Underwood and Flinch 7: Episode 13

Hello listeners, no chit-chat this time, just going straight in, mostly because I don't really have any chit to chat with. So, let's go. Last time, you may recall, Underwood was telling us how Verlaine and his men captured and tortured Matthias, forcing him to give up Underwood's whereabouts at the Pusset's plantation, Claverton, not too far from the town of Stroud. I left, rather abruptly, in the middle of a scene where where Martha walked in on Underwood as he was just settling into a feed from a pusset daughter. And so it's there that we will rejoin them. I'll fade into the scene just before we left it, and then we'll roll straight on into the story. No music, just straight in.

This is The Devil of Claverton, episode 13. Like all the passets, Nabi was quite in my thrall, so there was no resistance when I awakened her. If anything, she, like all of them, welcomed the sight of me and was eager to satisfy my appetite. So I settled down to feed. I didn't realise how absorbed I was in the process at the time. I was completely unaware of any other presence in the room, until from somewhere far away I heard someone, Martha, calling my name. It turned out she'd woken up and couldn't get back to sleep, so she came looking for me, expecting to find me downstairs, reading a book or some such. But as she was passing the girl's room, she said she heard a... He faltered, momentarily embarrassed. A slurping sound coming from within. I had

no idea I slurped when I fed. If I had, I would have taken more care, and I certainly wouldn't have been so lax as to leave the door slightly ajar, but Anyway, she came in, candle in hand. The room was dark, of course, because I didn't need a candle. And there she saw me, my shirt off to avoid possible bloodstains, on the bed, with my mouth at the girl's neck, and slurping away like a suckling pig. Well, she thought as anyone would that I was making love to her. Appalled and enraged, she shouted my name. I was barely aware of it, So, when I seemingly ignored her, she came over, calling me a lot worse than my name and demanding I stop. At first, she'd sounded far away, but a punch between the shoulder blades made me realise

she was a lot closer. This triggered an animal aggression in me, a need to defend my mule against some other predator. I snapped my head around, teeth bared to face the light of her candle. the blood in my mouth spilling over my lips and chin, and behind me, Nabi's neck with its open, bleeding wounds. Well, that's when Martha's anger turned to horror. She screamed. That woke me up.

I was at her in an instant, closing my hand over her mouth and fixing her wide, terrified eyes with mine to fascinate her instantly. How long had she been shouting before she screamed? I didn't know. But if the shouts hadn't woken anyone, the scream certainly would have. I knew that others would be there in the time it took to get a candle lit. So I told her to leave the room, close the door, and say to anyone who came to investigate that everything was fine. She'd had a nightmare and had come looking for me. She'd screamed when she thought she'd seen a ghost. Silly, I know, but it was all I could think of at the time. Anyway, it worked well enough. Anne and some others came, and she sent them back to bed reassured. She then waited

for me outside the room, since I'd not given her any further instructions. When the coast was clear and I'd closed Nabby's wound and settled her and young Eunice down, I went out and led Martha back to our bedroom. There I explained to her what it was she had seen and what I had become. I told her everything.

But she was fascinated, said Redmond. What's the difference between that and tying her to a chair and stuffing a sock in her mouth? She's incapacitated. You could have said anything and she wouldn't have been able to object. Quite so. Which is exactly what I wanted from her. Do you imagine for a moment we could have had a reasonable debate about how I'd been drinking a child's blood straight from her neck if she hadn't been fascinated? Oh dear me, no.

She would have screamed the house down. I couldn't have that. This way she had to listen to me, had to hear all I had to say without being overcome by rage or fear or revulsion. Which I'm sure she felt when you did finally release her, said Redmond. Yes, said Underwood, and she noted how his eyes slid from hers as he said it. But that wasn't for a while. I gave her plenty of time to acclimatise to my changed condition.

How long? Underwood shrugged. I don't remember exactly, but it was a while. You didn't release her, did you? said Redmond. It wasn't a question, it was an accusation. Of course I did. Inspector, if one leaves a fascinated subject long enough, with even the most difficult facts to contend with, they will, in time, assimilate and become comfortable with them. This struck a familiar note with Clare. It chimed with what Coleridge had told her when she had confronted him that morning in London. He'd said he'd been under Verlaine's fascination for a long time before eventually being released to become his faithful servant. Assuming, of course, he was telling the truth.

For all she knew, Coleridge could always have been on Verlaine's proverbial payroll. How long then? Underwood shrugged. About eight weeks, I suppose, give or take. Redmond turned to David to check his reaction. David averted his eyes and reached for his e-cigarette. He's okay with it, thought Claire. He's okay with anything Underwood does. She'd been nursing a hope that perhaps Flinch had some remaining vestige of human decency. He'd seemed as if he might back in London. But as the flight had progressed, his responses to Underwood's confessions had been consistently acquiescent.' Accepting anything,' the vampire said, however monstrous in his stride.' She turned from him to Underwood.' And she was comfortable with it, with your feeding on humans?'' Oh, yes,

by then she was.' I tried to release her sooner, of course, but every time I did she was unreasonable.'' Unreasonable?'' Yes, it was quite impossible to reason with her.' I first tried releasing her the following night, but there was no change. On regaining her autonomy, she immediately tried to flee from me in terror. She thought me a cannibal. I tried to explain that I wasn't. Cannibals feed on their own kind.

But me? Well, I wasn't Nabi's kind anymore. Or Martha's kind. I wasn't human kind, full stop. And I unwisely demonstrated the point by turning into a wolf, there and then. It, um... It wasn't the brightest idea, so I had to fascinate her again, leaving her in that state for longer. When next I released her, having spent the weeks in between explaining to her repeatedly what had happened to me, how it had happened, how I'd fought and tried to master it but couldn't because doing it wasn't a matter of choice but of survival— of how Maru believed I had become possessed by the spirit of vampire, and how despite everything, I was still me, still her John Brooks. Well, upon release she was more reasonable, but still very afraid, in

part due to the conclusions she'd reached in her own mind while fascinated. She thought I'd become a werewolf.' A werewolf?' said David.' Yes.' Martha was a country girl, and the werewolf legend was still very much alive and well in rural English folklore. She'd seen me turn into a wolf and heard how I'd been transformed after being bitten by the creature on the island, so to her that I was now a werewolf made perfect sense. This had never occurred to me. I'd heard of werewolves, of course, but being a Londoner I didn't know much about them. She explained the legend to me, and— While the idea of the curse being passed on by the monster's bite was clearly applicable, that aside, it didn't hold up to much scrutiny.

I mean, if I was a werewolf, why weren't the pussets and others I'd fed on all werewolves too? I'd bitten them, hadn't I? And then there was the whole lunar business. I didn't need to wait for a full moon to change into a wolf. I could do it any time I wanted. And to cap it all, there was the bat. She hadn't seen that yet, so I gave her a demonstration. Again, not the brightest move, it set her right back. So again, I had to fascinate her.

And on it went, in and out of fascination, until finally she grew to accept what I had become. At the end of those eight weeks, she had become sympathetic to my plight, even pitying of my condition. However, she wouldn't tolerate my feeding on the former slaves or indentureds. Many of these people were her friends, and all of them were people with whom she felt a common bond. So, if she were to remain unfascinated, which I dearly wanted more than anything, then I had to either restrict my feeding to the pussets— which I couldn't do if I wanted them alive and healthy, and I did want them alive and healthy because I needed them for whenever we were visited by the pesky people of Stroud, or start

making nightly trips into Stroud to feed on those same pesky people, which is what I did. David raised a finger. Yeah, earlier you said the pussets became really ill. You made it sound like it was more than just anemia. Was it? Oh, yes. It was a lot more than just anemia. They were smoking. David frowned. To what? They were smoking, you know, like I do in sunlight. Not as bad as me, of course, but certainly smouldering in a most unhealthy fashion. Why? Well, I know now that it's because they had too much of me in them. Whatever it is in my saliva that makes the first part of the vampiric infection work, was building up in their systems to the extent that it caused them to smoke like a smothered campfire whenever

they were exposed to direct sunlight. At first, it was just a burning sensation on their skins. One Sunday morning, when they were setting off for church, fascinated, of course, as they always were, they all complained to Matthias, who was still there at the time, that the sun was burning them. Well, he didn't know what to make of it.

It was October, not exactly the height of summer. So he just told them to cover themselves up, you know. Take the covered wagon, use parasols, gloves, or whatever, and be on their way. Which they did. When they returned later, they were still complaining about it, but there was nothing visibly wrong with them. However, that evening, all of them became inflamed with the most awful sunburn. Red as a baboon's rear end, wherever their skin had been directly exposed. Wow.

I don't mind telling you that this seriously alarmed me. The scientifically held belief at the time, when it came to communicable diseases, was that they were spread via miasma. Perhaps you know of it, being a medical man? Yeah, David nodded. I believe things like plague, cholera and typhoid were spread by the stench from rotting organic matter, isn't it? Precisely.

And since the pussets seemed to have been contaminated with at least part of my shall we say, condition, I had to wonder, was it me? Vampire breath can be pretty rank at times if one doesn't take steps to rectify it, which I did, and always have. I've always tried to at least rinse with water after feeding if I'm going to be around humans, and I'd pick a few sprigs of mint or other fragrant herbs and keep them in my pocket to chew on in emergencies, still do as a matter of fact, even since the invention of toothpaste. Old habits, as they say. He smiled. Anyway, yes, I thought this condition of theirs might have spread to them on the, um, miasma of my breath. But if that was so, why wasn't Martha infected? She and I

had been intimate an awful lot more than I'd been curled up with any pusset, and she was fine. So the halitosis-miasma thing didn't quite add up. It was a puzzler, but eventually, though not for a while... I reasoned that it had to be related to my bite, and the frequency of it. The fact that my other victims, people bitten once or twice and with decent intervals in between, hadn't gone the same way as the pussets, was the clue.

If they were okay, then I deduced, logically, that my overfeeding on the family must be the cause. But as I say, I didn't figure that out till a bit later. That evening I gave Matthias instructions to keep the pussets indoors during the hours of daylight until they were suitably recovered, and only then to allow them out again. And during that time, being ignorant of the cause, well, I continued to feed on them. So when about a week later, when Matthias let them out again, Underwood chuckled, well... By all accounts, it wasn't pretty. It was a sunny day, and as soon as the Pussets stepped outside, it was as if they'd hopped onto a chargrill. They all began shrieking and wailing, and their skin, much to the horror

and dismay of everyone who saw it, began to smoulder. So that was that. No more church services or other trips into Stroud for the Pussets. And that is what led to all their bloody friends, which felt like every Tom, Dick and Harriet in Stroud, coming out to us to find out what was wrong with them. He sighed, then continued. Well, I had the pussets meet these interlopers and tell them, truthfully, that they'd come down with a queer affliction of the skin that meant they had to stay out of the sun.

I thought that after the town doctor had given them whatever potions he had to offer, that would be the end of it. But, oh no, he was worried about them and made it his business to call round any time he was out on his rounds. The town's minister would be round at least once a week to provide services for them at home, and their innumerable friends began what felt like a constant pilgrimage, landing in on us whenever they bloody well felt like it with their infernal need to pray together. Underwood groaned. Oh, I knew it was only going to be a matter of time before one of these busybodies noticed something amiss. so the only way I could think of to end all this was to do away with them.'' Oh, the Pussets,' said David.'

You mean you killed them?'' Not literally, no. I faked their deaths, easily done, as the groundwork had already been laid by their well-documented sickness. But before I had them succumb to it, I had them tell all their pesky chums that their beloved cousin was coming over from England to make a new life for himself.' That cousin was, of course, me. Hitherto, due to my nocturnality, I had managed to keep myself out of the picture, but not any more. Now, reluctantly, I had to take centre stage. So, after my arrival, I was introduced to anyone and everyone who came out to visit. A nuisance, because it disrupted my rest terribly, but it had to be done. I presented myself as a stern, rather standoffish sort of chap,

I didn't want to make friends with these people. I wanted them to sod off. So when soon after I too contracted the pusset's mysterious hypersensitivity to sunlight, no one gave a damn about me. And then it was time for the pussets to pass into the great hereafter. I put them into a coma-like sleep and then sent Anne and Jacob, the former house slave, into town to fetch the doctor. He came out, along with the minister, declared them dead, and that was that. Oh, other than for me to show them Ephraim's last will and testament, which I'd had him draw up before he supposedly popped his clogs, and in which he left Claverton to grumpy old cousin John.

Underwood smiled and pointed to himself. C'est moi. Then we had the town undertaker come out to measure the pussets for coffins, and I had Anne and Jacob go into town to bring the boxes back to Claverton. We weighted them down suitably with sacks of grain, nailed them shut, and sent them off to be buried. Martha, still fascinated, and Anne were the only mourners from Claverton to attend.

I obviously couldn't go, and I wanted to keep Matthias and Maru concealed whenever possible, because the pair of them had been out and about in Stroud when we first got there, asking after the whereabouts of the Pusset's place, you may remember. They'd been a good deal hairier at the time after months of travelling, but still, white-empt fate.

But you'd been there too, said Clare, at the same time. Yes, but I'd also been heavily bearded, and I'd only been seen in the inn, at night. I felt no cause for concern. Anyway, after that, they left us alone. The minister wanted to come out and provide me with services, but I told him I preferred to worship alone. I told him I felt it best not just for my sake, but for that of the wider community. I said I feared that there was some strange miasma at Claverton that had affected us, plus it's a pestilence that, while it had so far only affected my family, might be communicable to others via my apparently noxious presence, and I feigned a little coughing fit, you know, just to underscore the matter.

Underwood grinned and raised his glass of Sangue Vita, and that saw him off. He took a sip, licked his lips, and continued. Now, All this went on during the period Martha was under my fascination, and concluded just before it ended. So, as I say, the first thing she did, once she was properly back in the world, was to tell me that the former slaves and indentureds, who by then I'd begun feeding on, were absolutely off the menu, as were the younger posset children. She pitied them for their mother's sakes, a fate that could so easily have befallen her. But since I was no longer feeding on any pussets for fear they'd either go up in flames, or worse, become vampires themselves, I had no choice. but to hunt farther afield.

Of course the irony wasn't lost on me that no sooner had I prevented the people of Stroud from calling on me than it was my turn to start calling on them. They probably would have resented my visits even more than I had theirs, if they'd had a mind to. Which, of course, Underwood swirled his fingers between his eyes and David's in mimicry of a vaudeville hypnotist. They didn't. And so, cousin John Posset is set to spread his black wings over the town of Stroud. Join me next time, listeners, when the adventures of Underwood and Flinch Continue. And now, a word from our AI voiceover artistes. Now you can get Mike Bennett's Patreon podcasts in your Spotify app. For just $ 3 a month, you can rejoin the UNF saga.

Underwood and Flinch 7: Episode 13

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