Free Anno Dracula by Kim Newman

of his good clothes but their owners mainly kept out of his way. Beauregard was conscious of the watch in his waistcoat and the wallet in his inside breast pocket. Nimble fingers were around, and long-nailed claws. Blood was not all the new-borns wanted. He swung his cane purposefully, warding off evil.
    A thick-necked vampire with size-twelve boots lounged opposite where Lulu had been killed, trying half-heartedly not to look like a detective constable posted on the off chance that the old saw about the murderer returning to the scene of the crime were true. The area around the Kosminskis’ doorway had been picked clean by the police and souvenir hunters. He tried to imagine the last moments of the vampire girl. The detective, the monotony of his duty broken by the presence of a man in a cloak with morbid interests, lumbered from his spot. Beauregard had his card out ready. The new-born saw the words ‘Diogenes Club’ and did a curious little dance with his hands and face, half-salute and half-snarl. Then he stepped in front of the doorway, shielding Beauregard from sight, like the look-out for a cracksman.
    He stood on the spot where the girl had died and felt nothing but the cold. Psychical mediums were reputedly able to track a man by invisible ectoplasmic residue, like a bloodhound following a trail. Any such who had offered assistance to the Metropolitan Police had not achieved notable results. The hollow where Silver Knife had worked was tiny. Lulu Schön, a small woman, had had to be twisted and trampled to be crammed down into it. Scrubbed-clean brickwork blotches, as shocking on the soot-blackened wall as an exposed patch of white bone, showed unmistakably where the blood-stains had been. There was nothing more, Beauregard thought, to be gained by this macabre visit.
    He bade the detective a good-night and walked off to find a cab. A vampire whore in Flower & Dean Street offered to make him immortal for an ounce or two of his blood. He flipped her a copper coin and went on his way. How long would he have the strength to resist? At thirty-five, he was already aware that he was slowing. Inthe cold, he felt his wounds. At fifty, at sixty, would his resolve to stay warm to the grave seem ridiculous, perverse? Sinful, even? Was refusing vampirism the moral equivalent of suicide? His father had died at fifty-eight.
    Vampires needed the warm to feed and succour them, to keep the city running through the days. There were already un-dead – here in the East End, if not in the salons of Mayfair – starving as the poor had always starved. How soon would it be before the ‘desperate measures’ Sir Danvers Carew advocated in Parliament were seriously considered? Carew favoured the penning-up of still more warm, not only criminals but any simply healthy specimens, to serve as cattle for the vampires of breeding essential to the governance of the country. Stories crept back from Devil’s Dyke that made ice of Beauregard’s heart. Already the definition of criminality extended to include too many good men and women who were simply unable to come to an accommodation with the new regime.
    At length, he found a hansom and offered the cabby two florins to take him back to Cheyne Walk. The driver touched his whip to the brim of his topper. Beauregard settled down behind the folding half-doors. With an interior upholstered in red like the plush coffins displayed in the shops along Oxford Street, the hansom was altogether too luxurious a conveyance for this quarter. He wondered whether it had carried a distinguished visitor in search of amorous adventures. Houses all over the district catered to every taste. Women and boys, warm and vampire, were freely available for a few shillings. Drabs like Polly Nichols and Lulu Schön could be had for coppers or a squirt of blood. It was possible the murderer was not from the area, that he was just another toff pursuing peculiar pleasures. You could get anything in Whitechapel, either by