Tip zigzagged between mounds of horse manure—some fresh, some already weeks old—that dotted the streets of southeast London. He was out of breath, and the city air, thick and dark like molasses, did little to satiate his need for oxygen. He hurdled over the lethargic legs of a leper that seemed to blend into the stones beneath him, just as the leper’s plea for a shilling blended into the anonymous background noise of the city. Tip turned the corner at Mr Oswald’s Store of Exotic Tinctures, whose storefront was decorated with sepia flyers that proclaimed a simple concoction of herbs and fermented rat uterus to cure your genital warts or your money back. Beads of sweat accumulated at the hairline bordering Tip’s temples before whizzing off behind him into the darkness and obscurity of night.
Tip was on a mission, and his destination was in sight. Ahead of him lay the nondescript façade of London’s least extraordinary police station, where Captain Wilbur Stopforth exercised command.
Captain Stopforth was on night shift, the time when the drunks and crazies unleashed their mischief, seemingly in an attempt to rouse Stopforth from the relative comfort of his hardwood desk and almost-too-narrow chair. The captain was a heavyset man, rotund but not jiggly, like an enlarged turnip with a matching complexion to complete the image. Stopforth was a good detective, a man who did things by the book, if not the most inspired law enforcement official there ever was. Now into his forties, he saw less action than he did a decade ago, but he’d earned his badges—and his paunch. These days, he was more content to ensure his operation was kept tidy.
He was just about to take stock of the department’s open dockets, and ensure a balanced case allocation between his detectives, when the dishevelled silhouette of Tip hurtled into his office and planted itself on the chair opposite Stopforth’s desk. Tip hunched over, steam rising from his back, in a desperate attempt to compose himself and gain control of his breathing. Tip’s fearful excitement was tangible.
“Good heavens, boy! What’s the matter with you?” exclaimed Stopforth with a practised blend of condescension and gravitas.
“Ss-s-sir…”
“Out with it, lad. Have you lost your senses?”
“Y-yessir, s-sorry sir,” said Tip, his breath beginning to return to him. “It’s just that, well, there’s been a murder, sir.”
“This is London, boy. There’s a murder in the city near every weekday, and double on weekends.”
“Not like this, sir.”
“Say what, boy?”
“There’s not been a murder like this before, sir, not what like I’ve seen, to be sure.”
“What’s happened?”
“You’d better come see, sir. I don’t have the words for it.”
“Where?”
“Maypole Street. Quick, sir, before the rain comes.”
***
Stopforth would have noticed the hairs dancing erect on the back of his neck. He would have noticed the cold surge running parallel to his spine. He would have noticed the paralysis that took hold of him, and the inertia, and the momentary disappearance of the world. He would have noticed all of these things, were it not for the astonishing spectacle before him. Stopforth couldn’t work out what he was looking at, or perhaps his mind simply refused to believe it.
The body was set with shins on the road, knees pointing forwards, torso arched with the solar plexus forming the peak of the parabola, the top of the head dusting the ground to complete the semicircle, face upside down, mouth agape, and eyes opaque, colourless. But it wasn’t the positioning of the body that was so strange—so disturbing—it was the texture, the consistency of the body itself. It evinced no sign of life, now or ever. It was a husk, a fossil. A sculpture of white ash. A brittle, alabaster installation. And yet, somehow, impossibly, and until very recently, it used to be Miss Elizabeth Thomas, who sold her company to lonely gentlemen of questionable moral standing. Stopforth gazed at her ghostly form; he had never seen someone exsanguinated before.
“What’s happened to her, sir?” Tip asked in a bemused tone.
“If I didn’t know better, boy, I’d say she’s been drained of her blood.”
“How much blood, sir?”
“A lot.”
“How, sir?”
“I don’t know boy, I don’t know.”
Stopforth wracked his brain. It didn’t make sense, and Stopforth wasn’t one who enjoyed things not making sense. He watched on vacantly as a pair of officers struggled to load the human-ish husk of Miss Thomas onto the back of a wagon to be taken to the coroner for autopsy.
***
He stood in the laboratory, observing as Dr Templeton poked and prodded various points of Miss Thomas’ moistureless flesh with dissection scissors and a pair of toothed forceps. Stopforth didn’t like the cold sterility of labs. They were emotionless, the backdrop for unfeeling men to explore their eerie curiosities. A place where souls were unwelcome and the dead seemed somehow to be at their deadest. Chills darted down Stopforth’s spine.
“What’s the verdict?” enquired Stopforth in a tone that was jollier than he’d intended.
“It’s quite strange,” replied Templeton in a tone so sterile it very nearly blended in with the surroundings.
“Yes, strange, but what’s actually happened to her?”
“Well, it appears to be an instance of exsanguination, but I’ve never seen one so perfect before.”
“Perfect? I’d hardly call it perfect.” Stopforth could not conceal his dismay at the choice of words.
“She’s been bled completely dry. But I mean completely. I can tell you, captain, this sort of thing does not occur in nature. Even a man intent on the task would surely fail to draw every drop of blood from the body of another, and that’s with the necessary medical training.”
“Well, she hasn’t done it to herself, I can tell you that much.”
“Now isn’t that peculiar,” muttered Dr Templeton, almost inaudibly.
“What? What is it?” Stopforth’s heart began beating more quickly.
“You say there was no weapon recovered at the scene?”
“No, the perimeter was searched, but whoever did this must have taken it with him, either that or hid it impossibly well. My men combed the whole area thoroughly.”
“Well, I’ve found something that might be of interest to you.”
Dr Templeton held Miss Thomas’ hair aside to reveal the back of her neck. Just below the hairline were three puncture wounds, three points of an isosceles triangle.
“What in God’s name is that?” exclaimed Stopforth.
“That appears to be how this unfortunate woman was divested of her blood.”
“Some kind of stab wound?”
“Not exactly. These piercings were made with an extremely sharp instrument. Several giant needles, perhaps? No, the holes aren’t the right shape. Also the blood had to have been drawn out directly from the body. There was no blood spatter, which would be impossible if the victim was simply stabbed. And to drain her of this much blood using an ordinary medical syringe, one withdrawal at a time, would have taken much too long—days, and even then, it wouldn’t be possible to drain all of it… No, this is… something different.”
***
The night was quiet. It was hard to believe that, not so far away, something so twisted and violent had occurred, and that whoever was responsible was still out there—a faceless stranger, out of reach like a nightmare forgotten instantly upon awakening.
Stopforth’s mind was racing. He stared at the ceiling, but saw nothing. His mind was far away. What had he missed? Who would want to kill Elizabeth Thomas in such a macabre way, and how was he able to do it? Someone must have seen something. Stopforth was no doctor, but he knew draining a human body of all its blood was never going to be a quick process for any man, no matter how strong or knowledgeable he might be. But even if he could, what did he use to do it? No weapon or instrument he’d ever seen or heard of could drain someone of all their blood so totally and with no mess.
“Think, man, think,” Stopforth admonished himself. As he waded through the marsh of information and useless facts that crowded his mind, the high-pitched whine of a mosquito oscillated in and out of earshot before reaching its shrill crescendo, followed by an abrupt silence as it landed on a patch of Stopforth’s exposed flesh. Suppressing the instinct to flail and swat at where he thought it might be, he lay dead still in the dark, imagining the parasite’s needle-like proboscis plunging into him and noiselessly extracting his blood—his life force. A quiet thief, silently stealing life.
The morning glow illuminated the streets in bright grey. “How many mosquitoes would it take to suck the blood right out of someone?” pondered Stopforth. He did not know the answer to that question, a question so outrageous he could never have contemplated having to ask it. But now he found himself seeking out the advice of a man who maybe could.
Stopforth ascended the four short steps that led up to the grand but slightly dilapidated Georgian house. The heavy timber door was furnished with a brass knocker cast in the shape of an unsettlingly large Goliath beetle. Stopforth found it grotesque. He reluctantly placed his hand over the metallic carapace and drew it back before thrusting it back against the door. He repeated the action twice more.
From deep within the house came the sound of papers flapping and the flurrying of limbs.
“Coming, coming, won’t be a minute.”
Stopforth heard the swipe of a bolt being drawn across the inside of the door, and took a step back. He was greeted by thick spectacles that framed the unfocused, adjusting eyes of a short, balding man with thick white eyebrows and an off-white cravat.
“Yes? Who’s that?”
“Dr Whitby, it’s Captain Stopforth, Wilbur Stopforth from the London police department. I was hoping you could assist me with some information pertinent to a most curious case.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about any of the goings on around here, you’ll find. I tend to stay inside. No, I wouldn’t know anything about any case,” said Mr Whitby in a quietly defiant tone.
“Perhaps not, but I’m led to believe that you do know a fair bit about insects?”
“Insects? Not many are enamoured by my field of study. I do not get many invitations for casual conversation on the topic. Come in Mr—What did you say your name was?”
“Stopforth.”
“Come in, Mr Stopforth. Would you like some tea?”
***
The ceilings were high and the passageways wide. The house was structurally spacious, but every inch was occupied by some artefact, curiosity, or trinket from various worldly origins. There was a stuffed dodo in the corner of the study, itself adorned with oriental silk and tapestries. Papers printed with diagrams, maps, and sketches were strewn about every visible surface. It was the physical manifestation of a knowledgeable but chaotic mind.
Stopforth sat alongside Dr Whitby at his oversized oak desk decorated with loose papers, books, and glass-topped display boxes containing a vast assortment of butterflies of varying sizes, shapes, and colours, each pinned through the thorax onto the stiff, deckle-edged paper within. Stopforth took a sip of tea, which was adulterated with the leaves from a plant with which Stopforth was unfamiliar. It tasted bitter and earthy. He placed the mug down in front of him and sidled it away as surreptitiously as he could. He did not want to upset his host; he needed his help after all.
Dr Whitby had his eye glued to an elaborate-looking microscope with four tubes, each containing a lens of varying degrees of magnification. The biggest of the four was presently focused a millimetre from the slide directly beneath it. On the slide, beneath an extremely thin, glass square was an even thinner wing that once belonged to a dragonfly. “Just breath-taking,” exclaimed Dr Whitby. “Would you care to take a look?”
Stopforth obliged, and found his eye confronted with a network of veins, intricately connected within the ethereal matrix of the transparent surrounding wing. “It’s exquisite,” said Stopforth, truthfully, but anxious to discuss more pressing matters. “Dr Whitby, could I borrow your attention for a minute? You see, something terrible has happened. Not just terrible, but terribly perplexing, and I would be greatly appreciative if you were able to provide some clarity on the matter. Let’s just say it’s not the kind of thing we’re used to seeing in my profession.”
“Well, I’m curious to see how I can be of assistance, although I must reiterate that I can promise nothing,” replied Dr Whitby tentatively.
Stopforth recounted the incident.
***
He finished describing the position of the corpse and the sensation he felt as he touched the dry flesh for the first time, as well as the strange marks on the victim’s neck that had been discovered on the coroner’s dissection table. “What I cannot wrap my head around, Dr Whitby, is how could a man manage to drain every last drop of blood from her, how could he do it so quickly, and how could he do it without leaving so much as a drop of blood at the crime scene? It seems impossible, and yet I saw her there with my own eyes, dry as a desert,” stressed Stopforth with due exasperation. “But I did have a thought. The only instance that I can think of whereby blood is drawn from a living being without leaving a drop behind—and correct me if I’m wrong—is when a mosquito sucks the blood of its host. The perpetrator must have used an instrument akin to a mosquito’s proboscis, only much bigger in scale. The problem of course being that an instrument of the like has yet to be invented. It simply doesn’t exist. So my question is this doctor: does there exist another, much larger mosquito-like creature in the insect world that you know of that is capable of such a feat?”
“No,” replied Dr Whitby. “It doesn’t exist.”
“Are you quite sure, doctor?” asked Stopforth, his voice now dulled with resignation.
“Yes, quite sure. An interesting hypothesis though it might be, if there were an insect capable of such a thing, I can assure you I would know about it. Alas, the idea belongs in the domain of fiction.”
“Well, it was worth a try. Thank you anyway, doctor.” Stopforth stood, readying to leave.
“Anyway, it wouldn’t be a mosquito you were looking for by all accounts. Judging by the description of that wound, you’d be looking for a specimen in the arachnida class.”
“As in a spider?” asked Stopforth, somewhat surprised.
“No, as in a tick.”
“Are you suggesting a tick could have done this?”
“Don’t be foolish,” retorted Dr Whitby. “What I’m saying is that whilst we are being fanciful, we might as well be accurate in our fancy. What I mean to say is that your hypothetical perpetrator would not be a giant mosquito, it would be a giant tick.”
“But no such a tick exists?”
“No, no such tick exists. I did, however, encounter a local folk legend once on a lepidopterological expedition to Guinea, on the west coast of Africa. The locals spoke of a creature that would snatch onto the feet of children, drain their blood until they died, and then detach itself and disappear. The only way to kill it was with fire. By their accounts, the creature was some subspecies of tick, much like the usual variety, but the size of a human fist. If it were true, it would be by far the biggest species known to man.”
“And if it did exist, would it be capable of draining the blood of a fully grown human?” Stopforth asked with renewed exhilaration.
“No,” said Dr Whitby. “It would still have to be much, much bigger, and, even more importantly, it would have to exist.”
Stopforth and Dr Whitby jumped in unison as a scream penetrated the busy London ambience outside. Nightfall had already descended and the city was dark, but they did not hesitate as they dashed out of the house, down the steps, and onto the street in pursuit of the scream’s origin. The scream became increasingly louder until they finally turned into a narrow street, where they were confronted with a harrowing but familiar scene. A woman was collapsed on the floor, wailing, an oil lantern on the cobbles alongside her; she was obviously the one responsible for raising the alarm. Beside her was the white, shrivelled husk of a man. He had been exsanguinated, just like Miss Thomas. Dr Whitby reeled back in horror.
“Who did this?” demanded Stopforth, anxious for answers and charged with adrenaline.
“A thing w-what’s like… n-nothing I’ve ever… l-laid me eyes on,” spluttered the woman through sobs and heavy, uneven breaths. She was clearly traumatised.
“Where did it go?”
The woman raised her arm and pointed ahead. Stopforth looked in the direction her finger was pointing, and was able to make out the outline of a huge crater in the middle of the road. Where it led was a mystery. “You wait here and call for help, Dr Whitby,” said Stopforth, before turning his attention back to the crying woman. “If I may, Madam,” Stopforth said, not waiting for permission before making off with the woman’s oil lantern. It was an emergency after all.
***
The stones underfoot were loose and hazardous, and the ankle-height water was foul. The darkness itself seemed to be in a state of decay. The crater led to the underground sewerage network below London, a labyrinth at whose centre Stopforth now found himself. He could not tell how long he’d been trudging through tunnels saturated with human waste, and he could not recall having ever smelled anything so putrid. The timid amber glow of the oil lantern provided the only light in London’s murky underbelly.
Above the sloshing rhythm of his own footsteps, Stopforth heard a new sound: a faint gurgling. Following the source of the noise, he quickened his pace. After a short while, he arrived in a chamber where various tunnels appeared to connect. He was listening for the strange sound when he stumbled over something in the shallow, grey water, nearly falling flat and submerging himself in the process. Looking down, he could make out the silhouette of a body. As his eyes adjusted, further details came into focus. The white, shrivelled skin, bloodless but no longer dehydrated; the body had become inflated with sewerage water. Beneath the paper-thin skin, the life force that had once flowed through this unfortunate soul’s veins had been replaced with liquid human excrement—an unholy transfusion. As Stopforth bent over to get sick, he noticed that there was not just one body in the water, there were hundreds—London’s watery catacombs. He started running in panic; any direction would do.
But Stopforth was quickly cut short. Before him, not more than thirty paces away, rising out of the gloom was the most hideous abomination out of Hell’s loathsome menagerie. A huge, bulbous abdomen, grey and pulsating, the size of an elephant. Eight red, crustaceous limbs protruded from the oblong frame, each segmented and tapered into sharp points upon which it carried its mass. A disproportionately small head crowned the narrowest point of the creature’s body, couched between tweezer-like pedipalps and a serrated hypostome. Stopforth stared into the beady black eyes of the giant tick. Then he ran.
Stopforth could hear the thrashing of water as the creature gave chase. It was alarmingly quick for something so big. Stopforth could feel the mushy compacting of waterlogged bodies beneath his feet. He did not have time to care too much. He darted down sewer tunnels, one after another, turning down intersecting passageways as often as possible in a bid to lose his ravenous pursuer. But the tick was relentless. No matter which way he turned, the beast was at his shoulder, hunting him without mercy.
And then all remaining hope drained from Stopforth’s heart. Ahead of him, the tunnel was cordoned off by an iron grate, allowing only for the passage of water. Stopforth shoulder-charged it, but to no avail; the grate held firm. He turned to face his would-be executioner. The tick was only a few paces from him now, but it had slowed to a walking pace. As it approached—now almost within touching distance—Stopforth raised the oil lantern. He wanted to properly see the creature before he perished. But something strange happened. As he raised the lantern, the creature reeled back in what Stopforth recognised to be fear. Could it be that this beast was scared of fire? He swung the lantern round in front of him, casting fiery shadows on the tunnel walls, and the tick retreated further. Stopforth charged. The hideous parasite took off back down the tunnel.
It was difficult keeping up with the creature; it was quick and unperturbed by the darkness. But Stopforth was motivated to ensure that this nightmarish manifestation from the underworld did not escape to continue its long-undetected massacre. The chase continued through an endless maze of interconnecting tunnels and avenues, forcing Stopforth into sudden turns and sidesteps. Just as Stopforth felt as though he might not be able to keep up any longer, a dead end emerged ahead—the end was literally in sight. Right before the tick seemed destined to careen into the stone wall ahead, though, it began to ascend into a vertical tunnel above. But, for a moment, it slowed, and without thinking too much about it, Stopforth leapt, grabbing onto a back leg and wrapping his left arm around it. The lantern remained tightly clutched in his right fist.
***
The Palace of Westminster stood serenely in the moonlight, as motionless as an oil painting of itself. There was no wind, and the permeating drizzle that plagued London had dissipated momentarily. The River Thames below was calm; the water dribbled by, oblivious to the frenetic lives of men and happenings beyond its banks. Most of the city was asleep by now, and only a handful of people were on the streets to witness as a gigantic grey mass exploded upwards through the road from the sewers beneath. Those with keener vision would, in addition, have noticed the dwarfed figure of Captain Wilbur Stopforth clinging to what looked by all accounts to be a giant red leg. Debris scattered outward from the huge subterranean projectile, and a plume of dust and lime mortar billowed up in its wake.
The mass landed with a doughy thud before scuttling off furiously in the direction of Big Ben. By then, Stopforth wasn’t sure whether holding onto the tick was the wisest course of action, but he was committed to the probably ill-conceived strategy and locked his arm even tighter around the leg. As they barrelled over an abandoned cartwheel lying in the street, the glass outer case of the lantern caught a broken spoke and shattered. Stopforth applied the now exposed flame to the indented, milky hide of the tick, staining it black with soot. The creature’s entire frame began to convulse, and then its bulky movements quickened, like a horse shifting from a canter to a gallop in response to the spurs of its rider digging into its hindquarters. It cannoned forwards on a collision course towards the granite column of Big Ben, the steadfast overseer of the city, the great timekeeper.
Soon, Big Ben was towering high above them; they had reached its base. “What now?” thought Stopforth. “Where are you headed?”
As if to answer his question, the tick propped itself up against the exterior of the Clock Tower and began to climb, navigating the grooves and inlays as it scaled the south face. If Stopforth had ever intended to dismount, he had clearly missed his chance, as the ground had receded too far to survive the jump. He would not be disembarking any time soon.
The streets ebbed further away as the tick continued its upward journey. Stopforth could not hold on forever; he needed a plan. The tick had just made it up to the fourth lateral division of the tower, and would shortly reach the belfry above. It scurried over the face of the clock using the immense minute-hand as scaffolding. Clasping the bottom of the oil lamp tightly at the base, Stopforth carefully removed the burner from the oil chamber, which remained intact, making sure that the wick continued to burn. Holding onto the tick’s leg by wrapping his own legs around it, he poured the kerosene over the parasite’s rear hide. Then he bided his time as they passed the Roman numeral twelve of the clock face; he did not have long before the wick burned out. As soon as the tick reached the belfry, Stopforth struck the wick against the area where he had emptied the kerosene. It ignited on contact and Stopforth sprung from the great leg, landing on the outside ledge of the belfry. The tick continued its ascent, a plume of smoke trailing behind it. As the flames grew and became hotter, a hissing sound emanated from within the body of the creature; the blood inside was beginning to boil.
Stopforth peered out from the relative safety of the belfry threshold in order to track the creature’s progress. It traversed the topmost iron roofing plates with ease. All that lay before it was the cast-iron spire rising out to form the needle-like summit of the tower. The tick commenced the final stage of its ascent. Its legs clung around the spire, heaving its enormous mass towards the tip in a fruitless bid to outrun the trailing blaze. Its strength was failing fast, and its movement had become lethargic and less deliberate. After an agonising effort, it reached the pinnacle, balancing precariously atop the lance-like point. Smoke billowed from the creature’s rear, causing the clock tower to resemble the chimney of a crematorium. The tick held itself in the skyline for one tranquil moment, one final glimpse at the world below. And then without warning, the tick collapsed, the spire impaling its bloated abdomen.
A flood of crimson cascaded from the sky, showering London in a thick blanket of second-hand blood. The smell was ungodly. None of the four clock faces were visible beneath the sea of red, but it was midnight, and Big Ben began to chime the hour.
“Bloody hell,” said Stopforth.