Chapter 45
The floor spins beneath me as I read the words again. I don’t remember writing that card, but it’s definitely my handwriting. The way I sign my name. And that wrapping paper . . . I recognise it. From Jonathan’s vision: the presents under the tree.
My pulse speeds up to an almost human rate as I struggle to make sense of this.
Because right now, as I hold this box, it feels like some distant part of me does remember.
That I can feel that love. It’s there, lodged beneath my ribs, winding me.
As if through finding this, I’ve opened some portal to a memory I don’t want to access. Panic floods my veins.
How do I shut it off?
I swallow hard; I don’t like the picture forming in my mind. Because . . . hang on . . . does this mean I . . . cheated on Jonathan?
What does this mean?
Am I a bad person?
All this time I’ve wanted to know more about my human-self, been trying to get back to her, and now it turns out I was . . . a cheater?
No. That can’t be right. If that were true, surely I’d know it?
Oscar must have seduced me the way he does so many women. He must have had me fall in love with him, turned me into this . . . monster . . . and then abandoned me . . .
That makes so much more sense.
Now his words come floating back: I was just hungry and your front door was unlocked.
Well, that was clearly a lie.
Screw him for lying to me about something so important.
But now, every part of me aches in a way I’ve ached many times over the past 150 years.
I think of how miserable I’ve been. How lonely, how separate from the world.
Always having to stay hidden, having to move through life alone year after year.
Pushing down my hunger, hating myself and all that I was.
My breath is quick and I can feel my lower lip quivering, but I bite back the tears.
Because human-me must have really trusted him. For me, this would have been a token of true love, but I know Oscar.
To him, it would have been nothing more than a trophy. I was just another one of his ‘girls’.
I look around the room, wondering how many other trophies of broken hearts, broken lives, he has hidden in here.
And then I think about the sound of that box dropping to the ground.
It dropped from somewhere.
I crouch down to find where it was hidden.
He probably keeps all his trophies together. Pulls them out and thinks about his conquests. He’s worse than any vampire in any book, any movie, any TV show.
I peer into the darkness beneath the desk, and at the very back, I can just make out a small hidden shelf.
I squint at it, crawl deeper under the desk and put my little box back, then feel around to see what else is there.
There’s something large and flat; an envelope.
I tug on it, feel its thickness between my fingertips; it’s full of something—papers maybe.
I pull it down and scramble back out from under the desk.
And then, sitting on the floor in that darkened old library, I open the envelope and pull out the contents.
Pictures.
Lots and lots of photographs.
They must be of us, his victims. His ‘proteges’.
I scatter them on the floor, scanning through them, not sure what to think.
Some are black and white, some are colour.
Some are square, some are rectangular—depending on the camera, I suppose.
But as I leaf through them, looking for the others, others like me, other women he’s done this to . . . there are none.
Every single photograph is of me.
The room stutters around me and I blink rapidly, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. My gaze jumps from picture to picture.
It’s like staring down at some weird time-lapse montage of myself.
There’s me in a 1940s blue military suit with cork-soled platforms. Me in a black 1950s dress nipped in at the waist, a beaded cashmere sweater around my shoulders.
Me, smoking a cigarette and walking down Kingly Street past Bag O’Nails in the mid-60s—I’m in the white knee-high boots I loved and a high-necked, sleeveless black dress .
. . I had accrued enough assets by then to be a lady of leisure if I so pleased, but instead, I was living in a small flat in The World’s End.
Blending in. Always blending in. Oh look, me marching on Grosvenor Square in 1968, protesting against the Vietnam War.
I only narrowly escaped arrest. There’s me in dark wash flares, me in shoulder pads, me in a slip dress, then low-rise jeans and high-rise jeans.
Me, through the windows of a flat I had in Battersea, another one in Greenwich, a couple in small country villages that all blur into one another.
Oh my god, there’s a picture of me in Paris, when I danced at the Moulin Rouge in the mid-1920s.
It’s black and white and grainy, and looks like it was taken on one of those Leica cameras everyone lusted after when they first came out.
I lean in to study my never-changing face.
The costumes change, as do the streets, the buildings, the windows, the make-up trends, but I never do.
It’s like the world kept on spinning for everyone else, but for me the clocks stood still.
Even when I’m smiling, even when I’m faking it, I can see the sadness, the despair, in my eyes.
And it’s jarring to see myself so clearly, so objectively.
And oh look, there I am through a window, me and a cupcake with a single sad candle.
He was there while I was missing him. Watching me.
And then I find a newspaper article. It’s one of the ones that came out after the attacks on Coventry Street.
Oscar knew about that.
He’d said he’d checked on me now and then over the years, that I’d always seemed .
. . how did he put it? An echo of his voice comes floating back: Sensible .
. . controlled . . . safety conscious . .
. quite boring. But looking at these now, I’d say, miserable beyond comprehension and always, utterly alone might have been a better way to put it.
And he let me stay that way. Maybe he liked me that way.
But there are so many pictures here. At least one for every year. This is a lot more than now and then.
And hang on . . . there are a couple of old bits of paper in there, scattered between the pictures. I reach for one. It’s worn at the edges, and as I frown down at it, recognition tugs at me. My bank details. From that bank in Lombard Street where Hans helped me set up an account.
Why would Oscar have these?
HOW would Oscar have these?
I reach for the other piece of paper—thick stock, turned yellow and brittle with age—and glance at the cursive writing and blotted ink.
It reads: Sir, I did as you asked, she will be fine. But I think I’m more hindrance than help now. I suggest I take my leave of her. Please advise.
Hans.
My breath sticks in my throat as the pieces fall together: in comes a flash of me sitting in that garden, that first night I woke up.
I didn’t just happen upon Hans in that garden. Oscar sent him to help me.
My gaze skips across the contents of the envelope, all laid out before me.
It’s too much. I can’t make sense of it.
Because it sounds insane, but it’s almost as though he . . . cares for me. If he didn’t, why keep all this? Why keep that box of love? And so many photographs?
Is that possible? Can someone like him even feel love?
Don’t even think about that, Aubrey. It would be a terrible thing if Oscar cared about you. Because it’s Oscar we’re talking about. OSCAR! He kills people for sport, he manipulates and lies and forces you to do things you don’t want to do.
Besides, of course he doesn’t care about me. If he did, he wouldn’t have watched me suffer for all that time and never made himself known to me. That’s cruel.
And then my gaze catches on one very specific picture in the middle of the mess.
It’s relatively recent, taken about four years ago.
I’m outside Selfridges and I know exactly when it was taken because I’m standing with Daphne and it was my first week working there—I know this because she still had hair extensions from a modelling job and she hasn’t had them since.
The floor beneath me ripples.
Realisation hits.
Oscar already knew about Daphne before I went to Serpentine with her that night.
And now that I think about it, it does seem somewhat coincidental that Daphne would be a member of a private members’ club that my vampire-maker owns, doesn’t it?
It seems more likely that he sought her out and gave her membership and told her to remember it came from one of her sugar daddies instead.
He’s been using her to get information about me . . .
I feel sick. Like my whole life has been a farce.
Like I’ve been play-acting for an audience I didn’t even know I had.
And then I realise, if Oscar hadn’t seen me that night at the club with Daphne, if he hadn’t been told to make sure I wasn’t a weak link, if he hadn’t decided I was a risk, and might get us all found out, then I’d still be all alone.
I still wouldn’t know who turned me. Or how I died. I’d still be yearning for him.
I want to be angry about that. I should be angry. But actually, I’m just so sad.
What am I meant to do with all this?
Hang on, if he’s been watching me, and he’s been talking to Daphne all this time, does he know about Jonathan? He can’t know. He’d have used it against me by now.
The sound of tyres on gravel cuts through the wind.
Someone is home.
My hands shake as I put the pictures back into the envelope, crawl under the desk and put them back on the secret shelf at the back, with the box of love.
My love. Then I put my phone back where I found it in that box under the kaleidoscope, and I run out into the hallway, under the staircase and back into the entrance hall.
I can see headlights shining in through the windows on either side of the front door as I run upstairs. It’s as I get to the top that the front door opens. I peek over the banister.
It’s Oscar.
I tiptoe back into my bedroom. As I close my bedroom door, the look in Oscar’s eyes the night he saved me from Felix flickers in my mind. The tenderness he showed me. And after all that I found tonight, that makes sense.
But nothing else does.
I almost wish he was just like the vampire villains on TV.
Pure evil. No soul. That he really had just abandoned me completely, never sent me Hans, never checked on me.
It would be simpler. But he’s more complex than that.
There are hidden depths, and now I don’t know what to think—how good or bad is he?
But worse than not knowing what to think, now I’m feeling things I don’t want to feel.
It’s like everything I found tonight has reopened Pandora’s box and I need to slam it shut again.
I just don’t know how.