The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life (13 page)

“Yes, indeed,” Cletus returned as he rolled his thin lips pleasurably over his teeth. “And you’ll never guess where...”

“At the Blue Post Saloon,” I quipped.

“In a closet,” he said solemnly.

I pursed my brow.

“It seems that about a month ago an English gentleman checked into a little resort in Interlaken, Switzerland, and after a couple of days he vanished. Of course, no one seemed to notice until his bill came due. In investigating they discovered one of the closet doors in his room wasn’t working properly, and so they had it forced open. Well, the reason that it wasn’t working was because William Chiswick had nailed it securely shut... from the inside.”

“And was he dead?”

“Oh, lord, yes. He’d been in there for weeks. But it’s a damned odd way to commit suicide, isn’t it, to lock one’s self in one’s closet and slowly starve to death.” He gazed at me intently.

I suddenly wondered why the little man had approached me with this information.

“Oh, there’s more,” he added quickly. “You see, papers found in the hotel identified the body as our Dr. Chiswick, but he had checked into the resort under the name of C. William. Following that up, Scotland Yard was able to follow his path as he left the country. It seems that he made a beeline from Dover to Calais and all the way through France and Switzerland
without stopping until he reached Interlaken
.”

“Without stopping?”

“Not once. It seems that Chiswick was in a very great hurry.” Cletus lowered his head and clasped his hands behind him as he began to pace back and forth in a space about five feet long. “Several people remember him from that first evening, the maître d’hôtel, the desk clerk when he asked for the hammer and some nails. He apparently sealed himself in the closet shortly thereafter.”

“There’s no chance it was murder?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Do you think he killed himself because he was lying to the trustees about making an important discovery?”

“Certainly not!” he snapped angrily. “You don’t put grates on your windows and new locks on your door to cover up a lie. Chiswick was frightened by something, and he was racing madly out of the country to get away from it. I think he nailed himself in that closet because whatever it was that made him crazy with terror showed up at that resort.”

“And what, pray tell, could that have been?”

Cletus stopped pacing and looked at me. There was a knowing glint in his eye. “The only fragment of anything that Scotland Yard has been able to turn up about the case is that a visitor from Italy showed up that evening and asked for him at the desk. They don’t know anything else. They don’t even have a description.” He puffed his cigarette. “I knew William Chiswick for a long time. I saw him walk into houses where smallpox epidemics were raging and I saw him overpower men twice his size so he could cauterize their wounds. I never saw him back down from anything, and if it was that Italian visitor who caused him to go insane with fear, let us hope you or I never confront him, for he was nothing of God’s world.” With that he stared rudely and directly into my eye. “I know there’s no real evidence, but every intuition in my body tells me there’s a connection between Chiswick’s Italian visitor and the arrival of the mysterious Mr. Cavalanti one week later.”

I felt a chill run down my spine. “You think Niccolo had something to do with it?”

“Niccolo?” Cletus asked as he continued to eye me curiously. “Yes, I think Niccolo had something to do with it. Two very strange events have occurred within a very short space of time and I think we’re naïve to think they’re not related.”

For a moment I was almost believing his words, but then I realized Cletus was succumbing to the same irrational fear that Niccolo had warned about. “Don’t be absurd,” I dismissed. “Granted, this Chiswick thing is most peculiar, but there are millions of young Italian gentlemen. The fact that one puts in a brief appearance a thousand miles away is a ludicrous reason to assume that Mr. Cavalanti had anything to do with it.”

Cletus drew back. “Tenuous and circumstantial, yes! But you mark my words, Dr. Gladstone. You just mark my words.” He swelled his chest self-assuredly, and then turned around and strode off.

That afternoon I found a small card in the letterbox with the words
J. Sedgemoor, Esq., Chemist,
embossed upon it. Scrawled in a crowquill was a brief and simple message:
Please come in for consultation.
I obliged the request on my way home from the hospital.

I was still both angry and amazed at Cletus’s accusation when I stepped into the little shop on Piccadilly and saw the tall and wispy proprietor standing behind the slate counter, carefully counting out small brown capsules. He was putting them in a glass vial with a rubber stopper. In front of him was a dithery little old woman waiting impatiently. When he finished she took out a neatly folded pound note and stuck it securely into his hand. As an afterthought she asked, “Do you have lemon grass for sachets?”

“No, mum,” Sedgemoor replied. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go to Butler’s, the herbalist, right down the street.”

She took her change, nodded, and left.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Sedgemoor,” I greeted.

“Ahh, Dr. Gladstone,” he returned. “I’m so glad you came right in.”

“Do you have the information I required?” I asked. “I’m not sure,” he answered oddly. He turned around and opened a small cherry cabinet, not unlike a card catalogue at the library. He pulled out a yellow card with a brown envelope clipped to it and emptied the few crumbled remains of the black pill on the counter. “I can’t exactly tell you what it is,” he explained, “but I can tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t in any formulary, and it isn’t anything that any apothecary in the country knows about. I’ve tried everything, but this little pill has a very complex chemical structure—too complex, in fact, for me even to begin to tell you what it is composed of.”

“Does this happen very often?”

“If it hadn’t happened in this instance I would have told you it was impossible. I mean, the English race has a finite knowledge of chemistry and any pill manufactured within the realm of this knowledge can be deciphered by anyone else within the realm of this knowledge. But this pill...” He became contemplative. “Either someone stumbled onto a very strange and complex compound by accident, or they have a brilliant knowledge of chemistry that far exceeds what they’re teaching in the universities.”

“I see,” I said quietly. “Well, Mr. Sedgemoor, if you had to venture an opinion, do you think the pill was an accidental creation or the product of a more advanced knowledge of chemistry?”

He stroked his pointed chin as he nervously poked the fragments of the pill around on the slate. “There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s the product of a more advanced knowledge of chemistry,” he said. “You see, when I was unable to decipher the pill I sent it to a friend of mine at Oxford. He didn’t have any luck either, but he ran a few other tests on the pill, and he’s discovered that it is a phenomenal healing agent. It causes a wound practically to suture itself and it seems to safeguard against infection as well. In short, it is a medicinal substance any chemist in the country would give his eyeteeth to be able to duplicate.” Mr. Sedgemoor’s voice became very hushed as he leaned over the counter. “But come now, Dr. Gladstone, let’s drop this ‘patient of yours’ nonsense and level with me. I could be very helpful, you know.”

“Whatever do you mean?” I gasped.

“I know the business,” he said. “I have the legal acumen and the connections. If you’d only come clean with me we could make a fortune.” His pale hazel eyes became insane with excitement. “You made the pill, didn’t you? Come on, you can tell me.”

“No, I’m afraid I didn’t,” I returned. “I’m as much in the dark as you are, Mr. Sedgemoor?’

“I wouldn’t ask for much of a profit.”

“I didn’t make the pill.”

“Twenty-five percent. That’s not much. One quarter and I’ll do all the work from here on out.”

“How much do I owe you?” I asked briskly.

“Oh, nothing,” he answered. “It’s free, just tell me—”

“Good day, Mr. Sedgemooif I said crisply as I scooped up the remaining fragments of the pill and left the shop.

The revelation about the pill left me with an odd mixture of excitement and apprehension. I was excited, as any physician would be, with the discovery of such a compound, but it raised many questions in my mind. Who made the pill? Niccolo? Lodovico? And if they possessed a knowledge of medicine that far exceeded what we were teaching in the universities, what else did they know, and perhaps more importantly, why were they keeping their discoveries to themselves instead of sharing their knowledge with humanity?

When I arrived home that evening I discovered Niccolo and Ursula alone in the parlor involved in one of their fiery discussions. I asked Niccolo if he felt up to going out for a little walk, and Ursula politely realized I wanted to be alone with him. It was raining, a particularly spectacular rain. The sky was wracked with lightning and the pretentious mummery of thunder. The wind tugged at our umbrellas as we passed a cast-iron street lavatory crowned by a gas lamp. I noticed that a playbill for Oscar Wilde’s
Salome
was about to be ripped off by the storm. The lightning flashed and for a moment the head of St. John the Baptist was revealed in garish detail before it was swept away in the muddy waters of the gutter.

“You are troubled, aren’t you, Dottore?” he finally stated as the wind died down.

“You don’t have to be overly perceptive to see that, do you,” I returned.

He shrugged. “You won’t tell me what it is?”

“Well,” I began slowly, “today I went to the chemist’s. I had one of those black pills of yours tested...”

“And?”

“And it turns out they’re a very sophisticated healing agent, much more sophisticated than our medical science could currently produce.”

“So?”

“So, who made them?”

“A brilliant chemist living in Paris—a vampire, of course. But it was Lodovico who devised the formula.”

I straightened with amazement. “And is Lodovico a genius when it comes to chemistry?”

“Probably,” Niccolo answered naïvely. “Lodovico’s a genius in just about everything. You know, he is very old, much older than I, and it’s difficult to have lived as long &3 Lodovico has and not acquire an incredible wealth of knowledge.”

“Are all vampires as knowledgeable as Lodovico?”

“Many of them. I told you, knowledge is our Holy Grail, and I daresay the wisdom possessed by the vampire would boggle your imagination. You see, we don’t have political allegiances to worry about, or religion, or differing mores. We all work together for one purpose: to further our achievements and our learning.”

“Why don’t you share your learning with the common man?” I snapped angrily. “This healing agent alone could save countless lives.”

“Why don’t we share our learning?” Niccolo repeated bitterly and laughed. “We’re feared and hated. Do you know what happens when a being who is obviously not human comes up to the rabble and says, ‘Look, I’ve invented a machine that will take generations for your scientists even to come close to understanding; here, let me help you with it’? Well, I’ll tell you what happens: witch-hunts and inquisitions. I can open the history books and find you the names of hundreds of vampires who were tortured and burned as heretics because they tried to ‘share’ their learning with the common man.”

“But surely that was during the Dark Ages—”

“You’re hopelessly stupid—” he began shrilly, but then lowered his voice as he struggled to maintain his composure. “We’re still in the Dark Ages. The scared and the superstitious savage still lurks behind the mask of civilization and he will remain there for untold generations to come. If wondering why we won’t share the science that created that pill is all that was troubling you, we can consider our conversation ended.” Niccolo pulled his evening coat more tightly around him as his pace quickened and he began to move ahead of me. He struggled to hold his umbrella firmly in the oncoming wind.

“No, wait!” I called as I ran to catch up. “It’s not all that was troubling me.”

He regarded me haughtily.

“You see,” I explained, “shortly before our carriage accident one of my older and respected colleagues at Redgewood vanished. He went insane, as if he were very frightened by something, and Scotland Yard just discovered he committed suicide at a little resort in Interlaken, Switzerland.”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

“Well, it seems that a visit from a mysterious Italian gentleman spurred him into taking his own life, and Dr. Hardwicke, you remember, the physician with the furious eyes?”

He shivered.

“Well, Cletus, the old fool, tried to convince me that you had something to do with Chiswick’s tragedy.”

“How clever of him,” Niccolo murmured dryly.

“Even though I didn’t believe it for a moment, I guess it just sort of put me into a frame of mind....”

“And you just got to thinking, perhaps my presence in your house is a little more than accidental—”

“No, I-”

“Perhaps Lodovico has just sent me on anther mission. I mean, if he would have me wake up under Leonardo’s knife in the morgue of Santa Maria Nuova, why couldn’t he just as easily have me throw myself beneath the wheels of your carriage? I mean, a couple of broken legs aren’t all that serious to a vampire....”

“No.”

“And after such an accident, you certainly wouldn’t dream of suspecting I had actually been sent to infiltrate your household.” He tilted his head back in a cruel and fraudulent contemplation as the lightning momentarily lit the rain-slicked street.

I straightened with fear as I felt my pulse quicken. He was delivering his words facetiously and with a strange sort of pretended guilt, but I fancied that I discerned a hidden edge of truth in the parley. Was it actually there, I wondered to myself? Was Niccolo trying to give me some sort of cloaked warning, and if so, was he doing so because of an unconscious concern and affection, or simply to torture me with a cruel puzzle?

“Perhaps,” he continued, “the same thing that happened to this Chiswick of yours is in the process of happening to you.”