was still required. The poor and destitute needed shelter, food, medical attention, education. The new-borns, potentially immortal destitutes, were hardly better off than their warm brothers and sisters. Sometimes, Genevieve felt like Sisyphus, forever rolling a rock uphill, always losing a yard for every foot gained.

  On the first-floor landing, Lilly sat, rag-doll in her lap. One of her arms was withered, leathery membrane bunched in folds beneath it, the drab dress cut away to allow freedom of movement. The little girl smiled at Genevieve, teeth sharp but uneven, patches of dark fur on her neck and forehead. New-borns could not change their shape properly. But that didn’t prevent them from trying, and mostly ending up in as bad a shape as Lilly, or worse . . .

  The door of the director’s office stood open. Genevieve stroked Lilly’s hair, and went in, rapping a knuckle on the plaque as she passed. The director looked up from his desk, shutting a ledger he had been studying. He was a young man, still warm, but his face was deeply lined, and his hair was streaked grey. Many who had lived through the last few years looked like him, older than their years. He nodded, acknowledging the policeman.

  “Jack,” she said, “Inspector Lestrade wants me to attend an inquest. Can you spare me?”

  “There’s been another,” the director said, making a statement not asking a question.

  “A new-born,” said Lestrade. “In Hanbury Street.”

  “Very well, Genevieve. Druitt can take your rounds if he’s back from his regular jaunt. We weren’t, ah, expecting you for a night or two yet anyway.”

  “Thank you.”

  “That’s quite all right. Come and see me when you get back. Inspector Lestrade, good evening.”

  “Dr Seward,” Lestrade said, putting on his hat, “good night.”

  III

  “What’s to be done?” shouted a new-born in a peaked cap. “What’s to stop this fiend murdering more of our women?”

  Wynne Baxter, an old man of Gladstonian appearance, was angrily trying to keep control of the inquest. Unlike a high court judge, he had no gavel and so was forced to slap his wooden desk with an open fist.

  “Any further interruptions,” Baxter began, glaring, “and I shall be forced to clear the public from this court.”

  The new-born, a surly rough who must have looked hungry even when warm, slumped back into his chair. He was surrounded by a similar crew. They had long scarves, ragged coats, pockets distended by books, heavy boots and thin beards. Genevieve knew the type. Whitechapel had all manner of Republican, anarchist, socialist and insurrectionist factions.

  “Thank you,” said the coroner, rearranging his notes. New-borns did not like positions where someone warm had the authority. But a lifetime of cringing when official old men frowned on them left habits. Baxter was a familiar type too, resisting the Dark Kiss, wearing his wrinkles and bald pate as badges of humanity.

  Dr Llewellyn, the local practitioner—well known at Toynbee Hall—who had done the preliminary examination of the body, had already given his testimony. It boiled down to the simple facts that Lulu Schön—a German girl, recently arrived in London and even more recently turned—had been heart-stabbed, disembowelled and decapitated. It had taken much desk-banging to quieten the outrage that followed the revelation of the method of murder.

  Now, Baxter was hearing evidence from Dr Henry Jekyll, a scientific researcher. “Whenever a vampire’s killed,” Lestrade explained, “Jekyll comes creeping round. Something rum about him, if you get my drift. . .”

  Genevieve thought the man, who was giving a detailed and anatomically precise description of the atrocities, a little stuffy, but listened with interest—more interest than expressed by the yawning newspaper reporters in the front row—to what he was saying.

  “. . . we have not learned enough about the precise changes in the human body that accompany the so-called transformation from normal life to the state of vampirism,” Jekyll said. “Precise information is hard to come by, and superstitio
n hangs like a London fog over the whole subject. My studies have been checked by official indifference, even hostility. We could all benefit from more research work. Perhaps the divisions which lead to tragic incidents like the death of this girl could then be erased from our society.”

  The anarchists were grumbling again. Without divisions, their cause would have no purpose.

  “Too much of what we believe about vampirism is rooted in folklore,” Jekyll continued. “The stake through the heart, the silver scythe to remove the head. The vampire corpus is remarkably resilient, but any major breach of the vital organs seems to produce true death, as here.”

  “Would you venture to suggest that the murderer was familiar with the workings of the human body, whether of a vampire or not?”

  “Yes, your honour. The extent of the injuries betokens a certain frenzy of enthusiasm, but the actual wounds—one might almost say incisions—have been wrought with some skill.”

  “He’s a bleedin’ doctor.” shouted the chief anarchist.

  The court exploded into an uproar, again. The anarchists, who were about half-and-half warm and new-borns, stamped their feet and yelled, while others—a gaggle of haggard mainly un-dead women in colourful dresses who were presumably associates of the deceased, a scattering of well-dressed medical men, some of Lestrade’s uniformed juniors, a sprinkling of sensation-seekers, press-men, clergymen and social reformers—just talked loudly among themselves. Baxter hurt his hand hitting his desk.

  Genevieve noticed a man standing at the back of the courtroom, observing the clamour with cool interest. Well-dressed, with a cloak and top hat, he might have been a sensation-seeker but for a certain air of purpose. He was not a vampire, but—unlike the coroner, or even Dr Jekyll—he showed no signs of being disturbed to be among so many of the un-dead. He leant on a black cane.

  “Who is that?” she asked Lestrade.

  “Charles Beauregard,” the new-born detective said, curling a lip. “Have you heard of the Diogenes Club?”