Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [80]
‘I merely entertain them, doctor. I should not ask them to move into my house.’
‘She’s just drawing an argument out of you, Harry,’ Moreau explained.
‘Of course, forgive me. To answer simply: vampires are no more parasites for feeding off the blood of human beings than human beings are parasites for feeding off the flesh of beef cattle.’
Geneviève’s red thirst tickled the back of her throat. She had slept the last few days away, and must feed soon or grow weak.
‘Some of us call you “cattle”. This dusty gentleman here was known to employ the term.’
‘It is understandable.’
‘Vardalek was an arrogant Carpathian swine, doctor. I assure you I hold the warm in no such contempt.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ put in Charles.
‘Neither of you have chosen to seek the Dark Kiss?’ she said. ‘Surely, in the name of research, that would be a logical step.’
Jekyll shook his head. ‘We wish to study the phenomenon at greater length. The vampire condition may be a cure for death, but in nine out of ten cases it is also a deadly poison.’
‘Considering the vital import of the field, it has been shockingly neglected,’ Moreau said. ‘Dom Augustin Calmet is still cited as the standard reference...’
Calmet was the author of A Treatise on the Vampires of Hungary and the Surrounding Regions, first published in 1746, a collection of half-confirmed incidents and roughly embroidered folk tales.
‘Even the late and ill-remembered Professor Van Helsing was at bottom a follower of Calmet,’ Jekyll said.
‘You gentlemen wish to be the Galileo and Newton of the study of vampirism?’
‘Reputation is not important,’ Moreau said. ‘Any buffoon can buy one. Look at the Royal Society, and recognise them, warm or un-dead, for a pack of bald-pate baboons. In science, proof is vital. And soon we shall have proof.’
‘Proof of what?’
‘Of the human potential for perfection, Miss Dieudonné,’ said Jekyll. ‘You are well-named. You might indeed be God-given. If we could all be as you...’
‘If we were all vampires, upon whom would vampires feed?’
‘Why, we would import Africans or South Sea Islanders,’ Moreau said, as if pointing out to a dunderhead that the sky was blue. ‘Or raise lesser beasts to human form. If vampires can shift their shapes, so can other creatures.’
‘There are African vampires, Dr Moreau. Prince Mamuwalde is much respected. Even in the South Seas, I have kin and kind...’
Geneviève saw an unhealthy light behind Jekyll’s eyes. Its twin could be observed in the eager look of Moreau: the lust of Prometheus, the desire for a consuming flame of knowledge.
‘What a cold, dark, silence perfection would be,’ Geneviève said. ‘I imagine an ultimate universal improvement would be something very like death.’
28
PAMELA
‘I seem suddenly to have developed a warm, almost affectionate, feeling for Dom Augustin Calmet,’ Geneviève said. Beauregard was amused.
In the cab on the way back to Whitechapel, she was close beside him. Clayton, engaged for the night, knew where they were going. After his unexpected trip to Limehouse, Beauregard was happy to be driven about London by someone he knew to be in the employ of the Diogenes Club.
‘Many brilliant men struck their contemporaries as mad.’
‘I don’t have any contemporaries,’ she said. ‘Except Vlad Tepes, and I’ve never met him.’
‘You follow my reasoning, though?’
Geneviève’s eyes flashed. ‘Of course Charles...’
She had the habit of using his Christian name. In another that might be unseemly, but it was absurd to insist on arbitrary rules of address with a woman old enough to be his ten-times great grandmother.
‘It is possible the murders are experiments,’ she continued. ‘Dr Knox needed dead bodies, and wasn’t too scrupulous where he got them; Dr Jekyll and Dr Moreau need un-dead bodies, and could quite conceivably not be above harvesting them from the streets of Whitechapel.’
‘Moreau was mixed up in a vivisection scandal a few years ago. Something particularly revolting involving a skinned dog.’
‘I can believe it. Inside his white coat, he’s a cave-dweller.’
‘And he is a man of some strength.