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Chapter 8

THE LYCEUM INCIDENT, PART II

BENEATH THE LYCEUM THEATRE, LONDON 3^rd 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. Her eyes were gone, although the valet could not tell whether this had been deliberate or the inevitable consequence of her final resting place.

In the final two corners were the missing chorus girls, arranged so they faced each other. They were less decayed than the others, and their death agonies were still visible on their faces, their teeth bared, their eyes wide. Both girls were naked, their torsos grotesque patchworks of cuts and stitches, done with what the valet realised to his horror were pieces of horse gut from a violin bow that lay between them. They were horribly, unnaturally pale, their veins invisible.

All four of the bodies, the valet realised, had a pair of ragged puncture wounds on their necks.

“She’s still alive,” said Van Helsing.

At his master’s voice the valet turned away from the horrible fates that had befallen the chorus girls and approached the altar. Stoker followed, unsteady on his feet.

On the slab, Jenny Pembry was barely conscious, moaning and turning gently against the ropes that held her fast. The valet pulled his knife from his belt and sliced through the ropes. Van Helsing gently lifted the girl down and passed her to Stoker, who held her at arm’s length, his face blank with terror.

“Hold her, damn you!” barked Van Helsing. Stoker flinched and drew the chorus girl tight against him.

“She’s been bled almost dry,” Van Helsing told the valet. “Recently, too. The jugular blood is still warm.”

“Where’s the conductor?” asked the valet, his voice low.

“I don’t know,” replied Van Helsing. “If he’s in one of other tunnels we will need more light, and many more men. If he’s—”

A drop of blood landed on the valet’s shoulder.

The valet examined the dark material of his jacket, then slowly both men looked up into the roof of the cavern.

Harold Norris hung upside down from the stone roof of the chamber, twenty feet or more above them, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes closed, like a grotesquely swollen bat. His mouth and chin were dark with Jenny Pembry’s blood and as the three men stared upwards, drops of crimson fell softly on to the dusty floor between them.

“Be absolutely quiet,” whispered Van Helsing. “We must not wake him.”

“What… what has happened to him?” asked Stoker, his whisper slurred by alcohol.

“There is not sufficient time to explain it to you now. We must leave here at once, and return better prepared. We are no match for him if he wakes.”

The valet was still looking up at the conductor. The face that hung above him was gentle, kind even, lined with wrinkles and topped with a mane of grey hair. Norris was wearing his evening suit, the jacket spreading out around him like wings, the white collars of his shirt stained brown with blood.

“Boy!” hissed Van Helsing.

The valet looked around, shaken from his thoughts. His master and the night manager were standing under the great arch that led into the chamber, waiting for him. He crossed the cavern slowly, anxious not to make any sound that might awake the sleeping monster swaying gently above his head. He had almost reached his companions when Stoker, his eyes wide with fear and incomprehension, turned and ran down the passage.

He made it only two steps before a stone slab shifted beneath him and he pitched sideways. Van Helsing made a futile grab for his jacket but gripped only air. The night manager thumped into the wall of the corridor, which collapsed around him in a shower of rubble and a great cloud of choking dust. And in the roof of the cavern, Harold Norris opened his crimson eyes and let out a deep, animal growl.

The conductor was upon them before any of the men had chance to react. He fell like a dead weight into the middle of the cavern, pivoting impossibly barely inches from the ground to land in a deep crouch. He burst forward from this position with dizzying speed, crossing the distance to the arch in the blink of an eye, barrelling into them like a snarling hurricane. He gripped Van Helsing around the throat, and threw the old man into the middle of the chamber. Van Helsing crashed to the floor, skidded into the side of the altar, and lay still. The valet made to pull his hand from his pocket, but was much, much too slow. The conductor descended on him, a dark thing from hell, his eyes a deep red flecked with black and silver, his face splashed with Jenny Pembry’s blood, two long fangs standing out from his mouth.

The valet felt himself lifted from his feet and then he was in motion, soaring through the air into the cavern. He saw his master lying below him, blood pooling beneath his head, and had time to regard the onrushing stone wall with something approaching dispassion.

I’m going to hit that, he had time to think.

And then he did.

Stoker lay among the crumbled stone of the wall. His back was agony where he had fallen across the section of the wall that had remained standing, and his nose and mouth were thick with foul-tasting dust. He felt hands reach through the hole in the wall and grasp the lapels of his tunic, and breathed a sigh of relief as he was pulled forward into the passage. Then the dust cleared and he found himself looking into the smiling, inhuman face of Harold Norris and he threw back his head and screamed.

“Quiet your screeching, you drunken wretch,” hissed the conductor. Stoker was horrified to hear that this monster spoke in the same gentle voice that Norris had used night after night to conduct his players. “If I tear the tongue from your head, you will wish you had done as I say.”

Stoker forced himself to stop screaming, clenching his teeth together, even though the face inches from his own made him feel as though he were teetering on the edge of madness. He forced himself to speak, to say something, anything that might see him escape the same fate that had befallen the others who had found themselves in this old place of dust and death.

“Harold… it’s me, Bram. Don’t hurt me, please. Please.”

The conductor laughed and opened his mouth to reply when his eyes suddenly snapped wide and a sharp wooden point emerged through the fabric of his dress shirt. Norris looked down for a fraction of a second before he exploded in a fountain of blood, spraying the night manager from head to toe and covering the cloak and hat of the valet who was standing where the conductor had been, his arm thrust forward, the hand at the end of it clutching a pointed wooden stake.

“What should be done with him?”

“I don’t know, exactly. It is possible he will not remember any of this.”

“Is that a chance we can afford to take?”

Van Helsing and the valet sat in a dark booth in the corner of the Lyceum Tavern, deep glasses of brandy on the table before them. The valet had supported Stoker, and dragged him back through the tunnels and out into the orchestra pit, while Van Helsing did the same for Jenny Pembry. The valet had collapsed the passage before climbing the ladder out of the ground for the final time.

It had been slow going; Van Helsing had received a deep cut to his head when he collided with the altar stone, and he needed to stop twice to rest on the journey back to the surface. Thankfully, the chorus girl was mercifully light and although she seemed almost catatonic she had been capable of putting one foot in front of the other.

They had put her in a carriage and instructed the driver to deliver her to the house of a physician friend of the Professor’s, with a note Van Helsing had scrawled on the back of a discarded programme for the evening’s performance of The Tempest.

The night manager had mumbled and muttered to himself as they hauled him back through the stone corridors, and was now sitting between them on a red leather bench, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling steadily as he slept.

“You realise what this means, boy?” asked Van Helsing.

“Yes, master. I do.”

“It means that Transylvania was not the end of this business.”

The valet said nothing.

“You played your part extremely well tonight,” Van Helsing continued. “Without you, this matter may have ended very differently.”

The valet watched as his master’s lined, weathered face broke into a rare smile.

“It is possible,” he continued, “that we may make more of you than just a valet, Carpenter.”