The Notes of Jenny Watson

Extract from  The Notes of Jenny Watson

Dad’s last tale ‘Like a Rolling Stone ‘ came close to naming who he thought the Victoria Vampire to be- that weird guy from the retirement complex, Clark Canning, the ageing hippy , would be rock star,   who looked like  a Rolling Stone that failed the audition, but kept up the image all these years later,  the one I called ‘ The Man in the Long Black Coat’, the guy who drove the black Lamborghini around the environs in the depths of night, blaring the sounds of Led Zeppelin for all to hear.

I firmly believe that Clark got to Dad before his identity could be revealed, though I have no proof thereof, or at least no proof that would stand up in a court of law these days.

I have the draft versions of stories or what really amount to  reports of what he was discovering about the 'Victoria Vampire', which I intend to develop into fiction, and publish the whole lot of the stories in tribute to Dad, my aunt Lorraine Watson, no stranger to the world of creative writing, under her pen name ‘Lorraine Denning’, is to assist me in this project. Aunt Lorraine is no stranger to horror fiction, as like Dad, she too is a fan of the Victorian ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James, and the vampire fiction of Bram Stoker, and her story ‘The Office Goth’ was the first story that got her recognition on one of the many literary websites of twenty odd years ago,  a thinly disguised version of her working life in the 1980s, with a fictional witch and cat woven therein to what was intended to be an update on James’ ‘Casting the Runes’.

She even gave her character the surname ‘Denning’ in tribute to James’ character in that tale! .

She has since published several crime novels under her other pseudonym, Prudence Perrier, and a collection of ghost stories as 'Lorraine Denning'.

 I will rely heavily on her editorial skills, which are far better than mine, as she comes from a secretarial background in a law office, from those days when people wrote letters to one another, and such things were seen as a skill, constructing paragraphs, and using the right form of address appropriate to each individual recipient of such a communication. We got back in touch after Dad died, and she is a real character, still razor sharp for someone in her seventies,  just like someone out of one of her or Dad’s stories.

Dad’s death was , according to the doctors in the Infirmary, one of the myriad variations of the Covid-19 virus, a rare strain that they had christened ‘Covid-43’. The press made much of this so-called new variation, but there was no scaremongering, as this was a very rare occurrence, or so they said. I was doubtful about this and wondered, quite honestly , if the Victoria Vampire had got him, as he was very weak and jaundiced towards the end. One of the nurses I had spoken to in the ward had advised me that Dad had marks on his neck which reminded her of bites, I was reminded of the vampire stories by Stoker and LeFanu  I had read as a teenager, and watching movies like ‘Salem’s Lot’ , and ‘Dracula , Prince of Darkness ' on what they called ‘DVD’s’ or 'digital versatile discs ',  in those days.

If I can ascertain if Canning is the Victoria Vampire, maybe he is the vampire referred in Dad’s stories written over a long period of time, the character in the anecdote recounted to Mark P, the vampire in Dad’s school memoir 'The Vampire Walk', and the one by his uncle James, set in the grounds of a hospice, which I understand is located near to the 'Vicky Park' as Dad called it.

 I believe them to be one and the same entity. I hesitate to use the word ‘person’ here, as vampires, as we know live forever.

It is the intention of Aunt Lorraine and me to get to the bottom of this mystery for once and all, and in the course of this, work on the publication of Dad’s book.

We were laughing the other day over tea and cakes, when Aunt Lorraine said that it was a shame that her surname wasn't Holmes, as we could have been Holmes and Watson, just like Conan Doyle's famous detective duo from Victorian times!