Dolly Biters - The Vampire Girls of Victorian London E-Book

Paul Voodini

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Welcome to the Gothic London of the 1800's.

These saucy tales quicken the pulse, thrill the mind and excite parts of the body that other, lesser books fail to reach.

Novellas and short stories featured in this sweet confection of blood, sex and gothic melodrama include Holmes of the Baskervilles, Miss Katie Bell - Victorian Vampire, Joan Dark is Lost, and The Vampire Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Here, vampires walk the streets and your favorite characters from Victorian literature are twisted until they snap.

This book contains adult content and is not recommended for readers under the age of 18.

Leseprobe

Dolly Biters!

The Vampire Girls of Victorian London

Paul Voodini

Copyright (C) 2015 Paul Voodini

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2019 Next Chapter

Published 2019 by Next Chapter

Cover art byhttp://www.thecovercollection.com/

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll was originally published in book form in 1872.

Many thanks to the following people whose belief and support made Dolly Biters possible! Luis Garcia, Jim Kleefeld, Aya, Jens Christian Rasch, Paul Noffsinger, Phineas Lane,William Gunderson

For all you little fingersmiths, in all your little bedrooms, all busy exploring your magical kingdoms.

Don't Dilly Dally On The Way (The Dolly Biters' Song)

by Charles Collins and Fred W. Leigh, written in 1901

My old man said “Hop on the tram[1],

and don't dilly dally [2] on the way!”

Off went the tram with my old man in it,

but I was too slow and I didn't catch it!

I dillied and dallied, dallied and I dillied,

Lost my way from Whitechapel to Bow [3]!

Oh you can't trust those Dollies [4] and their Hounslow Heath [5]

when you can't find your way home!

[1] Horse drawn and later electrical trams ran in London from 1860 until 1952.

[2] To 'dilly and dally' is an English expression which means to be slow, to dawdle, to be easily distracted.

[3] The Whitechapel to Bow horse-drawn tramway ran from 1870.

[4] 'Dollies' or 'Dolly Biters' was London slang for working class female vampires who lived in the East End of London, predominantly Whitechapel and Spitalfields.

[5] 'Hounslow Heath' is Cockney rhyming slang for teeth, and in this case is referencing the sharp teeth of the vampires, the 'Dolly Biters'. Humans tended to believe that they couldn't trust vampires, and that the lost or the unwary wandering the streets of the East End of London were likely to fall prey to vampires. Despite it being illegal for vampires to harm or kill humans, many humans believed that such laws were regularly broken and the crimes left unsolved by a police force unwilling to enter the dark maze of streets and alleyways that made up the East End in the mid-to-late 1800s.

…female children fall victims to the gross passions of natural-born vampires, when their tender age would have seemed to have put such dangers out of their way. When human girls and vampire men are thrown promiscuously together, do you wonder that so many 'Dolly Biters' walk the streets of the East End at night…

Thomas Beames, The Vampire Rookeries of London, 1852. This book was banned in the United Kingdom until 1931, the ban being overturned once official sources reported that the last living 'turned' vampire had been burned at the stake in the grounds of Holloway Prison, London.

Introduction – Exhuming the Crypt

That vampires once existed in the London of the 18th and 19th Centuries is not in question. After all, it is this knowledge that has brought you here, to these streets, filled with fog and gas-lamps and alluring women with teeth too sharp and manners too coarse to belong anywhere else but in the old East End of London.

The streets that you are about to walk are streets that you will not recognise. They are not the Victorian streets of Christmas cards and biscuit tins and cosy televisual costume dramas. These streets are dangerous and dirty; they are filled with shit and shadows and at any moment, out of these shadows, death could appear in the guise of a thug's bludgeon or a prostitute's syphilis or a vampire's teeth. The truth of the matter, and it's a truth that you may already suspect, is that the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields were far more dangerous than you will ever truly comprehend. The average life expectancy in the East End of London was the mid-twenties (it was an extravagant mid-forties in wealthier areas such as Chelsea), with half of all children dying before they reached their tenth birthday. It was in this atmosphere that the vampires of Victorian London operated with all-but impunity. Death surrounded the mortals, and if it wasn't one thing that got you, well, it would be the other.

To the vampire girls of Victorian London, we soft, weak humans were nothing but food, to be preyed upon and taken at leisure. We may thank our Gods (should we have cause to believe in such fancies) that we live now in the 21st Century, and not in the 1800s. For if this were the 1800s we would by now, undoubtedly, be dead.

So enjoy these tales, these macabre tales of death and murder and lesbian sex. Slaver over them, let them haunt your sleep and benumb your waking day. Laugh and curse and thrill along with our dark heroines, safe and secure in the knowledge that if these girls still lived, if our paths should ever cross, they would despise us, spit in our face, and then feast upon our blood.

If my words seem harsh, then understand this: I only wish to impress upon you the dangerous times we are about to travel to, so you are prepared, so you are not shocked when you come face to face with the sheer depravity of their world and come running back to me, whining that I had not warned you sufficiently of the depths that you have been dragged down to. I have warned you. I have done my job. Now you may close this book and leave, or you may take my hand and let me lead you, safely through the medium of the printed word, into the vampire-infested streets of Victorian London. That choice is yours, and remember, you make it freely.

Paul Voodini, 2015.

Book 1 - The Holmes of the Baskervilles

or the Fall & Rise & Fall Again of the Celebrated Heiress Miss Irene Adler, Lesbian Vampire, Dolly Biter, and Infamous Trollop

London, 1866

The Royal Aeronautical Society is formed.

A cholera epidemic causes 5,000 deaths.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson opens the St. Mary's Dispensary where women could seek medical advice from solely female practitioners.

Cadbury's first sell cocoa for drinking.

The General Post Office writes to all householders urging those without a front door letterbox to provide one.

Demonstrations in Hyde Park in favour of parliamentary reform turn violent.

HG Wells and Beatrix Potter are born.

Prologue: City of Dreadful Night

London, 20??

The door opens and I sense my prey immediately. I can smell her, smell the fear rising from her, a terrible perfume, as intoxicating as human fear always is. I can hear the blood pumping through her veins and the air being dragged in short, terrified bursts into her lungs. I can't see her, of course. My eyes had been lost during the Battle of Brick Lane back on New Year's Day, 1867; but my remaining vampire senses more than compensate for their loss, and during the intervening years they have been sharpened and heightened to such a state that I hardly notice these days that my eyes are lost. Some would say that I am blessed, others that I am cursed. I'm undecided either way. All I do know, these days especially, is that I am a survivor. I have seen the British Empire rise to unimaginable heights and then collapse again, I've lived through both of the World Wars that the humans fought against each other, and I'm still here, large as life. Still eighteen years old, as near as immortal as it is possible to be; still the handsome girl who turned the heads and bit the necks of the Poor Unfortunates down Spitalfields way. I am still here, minus my eyes of course. But I am still here when all the rest of the Spitalfields' gang have gone. Every last God-forsaken one of them.

The woman they have provided for me is trying to scream, but the gag they've put around her mouth is keeping her relatively quiet, save for little whimpers that serve to do nothing more than increase my excitement. My fangs, my dreadful, awful, pearly white fangs, extend in my mouth and the saliva begins to flow. On bare feet, I pad quietly up behind her. I do not think that she knows I am here. Perhaps she heard the door open and knew, instinctively, that it signalled her doom. But as for hearing me approach, no, I don't think so. You should understand that I am as quiet as the serpent when I want to be, a genuine snake in the grass. She does not know that I am behind her, but where, I ask, is the fun in that? I want her to see me, for her to know that it is I, this ancient eighteen-year-old relic of a by-gone age, that is about to feast upon her. For her to look at my face and know that my face, this face without eyes, is the face of her death.

The woman is tied quite securely to a chair, of course. The people who provide my food, who observe and record my every move, do not want to see the prey trying to escape. Personally speaking I think that I would prefer the sport of the chase, but the scientists, the observers, don't see it that way. I do not believe they want any undue distractions as they scribble on their notepads and push buttons on those machines that I do not understand. So she is bound to the chair as I sidle up behind her. I would have preferred the chase, but there is fun to be had in this game too.

I brush a hand through her hair, matted though it is with sweat and fear, and she stiffens at my touch. She is probably quite pretty. The scientists seem to get a perverse thrill from seeing me feast on pretty young ones, although, of course, they would never admit as much out loud. But I know humans and I know what makes them tick, and they cannot hide their dirty little secrets from me. I am too wise and too old and too full of sin for that.

“Don't worry, treacle,” I whisper. “It will soon be over.”

Her squealing begins afresh and she fights desperately against the ropes that bind her, the chair to which she is tied rocking backwards and forwards with her exertions. It is all to no avail.

I move around in front of her and sit on her lap, face to face, cheek to cheek, my legs straddling her. Her protests end and I imagine that she tries to beg with her eyes, beg for her life. I smile sweetly, like I used to smile close to two hundred years ago when this vampire life was new and there were adventures to be had. And then I bite down into her neck, deeply, mortally.

Her blood gushes in a torrent down my throat as her body convulses beneath me. As the convulsions subside I feel her life-force enter me, giving me sustenance, giving me strength, giving me life eternal.

I am not happy here, being watched and observed like some rat in a cage. But I am biding my time. Time. Time is my only friend.

Yes, I have seen empires rise and fall, wars begin and end, and through it all I have endured and shall endure again. This humiliation will not last, for nothing lasts forever save for myself and the ticking seconds of time. We endure. We are eternal. As eternal as the dreadful night…

Chapter One: The Vampire Girls of Victorian London

London, 1866

The first thing I saw, coming out of the October darkness, were their eyes. First one pair, then two pairs, a dozen and more. Then their faces, the white faces of teenage girls, some older, some younger, as they emerged from the shadows and stood before me.

They were well-dressed compared to some of the humans who lived (well, more like survived) in other parts of London's East End, but even these vampire girls, these children of the night, looked dirty, dishevelled and hungry.

“Who are you?” asked one, as they approached. “What you doing down here?”

“Look at her ears!” said another. “She's one of us!”

“Of course she bleedin' is,” said the first, “or I'd have eaten her by now.”

The ears. Besides the fangs, the ears were always the easiest way to tell a vampire from a human. When a human was turned into a vampire, the body would go through a whole host of changes. The fangs were perhaps the most well-known change, along with the hunger for blood. But there were many other changes too; the skin became paler, the body cooler, the eyes redder. And the ears, they became slightly elongated and pointed, like pictures of an elf that you might have seen in a children's book of fairy tales.

These elf ears did not occur in 'natural-born' vampires (those born of vampire parents), but it always happened to humans that were turned into vampires. All of the girls now standing before me had these ears, regarded by the natural-borns as a disgusting deformity. Deformity or not, these girls all wore their hair high to accentuate their ears; a badge of honour, a deceleration of who and what they were. Turned vampires, the lowest of the low.

“Coo, take a gander at her pretty dress,” said one of the vampire girls with a heavy East End accent. “She ain't from round here, whoever she is.”

There were no boys. The only male vampires I had ever come across were natural-borns. Men could never make the turn from human to vampire; they all died, for whatever reason. So there were no boys here, just the girls.

“Who are you?” demanded the first girl, who seemed to be their leader. She appeared slightly older than the other girls, all of them suspended in time at the exact age that they were turned. Her hard, angry face glared at me with suspicion, red eyes piercing the darkness, and the other girls looked to her to gauge how they should react.

“Sisters!” I smiled, holding out my hands in what I conceived of as a welcoming gesture. I had a whole speech ready in my head. A speech about kinship and being amongst my own kind. Since I had been forced to flee from my family home I had been lost and alone, and although these girls were living in what was close to poverty, they were, at least, the same as me, the same breed as me. Humans turned vampires and abandoned by society and by those who they loved. Sisters, I said, hoping that I had found some kind of home where I would be welcome. I said sisters, and they fell about in fits of laughter.

“Fuck off, sister!” screeched one, and the laughter redoubled.

Well, as you can see, they did not take to me at first. I was too fancy, too West End for their liking. My accent was not the same as theirs, and I was far too quick with my pleases and thank-yous. But they allowed me to stay, gave me a roof over my head, and a blanket to pull over myself when the sun rose over the streets of Spitalfields and we were all forced to take refuge from the murderous day. After three nights, when my once pretty dress was almost as filthy as the other girls' dresses, and my face was smudged with dirt and blood, the vampire girls of Chicksand Street began to relent, their mood softened towards me, and they asked me to tell my story; the story of how a lady from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea came to be turned vampire and henceforth came to stagger into their midst looking for acceptance.

Chicksand Street lay smack bang in the middle of Spitalfields, running off Brick Lane. And running off Chicksand Street were half-a-dozen smaller roads, little more than alleys really; Ely Place, Luntley Place, all ruled over and dominated by the vampire girls. They called themselves the Brick Lane Irregulars. They weren't an organised gang as such, not like some of the human gangs that ruled over parts of the East End with an iron fist. This was more of a co-operative; I estimated them at three or four dozen turned vampires, living together for mutual protection. Alone they would be easy prey to those who would have rid the world of all turned vampires, but together they were strong. They hunted as a pack, and robbed their victims for good measure. Yes, hunted, for these were vampires and killers, make no mistake about that, and they feasted upon human blood, and from the pockets of their victims they stole whatever they could to make their lives a little easier. Money of course, but watches, shoes, even spectacles; anything that they could utilise, pawn, or sell to the fences of Brick Lane. The press called them vermin, the curse of the East End they said; but if they were such then it was only because circumstances dictated that there was no other way for them to live. To live and to survive. I had called them sisters and they had laughed, and now I saw the humour of it all.

Their leader, the girl with the hard, mean face, was called Raffles. On that third night she sat before me in one of the run-down terraced houses in Chicksand Street and said, “Come on then, darling. Tell us your story. You ain't from the street like the rest of us. How come you managed to get yourself turned?”

We were surrounded by a dozen or so older vampire girls, girls who had been in their late teens and twenties when they had been turned. The younger girls had their own house, next door to the one we were in, where they socialised and slept and called home. Sometimes their laughter and shrieks of joy could be heard through the thin walls and it would have been easy to forget that they were vampires and not simply mortal children, playing games and enjoying the innocence that their tender years should have afforded them. Other times their sobbing and cries for their mother could be heard, and the reality of the situation was almost too painful to bear.

Raffles looked across at the other girls as they sat on the floor or on the rickety chairs that were scattered around the room. “We want to hear her story, don't we?” she asked of them. The girls looked up at Raffles and nodded in agreement. A handful of candles stood flickering atop a crude wooden table, sending shadows dancing like drunken marionettes across the bare walls and meagre curtains. How had I been turned from human to vampire, from Chelsea lady to Spitalfields rough arse? I smiled a little sadly, and told them how.

* * *

My name is Irene Adler, you may have heard of me or at least you may have heard of my father's business, the Adler Shipping Company. Father dear had formed the company in his early twenties, and by the time I was conceived it had grown to become the foremost shipping line in the UK, transporting goods and people to and from the furthest flung corners of the Empire and beyond. Spices, cotton, tobacco, weapons, soldiers, people. Whatever, whoever, and wherever; the Adler Shipping Company transported them all.

I was my parent's only child, and I had been such a troublesome birth that my mother had been left incapable of bearing further children, a fact that was pointed out to me on more than one occasion when my behaviour had not been sufficiently ladylike or my appreciation of the worldly goods provided for me not appropriately gushing. Still, my parents were as loving as any other parents – do not let me give you the wrong impression about that – and I did, I fully acknowledge, receive a privileged upbringing. We lived in a sumptuous house in Chelsea, served by a veritable horde of maids and butlers and footmen and cooks, and I was schooled in my own private study by my very own school teacher, Miss Ainsworth, who was kind and gentle, with a loving heart, and who would later prove that kindness in the most practical of terms.

So there I was, the daughter and heir to Sir (yes, the Empire rewards its successful sons well) Adler. But a shadow hung over the household. You see, I was a girl and how on earth could I be expected to take over the reins of the business upon my father's retirement? There was also the question of propriety. It simply was not considered decent that Sir Adler's daughter, a female, should enter the world of shipping and commerce. That was considered the exclusive domain of the male. My place, it would seem, was sat upon a settee, indulging in a little embroidery or light reading, while organising the occasional ball or banquet with the maids, the better to further my husband's position. Ah yes, my husband. A suitable male would be selected whom I would marry and who would take over the helm of the Adler empire, and thus would the thorny issue of my unfortunate femininity be resolved.

But, as I have stated, my parents did love me and as such they found it difficult to find a suitable young man who lived up to their very high expectations. My life carried on as much before the decision to marry me off was made; schooling in the days (reading, mainly, with a little rudimentary mathematics), embroidery by candlelight in the evenings, with the occasional dinner party to add a little spice to my very orderly existence. My parents threw some lavish dinner parties, all in the name of business, and dignitaries from around the globe would attend, to be wined and dined and wooed into signing business contracts with father. I was blessed to have met cotton traders from the United States, silk traders from the Orient, ivory traders from Africa, and, to my recollection, two British Prime Ministers.

Many of those who dined at our Chelsea home were vampires. Not the sordid little creatures that could be found in Spitalfields, the ones I would later run to in desperation, with their grubby clothes and their pointed little ears. No, these were natural-born vampires, born of vampire parents and fully grown to sexual maturity when the vampire blood within them stopped the ageing process and they became, to all intents and purposes, immortal. Many in government and business were natural-born vampires, who having lived for centuries had managed to accrue great wealth and influence. To me, meeting a vampire was as common place as meeting an American or a Frenchman; the circles in which my father moved was full of them. Natural-born vampires held power, wealth, and influence, and oh! How they despised the 'turned' vampire girls that lived on the streets of east London. “They should be exterminated, like the vermin they are!” I heard more than one natural-born declare of his turned cousins.

And so it came to pass that at one of these glittering vampire-attended soirées I met my downfall, or perhaps it was my awakening…

He was a natural-born vampire and his name was Prince Wilhelm von Ormstein (a vampire and a prince, no less!) from the Kingdom of Bohemia, and I think I may have fallen a little in love with him at first sight. He was undeniably handsome, with his luxurious moustache, shiny hair, and ridiculously smart military uniform. Add to this his impeccable manners and mid-European accent, and I will admit that he set my heart all a-flutter. I wondered and hoped that he might not have been invited to dine with us as a possible suitor for myself, but it soon became apparent that his attendance was entirely a business affair, and perhaps not a terribly pleasant business at that.

One of the advantages of being a female in these situations is that the men will often talk quite candidly in front of you, almost as though they forget that you exist. We silly women are dismissed as being unimportant or as being incapable of understanding the subjects being discussed by the men, and as such I got to listen in on all manner of scandals and intrigues. Who owed money to whom, who was on the brink of bankruptcy, what shares were not worth the paper they are printed on, and even more earthy scandals such as whose daughter had been sent to the countryside for a nine month 'retreat' and who the cause of such an unscheduled vacances might have been. I enjoyed listening in on these little pieces of gossip, and it often struck me as amusing how like washer women these powerful magnates of business could be when they'd a few glasses of brandy or burgundy inside them. So it was on that fateful evening. There was a delicate issue being discussed between my father and the prince, and beneath the polite language and coded references, I sensed rage and anger on the prince's part and greed, I am sorry to say, on my father's.

There was a letter or a document or perhaps even a photograph that had fallen into my father's possession and which the prince wished to relieve him of. The prince offered my father money but my father waved this offer away. He wanted something far more valuable – the monopoly on all shipping conducted by the Bohemian government. The prince refused, and the dinner party ended with curt words and barely concealed hatred. But such matters were not of my concern, and with the dinner party at an end, and my head filled with silly romantic notions of the vampire prince coming to visit me in my chambers in the middle of the night to declare his undying affection for me (and how my heart fluttered at such a thought!), I kissed my mother and father goodnight for what would prove to be the very last time.

Oh, what childish fancies may enter the minds (and hearts) of mortal girls, for when the prince did enter my room, later that very night, it was a far more brutal and sordid encounter than my foolish daydreaming had imagined. I had been asleep for, well, who knows? An hour? Maybe longer? And then something awoke me and I sat bolt upright in bed, the drapes of the bed's canopy pulled tight and the room in darkness. But I was not alone, instinctively I sensed that there was someone, something, there with me in my chamber. Fear froze my body and though I wanted to cry out for help, I could not. My body, in terror, had betrayed me and there I sat, as helpless as a kitten before a rabid dog.

The drape beside me parted and by the light of the moon that now flooded from the window and into my meagre fortress, I could just make out the face of my sweet prince. “Miss Adler,” he smiled, and the smile was evil and full of sharp teeth, not at all the face of the gentle suitor I had imagined in my girlish fantasy, “I do apologise for this unforgivable intrusion. But my, how beautiful you look by the light of the moon. Sadly though, I am here on a matter of business rather than affairs of the heart, and for this I do, once again, apologise. But the sad fact is, Miss Adler, that your father, a rather vain and arrogant man in my opinion, has something of mine and he steadfastly refuses to give it back to me. I have offered money and favours, and always he demands more, and, forgiving and reasonable though I am, I find myself at the end of my, how do you say it? The end of my tether? Yes, the end of my tether. He has something of mine and will not relinquish it. Therefore, I find myself in the unenviable position of having to take something of value from him, to make amends, you understand?

“Now, what in all the world does your father value above everything else? Well, certainly his shipping line, of course. But surely there is something even more precious, more precious but also so terribly, terribly delicate? It is you, Miss Adler, that I fear I must take. I am forced to take you like a common thief in the night, so that your father may never know the innocence of your smile or the melody of your laugh ever again. To balance the books, as it were. It pains me, but I fear that it must be so.”

“No,” I managed to whisper by way of protest but that was all. I had no defence. I was an eighteen-year-old girl, he a centuries old vampire. I had no defence, and in a blink he was upon me.

There was pain at first as his teeth savaged the flesh of my neck, but the pain quickly subsided to be replaced by the peculiar sensation of my blood and my very soul being drained out of my body. I understand now that a vampire's bite produces a sedative of sorts that numbs the bite area and induces a sense of helpless euphoria within the victim. It is a strange sensation which, if I am to be honest, is not entirely unpleasant. I swooned beneath the prince's bite and beneath his grip and he drained the blood and the life from me. I was within seconds of being embraced by death when he stopped.

I looked up at him through watery, saucer-shaped eyes, and he looked back down at me, his eyes black pits of menace, my own blood dripping back down upon me from his lips and his teeth. “It is a singular gift that I bestow upon you, Miss Adler,” he hissed down at me. “I leave you to turn. To become a turned vampire. The lowest form of life, reviled by both natural-borns and humans. You will have no place to call home, no friends to turn to, no sanctuary to seek. Enjoy your immortality, Miss Adler. I rather fear it will not last long.”

In the room in Chicksand Street, the assembled girls let out howls of disgust. “What a rotter!” cried one, “I'd like to fix him good and proper!” cried another. Eventually Raffles hushed the outrage, and I continued my monologue of woe.

I passed out and awoke I do not know how much later. Whatever the time, I was surrounded by my mother and father, our local doctor, and several maids who scurried back and forth, dutifully carrying bowls of water and soiled towels and steadfastly avoiding my gaze. It was morning, or at least it was daytime, and light poured in through poorly closed curtains. The light pained my eyes and irritated my skin and, more than that, it offended me with its cheery brightness and its inane little message of hope. “Close those fucking curtains, you stupid cunts!” I screamed, spitting blood and fighting to sit up in my idiotically luxurious bed with its insipid comfort, plump pillows, and human succour. “You stupid fucking cunts!”

At my words mother dearest fainted, hitting the floor of my chamber like the veritable sack of potatoes, and my father, visibly shocked, slapped me across the face with the open palm of his hand. I rather suspect the blow hurt his hand far more than it hurt my face. I spat blood, my blood, the blood that had dripped down onto my face from the fangs of the prince, up at my father and began to writhe upon the bed. The light was hurting me, I felt hungry, I felt an itch deep down inside me that I did not know how to scratch, I felt hatred and anger and helplessness, and all I could do was moan and writhe and snarl.

“It is as I feared,” said the doctor as he pulled my father away from my bedside. “She has been turned. She is a turned vampire.”

The maids ran squealing from my chamber, taking my half-conscious mother with them. The doctor pulled the curtains tight across the windows, blocking out the light and providing me with a modicum of relief, and then both he and my father left the chamber also, locking the door as they went.

The hours passed and as twilight enveloped the house, my body began to relax and the distress caused by being awake in the daytime began to subside. I was increasingly hungry. I was not sure what exactly I was hungry for, but a terrible ache was making itself known in my stomach and I longed for sustenance. I tumbled out of bed and climbed to my feet unsteadily, and holding onto first the bedside and then a chair, I made my way across the room and towards the mirror that stood atop my dresser. I did not recognise the face that looked back at me. It was not the face of sweet, pretty, innocent Miss Adler. No, this was some manner of feral creature. My skin was pale and smeared with dried blood, my hair was dishevelled and matted, and my eyes were dark pits with glowing red embers deep within them. And my ears, my ears were pointed and elongated, and my teeth were white and sharp and dangerous. I picked up a perfume bottle and hurled it at the mirror. It exploded in a fountain of sparkling glass. “Bastards!” I screamed, at the prince and his teeth, at my father and his business, at the life that had been stolen away from me, at the whole sorry lot of them. What a shower of cunts they were, after all.

I had never used profane language before in the whole of my life! I had hardly even been aware of any four-letter words, and yet here they were, filling my mind and tripping off my tongue as easily as if I were a veteran sailor, used to swearing and cursing the whole day through. Where were these words coming from? Had I known them all along? I must have done. I must have known all these words and all this rage and all this anger before, but never acted upon them. Now though, now I truly was a little bundle of fury. Fury and hunger. The hunger, by now, really was quite intense…

The door opened and in walked the doctor, a white handkerchief held up to his mouth and his nose as though the little cunt thought this vampiric state might be contagious. He avoided my eyes, refused to look directly at me, rather he stared hard at the floor and blurted out a speech that he must have hastily concocted on the walk back up here, from the drawing room where doubtless my mother and father and the whole gaggle of them had convened, up the stairs and along the corridor to my bed chamber.

“Your father has decided that you must leave,” he said, handkerchief still thrust up against his lips, giving his voice a ridiculously muffled sound. “He has disavowed you, disowned you. He cannot have a turned vampire for a daughter. It simply won't do. Your tutor, Miss Ainsworth, will be along presently to help you pack, and then you must leave. You should know that Miss Ainsworth volunteered to help you. Nobody else was willing.” And with that the illustrious doctor slipped back through the door and was gone.

So that was it. My mother and father would not even come to say goodbye. Only that quack and my tutor, only they could bring themselves to enter my chamber to hasten my departure. Was I such a monster now as to be deserving of such treatment? Was this not all my father's fault, his avarice and his empire building bringing the wrath of the Bohemian vampire prince down upon me? I had paid a terrible price for his errors of judgement, and yet he would not even face me. I was truly damned.

Well if damned I was, then I was about to give them all good reason to damn me twice.

Miss Ainsworth was a handsome woman, in her mid-twenties, with a ready smile and pleasing countenance. She was a spinster, unmarried, as women with certain tastes in life can tend to be. My mother's sister was similarly a spinster, and I had often over-heard my parents discussing her choice of friends and 'companions' in less than flattering terms. It amused me to think that perhaps Miss Ainsworth secretly loved me. Certainly her teaching style was at times unconventional, and we would often laugh and make jokes at the expense of my parents or members of the household staff. We would discuss books late into the night, and on sunny afternoons walk arm-in-arm through the park, more sisters than tutor and pupil. If she really did love me she never declared this emotion or made any kind of overt gesture to express this emotion, but there was something in the glint of her eye and the tilt of her head when she regarded me that I liked to think spoke of secret wishes and taboo emotions. Perhaps, yes, perhaps we were in love, after a fashion.

I heard a key turn, unlocking the bed chamber door, and a tingling sensation buzzed across my mouth as my terrible fangs stretched and ached, yearning to reach out and violate human flesh. I turned to face the door as Miss Ainsworth entered. At the sight of me she took a step back, visibly shocked at the sight that befell her.

“Oh you poor, poor dear,” she gasped, raising a hand to her lips. “Come, let me help you pack,” she said, trying to regain her composure and focus on the task at hand. “I have some lady friends I can speak to. Perhaps we can find a place for you to stay.”

Though tears were welling in her eyes, still she attempted to smile at me, attempting to reassure me that all would be well. She did not realise that I was beginning to come to the conclusion that all was well enough as things stood. My hunger had found a focus. She smiled at me meekly, tears in her gentle eyes, and I smiled back at her like a snake with a rat's tail hanging out of its mouth.

Catching sight of myself in the mirror, I was struck by how much I now resembled my vampiric father, the infamous prince. I slid from the side of the dresser and quick as a flash made my way around the room towards the snivelling teacher. I tried to think of some words to say, perhaps an apology for what I was about to do, or a way of thanking her for her kindness, a way to perhaps even acknowledge her, our, unspoken affections, but at the sight of her neck and the smell of her sadness I could contain myself no longer, and I exploded upon her in a frenzy of hunger and passion.

My fangs clamped themselves around the back of her neck and my right hand reached around and clamped itself across her mouth, the better to stifle her screams. Under such exertions we tumbled to the carpeted floor, our legs and feet having become tangled in the teacher's voluminous dress, my breasts pushed up against her shoulder blades, her face pushed into the carpet, as I sucked her blood and waited for the natural sedative of my fangs to take hold and quell her vain struggling. It did not take long and soon she was subdued. I rolled her onto her back and slowly, luxuriously, drained her of her blood.

Her left foot, clad in a delicate pink heeled slipper, tapped rhythmically, involuntarily against one of my bed's wooden feet. Tap, tap, tap, in time with my sucking and the heaving of my chest. Tap, tap, tap. I tasted the summer walks in her blood, the books she had devoured, the laughter we had shared. It was all here, in her blood, and my mind exploded at the sweet taste of it. Her very life-force was here within her blood, and now it was within me, giving me life anew. I was reborn there in that bed chamber, writhing atop my dying tutor. Such a world this was for those few short minutes, a place of wondrous release and hellish passions. Tap, tap, tap, more gently now for death was upon her. I thrust my teeth deeper into her flesh and placed a hand upon her breasts, the better to know her fully, intimately, without sorrow or fear of judgement. We were joined at last as one, hunter and prey, with more intensity than any two lovers had ever known. And then, like the last bloom of summer, she was gone.

I sat up and leaned back on my heels. Miss Ainsworth was dead beneath me, and her blood still filled my mouth and my throat. I raised a hand to my lips and fought back the urge to vomit. I was sitting in a lake of blood; it covered me and it covered the corpse, it was soaking into the carpet, and it had splattered across my dresser and my bed. So much blood. I dragged myself to my feet, my stomach bloated from the feeding, and knew I had to escape the house. If they found me here with the butchered Miss Ainsworth they would try to kill me. The authorities would be involved and they would hunt me down and burn me at the stake, the prescribed sentence for turned vampires that kill humans.

I pulled off my red-stained night dress, wiping my hands and my face as best I could on the soft linen, and then I quickly pulled on a dress that I found hanging in a closet. With no maids to help me I struggled at first to fasten the corset, but to my delight I found that being a vampire meant I was stronger now, lither, more subtle, and so what could have been a tricky job was accomplished in a matter of moments and I took a last look around my chamber. Nothing here to hold me back now, I decided. I had been abandoned, I had no soul, I did not belong with the living. “Cunts,” I said of my family and the house and the doctor and the prince, relishing the way the word formed in my mouth and tumbled off my tongue. “Cunts.” I had found my new favourite word.

There was one last matter to attend to before I fled. I knelt back down beside the ravaged body of Miss Ainsworth, my bloody hand-print now drying upon her breasts, and I kissed her gently upon the forehead. Dull, lifeless eyes looked back up at me. The spark had gone from them, she loved me no more. “Au revoir, mon cheri,” I whispered to her, remembering the time she had told me of her desire to one day visit Paris, a desire that now could never be acted upon, and then I stood, turned my back on her, and climbed out of my chamber window; it felt like I was eloping, but my love lay dead upon my bedroom floor and so I was left to elope alone.

London by night. What a sight! What a spectacle! Unmatched by any of the many wonders of the Empire! London is a jewel, and at night she sparkles with a ferocity to bring joy to the dourest of souls. I skipped along the streets of Chelsea with a spring in my step, feeling suddenly liberated, free from the shackles of conformity, and, perhaps most of all, supremely powerful. I was a vampire! A vampire, by all the saints! The teacher's blood coursed through my veins, intoxicating me, and I laughed out loud as I cantered through Chelsea and Belgravia and up towards the very centre of civilisation itself, Buckingham Palace. I had no plan in mind, no ultimate destination; I was simply enjoying this sense of euphoria. The night was beautiful, and I wished only to wallow in her dark radiance. I felt no sense of regret or remorse following the evening's gory events; my mind was focused solely on the here and now. My transformation was complete.

As a mortal, I had been a girl of privilege. I had grown up never having to work or want for anything. My life had been delivered to me on a silver platter, and whatever I had desired, within reason, had been mine for the asking. So, perhaps, I approached my new found vampiric status in a similar fashion. This was my new gift, my new toy, and I expected all around me, the mortals, to be impressed by the new me, to be afraid, to shrink from me or fall under my thrall. Well, I was soon to discover that a teenage girl with fangs, elf ears, and a blood smeared face (the night-dress had not been particularly effective at cleaning the blood from my visage), walking up Buckingham Palace Road as bold as brass, was not a sight welcomed by London's human populace. I had forgotten, in my excitement of the metamorphosis, that I was not regarded as a divine monster of the night. Rather I was a turned vampire, a filthy trollop, the lowest of the low, the scourge of the East End.

I first noticed a group of six or eight young men following me. I turned to smile at them, expecting I suppose that they were walking behind me in admiration or trance-like devotion. But when I saw them, saw their faces, I saw the truth. They looked angry, determined, full of bravado. “Watch out, love!” shouted one of these young toughs to a woman ahead of me, a nanny, pushing a baby in a pram. “We've got a Dirty Biter here! Must've wandered out from Spitalfields and got lost!” The nanny saw me, and quickly pushed the pram away from my path. As I passed her, she spat on the ground where I walked. The group of young vigilantes now numbered a dozen, maybe more, and with each step more men, older now, joined the throng.

Dirty Biter. It was the first time I had heard the term, and now these men were calling it again. “Dirty Biter!” they cried, warning others walking along Buckingham Palace Road to beware. And then they began to shout directly at me. “Get back to Spitalfields, you filthy slapper!” “Aye, sod off! You don't belong here!”

They had been keeping their distance, allowing me to keep perhaps twenty feet ahead of them. But as their number increased, so did their courage and now they were but a step or two behind me. I was unsure of my powers at the time, of course. I could have, if I had put my mind to it, killed them all – how many now, two dozen? – but this was still so very new to me, and I had never had cause to fight anyone before in my life! I was from Chelsea, for heaven's sakes, and these ruffians were, I hesitate to admit, quite intimidating. Five minutes before I had thought myself the Queen of the Night, Mistress of the Damned, and yet now I was hastening my step, on the verge of being chased by a rabble of righteous men, and the exuberance I had felt was now rapidly being replaced by fear.

An old woman, tottering along the middle of the pavement, saw the commotion and stepped unsteadily aside to let our dark parade pass. At the sight of me she hissed, “Filth!” and then to the men following, “Kick her face in, boys!” I could stand it no longer. I lifted up the bustles of my black dress and took flight. I was fast, amazingly fast, and I dodged between the mortals walking along the pavement, running at such a pace that I must have seemed like something of a blur to them. The men who had been following me attempted, for a short distance, to keep pace with me, but they could not. I ran and I dodged and I weaved, and I left them trailing in my wake. My exuberance returned; they could not hurt me, they could not even touch me!

I sprinted the rest of the way along Buckingham Palace Road, past the palace itself though I hardly registered it in my haste, and into St. James's Park where I hid amongst the trees and the shrubbery, catching my breath (not that I was terribly out of breath really), and making sure I had not been followed by any of those mortal ruffians. I hadn't. I was safe.

From my secret vantage point, I looked out at the human world carrying on around me. Here in the park I could see sweethearts walking hand-in-hand, the occasional gaggle of old maids out for an evening stroll, nannies pushing prams, a well-dressed city gentleman hastening along, perhaps having worked late and now heading for home. Here a young gentleman peddling along on one of those bicycle contraptions, here a smart soldier enjoying a pipe. What time was it? Perhaps half past eight? Yes, that would make sense. It was still early enough on this October evening for mortals to be wandering the streets in what they would regard as safety. I watched them and they had no idea that I was there. At any moment I could have leapt from my hiding place and ripped the throat out of them. Luckily for them I was still sated from the blood of Miss Ainsworth, my tutor, and so I only watched them as they strolled along. I watched them and I despised them, these humans who had chased me from their streets, who had spat on the floor as I passed, and who had called me filth. I suddenly felt a very real hatred for their warm-bloodedness, for their rosy complexions and their plump little cheeks. They were pigs, I realised. Pigs who walked on two legs and dressed in fine clothes, but pigs none-the-less. Pigs whose only true purpose in life was to serve as my food. I could stand being amongst them no longer; I needed to find my way to those like me, to my kin, to the so-called Dolly Biters…

How much did I know of these girl vampires, the pointy eared and sharp toothed trash of Spitalfields? Not much, I suppose. In the leafy avenues of Chelsea, such matters were not thought suitable subjects for discussion, except of course when one is entertaining at dinner parties and the wine is flowing.

I vaguely remembered one such dinner party, and oh how I wished I had paid more attention at the time! Again I think I must have appeared invisible to those sat around me, when business men, men of power, my father, were discussing these girls. I now struggled to recall what they had said. They had used words such as 'filthy' and 'vermin' when describing these turned vampires, they had said they lived in squalor, more animals now than the humans they had once been, preying on the unwary who wandered inadvertently into their lair, occasionally hunting farther afield, killing humans and drinking their blood and stealing their possessions. They were all females, most of them prostitutes who had been turned when natural-born vampires (the respectable vampires, the ones with the bloodlines and the ancestral homes and, perhaps most importantly, the money) had bitten them and infected them with vampire saliva during the throws of passion. Some of course had not been prostitutes. Some had just been unlucky enough to have crossed paths with a natural born of dubious morals. But all of them, all of these filthy East End Dolly Biters were shunned and detested by both human and natural-born society. Had it been a Prime Minister who had sat in our dining room and told my father that the situation was under control? That the female vermin had been contained in Spitalfields and that the government was working on a 'final solution' to the problem? Yes, I seemed to recall that it was.

Spitalfields. It was to Spitalfields that I must go. To go and find my sisters…

Having experienced how the humans reacted to a lone vampire in their midst, I took a moment to try and smarten my appearance. I pulled my hair over my ears, and in a near-by fountain, at an opportune moment, I quickly rinsed water over my face and teeth, washing away the bloody evidence of my earlier meal. I must still have looked a frightful state, but at least I looked marginally more human than before. I bowed my head, kept my mouth tightly shut, and hurried out of the park and down Horse Guards Road and towards the Embankment. I travelled along the Embankment and Thames Street, following the path of the great river, before, in the early hours of the morning, heading up Commercial Street into Whitechapel and hence to Spitalfields.

* * *

“Fuck off, sister!” screeched one, and the laughter redoubled.

* * *

“You were lucky to find us,” said Raffles as we sat in that room on Chicksand Street. “A single vampire roaming the streets of London, well, it don't usually end so well. We have to stick together, watch each other's backs. I'm sorry if our welcome when you first arrived here was less than cordial. That weren't right of us. You're welcome here, Irene. I hope you knows that now.”

“Thank you,” I said and smiled, and around me all the other girls smiled too, a dozen or more pairs of fangs twinkling like shooting stars in the night.

Raffles put an arm around me and pulled me close. “Come here darling,” she whispered, “let us welcome you into our little coven properly.”

For the first few nights after my arrival on Chicksand Street, before the girls had properly accepted me, they had deigned to allow me to hunt with them. Each night we had set out into the dark streets of Spitalfields, and each night we had fed on the blood of mortals. But upon our return and during the daylight hours, I had slept alone, in a room by myself, very much an outsider in this tightly knit band of comrades. I had, during the daylight hours when blinds and drapes were pulled tight across windows to keep out the murderous rays of the sun, heard shuffling and giggles, the sound of people moving from room to room, and moans and wails also. I had not known what it all meant, but now, now I was about to discover the true intimacy of Raffles' coven.

Raffles put an arm around me and pulled me close. She began to kiss me on the neck, gentle little caresses that belied the awful power of her teeth and mouth. I heard the other girls breathing and was aware of them moving closer. I did not fight Raffles' attentions.

She stood me up and pulled my skirts up over my head, removing the dress from my body and finding me quite naked beneath save for my stockings and boots. I had still been wearing the dress I had thrown on when I had vacated the family home, and having dressed in a hurry, under-garments had been sacrificed in favour of haste. Placing her hands around my neck and squeezing gently, she observed me with her face tilted to one side. Her lips were pulled back, like a snarling dog, and her fangs were elongated and dripping with saliva. Her eyes glowed a vibrant red, and around us were the eyes of the other girls, also glowing red. Their breathing sounded like panting, and their cold breath buffeted my naked skin.

I began to panic. Raffles' hands still squeezed me around the neck and her grip was growing tighter. Did she mean to murder me? Was this all some cruel joke? I tried to speak but found I could not. And then, and then just as tears began to roll down my cheeks, she released me. I felt insane desires take a hold of my mind, a feeling the likes of which I had never experienced before, and I had an overwhelming need to experience Raffles' tongue, long and lizard-like, caress my body and my breasts and my legs and…