Dracula: The Un-Dead. Ian Holt
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a fresh pot of tea and a basket of fresh bread on the side table, and shut the door silently behind him. Over the years in which he’d worked for the Harkers, he’d grown accustomed to their troubled marriage, and could sense their subtle stresses.
The sound of the door closing made Jonathan wince. He tried to steady himself on the chair.
“Are you still inebriated?”
Jonathan looked up at Mina as if surprised that she was still there. He reached for the tea. “God, I hope so.”
“Where did you spend these past nights? In an alley? Or with one of your…companions?”
“It was not in an alley, that I can assure you,” he said, pouring unsteadily.
“Why have you become so cruel?”
Jonathan raised his cup as if in a toast. “The world is cruel, my dear. I am merely a reflection of it.”
He was mocking her and the youthful reflection she cast in a mirror.
“Then reflect upon this,” Mina said, gathering her resolve. “Our marriage may not be all we had hoped. We may even sleep in separate bedchambers. But sometimes I do still need you here!”
“You forget, Mrs. Harker, that I needed you once.”
Mina bit her bottom lip. “I had visions again.”
“Dreams of him?” He reached for the Times.
“These are not dreams. They’re different.”
“I believe you want to have these dreams, Mina, that deep inside, you still desire him. You hold for him a passion I could never fulfill.”
Passion! Reeling with rage, Mina straightened her back like a cobra ready to strike. “Now, wait a moment…”
“Why?” he interrupted. “Why must he always come between us, Mina, invading our marriage like a cancer?”
“It is you, Jonathan, not I, who puts him between us. I chose you.”
Jonathan slowly turned and looked at her with such longing that she thought for the first time he had actually listened to her words. “Oh, my dear, dear Mina, still as beautiful and young as the day I first met you. Is that why you still call his name in the night, because you love me so much?”
Mina’s heart sank. “How long will you continue to punish me for my mistakes? I was only a foolish young girl. I could not see the monster behind the mask.”
“What did he do to you? While I grow old, you…” He gestured to her youthful body, shook his head in despair, and gulped his tea.
The passion, the fire, the concern for others had all been drowned in gallons of whisky. The man she looked at now had killed her husband, the love of her life. She detested this wretch before her. There was no resemblance in him to the man she had fallen in love with.
If that was the game he would play, so be it. Locking her emotions behind a bland mask of politeness, Mina sat down and forced her attention back to her newspaper. A small headline in the Daily Telegraph’s society page caught her eye: “former head of whitby asylum dead in paris.”
Horrified, she scanned the first paragraph. “Jack Seward is dead!”
“What are you clamoring on about now?”
“My vision last night. Jack’s death!” Mina cried. She slapped the newspaper onto the table in front of her husband. “This is no coincidence.”
A light appeared in Jonathan’s eyes as he struggled to repress his alcoholic daze. Seeming almost lucid, he said, “God rest his troubled soul.” He bent his head to read the entire article. When he looked up again, an unspoken question hung between them.
Has he returned for revenge?
Jonathan sat for a moment in silence, as if making a decision. Then his shoulders slouched, and his mind fell back into the void. He handed the paper back to Mina. “Run over by a carriage. It says right here it was an accident.” He tapped his finger on the line for emphasis.
Fury ignited Mina. “You’ve withered into a blind, drunken old fool, Jonathan!”
The moment she said it, she regretted it. She was trying to spark him to action. Her severity only wounded this fragile man.
“I envy Jack,” Jonathan whispered, tears welling in his bleary eyes. “His pain is finally at an end.” He rose and headed for the door.
Mina felt the chill again. Her visions were real. Something terrible was in their future. And this time she knew she would have to face it alone.
In a panic, Mina chased Jonathan, catching him outside. “I’m sorry, Jonathan. I love you. I always have. How many more times must I say it?”
Jonathan didn’t look back as he climbed into his car and pulled the goggles over his eyes. “I need to contact Jack’s ex-wife and daughter in New York. As far as I know, I am still executor of his estate, and there are arrangements to be seen to.”
Jonathan depressed the accelerator, let off the brake, and sped off at a roaring ten miles per hour.
Mina watched Jonathan’s motorcar disappear in the direction of the station. The finality of his departure caused tears to sting her eyes. She blinked them away, suddenly seized by the conviction that she was being watched. Someone was hiding in the nearby shrubbery.
Inspector Colin Cotford walked along Fenchurch Street, heading toward the heart of Whitechapel. It was the most loathsome place on earth. After thirty years of service with Scotland Yard, Cotford had seen the worst of mankind. He no longer believed in the notions of heaven and hell that he had been taught as a child. He had seen hell on earth, and Whitechapel was it. One of the poorest districts in London’s East End, it attracted the dissolute to its factories in the hope of finding work, but there were more people than there were jobs, which resulted in extreme poverty and overcrowding. The whole district had a distinct odor, a mix of bodily waste, filth, and rotting flesh.
Walking along Commercial Street, Cotford tried not to breathe through his nose, in an attempt to avoid that foul stench. It was early in the morning; daylight was breaking, and vendors were starting to move their fruit, milk, and water wagons toward Covent Garden. A locksmith’s cart clanged past him along the cobbled road. Cotford continued, pretending not to see the crawlers—old women reduced by poverty and vice to the depths of wretchedness. They no longer had the strength to beg for food. Instead, they huddled together for warmth and waited for starvation to end their miserable existence.
Cotford had received an early morning call from the chief superintendent “requesting” that, as soon as possible, he look into the death of some vagabond who had died in Paris. Cotford had spoken to Lieutenant Jourdan, the French police officer assigned to the case, though he did not see the point in this investigation. Crazed, poverty-stricken men were run over by horse and carriages at least a dozen times a day in London. He would have to assume the statistic would be similar in Paris.
But Jourdan appeared to think there was more to the case. The victim had been carrying a silver-plated sword and, according to civic records, had at one time received grants from France for scientific studies. Unlike the Metropolitan Police in London, La Sûreté Nationale in Paris was not municipally operated but rather an agency of the government of France, and they wanted to be certain that Dr. Jack Seward’s death was not the result of foul play.
Cotford had rolled his eyes as he listened to Jourdan prattle on in broken English. The man had seemed to be insinuating the existence of some odd conspiracy and, when Cotford had shown his contempt at such nonsense, had threatened to go over Cotford’s head.
Now Cotford stopped in front of the lodging house opposite