Supping With Panthers (30 page)

When I return to the surgery, Llewellyn informs me that Mary Kelly has something she wishes to tell me. When I visit her, however, she appears nervous and upset, and talks only of inconsequential matters. Something on her mind, though, that is clear enough.

Note, Miss Mary Jane Kelly to Dr John Eliot.

Dere Doctor Elliot, it’s horrible. I wanted to tell you before but I can’t, she’ll know, or leestways that’s how I feel. She’s fading now. I haven’t heard her voice for a long time. But she was there in the beginning in my blood, and that’s what’s making me afrade because I don’t know what’s been happening to me, and what she might know or hear me say or anything. I hope you understand.

But it is better now like I said. But sometimes I want the blood she took from me back again. I feel dizzy and can’t control what I do. When I saw the dog that was what I felt, I couldn’t control myself. Always animals. Again I am very afrade because I don’t understand. Why do I have these thorts? They are very strong and I can’t resist them, because I just know it, all my blood has been given to animals and changed, I know it, and I want it back. Sometimes when the feelings come and I think I am possessed, I can’t help it.

But these thorts are fading too. I think I am better now sir. Thank you very much. Yours faithfully

MARY JANE KELLY (MISS)

Dr Eliot’s Diary.

23
May.
– A curious note from Mary Kelly. Reference to a mysterious ‘she’ – clearly the negress who had sliced her wrist. Subsequent questioning of the patient confirmed this assumption. Kelly very reluctant to talk about her assailant, though, and would only do so in the lowest of whispers, shaking all the time. Poor woman, she is clearly terrified and nothing I could say would comfort her.

It seems there are a good number of unpleasant imaginings abroad. At the moment I find that even I am distracted by irrational fears. Reluctant to identify them too closely, so leave them unformed on the margins of my mind. I remember what happened the last time I surrendered to superstition. Must not allow it to happen again.

The state of the blood samples is unchanged: the leucocytes remain alive.

26 May.
– Mary Kelly talks of discharging herself. I find out later that a man, one Joseph Barnett, had visited her earlier that morning, for the first time since her admission here. Claimed to be her husband; doubtless something worse. I can only assume he is running short of funds.

Condition of the leucocytes unchanged.

30 May. – Mary Kelly discharged. Joseph Barnett arrived to help lead her away. I felt strangely saddened at seeing her go. Unprofessional, of course, to identify with any particular patient, but she seems to embody for me all the blighted potential, the wretched waste, that is inflicted on millions of my countrymen. She, and all those like her, deserve so much more.

Condition of the leucocytes unchanged.

The implications grow more and more unnerving by the day.

4 June.
– George reported to have called on me while I was out. He wouldn’t leave a message, but I can guess what his business was. According to Llewellyn, he will call again tomorrow.

1 a.m.
– Around midnight, experienced the strangest prickling down the nape of my neck. Turned round. Lord Ruthven was standing behind my chair. I had not heard him enter. He bade me good evening, very coldly, and though he did not say I knew why he had come, and what his purpose was. I glanced back at the test-tubes stored on my desk, and all of a sudden shivered at the thought of Lord Ruthven’s illness, and what it might be. The very idea of his blood, flowing and alive in his veins, filled me with horror. Hard to explain such a feeling, but it was very real.

Lord Ruthven himself exceedingly cool and restrained, but angry too – sense of some maelstrom beneath a great sheet of ice. He asked me very softly how my work was progressing; I answered him by explaining my research on his blood cells, but his anger seemed unappeased.

‘Why should you be surprised, Doctor?’ he asked me coldly. ‘I told you before that our blood would never clot, and as for the blood cells – well …’ He paused, and smiled for the first time that night. ‘You saw such a thing in Kalikshutra, did you not?’

I stared at him, surprised, then asked him how he knew.

‘I have read all your papers,’ he replied, ‘even the most obscure.’ I should be flattered, I suppose. The article was printed only in India; Lord Ruthven must have gone to some effort to obtain it. ‘So then, Doctor,’ he pressed me, removing his coat and unbuttoning his sleeve, ‘have you started your work yet on a cure for the disease?’

‘Disease, my Lord?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said impatiently, ‘the same disease you described in your paper.’ He stared at me in sudden disbelief. ‘What?’ he exclaimed. ‘All this time and you haven’t even recognised it in the samples of our blood? Why do you think I approached you at all?’

‘But die disease described in my paper does not exist outside Kalikshutra,’ I replied.

Lord Ruthven raised an eyebrow. ‘Indeed?’

‘If you have read my paper on the blood type I studied there,’ I told him, ‘then you will know that the leucocytes survived for only forty-eight hours. Yours have been active for over two weeks now.’

‘Then it is clear, is it not, that my condition must be all the more advanced?’

‘My Lord,’ I told him, trying to make him understand, ‘your cells are of a quite different order from any I have ever seen before. Yes, I admit there is a certain resemblance to those I studied in the Himalayas. But it is the differences which are more significant. Yours are not degenerative. Yours do not affect your appearance and mental health, which if anything appear to have been enhanced.
Your cells, in short, show not the slightest sign of dying at all’

Lord Ruthven looked up at me, his grey eyes hard as jewels.

‘Do you not see,’ I insisted, ‘the implications of what I am saying?’

He sneered faintly. ‘I understand them quite well enough.’

‘Why, my Lord…’

‘Enough.’

‘But in the name of God…’

‘Enough!’

‘But you can’t understand – I mean … we could be talking of virtual immortality.’

Lord Ruthven did not reply to this. But as I opened my mouth to repeat what I had said, I felt my tongue suddenly dry and stick to my throat. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but the horror seemed to submerge me again. Then Lord Ruthven smiled; he extended his naked arm. The terror ebbed away from me.

‘I have paid you,’ he told me, ‘to undertake a programme of research. You will require a fresh sample of my blood. Take it.’

I did so. The sample is in the cold room now. Tomorrow I must intensify my analysis. I shall give Lord Ruthven any results I obtain as soon as I can, for I accept that through my delays I have indeed wronged him. But why my reluctance? Why – I must admit to the word – my dread? The behaviour of his blood cells is admittedly extraordinary; but there is surely a rational explanation for their state. What more exciting task in all medicine could there be than to identify it? Who knows what mysteries might then be solved?

I shall work on the sanguigens tomorrow afternoon.

Telegram, Dr John Eliot to Professor Huree Jyoti Navalkar.

5June.

Come as soon as you can. Remarkable developments. Need your advice urgently. Have no one else to whom I can turn.

JACK.

Dr
Eliot’s Diary.

5
June.
– Let me remind myself aloud of my methods. It is important that I do so, for I am afraid that otherwise I may plunge into wild and illogical conclusions. I must clear my head of all imaginings, all the fervid emotions to which I have of late been prey, and approach the data with the cold disinterest of the scientist This is a singular affair, that is true enough – and yet it has always been the singular, in my experience, which has proved most fruitful when examined with care. Let me banish all thoughts of the fantastical, then; let me lay down the facts, and the bare facts alone. Deduction is nothing if it fails to be exact.

Very well. This morning, in the early hours, I began my analysis of Lord Ruthven’s blood, and specifically my attempt to identify his sanguigen. I took a smear and placed the slide beneath my microscope. As before, I observed how the red cells were dead and the white cells still alive. I then took a sample of my own blood and added it to the slide. Results immediate. Phagocytosis of the type identified by Netchnikoff: my own blood cells, both red and white, attacked by the white cells in Lord Ruthven’s blood, absorbed, and broken down. Sample then seemed to pulse, almost as though some charge were being generated; even with the naked eye, I could see the smear shimmer and expand on the slide. Agglutination of a kind, then; but better described, perhaps, as annexation, for my own cells have been utterly overwhelmed and destroyed.

I repeated the process with the weeks-old samples of leucocytes, both Lord Ruthven’s and Haidée’s: results the same. I then took samples of blood from Llewellyn and two of the nursing aides, whose blood types I had previously identified as being mutually distinctive; but with all three sanguigens, the cells were attacked and absorbed just as mine had been, and once the process was finished it was as though they had never been. The red cells in Lord Ruthven’s blood, however, which previously had been quite dead, were now reanimated – a result so extraordinary, and so contrary to medical science, indeed all science, that I can still scarcely credit it. The proof, however, is incontrovertible: I have persisted with my experiments, drawing blood from all the volunteers I could persuade to help me, and the results have continued the same as before. Conclusion? It would seem that Lord Ruthven’s condition is of a kind never before even suspected by medical science; his blood type, certainly, is something quite strange to me. But beyond that, I cannot – I will not – yet deduce.

I am reminded of the comment by my old professor at Edinburgh, Dr Joseph Bell. ‘Eliminate the impossible,’ he always told me, ‘and whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ But what if nothing remains? Must the impossible then be acknowledged as the truth?

6 p.m.
– I should abandon this whole course of research. It is possible there are things man should not attempt to know. I remember Kalikshutra, and the skewered body of the little boy. Once the impossible is instated as reality, what frameworks and boundaries will then remain? Where might we not end?

11 p.m.
–I went at last, for all my initial determination not to go. Lord Ruthven received me in his study; despite the fine evening outside, the curtains were drawn and only a single candle flickered in the room. I could see at once, however, that he was flanked on either side by seated men and women, for their faces and hands seemed to gleam against the dark; they smiled as I walked in, their teeth ivory-white and sharp, and their expressions almost predatory. I waited to see if Lord Ruthven would request them to leave, but he did not, and in truth I was hardly surprised, for it was apparent – seeing them together now – that Lord Ruthven’s ailment had afflicted the others too, for they all shared the same pale beauty and that same strange sense – which I think I now understand – of something terribly corrupted and wrong.

Lord Ruthven gestured at me to pull up a chair. I did so and then, in reply to his invitation, told him of the experiments I had been conducting all day. ‘In short,’ I concluded, ‘I cannot be certain that your illness is wholly, or even largely, anaemia. If it is, then its form is like nothing I have seen. It is susceptible, furthermore …,’ Here, I paused. I stared up at the watching pairs of eyes. They glittered at me unblinkingly.

‘Go on,’ said Lord Ruthven.

‘The anaemia, I was going to say – which is strictly speaking a deficiency of haemoglobin – is susceptible in your blood to an immediate cure.’

‘And that is?’

Again, I paused. At length I smiled. ‘Do you really need me to tell you?’

He made no reply.

‘Tell us,’ said one of his companions, her lips curled in a sneer.

I rested my chin on my fingertips. ‘Blood,’ I told her. ‘Fresh human blood.’ I stared again into Lord Ruthven’s eyes. They were as cold as before, but no longer impenetrable. Instead, I could glimpse sadness and self-loathing there, and I knew my suspicions were surely correct. Yet even at that point I could not bear to accept them as the truth. I stared into the faces opposite me, searching each one for some sign of denial, but they remained as frozen as the masks of the dead and the silence of the room made my flesh start to crawl.

One of the crowd suddenly laughed. ‘He confirms me in my opinion, I am afraid, my Lord, that doctors are always insufferably dull. You pay them money, and in return they tell you what you already know.’ He yawned. ‘Damme, how I long for some genuine surprise.’

Lord Ruthven held up a hand to silence him. He leaned forward. ‘Doctor Eliot,’ he murmured, ‘you would agree, I presume, that a need for blood might be an illness in itself?’

I studied hard to preserve my impassivity. ‘Yes, I would,’ I replied.

Lord Ruthven nodded. ‘Then might there not also be a cure for that need? Might there be a blood type that our cells would not absorb?’

‘If there is,’ I said slowly, ‘then I am yet to find it, I am afraid.’

‘But you might? If you continued your search?’

I observed him carefully. ‘I would need,’ I said at length, ‘to know far more than you have been prepared to tell me so far. I would need the truth, my Lord.’

No reply to this. Again, the silence seemed to crawl against my skin.

‘He can do nothing for us,’ a woman said, and another nodded. ‘He does not seem right to me,’ she murmured. ‘Not right at all.’

‘Oh?’ Lord Ruthven raised an eyebrow.

The woman nodded. ‘He is mortal. What can he know? There is no cure.’

‘How can we be certain,’ Lord Ruthven replied coldly, ‘if we do not try?’

The woman shrugged. ‘You tried before, my Lord. You remember? With another doctor.’