by Various
The inviting dark resolved to a red glow permeating his closed eyelids. He opened them to a sight he’d never previously seen, but he recognized immediately from the stories of military acquaintances: a village on an African plain in the dead of night. He choked on the thick air, smoke and dust riding the slight breeze in equal parts. The crude and ever so primitive huts were made of straw held together with clay, now dried enough that the flames consumed the squat hovels. Perhaps the clay did not so much hold together the fronds and blades of grass; perhaps the thick earth coating was spread to keep the harsh desert sunlight out of dark interiors.
Charlton Muzzlewit never had an inspired thought in his life, and this one had been cued by a singular image: three hideous vampires bursting out from the cover of their grass-hut hideaways, their hair aflame, fangs shining in the blaze. A little better accustomed to the harsh contrast of the fire and the night sky, the Watcher could now see that color still clung to the western horizon. Wearing only his nightclothes, the proper English gentleman found himself at dusk on the Sahara—or so he assumed his location to be, knowing little to naught about the geography of the dark continent.
He turned to the girl at his side, who looked every bit as out of place as he in the sweltering African night. “Did you take me here so I could bear witness to your final, posthumous slaying?”
“This work is not of my hand, Herr Muzzletwitch. And she who did it, did it not after my death, but even before my birth.”
Suddenly another African appeared, white markings on her jet-black skin glistening in the fire. Though nearly as monstrous as those beasts now running for cover from the setting sun, Muzzlewit knew at a glance that he beheld the arsonist responsible, the slayer of her day, and that this day was in no way his own. This primitive slayer snapped a flaming branch from the lower roofs and drove the jagged end into the chest of the fleeing vampires, one after another, their ashes mixing with the smoke and the clay dust lifting off the burning huts. She howled as she worked, her head and her filthy hair whipping round with great excitement. The Watcher frowned at the barbaric spectacle, his lower lip jutting out over the chin; indicating acute displeasure.
“This is where it starts, this tradition that you will live by, by which I am to die—by which your young Catherine Hogarth will also die.”
“If its roots are with these coarse savages,” Muzzlewit said, looking away, “perhaps it’s best that such a tradition die too.” Turning, he didn’t see the Dutch girl scowl, then wave a hand at the moon.
The sky suddenly lit up as though at midday; Muzzlewit spun on his heels again, bare feet nearly tripping over one another in the sand. He now faced not just the ghost of the Dutch slayer, but a magnificent wall. Stones, each of them bigger than the rooms of his luxurious house, were stacked high into the pale arid sky, each one painted with a different mural of some winged god, an unidentifiable (though beautiful) beast, or a heavenly woman, performing acts which in England would be reserved for saints and kings. Muzzlewit gaped at the fantastic facade, which stretched hundreds of yards in either direction; when his eyes came to center again, Carissa walked away from him, toward a grand doorway in the wall, leading into a bright blue chamber. It was not merely a wall; Muzzlewit stood at the foot of a most enormous building. Unsure what to fear more, the world within or without the mammoth structure, Muzzlewit did what he trusted, and followed a few feet behind the Slayer.
Past the door, pillars as grand as those before the church of St. George Bloomsbury lined the entryway. This was merely the entryway! Each great shaft was covered by an exquisite mosaic, which Muzzlewit imagined would reveal, if he were to take the time, the entire history of the strange people occupying this palace. The mosaics and paintings all bore the signature style of the ancient Egyptians, whose crumbling relics had recently arrived in the British Museum. The wonders before him, however, put to shame the scraps that Schliemann and his plunderers had scavenged. But if archaeologists had not been able to unearth such wonders as this . . .
“Who could’ve built it?”
The ring of his own voice in the vast hall surprised even him, and he whipped round to check on his astral guide. Carissa proceeded along the vast hall more quickly, so he raced now to catch up, doing so just in time to enter another room at her side.
If the outside of the building had the quality of a mirage in the vast desert, this room delivered on that promise. A great pool filled most of the place, and two long-necked birds, unlike any swan, coasted gently in an arc across the calm water. At the near end of the pool four nude Africans stood with arms crossed, backs to the European arrivals. Despite skin as black as night, Muzzlewit had to admit a certain handsomeness to these brutes; they were certainly more pleasing in appearance than either the vampires or the Slayer to whose skirmish he’d just been subjected. For a moment he couldn’t take his eyes off them, until he realized two things, the first being that Carissa again walked away from him.
“They don’t see us, do they?” He shared this second revelation as he followed her along the left side of the room. Only as she answered did Muzzlewit notice the two women at the far end of the pool.
“It is needed that you see these sights. Do not be surprised that they have nothing to learn from you, sir.”
Wading through water up to the hip, a naked Egyptian girl moved with inhuman grace and beauty; Muzzlewit knew at once that this was the Slayer. What fantastic contrast, what immeasurable variation in that term “slayer,” could be seen when turning from the proper Germanic girl at his side to the Nubian child in the water.
Sitting at the edge of the pool—and the two Europeans now approached quite closely this far end—an older Egyptian woman kicked her feet in the water, her skirt pulled up to her thighs. Naked above the waist, with an enormous bosom, she had nonetheless almost the bearing of a man. Her jaw was set proudly, her nose broad, but with a bridge as thick as a Frenchman. Although her appearance could not have been more in contrast to that of Her Royal Majesty Victoria, it surprised Muzzlewit not at all when Carissa gave the woman’s title as queen.
“She lets the Slayer live in the palace because the people worship the girl as a living goddess. She is to them as much a savior as He whom you and I acknowledge upon bended knee, though these people collect many a goddess in their halls. Certainly this is not so coarse, not so savage, as to offend your fine British senses? Do you not look at this young girl and bemoan her doom as the Slayer of a wondrous age?”
Muzzlewit, now a little less horrified at these leaps through time and place, fairly spat, “Pttf! All this talk of goddesses, my blasphemous slayer? Are you so quickly swayed by this heathen temple, the obvious lack of male discipline? Of order? Do you take one of those brutes by the door for a watcher? Nay, I wager yonder ‘queen’ deigns to fill the shoes which in any civilized age have been worn by one such as I.” He paused a moment to consider his condemnation of an admittedly beautiful place, but decided that what must be said would be said. “I’m sorry, dear girl, but this impresses me not at all.”
This time Muzzlewit witnessed the rage clouding Carissa Avenhaus’s eyes, the scowl, and the quick wave of the hand. This caused him to take a quick step backward, and, were it not for the sudden disruption of space and time, he’d have unhappily joined the beautiful Nubian “goddess” for a swim.
Their next destination Muzzlewit recognized immediately, not in any great specificity, but with comforting certainty: He found himself in England. Beyond a long, well-maintained field, an enormous country house glowed with a golden light from within, warming the edge of the night sky. The estate appeared to host a great party; on the terrace a young lady—finally, a real lady—in a beige evening gown and white gloves looked round curiously, kicking at what seemed to be a pile of dust. Within the terrace doors, pairs of partygoers engaged in conversation, while through another tall window Muzzlewit could see a grand ballroom alive with dancers. A fine blue greatcoat had been discarded in the yard by Muzzlewit’s feet, and at this p
roximity he could see that, though clearly brand new, this coat, and probably everything else he saw, belonged to a slightly older England than did he himself. He nonetheless breathed an audible sigh of relief to be, for most purposes, home.
Scanning the scene to find Miss Avenhaus, he first spied two men disappearing into the wood that surrounded the field. His Dutch slayer also observed the pair slipping between the trees, and, after a guttural “Ach,” waved her hand in the manner Muzzlewit had come to recognize.
Now he found himself in the thick of those same woods, the stars barely visible through the dense treetops. Just when he thought he’d gotten used to their mode of travel, this shortest of all jumps left him dizzy. He whirled slightly and looked to the ground to steady himself. A cough startled him, (or perhaps the Slayer laughed) and was followed by some sharp movement across the forest floor. He collected himself, fearing that he’d be abandoned out here, untold miles from London. But Carissa had not taken a step away; the two figures they’d just seen leaving the field now ran toward them through the trees.
In the lead by a dozen feet, the younger of the two sprinted in shirtsleeves and a powder-blue vest, short blond hair plastered back over his forehead by the swiftness of his stride. Behind him pursued an older man in a handsome brown waistcoast and vest and a purple ascot coming loose at the throat. To this man, the London watcher felt an immediate camaraderie.
“I would suppose,” Muzzlewit said, taking a deep breath and trying to look bored, “that these are hapless victims? We’ve come to witness an attack by fiends and subsequent rescue by your counterpart of this age?” He tried to muster an air of superiority, looking down over the prodigious bump on his nose at the girl; until, remembering that he wore only a nightgown, he let his shoulders fall noticeably.
At just that moment the two men ran by Muzzlewit and his guide. They did not run round the stationary pair, but ran directly through them, and our hapless protagonist was surprised to find the sensation not particularly unpleasant.
“You did recognize the Slayer in a ‘savage’ and a ‘heathen’ with no help of mine, but in your own country you are blind to her?” She pointed to the smaller and younger of the two receding figures, disappearing again into the shadows of the forest. “In the council’s incomplete records of these days, she is Elizabeth Weston, but in her day went by the name Edward Weston. Only by wearing the clothes of a man could she move through your English society with the freedom necessary to a slayer. Maybe this is why in our time the Slayer tends so often to be of low station. No one is batting eyes at dirty fingernails on a peasant girl.
“This, Mr. Muzzletwitch, is the courage of the Slayer. This, the ability to adapt to any situation, any obstacle—”
The Watcher covered his mouth and cleared his throat softly, politely interrupting. “Has it really been so hard for these girls, through these long ages?”
“More often than not, yes, it has. My own parents died when I—”
“Then what I’ve always suspected is true. It was an accident—a misstep in the history of our order! The Slayer should have been a man—!”
Carissa’s eyes flared at this, and her hand whipped under her white laced apron, drawing a short chunk of wood with one end carved into a long point. This she raised, and she stepped toward the befuddled Watcher, who fancied he heard a soft and sonorous voice from above offer a subtle reproach: “Uh-uh.”
But it was probably just the wind.
Or nothing at all, for he found himself suddenly sitting bolt upright and partially under the covers of his own bed. The bed curtain hung where it belonged atop the four posts (he did not remember that the Dutch slayer had put it back before taking him away), and for a moment he believed the entire thing had been a dream. The small tear in the scrim, made when he’d pulled the whole affair sharply out from the hand of his dead father, made it once again real to him.
His father had spoken of three spirits. Muzzlewit tried to quell the pounding in his thunderous heart by counting off the three girls he’d observed, but under all the heavy beating in his breast was the knowledge that it was the visitors to his chamber who would number three before the night was through. So it was with more chagrin than surprise that he noticed another girl in the room with him.
The word “chagrin,” borrowed from the French, can imply anything from distress to disappointment, and it is the whole spectrum of the word that I call upon for the current moment. Noticing another girl meant only mild disappointment, as he’d somehow known that the night would not end so soon. But as he recognized her—“Not you!” he cried—matters drifted into the more unpleasant meanings of the word.
“Oui, m’sieur. And I am not happier than you to be here in London again.”
“Marie Siegner, the most recently deceased of the Slayers.”
“Yes, m’sieur Muzzlewit. I am certain that I am the last girl you would choose to see on this night. However, know that I have forgiven you your cruelty, although I am sure you shall not ever forgive me. Fortunately we have not far to travel together, and it is only one girl I am to show you.”
With those words, the few minutes of comfort he enjoyed in his own bedchamber ended, and Charlton Muzzlewit found himself in the East End, a place he recognized chiefly by its stench.
He scowled at Marie, who bowed slightly and pressed a finger to her lips; he believed he detected a smile. She leaned toward him, and he noticed with some relief that though a corpse certainly stinks worse than the French, a ghost leaves its body odors at the grave.
“Be very quiet, m’sieur,” she whispered. “You’ll see now the hovel in which lives that girl who you are meant to look after. Maybe this sight will teach you compassion.”
“Oh, why are you whispering? They can’t hear us!” he shouted, and pushed open the front door of the crude shanty.
His experience bore out, as their impolite entry failed to wake even the bum asleep at the foot of the stairs. Muzzlewit had never been here before, had never even seen the outside. It occurred to him that this might be an oversight in his responsibilities as a watcher, but he had no time for self-reproach. Marie stepped over the snoring drunkard and started softly up the stairs, giving Charlton Muzzlewit a clear view of her uncovered calves and the hem of her skirt, muddy now as in life. He rolled his eyes and ascended after her.
The stairs going up were perhaps hazardous, many of the boards either split or with the nails pulled up. A window would have helped to ease the horrid smell of the narrow passage, but there was none. He breathed a sigh when Marie indicated the first door they came to as Catherine’s.
In a small front room, two older East Enders slept under a sheet on the rough floorboards, which had suffered slightly less wear than the crumbling staircase. This pair looked too old to be Catherine’s parents, but Muzzlewit knew that the workers of the East End often appeared old for their age; also, the woman resembled Catherine—the weak chin, the eyes too far apart. A bedpan sat on the windowsill, conveniently next to a broken pane, where the smell from within and the smell from without battled for dominance. Beside the window was a doorway without any door. Marie stood in a corner and gestured that Mr. Muzzlewit should look within.
“Oh, you can do without the bloody pantomime,” he shouted, waving a hand over the sleeping couple. “They can’t hear us!”
So the Watcher stepped through the open doorway, peering into the dark room. Clothes hung from a rod over the window to block the dim light from the street, and it took him a moment to make out the bed. Upon a stained mattress slept three children—Catherine had perhaps once mentioned younger brothers—but they were all too small to be his wide-hipped slayer. A torn wool blanket lay over the boys, wrapped round one of their ankles, and the urge to straighten the covering to better serve the boys took Muzzlewit quite off guard; he pushed the thought away easily enough.
Standing closer to the bed, he at last saw his teenage charge. She kneeled, saying her prayers, on a small pile of towels and clothes in the corner, su
rely her approximation of a bed. The clothes she’d worn that night made up her pillow, and the raw destitute honesty of the scene, as though from an engraving, spared Muzzlewit any unease at seeing his apprentice in her underclothes. Still, the spectacle of poverty inspired a certain discomfort which, he wondered, might have been akin to sympathy.
Soliciting a nod of approval from Marie, still in the doorway, he squeezed past the foot of the bed to get a closer look at the child. He’d known she was poor, but he never knew that she lived like this. She whispered her prayers so as not to wake her brothers, her head bowed toward the wall. Muzzlewit almost thought to kneel, but instead just leaned over her.
“. . . needs a new crutch or she ain’t goin’ to work no more,” the girl said in words as soft as breath. “The boys, they need proper beddin’. Me, Lord, I don’t need much. Ain’t me needs lookin’ after. It’s Muzzlewit.”
In some strange way these words tickled that discomfort which was now lodged just between his belly and his throat. He shifted his weight, although he in fact had none in this spectral form, and leaned yet closer to his charge, who continued her prayers, unaware, of course, of his attention.
“And the best lookin’ after he could get would be by one of them plague of frogs, or summat like what you did to that Job fella. Give him some real painful-like affliction of the skin—a real slow, tortured death. I could do it meself, Lord, but I got this whole destiny bit I need to keep up on. I tell you, though, what I wouldn’t do for Scotland Yard to declare open season on stuffy old used-up spinster-blokes from the West End.”
Charlton Muzzlewit set his jaw and stuck out his bottom lip so far that even in his father it would have indicated strict displeasure. “Merde,” said Marie the Vampire Slayer; with a wave of her hand they were gone.
* * *
Alone in his room again, Charlton Muzzlewit, from a long line of watchers and a fine London family, sat in a plush armchair, wish-iing the dawn were upon him. His teeth had taken to chattering, as they often did if he went too long without sleep. He gripped the arms of the chair and tried to push himself deeper into the soft cushioning, to make himself as steady as that fine bit of furniture, which, he couldn’t help thinking, probably cost more than a month’s rent for Catherine Hogarth’s family—a sum which they no doubt scraped together with great pains sometime well after the first of each month. “Still, let the ungrateful peasant be damned,” he muttered. “Hadn’t she said herself that I’d done her a favor bringing to her attention the destiny of the Slayer? What hypocrisy, then, for her to curse me for it to God Himself.”