Varney versus Spring-heel Jack 28: June 1888.

Twenty-Eight: June 1888.

It was done. The lifeless body of Tristram Brackley flopped down as Varney let it go. He had risen from his prone position, carrying the dying man with him, as he sought a better position to drain him of his vital fluid. Now he stepped back and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, smacking his lips in a grotesque parody of satisfaction.

‘By God, that feels better,’ he said with relish. It was his little joke: if there was a God, then he had deserted Sir Francis Varney many years before.

The dead man looked like a child’s rag doll as he sprawled at a bizarre angle across the counterpane. There were small stains of red that soaked in to the material beneath him, but the relative cleanliness of the bed bespoke of nothing so much as the appetite and efficiency of the undead fiend who gave him only the most cursory of looks.

‘Sorry I had to kill you off, old boy,’ Varney said with a grim twinkle, ‘but the fact is that I really rather needed that. Anyway, the idea of you running around in that bloody dress sodomising boys before sucking them and turning them into your acolytes is just not on. It’s the sort of thing that gives us a bad name. Well, a worse one.’

Varney looked around the room for an exit he could use without too much notice. A window would do: walls and the perpendicular presented him with no great problem. He could hardly go back through the apartment: too easy then for someone to discover Brackley before he had a chance to put some distance between himself and this place. Not that the men in the other room would present too much of a problem: it was just that he had plans for the rest of the evening, and time was always far too short for any kind of delay.

Unfortunately, Brackley had taken him into a bedroom that had no walls, and no other door other than back the way he had come. To make matters a little more inconvenient, he had obviously crated more noise in feeding off Brackley than he had intended, for now that he had finished, and had time to step back and take note, he could hear that the hubbub in the next room had subsided. Shuffling of chairs, murmurings, and then a hammering at the door.

‘Tristram – are you all right?’ A stentorian voice.

‘Dearheart, speak up, pray do.’ A more fey tone.

Sir Francis sighed. ‘This is going to be messy, and I don’t have time,’ he grumbled, before throwing open the door, and stepping back so that those outside could take in what had occurred.

There was a shocked silence. Partly because the sight of death was not what they had expected, and its full import was terrible in its aspect. But partly, perhaps, because the actions of a murderer – particularly one caught in such flagrante – were not generally assumed to be on such blasé and devil-may-care lines. It was debatable which was more shocking: the sight of the corpse on the bed, or the manner in which the old man responsible – whose age and stature made such actions almost unbelievable – stood back as if inviting them to inspect his handiwork.

‘You blackguard,’ hissed the florid owner of the stentorian tones. He was not, unsurprisingly, one of the mollys, but rather a middle-aged gentleman in a dark lounge suit.

‘How could he do that?’ The owner of the fey voice took an involuntary and fascinated step into the room, skirts rustling. ‘There’s nothing of him,’ he added, sizing up Varney.

The old man pulled a fob-watch from his cape and, looking at it, sighed.

‘Gentlemen, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. But prey make up your minds, as I am in some hurry…’