Dolly Biters

Chapter One: The Vampire Girls of Victorian London-2

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 f*****g 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 f*****g 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.