Supping With Panthers (58 page)

‘But you defeated her …’

‘Really?’

‘You saw … What we did …’

‘Yes.’ He shrugged faintly. ‘But I was stronger than she had ever thought.’

‘So you agree? She might indeed be dead?’

He sighed. ‘Yes, perhaps.’ He shrugged again. ‘But we shall know for certain soon, anyhow. If Lilith is dead – then Charlotte Westcote is dead. If Charlotte Westcote is dead – then Lucy is dead. But if Lucy is alive …’ He glanced out through the window. ‘We shall be in Mayfair very soon.’ He hunched himself up in the folds of his cloak. ‘Let us wait until then.’

And so wait I did, in silence, until our carriage had stopped in a quiet Mayfair street, before the steps which rose to Lord Byron’s door. I climbed out and walked up with him; as the door was opened, I saw a shadow pass across my companion’s pale face and then, almost simultaneously, a gleam of pleasure and desire in his eyes. His nostrils widened; and as I watched him smiled the air, so too, just faintly, I caught a scent myself. It was rich, and golden, and like nothing I knew; as we walked through the hall it grew progressively stronger, until, by the time we had arrived in the dining room, I was conscious of almost nothing but the pleasure it was giving me. Lord Byron too seemed similarly entranced; I asked him what the perfume was, but though he smiled at me faintly he didn’t reply. I wondered if it were not some drug we were breathing in, which had the power thus to affect the olfactory nerves; and I knew, with a surprised shock of utter certainty, that whatever it might be I had to have more. You will know, Huree, that I was never a man of intemperate tastes; I was surprised, now that Lilah’s curse had been purged from my brain, that I should desire anything quite so strongly; I wondered if, perhaps, I was still not quite myself. I would recover soon, no doubt. And yet in the short term my enslavement to the drug seemed, if anything, to be growing; and my desire to taste it felt almost like a pain.

Lord Byron breathed in deeply; he leaned against the wall. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

Only a single candle lit the room. I stared into the shadows, expecting not to make anything out; but to my surprise I found I could see perfectly well. A couple of vampires were lounging over a bottle of wine. They both smiled at me, and I saw their eyes gleam.

‘Where is she?’ Lord Byron asked again.

One of the vampires drained her glass. ‘Below,’ she replied.

‘With Haidée?’

‘But of course.’

‘And has she …?’

‘Haidée?’

Lord Byron nodded.

‘No.’

‘Doctor …’ Lord Byron reached for my arm. ‘You had better …’ He stared into my eyes, then he shook his head. ‘This way,’ he murmured. He led me through the dining room and on through the hall. We began to descend a flight of spiral steps. The scent was almost unbearable now; the further we went, the more desperate I grew. By a large oaken doorway, Lord Byron paused and smiled at me and pressed my arm. Then he opened the door and passed inside. I followed him. The scent, in a wash of gold, flooded my brain.

Dimly, I could make out the room we were in. The floor and wads were stone; but the fittings were wonderfully beautiful: glittering ornaments, many-coloured rugs, rich woods, bright flowers, paintings, rare books. These meant nothing to me, however; nothing at all; I wanted only one thing … I wanted the drug. I stared about the room, searching for it. I breathed in deeply; then saw two women seated on a bed, the one rocking the other’s curled body in her arms. Lord Byron had already crossed to them. The woman cradling the other looked up; she seemed remarkably lined and old, and I knew her at once: Haidée, whom I had met one evening at table with Lord Byron, and who had asked me to help cure her disease. But it was not her I was smelling. No. It was the other one, the girl in her lap, I was smelling her
blood.
That was what the perfume had been; that had been the drug – human, mortal, living
blood.
I remembered Lilah’s question. ‘If Dr Eliot were like you,’ she had asked Lord Byron, ‘killing only in order to survive: would that make him happier, do you think?’ And at once I knew, Huree. I knew what I was.

I watched as Lord Byron took Lucy by the hand. Her eyes were glazed, but otherwise she seemed the very picture of health: fresh-skinned, rosy-cheeked – vital … fresh. For several minutes Lord Byron spoke with Haidée; and all the time my hunger was growing worse, and I was almost tempted to seize Lucy myself. But at length Lord Byron shook his head, and turned away; Haidée screamed after him, but he made no reply and, walking past me, led Lucy through the door.

‘I can never resist temptation,’ he said.

‘No’, I replied.

He motioned me to shut the wooden door. I did so. Lord Byron nodded, his smile now a terrible and chiding one. He led Lucy on up a further spiral of steps; then he seized her by the arms; he thrust her against the wall. He was shaking violently, but as he unbuttoned Lucy’s dress his expression seemed almost tender, and his eyes were half-closed as though reluctant to watch. Suddenly he bowed his head; for a second he froze. ‘I am not like Haidée,’ he muttered. Again he paused. ‘And even she – one day – even she will give in.’

‘Haidée?’ I asked.

Lord Byron glanced round at me. ‘It is not just my blood’ – he stroked Lucy’s neck – ‘which flows in these veins,’ He shuddered; he seemed ready to bite; then he paused and turned to stare at me again. ‘Almost eighty years,’ he whispered. ‘Haidée has endured, growing older, and drier, and more withered by the hour,’ He laughed softly, despairingly. ‘How long, Doctor? How long will you wait, now you have realised what you are?’

With his nail he punctured through the skin of Lucy’s neck. The blood began to pump from the jugular. Lucy moaned softly, as she slumped into his arms, and I closed my eyes as I smelled the flowing blood. Lord Byron was on his knees; and I knew I was weak, that I couldn’t fight the scent. He glanced up at me. ‘Hungry?’ he asked.

I tried, and failed, to reply.

‘I shouldn’t ready waste this blood on you,’ he said, ‘but I feel guilty. You wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for me.’ He reached up for my hand, and pulled on it. ‘Come, Doctor. Join me. Have your first taste.’

A minute more I resisted. Then I staggered; I fed to my knees, I gazed at the blood. Lord Byron laughed and gave me her wrist. ‘There,’ he murmured. ‘Bite deep. It’s always best that way.’

I stroked the veins.

I glanced at Lucy’s face.

I bit, as Lord Byron had advised, very deep …

Like a couple of dogs, we fed on our prey.

‘I am compassionate’ – so Lilah had claimed. Yet even now, the game was not quite over; there was one last joke to be played. It was waiting for me in my study in Hanbury Street. I had returned there to pack, just the barest essentials I would need, for I could not stay in London; the whole world was now my exile. Indeed, I almost missed Lilah’s parting gift, for I had not at first planned to take my microscope. My work, my dreams, seemed like dust to me now.

Yet at the last moment, I found I could not abandon either – not altogether. I crossed back to my desk. As I approached the microscope, I saw the slide of blood beneath the lens. I frowned. I remembered it quite clearly, for I had looked at it before leaving for Miller’s Court: Lord Byron’s leucocytes – a film of white cells. I bent down. I peered at the slide with my naked eye. The sample was now red. Thick, vivid, haemoglobin-rich red. I adjusted my microscope’s lens. I stared through the glass. I inspected the slide.

The leucocytes were still alive as they had always been; but now the red cells were active as well. Somehow the slide had been doctored; somehow, the structure of the blood had been changed. For there was no phagocytic activity; no absorption of the red cells by the white; instead both seemed utterly stable. I remembered, from my researches into the structure of vampire blood, how Lord Byron’s white cells had broken down and fed on alien haemoglobin; I rushed downstairs, to the astonishment of Llewellyn and the attendants who had clearly given up on me for good; I took a sample of blood from a patient; back upstairs, I added it to the blood on the slide. Still there was no activity. I waited, speaking to Llewellyn, lying in response to his questions as best as I could manage, and ad the time wondering, wondering what I had. At length I inspected the sample again. Still nothing; no phagocytosis; no reaction at all. The alien blood had not been consumed. Nothing had changed, Huree –
nothing had changed.

Nor has it ever done. I have the sample before me now. I am never parted from it. Sometimes, when my depression grows too great, I will inspect it again, just to check that it is truly unaltered – truly unchanging – a true immortal’s blood. Lilah’s, in other words – for it could have come from no one else’s veins. It was what Lord Byron fought her for, after all – fruitlessly, as it now proves, since his blood remains a vampire’s, and I still do not know how its structure can be changed. For the sample of Lilah’s own blood resists my every effort to fathom its secrets; it has offered me no illumination, no breakthrough, no cure. Instead, it offers me only one thing I did not have before – the certainty that immortal cells can indeed exist. It is, after all, Lilah’s final parting gift; her most refined and delicious torture: the torture of hope.

I have not told Lord Byron, since I know that Lilah intended me to. One day, perhaps, when I am nearer the source of her joke; but not until then. For, on him, the torture would be infinitely worse.

Help me, Huree – help me, please. Use what I have told you to warn those you can. And meanwhile, I am waiting.

As I have waited these past seven years.

As I will always wait …

For ever, it seems.

For now, and all time.

JACK.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Detective Inspector ‘Steve’ White’s report on pages 423–4 is taken from Donald Rumbelow’s
The Complete Jack the Ripper
(W.H. Aden 1975). My thanks also to Dr Ric Caesar and Captain Damien Bush for our many late-night discussions on a possible pathology of vampirism.

*
Calcutta, I have been informed, was built on such a site. The name of this second city of the British Empire was originally
Kali-kata.

*
I am indebted to my friend Francis Younghusband for pointing out to me the existence in former times of similar practices elsewhere in India. In the Deccan, for instance, victims were bound, not to the image of a goddess but to the proboscis of a wooden elephant Those who are interested may care to read Major-General Campbell’s
Narrative,
pp. 35–7.

*
I have been able to find no record of such a plant. The Kirghiz Desert, however, is the home of garlic. I wonder if Professor Jyoti’s plant was a variant of that noxious-smelling bulb?