Anno Dracula

27

DR JEKYLL AND DR MOREAU

‘My dear Mlle Dieudonné,’ read the note, delivered by the estimable Ned, ‘I have a call to make in connection with our enquiries, and should like a vampire with me. Could you make yourself available this evening? A cab will be sent to Whitechapel for your use. More later. Beauregard.’

As it eventuated, the cab contained Charles Beauregard himself, freshly shaved and dressed, hat in his lap, cane at his side. He was becoming accustomed to vampire hours, she realised, sleeping by day and thriving by night. He gave the cabby an address across in the city. The hansom shifted pleasantly on its springs as it made its way out of the East End.

‘Nothing is so reassuring as the interior of a hansom cab,’ Charles declared. ‘It is a miniature fortress on wheels, a womb of comfort in the dark.’

Considering her companion’s evident inclination towards poetic thought, Geneviève was thankful she had taken care with her attire. She would not pass at the Palace, but her costume was at least not designed to radiate hostility to the male sex. She had bothered with a velvet cape and matching choker. She had spent some extra time brushing her hair, and now wore it loose about her shoulders. Jack Seward told her the arrangement was pleasing, and, denied the vain pleasures of a looking-glass, she would have to take his word.

‘You seem different this evening?’ Charles noticed.

She smiled, trying to keep her teeth from showing. ‘It’s this dress, I’m afraid. I can hardly breathe.’

‘I thought you didn’t need to breathe.’

‘That’s a common fallacy. Somehow, those who know nothing are able to maintain entirely irreconcilable beliefs. On the one hand, vampires can be detected because they do not breathe. On the other, vampires have the rankest breath imaginable.’

‘You are right, of course. That had never occurred to me.’

‘We are natural beings, like any others,’ she explained. ‘There’s no magic.’

‘What about the business with mirrors?’

That was the thing they always came down to, the business with mirrors. No one had an explanation for that.

‘Maybe a little magic,’ she said, holding her thumb and forefinger nearly together. ‘Just a touch.’

Charles smiled, a thing he did rarely. It improved his looks. There was something closed in the back of Charles Beauregard’s mind. She could not truly read thoughts, but she was sensitive. Charles was intent on keeping his mind private. Not a trick that came naturally; his life in the service of the Diogenes Club must have taught it him. Her impression was that this courteous gentleman was an old hand at keeping secrets.

‘Have you seen the newspapers?’ he asked. ‘There has been another communiqué from Jack the Ripper. A postcard.’

‘“Double event this time”,’ she quoted.

‘Quite. “Had not time to get ears for police”.’

‘Didn’t he try to sever Cathy’s ear?’

Beauregard had obviously memorised Dr Gordon Brown’s report. ‘There was some such injury, but it was probably incidental. Her face was extensively mutilated. Even if our letter-writer is not the murderer, he may have an inside source of information.’

‘Like whom? A journalist?’

‘That is a possibility. The fact that the letters were sent to the Central News Agency, and therefore available to all the newspapers, is unusual. Few outside the press even know what a news agency is. If the letters had been sent to a specific periodical, then individual journalists would benefit from the “scoop”.’

‘And also fall under suspicion?’

‘Precisely.’

They were in the city now. Wide, well-lit streets, houses far enough apart to allow for grassy spaces and trees. Everything was so much cleaner here. Although in one square Geneviève noticed three bodies spitted on stakes. Children played hide-and-seek in the bushes around the impaled, red-eyed little vampires seeking out their plump playfellows and giving them affectionate nips with sharpening teeth.

‘Upon whom are we calling?’ she asked.

‘Someone of whom you will approve. Dr Henry Jekyll.’

‘The research scientist? He was at Lulu Schön’s inquest.’

‘That’s the fellow. He has no gods but Darwin and Huxley. No magic at all is admitted past his doorstep. And, speaking of Dr Jekyll’s doorstep, I should hope that this is it.’

The cab stopped. Charles climbed out and helped her down. She remembered to gather her dress and steady herself as she was extricated from the hansom. He told the cabby to wait.

They were in a square of ancient, handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from high estate and let in flats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men: map-engravers, architects, Carpathians, shady lawyers, and the agents of obscure enterprises. One house, however, second from the corner, was still occupied entire; and at the door of this, which wore a great air of wealth and comfort though it was now in darkness except for the fan-light, Charles knocked. An elderly servant opened the door. Charles presented his card, which Geneviève gathered was a free pass to every dwelling or institution in the country.

‘And this is Miss Dieudonné,’ Charles explained, ‘the elder.’

The servant took note, and admitted the visitors into a large, low-roofed, comfortable hall, paved with flags, warmed after the fashion of a country house by a bright, open fire, and furnished with costly cabinets of oak.

‘Dr Jekyll is in his laboratory with the other gentleman, sir,’ the servant said. ‘I shall announce you.’

He vanished into another part of the house, leaving Geneviève and Charles in the hall. In the dark, she could see more clearly. There were strange shapes in the flickering of the firelight on the polished cabinets and the uneasy starting of the shadow on the ceiling.

‘Dr Jekyll obviously doesn’t believe in the incandescent lamp,’ she commented.

‘It’s an old house.’

‘I expected a man of science to live among the shining apparatus of the future, not lurk in the dark of the past.’

Charles shrugged, and leaned on his cane. The servant returned, and led them to the back of the house. They passed through a covered courtyard, and came to a well-lit building which abutted Jekyll’s house back-to-back. A red-baize door hung open and voices came from within.

Charles stood aside, and let her enter. The laboratory was a high-ceilinged space like an operating theatre, its walls covered with bookshelves and charts, tables and benches set up all around with intricate arrangements of retorts, tubes and burners. The place smelled strongly of soap, but other scents were not quite obliterated by regular scrubbing-down.

‘Poole, thank you,’ said Jekyll, dismissing his servant, who retreated to the main house with what Geneviève fancied was relief. The master had been in conversation with a broad-shouldered, prematurely white-haired man.

‘Mr Beauregard, welcome,’ Jekyll said. ‘And Miss Dieudonné.’

He bowed slightly and wiped his hands on his leather apron, leaving smears of some substance.

‘This is my colleague, Dr Moreau.’

The white-haired man raised a hand in greeting. Geneviève’s impression was that she would not care for Dr Moreau.

‘We have been talking of blood.’

‘A subject of much interest,’ Charles ventured.

‘Indeed. Of paramount interest. Moreau has radical notions on the classification of blood.’

The two scientists had been standing by a bench upon which was unrolled a length of oilcoth. Spread on the cloth was an arrangement of dust and bone fragments roughly in the shape of a man: a curved piece that might have been a forehead, some yellow teeth, a few staves that suggested ribs, and a great quantity of crumbly red-grey matter which she regretted that she had cause to recognise.

‘This was a vampire,’ she said. ‘An elder?’

A new-born would not decay so completely. Chandagnac had turned to ashes like these. He had been over four hundred at the time of his destruction.

‘We were lucky,’ Jekyll explained. ‘Count Vardalek committed an offence against the Prince Consort and was executed. As soon as I had word of the case, I made an application for his remains. The opportunity has proved invaluable.’

‘Vardalek?’

Jekyll waved away the name. ‘A Carpathian, I believe.’

‘I knew him.’

Jekyll, for a moment, was jarred out of his scientific enthusiasm. ‘I am profoundly sorry, you must forgive me my lack of tact...’

‘It is perfectly all right,’ she said, imagining the Hungarian’s painted face stretched over the skull remnants. ‘We were not intimates.’

‘We must study vampire physiology,’ Moreau said. ‘There are numerous points of interest.’

Charles was looking around the laboratory, peering casually at experiments in process. Sludge dripped into a beaker in front of his face, and fizzed into purple foam.

‘You see,’ Jekyll said to Moreau. ‘The precipitate reacts normally.’

The white-haired scientist made no reply. Evidently, a point had been scored against him.

‘Our concerns,’ Charles began, ‘are not so much scientific as criminal. We have been following the Whitechapel murders. The Jack the Ripper affair.’

Jekyll gave nothing away.

‘You have yourself taken an interest? Attended inquests, and so forth?’

Jekyll conceded that he had, but volunteered no more.

‘Have you formed conclusions?’

‘About the murderer? Very few. It is my contention that we are all of us, if freed from the restraints of civilised behaviour, capable of any extreme.’

‘Man is inherently a brute,’ Moreau said. ‘It is his secret strength.’

Moreau made hairy fists. It occurred to Geneviève that the scientist was physically enormously strong. There was something almost of the ape about his physique. It would be nothing to him to cut a throat or perform a swift dissection, dragging a silver blade through resisting meat, sawing apart bones.

‘My concern,’ Jekyll continued, ‘is with the victims. The new-borns. Most of them are dying, you know.’

Geneviève did.

‘Vampires are potentially immortal. But they are fragile immortals. Something inside drives them to self-destruction.’

‘It’s the shape-shifters,’ Moreau said. ‘They are evolution run backwards, an atavism. Mankind stands atop of the parabola of life on earth; the vampire represents the step over the prow, the first footfall on the path of regression to savagery.’

‘Dr Moreau,’ she said, ‘if I understand you, I might be offended.’

Jekyll cut in, ‘ah, but Miss Dieudonné, you should not be. You are the most interesting case imaginable. By your continued existence, you demonstrate that vampires need not be retrograde steps on the evolutionary ladder. I should like to examine you properly. It is conceivable that you could be humanity perfected.’

‘I do not feel like anyone’s ideal.’

‘Nor will you until you have a perfect world about you. If we could determine the factors that differentiate an elder from a new-born, we might eliminate much wastage of life.’

‘New-borns are like young turtles,’ Moreau said. ‘Hundreds hatch, but only a few crawl from sand to sea without being picked off by sea-birds.’

Charles was listening intently, allowing her to quiz the scientists. She wished she knew what he wanted to learn from them.

‘Without wanting to contradict the pleasing suggestion that I might be the culmination of a divine scheme, surely general scientific opinion is that vampires do not constitute a separate species of humanity but rather are a parasitical outgrowth of our family tree, existing only by virtue of sustenance stolen from our warm cousins?’

Jekyll looked almost angry beneath his mildness. ‘I find it disappointing that you entertain such outdated notions.’

‘I merely entertain them, doctor. I should not ask them to move into my house.’

‘She’s just drawing an argument out of you, Harry,’ Moreau explained.

‘Of course, forgive me. To answer simply: vampires are no more parasites for feeding off the blood of human beings than human beings are parasites for feeding off the flesh of beef cattle.’

Geneviève’s red thirst tickled the back of her throat. She had slept the last few days away, and must feed soon or grow weak.

‘Some of us call you “cattle”. This dusty gentleman here was known to employ the term.’

‘It is understandable.’

‘Vardalek was an arrogant Carpathian swine, doctor. I assure you I hold the warm in no such contempt.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ put in Charles.

‘Neither of you have chosen to seek the Dark Kiss?’ she said. ‘Surely, in the name of research, that would be a logical step.’

Jekyll shook his head. ‘We wish to study the phenomenon at greater length. The vampire condition may be a cure for death, but in nine out of ten cases it is also a deadly poison.’

‘Considering the vital import of the field, it has been shockingly neglected,’ Moreau said. ‘Dom Augustin Calmet is still cited as the standard reference...’

Calmet was the author of A Treatise on the Vampires of Hungary and the Surrounding Regions, first published in 1746, a collection of half-confirmed incidents and roughly embroidered folk tales.

‘Even the late and ill-remembered Professor Van Helsing was at bottom a follower of Calmet,’ Jekyll said.

‘You gentlemen wish to be the Galileo and Newton of the study of vampirism?’

‘Reputation is not important,’ Moreau said. ‘Any buffoon can buy one. Look at the Royal Society, and recognise them, warm or un-dead, for a pack of bald-pate baboons. In science, proof is vital. And soon we shall have proof.’

‘Proof of what?’

‘Of the human potential for perfection, Miss Dieudonné,’ said Jekyll. ‘You are well-named. You might indeed be God-given. If we could all be as you...’

‘If we were all vampires, upon whom would vampires feed?’

‘Why, we would import Africans or South Sea Islanders,’ Moreau said, as if pointing out to a dunderhead that the sky was blue. ‘Or raise lesser beasts to human form. If vampires can shift their shapes, so can other creatures.’

‘There are African vampires, Dr Moreau. Prince Mamuwalde is much respected. Even in the South Seas, I have kin and kind...’

Geneviève saw an unhealthy light behind Jekyll’s eyes. Its twin could be observed in the eager look of Moreau: the lust of Prometheus, the desire for a consuming flame of knowledge.

‘What a cold, dark, silence perfection would be,’ Geneviève said. ‘I imagine an ultimate universal improvement would be something very like death.’