The Whitechapel Vampire

By Alex O'Connell

If William Shakespeare was alive today he would be writing vampire fiction. But he isn’t, so Alex O’Connell saw the gap in the market and jumped in without thinking...

A serial killer is at large on the squalid streets of Victorian London. He strikes only at night, causing horrendous mutilation to his victims’ throats and leaves them drained of blood before disappearing into the shadows. There can be only one logical hypothesis – a predatory vampire is marking his territory (surprisingly there remain one or two academics who are not yet fully persuaded by this theory).

Dare you join legendary Scotland Yard detective Frederick Abberline and his friend the Irish novelist Bram Stoker, abetted by the World Heavyweight Champion John L Sullivan as they hunt the diabolical fiend defecated from the very bowels of Hell, a monster known through the ages as... Jack the Ripper?

The Whitechapel Vampire features interludes from genuine contemporary newspaper reports to put the story in its proper historical context, as well as extensive appendices. What’s not to love? ...And it’s cheap too.

‘O’Connell’s my kinda guy. I’d fix him a Daiquiri and take him marlin fishing. I could listen to those vampire stories of his for hours... well until about 9ish. After that I get a bit tired.’ Ernest Hemingway.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex O'Connell
• Release date: Sep 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465771391

Alex O'Connell

By day Lexi enjoys fitness, yoga and hiking, but when night falls, the dark side of her imagination unfurls. Inspired by her past experiences, Lexi loves getting lost in creating exciting fictional characters in very exciting and steamy romance stories. She enjoys putting her own emotions and fantasies into her work so others can relate and enjoy.

Book preview

Chapter One

The Vampire’s Kiss

On days like this Albert Williams felt very old. But as the only viable alternative he had so far come up with was death, he had decided to stick it out. As shipping agent of the Black Swan Line it was his responsibility to account for the cargo and the one or two passengers accompanying it. It had been a long day and he would have rather been anywhere than walking up the gangway of the SS Saint Ekaterina. The two and a half thousand ton clipper had arrived in Bristol docks from Odessa barely an hour before and he was not expecting to be home this side of midnight.

As he boarded the ship Williams suddenly jerked. A hand gripped his shoulder so tightly that it could easily have been mistaken for a common assault. He spun round, fists clenched and jaw set for the impending confrontation. The hand was not shaken free, the grip was merely adjusted for Williams’ shifting position.

‘What the hell…’ he spat but was immediately stopped in his tracks. His voice was no longer his own, his mind instantly under the control of the tall man whose eyes seemed to flash an intense flaming scarlet beneath the cowl-like hood of his dark grey mantle. The man spoke directly to the core of Williams’ being. He felt rather than heard it. In his brain? In the pit of his stomach? He couldn’t be sure. It seemed more of an animalistic compulsion rather than a conscious, rational process. What he did know was that he had never experienced anything with such piercing, intensely brilliant clarity. The man’s voice was barely audible to him and he had no idea what accent he spoke with, if any, or the intonation he used.

‘You will journey to London. Now. And arrange lodgings for me.’ It was more than an instruction, more than a command; it was a statement of absolute fact.

‘Yes’ there could be no other response. ‘I’ll leave now. The finest mansion in Mayfair…’

‘No. That is not what I require. Something simple. Among the people who come alive at night. The common people. The whores on the street; the children in the gutter; the drunks in the tavern. Somewhere in the East End. Whitechapel perhaps. Go now.’ He released his grip at last and Williams was dismissed with an imperative flick of the wrist.

‘Return to me at this time on Friday – I will wait for you… there.’ He cast his eyes around and pointed at a seedy dockside inn nestling in the shadows. ‘You will not fail me.’

Nothing else now mattered to Williams. Not his duties, neither his wife nor children, not his home. This given task was now his sole reason for being and he set about it like a relentless automaton.

***

The rain had cleared but the damp seemed to hang in the air like a shroud over the bustling figures going about their business, some legitimate, others less so, on the dockside. The nameless young woman had been waiting for the passengers and crew to disembark for what seemed like hours. She had staked her claim to a position alongside the other girls looking to earn a living that night. She had been pretty once, maybe even beautiful but her twenty two years had worn heavily on her, as had the laudanum when she could afford it and the gin when she could not, and she now could have passed for a careworn forty.

She saw him first in the twilight, atop the gangway, seemingly giving orders to the man in the smart business suit. He was tall and imposing; his mantle pulled across him against the Autumnal chill, the hood pulled low, leaving his face cast in shadows.

She was determined to make him her first customer of the night but didn’t really know why. It was madness, she knew, to be back on the streets so soon after the birth of her daughter but her rent was almost three weeks in arrears and the landlords of Bristol were not famed for their forgiving nature. She and the child would be both sleeping on the street by the weekend if she could not make at least a token payment. That could not be tolerated. There may no longer be hope for her but there had to be for the girl. There had to be.

Business had been deathly quiet for many weeks since she began to show and although just one or two men actually seemed to prefer her in that condition it was not enough to compensate. Now her belly was empty, if not actually yet flat again, she was hoping that she would at least be able to make a living again.

His business concluded, the man walked down the gangplank and she sidled up to him discreetly to spare him embarrassment and she made her offer unemotionally, in as businesslike a way as she could manage, asking twice the amount she would be happy to agree to after the usual negotiations.

He spoke impeccable English but it was heavily inflected with the deep, sonorous tones of his Eastern European motherland. Looking into washed out blue eyes, he simply said ‘Yes’ and took control of her mind. She could barely make out his eyes below the cowl but she saw that he was dark and almost handsome in the rugged, unshaven way of sea travellers. His canine teeth, descending below his bottom lip, gleamed white and looked exceedingly sharp. But that barely registered with her. This was an age where physical abnormality was, if not actually the norm, then at least far from uncommon and many worse disfigurements than his passed without notice or comment.

She didn’t want him in her room – the child in her makeshift box cot was bound to be disturbed by the sound of their rutting. Her sleep had been fitful anyway, but the woman really had no choice. Her single room, in a squalid slum tenement along a dirty, unlit side street no more than a hurried stroll from the docks, served as living room, bedroom, lavatory and bathroom for both her and her new daughter. The unhealthy smell of rising damp immediately struck the man as they entered, his senses being more acute than those of humans but he chose to ignore it. God knows, he thought, what creatures occupy the travesty that passed for a bed with the whore but he had slept in worse. In the half light she unnecessarily urged him to be quiet and she began to undress but he restrained her. He was hungry, not aroused. The days on the ship, when he had fought to control his blood lust had seemed an eternity and now the hunger had to be satiated. He held her wrists firmly but not too hard and his eyes flashed from black to red as he took her gaze and entered her mind.

There were no words, just a warm but inarticulate feeling of contentment and wellbeing as he bent and caressed her neck with his vampire’s kiss. She felt no pain as his fangs sank into her jugular vein.

For a moment, a brief fleeting moment, she was beautiful again.

Taking almost five pints in a single draught, he felt her vitality course through his body and felt truly strong again for the first time in a long time. He was becoming powerful once again. When he had drunk his fill, he stopped her barely beating heart and laid her anaemic, exsanguinated corpse gently on the floor.

***

The single candle barely illuminated the woman’s shabby dockside lodging room, casting long and menacing shadows through the myriad dust motes that meandered inexorably through the ether. The faint light barely reached the man as he cradled the baby gently in his arms. As he rocked her soothingly he sang, in a quiet, rich voice just for her, the rhyme from his native land that he had sung to pretty little Ruxandra, to Mircea, even to Miloş, in their nursery, so much more salubrious than this, many years before. He felt a strange and disconcerting warmth infuse his chest when he thought of Mircea. Was it an affection he thought dead long ago? Was it bile and indigestion from his meal? He managed a half smile.

Podul de piatră s-a dărâmat

A venit apa şi l-a luat

Vom face altul pe riu, în jos

Altul mai trainic şi mai frumos.

Vom face altul pe riu, în jos

Altul mai trainic şi mai frumos.

[See Appendix 2]

The child, no more than a few days old, gurgled contentedly at the man. He had not disturbed her greatly when he killed her mother and the blood congealing on his lips did not mean anything to her. He had no need to enter her mind as he had done to the woman just minutes before. The child’s was too embryonic, too young, too innocent and so it would always remain.

The man, whom we shall call Jack, smiled at the child with genuine affection and she returned his gaze with an unthinking infant determination. He bent to kiss her too and lovingly, and oh so gently, he ripped out her throat and swallowed her soul.

Chapter Two

The Clockmaker and the Theatrical

As Jack lay in the whore’s foetid bed, the moth eaten curtains of the squalid room tightly drawn to block out the fading vestiges of the weak sunlight that was anathema to him, some one hundred and twenty miles east, in London, capital of Empire, the clockmaker was intent on his work. Spread out before him, on a white cloth covering his dining room table, were the dismembered guts of an expensive gilded carriage clock. He examined the clockwork mechanism piece by piece, cleaning and applying the occasional drop of oil where necessary to the ratchets, the ratio wheel and the hammer heads.

The clockmaker, whose name was Frederick Abberline, wore his forty five years gracefully despite the heavy demands placed on him as an Inspector First Class in London’s Metropolitan Police Force. The detective’s star was burning brightly, even among the stellar luminaries that inhabited the dark and winding corridors of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department. And these were exciting times for the CID. The Department had been in existence for ten years now and just a few months earlier it had been manumitted from the shackles of the Force’s political masters and was now firmly ensconced within the aegis of the Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren. Great things were in the offing for the Department and its detectives.

Looking down on the intricate metal pieces arrayed before him, Abberline stroked his thick moustache ruminatively and ran both hands through his lustrous mutton-chop sideburns. He pushed forward his thinning hair, subconsciously trying in vain to conceal the ever expanding pate that he continued to deny – the eternal triumph of denial over the obvious. He allowed himself the luxury of letting his mind wander. It took him back to a time before he succumbed to the garish pleasures of the big city and the excitement of his second career. It took him back to his clock making apprenticeship in rustic Wessex and from there, further back, to his childhood in the parochial Dorset market town of Blandford Forum.

For a few blissful and much treasured minutes he was seven years old again reliving the never ending innocent summertime of his callow youth. Running through the rolling hills of Cranborne Chase; playing shove halfpenny with his friends outside the Corn Exchange; swimming in the river and smearing himself in mud to avoid the incessant bite of the Blandford Fly. Good, good times. It seemed so long ago now. Why couldn’t his idyll have lasted for ever?

It was well and truly broken now. Abberline was aroused from his reverie by a commotion outside his room and the door was pushed urgently open and the clockmaker’s wife Emma, clearly more than a little flustered, hurried in.

‘Frederick dear, it’s Mr Stoker here to see you. He seems a little… disturbed.’ She chose the word carefully and as diplomatically as she could manage extempore.

‘Too right, I’m disturbed.’ There was high excitement in his normally lilting Irish brogue and Stoker unceremoniously and none too gently, pushed past Emma into the room, closely followed by Bendigo, his brindle Staffordshire Bull Terrier, forty two pounds of rippling muscle and saliva soaked fang-like teeth. Abberline had never trusted that dog – bull fighting and bear baiting had been outlawed in England nearly sixty years before but no one seemed to have told Bendigo and his hunter’s spirit was forever undimmed. As the dog’s demeanour was clearly being affected by that of his master. Abberline intended to give it a very wide berth.

‘I’ll leave you two to chat’ Emma said and left, shutting the door behind her. Abberline was in continual admiration of her patience and stoicism.

With the resonant burr of his West Country accent Abberline said ‘Come in, come in, Abraham. It’s been a long time. Don’t stand on ceremony.’ Abberline could wield irony like a stiletto blade but he had been worried about his friend. For some months now he had had neither sight nor sound of him. ‘The great Sir Henry seems to have worked you into something of a state…’

‘It’s not Irving, not the theatre’ stormed Stoker, spittle dripping onto the ginger tinges of his beard. ‘And don’t call me Abraham – you sound like my mother. It’s Bram, BRAM’ he emphasised, ‘or Stoker, as well you know.’ He paused, trying in to regain a little of his composure and failing completely.

Stoker’s excitement seemed to be reaching a fever pitch. Abberline had never seen him like this before and he was becoming worried.

‘Well sit down, won’t you, Bram? And take a brandy with me.’ He stood and ushered his guest into a chair, taking care to keep out of Bendigo’s reach. At the sideboard, Abberline poured two good sized measures and passed one to Stoker who drank it with a grimace, without pausing for breath and handed the empty glass back to Abberline who, taking the none too subtle hint, refilled it with a yet more generous measure for Stoker before retaking his own seat.

‘Well if it’s not work, Bram, what ever is the matter?’ Abberline knew only too well that Stoker’s relationship with his employer, the superstar of the London stage, Sir Henry Irving, proprietor of the Lyceum Theatre in the West End, was stormy at best, tempestuous at worst. Irving had a reputation for not suffering fools, or indeed anyone professing some greater or lesser degree of wisdom, gladly.

‘I’ve been away. Out of the country, researching my next book. And I’ve got information. Dreadful things are about to happen. Dreadful’ he paused over the word for a moment and continued ‘Here. Now!’

A third large brandy was beginning to settle him at least a little. ‘He… he is coming here.’ He stressed the last word heavily.

‘Start at the beginning, Bram. Take it slowly.’ Abberline was well used to interrogating witnesses and knew how to draw information from them. He had no little skill. With a supreme effort of self control, Stoker complied. His mood carried over to Bendigo, who for the first time sat quietly and watched the men with a diligent intelligence.

‘You know that for a long time now I have had an interest in the arcane. The occult if you like.’ Abberline nodded, he had never encouraged his oldest friend to travel along such illicit highways but was too fond of Stoker to criticise him overtly.

‘I’ve heard many stories of creatures… of vampires. You know the word, Frederick?’

‘You mean the bats? The one’s that feed on blood? From the Americas?’

‘No, no, man. Well yes, there are those too. But I mean monsters. Real monsters. Men that were once alive like you and me but are now un-dead, or more accurately ab-dead. They suck the living blood out of us. Bleed us dry, taking our lives our souls.’

Although Abberline could see that he clearly was, he had to ask the question. ‘You are serious, Bram, aren’t you?’

Stoker nodded. ‘Deathly. There have been stories of such creatures throughout the ages. In every culture. I’ve been reading them for years. Old van Helsing, the mad professor from Amsterdam, you know him?’ Abberline did not. ‘No? Of course you don’t. Well he put me on the trail of this one. The worst. Try as I might, I could never find out his real name, to me he was always just Jack. But God knows, I followed his trail. Blood, carnage, death. Like nothing you could ever imagine. All through Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, the Ukraine. I could never catch him. I lost his scent in the Ukraine but then I caught a lucky break. I paid informants and eventually there were reports of him leaving the country. It seems he bought passage from Odessa and, you know where he’s bound, Frederick? You know?’

Abberline had a sinking feeling that he really did know but still he shook his head. Must be a brain fever. Stoker’s contracted some strange, foreign disease of the mind he reasoned.

‘Here!’ Stoker was almost maniacally triumphant now. ‘He’s coming here. His ship was bound for Bristol but he’ll not stay there long. It’s London that’ll be drawing him This damned, filthy city of ours would be his idea of Heaven. One big feeding trough.’

‘But, Abraham,’ Abberline immediately corrected himself, ‘Bram, surely you realise how… implausible this all sounds?’ He tried to sound balanced, objective in the face of the fantasy that Stoker was expounding.

But for the writer, it was no longer a matter of reason, like his Church of Ireland Protestantism, it had become now a matter of faith. ‘He’s like the Devil, Abberline’ Stoker choked over the words. ‘He’s real. And your disbelief just feeds him. It is his greatest advantage over you; his strength and his shield. He’ll hide behind it and he’ll strike from the shadows. And he’s as dark and vicious as Hell.’

‘But, damn it, man’ countered Abberline, unable restrain himself any longer. ‘We live in an age of reason, an age of enlightenment. This is 1888, man, we’re nearly in the twentieth century for Heaven’s sake – it’s the time of science now. Superstitions like these fade in the light of science and dissipate. There are no shadows left anymore, Abraham.’

‘He eats people, Frederick’ Stoker said the words coldly, deliberately. ‘He takes control of their mind and eats them. Drinks their blood. Can you imagine that? I’ve seen it and I’ve warned you. If he’s not here already, he’s coming. And it’ll be you that’ll be sent to pick up the pieces. You know that.’ Abberline felt Stoker’s excitement rising again. ‘And when you are, my old friend, call for me. I have knowledge that we can use. I’ll be waiting for you.’

Stoker knew that for the detective, grounded as he was in logic and empirical reason, to believe, to really and unequivocally believe, he would have to see with his own eyes. Like Doubting Thomas. He wished, with all his heart, that he could spare his friend the unspeakable terrors that caused him to wake screaming each night, bathed in a cold, clammy sweat. But he knew he could not.

The theatrical clicked his tongue and inclined his head, summoning Bendigo, who was at once at his side. ‘We’ll take our leave, Frederick. I didn’t expect you to believe all this. Not a first blush. But you will. You know where to find me. Come on, boy’ he issued to Bendigo. ‘I bid you good night.’ He placed his hand briefly but affectionately on Abberline’s shoulder and the clockmaker’s eyes returned to the guts of the mechanism on the table. He could not meet Stoker’s gaze.

Abberline was too unsettled to accompany Stoker to the door and as it closed, with a rough slam, he sat in quiet contemplation.

‘Good night, Abraham’ the clockmaker said quietly and returned to his work.

Chapter Three

London, a Pilgrimage [See Appendix 3]

‘Invite me in’ came the command.

Albert Williams was unsure where the form of words came from, they just seemed to appear in his mind, ‘Enter freely and by your own will.’ He stood aside to allow Jack to enter.

‘I have taken it for six months. It was all I could afford. Will it suffice, Master?’

For so many years past Jack had lived in luxury and it no longer held any attractions for him. He had acquired vast sums of money that he used sparingly, spending only what was necessary, when it was necessary. In various names he was the largest private depositor at Coutts & Co in London, Berenberg in Hamburg and Wegelin & Co in St Gallen. And these holdings were far from the sum of his wealth.

This house was dirty, unkempt, soiled. It was set in the squalor of the slums on the eastern side of Wentworth Street in London’s Whitechapel. The road ran from Brick Lane to Middlesex Street, along the boundary of Spitalfields and St Mary’s Whitechapel. Busy during the day with the overspill from the market at Petticoat Lane, at night it disgorged from its cankerous underbelly legions of whores, thieves, burglars, sadists and the mentally incapable. The western side of the street fell within the poor Jewish quarter and as such it was insular, shunned by some, avoided by all.

It would indeed suffice.

The vampire sniffed the air. The acrid co-mingling of sweat, sewage and the rotting corpse of a cat were intense to him but not totally unpleasant. Over the years he had become inured to the heady stench of the grave.

Jack looked through the murky twilight towards the people congregating outside the shabby Princess Alice tavern. He might have thought of them as victims but he did not. To him they were a resource. They were food.

A number of people stood so deeply in the shadows that it was difficult even for Jack’s acute vision to pick them out. What struck him in their faces was the appalling lack of hope, a quality he always admired in his prey.

Two men stood under the ancient cocked hat and epaulettes, trophies of some long forgotten military campaign, that served as the inn’s sign. The smaller man with blond curls exploding out of his ill fitting cap cast a cautious look over his shoulder. Planning some nefarious business no doubt, Jack concluded, as they waited to enter the tavern

The landlord’s servant, a tall, good looking black man went about his work wiping dishes, with a cloth that might have been clean once but not within living memory, his shoulders deeply stooped under the burden of a lifetime of unwarranted insults and prejudice. Down from him sat a young Jewish man, trying hard to look like an old Jewish man. His fingers interlaced, thick black coat drawn tightly across him to keep out the chill, almost covering the leather apron he wore. His quick, keen eyes were surveying the scene before him almost as intently as Jack’s were. The boots that he had been mending were lying at his feet and his cauldron sat at his feet but there were no customers for the cold pottage he hoped to sell.

And then there were the children. An infant cradled less than lovingly in its mother’s arms as if it were a burden to be borne. Another, dressed in the barest of rags, crawled unwatched through the filth in the gutter. One perched carelessly on his grandfather’s lap as the old man gave in to sleep. Saddest, most pathos inducing of all, was the sickly, gaunt faced baby, clutched by his emaciated sister, not really very much older herself. They stared sadly at nothing in particular. It is as if they sat waiting for Death to embrace them as inevitably He will, if they just wait there a little longer. The girl turned her head, looked directly at Jack and nodded once, slowly and deliberately to acknowledge him. He returned her greeting a fleeting smile playing across his full red lips and the moonlight caught his fangs and, just for an instant, they gleamed like polished ivory. It was a small thing of beauty.

There were older children as well but they too were joyless, beaten and defeated despite their tender years. A small boy, undernourished and tired, his back to Jack, held a hoop, his only toy, but he made no attempt to play with it. Four more sat around a large, thin dog, gaining some comfort from its mere presence but not petting it. An undersized girl looked on, her faced haggard, exhausted after too long a day in the oppressive heat of the bell foundry.

But the faces that most captivated Jack were the two looking out from the windows of the lodging rooms above the inn. Two women waiting, like him for the night, for that is when they ply their trades on the street, sell their wares. The pretty girl, long blonde hair falling over her shoulders, rested her head on her hands. She could be no older than fifteen. Her shawl draped out the window, about to fall, she looked disconsolate. Despairing. To her right, Jack could barely discern the other woman, the one at the next window. At 43 she was much older than the blonde girl and she stared impassively out into the night and away from Jack. Her name was Mary Ann Nichols but she liked to be called Polly.

Yes, thought Jack. This place would suffice. These people, they would suffice too.

***

The London that Jack came to was the glorious capital of a ‘greatest’ Empire the world had yet seen, the Empire on which the sun would never set, the Empire that turned the map pink and extended from Canada to Australia, from South Africa to Singapore, from Guyana to India. All ruled over by a benevolent if mad Empress who had been in mourning for her lost love for almost 27 years.

It was a city of advancement and of wonder. Only a few years before the treasures of Empire and industrial progress where brought together in Paxton’s secular cathedral that became known as the Crystal Palace. The coming of the railways opened up the country and made the capital accessible to many more than it had ever been before; trade and wealth came in its wake.

A nation’s pride was forged in the hell-hot crucibles of Trafalgar and Waterloo and tyrants were vanquished. Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police had brought public order and civic safety; Sir Rowland Hill’s penny post had revolutionised mass communications.

Bazalgette’s civil engineering genius turned London’s new sewerage system into one of the wonders of the modern world and sounded the death knell for cholera in many areas. London was at the cutting edge of medical science and was in the vanguard of countless medical advances.

So many wonderful buildings were erected: the mother of all