The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(15)
I hesitantly lowered the bookcase to its former place. “And Mary? What can be done for her?”
Dracula stepped forward and spoke, “She is dead to you, Dr Watson, at least in the way that you knew her. She is in the power of an elder vampire now. She is no longer your wife. She is lost to you. Gone forever.”
“Another vampire,” I said. “How can this be?” I could feel the black weight of loss settle its talons deeper into my back. Mary, my own humanity. What nightmarish future awaited me like this?
“I am quite sorry,” Holmes said, “that you did not have the opportunity to hear the Count’s story to its full conclusion. It is most important that you do, I think. First we must attend to your health, for the Count assures me that this is quite a precarious time for you.”
The Count himself did not speak, but watched the proceedings with an air of detached interest. Mrs Hudson was nowhere to be seen, and I could only assume that Holmes had forbidden her entrance to our quarters. He himself brought the tea service to my bedside.
Though a hunger consumed me, the thought of this once comforting ritual now caused a wave of nausea, until the aroma of something I did need came to me.
“Holmes!” I cried when I divined his strange joke. “Really, this has gone too far. I cannot go on with this charade as if nothing has happened to me!”
“Tut, tut,” he said, pouring out the warm red fluid into a tea cup in front of me. “Of course you can’t. But I also know that you need sustenance to survive, and is the consumption of flesh that every good British citizen partakes in really more cultured than this? Oh, I admit this is certainly very outré, to say the least, but I see no reason why you should have to descend to the level of a beast. This has come from the butcher’s shop, the same as my breakfast sausage, and from the same source, I am sure.”
My objections rose in my throat, but they were momentarily forgotten when Holmes set the tea cup of warm blood in front of me. It was the sheerest mockery in my mind to pour it from one of Mrs Hudson’s best teapots. My hand shook as I picked it up and I felt a wave of deep emotion for this man who had done this for me, even though he acted as if it were nothing more uncommon than our usual breakfast. I finished the first cup. It was delicious. More than delicious. I could feel strength and life pour into me with every drop. I drained both a second and a third before I came to myself. Then I looked at the red stain in the cup. I wiped my mouth and moustache and my hand came away with an abhorrent red stain. Despair welled up in me again.
“Holmes,” I said, my voice heavy. “I am a beast now. There can be no denying it. I am a danger to every citizen in London. Dear God, Holmes. I am an abomination and should be destroyed!”
“Nonsense!” Holmes said. “You are no more a danger to our fellow citizens than you were before your affliction. No, no, don’t try and contradict me on this; the evidence is far too great against your position. You see, I have some knowledge of your wanderings before we picked you up. The hackney driver behind the paper factory, the butcher’s boy on Windermere Road—” He ticked them off on his fingers, one by one. “—and the elderly gentleman last night, indisposed with drink underneath the floral display on Covington Way. In point of fact, you have gone to great lengths, despite your disorientation and starvation, to ensure that no other citizen suffered on account of your recent tragedy.”
“It’s true I have not hurt anyone yet… but how could you know?”
“Come, come, Watson, you know my methods. While the Count assisted in locating your person, I am not so great a bumbler that I didn’t at least find traces of you.”
“But… Mary…” I lifted my hands helplessly. “She was like a soulless monster when she had me in her power… Holmes, it looked like her, but it was not the woman that I married! I would swear to it. She was hardly a person at all!”
Holmes’s face went very grave. “Ah… well there I am afraid that I am unable to provide any comfort, as much as I should like to. Our present conversation is enough to assure me that the Count’s words are true about the nature of the transformation. The mental faculties, though muddled for a short while, do return, along with their memories. It is only the personality that is shattered.”
I felt a blackness overtaking me at the thought of Mary’s casual cruelty that I had witnessed. I could not even begin to compare it to the woman I had loved. How could her change be that complete? I certainly did not feel the same person as I once was, despite Holmes’s assertions, but my thoughts remained intact. I could still understand right and wrong. Could Mary? There had been nothing but monster in her, behind that pretty and familiar mask. How much more could I lose?
“Evidence clearly suggests,” Holmes went on, “that the primal need to feed is usually quite enough to overcome almost anyone’s moral sense of right and wrong.”
“Almost,” the Count murmured, the first word he’d spoken in some time.
“Indeed,” Holmes agreed. “In fact, Watson, if the Count and I were betting men, I should have won a great deal of money on you. I had no doubt that your character would come through the transformation intact, and I was right. You have risen over magnificent odds to do so. Far greater than I think you realize.”
“A most impressive feat, Doctor,” Dracula said. “Believe me when I say that most men do not do so well. The deprivation and madness of the change, followed by such a pure temptation to evil, breaks the soul of the transformed as surely as any bout of lunacy. It requires a great strength of character to survive it intact. A poet I’d known long ago once described the process as a ‘shattering and reconstitution of the soul’. I’ve only known a handful of souls that could be said to be the same person afterwards. Call it one in a hundred. Most come out exactly the bloodthirsty monsters that Stoker accused me of being.