The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life (10 page)

“Do you smell it?” he asked.

I reluctantly inhaled, and detected a faint trace of another odor. “Gin?” I returned.

“No, not the gin. There’s another smell, even fainter.”

As I started to take another breath Niccolo vanished into the darkness. The gilt buttons on his evening coat twinkled faintly as his silhouette approached the grating. When I caught up with him I saw that the basement room was full of people. Most of them were ragged and coal-smudged, but there were a few incongruously fashionable gentlemen scattered among the riffraff. They formed a circle around one mangy brown-and-white terrier who was delicately licking a small gash on its leg.
A
trickle of blood showed up vividly against the white fur.

“That,” Niccolo hissed as he flared his nostrils. I realized he was staring intently at the wound. For a brief second I caught a glimpse of his fangs as the corners of his mouth twitched excitedly.

“Another shilling!” shouted one man as he waved the coin above hie head.

A low murmur ran through the crowd as a decrepit old man came hobbling in with a filthy burlap sack slung over his back. His greasy white hair was tucked haphazardly beneath a tight flannel cap, and his protruding chin was covered with a gray stubble. A trickle of tobacco spittle ran through his broken teeth. It was only after several seconds that I realized the side of his sack was moving as if a thousand tiny feet were squirming and kicking to get out.

With a raspy crackle the old man suddenly flung the contents of the sack on the floor, and half a dozen rats scattered as the terrier let out a savage growl. Most of them hovered about the edge of their enclosure, but one unusually large rat froze when it saw the terrier and bravely stood its ground. It was obviously an old rat, with most of its tail and part of its hind leg missing, but it bared its long yellow teeth with ferocity. The terrier lunged. The rat squealed and sunk its fangs, and the bets were on.

As I went to pull Niccolo away he accidentally tipped over a stack of boxes. The movement revealed one of the evening’s earlier hopefuls, a grimy little white dog. Its eyes were wide open, frozen in a vacant and deathly gaze, and its neck was a mass of bloody gashes. I shrunk back with horror, but I noticed Niccolo was leaning forward with a peculiar interest.

“Please,” I beckoned. He looked at me with wild and excited eyes. He hesitated for a moment, torn between two loyalties, but upon seeing my disgust he tried to compose himself as he reluctantly drew away. After several minutes of uneasy silence he glanced up at me sheepishly.

“My legs,” he said. “I think we’d better go home; my legs are beginning to throb a little.”

I nodded and pointed in the right direction, but it was obvious that the quiet tension was still very much present. It started to rain a little harder as we made our way back to Mayfair, and we pulled our collars a little tighter around us. “Niccolo,” I finally blurted out, “how many vampires are there?”

“In round figures?” he asked. “Oh, maybe a couple hundred in most countries.”

“Do you know others here in London?”

“No, not really. I am new to this part of the world and I haven’t had time enough to seek out friends.”

“And what are you doing here?”

“Traveling.”

I nodded and then resumed the stony silence for a few more minutes. “Can I ask you one more question?”

He glanced up at me and in the light of a nearby gas lamp he was once again an angel. “Yes?” he said and his face was wrought with innocence.

“Whatever happened to Lodovico?”

“He’s still alive, of course.”

The remark took me a little by surprise. “‘From the way you talked I gathered he might be dead.”

Niccolo chuckled and I detected something sad and distant in his amusement. “No...” he said slowly. “Lodovico will never die. If you must know, he is very much alive and well. He still resides in Italy, but I really couldn’t tell you where.”

This last remark also caught my interest because from the ever-so-slight quaver in Niccolo’s voice I got the distinct impression he was lying.

“Oh,” I returned quietly.

As we approached our address on Bond Street I noticed he was dropping back about ten or fifteen paces behind me and appeared to be taking in the architecture. As I turned the key in the lock I saw him quickly slide an envelope into a nearby letter box and then come running back.

“Could I be so bold as to ask you who that was to?” I inquired.

He looked at me with reproach. “Certainly not. I still have a right to my privacy, Dottore.”

I felt myself blushing at my own presumptuous behavior, but the fact he’d obviously tried to conceal the action still bothered me. “Would you tell me why you were so secretive then?” I asked.

“No,” he snapped again as I shut the door behind us. “That is a private matter also.”

It was sometime in the afternoon of the next day that I detected the pungent odor of Niccolo’s oil of lily and palm. I was sitting in the breakfast room in one of the white peacock-backed rattan chairs at the glass-top table supported by carved and gilded water lilies when I noticed the familiar scent. It was only moments later that Cook came rushing in, her face filled with disquiet. She was a short, plump woman with a round red face, and a nose that betrayed one too many teacups full of gin. Her disheveled, fleecy hair was pinned haphazardly atop her head, and a few stray strands dropped down into her china-blue eyes. In her hands she held a bundle of glazed butcher’s paper. It was from this that the scent of Niccolo’s oil seemed to be emanating.

“Whatever do you think could have ’appened?” she asked in her thick cockney accent as she held the bundle out for me to see. I caught a familiar glimpse of quills and saw that it was Deirdre. When I touched her I realized she was stiff and cold.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps she just died of old age.” I took the little bundle from her hands. “I’ll dispose of her in the laboratory.”

“Dear, dear,” Cook purred as she left the room.

When I reached the laboratory I placed Deirdre on the counter and examined her carefully. She seemed smaller than usual, as if she had lost quite a bit of body weight. It couldn’t have been old age, I thought to myself. I knew the life span of hedgehogs distinctly and Deirdre was still in the prime of her youth. But there were no other markings or signs of injury over her body I could discover. For a moment I became afraid that perhaps a strain of one of the viruses I kept in my laboratory for my experiments had escaped, but as I pulled back her quills I saw. There, on the nape of the neck, and so tiny so as nearly to escape my attention, were two small holes.

That evening I reprimanded Niccolo for killing Deidre and he was duly apologetic. He explained that the sight of blood at the rat fight had made him feverish and anxious, and later that evening when Deirdre had wandered carelessly into his bedroom it was simply too much for him. From that day forward we made an agreement that every two or three days I would supply him with a brown rabbit, and this made him quite happy. He informed me that the vampire didn’t require much food. A larger animal such as a baby lamb would keep them satiated for a week, not unlike the anaconda, and, indeed, the blood of an even larger creature might last well over two weeks.

As for his eating habits, after the incident at the rat fight he never allowed me to see him indulging in his strange predilection. He even kept his fangs carefully hidden when he spoke, and, to my great unhappiness, under no circumstances would he allow me to examine them. About the only thing Niccolo would allow me to check was his pulse and body temperature, both of which were impossibly low. However, under no circumstances would he allow me to take any blood samples. He explained that long ago Lodovico had warned against it. This was all Niccolo would say about the matter. No amount of persuasion would convince him otherwise.

Naturally, I was upset. There were few truths I held so fervidly as the belief that the pursuit of scientific knowledge was a universal good. All the teeming peoples of the world may prove themselves wretched, but the wonders of their creation will remain. Even if a man fails in life, if he makes one contribution to the betterment of society, he has fulfilled his purpose. I tolerated the frustration, for I thought I understood it. What a feat of survival this boy had perpetrated. He certainly hadn’t done so by trusting the world. For brief moments I thought I could actually see through his eyes, not for long, a fleeting but lucid second of perfect vision. I saw what an inhospitable and dangerous world he must live in. I felt with curious depth how cautiously he must view my scientific interests.

Until I gained his trust I was forced to confine my curiosity to other arenas. I scoured all of the details contained in the books on vampirism. I discovered few facts. Here and there were reports that suggested possible cases of vampirism: an extraordinary account of an epidemic on the island of Mykonos in 1702 as recorded by a Jesuit father; the many cases collected in Hungary by the Benedictine abbot, Dom Augustin Calmet, in 1746. However, all of the supernatural aspects and legends about Niccolo’s kind turned out to be completely false. He was reflected in mirrors. He did not sleep in a coffin or require a handful of his native soil to be with him. He was not repulsed or disturbed in any way by Bibles, crucifixes, or garlic.

My observations led me to quite another possibility. All of Niccolo’s unusual aspects, from his sensitivity to sunlight to his immortality, smacked of having physiochemical explanations. It was my growing belief that vampirism was a medical condition. This notion led me inevitably to the next glistening possibility, that perhaps Niccolo’s incredible immunity might provide a key to the guiding force in my life, the search for a cure to
Haemophilus influenzae.

All the next day at Redgewood I thought of nothing but this possibility. My thoughts were still so pervaded with ideas when I arrived home and went into the garden to compose myself, I completely forgot it was the day of Ursula and Camille’s return. It was that strange interim between sunset and dusk when the last rays of sunlight remained frozen for a brief moment at a low angle through the ivy trellises, and the shadows of the hedges were at their longest point, stretched across the courtyard. Everything seemed strangely becalmed, frozen in one final shimmer of gold before the ghostly blue of twilight set in.

I was so lost in thought as I strolled around the wide perimeter of the astrolabe, I almost didn’t notice the shadowy figure standing beneath the chestnuts.

“Ursula,” I gasped, “is that you?”

“Yes, Father,” she said and stepped out into the light. She was a beautiful young woman with fervent dark eyes and pale skin. Her face was round, not unlike a Botticelli, but her chin was strong and determined, and her dark red hair, drawn tightly behind her head, made her seem stronger, even harsher than her young years should have allowed. Her thin lips also betrayed a sort of melancholy in the way they were turned slightly downward. It was not a weak or passive melancholy. It was a sad reticence that held behind it a self-assured strength, even a reserved and noble beauty. She was tall for a woman, almost as tall as I, and she wore a white chemise with fashionable puffed sleeves. However, she also wore riding breeches, which were certainly not fashionable attire for a young woman to wear so casually, but they only added to her self-confident, slightly mannish presence.

“I forgot completely that you were coming home today,” I said. “Just out for an evening stroll?”

She shrugged.

“Is anything wrong?”

“Not really,” she replied and her moody silence startled me. Even when Ursula was deeply troubled she usually confided in me. It wasn’t like her to be so evasive. There was only one other time that I remembered something sending her into such a hushed disquiet. It was during an evening several years before at the home of one of my fashionable colleagues when a young woman of social inferiority manipulated her crinoline, purposefully, but without obvious jostling to get through the dining-room doorway ahead of Ursula. It wasn’t that Ursula minded so much that the ridiculous, but nonetheless rigid, protocol hadn’t been followed. It was what the young débutante had murmured so quietly and dispassionately beneath her breath. “
Bad seed,
” she sniffed. “
Bad seed
.”

“It’s a nice evening, isn’t it?”

“Very nice.”

Ursula tilted her head back and admired the darkening sky. The sunbeams coming through the ivy trellises were gone now, clipped off suddenly by the inexorable advance of twilight. “It’s turning out to be a very warm spring. It should mean wonderful weather for May.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Do you know where the name ‘Mayfair’ comes from?”

“Why, yes... yes, I do. Because the celebration of May Day has always been held here.” Visions of a raffish festival of scamps and pickpockets with their doxies rollicking round maypoles filled my mind.

“But do you know where the celebration of May Eve comes from originally?”

I shrugged. “From the old ritual of welcoming in spring?”

“Yes, spring,” she repeated and then her voice became distant. “
Through the rowan and through the keep, spare the horse and spare the sheep. Spare the fox and spare the hen, but throw the woman in
...

“Throw the woman in?” I said with a puzzled smile. “
Aye
,” she continued the old Celtic litany. “‘...
but throw the woman in.’
”

“What’s wrong, Ursula?” I asked and for the first time a flicker of emotion crossed her face. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “It’s all so formless and confused. All these worries.”

I put my arm around her. “Try to tell me.”

“Well... here I am. Everything given. What I mean is, I know who I am. I know my ‘station’ in life, said what is proper and what is not proper. I know that at dinner parties I must talk to the gentleman at my left until the soup is removed, and that I must contrive to wind up the conversation in time to turn to my other neighbor the moment the fish arrives. I don’t mind playing the games, so much. But here I am, already getting glances because I’m a spinster, and I’m scarcely into my twenties.”