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IN THE FOG

Dr Seward&039;s Diary (kept in phonograph)

17 SEPTEMBER

Last night&039;s delivery was easier than the others Much easier than last week&039;s Perhaps, with practice and patience, everything becomes easier If never easy Never easy

I am sorry: it is difficult to maintain an orderlyI cannot ink over hasty words or tear loose a spoiled page The cylinder revolves, the needle etches, and raven for all time in merciless wax Marvellous apparatuses, like miracle cures, are beset with unpredictable side-effects In the twentieth century, new ht ression Brevis esse laboro, as Horace would have it I kno to present a case history This will be of interest to posterity For noork in camera and secrete the cylinders hat remain of my earlier accounts As the situation stands, ered were these journals exposed to the public ear One day, I should wish my motives and methods made known and clear

Very well

The subject: female, apparently in her twenties Recently dead, I should say Profession: obvious Location: Chicksand Street The Brick Lane end, opposite Flower & Dean Street Ti for upwards of an hour in fog as thick as spoiled ht-work The less one can see of what the city has become in this year, the better Like ht Mostly, I doze; it seems years since the bliss of actual sleep Hours of darkness are the hours of activity now Of course, here in Whitechapel things were never much different

There&039;s one of those cursed blue plaques in Chicksand Street; at 197, one of the Count&039;s bolt-holes Here lay six of the earth-boxes to which he and Van Helsing attached such superstitious and, as it eventuated, entirely unwarranted i was supposed to destroy them; but, as in so much else, my noble friend proved not equal to the task I was under the plaque, unable to discern its wording, pondering our failures, when the dead girl solicited my attention

&039;Mister&039; she called &039;Missssster&039;

As I turned, she settled feathers away fro woman would have shook with the cold She stood under a staircase leading to a first-floor doorway above which burned a red-shaded lantern Behind her, bar-shadowed by the stairs, was another doorway, half-sunken below the level of the pave, nor in any close enough to see clearly, showed a light We inhabited an island of visibility in a sea ofyellow eddies in the low-lying fog There was no one nearby I heard people passing, but ere curtained Soon, the first spikes of daould drive the last new-borns froirl was up late by the standards of her kind Dangerously late Her need for money, for drink, entle a hand in front of her, sharp nails shredding traces of fog

I endeavoured to make out her face and was rewarded with an ihtly to regardaway from a white cheek There was interest in her black-red eyes, and hunger Also, a species of half-aware a women, on the streets or off When Lucy - Miss Westenra of Sainted Memory - refused my proposal, the spark of a similar expression inhabited her eyes

&039; and so close to lish Froe her German or Austrian by birth The hint of a &039;ch&039; in &039;chentleed upon &039;cloze&039; The Prince Consort&039;s London, frohaed with the ejecta of a double-dozen principalities

&039;Come on and kissShe was indeed a pretty thing, distinctive Her shiny hair was cut short and lacquered in an aluards of a Ro, her red lips appeared quite black Like all of the sharp pearl-chip teeth A cloud of cheap scent hung around, sickly to cover the reek

The streets are filthy, open sewers of vice The dead are everywhere

The girl laughedfroged feathers about her shoulders Her laugh reain of Lucy Lucy when she was alive, not the leech-thing we finished in Kingstead Ce believed

&039;Won&039;t you give&039;Just a little kiss&039;