Anno Dracula by Kim Newman Read Free Book Online

on guard, was a vampire, the first he had seen within the walls of the Diogenes Club. For a horrid, sinking moment, he assumed his eyes would get used to the gloom within the Star Chamber and alight upon five bloated leeches, sharp-fanged horrors ruddy with stolen blood. If the ruling cabal of the Diogenes Club had fallen, the long reign of the living would genuinely be at an end.
    ‘Beauregard,’ came a voice, normally pitched but sounding, even after only a minute in the silence of the Club, like a thunderclap from God. His moment of fear passed, replaced by a mild puzzlement. There were no vampires in the room, but things were changed.
    ‘Mr Chairman,’ he acknowledged.
    It was convention not to address any of the cabal by name or title in their suite, but Beauregard knew he faced Sir Mandeville Messervy, a supposedly retired admiral who had made his name in the suppression, twenty years earlier, of the Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean. Also present were Mycroft, an enormously corpulent gentleman who had been chairman on Beauregard’s last visit, and Waverly, an avuncular figure Beauregard understood to be personally responsible for the downfall of Colonel Ahmad Arabi and the occupation of Cairo in 1882. There were two empty seats at the round table.
    ‘Alas, you find us depleted. There have, as you know, been changes. The Diogenes Club is not what it was.’
    ‘A cigarette?’ offered Waverly, producing a silverwork case and offering it.
    Beauregard declined but Waverly tossed him the case anyway. He was fast enough to catch it and return it. Waverly smiled as he slipped the case into his breast pocket.
    ‘Cold silver,’ he explained.
    ‘There was no need for that,’ said Messervy. ‘I apologise. Still, it was an effective demonstration.’
    ‘I am not a vampire,’ Beauregard said, showing his unburned fingers. ‘That much should be obvious.’
    ‘They’re tricky, Beauregard,’ said Waverly.
    ‘You have one outside, you know.’
    ‘Dravot is a special case.’
    Formerly, Beauregard had considered the ruling cabal of the Diogenes Club impregnable, the ever-beating lion-heart of Britannia. Now, not for the first time since his return from abroad, he was forced to realise how radically the country was altered.
    ‘That was a fine piece of work in Shanghai, Beauregard,’ the chairman commented. ‘Very deft. As we have come to expect of you.’
    ‘Thank you, Mr Chairman.’
    ‘It will be some years, I believe, before we hear again of those yellow devils in the Si-Fan.’
    ‘I wish I shared your confidence.’
    Messervy nodded sagely. The criminal tong was as impossible to root out and destroy as any other common weed.
    Waverly had a small pile of folders in front of him. ‘You’re a well-travelled man,’ he said. ‘Afghanistan, Mexico, the Transvaal.’
    Beauregard agreed, wondering where he was being led.
    ‘You’ve been of great service to the Crown in many situations. But now we need you closer to home. Very close.’
    Mycroft, who might have been sleeping with his eyes open for all the attention he seemed to pay, now leaned forwards. The current chairman was obviously so used to deferring to his colleague that he sat back and allowed him to take over.
    ‘Beauregard,’ said Mycroft, ‘have you heard of the murders in Whitechapel? The so-called Silver Knife killings?’

6

PANDORA’S BOX
    ‘W hat’s to be done?’ shouted a new-born in a peaked cap. ‘What’s to stop this fiend slaughtering more of our women?’
    Coroner Wynne Baxter angrily tried to keep control of the inquest. A pompous, middle-aged politician, Geneviève understood him to be unpopular. Unlike a High Court judge, he had no gavel and so was forced to slap his wooden desk with an open hand.
    ‘Any further interruptions of this nature,’ Baxter said, glaring, ‘and I shall be forced to clear the public from the room.’
    The surly rough, who must have looked hungry even when warm, slouched back to his bench. He was