Supping With Panthers (53 page)

I nodded. Yes – I could recall it ad quite clearly now.

‘I recognised in it,’ continued Suzette, ‘the inspiration for a wholly novel type of game – suitable to this new age of reason, this scientific century, before whose sceptical gaze all superstition must die. Lilah was quite entranced by the idea. We set you on the case; we observed your progress; we followed each turn you took through our maze. You did very wed – it was a privilege to watch – but you faded, of course, in the end, to understand,’ She smiled, and turned away. ‘As I had always known that you would,’

‘Why?’

‘I have already said. You are a child of your century, of your rational age.’

I stared at her blankly.

‘It was the single most intriguing aspect of the game: to test your arrogance, and see it fad.’ She handed me something. ‘Do you remember this?’ she asked. It was the card I had found in the opium box.

I nodded. Yes, I did remember it. I read it out aloud:
‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable,
must be the truth?’
I shook my head, then laughed wildly as I tore up the card. ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘you were right – what arrogance.’ I laughed again. ‘How could I have been so blind before?’ I asked. ‘How could I not even have suspected the truth – what possibility might be … or pleasure … or experience? But now, thank God’ – I raised my hands, and looked around me –
‘thank God, I do.’
I laughed again, hysterically. Thank God, indeed! I had never known such a happiness, I had never felt so boundless – so blissful –
so free.
What limits could there be on
anything?

I started to remember, though, very soon afterwards – just as I had done after the first murder, like a painting cleansed of its accretions and dirt, my guilt was reappearing again, dim at first, then with ever greater clarity; and as it did so, the palace around me was slowly transformed back to a gaol. I knew better now, of course, than to attempt to escape it; and so I remained with the other captive beasts adorning die menagerie, an amusing trophy set amongst the rest. I was privileged, I realised, looking around me, to have been permitted to retain my human form; I could have been a monster, a spider, a snake. As Suzette explained to me, Lilah took inordinate pleasure in choosing the form to which her victims were reduced. ‘Always something apt,’ she smiled. ‘A punishment crafted to fit the crime,’

‘Crime?’

‘Yes … of boring her. For she will always be bored in the end by human love – though she also loves and feeds on it. The dwarf, for instance – a French vicomte from some two centuries ago, exceedingly handsome but dangerously vain. The panther – an Ashanti girl, arrogant and cruel, who sought to stab Lilah in a jealous fit. Sir George’ – she smiled – ‘wed … you saw him for yourself.’

‘But you killed him; you bled him to ash.’

Suzette turned away. ‘I am a vampire,’ she said at last. ‘I must have blood.’

‘Must?’

She glanced back at me coldly. ‘You should understand the need to kid.’

‘Should I, though? Is that what I am – a vampire, like you?’

Suzette frowned, then shook her head slowly. ‘Perhaps not,’ she murmured. ‘I had assumed you were. But Lilah can make her victims into anything. Perhaps you are a killer and nothing more. For if Lilah had transformed you into a vampire, then believe me – you would recognise your own taste for blood.’

‘I like to shed it,’ I replied, ‘sometimes.’

‘But not to drink it?’

‘No.’

She shrugged. ‘Wed, then – you are not a vampire,’

‘But you?’ I pressed her. ‘Was that what Lilah made of you?’

She turned back to me, and there was not a trace now of the child in her woman’s face. Terrible it was, radiant with intelligence and loveliness. ‘When Lilah met and seduced me,’ she said at last, ‘I was a vampire already.’

‘When?’

‘A long time ago.’

A trace of my old wonder stirred, my forgotten disbelief that such things could be. I swallowed. ‘How long?’ I asked.

‘In the courts of the Moorish kings of Spain,’ she replied. ‘A thousand years ago – eleven hundred, perhaps …’ She turned away from me again. ‘It is so hard to remember now.’

‘And Lilah – that is where she met you? In one of those kingdoms in Spain?’

Suzette nodded shortly. As she gazed into the distance of the night, she stroked back her hair – her elegantly braided woman’s hair. ‘I lived,’ she murmured at length, ‘when I first met her, amongst the fountains and courtyards of Andalucia, where learning and ad the arts of civilization flourished as they had rarely done before. My mother was a Jew, my father a Christian; I lived amongst the Arabs of the Caliphate. The different cultures were mine to sample, for I belonged to each one and none of them; and with this displacement came its birthright – mockery of them ad. Knowledge was my passion – and amusement the perpetual condition of my mind, Lilah I loved, for she seemed to share these qualities of mine, yet infinitely amplified so as always to challenge and fascinate me. We left Spain. Across the whole world we roamed for two – three – however many centuries. Always, though, we would return to her favourite shrine, her kingdom amongst die Himalayan peaks, which is her one true home, and which, as you have witnessed for yourself, she will always defend. Others she has abandoned, to empires, cities, the various encroachments of man … but never Kalikshutra. She – and I with her – have lived there far too long.’

‘Yes,’ I exclaimed, remembering suddenly, ‘I saw you, a statue, in the jungle shrine. You were standing by her throne,’ And then I frowned, staring at her, seeing not the girl but the woman still. ‘When the statue was made, though…,’ My voice traded away. ‘You must have already been transformed by then

‘Yes,’ she said, her smile both self-mocking and sad. ‘It happened in the end, of course. I came to bore Lilah,’ Suzette paused. ‘Just as she bored me. I told her that I intended to leave. Her demands for amusements, for perpetual entertainments – they had started to fatigue me, to wear me down. I was tired of games; I wanted something more,’ She smiled again and turned away. ‘I told her, as I left, that she was like a little child.’

There was a long silence. At length she glanced round. ‘So you see,’ she murmured, gesturing wide with her arms, ‘she came after me. I did not escape her after ad.’

‘You are a prisoner here too, then?’

Suzette didn’t answer.

‘You could leave if you wanted to, surely?’ I pressed. I swallowed. ‘Surely … I mean, your powers … you couldn’t be stopped?’

Suzette turned from me and gazed out at the stars. We had been climbing the staircase towards the dome of glass; now we passed through it and beyond, into the night outside. ‘Look at me,’ she whispered, and I stared. Once again she was a little girl. I sought to find the woman beneath the plaits, the ribbons, the pretty party dress. But she was gone. I suddenly remembered the creature from the boat; his former self had been absent as wed, when I had looked at him out on the river and searched for his past in his present face. I swallowed. Sweat was starting to form on my brow.

I stared at the crimson glow of London spread out before me. I could feel the prickle of anger again, borne on the breeze. The marks of my own change were returning to me. ‘I must get inside,’ I muttered. As I turned, I staggered; Suzette smiled and took my arm. We passed back through the door. As we did so, die prickling ebbed and died away. When I looked at Suzette, she was a woman once again.

‘So there can never be escape,’ I pressed my forehead against the glass. ‘Never.’

‘You can leave,’ replied Suzette. ‘But what she has made you here – no – you can never escape that.’

‘And that is true for ad of us, then? In this …,’ I paused, and stared about me. ‘In this … place – this prison.’

‘Prison?’ Suzette laughed. ‘You think this is a prison?’

‘Why? What do you think it is?’

Suzette shrugged. ‘What you were promised. What, in the end, you grew so desperate to find: a sanctuary from the laws of probability, where human science would no longer apply. Hasn’t that been your goal ad this time? And now you have it – you exist in it.’ She paused, gazing at the dome of light above our heads, the blaze of stars. ‘Wherever she lives,’ she murmured softly, ‘wherever in the world, she recreates this dimension for herself. The finite is ad around us – but here, where we live, is infinity.’

‘Yes.’ I followed her gaze, then shivered. ‘But burrowed out from the warehouse walls,’

‘That disturbs you?’

‘Of course,’

‘Why?’

‘It reminds me too much…,’ – I paused to consider – ‘of the hole in which the antlion traps its prey.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Antlion, Doctor?’

‘Yes – its larval form, to be strictly accurate.’ I smiled ironically. ‘You will recall the funnel it digs, into which inquisitive ants are then lured. The larva feeds on them, drains them of their fluids, tosses their shrunken skins aside. What is waiting here if not just such a trap? The jaws are open – the ants blunder in.’ I paused. ‘Ants like the wretches in the opium den.’

Suzette stared at me, then shrugged. ‘I do not share your outrage. It is hard to feel concern for the fate of ants.’

‘So I am right? The opium den does serve as the rim of the trap?’

There was a lengthy pause. ‘Yes,’ said Suzette at last. ‘Clearly.’

‘And Polidori?’ I asked.

She narrowed her eyes. ‘What do you mean, Polidori?’

‘He is its guardian. Is he not a part of Lilah’s collection, then? Not one of her trophies?’

‘Polidori? No.’ Suzette stared at me coldly, then laughed. ‘She would never choose him as her lover.’

‘That is a prerequisite?’

Suzette inclined her head.

‘So is that why Charlotte Westcote is here?’

‘Charlotte Westcote does not live here; she was merely a tool.’

‘So …’

‘She has never been with Lilah – no. We needed a wife for Sir George, that was ad. English, of course. So we took die Westcotes on die mountain road. The mother was too ugly – we fed on her. But Charlotte Westcote made a pretty vampire. She was clever too, just what we required, and with a remarkable and immediate aptitude for vice.’

‘Evidently,’ I agreed. I paused. ‘And Polidori? What is he doing in this menagerie? Was he made a vampire by Lilah too?’

‘No, Doctor. As you know very wed.’

‘Then by whom?’

‘You know.’

‘Lord Byron?’

Suzette inclined her head.

‘And so that is what Polidori is doing here now? Pursuing a vendetta against Lord Byron and the whole Ruthven clan?’

Suzette shrugged faintly. ‘His Lordship, I gather, still has scruples about killing those who share his own blood. Polidori likes to send his descendants to him — just to remind Lord Byron of what a monster he is. Arthur Ruthven was one of those descendants. So you will recognise – in response to your original question – that Polly and Lilah had a certain
congruence
of aims.’

‘But Arthur Ruthven is long dead now. Lucy, his sister, though, is still alive.’ I swallowed. ‘Tell me, Suzette – do Polidori and Lilah still share their congruence of aims?’

‘Doctor.’ Suzette smiled and raised her hand. ‘I have answered quite enough, I think, for now. The game is finished.’ She turned, and this time did not wait for me. ‘You have lost, Doctor,’ she called out as she left me alone. ‘Be content with that.’ She laughed. ‘Be a sportsman, if you must.’ And then she was gone. Slowly, I too descended the stairs, considering ad I had gleaned from her. As I did so I felt, with a sudden thrill of recognition, how my mind seemed almost my own again – restored almost to its former sharpness and resolve. Yes, I had lost the game. It was too late for me. But it wasn’t myself I was playing for now.

Polidori, it was clear, held the key. My conversation with Suzette had confirmed a suspicion I had pondered on before, that the world of Lilah’s palace was indeed like a burrowed hole dug within the fabric of the warehouse brick – and that the entrance to it lay through Polidori’s shop. That was how the addicts had been drawn in, after ad; that was how Stoker and myself had come through; that was where reality seemed to blend with the unreality beyond. For elsewhere – the entrance from the High Street, for instance, or the moorings on the Thames – the border between the two states seemed more like a wall than a meeting place, guarded by Lilah’s unsleeping consciousness, through which no one could penetrate except on her desire. Penetrate – and, of course, withdraw as wed. But through Polidori’s shop, perhaps … Polidori’s shop … What opened into infinity, after ad, would surely lead from it too – and might Lilah not then be oblivious to the escape if I left through that exit, yes,
through Polidori’s shop …
The data, it was true, was scarcely conclusive; the reasoning barely supported by facts; but I had no other options, no choice but to try. After ad – could the penalty for fading be worse than to endure as I was?

Naturally, if I was to make my attempt through Polidori’s shop, then I would have to cultivate the man himself. His attic, I found, had begun to fid once again like a wed-stocked larder, as I told him myself. I could see now, as I had not done before, how some of the addicts had already been bled – but it was less their pallor which betrayed them, rather their reaction to me. For my presence would fid them with terror, even rage; sometimes they would cower before me, at other times spring at my throat – just as Mary Kelly, I remembered, had once leapt at a dog, or Lizzie Seward, in her cell, had ripped the head from a dove. These violent reactions had always puzzled me before; but now, recalling the beasts of the menagerie and how they had been formed, I wondered if the women had not somehow sensed the transfusion of their blood and sought to reclaim it, during their bouts of insanity, from any beast that might happen to fad into their hands – just as the addicts now sought to reclaim their lost blood from me. Certainly, whatever the explanation, the effect of my presence in the attic was undeniable; and to Polidori, as the addicts’ keeper, it afforded endless delight. He would often be reduced into a frenzy of his own, so violent was his laughter, and since I was always careful to share in the joke he began to encourage me, for his own amusement, to visit him more. He never liked me – he never liked anyone – but his hostility grew slowly less evident. Once, I went so far as to try to reach the shop on the floor below; Polidori froze immediately and ordered me back; yet by turning with a show of the utmost unconcern, I was able to preserve his good humour with me. For I was satisfied at that stage merely to see my suspicions confirmed; the issue was not yet ready to be forced. First of ad, Polidori had to be won.