As he felt his eyes beginning to close, something huge flew across his narrowing field of vision. There was a loud crunching sound, and suddenly, blissfully, the pressure on his throat was gone. He opened his mouth and took a giant, terrified breath, his chest screaming, his pounding head thrown back as oxygen flooded into his desperate lungs.
There was an incredible commotion in the hangar above and around him, but he barely registered it as he realised with savage, victorious elation that he wasn’t going to die.
Not now, at least.
His vision was clearing, the thumping noise in his head starting to recede, when a dark shadow appeared above him, and knelt down. Jamie looked up at the shape crouching over him; the image came into focus and he stared into the face of Frankenstein.
“Can you sit up?” he asked, his voice surprisingly gentle, and Jamie nodded.
He pushed himself up with his elbows and looked around the vast hangar. Scientists and doctors were clustered around the fallen soldiers, but almost everyone else was staring at him, concern and fear mingled on their faces. A rush of panic shot through him and he looked for the girl that had attacked him.
“Don’t worry about her,” Frankenstein said, as though he could read Jamie’s mind. “They’ve got her.”
He pointed to the left, towards the open doors. Jamie turned his head to look, and smiled weakly at what he saw.
Two soldiers were holding up the girl. The whole left side of her face was swollen, her arms and legs dangling limply above the ground. As Jamie watched, a scientist slid a hypodermic needle into her neck and depressed the plunger, sending a bright blue liquid into her jugular vein. Two doctors picked the stretcher up from the ground, righted it, and wheeled it over to the soldiers, who lowered the girl on to it. The doctors zipped the plastic sheet back into place, as Jamie stared at the figure beneath it. The girl’s chest was slowly rising and falling.
“She’s not dead,” he said, softly. “But they shot her. I saw the bullets hit her.”
“She’s not dead,” confirmed Frankenstein. “She’s something else.”
Chapter 8
THE LYCEUM INCIDENT, PART II
BENEATH THE LYCEUM THEATRE, LONDON 3rd JUNE 1892
The valet descended first, hand over hand down a rope, a lamp hanging from his belt. The hole was pitch black, but the flickering gas light was strong enough to pierce the edges of the darkness, and he touched down gently.
“Twelve feet, no more,” he shouted up to his master. He heard the old man instruct Stoker to find fifteen feet of ladder, smiled, then surveyed the area with his lamp.
He was standing in a round chamber, built of large white stones that had been turned a speckled grey by years of dust and darkness. Four arches were set into the walls of the chamber, the stone crumbling in places but holding steady. The same could not be said for the passages that led away from three of the arches; the roofs had long since given way, collapsing into piles of broken masonry that blocked the way completely. The fourth passage was clear, and its stone floor was scuffed with footprints.
The wooden feet of a ladder thudded to the ground behind him, then Van Helsing and Stoker made their way down one after the other, holding lamps of their own.
“What is this place?” asked Stoker, his eyes widening as they adjusted to the gloom.
“Catacombs, or cellars, or possibly something else entirely,” replied Van Helsing, peering at the stone walls, and the valet felt a shiver dance up his spine. He had never heard his master sound uncertain, not at any point in the two years he had served him.
The old professor approached the arch of the one passable corridor and looked down at the footprints in the dust.
“This way,” he said, as he stepped into the passage.
The space between the stone walls only allowed for single file, so Stoker followed Van Helsing and the valet followed them both, his hand buried in his jacket pocket, gripping something tightly.
Van Helsing led them through the stone corridors, pausing at junctions and tipping small pools of flaming oil on to the dusty floor, markers that would hopefully lead them back to the ladder.
The passages were pitch black, lit only by the flickering orange of the lamps. At the edges of the light, rats scurried into cracks in the ancient stone, their pink tails leaving thin lines in the thick dust. Heavy, intricate webs hung between the walls, ropy strands of silk that caught in the men’s hair and brushed their faces. The dark brown spiders that had woven them squatted in the highest spirals, thick-bodied creatures that Van Helsing didn’t recognise, although he kept this information to himself. The stone floor was uneven, cracked and subsiding, and the going was slow. Twice the valet had to reach out and grab Stoker’s shoulder when a slab moved under his feet, preventing the night manager from turning an ankle, or worse.
This was no place to be carrying an injured man.
It was difficult to gauge the passage of time in the darkness, but after a period that could have been as much as an hour or as little as ten minutes, the glow of light became visible in the distance, beyond the arc of their lamps. The three men headed towards it.
The light grew brighter and brighter, illuminating more details on the stone walls as they approached. At head height, carved into the wide slabs of the narrow passages, were the grotesque faces of gargoyles, their mouths open wide, forked tongues protruding between triangular teeth, their eyes staring out from wrinkled, finely worked skin. Stoker muttered to himself as they passed them, his hip flask now almost permanently attached to his lips. The valet watched with mixed emotions. He did not want to have to rely on a drunken man if, as seemed increasingly likely, they found trouble at the end of this labyrinth. But nor did he have any desire to answer the night manager’s questions, or placate his fears. If the brandy was keeping him quiet and putting one foot in front of the other, the valet supposed that was sufficient.
As they neared the source of the light, it became clear that it was shining through an ornate arch, much larger than the passage they were travelling along. Indeed, as he looked, the valet could see that the walls and ceiling were now tapering gently outwards, widening the corridor in a way that was extremely disorientating. Stoker stumbled, yet again, and the valet gripped the man’s shoulder and righted him. The night manager murmured thanks, and they pressed on, until they walked under the towering arch, and entered hell.
The arch opened into a square cavern, lit on each side by pairs of two flaming torches. The lower walls were covered in carvings: gargoyle faces, humanoid figures and long rows of text, chipped out of the stone in a language the valet had never seen before. On a stone slab in the middle, her arms and legs bound with rope, her skin so pale it was almost translucent, was a girl.
“That’s her,” whispered Stoker. “Jenny Pembry.”
Van Helsing quickly crossed the room and began examining the girl, while Stoker and the valet stood frozen under the arch, taking in the horror that surrounded them.
In the four corners of the room were the missing employees of the Lyceum theatre.
To their left was the trumpet player, the fraying remains of his dinner suit hanging from his decaying corpse, which had been propped against the stone corner. His legs and arms were missing, and the skin that remained on his face was a green so dark it was closer to black. Stoker turned back into the passage and retched, his hands on his knees, while the valet approached the body. As he neared it, he saw pages of sheet music had been crammed into the dead man’s mouth.
In the next corner was the understudy, clad in what remained of her Queen Titania costume. Her tiara, rough metal painted gold, shone horribly above the decomposing flesh of her face. Her legs had also been removed and her ballet shoes placed on the floor before the ragged stumps, a practical joke of vicious cruelty.