The Holmes-Dracula File

Chapter Nine

When I sank gratefully into slumber in my snug earthen den, it was with the expectation of sleeping the earth's rotation fully around. In this estimate I was not far wrong; nothing short of an attempt to stake me through the torso could have roused me much sooner. When the first crack of consciousness broke into my dreamless oblivion, I could feel that the bulk of the planet had turned between me and the sun, and a clock somewhere nearby was striking ten. I awoke hungry, but otherwise greatly refreshed in mind and body. Even the pain in the back of my head had dwindled to the point of being scarcely noticeable.

Some six feet underground lay my comparatively new box. It was half-filled, of course, with hospitable homeland soil, and wedged between the remnants of two old wooden coffins, whose peaceful tenants were far past objecting to their restless new neighbor, although his installation had nudged them into postures far from dignified. Not that my clandestine digging had wrought havoc any worse than that of the breathing gravediggers in their sunlit routine. Fortune for once had smiled on me indeed, in that my den lay undisturbed. Below my six-years-planted box, round it on every side, and now above it too, the soil was thick with jumbled old bones, churned up by the sextons in their ceaseless search for space in which to plant the recent dead. In a long rush hour that goes on and on, the London cemeteries were—for all I know still are—more crowded than the streets above, a circumstance that the silent majority of the population are in no condition to protest.

Like smoke I rose to the dank air from my small borrowed plot. In the shadow of a half-fallen shed nearby, a brace of large rats tarried unwisely to observe my assumption, above ground, of the form of man. When I had called them to me, they provided all the material nourishment* I really needed at the moment. Yet I found I had the appetite for more; and with this goal in mind, I began to walk from the churchyard, down one of the darker byways of Mile End.

My normal hunting methods bear little resemblance to those of breathing men; the great control I am able to exercise over the lower orders of life obviates the need to stalk, or to kill from a distance. On this occasion I had not gone far before there harkened to my silent siren song a single large black rat, of glossy coat and graceful form. The race of Rattus rattus had even at that time been much diminished in most European cities, more by the effective warfare of his larger brown cousin the Norway rat (Rattus Norvegicus) than by the immemorial efforts of men, dogs, and cats.

*I had better pause here to make it clear to modern readers misled by the wild tales of my enemies, that human gore is not my customary food. The delight that I seek from women's veins is frankly sexual. But for sustenance, the blood of any mammalian species will serve my modest needs; it is my belief that most of any vampire's really essential nourishment comes from some mysteriously penetrating emanation of the Sun. Full sunlight is too much for us, of course, as breathing men will drown in a short time in a surplus of the same water that they must have to drink.

As bold as a bandit, though he could no more overcome my mental grip than he could have fought free of my hands, black rattus looked me in the eye and bared an ivory tooth, and I had not the heart to take his blood for a mere whim of appetite. So I stood there in the dark, holding and stroking him like a pet, and meanwhile let my thoughts begin to turn on deeper subjects.

Of course my waylaying at dockside had not been the work of anyone who knew my true identity. The ways in which they had tried to murder me—their carelessness in letting me get free after such efforts—their puzzlement at my vampirish blood—all these were proof enough of that. No, only the bitch-goddess Fortune had picked me as their victim, to serve their evil experiments, experiments that I still did not understand… Well, when I had found the villains out, they would live just long enough to rue their choice of prey.

As I stood there petting my black rat, and nursing blacker thoughts, I became aware of some folk approaching along an alley. Three pairs of feet were coming, those of young men or boys nearly grown. One of them was carrying—something—that both squirmed and squealed, in half a dozen subhuman voices. Presently the walkers rounded a corner and came into my sight—though I was still not in theirs—and I perceived that the squeals emanated from a canvas bag alive with captured rodents.

My curiosity aroused, I remained standing where I was whilst they drew closer. Surely, I thought, they are not taking rats for food? Poverty was all about me in this part of London, but I had not seen starvation of the sort that comes with an extended siege, and argues breathing folk into trying the taste of rats.

The three youths were almost near enough to bump me, before one of them spied or heard something, and quickly flicked open the shade of a tin lantern. After their first startlement at seeing me in its uncertain beams, my wretched clothing acted in my favor, reassuring my discoverers that I was lower, if anything, in the social scale than they.

" 'Ere, mate!" one cried out. "Fair give me a turn, you did, standin' there in the dark like that. Wotcher got—well, pickle me if it ain't a pet."

"Just lookit 'im," another chimed in, "a-strokin' of it like a bloody kitten!"

I held out the quiet rat toward them in one hand. "It is yours, if you like, to go with those you have already."

As I might have expected, my accent, upperclass and foreign-flavored, undid some of the reassurance of my clothes. The one who held the lantern asked me: "Not sick, is it?"

"My pet here? Not a bit." In the same moment I shifted the grip of my fingers, and released that of my mind. In my hand the little beast became a blur of motion, ready to bite the flesh that its jaws could no longer reach, now that I held it by the neck. After a moment, another youth unslung his sack and held it out, and in the black one went.

"Tell me," I asked, "what will you do with them?"

They glanced at one another. "Look 'ere—you ain't in the business?"

"I am not, but I might be. Oh, I would prefer to be not your competitor, my friends, but your associate." The smell of rats burned in the air, and forced my thoughts back to that grotesque, improbable laboratory. Ah, to be free of honor's claims! Could such a wish be honorably made, I would have prayed it then. In Exeter, Mina was waiting, who for six years had been more dear to me than life itself, and whom I had not seen in almost all that time. Yet honor held me in London, to fight a war. "I can catch rats, as you have seen. Where are they needed?"

They at first were loath to tell me where their market was. So from the holes and crevices I coaxed out a dozen more rats, some black, some brown, which performance filled their bag to squirming tautness with very little effort on their part. Then soon I learned the young men had more bags, and cages, aboard a cart nearby and waiting to be filled. No more rats appeared, however, until I had been made full partner in the enterprise.

"Three pence a head we're gettin', mate, and it's share and share alike when we divvy up."

"Those terms seem fair. And we are selling the rats to—?"

They looked at one another, shrugged. One spoke: "No more than one steady market, these days, chum. It's Barley's."