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My first winter in London was an unseasonably warm one—or at least that is what my new friends at the Adventurer’s Club informed me, when I complained about the lack of snowfall in December of 1897. I had made a name as a habitual complainer already, in my mere six weeks in the city: but I thought it to be my patriotic duty, as an American, to voice my dissatisfaction about any given inconvenience amongst a roomful of Englishmen and other equally starched Continentals who found such forward expressions distasteful.
“But you don’t want snow, anyway,” said Racovitza wisely. “Not here. It picks up motes of soot from the air and comes down all grey and quite toxic.”
“The cloudlessness of the winter sky is to be cheered, Docteur,” Lecointe added. “One rarely has such a good view of Aquarius this time of year. My new telescope is being put to use!”
“What of skating?” I pressed them. “What of flavored ice, and wrapping yourself in furs, and enjoying a hearty shiver to awaken the nerves? Gosh, it’s just not winter without it, is it?” They dismissed me with kind laughter. My tales of skiing in the Catskills as a child hardly impressed a group of men who had grown up in the shadow of the regal, ancient Alps.
The only other person who dared go against the opinion of the crowd, and agree out loud that London’s high temperatures were a shame, was a shadowy figure lurking near the bar. He came forward, parting the sea of gathered men, and loomed above me in my armchair.
“You like the cold, sir?” he asked.
“It’s my bread and butter, if you’d believe it,” I responded. “Does the circulation a world of good.”
His craggy face split into a sharp grin, and he reached out to favor me with a firm handshake. His hands were strong, almost stone-like. I had the impression I was in the presence of a truly exceptional man.
“Doctor Cook,” he said, “I believe we shall be very good friends.”
I had heard such assurances before; all the men of the Club had flocked around me upon my arrival, flattering me and wishing to hear tales of my travels in Texas and Canada. I enjoyed their company, naturally, but as the weeks wore on and my duties increased in volume and intensity, I found I could not be at ease around them: a certain coarseness pervaded the smoky room which my natural polite manner was somewhat at odds with.
But the way this stranger said it, I found I truly believed it too.
His name was Roald Amundsen; he hailed from Norway; any other concrete details about him I struggled to attain. Even his age seemed obscure: he could have been twenty-five, or forty-five. His moustache was perfectly groomed in the fashion of the day. The other men of the club knew him, as he was a long-time member in good standing, but none of them seemed to know his trade, nor if he was married, or if he had any family or friends outside the Club. To join the Club, he would have had to have proved to its esteemed Board that he’d traveled at least a thousand miles from the city in which he was born on at least two occasions, but where precisely he had gone was known to nobody.
We fell into a hearty discussion for the rest of the afternoon, on such wide-ranging topics as anatomy and geography. It was refreshing to meet someone so knowledgeable, yet quite willing to admit when he did not know something, and ask for explanations; the man presented none of the moneyed arrogance which pervaded many dialogues I’d had with other men in town. He was quite down to earth.
“This ethnography of yours,” he said, pronouncing the word delicately, “how do you imagine the science of phrenology weighs on the differences between men?”
“Oh, somewhat, to be sure,” I answered with a wave of the hand. “But there are far more interesting contrasts to be found in different human races than that. Their tools, their family traditions: surely the presence of a lump on a forehead or occiput has little bearing on how they treat their dead, or what gods they worship? Phrenology has its uses for the city doctors, but I would rather do my darndest to talk to a man in his own language than fancily fondle his frontal lobe.”
This seemed to satisfy him, and we proceeded to criticize the London medical establishment for the rest of the evening.
My work called me away from the city into the hinterlands of the United Kingdom and occasionally as far afield as France. When I had been based in my native New York, my services were rarely made use of, but it seemed that having to uproot myself and land in the “Smoke,” as natives called it, had been fortuitous, even as it was not my own choice: never had I been in such demand. However, the downside to this increased productivity and income lay in an exacerbation of my tendency to overwork myself. For the first time ever, I found myself reaching the limits of my capacity as a sole proprietor. And inevitably, by the new year, when no snow had yet fallen to improve my mood with its beauty, only endless dull gray rain and fog, I was falling into an interminable case of the doldrums.
Shortly after my first meeting with Amundsen, I was summoned by a new client to Liverpool. When I returned, my business there not yet done but merely paused, I was making use of the Club’s extensive and highly useful library (far surpassing the paltry offerings of its cousin club in New York, which for that matter I had been summarily banned from) when Amundsen swept up to me.
“Doctor Cook,” he said, lingering in the shadows beyond my table as if waiting to be invited. “We have missed you here these days.” I stood to greet him and motioned for him to sit across from me. His sprawl in the chair was rather majestic. “How have you been?”
“Swell, just dandy,” I said. “Away on business. And you?”
He didn’t answer, as he cast his piercing gaze across the jumble of books before me. “You are studying the Hermetic literature?” he asked.
“Why yes—you’re familiar with it?” I was quite surprised. Our last conversation had led me to believe that Amundsen was the rational sort, purely concerned with the physical world—but then again, I had likely given him the same impression.
“I am an enthusiast of all things which beckon from beyond the limits of human knowledge. Indeed. And I’d long despaired of finding a kindred spirit here.”
I was incredibly flattered. His attention upon me had almost a heat to it. “It’s real good stuff,” I said. “A bit dense. But worthy of study. See, how many real advances in physical chemistry came about from alchemical dabbling… you never know, do you?”
He leaned forward and put a long, pale finger on the page of the treatise on the Emerald Tablet I was perusing. “The principle of polarity,” he murmured. “In the existence of one, all its opposites are implied. As above, so below.”
Gripped by a powerful urge to bare my soul, I was moments away from bringing Amundsen into my confidence as to the nature of my work when suddenly, we were interrupted by a cheerful voice.
“Fellows, I have a question,” said the man who’d just come up to our corner of the reading room—I recognized him. Danco, the erstwhile artilleryman. A cheerful man, bearded and bright-eyed, with unusual physiognomy which made him stand out in a crowd: incredibly tall, with large hands and a bow-legged gait. “I bought this as a congratulation present for Lecointe’s engagement, but he tells me his betrothed already owns a copy, and he does not wish to have a ‘house full of junk,’ as he puts it, when they move intogether. Would either of you care to have it, free of charge? It’s an anthology, on themes of amor.”
Amundsen shook his head dismissively, like a horse shakes off a fly, but I raised a hand. “My wife has quite a fondness for poetry. I’ll take it, and thank you very much.”
Danco handed over the book to me; Amundsen had visibly stiffened, his mustache twitching. After Danco had departed with a whoop and a shout of “Georges, I told you someone would want it!” Amundsen asked me, quite severely, “You are married?”
The urge to bare all had evaporated away, and now I felt that this being only the second time we’d spoken, despite our immediate and apparent connection, I didn’t wish to involve him in the sordid details of the affair—it was a loveless arrangement, to say the least, though I was fond of the girl as it was possible to be. So I merely told him that I was indeed married, and asked if he also had a wife.
“No,” he said. “Nobody. You see, nobody sticks around long enough, ha.”
Another flash of that enchanting crooked smile and I found myself laughing along, although I wasn’t entirely sure he had just told a joke.
I returned to Liverpool to conclude the case; I was paid handsomely, and deemed it prudent to spend my earnings on obtaining better housing than the bachelor’s room in Camden I had rented sight unseen by telegram from New York before I arrived.
While I was engaged in touring rooms, I met Mrs. Osterreich, the landlady of a handsome building on Russell Square with full-floor flats available. Little old ladies are a forté of mine, and soon I had her wrapped around my finger, telling me stories of the Continent and her first three husbands and her many fortunes gained and squandered. Eventually I told her I admired the apartment, but was confused by why the rent was so cheap.
She told me she had bought the building recently, and been trying desperately to keep it rented, but tenants kept departing abruptly—here she didn’t offer more detail immediately, but my finely attuned sense of opportunity rang like a bell.
When I had finished speaking to her, she promised to call on me and engage my services formally, but at the moment had to shoo me out to see in another prospective tenant. So I wandered leisurely across the street into the park. The lowering dusk had cast the square in soft burnished rose, shot through with the dark, jagged shadows of the bare trees, like the iron in a window of stained glass.
I was admiring a path worn down by people crossing the square, not paved but still visible in the gray mud: that made-visible instinct of knowing where one needed to go, and to bend the rules in order to get there, always impressed upon me a sublime feeling.
And then a familiar pair of shining black shoes came down the path. I looked up from them to find myself gazing at Roald Amundsen. Outside the homey, familiar confines of the Club, the man’s bearing seemed even more regal, and quite out of place amongst the hunched shoulders and hurried paces of the other men and women in the square. As if he could call the cold clouds long-awaited snow down upon us by the force of his furrowed brow. Birds in the path fled from him, giving him a wide berth. He walked alone.
Then I called his name, and upon turning and catching sight of me, he came into a new attitude: open and excited.
“You live here?” Amundsen asked, pointing to Mrs. Osterreich’s building beyond the gate.
“Not as such,” I answered. “I came here with a view to rent rooms, but as it happens I’ve just agreed to take the landlady on as a client.”
He frowned. “Is she ill?”
“No, no, not at all—a client, I said, not a patient. I actually rarely practice medicine these days—well, here. Take this, why don’t you.”
It was a decision I must have finally made some time ago, after my earlier hasitation, for without hesitation I pulled my card case from my coat pocket and handed him one. It read:
Dr. Frederick Cook
Investigator of the Unknown
Spiritual Physic • Scientific Exorcisms • Physiognomic Seances
“Why, are these not all antonyms, Doctor?” Amundsen observed.
“They are not,” I said, smilingly. He turned the card over in his hands: my motto, scientia coronat.
“Knowlege crowns,” murmured Amundsen. “I have always found that to be true.”
Since being trained, I had always worked alone. My experiences with my mentor had proved so regrettable that I had consigned myself to going into business without a partner, or even a secretary. But Amundsen—Roald, as he urged me to call him—changed my mind on the subject. I couldn’t say no; I didn’t.
Naturally I did not let him interface directly with clients; but in all matters relating to the taking of photographs, the operation of the machinery, and the speculation on causes of unexplained phenomena, he proved himself above and beyond what I had expected. Never had I been so invigorated by companionship.
His aptitude was immense; he was entirely unsurpassed in his drive and curiosity. He was busy during the day—doing what, I did not manage to find out—but I could count on him to appear punctually each evening, in his leather gloves and spotless coat, his brushed hat and shined shoes.With striking ease he hefted the cases containing my equipment, ectoplasm-sensitive glass plates and wired boxes full of inked needles and rolls of paper. He often hinted at troubles in his past: something to do with a brother, I believe, a situation so fraught he had left his native country at some point and never returned. I, in turn, could not help but reel out vague references to the regrets of my own past. In this way we grew closer. In a dusty grotto beside the Bakerloo line Amundsen and I nearly lost our lives when, investigating a haunting of the train tracks, an unexpected train snuck up on us unawares. With remarkable reflexes he threw me to safety and we crouched closely together in a brick niche, silent for a moment and then exulting in peals of relieved laughter.
***
In February, it finally snowed. Glittering flakes flitted down from a slate-grey sky; the noisy city was cloaked in silence; and that unmistakable, anaerobic clean scent coated everything, promising a brand new start to those who needed it.
But I could not enjoy it. No, not even the sight of St. James's Park sweetly mantled over by pure whiteness could pierce my black mood or reverse the event that had caused it.
That very morning I had to hastily send a messenger to the Club with a note for Roald saying that I would not be able to meet at our appointed time. I prided myself on punctuality and keeping my appointments—so, I had learned, did Roald; just another thing which we found to admire in each other, a list which was growing ever-longer these days. So the next day I was able to put in an apologetic appearance at the Club for a drink after supper, and found him there in his usual chair.
“My wife is unwell,” I said, at his inquiries regarding my absence. “It may be some days before I’m able to resume the work with you.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Roald said.
“No, I—” I sighed, putting a hand to my head. “I suppose I should tell you: I do not love her. I have a duty to her, yes, but not that of a husband.”
“Forgive me, if this is some American thing, I am not sure I understand—”
“It’s not American, only practical. You see, the poor girl—the cousin of a friend of a schoolmate of mine—is the only child of a wealthy man, who died long ago. An orphan, in fact: her mother died soon after she was born. And she was close to reaching the age of majority when she became betrothed to a scoundrel of a scion, a rapacious and violent fellow who only wanted her for her fortune to shore up the one that had been gambled away by his own father.” I sighed, then went on, “This was about when I came into the picture, although only as a passing acquaintance at first. What transpired next was quite complex—I will not bore you with the details. But suffice to say that the fiancé grew more devious, and then violent, in his single-minded pursuit of her inheritance. There was an encounter on a London rooftop—a fall—she lived, but was invalided, in mind and body. And if I had not stepped in and married her, for her protection only, why, he certainly would have—and who knows what horrors would have been wrought on not only her bank account but her very person?”
Roald’s expression had warmed as I spoke. No judgment, as I had feared—only the intent interest I had become so used to. “Doctor Cook,” he said gravely, “I must observe that you seem to be living the life of a character in a sensation novel.”
I was grateful for the chuckle that gave me. “And might you be a secret count or baron, perhaps, to fit the theme?” Roald only raised an eyebrow, so I continued. “I am a medical doctor, but I can do nothing for her other than hope for a speedy release from the pain she is in. And all of my spiritual instruments are useless as well, in this scenario, I may add. It’s a wretched sort of feeling. I visit her a few times a week—read to her of an evening, tell her the latest news—and do everything in my power to prevent that blackguard from laying eyes on her again. Even now she lingers on the border of life and death—her condition takes a turn for the worse, like it has many times before, but then it resolves once. What purpose she has in clinging on so tenaciously, I don’t have a single clue. But I wish—I wish for her to be free, far more than I wish to be free of her, though I do wish that as well, I am only a man…”
“You are a kind soul, Fred,” said Roald sincerely. “Perhaps she just wants to spend more time with you.” He laid a gloved hand upon my arm and squeezed through my jacket. His grip was firm, and quite comforting. I wondered at how good it felt, to be comforted: I couldn’t recall the last time I’d had the pleasure.
***
“My condolences, Dr. Cook,” Racovitza said, catching sight of me when I entered the broad doors of the Club. It was unusual and quite heartwarming to see the usual jocular, animated man so solemn in the face of my bereavement.
Beside him, his friends Lecointe, Danco, and de Gerlache nodded and murmured their sympathies as I passed. When I took my seat at my usual table, the waiter silently delivered me a handful of cards that had been left for me by other acquaintances.
A week had passed since I had confessed to Roald; four days since Anna had at last passed away; two days since her funeral. I had not had very many affairs to put in order: truthfully the plans had been made at the same time as my marriage had been effected, due to her condition at the time. The erstwhile suitor could do no more harm to anyone; he had sat impotently in the back row of the chapel at the service, fuming.
That evening I retired to Anna’s rooms and began the process of disposing of her things. As I placed books into boxes, and trinkets into trunks, I carefully examined my feelings. I was relieved, was I not? Anna had at last passed on to her rest, the poor dear; the entirety of her sizable fortune was, after a simple signature on some paperwork on my behalf, in the safe hands of her cousin, and now, having remained dutiful to the end, I was at last free to court whomever I chose. I was unencumbered; so was she.
But there was, I perceived, something wrong. My medical mind—which once you have spent years training and learning to listen to, you can never fully quiet—went repeatedly over the facts of her end and found them lacking. Why had she declined so quickly, under the same circumstances which she had survived before? All of my treatments had been quite the same...
I began to pace. My thoughts had begun to run in strange directions. Then as I passed the window, I spotted a familiar form, silhouetted in black against the snow that still cloaked the pavement outside of the house.
I undid the casement window, leaned out into the winter night and shouted, “Roald!” He turned to gaze up at me. “You always find me when I need you.”
He came up the stairs to Anna’s attic room, having to bend over as he skirted the eaves, looking at her knick-knacks and half-dismantled bookcase. We spoke: he asked me some questions about her which I answered plainly, but embarrassingly, the conjunction of his graceful form amongst her familiar things had tears springing to my eyes—in the way that the most unexpected syzygies can do so to a man who is already, perhaps unbeknownst to himself, not feeling quite balanced.
Eventually, feeling heavy, I sat down heavily on Anna’s bed and put my head in my hands. A creak of the mattress occasioned Roald seating himself next to me.
I am a man who knows his own mind. But sometimes I forget that my decisiveness, always wholly sensible from my point of view, has the potential to shock and confuse when turned upon another.
So when I pulled back from the kiss which I had decisively planted on Roald’s mouth I was expecting to see shock and revulsion on his face; or perhaps if I was lucky a grim look that resolved to neutrality as he rose to leave.
But instead I saw plainly that the harsh angles of his face had softened; that he was breathing quickly and eagerly; that he was considering me in light of what had just happened, and how to make it happen again.
He was moments away from bearing me back down onto Anna’s bed when, seeming to realize the implications, sprang up onto his feet and brought me with him, holding me half-suspended over the linen sheets. I swung myself away; his hands remained on my back; and for a moment we were dancing without music. There was that grin of his which only emerged every so often, the sun from behind silver clouds.
And then a knock on the door interrupted us. We sprang apart; I brushed down the front of my suit and went to answer. A woman I vaguely recognized as an occupant of another room on the same floor was there, looking grave-eyed and concerned.
“Dr. Cook? I speak you,” she said urgently. She was Russian; I had none of that language, but apparently Roald did, and he entered into a hushed conversation that flew quickly between them, with much gesticulating on the part of the landlady.
“She says she has seen her,” Roald said eventually. “Out in the garden, moving about. Peering in through the window, these last few days.”
I didn’t understand. “Who? Who is she talking about?”
“Your wife.”
Moments later, I stood unmoving and tense with a furrowed brow out in the snowy garden, holding my jacket tightly around me as I searched for any sign of what the woman reported she had seen. Enough snow had fallen in the meantime that if there had been any physical marks of someone or something passing through, they were now long effaced.
“Surely you should go home and fetch your instruments, doctor?” Roald said, having followed me downstairs. There was a note of humor in his voice which abraded my ears.
I said despairingly, not turning towards him, “What use would that be?”
“Why, to seek evidence of Anna’s presence.”
“Those instruments are useless. Conjuring tricks, that’s all. Oh, my dear man, have you not figured that out yet?”
In hindsight, I really ought to have thought before I spoke. But my nerves were so tightly wound, and he seemed so blithe, that anger and despair got the better of me in that moment. I spun around and said, “Roald, it is all nonsense. There is no next life from which loved ones will call. There is only the distortion of flesh, and the taxonomies of mankind, sundered unto horror. If Anna still lives by some supernatural means then she is surely Anna no more. She is something far, far worse. Something I do not wish to meet nor see, except to mercifully dispatch.”
“But—but your training in the true occult shines through in your knowledge—” Roald said, haltingly. He was throwing his mind back, I knew, to the wide-ranging conversations we had had on such fascinating subjects: Hermeticism, Satanism, witches, vampires, lycanthropes and skinwalkers. All the creatures which roamed the American West and the great undiscovered landscapes of the world.
Rushing out hatless, snow had begun collecting in my hair; my hand came away wet as I ran my fingers through it. “Of course, of course. Yes, I am an expert—but such matters as my expertise deals with is far rarer than those willing to pay for the privilege of being told their grief can be relieved by—messages, and images. It is charity, Roald, if it is anything! Besides, I could not risk my own life in dealing with the real and true danger that the genuine supernatural presented, no, not when I had my wife to look after!"
I had not been cold where I stood in the snow, but suddenly I was. Roald’s look chilled me to the bone.
“Fred,” he said. “You are taking their money and giving them lies in returns?”
“Of course I am!”
“I would never have thought you capable of such dishonor.”
I laughed humorlessly. “The 20th century is nearly upon us, Roald—what is the use of living by these codes of honor meant for man of a past age? My medical license was useless to me in this foreign country, and with my knowledge and training I could easily earn money in order to—”
I was not allowed to finish my justification. He placed a hand on my chest and in one movement slammed me backwards into the brick wall of the house. Towering above me, I felt small and powerless, and even colder than before. There was no warmth coming from him.
“If you had told me this truth,” he said, leaning down closely so that his nose brushed mine, “I would have told you mine.” It was not with anger that he spoke, though it was with anger which he held me, tightly between his body and the brick wall. It was a sort of calm plea which in that moment I did not understand. He was half in shadow before me, his deep-set eyes bright and alien.
He kissed me, with violence, and I felt the scrape of his teeth sharp against my lips, and the hiss of his icy breath on my cheeks, and his powerful grip on my hand—and then in between one blink and the next, he vanished. I was alone with the snow.
***
I had cause to regret all of it. I missed his company. It was as a wound.
His parting words haunted me. Naturally I had known that he had been keeping things from me—after all our hours spent together I had learned nothing, nothing at all of him: a conspicuous lack. But I had not pressed him; I had not minded. Men can be friends without such soul-baring intimacies: we know each other from how we act, and how we perform our duties, and from such experiences as we share.
Well, I admit that I had not acted entirely with honor. But to have been left by Anna and then by Roald in such quick succession was a blow I could hardly bear.
The distraction that eventually came to save me from my doubly-heartbroken state was one I would never have wished for. After a meeting with a prospective client that seemed to drag on, never-ending, I at last arrived at the Club and was looking forward to my cigar when—
“Help! Someone help!” Lecointe came barreling into the dining room of the Club, frantic and wide-eyed. "We need a doctor!"
I leapt up, bounding ahead of a pack of men that followed me, as I in turn followed Lecointe through the warren of the Club's rooms and into the card room, which was unoccupied, except for one man: Emile Danco, who lay sprawled and glassy-eyed on the carpet.
Crouching to examine him as the other men watched in dismay, I found that I already suspected what I would discover. Like the inexorable, unavoidable clicking into place of some deadly mechanism.
Yes: Danco had been entirely drained of blood.
If it had been a stranger—a man I’d never known, dined with, joked with—I would have been, I admit, a little excited.
All the signs were there. Exsanguination; telltale punctures; a look of great shock on the poor fellow’s face that froze there forever as he expired. This was what I had once longed for, and lost hope of ever encountering on my own.
Something to make my name with, in the circles I had once moved in.
Proof of the visitation of a vampire. The opportunity to go on the hunt.
But this was Danco—friendly Danco, who I had played cards with, dined with, even been to the theater with.
And, even worse: I knew exactly who had done this to him.
“I knew he was ill,” wept Lecointe, “but I did not think the end would come so suddenly…” He fell into Racovitza’s arms, and the larger man held him tightly, comforting him, and glanced up at me as if to plead my help.
So, I followed the body as it was escorted to the morgue and bribed the attendant to allow me to take a few photographs. But there was no excitement in it, as befitting a man of my profession. Nor was there in my examination of the photographs, hanging them up on my office wall and casting my eyes between them for some hint—some morsel of proof that this was not all it seemed clearly to be. More than once I turned and began to speak to Roald for advice, before realizing that he was not there.
To be quite honest, I did not know what to do. My training and knowledge had one path set out clearly before me: my heart had another.
The next morning I found an ugly surprise waiting for me on the street-corner in the hands of a newsboy. Someone from the club had leaked the crime to the press; it was splashed across the more lurid dailies and surely was already on its way by wire to New York. Were I to have been in the privacy of my home at the time, and not on the street, I might have well let as rare “Damnation!” slip from my mouth.
For I knew that once the news reached Manhattan I had precisely the length of a trans-Atlantic steamship passage to find Roald and warn him: before my erstwhile mentor, Robert Peary, found him first and staked him through the heart.
***
I did not know Roald’s address; he had not been seen at the club since he swept out of my sight on that snowy night. He had gone to ground somewhere, but where?
Visiting de Gerlache at his home, I learned from him through tears that Danco had suffered a heart complaint for some time, deemed incurable by the best doctor in Harley Street, and that he had been ordered to convalesce in the countryside of his homeland for the few months he had left: but that nothing could tear him from the enjoyable life he lived at the Club, that he in all his characteristic determination and loyalty had wanted to pass happily and without fuss, with his friends about him. He had, it seemed, gotten his dearest wish. (Well, perhaps not the "without fuss" part.)
I chewed on all of this this as I chewed on a cigar, pacing in my room. On the wall next to the photographs of Danco I had placed a poor sketch I had made of Roald. It hardly captured him, but I had no photographs of him at all, no proof that I had ever known him.
And then, considering the gestalt, I removed from my wallet a small picture of Anna, as she had been before I ever really knew her, and placed it amongst the others.
That night I had a dream of Anna, dancing with Danco. That was all: no blood flowing up through the cracks in the tile, no rending of flesh, nothing so horrible. Only the soft sounds of feet stepping through snow, and the bells of a music-box playing from somewhere distant, and the faintest echo of joyful laughter.
Anna had been ill. Incurably so. And Danco too… oh, it was generosity, as surely as it was violence. More charitable than anything I had done. I woke up with tears stinging my eyes and my heart racing.
Five days had passed. Peary would be arriving soon, as surely as the tide—I knew that my time was running out.
In the end, it was not my clever mind or expertise which gave me succor. Instead, help arrived from a most unexpected quarter: a letter delivered to my door, amidst a mess of bills and humdrum papers.
When I opened it, I blinked to clear my vision, but the same words, in a curled and feminine hand, continued to pulse before me.
Dear Dr. Cook,
I know this letter must be a shock to you—I cannot explain how I am writing it, only that I should not be, that it goes against the rules imparted clearly and sternly upon me.
I leave for the coast tonight with a new friend of mine, and we will be sailing on from there to America to start new lives.
I was told about all you did for me in my state—I wish I could thank you in person—but these words will have to suffice. Dear old Fred, I so wish I could have known you. But it is not to be.
With all the gratitude in the world,
Anna
The train station was at this late hour crowded with well-wishers and travelers, about to board trains to all parts of England. I made a beeline for the platform for Southampton, from where I knew the Thursday liner bound for New York departed each week, and pushed my way through the waiting crowd.
I stopped in my tracks when I saw two figures; an unusually tall man and a slender woman. The man had one hand around the woman and a portmanteau in the other; the woman was rocking back and forth, the fabric of her skirt swaying, as if she were full of boundless energy just waiting to be released. And both of them were swathed in scarves and hats and gloves, far more than was necessary for the weather.
But I recognized them.
And I recognized the man under the eaves of the ticket booth, carefully observing them both.
When the train pulled out of the station, with both safely aboard, he turned, moving through the busy passenger hall and through a lonely exit door, and I followed him.
Passing into a darkened alleyway between two buildings, through which shafts of light pierced, turning the cobbles into a patchwork of gold and gray.
“I hear you behind me, Dr. Cook,” he said, without turning.
I said, “On the train. I saw them—that was—that was her. And him. Wasn’t it?” I asked, although I was sure of it as I was sure of the danger we were both in that very moment.
“I told her she must not reveal herself,” he said. “For you would kill them if you knew. But it seems she could not resist. You have that effect on people, I find. You can make anyone trust you, anyone at all.”
My throat grew tight. I could not find any words.
“I am sorry,” he went on, “for what I did. I know you must object to the transformation I have effected upon your wife and your friend—”
“Roald,” I said finally, “I’ll be honest, I don’t give a sticky lick. I only wanted to find you in time. We must go, I have to—”
He ignored my urgency. “Worse than human, you had said,” with an accusatory jab of his finger.
“No. No, I’m sorry.” I shook my head, knowing my apology was inadequate. But surely he understood…?
“I believed,” he said bitterly, “that you were the one who could help me do what I always dreamed,” he said, “and solve scientifically the mysteries of the vampire condition which cause me such bedevilment. I believed you were the man I have been searching for for my whole life. Two hundred and seventy years—can you comprehend such a length of time?”
“...Do you still believe that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Listen,” I said, and I touched him gently, trusting he would not unleash his still-simmering anger in my direction, “listen, much has changed for me, since we last spoke. It has come to my attention that I care more about your—about your companionship than I care about any rules—the code I live by is, ah, flexible. We might discuss all this later—in a safer place—”
“You would help me? You would abandon your trade and seek knowledge?” His hawklike mien projected a sense of vicious sharpness, yet I still found it lovely. I wondered that I had been so entranced by it from the start, that I had seen only friendliness in it: was that to do with his desire for me, changing himself to appeal to me using his vampire abilities—or merely an innate sensibility of mine? My travels had frequently found me taking eager leaps in the direction of danger, after all. This was no different.
“Should you provide the resources, I would have no hesitation. Imagine—” my mind was now speeding far ahead of my tongue, images blooming before my eyes— “oh, imagine machinery to purify blood so far as to let you need less of it. Medicines to reduce your sensitivities to sunlight. Imagine taxonomies which plotted out the characteristics of vampire types across the world... interviews and catalogs of creatures..."
He said slowly, narrowing his eyes, “Those are all very attractive propositions.”
He took his hand in mine—he was not wearing his usual gloves, and I could see the telltale crimson crescent moons of his fingernails which, had he removed his gloves when we had first met, would have immediately impressed upon me his true nature. But I was glad he had waited. I did not think him a monster now.
"I will not make you swear."
"Nor I you," I said quickly.
"But I would have us make a pledge."
"Anything you want," I said, meaning it. The urgency I had felt moments prior had begun to dissolve. Perhaps he was working some pheromonal power on me—oh, I did not care, although surely it was something that together we could study the properties of, together in the future. For indeed there was a future that unfolding before us, full of opportunity and discovery. It was all I could do not to fall into his arms.
Then—footsteps. A shadow.
And a pompous, froglike voice from the mouth of the alleyway.
“Fascinating,” said Robert Peary, stepping out into the lamplight. “And so very, very sad.” In his hand he held a polished stake. “You were once my brightest pupil, Frederick. And to come all this way only to see you fallen under the thrall of a monster…”
“He’s nothing of the sort," I declared.
“Ha!” Peary’s laugh was an ugly sound. Bile rose in my throat. “Not only has he murdered a prominent expatriate and member of London society with his cursed bite, but a little bird told me he did the same to your wife.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, it’s a little more complicated than that,” I tried, but Peary was not known for the ability to listen sympathetically to an argument, no matter how justified.
“I should have known!” he declaimed. “You were always a weak one! Impossible ideas float into your head like poisoned miasmas! And you lie, lie, lie. Does your friend know? Have you even told him about what you did to me? What you took from me? To say nothing of your absurd theories, your selfish acts and your manipulations… But all of that, I will forgive! If you kill this creature and kill it now! I shall be so generous as to let you use my stake to do it…”
“Is he going to keep going like this?” Roald whispered to me.
“For ages and ages,” I murmured back. “Very boring stuff.”
“Right.”
What unfolded next was—to put it delicately—intense. Roald’s superhuman strength and reflexes were no match for even Peary’s years of training and hatred of the vampire race. It was not even close to a fair fight; privately and with some satisfaction, I imagined that Roald’s desire to protect me from harm had something to do with that. He did not draw it out for the sport of it, as I felt he might have had it been just the two of them alone.
No, it was over in mere moments; poor wretched Peary prone with his throat chewed out and Roald crouching above him, not even breathing hard.
He stood, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, which did really nothing for the copious amount of blood on his face, only smearing it around somewhat. Then he spat, ungracefully but so forcefully as to occasion a frisson beginning somewhere deep in my body and rippling outwards.
“Are you not—still thirsty?” He had not drank deeply at all, but I knew from my studies of vampire physiology that even the smell of blood, let alone a taste, could turn one raving with hunger: a dangerous phenomenon.
“I am,” he said, with a grimace. “But he tastes disgusting. Like rancid mead. I shall wait.”
Silently, I began to remove my tie. I let it drop; then undid my collar buttons. I spread the fabric open as he approached me and, without saying a word, bent over me and sank his teeth into my flesh. I gasped at the sensation, but it did not hurt—how could he hurt me, with anything he did? I was only grateful that we had been reunited.
"And me? How do I taste?" I managed to say.
"Warm," he said. "Oh, so warm, and wonderful."
Conscious of the uniqueness of my situation, I made a valiant effort to record mentally the precise gradations of the sensations that passed through me as he drank, for extensive analysis later, but I fear that without pen and paper on hand they all merged together and slipped away into a memory of pleasure. One that only foregrounded what came next: with my own blood now running hotly through him, I felt his member stiffen against my groin, growing quite enormous inside his trousers.
When I told him some time afterwards that in no small measure I was highly opposed to this kind of public debauchery, that gentlemen had rooms for a few intelligent reasons and this was one of them, he only gave me a very serious look and reminded me that I had in fact begged desperately for it, quite heedless of our position, that I had "panted like a dog" and "made a fool of myself" for it, which I was loath to believe but certain persistent bodily sensations hinted at the truth of.
By then we were in fact back in his rooms, his neat and handsome dwelling full of artifacts from his last two centuries of life and even beyond. His own bed he rarely made use of, sleeping sentimentally instead in the coffin given to him by his "maker" who had marked it with his initials F.N., but I had designs on changing that. During a break from our task setting up a laboratory in one of his many disused and dusty rooms we had landed in his velvet-curtained four-poster, and, since he had not fed recently enough, this time it was I who took him. It was this meeting of heat and of cold which I exulted in more than anything: this union of opposites which could not exist without the other and were, in reality, two expressions of the same principle. As above, so below.
***
My dear Lecointe,
I ought not to write, but my new wife has done so (Indeed I am married! Now you are not the only one, and cannot be quite so proud) and in my current state I find that the idea of abiding by rules far less appealing than I recall I once did.
You will surely be confused at hearing from me but I assure you I am quite well. Regarding how I came to be so, I can only say it was the work of someone you have met before.
There is much scientific work to be done on the phenomenon—quite beyond me, but I think it would appeal in principle and in application to you and your sharp mind. I hope you will not mind that I mean to petition for you to join our little troupe, as we plan to travel widely, seeking answers as well as brand new questions. It is even thought we might visit the Polar Regions, for in the winters the weather there is quite agreeable for us.
Ah, I have already said too much. In any case should you not wish to come, I understand—but know I am happy and only desire for you to be also.
Yours ever truly
Emile Danco