The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(12)
“Hush, John,” she said, and nuzzled into my neck.
There was a sharp pain that lashed all through me. I struggled, for just an instant, before a heavy torpor seized me and I went limp in her arms. I could feel Mary’s bite and the trickle of blood, but it did not alarm or surprise me; nothing could in that sleepy state. Feelings of confusion and surprise, that Mary should be here at all, still drifted around in the back of my trammelled brain, and then I knew nothing at all.
*
The next days are exceedingly hazy in my recollection, and I can only beg the reader’s forgiveness for my lack of clarity. I would have no idea of the length of time missed by my narrative were it not for Holmes filling in the details later. It was nearly a week.
My own memories of that week are fragile and fragmented. They have the feel of an old mirror shattered and reconstructed with some of the pieces missing. I know that Mary was with me some of the time, which should have been a blessing, but was instead the purest form of shame and terror. I knew I lay insensate for at least several days, and that Mary came and went, leaving me for long periods by myself.
I do not know the precise location where she housed me during my convalescence, but I was familiar enough with the type of establishment from such adventures as “The Man with the Twisted Lip”. The room was a long series of squalid cots, partitioned by thick, stained curtains. The air was heavy with brown smoke and the slightest taste of salt. That last told me that we were somewhat near the water, though the far-off cry of gulls would have done that on its own. The murmur of stuporous voices pooled all around me. I was in an opium den.
The hunger clawed at my stomach like a living thing, digging through the haze and deluge of scents and sounds. I knew that I had not eaten in days, but also knew that the days of rashers and kippers for breakfast were gone. Indeed, I could not even think of such things without a wave of nausea rising up inside of me. I felt so weak and feverish that I could barely lift my arms.
Mary appeared by pushing up one of the hanging cloths and sliding underneath. My senses were now frighteningly acute, particularly smell, and I could tell with certain accuracy how many people lay in this sinister place. A cloud of brown opium smoke came with her and the scandalous dress she wore carried on it the scent of an entirely different woman. I could guess all too well what had become of that woman. One curious thing penetrated even my febrile haze: Mary herself was an exception. Though odours clung to her stolen dress, she herself had a strangely subdued, earthy scent, much harder for me to detect than the rest.
She looked down at me with a small smile. “My poor dear,” she said, in mockery of her previous concern for me. “I know what it is that you need, and nothing could be easier.” She pulled up another cloth, revealing the berth of the man next to me. He was reclining in an awkward pose, lying with his head dangling off the side of his bunk and his limbs stiff at his side. His chin pointed straight up and his eyes hung open and glassy in an eerie testament to the power of opium to completely desensitize any man to any and all events around him.
“Mary,” I pleaded. “Don’t do this. You can’t mean for me to…” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the thought. This was Mary, my Mary, not some commonly cruel and banal criminal. I reached out for her, desperate to somehow reach the woman I’d married and loved all these years.
But the Mary looking down at me curiously wasn’t the woman I’d known at all. She wore her face, but the expression of idle curiosity when confronted with someone else’s pain was completely antithetical to everything I knew about her sensitive and caring nature. It wasn’t something my wife could have done.
She seized me by the back of the neck and pulled me off the cot with prodigious strength, moving my not-inconsiderable weight as easily as if I were only a small kitten. She hauled me to an upright sitting position so that I was staring down at the pulsing neck of her proposed victim.
“You’re hungry,” she said, “and need to feed. But no problem could have a simpler solution, for all the nourishment you require is right in front of you. You have merely to take it. No one will miss this man. Arrangements have been made. If the opium in his system should concern you, have no fear of that. We have found that its qualities can be of great comfort during your transition.”
Her hand was light and gentle and cool on my skin now, but I was not fooled. This creature was what the Count had made of my Mary, a demonic shell. Her eyes were wild, her expression sly, and I could still see, and smell, traces of blood around her mouth from where she had fed a short time ago. She was completely a creature of the night now, as I would be shortly, were I to succumb to the temptation before me. A further chilling thought went through me. She had said ‘we’. She counted herself as one of Count Dracula’s folk now, a vampire.
“No,” I said, struggling to pull myself away from the unfortunate man in front of me. Mary held me there for a few seconds and then released me. I fell back, knocking over my cot with a crash.
“My dear, poor John,” she said with a tinkling laugh, cruel and expressive, that I’d never heard from her before. “You’ll come around, John. Everyone does. You’ll see.” She left me. I could hear her feet delicately pad across the bare slats of the floor, a brief whispered conversation too faint to make out and finally the scrape of a door opening and closing as she left.
The profound weight of her words pressed down on me as I lay sprawled on the overturned cot. The hunger was scraping me hollow even now. If it got any worse, there would be no possible resistance. Escaping this prison was the only way to distance myself from the temptation that lay incoherently all around me. I had to escape now before I weakened any further.