Free Anno Dracula by Kim Newman Page A

paying for it or taking it.
    His duties had taken him to worse places. He had spent weeks as a one-eyed beggar in Afghanistan, dogging the movements of a Russian envoy suspected of stirring up the hill-tribes. During the Boer Rebellion, he had negotiated a treaty with the Amahagger, whose idea of an evening’s entertainment was baking the heads of captives in pots. However it had been something of a surprise to return, after a spell abroad in the discreet service of Her Majesty, to find London itself transformed into a city more strange, dangerous and bizarre than any in his experience. No longer the heart of Empire, it was a sponge absorbing the blood of the realm until it burst.
    The cab’s wheels rattled on the road, lulling him like the soft crash of waves under a ship. Beauregard thought again of his possible secret society; the Hermetic Order of the Stake perhaps, or the Friends of Van Helsing. In one feature, the crimes were unlike ritual murders: in such cases it was important there be an unmistakable signature, like the five orange pips sent by the Ku Klux Klan to a traitor or the cold fish left beside a Sicilian who defied the mafia. Here the only signature was a kind of directed frenzy. This was the doing of a madman not an insurrectionist. That would not prevent street-corner ranters like those who had interrupted the inquest from claiming these pathetic eviscerations as victories for the warm. It would not be beyond the capabilities of many a secret society to take advantage of a hapless lunatic, systematically to drive a man mad in a certain direction as if he were a weapon being aimed, then discharging him into the streets to do his bloody business.
    He might have drifted into sleep, to be awakened outside his own front door by the cabby’s rap, but something irritated him. He had grown used to trusting his occasional feelings of irritation. On several occasions, they had been the saving of his life.
    The cab was in the Commercial Road, heading east, not west. Towards Limehouse. Beauregard could smell the docks. He resolved to see this out. It was an intriguing development. He had hopes that the cabby did not merely intend to murder and rob him.
    He eased aside the catch in the head of his cane and slid a few inches of shining steel out of the body of the stick. The sword would draw freely if he needed it. Still, it was only steel.

9

A CARPATHIAN QUARTET
    B efore returning to the Hall, Geneviève slipped into the pub opposite Spitalfields Market. She was well-known there, and in every other rowdy house within the so-called Terrible Quarter-Mile. As Angela Burdett-Coutts had shown, it was not sufficient to sit surrounded by improving tracts and soap in a comfortable church hall, waiting for the fallen to come and be improved. A reformer had to be familiar with the vilest sink-holes of drink and depravity. Of course, the Ten Bells on a week-night in 1888 was like one of the Aerated Bread Company’s tea-rooms set beside a Marseilles brothel in 1786, a St Petersburg palace in the days of Great Catherine, or the château of Gilles de Rais in 1437. If her unfortunates could have seen their Miss Dee in earlier years, when the vicissitudes of a long life brought her to low circumstances, they might have been shocked. At times, she would have looked up to Polly Nichols or Lulu Schön as a scullery maid looks up to a Duchess.
    The atmosphere of the Ten Bells was steam-hot; thick with tobacco, beer and spilled blood. As she stepped through the doorway, her eye-teeth slid from their gumsheaths. She pinched shut her mouth, breathing through her nostrils. Animals trussed behind thebar squealed and fought their leather straps. Woodbridge, the barrel-bellied potman, took a sow by the ear and yanked her head around: the spigot-mouth of the tap driven into her neck was clotted. He gouged out the coagulated gore and turned the handle, disgorging a gushing dribble into a glass tankard. Pulling the pint, he joked in a rich