Anno Dracula

Her face was taut, as if it had shrunken on to her skull. She should never have ventured out into the sun on her first day as a new-born. Kate had told her. Someone got in her way and she bowled him over. She was still strong and swift. She bent double as she ran, the blast of the sun on her back, heating her body through several layers of cloth. Her lips were drawn away from her teeth, stiff and shrivelled. Every step hurt, as if she were skipping through a forest of razors. This was not what she had expected...

... a homing instinct brought her to her street, to her own front door. She fumbled with the bell-pull and hooked one foot under the boot-scraper to prevent herself from falling backwards. Unless admitted into the cool shade at once, she would die. She leaned against her door and banged with the heel of her hand.

‘Mother, mother,’ she croaked. She sounded like an old crone.

The door was opened and she fell into the arms of Mrs Yeovil, their housekeeper. The servant did not recognise Penelope, and tried to push her back out into the cruel day.

‘No,’ her mother said. ‘It’s Penny. Look...’

Mrs Yeovil’s eyes grew wide; in their horror, Penelope saw her reflection more surely than she ever had in any mirror.

‘Lord bless us,’ the servant said.

Mother and Mrs Yeovil helped her into the hallway and the door was slammed shut. Pain still streamed through the stained-glass fanlight, but the worst of the sun was kept out. She lolled in the embrace of the two women. There was another person in the hallway, standing at the door of the withdrawing room.

‘Penelope? My Lord, Penelope!’ It was Charles. ‘She’s turned, Mrs Churchward,’ he said.

For a moment, she remembered what it was all about, what it had all been for. She tried to tell him, but only a hiss came out.

‘Don’t try to talk, dear,’ her mother said. ‘It’ll be all right.’

‘Get her somewhere dark,’ Charles said.

‘The cellar?’

‘Yes, the cellar.’

He pulled open the door under the stairs and the women carried her down into her father’s wine cellar. There was no light at all and she was suddenly cool all over. The burning stopped. She still hurt but she no longer felt on the point of exploding.

‘Oh, Penny, my poor dear,’ her mother said, laying a hand on her brow. ‘You look so...’

The sentence trailed off and they laid her out on cold but clean flagstones. She tried to sit up, to spit a curse at Charles.

‘Rest,’ he said.

They forced her back and she shut her eyes. Inside her head, the dark was red and teeming.

39

FROM HELL

Dr Seward’s Diary (kept in phonograph)

17 OCTOBER

I am keeping Mary Kelly. She is so like Lucy, so like what Lucy became. I have paid her rent up to the end of the month. I visit her when work permits and we indulge in our peculiar exchange of fluids. There are distractions but I do my best to set them aside.

George Lusk, chairman of the Vigilance Committee, came to see me at the Hall yesterday. He had been sent half a kidney with a note headed ‘From Hell’, claiming the enclosure was from one of the dead women, presumably Eddowes. ‘Tother piece I fried and ate, it was very nise.’ With a horrid irony, he thought first to bring the grisly trophy to me, believing the meat from a calf or a dog and himself the victim of a jape. ‘Jack the Ripper’ jokes are an epidemic, and since Lusk had a letter about the murders published in The Times, he has fallen victim to not a few. With Lestrade and Lusk looking over my shoulder, I prodded and poked the kidney. The organ was certainly human and had been preserved in alcohol. I told Lusk the prank most likely the work of a medical student. From my days at Bart’s, I recall fools who became devoted to such infantile and macabre practices. I cannot walk down Harley Street without remembering which society doctor once decamped from his lodgings leaving a dismembered torso to be discovered in his bed by the landlady. One oddity I observed was that the kidney almost certainly did come from a vampire. It displayed an advanced state of that distinctive species of liquid decay that comes upon the vampire after true death. I was not called upon to explain my familiarity with the innards of the un-dead.

Lestrade concurred, and Lusk, who is I understand quite a nuisance, was placated. Lestrade tells me the investigation is constantly muddied by similar false leads, as if Jack the Ripper were supported by a society of merry fellows intent on providing him with a protective fog of confusion. I have thought myself that I was not without friends, that some unknown power watched over my interests. Nevertheless I believe I have played out, for the time being, my string. The ‘double event’ – hideous expression, courtesy of that bothersome letter-writer – has unnerved me, and I shall suspend my night-work. It is still necessary but it has become too dangerous. The police are against me and there are vampires everywhere. It is my hope that others will take up my task. The day after John Jago was wounded, a vampire fop was killed in Soho, a stake through his heart and crusader cross carved in his forehead. The Pall Mall Gazette ran an editorial suggesting that the Whitechapel Murderer had gone West.

I am learning from Kelly. Learning about myself. She tells me sweetly, as we lie on her bed, that she has gone off the game, that she is not seeing other men. I know she lies but do not make an issue of it. I open her pink flesh up and vent myself inside her and she gently taps my blood, her teeth sliding into me. I have scars on my body, scars that itch like the wound Renfield gave me in Purfleet. I am determined not to turn, not to grow weak.

Money is unimportant. Kelly can have whatever I have left from my income. Since I came to Toynbee Hall, I’ve been drawing no salary and heavily subsidising the purchase of medical supplies and other necessaries. There has always been money in my family. No title, but always money.

I have made Kelly tell me about Lucy. The story, I am no longer ashamed to realise, excites me. I cannot care for Kelly as herself, so I must care for her for Lucy’s sake. Kelly’s voice changes, the Irish-Welsh lilt and oddly prissy grammar fade, and Lucy, far more careless about what she said and how she said it than her harlot get, seems to speak. The Lucy I remember is smug and prim and properly flirtatious. Somewhere between that befuddling but enchanting girl and the screaming leech whose head I sawed free was the newborn who turned Kelly. Dracula’s get. With each retelling of the nocturnal encounter on the Heath, Kelly adds new details. She either remembers more or invents them for my sake. I am not sure I care which. Sometimes, Lucy’s advances to Kelly are tender, seductive, mysterious, heated caresses before the Dark Kiss. At others, they are a brutal rape, needle-teeth shredding flesh and muscle. We illustrate with our bodies Kelly’s stories.

I no longer remember the faces of the dead women. There is only Kelly’s face, and that becomes more like Lucy with each passing night. I have bought Kelly clothes similar to those Lucy wore. The nightgown she wears before we couple is very like the shroud in which Lucy was buried. Kelly styles her hair like Lucy’s now. Soon, I hesitate to hope, Kelly will be Lucy.

40

THE RETURN OF THE HANSOM CAB

‘It’s been nearly a month, Charles,’ Genevieve ventured, ‘since the “double event”. Perhaps it’s over?’

Beauregard shook his head. Her comment had jolted him from his thoughts. Penelope was much on his mind.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Good things come to an end, bad things have to be stopped.’

‘You’re right, of course.’

It was after dark and they were in the Ten Bells. He was as familiar with Whitechapel as he had become with