Anno Dracula (2 page)

Very well.

The subject: female, apparently in her twenties. Recently dead, I should say. Profession: obvious. Location: Chicksand Street. The Brick Lane end, opposite Flower & Dean Street. Time: shortly after five
ante meridiem
.

I had been wandering for upwards of an hour in fog as thick as spoiled milk. Fog is best for my night-work. The less one can see of what the city has become in this year, the better. Like many, I’ve taken to sleeping by day, working by night. Mostly, I doze; it seems years since the bliss of actual sleep. Hours of darkness are the hours of activity now. Of course, here in Whitechapel things were never much different.

There’s one of those cursed blue plaques in Chicksand Street; at 197, one of the Count’s bolt-holes. Here lay six of the earth-boxes to which he and Van Helsing attached such superstitious and, as it eventuated, entirely unwarranted importance. Lord Godalming was supposed to destroy them; but, as in so much else, my noble friend proved not equal to the task. I was under the plaque, unable to discern its wording, pondering our failures, when the dead girl solicited my attention.

‘Mister...’ she called. ‘
Missssster
...’

As I turned, she settled feathers away from her throat. Her neck and bosom showed mist-white. A living woman would have shook with the cold. She stood under a staircase leading to a first-floor doorway above which burned a red-shaded lantern. Behind her, bar-shadowed by the stairs, was another doorway, half-sunken below the level of the pavement. None of the windows in the building, nor
in any close enough to see clearly, showed a light. We inhabited an island of visibility in a sea of murk.

I traversed the street, boots making yellow eddies in the low-lying fog. There was no one nearby. I heard people passing, but we were curtained. Soon, the first spikes of dawn would drive the last new-borns from the streets. The dead girl was up late by the standards of her kind. Dangerously late. Her need for money, for drink, must have been acute.

‘Such a handsome gentleman,’ she cooed, waving a hand in front of her, sharp nails shredding traces of fog.

I endeavoured to make out her face and was rewarded with an impression of thin prettiness. She angled her head slightly to regard me, a wing of jet-black hair falling away from a white cheek. There was interest in her black-red eyes, and hunger. Also, a species of half-aware amusement that borders contempt. The look is common among women, on the streets or off. When Lucy – Miss Westenra of Sainted Memory – refused my proposal, the spark of a similar expression inhabited her eyes.

‘... and so close to morning.’

She was not English. From her accent, I’d judge her German or Austrian by birth. The hint of a ‘ch’ in ‘chentleman’, a ‘close’ that verged upon ‘cloze’. The Prince Consort’s London, from Buckingham Palace to Buck’s Row, is the sinkhole of Europe, clogged with the
ejecta
of a double-dozen principalities.

‘Come on and kiss me, sir.’

I stood for a moment, simply looking. She was indeed a pretty thing, distinctive. Her shiny hair was cut short and lacquered in an almost Chinese style, sharp bangs like the cheek-guards of a Roman helmet. In the fog, her red lips appeared quite black. Like all of
them
,
she smiled too easily, disclosing sharp pearl-chip teeth. A cloud of cheap scent hung around, sickly to cover the reek.

The streets are filthy, open sewers of vice. The dead are everywhere.

The girl laughed musically, the sound like something wrung from a mechanism, and beckoned me near, loosening further the ragged feathers about her shoulders. Her laugh reminded me again of Lucy. Lucy when she was alive, not the leech-thing we finished in Kingstead Cemetery. Three years ago, when only Van Helsing believed...

‘Won’t you give me a little kiss,’ she sang. ‘Just a little kiss.’

Her lips made a heart-shape. Her nails touched my cheek, then her fingertips. We were both cold; my face a mask of ice, her fingers needles pricking through frozen skin.

‘What brought you to this?’ I asked.

‘Good fortune and kind gentlemen.’

‘Am I a kind gentleman?’ I asked, gripping the scalpel in my trousers pocket.

‘Oh yes, one of the kindest. I can tell.’

I pressed the flat of the instrument against my thigh, feeling the chill of silver through good cloth.

‘I have some mistletoe,’ the dead girl said, detaching a sprig from her bodice. She held it above her.

‘A kiss?’ she asked. ‘Just a penny for a kiss.’

‘It is early for Christmas.’

‘There’s always time for a kiss.’

She shook her sprig, berries jiggling like silent bells. I placed a cold kiss on her red-black lips and took out my knife, holding it under my coat. I felt the blade’s keenness through my glove. Her cheek was cool against my face.

I learned from last week’s in Hanbury Street – Chapman, the newspapers say her name was, Annie or Anne – to do the business swiftly 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 reach.

I had made preparation carefully before venturing out. For half an hour I sat, allowing myself to become aware of the pain. Renfield is dead – truly dead – but the madman left his jaw-marks in my right hand. The semi-circle of deep indentations has scabbed over many times but never been right again. With Chapman, I was dull from the laudanum I take and not as precise as I should have been. Learning to cut left-handed has not helped. I missed the major artery and the thing had time to screech. I am afraid I lost control and became a butcher, when I should be a surgeon.

Last night’s went better. The girl clung as tenaciously to life, but there was an acceptance of my gift. She was relieved, at the last, to have her soul cleansed. Silver is hard to come by now. The coinage is gold or copper. I hoarded threepenny bits while the money was changing and sacrificed my mother’s dinner service. I’ve had the instruments since my Purfleet days. Now the blades are plated, a core of steel strength inside killing silver. This time I selected the postmortem scalpel. It is fitting, I think, to employ a tool intended for rooting around in corpses.

The dead girl invited me into her doorway and wriggled skirts up over slim white legs. I took the time to open her blouse. My fingers, hot with pain, fumbled.

‘Your hand?’

I held up the lumpily-gloved club and tried a smile. She kissed my locked knuckles and I slipped my other hand out from my coat, holding firmly the scalpel.

‘An old wound,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing.’

She smiled and I quickly drew my silver edge across her neck, pressing firmly with my thumb, cutting deep into pristine dead-flesh. Her eyes widened with shock – silver
hurts
– and she released a long sigh. Lines of thin blood trickled like rain on a window-pane, staining the skin over her collar-bones. A single tear of blood issued from the corner of her mouth.

‘Lucy,’ I said, remembering...

I held up the girl, my body shielding her from passersby, and slid the scalpel through her stays and into her heart. I felt her shudder and fall lifeless. But I know the dead can be resilient and took care to finish the job. I laid her in the well of the sunken doorway and completed the delivery. There was little blood in her; she must not have fed tonight. After cutting away her corset, easily ripping the cheap material, I exposed the punctured heart, detached the intestines from the mesentery, unravelled a yard of the colon, and removed the kidneys and part of the uterus. Then I enlarged the first incision. Having exposed the vertebrae, I worried the loose head back and forth until the neckbones parted.

N
oise reached into her darkness. Hammering. Insistent, repeated blows. Meat and bone against wood.

In her dreams, Geneviève had returned to the days of her girlhood in the France of the Spider King,
la Pucelle
and the monster Gilles. When warm, she had been the physician’s daughter not Chandagnac’s get. Before she turned, before the Dark Kiss...

Her tongue felt sleep-filmed teeth. The aftertang of her own blood was in her mouth, disgusting and mildly exciting.

In her dreams, the pounding was a mallet striking the end of a snapped-in-half quarterstaff. The English captain finished her father-in-darkness like a butterfly, pinning Chandagnac to the bloodied earth. One of the less memorable skirmishes of the Hundred Years’ War. Barbarous times she had hoped deservedly dead.

The hammering continued. She opened her eyes and tried to focus on the grubby glass of the skylight. The sun was not yet quite down. Dreams washed away in an instant and she was awake, as if a gallon of icy water were dashed into her face.

The hammering paused. ‘Mademoiselle Dieudonné,’ someone
shouted. It was not the director – usually responsible for urgent calls that dragged her from sleep – but she recognised the voice. ‘Open up. Scotland Yard.’

She sat, sheet falling away. She slept on the floor in her underclothes, on a blanket laid over the rough planks.

‘There’s been another Silver Knife murder.’

She had been resting in her tiny office at Toynbee Hall. It was as safe a place as any to pass the few days each month when lassitude overcame 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, as coffins and crypts served for those of the Prince Consort’s bloodline.

She gave a placatory grunt and the hammering was not resumed. She cleared her throat. Her body, unused for days, creaked as she stretched. A cloud obscured the sun and the pain momentarily eased. She stood up in the dark and ran her hands over her hair. The cloud passed and her strength ebbed.

‘Mademoiselle?’

The hammering started again. The young were always impatient. She had once been the same.

She took a Chinese silk robe from a hook and drew it about herself. Not the dress etiquette recommended to entertain 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 earth-lined coffins in Mayfair, and hunting in packs on Pall Mall. This season, the correct form of address for an archbishop was hardly of major concern to anyone.

As she slid back the bolt, traces of her sleep-fog persisted. Outside the afternoon was dying; she would not be at her best until night was
about her again. She pulled open her door. A stocky new-born stood in the corridor, long coat around him like a cloak, bowler hat shifting from hand to hand.

‘Surely, Lestrade, you are not of the kind that needs to be invited into any new dwelling?’ Geneviève enquired. ‘That would be very inconvenient for a man in your profession. Well, come in, come in...’

She admitted the Scotland Yard man. Jagged teeth stuck from his mouth, unconcealed by a half-grown moustache. When warm, he had been rat-faced; the sparse whiskers completed the resemblance. His ears were shifting, becoming high and pointed. Like most new-borns of the bloodline of the Prince Consort, he had not yet found his final form. He wore smoked glasses but crimson points behind the lenses suggested active eyes.

He set his hat down upon her desk.

‘Last night,’ he began, hurriedly, ‘in Chicksand Street. It was butchery.’

‘Last night?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he drew breath, making an allowance for her spell of rest. ‘It’s the seventeenth now. Of September.’

‘I’ve been asleep three days.’

Geneviève opened her wardrobe and considered the few clothes hanging inside. She hardly had costume for every occasion. It was unlikely, all considered, that she would in the near future be invited to a reception at the Palace. Her only remaining jewellery was her father’s tiny crucifix, and she rarely wore that for fear of upsetting some sensitive new-born with silly ideas.

‘I deemed it best to rouse you. Everyone is jittery. Feelings are running high.’

‘You were quite right,’ she said. She rubbed sleep-gum from her
eyes. Even the last shards of sunlight, filtered through a grimy square of glass, were icicles jammed into her forehead.

‘When the sun is down,’ Lestrade was saying, ‘there’ll be pandemonium. It could be another Bloody Sunday. Some say Van Helsing has returned.’

‘The Prince Consort would love that.’

Lestrade shook his head. ‘It’s merely a rumour. Van Helsing is dead. His head remains on its spike.’

‘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.’

Geneviève almost laughed. ‘I am 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 little to the vampires of London, Geneviève knew. Even at a third, a tenth or a twentieth remove, they all had Vlad Tepes as father-in-darkness.