Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [110]
... a homing instinct brought her to her street, to her own front door. She fumbled with the bell-pull and hooked one foot under the boot-scraper to prevent herself from falling backwards. Unless admitted into the cool shade at once, she would die. She leaned against her door and banged with the heel of her hand.
‘Mother, mother,’ she croaked. She sounded like an old crone.
The door was opened and she fell into the arms of Mrs Yeovil, their housekeeper. The servant did not recognise Penelope, and tried to push her back out into the cruel day.
‘No,’ her mother said. ‘It’s Penny. Look...’
Mrs Yeovil’s eyes grew wide; in their horror, Penelope saw her reflection more surely than she ever had in any mirror.
‘Lord bless us,’ the servant said.
Mother and Mrs Yeovil helped her into the hallway and the door was slammed shut. Pain still streamed through the stained-glass fanlight, but the worst of the sun was kept out. She lolled in the embrace of the two women. There was another person in the hallway, standing at the door of the withdrawing room.
‘Penelope? My Lord, Penelope!’ It was Charles. ‘She’s turned, Mrs Churchward,’ he said.
For a moment, she remembered what it was all about, what it had all been for. She tried to tell him, but only a hiss came out.
‘Don’t try to talk, dear,’ her mother said. ‘It’ll be all right.’
‘Get her somewhere dark,’ Charles said.
‘The cellar?’
‘Yes, the cellar.’
He pulled open the door under the stairs and the women carried her down into her father’s wine cellar. There was no light at all and she was suddenly cool all over. The burning stopped. She still hurt but she no longer felt on the point of exploding.
‘Oh, Penny, my poor dear,’ her mother said, laying a hand on her brow. ‘You look so...’
The sentence trailed off and they laid her out on cold but clean flagstones. She tried to sit up, to spit a curse at Charles.
‘Rest,’ he said.
They forced her back and she shut her eyes. Inside her head, the dark was red and teeming.
39
FROM HELL
Dr Seward’s Diary (kept in phonograph)
17 OCTOBER
I am keeping Mary Kelly. She is so like Lucy, so like what Lucy became. I have paid her rent up to the end of the month. I visit her when work permits and we indulge in our peculiar exchange of fluids. There are distractions but I do my best to set them aside.
George Lusk, chairman of the Vigilance Committee, came to see me at the Hall yesterday. He had been sent half a kidney with a note headed ‘From Hell’, claiming the enclosure was from one of the dead women, presumably Eddowes. ‘Tother piece I fried and ate, it was very nise.’ With a horrid irony, he thought first to bring the grisly trophy to me, believing the meat from a calf or a dog and himself the victim of a jape. ‘Jack the Ripper’ jokes are an epidemic, and since Lusk had a letter about the murders published in The Times, he has fallen victim to not a few. With Lestrade and Lusk looking over my shoulder, I prodded and poked the kidney. The organ was certainly human and had been preserved in alcohol. I told Lusk the prank most likely the work of a medical student. From my days at Bart’s, I recall fools who became devoted to such infantile and macabre practices. I cannot walk down Harley Street without remembering which society doctor once decamped from his lodgings leaving a dismembered torso to be discovered in his bed by the landlady. One oddity I observed was that the kidney almost certainly did come from a vampire. It displayed an advanced state of that distinctive species of liquid decay that comes upon the vampire after true death. I was not called upon to explain my familiarity with the innards of the un-dead.
Lestrade concurred, and Lusk, who is I understand quite a nuisance, was placated. Lestrade tells me the investigation is constantly muddied