Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [166]
The carriage, able to breathe at last, rolled down the Mall towards Buckingham Palace. Insurrectionist leaders hung in chains from cruciform cages lining the road, some still barely alive. Within the last three nights, an open battle had raged in St James’s Park, between the warm and the dead.
‘Look,’ Beauregard said, sadly, ‘there’s Van Helsing’s head.’
Genevieve craned her neck and saw the pathetic lump on the end of its raised pike. The story was that Abraham Van Helsing was still alive, in the Prince Consort’s thrall, raised high so that his eyes might see the reign of Dracula over London. The story was a lie. What was left was a fly-blown skull, hung with ragged strips.
They were at the Palace. Two Carpathians, in midnight black uniforms slashed with crimson, hauled the huge ironwork frames aside as if they were silk curtains.
The exterior of the Palace was illuminated. The Union Jack flew, and the Crest of Dracula.
Beauregard’s face was a blank.
The carriage pulled up at the entrance, and a footman opened the door. Genevieve stepped down first, and Beauregard followed.
She had selected a simple dress, having nothing better and knowing finery had never suited her. He wore his usual evening dress, and handed his cape and cane to the servant who took her cloak. A Carpathian, his face a mask of stiff hair, stood by to watch him hand over his cane. He turned over his revolver too. Silver bullets were frowned on at the Court. Smithing with silver was punishable by death.
The Palace’s doors were hauled open in lurches, and a strange creature – a tailored parti-coloured suit emphasising the extensive and grotesque malformations of his body, growths the size of loaves sprouting from his torso, his huge head a knotted turnip in which human features were barely discernible – admitted them. Genevieve was overwhelmed with pity for the man, perceiving at once that this was a warm human being not the fruit of some catastrophically failed attempt at shape-shifting.
Beauregard nodded to the servant, and said ‘Good evening. Merrick, is it not?’
A smile formed somewhere in the doughy expanses of Merrick’s face, and he returned the greeting, his words slurred by excess slews of flesh around his mouth.
‘And how is the Queen this evening?’
Merrick did not reply, but Genevieve imagined she saw an expression in the unreadable map of his features. There was a sadness in his single exposed eye, and a grim set to his lips.
Beauregard gave Merrick a card, and said ‘compliments of the Diogenes Club.’ Something conspiratorial passed between the perfectly-groomed gentleman-adventurer and the hideously deformed servant.
Merrick led them down the hallway, hunched over like a gorilla, using one long arm to propel his body. He had one normal arm, which stuck uselessly from his body, penned in by lumpy swellings.
Obviously, it amused Vlad Tepes to keep this poor creature as a pet. He had always had a fondness for freaks and sports.
Merrick knocked on a door.
‘Genevieve,’ Beauregard said, voice just above a whisper, ‘if what I do brings harm to you, I am sincerely sorry.’
She did not understand him. As her mind raced to catch up with him, he leaned over and kissed her, on the mouth, the warm way. She tasted him, and was reminded. The sharing of blood had established a link between them.
The kiss broke, and he stood back, leaving her baffled. Then a door was opened, and they were admitted into the Royal Presences.
Nothing had prepared her for the sty the throne-room had become. Dilapidated beyond belief, its once-fine walls and paintings torn and stained, with the stench of dried blood and human ordure thick in the air, the room was ill-lit by battered chandeliers, and full of people and animals. Laughter and whimpering