Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [79]
‘This was a vampire,’ she said. ‘An elder?’
A new-born would not decay so completely. Chandagnac had turned to ashes like these. He had been over four hundred at the time of his destruction.
‘We were lucky,’ Jekyll explained. ‘Count Vardalek committed an offence against the Prince Consort and was executed. As soon as I had word of the case, I made an application for his remains. The opportunity has proved invaluable.’
‘Vardalek?’
Jekyll waved away the name. ‘A Carpathian, I believe.’
‘I knew him.’
Jekyll, for a moment, was jarred out of his scientific enthusiasm. ‘I am profoundly sorry, you must forgive me my lack of tact...’
‘It is perfectly all right,’ she said, imagining the Hungarian’s painted face stretched over the skull remnants. ‘We were not intimates.’
‘We must study vampire physiology,’ Moreau said. ‘There are numerous points of interest.’
Charles was looking around the laboratory, peering casually at experiments in process. Sludge dripped into a beaker in front of his face, and fizzed into purple foam.
‘You see,’ Jekyll said to Moreau. ‘The precipitate reacts normally.’
The white-haired scientist made no reply. Evidently, a point had been scored against him.
‘Our concerns,’ Charles began, ‘are not so much scientific as criminal. We have been following the Whitechapel murders. The Jack the Ripper affair.’
Jekyll gave nothing away.
‘You have yourself taken an interest? Attended inquests, and so forth?’
Jekyll conceded that he had, but volunteered no more.
‘Have you formed conclusions?’
‘About the murderer? Very few. It is my contention that we are all of us, if freed from the restraints of civilised behaviour, capable of any extreme.’
‘Man is inherently a brute,’ Moreau said. ‘It is his secret strength.’
Moreau made hairy fists. It occurred to Geneviève that the scientist was physically enormously strong. There was something almost of the ape about his physique. It would be nothing to him to cut a throat or perform a swift dissection, dragging a silver blade through resisting meat, sawing apart bones.
‘My concern,’ Jekyll continued, ‘is with the victims. The new-borns. Most of them are dying, you know.’
Geneviève did.
‘Vampires are potentially immortal. But they are fragile immortals. Something inside drives them to self-destruction.’
‘It’s the shape-shifters,’ Moreau said. ‘They are evolution run backwards, an atavism. Mankind stands atop of the parabola of life on earth; the vampire represents the step over the prow, the first footfall on the path of regression to savagery.’
‘Dr Moreau,’ she said, ‘if I understand you, I might be offended.’
Jekyll cut in, ‘ah, but Miss Dieudonné, you should not be. You are the most interesting case imaginable. By your continued existence, you demonstrate that vampires need not be retrograde steps on the evolutionary ladder. I should like to examine you properly. It is conceivable that you could be humanity perfected.’
‘I do not feel like anyone’s ideal.’
‘Nor will you until you have a perfect world about you. If we could determine the factors that differentiate an elder from a new-born, we might eliminate much wastage of life.’
‘New-borns are like young turtles,’ Moreau said. ‘Hundreds hatch, but only a few crawl from sand to sea without being picked off by sea-birds.’
Charles was listening intently, allowing her to quiz the scientists. She wished she knew what he wanted to learn from them.
‘Without wanting to contradict the pleasing suggestion that I might be the culmination of a divine scheme, surely general scientific opinion is that vampires do not constitute a separate species of humanity but rather are a parasitical outgrowth of our family tree, existing only by virtue of sustenance stolen from our warm cousins?’
Jekyll looked almost angry beneath his mildness. ‘I find it disappointing that you entertain such outdated