Supping With Panthers (36 page)

He then asked Dr Renfield for his diagnosis. ‘Zoophagous hysteria,’ the Doctor replied, seemingly hurt that Eliot had forgotten his phrase. ‘Incurable,’ he added, clearly content that this should be the case. Eliot nodded; he seemed not to have any further questions to ask, and I imagined he would be disappointed by the fruits of his trip. Once outside die asylum, however, he seemed not disheartened at all; indeed, he appeared almost pleased with himself. He said nothing to me, however, and since the hour was now growing late I did not have time to bother him with questions. Hailing a cab to transport me to the Lyceum, I ordered him not to forget my invitation and to call on me, as ever, if he needed any help. He assured me that he would. I left him, frustrated by my companion’s taciturnity, but roused as well at the thought that our adventure might not quite be finished yet …

Dr Eliot’s Diary.

6 July.
– A visit to New Cross, to observe Lizzie Seward. Met Stoker on the way, and he accompanied me. The head of the asylum worse than incompetent, and the conditions in which the patient is kept are a disgrace. The visit not entirely wasted, however – one suggestive line of inquiry opened up. I observed, during one of Seward’s fits of madness, how she clawed at the wall as though attempting to break out. As we left the asylum I observed the layout of the building, and my conjecture was confirmed: the wall Seward had attacked faces to the north, towards Rotherhithe. Mary Kelly, I realise now, had thrown herself against a wall facing south-east – also towards Rotherhithe.

I determined to proceed there immediately, to see if I could not find more information concerning this seemingly mysterious coincidence. Stoker unable to accompany me: the Lyceum waiting. As we parted, he bade me good luck; he had evidently been shocked by what he saw of Lizzie Seward. Hope it does not affect his imagination too strongly. I continued alone to Rotherhithe.

I told the cabbie to drop me by Greenland Dock. Searching through the back streets, I located the pub mentioned by Mary Kelly in her account of the events that had led up to her assault. The bar crowded. My first inquiries met with hostile incomprehension, but I stood a few drinks and tongues began to loosen. It seems there are dark whisperings abroad in Rotherhithe. No one remembers the specific case of Mary Kelly, but the rumours of a beautiful woman stalking the docks for prey had been heard by almost everyone at the bar. One man told of a friend who had disappeared; others had heard stories of similar cases. But when I asked for a description of the mysterious woman, there was remarkable disagreement. Some spoke of a negress, glimpsed through the window of a curtained carriage; but others described a blonde, and their terms reminded me of the woman that I had seen following me. Unfailingly, though, with both women the same aura was insisted upon: a beauty which terrifies, appals, turns the blood to ice. I described Lilah; no one had seen a woman like her, nor were there even any rumours of such a woman being glimpsed. But Lilah’s beauty too could be described as unnerving. Hard to know if this is just coincidence; hard to reach any conclusion at all. This business seems to lie beyond rational analysis.

I stayed in the pub for several hours. When I left, it was late afternoon; the side roads were dusty and deserted; the odd wagon rumbled past, and even a hansom, but nothing corresponding to a private carriage of the kind that Mary Kelly had described. It seems impossible that such a vehicle could stay hidden for long. And then, just as I was thinking this, I found myself by the turning to Coldlair Lane, and I remembered the difficulty I had suffered before when I had searched for a warehouse, an entire building, and failed to find that. I was suddenly struck by a feeling of panic, of a kind that I had not known since Kalikshutra, when I had been similarly confronted by inexplicable facts, when the structures of logic had seemed just as close to collapse; and I felt how dangerous were my efforts to resolve the case. I turned back to the High Street, and wondered what I should do next. As I deliberated, I stared at a shop-front across the road. A wagon went by laden with produce from the docks, and obscured my view. It passed, and once it was gone I saw a little girl standing by the shop. She was dressed neatly in coat and hat, and wore ribbons in her hair. She held a hoop. It was Suzette. She smiled at me, then turned and began to bowl the hoop down the street. She didn’t glance round. I called out her name, but she didn’t even pause and I began to run after her. Another wagon rumbled by. I lost sight of Suzette. The wagon passed, but still I couldn’t see her. I scanned the High Street, up and down, but there wasn’t a trace of her. I breathed in deeply.

Suddenly, from behind me, I heard the rolling of her hoop again. It was strangely amplified, and I realised with a shock that all other noise – the rumbling of the traffic, the sounds from the street – had fallen utterly away. I looked down a side alley. For the fraction of a second I could see Suzette, just a tiny figure running away from me, and then she was gone again. I followed her. At the turning of the street where she had disappeared I heard the rolling of the hoop, echoing as before down an empty lane, and then, pursuing it, I heard it suddenly clatter to the ground and fall silent. Round a further corner, I recognised the street which led to the warehouse door. Suzette was standing by it, waiting for me. As I approached her, she smiled shyly and reached out to take my hand; with her other, she rolled her hoop. I did not even think to hesitate; my will no longer seemed my own. Together, we passed in through the open door.

Waiting for us in the hall was the wretchedly deformed dwarf. He removed Suzette’s coat and hat; she smiled up at me and clutched my hand again. ‘This way,’ she said, pointing towards the stairs. Their twisting of proportion was as startling as before; we were climbing only one of several double stairways, all spiralling in seeming defiance of gravity and reaching into heights that I knew could not be there. And yet they were; and I felt that same strange giddiness I had just suffered on the street, the sense that my frameworks of understanding could not deal with the mysteries being opened up to me. There was a difference, though: before, I had felt helpless; now, with my sense of what was possible dissolving before my eyes, I began to glimpse amongst the wreckage of my old assumptions new forms, new ideas, and felt not afraid but excited, even moved. ‘Lilah has been waiting for you,’ said Suzette, ‘a very long time. She did not think you would stay away for so long,’ We were standing on a balcony next to a wondrously crafted door, inlaid with Arabic designs of indigo and gold. Suzette reached up and opened it. ‘You must tell her you are sorry,’ she whispered. I passed through.

Beyond was the room I remembered from before, yet it was subtly changed. It took me a second to understand this; then I realised that along the side of the room, where before there had been curtains, now there was a wall of glass made from panes of different colours – blues, dark greens, nasturtium oranges and reds – so that the light, like the scent of perfumes in the air, was remarkably rich and deep, and seemed almost to possess the texture of water, stained perhaps by a setting sun. Two doors were open in this wall of glass, and I saw that beyond them stretched a conservatory. I heard the bubbling of water; passing through the doors, I saw two small fountains, spaced at equal distance along a pathway of marble, with trees and plants on either side and further pathways, running and disappearing into heavy green shadows. The air was as rich as before, but the perfumes now were of orchids and vegetation, sweeping tropical trees, flowers of an impossible brightness and strange, flesh-coloured plants which seemed to palpitate before my gaze, as though shuddering beneath the pollen and its suffocating kiss. I felt a touch, as soft as blossom, brushing my hand. I turned round.

‘I am upset,’ said Lilah, ‘that you did not come sooner than this.’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Suzette told me I had to apologise.’

‘Well, do so.’

I smiled. ‘I am sorry.’ Lilah took my arm; she met my smile. ‘Here,’ she said, gesturing towards a side-path. She brushed aside some lilies that obscured our way, and we walked beneath the warm, ripe shade of the trees. I glanced at her. She wore a sari and across her long, braided hair, fastened by jewels, hung a veil of the purest diaphanous silk. The effect should have been to cloak her; and yet in truth the sight of her, her touch, the scent on her clothes acted on me as the arboretum did, oppressing but also stimulating me, inducing a strange reverie, a sense of being close to new sensations and ideas. Whether it was truly her presence or the closeness of the air, I hesitate to say, but I began to experience thought differently, as though concepts and reasonings were nothing but dreams, my brain a hothouse in which strange things might flourish and grow. I longed for some relief from the vegetation; and hearing a fountain ahead of us, I suggested to Lilah that we pause there for a moment. Next to the fountain was a stone seat covered with cushions and rugs. Sitting down, I watched the flow of the water from the fountain’s mouth, Lilah whispered something so softly that I couldn’t catch what she said, and at once, from the shadows, the panther came slinking. Lilah smiled; she snapped her fingers; the panther leapt up beside her on to the seat and Lilah curled up next to it. I realised I was staring at her like an idiot, like some green young boy. I struggled to tear my eyes away from the sight of her bare arms against the panther’s black fur, from the curve of her breasts beneath the sari’s satin fold, from the fullness of her bright lips, from the fullness of her smile. I knew I had to escape it, this hothouse lust – this muggy, sapping, destructive desire, which I had always despised before and learned to ignore. I would not surrender to it now. With an effort, I looked down at the stone slabs of the pathway. I forced myself to think. I forced myself, in short, to be Jack Eliot once again.

And as I did so, so I returned to the mystery which had first brought me to Rotherhithe. I began to ask about the phantom woman supposed to haunt the docks, and although Lilah shrugged she did not seem surprised by the question. She could not help me, though; and so instead I told her about Mary Kelly and my work with her; then I asked about the strange attraction that both Kelly and the poor lunatic in New Cross seemed to feel towards the scene of their assaults. Could she explain this remarkable phenomenon? Lilah took my hand; she began to talk. There was no magic, she said; she had told me that before. But there were many ways to understand the secrets of nature; I had realised that, surely; why else had I come to Kalikshutra, and worked there for so long? Yet it was not just in Kalikshutra that these secrets could be found; there were many places haunted by the darkness of such mysteries; and London too was one of them.

‘You mean Rotherhithe?’ I asked. ‘Now, here, for as long as you stay?’

Lilah smiled and retouched the edge of her veil, as though to cloak herself from my inquisitiveness; yet the gesture was a tantalising one and the effect, as she must have known it would be, was to concentrate in a single moment all her fascination and loveliness and power, to hint at the depths which I had barely skimmed, and appear to offer them up to me.

‘For as long as I stay?’ she murmured softly. She laughed, but I knew that I was right, that wherever she was, wherever she had been, there mystery would also be – that dark, unexplored dimension of the world which I could not explain, but knew now to exist and could no longer deny. For the truth will always gather followers; and Lilah, for those afflicted by what they could not understand, might indeed seem to represent a form of truth. I thought of the darkness that was rising in Rotherhithe, outside Lilah’s door, and of all the creatures borne on its tide. The negress in the carriage. Polidori. Myself.

This last thought made me start. Lilah squeezed my hand, then she raised it to her lips. Her kiss almost froze me; I blinked, struggling to recapture my thoughts. I began to ask about Polidori. I explained my involvement with Lord Ruthven and I thought – or perhaps I imagined it – that at the mention of his name, Lilah’s eyes appeared to gleam as though excited or disturbed. Certainly, I had never seen her respond with such evident interest to the mention of any other name; and I wondered what power Lord Ruthven might possess to unsettle such a woman even as Lilah. But though her eyes had betrayed her, she said not a word; and would only agree, when I pressed her further on the topic of Lord Ruthven, that he and Polidori were indeed afflicted by the same disease. What that disease was, I did not need to be told; but remembering my studies on Lord Ruthven’s blood, and eager to pursue the implications they had suggested for haemotological research, I began to share with Lilah my theories and hopes.

Never has the pursuit of knowledge seemed more intoxicating to me. As we talked, I began to see – to understand – to feel unsuspected truths almost tangible in my grasp. How long did we sit there together? No time at all, it seemed, so oblivious to all but our conversation had I grown, yet when at length we finished and I returned to the streets outside, the moon was pale in the sky and the first hints of dawn were rising in the east. I had been with Lilah for ten hours; I hadn’t eaten, I hadn’t drunk, I had only talked, and in that time, it had seemed to me, I had spanned the world of medicine and travelled far, far beyond. If I could only repeat it all now, speak it into this phonograph, what a revolution in knowledge might I not pursue!

But I remember nothing. The inspiration is gone. All my insights and certainties, the whole edifice of understanding that Lilah and I had raised up – it is disappeared, melted away on the morning light like the phantom fabric of a castle of air. And yet it was more than that – more than a phantom: it was there last night, I know it, in my head. The truth may have faded; but the truth remains the truth. Is that what I am searching for now? Is that where this case is leading me to? Not away from, but back to scientific research? The stakes I am playing for seem to heighten with time.

Letter, Hon. Edward Westcote to Mrs Lucy Westcote.