Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl Page 4

  The cargo—three long wooden boxes—arrived in horse-drawn coaches, each one driven by two of, according to the captain’s log, the most beautiful young women he had ever seen in all his travels. Due to the late hour, some of the crew had imbibed liquor, and one seaman announced he had quite taken a shine to one of the women. I had expected to read that the captain immediately put a stop to such dishonorable talk, but it seems he merely encouraged the man, who went off in pursuit of the coaches.

  He was not seen again . . . and his was not the last disappearance on the Dmitri’s ill-fated voyage. After becoming becalmed near an archipelago of Greek islands, another crewman vanished in the night. The Dmitri stopped for supplies at Gibraltar, and a crewmember absconded. The journey continued, but relations between the captain and the mate, who were Russian, and the remaining jack tar, a Romanian, were strained. The Romanian talked of creatures that inhabit the night and drink the blood of men, but the captain dismissed him as a mere uneducated yokel.

  As they passed the south coast of England, a sea mist drove the Romanian mad, and he leaped over the side. The first mate did not last until dawn before he, too, was taken by whatever plagued the Dmitri. Driven half mad, the captain vowed in his final log entry he would never abandon ship. He charted a course for Whitby and lashed himself to the wheel.

  It was this sight that greeted the harbormaster and the police when they boarded the beached schooner. The Dmitri had completed its journey with its captain utterly drained of blood!

  The ship’s log noted that delivery of the boxes was to be taken by an F. Billington, Attorney, of Royal Crescent, Whitby—mere doors from my own lodgings. A swift inquiry turned up the fact that Billington had been subcontracted by a firm of London attorneys, who were in turn acting for a practice in Roumania. Several telephone calls were made at my behest until the name of the procurer was at last obtained.

  The Dmitri had been commissioned from the Transylvania region of Roumania by a party of the name Dracula.

  While the log and manifest made no mention of any dog, the beast was witnessed leaping from the ship by half the town. It has not been seen since.

  Mrs. Veasey rapped smartly at Stoker’s door, and she was so flustered she forgot her hitherto impeccable manners and blustered in, waving the Whitby Gazette at him.

  “Oh, Mr. Stoker! Russians! Dogs! Whatever will become of us? And the papers say you are helping in the inquiries!” She halted in her rapid-fire speech. “Forgive me, sir, I’m all of a flutter this morning. Your young man, Mr. Smith. He is here to see you.”

  While Stoker had earlier pored over the ship’s log, Gideon had grown more anxious in the enclosed quarters, stalking up and down and staring out the window toward the sea, where something had done for both the Dmitri and his father’s vessel, the Cold Drake. To save the boy’s fraying nerves—and Mrs. Veasey’s threadbare carpet—he dispatched Gideon to the library to see what he could turn up on the name Dracula.

  “Mr. Smith!” said Stoker. “How did your investigations at the library go?”

  “Fruitfully,” said Gideon, waving a sheaf of notes at him. “Though I admit I’m not sure where this is leading.”

  “Let us take a walk on the promenade,” said Stoker. “Mrs. Veasey keeps an impeccable house, but it gets damnable hot in here.”

  He led Gideon out of the guest house and toward one of the wrought-iron benches on the stone jetty. The sun was low, and a refreshing breeze was blowing off the sea. Stoker nodded at the papers in Gideon’s hands. “So. What did you learn?”

  Gideon began to leaf through the pages. “Vlad Dracula the Third was a Prince of Wallachia,” he said, as though reciting for a schoolmaster. “He was a voivode, which I think is a type of nobleman. He was an enemy of the Turks and was known as Tepes, which means The Impaler. Wallachia is in Roumania, or was.” Gideon shrugged. “He died in 1476, or thereabouts. I’ve got sheets and sheets of this. How much do you want, and how relevant is it to anything?”

  Stoker smoothed his beard. “You seem a little frustrated, Mr. Smith.”

  Gideon handed the pages to Stoker. “I am seeking answers to my father’s death, Mr. Stoker. You seem to have had me on an errand for the past afternoon which seems nothing more than . . . well.”

  “Perhaps you are too polite to say a waste of time, Mr. Smith?”

  Gideon met his eyes and held his gaze. “Is it? Some wild goose chase? What can a long-dead nobleman from . . .” Gideon glanced at the papers in Stoker’s hands. “Wallachia. Transylvania. Wherever. What can he have to do with my father? Your Dracula has been dead for four centuries.”

  Stoker looked out to sea. The boy had fire in his belly. One saw so little real passion in London, where everything was old and boring and unexciting to the young men who moved in the theatrical circles. Perhaps Gideon Smith could give some of his peers in the capital lessons on how to be alive.

  “Dracula,” said Stoker thoughtfully. “It means Son of the Dragon.”

  He felt Gideon glance at him, then look out to sea. “The night before my father died, I dreamed a dragon ate the sun,” Gideon said quietly. “But I still fail to see—”

  “If you will allow me,” said Stoker, raising a hand. In it was a small, leather-bound notebook. He had brought many books with him to Whitby, which he had arranged on the bookshelves in the living room. This one was a journal filled with closely written words in a tight, crabbed hand. Not his hand, however. He flicked it open to show Gideon the title page, on which was scrawled Being an Account of JS Le Fanu’s War Against the Darkness, by Himself. Inside the cover was a folded piece of vellum, on which, in the same handwriting, was a short note, which he again presented to Gideon. It read:

  Dearest Bram, Please forgive me for the abrupt nature of this missive, but I fear time is short. I am about to embark upon an adventure from which I fully expect I may not return. If that is the case, it shall be an untimely death, because my work is far from done. Just as the baton was passed to me many years ago, I in turn intend to ensure the flame of my work remains lit, and hand the torch to you. There are others to whom I am posting copies of the enclosed work, but for your own safety and sanity I intend to keep you ignorant of each other for now. There may well come a time when your paths cross, but for now I entrust you with a task that is necessarily lonely. May God go with you. Joseph.

  Stoker had received the package a year ago, and within a month Le Fanu had indeed turned up dead, near Macroom in County Cork, Ireland. Stoker had thought the book a literary joke for Le Fanu’s friends, and had given it a brief read. After Le Fanu’s body—horribly maimed and almost bloodless, by all accounts—had been discovered in the ruins of Carrickaphouka Castle, Stoker gave the book more careful study. It purported to be a journal of Le Fanu’s war on vampires, following his being entrusted with the role of hunter and slayer by a mysterious old European, and the final chapters detailed Le Fanu’s final assault on his bête noir, a revenant High Sheriff called Cormac Tadhg McCarthy who had died in the seventeenth century yet who returned as a derrick-dally, in the local parlance, to feast upon the living and continue the evil deeds that had marked his life.

  Even after the troubling death of his friend, Stoker still largely regarded the work as merely another of Le Fanu’s excellent supernatural fictions. But sometimes, in the dark, he wondered if the writer really had lost his life battling the undead Cormac Tadhg McCarthy, and whether he had managed to dispatch the vampire with his final breath. That was his problem, Stoker thought ruefully, a problem often pointed out gently by Florence. He had lived his life so long among theater folk, had spent so much time in stories and fictions, had immersed himself so deeply in artifice and pretence, that he had trouble separating truth from fancy. The facts as he knew them wrestled with what he hopelessly believed to be true. On the one hand, as his feverish imagination married the tales of the undead bequeathed him by Le Fanu with the reports of the slavering hound that had leaped from the ship, the Dmitri had brought with it a supernatural
entity from the wilds of Transylvania, now abroad in England. On the other hand—the one that cautioned sense and logic—the Dmitri was merely an unfortunate ship that had run aground, a starving dog of a very prosaic nature fleeing as soon as the vessel landed.

  In the end, fancy won out. Why else had Stoker ordered all those items from the hardware store, doubtless being delivered at that moment to Royal Crescent? Why else, after allowing Gideon to peruse Le Fanu’s notebook, did he now find himself murmuring, surprising even himself, the words “Mr. Smith, it is my profound belief that Count Vlad Dracula still thrives in a most unholy state, four hundred years after his death. It is not inconceivable he could be responsible for your father’s disappearance. Tell me, what do you know of vampires?” The sky was already black on the horizon, and to the west the sun had dipped behind the hills and moors, painting the underside of the straggling clouds bloodred. The imagery was not lost on Gideon, who quickened his pace on the coast road. He didn’t know what to make of Stoker’s theory. If Peek thought Gideon’s fears about the Cold Drake outlandish, what would the fishermen make of the tall Irish writer? They’d think him mad, and Gideon wasn’t wholly sure he didn’t agree. But Captain Trigger himself had faced the undead. Gideon searched his memory and recalled The Endless Night of the North, in which Trigger and the Yankee adventurer Louis Cockayne had battled an undead creature that preyed on young girls in the Swedish city of Gothenburg. He hurried to his cottage and let himself in, checking that all the doors were locked before taking an oil lamp upstairs where he sought out the issue of World Marvels & Wonders. He read the story until drowsiness overtook him. Gideon made to blow out the lamp, then paused as the shadows danced. Just this once, he would leave the light on while he slept.

  The beaching of the Dmitri had brought excitement to Whitby, but in summer excitement was by no means rationed in the port town. It had been the destination of holidaymakers for half a century, and one such tourist was Robert, a good-looking, tall young man from mill-owning stock in Bradford, who had paid Ella Rainford good deal of compliments as he bought cod and chips from the shop where she worked. She had seen his like often enough, but she had allowed herself to be flattered by his attentions and had primly agreed to meet him after her shift. They had looked at the wreck of the Dmitri, then taken a small beer from the street vendors. Ella informed Robert that she must be home by ten, and he was welcome to walk her. The alley they now found themselves in was just two narrow streets away from Ella’s family cottage. She had found him agreeable enough company, and she was ready to consent to meeting him the next evening if he suggested it. Robert, however, was not planning to wait.

  “Robert?” she queried, as he shoved her hard against a shadowy alcove. “Robert! What is the meaning—”

  “You know full well,” he said, then planted hot, wet kisses on Ella’s bare neck, and took a rough, stolen handful of her skirts. “I’ve heard you Whitby girls like to entertain the tourists.”

  Robert placed his body scandalously close to Ella’s. “Like that, do you?” he breathed heavily, just before realizing Ella had not gone slack in submission, but in reaction to a presence he now felt at his back, making the hairs on his neck stand on end and his skin crawl. “Who’s there?” he asked, turning and peering into the darkness. The shadows in the alley deepened and fell upon him before he even had time to scream.

  Stoker gasped, convulsed, and shocked himself awake with a throbbing head. He reached from the tangled bedsheets for his pocket watch on the bedside table and peered at its face in the moonlight shafting through the open windows. A little after three. Burning shame colored his cheeks as he realized he had ejaculated. How odd. He hadn’t done that since he was little more than a boy. Half- glimpsed dreams clouded his mind and disappeared like dandelion clocks as he tried to grasp them. One thing was certain: His dreams had not been of Florence. He considered changing his sheets, but he felt tiredness weigh down upon him and lay back in the bed. As he did so he heard a distinct tapping sound, and he blinked away the sleep enveloping him. Stoker looked up and let loose a small cry.

  There was a pale face at the window, shadowed within the confines of a voluminous hooded cloak, a pair of blazing eyes regarding him balefully as a long, thin finger tapped insistently on the glass. Was it Dracula, come to claim him?

  Then the eyes became two moths, banging in unison against the pane before parting and fluttering off. The face was nothing more than the moon, within not a hood, but the branches of the plane tree outside his room. The components of the hooded face had disassembled, and Stoker forced a smile. He lay back again, laughing at his own foolishness. But his departed dreams still left a strange taste of something incredibly old and forbidden on his dry lips, and it was a long time before sleep embraced him again.

  There was excitement in town that distracted Stoker from his intention to telephone Florence, and from his brooding of the incidents of the night before: a crowd at the entrance to one of the cobbled side streets stretching in a haphazard warren up from the harbor. Stoker spied the chief of police, Superintendent Jackson, glowering grimly as a uniformed officer murmured in his ear, and he hailed him.

  “A bad business, Mr. Stoker,” said Jackson, his moustache waggling. “A bad business all around.” He leaned in close and whispered, “Murder most foul.” He pointed at a shapeless lump in the shadows of the alley, covered by a sheet. “Holidaymaker,” said Jackson. “Son of a Bradford wool family.”

  “A thief?” asked Stoker. “He was murdered for his money?”

  “It doesn’t appear so. He had a full- to-bursting wallet in his jacket pocket. We’ve got witness reports saying he left the harbor area at quarter to ten, with a local girl.”

  “Aha,” said Stoker. “A suspect.”

  “A doubtful one,” said Jackson. “She was at the scene, in a dead faint. Still in the infirmary, not properly conscious. And I doubt a fish-and-chip shopgirl could do that to a man.”

  “Do . . . what?”

  “Rip his throat out,” said Jackson grimly. “And leave a corpse drained of blood, with barely a drop spilled on the cobbles.”

  Stoker met Gideon at their appointed time and led him to the harbormaster’s office to return the ship’s log of the Dmitri. More mysteries worried the harassed Randolph; he had discovered that the three wooden boxes were filled with nothing but earth, and overnight someone had stolen one of them. “Now, who’d do a thing like that? A six-foot-long box of soil? Take three men to carry it.” He shook his head. “What’s the world coming to?”

  Or one man, thought Stoker. One man with the unnatural strength of the vampire. They left Randolph poring over the translated notes, shaking his head and puffing again, and stepped out into the afternoon sunshine.

  “Well,” said Stoker. “Most exciting. Did you know, Mr. Smith, that vampires like to hide away from daylight in coffins? According to Le Fanu, they favor a layer of soil from their homeland.” He paused and stroked his beard, regarding Gideon. “You are not yourself today, Mr. Smith, if I might say so.”

  Gideon sighed. “All this talk of vampires, Mr. Stoker. I’m not sure . . .”

  “We need to get back into the chase,” said Stoker. “Perhaps some lunch at the Magpie Café . . . ?”

  “Mr. Stoker,” said Gideon, “if this Count Dracula really is in Whitby, and if he is responsible for the deaths of this tourist and my father’s crew, perhaps we need help. You have worked for the magazines . . . maybe they’ll listen to you at World Marvels & Wonders, put you in touch with Captain Trigger.”

  Stoker laughed, then regretted it as Gideon’s face fell. “I didn’t mean—” he began, then stopped. “Look, Mr. Smith, this is my story, and while I’m grateful for your assistance . . .”

  “Story?” asked Gideon sharply. “You mean this is all some kind of . . . of research project for a novel? I thought you were helping me investigate my father’s disappearance.”

  Stoker bit his lip and directed Gideon to a wooden bench. He sat down an
d said kindly, “Look, lad, I went through the ship’s log again . . . when did your father go missing?”

  “Three nights ago.” Gideon frowned. “Why?”

  Stoker took a breath. “The log quite clearly charts the course of the Dmitri. The night your father was lost it was hundreds of miles away. I don’t think that Dracula could have been responsible for the fate of the Cold Drake.”

  “Oh,” said Gideon. “Then . . .”

  “Perhaps an unfortunate accident?” said Stoker softly. “I am no expert, but I suppose these things do happen . . .”

  There was silence as Gideon stared morosely at his boots. “Still,” said Stoker, “nothing to stop you continuing to help me. Take your mind off things, eh? We’ve still got Dracula out there somewhere.” He dropped his voice to a murmur. “I need your help, Gideon.”

  Gideon looked at him. “I must go, Mr. Stoker. Home. I must go home and think about things.”

  Stoker nodded, and Gideon stood like a sleepwalker and walked toward the West Cliff, and the coast road to Sandsend.

  4

  The Shadow Over Faxmouth

  Peek let Gideon in to a house that seemed to be full of children, though they didn’t sit still long enough for him to count them. Except Tommy, drawing with his tongue poking out of his mouth in concentration.

  The cottage was filled with the smells of cooking, and Gideon’s stomach rumbled. “Sorry to interrupt you at teatime.”

  Peek shrugged. “It isn’t ready yet. You’re not interrupting.”

  Gideon looked over Tommy’s shoulder at the pencil drawing of a gull on a breakwater. Very lifelike, and evidently drawn from memory. The boy was astonishingly good. Gideon felt a momentary pang of sadness. Tommy’s talent would not be nurtured; that didn’t happen in Sandsend. Not through malice, but because its inhabitants didn’t know anything else. He would fish, like his brothers, like his daddy, like everyone.

  “I won’t keep you long,” said Gideon at last. “I’ve come to tell you I’ll be taking the Cold Drake out as soon as possible. Day after tomorrow, perhaps. I need to look over her, and get some supplies.”