The Whitechapel Vampire - News (original) (raw)

The setting is London, 1892, in the district of Whitechapel, an area notorious for being the neighborhood where Jack the Ripper went on his killing spree only two years earlier.

The Anglican monks and nuns of the Hermitage of St-Justinian the Martyr have aided the poor slum dwellers of Whitechapel for years. Then, shortly before Christmas, one of the monks is found dead in the abbey church, the apparent victim of a vampire.

For Brother Marstoke, head of the Hermitage, this death has a horrifying resonance. Several years earlier he and others of his religious order had founded a mission in British Guyana. The mission prospered until an outbreak of rabies began taking its toll on the local population. Believing that vampire bats were the carriers of the disease, Brother Marstoke had them wiped out against the wishes of Dr. Chagas, a local naturalist and black man who was studying the bats. Soon thereafter, two monks were found dead with bite marks on their necks. Nearby, scrawled on the wall, were macabre messages from Desmodo, a local vampire demon, that warned of bloody revenge for the deaths of �his children�.

The mission was closed and while Brother Marstoke went traveling for a year, his followers returned to London. All believed that the nightmare was at an end. But now, shortly after Marstoke�s return to England, it seems that the vampire demon has struck again. Terrified and shaken, Brother Marstoke turns to Sherlock Holmes to solve the latest murder.

Holmes maintains that the killings are the work of a human hand. To this most famous man of facts, logic and deduction - even the concept of God is in question. He is certain that a vampire demon is a scientific impossibility. And yet, Brother Marstoke insists that a demon has followed them from South America. What�s more, Holmes�s trusted friend, Dr. Watson, keeps on reminding him that many things are unknowable and scientifically unexplainable. As events unfold, even Sherlock Holmes begins to doubt his own mental powers.

Ultimately Holmes solves the mystery. But at the end of the day even he wonders whether or not he had a bit of �divine� assistance.