The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(13)

I lurched unsteadily to my feet and found the strength to stand, after all. Pushing up the heavy curtain, however, caused me to slip and fall, and the curtain and part of the moulding came down with me in a raucous clatter. Inhumanly fast, a disreputable blonde man with mutton chops and bad teeth materialized at my elbow and laid his hands on me. Like Mary, he had very little scent, and so his sudden appearance surprised me beyond measure. Another vampire. When I got a good look at his face, I recognized the driver from the hansom that had taken me to Mary, and an anger at what had been done to me flushed through me.

With a strength I hardly expected, I pushed at him and he flew the length of the corridor and finally crashed through one of the curtained-off compartments at the end, tangling himself with the rug, cot, and the compartment’s occupants.

Staggering out into the street, I moved at no great speed, but whether the attendant was seriously hurt or perhaps did not consider me worth chasing, I do not know. Mary was nowhere to be seen, which was a blessing. Having taken the time to find and trap me, I had to assume that she would want to finish her diabolical plan (no doubt, Dracula’s plan) of infecting me with the same disease that had taken her soul. At any rate, no one at all pursued me.

The next few days are but a delusional blur. No opium addict’s withdrawal ever taxed his system more than this ordeal taxed mine. I will spare the reader an endless recitation of the stumbling night of horror – not to spare myself indignities – but only because I remember nothing better than flashes of lucidity during that time.

I know that the light of day was far too painful to my eyes and skin, and I spent most of the daylight hours huddled in back alleys. It was on the first day of this that I lost my clothes when two immigrant workers rolled my unresisting form for all the material wealth that it could offer them. Miraculously, my watch and suit and wallet had not been lost in the opium den, but they were lost to me then. Like a character in a penny dreadful, I shuffled from alley to alley shaking as if from the ague, craving sustenance and finding nothing that I could eat. I was taken in at one of the soup houses, but I violently expelled the soup that a charitable soul gave to me. Everywhere all around me, walking temptation roamed in the form of the riff-raff and homeless of London and I was forced to avoid their company altogether, lest I submit to the cravings that howled inside of me.

A curious effect almost as predominant as the driving hunger was the transformation of my senses. I have already spoken of the heightening of my sense of smell, but I don’t believe I have conveyed fully the effect that this had on my psyche, nor related what happened to my other senses. I thought that my vision had begun failing altogether when I tried to look at the moon overhead and found it lacking clarity. Or thought, briefly, that it was the London fog. Then I came to realize that my vision across long distances had become less keen. This did not inhibit me as I thought it might, partly because my vision was amazingly acute when it fell on things close at hand, certainly much more so than it had been previously.

But perhaps more importantly, the changes to my vision mattered less because my vision itself mattered less. My hearing and sense of smell had become so sharp that they had driven my sight into a strictly tertiary role. When coming into a new alley, I could detect the breathing and scent of any occupants immediately and place all their relative positions with unerring accuracy. Only as a second thought did I bother to pick them out with my eyesight as well. I didn’t often understand this jumble in my head, but found that my first instincts were those of a predator on the hunt. A primal and burning core inside me would detect prey automatically and I would find myself stalking silently towards some hapless alley denizen before I forced myself to turn away. I felt more like a rabid automaton than a man of free will, and I was rather certain that I could kill with these new instincts without conscious decision on my part, a sheer horror to the thinking part of me. Instead, I used this new acuity to fastidiously avoid the other inhabitants of London, so that I should not fall prey to temptation.

I found other places to feed, but I am proud of none of these. I stole a butcher’s shipment delivered to a kitchen in the dark hours of the earliest morning. I found that I could get some relief from hunger pangs by gnawing and sucking at the raw flesh for the juice, though I had to spit the worthless and spent meat into the street. This discarded bounty led me to my next source of nourishment. As the stray dogs of London fought over the scraps, I was able to snare one, God help me, and slake my thirst on the wretched creature like a savage beast. Once, I even stumbled into a charnel house and drank the cool blood from a puddle on the floor. I did what I must in order to survive, but still I vowed that I would take no human life, regardless of what kind of foul creature I had become. I felt that I moved through a disconnected landscape of haze and mist only remotely connected to the London I had known.

I could not bring myself to hunt more than the bare necessity to keep myself alive, and so I still felt weak, and found myself getting weaker as the nights went on. Even worse, I could not sleep. Each morning I slunk into the darkest corner that I could find – a coal cellar one day, the bottom of a dark stairwell on another – but these places did not bring any succour. I would lay all day, half conscious and groggy, swimming in the deluge of unfamiliar sounds and smells and certain that each scuffing noise in the street, possibly many houses away, would bring some fresh danger to my barely defendable position. There was no refuge, and after days without any sleep, I crawled into a drainage ditch and knew that I had not the strength to crawl out. Here I would perish.