Supping With Panthers (57 page)

‘Jack.’

I turned round. Lilah was beside me, seated on a throne. She pointed, and smiled mockingly. ‘So brave, weren’t you?’

I looked. I was standing, I realised, on the topmost point of the temple’s dome. Below us, the barricade I had erected from the shattered statues was blazing furiously; the army of the dead was beyond it; and behind it, sheltering from the attack, were you, Huree; the soldiers; and yes – next to Moorfield – me as well. I had a torch of burning wood in my hand. I was waving it and jabbing it in the faces of the dead. They surged forward suddenly; I remembered the moment it was when our flank was turned, and I had smelled our fate on our assailants’ breath.

Lilah laughed, and rose to her feet ‘Should I save you?’ she asked.

‘Save me?’ I frowned. ‘But I
was
saved.’

‘No.’

‘I am here now.’

‘Yes – for the moment.’ Lilah smiled and inclined her head. ‘You. Me.’ She glanced round. ‘The noble lord.’ She sat down again, slowly, into her throne. ‘But we need not be at all.’

Lord Byron shook his head. ‘What is this?’ he asked.

Lilah gestured with her hand to me. ‘If he is killed on the barricades now, he will never meet me – he will never meet you. The whole fabric of the plot will be torn, and unravel into nothing. Our standing here need never occur.’

‘No.’ I ran my hand through my hair. ‘I don’t understand …’

‘But of course not!’ Lilah clapped her hands with delight. ‘And you never will! But I understand; it is perfectly simple. And I would do it if I chose, Jack, just because I can. However’ – she smiled at me – ‘I choose not to this time. You have had your chance and wasted it. I do not intend to pass up what happens as a result of this decision. I wish to meet Lord Byron – and yes, Jack, even you.’ She clapped her hands again. ‘And now, my Lord, see how the corpses drop. Yes! Down they go, withering away. Dust to dust – their natural state.’ Her eyes gleamed with pleasure. ‘And see our bold defenders – saved at the last!’

I watched as Moorfield stepped round the barricade. As he did so, the flames began to rise; I saw them grow black with the bodies of the dead and leap higher and higher, up towards the stars. I searched for Moorfield; I searched for myself; but no one living seemed left on the dome. I remembered what I had felt at the time, and which you reported, Huree, and Moorfield too: a sense of being wholly alone in that place, and then suddenly, the six women, the vampires, seen in the fire. I looked now, from where I was standing with Lilah, and saw them again. They turned; they stared up; they prostrated themselves. And suddenly I remembered another thing I had glimpsed when I had seemed alone on that place: a throne, surmounting the very pinnacle of the dome; a shadowy form seated on the throne; and by its side, two other shadows, similarly dark, and I recalled, what I had forgotten until that moment, how one of those shadows had worn my face.

Lord Byron frowned; he had read my thoughts; he had sensed my shock and my bafflement. ‘But how can this be true?’ he asked. ‘That the figure you saw … now proves to be yourself?’

I stared at him; I made no reply.

‘It cannot be true.’

‘But it can.’ Lilah smiled. ‘Oh, it can, my Lord. And you thought …’ She laughed; she stretched languorously, and closed her eyes. ‘You truly thought you could challenge me?’ She shook her head. ‘When I am more than nature, more than time – and certainly more than your world of spirits, my Lord: I am control and the uncontrollable; union and the dissolution; I am truth – and also iniquity.’ She laughed again. ‘So enjoyable it is – being so much all at once.’ She opened her eyes. ‘You cannot fight me,’ she whispered as she reached for his hand. ‘But you have seen now, I hope, what I might give you instead.’

‘I have indeed.’

Lilah ignored the coldness in his voice. Instead, she gestured with a sweep of her hand. The temple was suddenly still and empty, its pinnacle touched by the first rays of dawn. The stonework seemed impossibly steep; it appeared to grow from the mountain-side, and tower high into the oxygen-less air, yet I experienced no discomfort, only the pleasure I had felt in Lilah’s bed, when the knowledge of the whole world had seemed opened up and revealed to me. The mountains stretched away before us: the plains, the rivers, the jungles, the seas. I looked to the east. The sky was rosy now, and fresh with the promise of regeneration, of hope. My soul seemed flooded by a blaze of light.

‘And yet,’ said Lord Byron very softly, ‘I have also seen what was done in Miller’s Court.’

‘What, squeamish, my Lord?’ asked Lilah. ‘A blood-drinker like yourself?’

‘All this beauty, all this wonder and hope …’ – he swept with his arm – ‘the earth, the air, the stars – can it only be bought with the skinning of a whore?’

Lilah’s eyes narrowed. ‘And if that were true?’

Lord Byron shrugged. ‘Then I would not be interested.’

‘And yet you kill.’

‘Yes. But you know why: because I have no choice. It is not a great comfort, I admit, but it is better than killing without reason at all.’

Lilah laughed. ‘And the Doctor, here – if he were like you – killing only in order to survive: would that make him happier, do you think?’

Again Lord Byron shrugged. ‘You would have to ask him that yourself

Lilah glanced at me as I tried to think. Suddenly the dawn, the mountains, the sky seemed shrunk to a room lit with darkness and fire. ‘No.’ I said. ‘No. Anything but this.’ Mary’s corpse, her hand in her stomach, ripped and skinned, lay stretched before my gaze. ‘No,’ I said again, burying my face in my hands.

‘You would rather kid, then, to slake a thirst than for pure amusement’s sake?’

Slowly, I uncovered my eyes. Mary’s face was gone; instead it was Lilah who was watching me. We were in the vault again, deep underground, beside the wall of fire. ‘I would rather not kid at all,’ I replied.

‘No, no,’ she laughed, ‘you are forgetting, that what the Gods give, they cannot take away. And yet’ – she stroked my cheek and smiled – ‘for all that, I am compassionate.’

‘Compassionate?’ Lord Byron’s smile was dark with bitterness. ‘You are the damnedest politician I have ever met’

‘Unfair, my Lord. Politicians promise what they cannot give.’

‘Yes, of course, my apologies – you are perfectly correct – you have already shown us tonight what you can give. No.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I will not have you. Even as I am, the slave of my thirst, I am freer than I would be as the slave of your gift.’

‘But if that gift were freedom from your thirst?’

‘I will not be beholden to you.’ He smiled suddenly and glanced back at me. ‘But I will fight you for it,’ he whispered softly.

Lilah stared at him. A shadow of sudden anger crossed her brow. ‘And that is your final decision?’ she asked.

‘You heard me. Cant – cunt – whatever it is you are hawking – I will have none of it.’

Lilah smiled thinly. ‘How regrettably obdurate of you,’ she whispered. ‘How regrettably
base.’
She turned, and clasped herself, and gazed into the fire. ‘Well,’ she said at length, ‘it is no great loss. You will still be mine. Yes’ – she smoothed back her hair and turned round again – ‘you should make an entertaining addition to my menagerie. Your friend, Doctor Polidori, has offered me several suggestions as to what you might become – all quite amusing. I will give you to him, I think. Yes. As a reward for his honest and devoted months of service. Would that not be fitting, my Lord?’

She spat out the word as Polidori had done. Lord Byron surveyed her with a look of faint amusement; he turned to me. ‘A tigress robbed of young,’ he murmured, ‘a lioness – or any interesting beast of prey – are similes at hand for the distress – of ladies who cannot have their own way.’

‘Very pretty,’ smiled Lilah. She reached out to stroke Lord Byron’s cheek. ‘But have you ever’ – she kissed him – ‘met a lady quite like me?’ Their lips met again, then she broke away. ‘I doubt it, my Lord. Even so praised a Don Juan as yourself. I doubt it very much.’

Again she kissed him; she held him in her arms; and I saw blood, thickened to a fleshy slime, oozing from her body and sucking on his. From behind me I heard a sudden intake of breath. I looked round. Polidori was crouching in the doorway, his eyes gleaming, his teeth parted in a greedy smile. Lord Byron staggered. Polidori leaned forward even further, and bit on his knuckles so hard that they began to bleed; and as he did so, Lord Byron smelled the air and looked round, and saw where Polidori was watching him. Lord Byron laughed; but his face was very cold, and stamped not with fear but with pride and contempt. He raised his arms; blood streaked with jelly ran in strings from Lilah’s skin, but they snapped, and fed, and Lord Byron’s arms broke free. He combed her hair away from her neck; she struggled to twist back from him, but his grip tightened as, with a sudden moan, he bit. Lilah shuddered; she too moaned; locked, they staggered and fell, body against body, limb against limb.

Still, Lord Byron drank; and still the bog of Lilah’s blood and mucus sucked; and still they rolled across the sticky floor. The wall of fire enveloped them, flickering and twisting gold about their forms, as they continued in their embrace, nothing but dark shadows now, so tightly locked they seemed like one, and yet they were moving still, and then one was breaking free, and though I drew closer to the flames, and tried to peer through, I could not make out who it was, body arced backwards, arms upraised, and then falling, so that the two forms were joined once again. Suddenly, so ghastly that I could barely endure it, a shriek idled the vault, rising on a note of horror and disgust that seemed to dim the flames, for as I stared at it, the fire was dying away, and fading into the dark. Again a piercing shriek of revulsion, mingled now with disbelief; and this second time I knew I was hearing Lilah’s voice. I stepped forward; where the fire had been there were now only stones, and the light was very faint, but I could see, ahead of me, Lilah’s body stretched out. Lord Byron was lying on her. Slowly, he rose to his feet. I looked down; I held my hand to my mouth. Lilah was marked with Mary Kelly’s wounds.

Lord Byron stepped back. ‘Get aside,’ he ordered numbly. But I continued to stare. Still beautiful she was, as lovely as before, despite the mutilations to her body and face. No blood though. No blood from the stomach, or the thighs, or the throat. ‘Get aside,’ repeated Lord Byron. I saw he was holding his revolver in his hand. He waved it at me and I took a single step back. He fired; then again; and again and again. He dropped the gun; he looked around the room; then he knelt by the corpse and beckoned to me.

‘Do you still have your knife?’ he asked.

I removed it from my cloak.

Again he glanced round the room, making certain Polidori was gone. He closed his eyes, then turned back to me and clasped my hand, gripping it tightly round the handle of the knife. He did not speak to me, but I understood at once what it was I had to do. I swallowed my disgust. I cut out the brains and the living heart. I finished the job, and slumped back. As I did so, I heard the crunching of glass.

I looked about me in surprise. The vault was gone; we were kneeling on a warehouse floor, amidst shattered bottles, and bricks, and clumps of weeds. I stared up: through the roof I could see the early-morning sky; through a paneless window the gleam of the Thames. I looked for Lord Byron. He was limping slowly across the rubbish-strewn floor. By a pile of boxes, he paused and, brushing a couple aside, uncovered Polidori as he crouched amongst the weeds. Lord Byron held out his hand; Polidori flinched, then scrabbled through the boxes and passed up a cloak. Lord Byron draped it over his arm, then felt in his pocket and tossed Polidori a coin. He continued towards the bridge, and I joined him there. Together, we crossed into Polidori’s shop, and down into Coldlair Lane where the carriage was waiting for us. ‘Mayfair,’ ordered Lord Byron. I climbed in, then sat back dumbly as the wheels began to turn.

I gazed out at the streets: at the workmen drinking their breakfast gin, the early-morning traders, the bedraggled whores. I saw the newsboys, with their placards and their gleeful cries: ‘MURDER – HORRIBLE MURDER – MURDER IN THE EAST END.’ I shuddered, of course, as the image of Mary Kelly rose before me; but though I knew the horror of what I had done would never leave me, yet I felt no prickling, no anger in my brain. Again I looked out at the streets. They were teeming now, for we were drawing nearer to London Bridge, and the crowds were a ceaseless, thickening flow; yet still I felt nothing. Or rather – I felt what I had always felt in the past, before Lilah, before my mind was changed; but of hatred, of revulsion, of disgust … not a trace. I was no longer the monster she had made me. I was myself again. I turned to Lord Byron. I smiled. ‘She is dead.’

He glanced at me. ‘Do you think so?’

‘Why? Do you not?’

He smiled faintly, then gazed out through the window. His silence disturbed me. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘No, she isn’t dead.’

‘But …’ The words froze on my tongue, as I stared out again at the filth and the crowds. Still no prickling. ‘But you saw her … What I did … What I feel now in my head …’

‘And what do you feel?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘Well … no. I feel – as I did before but almost – stronger – reborn,’ I breathed in deeply. ‘The very air – it’s as though I am tasting it for the first time.’ I met Lord Byron’s stare. ‘I am myself again. Only somehow, even more so than before.’ I paused. ‘No, I’m not making sense.’

‘But you are, Doctor. Perfect sense.’ He smiled. His expression, though, was mocking and almost sad.

I stared at him. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘What?’

‘How you can think that she isn’t dead? Surely it is over. And soon we shall have our prize. Immortality, my Lord – freedom for ever from your hunger for blood.’ I held up my wrist and nicked it gently. I dyed my nail with a touch of red, and held it up to the morning tight. ‘Look at them, my Lord. My precious cells.’

For a long time he did not reply. Then he frowned. ‘When I held her,’ he murmured, ‘I would have felt it I would have known …’