The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 7 The Bloodsucker

December 18,1893, cont.

London had become an alien land for Arthur, full of strange people going about their strange ways. He felt like Captain Nemo, adrift from civilization and surrounded by monsters. As he tumbled through the rest of this perverse day, eyes seemed to trail him all the way down the Strand, even into Simpson’s, where he stopped for his dinner. Inside, they flicked at him from every dim corner as he ate his kidney pie and read the papers. He flipped through the Times’ back pages to find that even London’s cartoonists had drawn their share of blood. A crudely rendered image showed a young boy reading the final Holmes tale, his face contorted in grief and disillusion. Arthur was now accused of shattering a generation’s childhood.

He sputtered at the drawing and spilled a droplet of kidney juice onto the paper. The hot beefy broth blotted out the face of the young boy, smudging the ink and distorting his features. The child’s skin turned brown. Curiously, Arthur took his spoon, scooped up another helping, and after pushing two peas and a mushy carrot sliver back onto the plate, he dribbled a few more drops of hearty brown juice onto the newspaper. And then a few more. And then a whole spoonful, until the cheap, soggy paper wrinkled and tore from the liquid.

Arthur glanced around Simpson’s to see if anyone had witnessed his petulant antics. No one had. Or everyone had, and they were presently gossiping in angry whispers about him. It was impossible to tell.

On the streets, Arthur wobbled through his errands. His solicitor. The pharmacy. There was some vital shop he knew he’d intended just hours before to visit but whose identity he could no longer seem to recall.

A mystifying sensation of loneliness shook him. Arthur had been alone before, to be sure, but to be alone while surrounded by people, the one sane man in a mad place-that was loneliness. Of course there had been in his years long bouts of solitary hours. In the first-very well, the only-years of Arthur’s medical practice, he logged interminable afternoon after interminable afternoon in his bright, empty office. He would sit at his cheap desk, waiting in vain for patients to arrive on his doorstep. So he made use of the time by writing stories: a long novel called The White Company and a handful of short tales that marked the first appearance of a certain consulting detective. They were such pleasant trifles then-his brooding, cantankerous detective and the oblivious, dim-witted assistant. Holmes was too cold-blooded, too remote for Arthur to become attached to him. But Watson! Well, Watson one could come to love. He was Arthur’s stand-in, not Holmes; it was Watson who shared the author’s biography, the author’s voice, the author’s hotheaded romantic afflictions. Watson was the one he would miss now. But hunched over that desk with his stories, Arthur had never, in all that time he spent patiently hoping to hear the sound of the visitor’s bell, been this alone.

He made his way to the Lyceum Theatre and stepped across the long shadows etched onto the cobblestones by the Lyceum’s six tall stone columns. It was dark under the broad portico, as the roof shielded Arthur from the late afternoon. It felt warmer in the shadows.

“My, my,” crowed a ghostly voice from behind. “You look a fright. Has someone died?”

Arthur turned. A thick, wide-shouldered man emerged from the third pillar back, materializing into the sunlight like a spirit made flesh. His beard was cropped tightly to his cheeks, his unfashionably short hair pasted across his scalp from a deep part far to the left. He wore coat and tails, and shoes of such deep black that they sparkled directly into Arthur’s eye. He was dressed for a state funeral-or, more likely in his case, for opening night. After a few seconds had passed and Arthur had recovered from the shock, he recognized his old friend.

“Bram,” said Arthur with a deep, steadying inhale. “You gave me some start.”

“My deepest apologies,” said Bram Stoker as he came forward to shake Arthur’s hand. “It’s only that you look so pale-I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Do I?” Arthur leaned against the freezing Lyceum wall. “It has been… It has been a curious day.” The great center door to the theater opened suddenly, and a radiant woman bounced onto the portico.

“At six, then?” she called to Bram, her frizzy brown hair shaking free at the sides of her cap as she trotted down the steps. She gave Arthur a smile and a knowing raise of her dark eyebrows.

“Six,” responded Bram firmly. The woman-Arthur could not help but admit that she was indeed quite handsome-continued on to the Strand. Just before she merged into its pace and disappeared in the crowd, Arthur caught a glimpse of a black mourning band round her arm. He ground his teeth together.

“You must remember Ellen Terry,” asked Bram after she was out of earshot. “I’m sure you’ve seen her on the stage a dozen times.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course. Certainly, yes.”

“The woman’s going mad with this Juliet.” He grinned. “Henry’s getting all the press with his Romeo, and the poor girl’s a bit starved for attention. Mind you, not that Henry’s press is good enough for him either.”

This was typical conversation for Bram. His life consisted of placating the raging egos of the actors in his care as manager of the Lyceum-especially Henry Irving, whom Bram managed personally. As Irving got older, he became more dictatorial in his manner, and ever more vain in his person. At fifty-five, he was perhaps long in the tooth to take the stage as Romeo, but he would hear none of Bram’s objections. When the reviews came in-Arthur had read them, of course- and Bram’s position was vindicated… well, that only served to further enrage the aging actor. Bram was a dutiful servant, who’d been in thrall to his master since the day they’d met, though Arthur suspected that his friend had not known a happy moment in the fifteen years since he’d accepted this position.

Bram had always wished to be a writer. That was the issue, Arthur felt. That accounted for the very slight bitterness he’d occasionally find in his friend. Underneath the burdens of his thankless, spirit-wearying job, Bram held firm to a passion for the literary life that he rarely shared publicly. He would wake early in the mornings. Before heading to the Lyceum to solve the day’s budgetary crisis and flatter Irving until he grew sore in the throat, Bram would scribble such macabre and fantastical stories-truly bloody stuff-and then squirrel them away in a drawer. He showed some to Arthur only once, and Arthur was shocked by the violence Bram could commit only in fiction, and only in secret. On an occasional evening of drink, Bram would describe for Arthur his work on a longer piece, a perpetually half-written novel of undead ghouls and some bloodsucking count from the Continent. For a man so meek and-dare he say it?-sinfully effeminate, Bram had quite a heart for the grotesque.

They’d met two years earlier, when Bram had bought a play of Arthur’s, a one-man show for Henry Irving to perform. Over the long nights of rehearsals, and the still-longer nights of burgundy after the play had gone up, they’d become fast friends. Irving was a pompous buffoon, but in this gentle manager with a hidden drawerful of ghost stories, Arthur had found someone who understood him. And just because the man’s yarns hadn’t netted him more than a halfpenny over the years, while at the same time Arthur had become financially quite comfortable, that was no reason for any tension between the two.

“Do you have a moment?” asked Arthur.

“For you?” replied Bram. “Always. Now, what is afflicting you?”

“I hate him!” Arthur barked suddenly.

Bram laughed. “This is your Holmes we’re talking about?”

“I hate him more than anyone! If I had not killed him, he certainly would have killed me. And now these… these people act as if the man were real, as if I’d murdered their father, their wife.” Arthur spoke faster, the anger welling up inside him. He began ranting to Bram about the unfairness of it all, about how Holmes had distracted the public from better things, about the myriad ways in which, once loosed, the creation begins to dwarf its creator. Arthur’s breath puffed into the frigid air like smoke from a pipe.

Finally Bram began to laugh, the sound somewhere between a cackle and a feline meow. Arthur stopped, derailed from his anger.

“I hate him,” Arthur repeated.

“You’re the one who tossed the poor sod off a cliff,” said Bram. “Imagine how he feels about you!”