Daniel Friedman - Riot Most Uncouth

“Fine.” She crossed her arms. “I swear that I’ll never betray your secret, Lord Byron.”

I rose from the bed, and she followed me down my hallway, where I unlocked the door of the Professor’s study, a windowless interior room that made a nice lounge for a gentleman or a suitable lair for a medium-sized mammalian predator. I cracked the door slowly, to avoid surprising the occupant, and ushered Violet inside. The bear stirred from slumber upon the pile of rugs and skins he used for a bed, and regarded the woman with a rumbling growl.

“That creature makes me uneasy,” she said.

“The Professor is perfectly harmless,” I assured her. “In any case, our concern is over here.” I pointed toward a large, heavy piece of furniture, a thing like a wardrobe. It would have been sleek and black, but the Professor had scored the wood with his claws. It had come from Newstead; part of my inheritance from William, the Wicked Lord. Joe Murray told me my great-uncle had liked to lock his whores inside the cabinet when they displeased him, hence the heavy doors and sturdy lock. The use I’d found for it was arguably more disturbing. I unbolted the doors on the front of the chest with an iron key.

“This contains treasures and truths from across the world, obtained at great effort and expense over a period of years,” I said.

“But you never have any money.” I wondered if I’d spoken too freely of my financial difficulties in front of this woman. Perhaps it was a mistake to reveal my treasures to her. I wondered if she ever betrayed my secrets to her husband, as she betrayed her vows to him with me.

“I find credit whenever it’s available,” I said. “And I employ my borrowed funds toward the pursuit of this.” I opened the cabinet to reveal several rows of ancient heavy tomes.

“Why, it’s a bookshelf,” Violet remarked. “But who locks a bookshelf?”

“There is some knowledge that is valuable and dangerous. Some knowledge must be shielded behind locked doors and guarded by bears,” I said. “You are looking at the most comprehensive library in all of Britain on the subject of immortal creatures, and on vampires in particular.”

“Vampires?”

“The undying dead,” I told her. “They rise from their graves to feed on the blood of the chaste. Stealing life allows them to stave away death. They do not age, they cannot be hurt, and they never die.”

“I’ve never heard of any such thing,” she said. “This sounds like a fairy story.”

“It’s true that there have been no documented sightings of these creatures in England,” I said. “But they are quite common in the East.”

Violet was examining an ancient heavy tome and rubbing with a pink thumbnail at a small, dark spot on the cover.

“That won’t come off,” I said. “It’s a mole, I think, or a freckle.”

She looked at me with confusion.

“That book is bound with human skin,” I explained, to clarify.

Violet turned very pale, which I thought was attractive. But she looked like she might drop the precious volume, so I took it from her and opened it to show her a lithograph printed onto one of the parchment pages, depicting a fanged wraith sucking at the throat of a young woman.

“My father told me stories about these creatures when I was a child. He said they possessed the secret of eternal life, and that, with their knowledge, he would live forever. I was very young when he disappeared. There are two possibilities: either my father deserted my mother and me and he died someplace, destitute and alone, or he went to the East to take his place among the vampires. The second scenario seems unlikely, but I would submit that the first is impossible. My father loved me.”

“Men are imperfect, Byron,” she said. “They are weak and flawed. Your father was incapable of being what you needed him to be. You do yourself no service by mythologizing him.”

“In 1676, stoneworkers in Cornwall discovered a hunk of calcified bone in a quarry,” I said. “A professor of chemistry at Oxford deduced that this bone was the base of a femur, but no known animal has a leg-bone of comparable size. This creature, you must understand, would have easily exceeded the bulk of the African elephant by several orders of magnitude, and it dwelt in England at some point in the past. Fanciful creatures are realer than you think. The natural world exceeds and outpaces man’s ability to document and catalog it.”

“I’m sure your father loved you as best he could.”

I ignored her. “Six years ago, a gentleman named Schneider discovered the estuarine crocodile, an eighteen-foot reptile with jaws that can tear a horse in half. If a thing like that can exist in the saltwater swamps of the Indochine, why can’t vampires dwell in the sparsely populated mountains and caves of Rumania?”

“If such a thing existed, there would be documentation. There would be proof.”

“What do you think is collected in these volumes? Vampires are real enough for the mountain Gypsies to drape their doors and windows with strings of garlic in hopes of warding the things off, and to nail the dead into their coffins with wooden stakes.”

“You’re talking about superstitions and folktales.”

“Like the tales of giant reptiles, with teeth like knives, which we have only recently verified?”

“I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing.”

“It would have seemed impossible that the American colonies would revolt and throw off the rule of the Crown, and yet they did. Nobody would have believed that the French would haul their royal family out of Versailles and execute them upon the guillotine, and yet it happened. Who would have imagined the mechanized textile-factory or the steam-powered mine were things that could exist, until they did? Who can say what is possible, when we live in an age in which the inconceivable happens with regularity?”

“The progress of the practical sciences does not justify your credulity regarding the existence of the fanciful and mythical. I see no relationship between the one thing and the other.”

I put the ancient book back on the shelf. “The estuarine crocodile is the relationship,” I said. “It’s a verified, documented dragon.”

“No, it’s not. It’s just a crocodile,” she said. “When your father left, you were a small child, and it was no fault of your own. But you’re a man now, and your father is gone. You only do yourself harm with these elaborate fantasies.”

I kept a green-glass bottle of absinthe on the shelf next to my vampire texts. I pulled the cork stopper out with my teeth and took a long pull of the burning-sweet liqueur.

“You are frantic and crazed some days, and sullen and brooding on others,” Violet said. “And you’re always drunk lately. You have friends who care about you, but not so many as you used to. People will not stand by and watch you destroy yourself, Byron. I won’t.”

“You’re welcome, then, to go away,” I said, and I tipped the green bottle back a second time.

As I figured it, the best way to establish Sedgewyck’s guilt was to search his rooms and find some proof. The killer had taken Felicity Whippleby’s blood with him, so if Sedgewyck had done the deed, the blood might be stashed away in his residence, or at least I’d find the dirty bucket, if he’d already drunk the contents of his gruesome haul. Perhaps he also had a vampire coffin. Regardless, my nemesis would be exposed, and I’d be a hero. It went without saying that I would claim Olivia as the spoils of my victory.