Anno Dracula (44 page)

Holly and Kit were about set to take Judd down when the floor fell away like a gallows-trap. They dropped into a wet basement. All around, rattles and hisses. Yellow eyes shone in dark. Sharp mouths darted and nipped.

‘Best place for vipers,’ cackled the old man. ‘A genuine snake-pit!’

Holly and Kit hissed back, through fangs.

Holly felt Kit’s embarrassment and rage. Kit felt Holly’s acceptance and determination. Inside seconds, Kit was fang-jabbed half-a-dozen times. Holly shifted, thickening her skin, changing her skeleton, raising scales on her arms and legs. She could be a reptile if she took it in mind, and snakes didn’t often bite each other. Kit caught some of her calm, but venom burned in his arms, which swelled like Popeye’s after spinach.

‘Thought you’d happened on free lunch in Tombstone, didn’t ya?’ Judd called down at them. ‘Took me for a foolhead old man with a rinky-dink museum, just begging to be rent and drained like unto a lost sheep.’

Judd, wooden leg stiff and creaking, peered into the pit. He tapped his grizzled temple.

‘I ain’t so simple, deadfolks. You figured I was a couple of cowboys short of a posse, but I’m up here and you’re down there. Says it all, don’t it? Sketches the parameters of our relationship. Left my leg on Guadalcanal, back in the Big War. Since I been messing with the slitherers, I been bit a hundred times. Too ornery to die, that’s me. I spit the venom back.’

Holly tried to keep Kit from thrashing and over-exciting the snakes.

The pit was full of rattlers, diamondbacks, copperheads, whatever. Neither knew one serpent from another, though they could tell which beasts were deadly. Everything down here was venomous.

Doctor Porthos, their father-in-darkness and first teacher, had listed things that could hurt them: direct sunlight, silver bullet, stake through the heart. Five nights after he turned them, they’d proved him right. Kit and Holly didn’t care to be anyone’s ‘disciples’, not after all the church they’d swallowed back in South Dakota.

Porthos hadn’t said anything about snakebite. It might not kill Kit, but it was surely hurting him. Holly put her hand on his fever-hot brow, trying to pull the hurt out of him.

‘For live folks, the pit’d be enough. But you’re special guests. I got to fetch a prime exhibit. I have Doc Holliday’s boots, the ones he wasn’t wearing when he died. Bat Masterton’s cane and derby hat. Liberty Valance’s quirt. You’d sure have appreciated seeing those, I bet. And the shotgun Bob Ollinger used to try to kill the viper Billy the Kid. Ollinger ground up sixteen silver dollars for shot. Billy got the gun away from him and blasted him in the face. “Keep the change, Bob!” That’s a true story, deadfolks. An authentic piece of Western history. This ain’t none of those, though. It’s a special exhibit. A one-of-a-kind item. Hang for a moment. It’ll take me a while to hobble there and back. Amuse yourselves. Like I tell the schoolkids, this should be an educational experience. Come up with a good question and I’ll give you a piece of sugar candy.’

Kit’s mouth was too swollen to get anything out and his brain was on fire. Holly heard a stream of curse words deep in her mind, where Kit always spoke to her. She was in his head too, taking her share of the pain.

The Tombstone Dime Museum was on the outskirts of town. A light was burning when Kit and Holly chanced along after forty-eight hours on the road in a stolen Cadillac. They hadn’t had a feed in three states. Judd was right. They’d taken him for easy prey.

The pit was about twenty feet deep, the walls rough for the bottom ten but smooth above that. No handholds. People had died here. Holly knew from the bad air. Sometimes, when she and Kit were inside each other, things played back like a motion picture on a drive-in screen. A series of death scenes, mostly.

They were vampires, but old Judd was a killer too.

They were made this way. What was his excuse?

She found the worst bites on Kit’s arms and suckled them, adapting her fang-teeth to the thin snake-needle holes. She drew out Kit’s venom-laced vampire blood. The heady mix hit her between the eyes the way gobbled ice cream had done when she was alive. She spat the poison out like a chaw of tobacco. Kit’s face looked less like a big purple bruise.

‘Bloody Holly, you sure are beautiful,’ said Kit, with difficulty.

‘Lambchop, you say the sweetest things,’ she said, hearing a hiss in her ‘s’ sounds.

She’d snakeshifted, hair flattened against her neck in a cobra hood, diamondback patterns up and down her bare arms, face a flat-nosed mask, tongue forked. Her eyes, almost on the sides of her head, gave her a wraparound view. Serpents raised in lithe s-shapes, hissing tribute, begging her to be their queen, to lead them out of this dark place.

Kit stroked her scales, adoring her. Whatever she shifted to, he was in love with. He always saw inside. It had been like that before they were reborn into this night-life.

‘Missy, you’re a nasty one,’ said Judd. ‘Doin’ you a favour, puttin’ you out of your butt-ugly bitch misery. And your no-account boyfriend’s too.’

The dime museum’s curator was sat on a stool by the trap. In his lap was what looked like an outsize toy gun, a Wild West revolver.

‘A Buntline Special,’ said Judd, hefting the gun, stretching his fingers around the handle, skinny thumb on the cock-lever. ‘A real collector’s piece. Not many made. This is an eleven-inch barrel. Ned Buntline, the Western writer, had them made special. Only a few proud men earned the right to carry iron like this. Men like Buffalo Bill Cody.’

He twirled the gun in his hand, expertly.

‘This wasn’t Cody’s, though. This exact gun belonged to Wyatt Earp, Marshal of Tombstone.’

‘You’re ravin’, old timer,’ said Kit, still in pain, but able to speak again. ‘Wyatt Earp weren’t real. He was a made-up person.’

‘Hugh O’Brian,’ said Holly.

‘That’s right, Bloody Holly. Hugh O’Brian played Wyatt Earp on TV He was no more a real person than Clarabelle the Cow. The big gun is probably a prop from the show. TV ain’t real.’

An explosion, loud as the crack of doom, vaporised a grapefruitsized chunk out of the wall of the pit. Snakes hissed and rattled and tied themselves in knots. Holly’s hearing membranes ached and reverberated.

‘Ain’t no prop,’ said Judd. ‘You don’t know nothin’ about Marshal Earp. Afore there was television, Earp was as real as you or me. An actual historical personage. Cleaned up Dodge and Tombstone. Faced down the Clantons at the O.K. Corral. Left many a badman dead in the dust.’

Holly’s hand was webbed, like a lizard’s.

Judd opened and emptied the gun.

‘Deadfolks have to be treated special. No point wasting lead on you.’

Something gleamed in Judd’s hand.

Holly felt that inrush of panic breath, the most intimate thing Kit shared with her. She was the only person who ever knew when he was scared.

She was with him. It didn’t matter.

Judd held the shiny bullet between thumb and forefinger.

‘This is an antique item, too. Can either of you kids tell me the principal business of Tombstone, Arizona? During the times Earp was lawman here?’

‘Cattle,’ Kit took a guess. ‘Rustlin’, ranchin’, ropin’. All that cowboy crap.’

Judd laughed. The sound filled the pit.

‘That’s a no, smartmouth. It was
silver mining
.’

The old man slipped the silver bullet into the gun.

‘Notice all the holes in the ground? Like the one you’re in. Why do you think folks dug ’em? For their health? They were after
plata, compadres.
Bright, shiny metal. Used to be gold was more valuable than silver. Remember that? Then you deadfolks came along, shucking off lead slugs like peas, and silver became the most sought-after stuff on Earth. Not just pretty - practical.’

Judd took other bullets and slipped them into the chambers.

‘These rounds were crafted by a man named John Reid. He put on a mask to ride the range, out after your kind. Billy Bonney wasn’t the only viper to slither across the Early West. John Reid was the greatest Vampire Slayer of the nineteenth century. I was given these bullets by his nephew, a big newspaperman. Been saving them for a party like this.’

It was time to end this.

Holly had Kit hug her around the neck from behind and pin her sides with his knees, as if she were still twelve giving her younger cousins horsey-back rides. She slapped lizard-hands against the wall, about seven feet off the pit-floor, spreading the finger-webs out to get suction. Her arms, legs and back were extended and flexible.

She zig-zagged up the wall.

Her face was to the rock, but Kit kept his eyes on Judd. Through him, she saw the old man’s face gape with shock and surprise. He fumbled one of the bullets, which fell from his fingers and pinged into the pit. His hands were shaking.

Judd saw Kit looking vengeance at him. He tried to close the gun, but they emerged from the snake pit and fell upon him. His pistol skittered away on the floor. Holly and Kit took either side of his scrawny neck. They bit through to the windpipe, kissing in the fountain of blood.

‘Bloody Holly,’ said Kit.

‘Lambchop,’ said Holly.

The doorbell chimed just after midnight, sounding the first six notes of ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’. From the first-floor landing Alucard used the universal remote to admit the girl Heidi had sent over. The main doors were California mission relics, hung between Transylvania granite - it had taken some effort to get the hinge-creak, which needed oil and grit every week. He punched in a lighting plan for the reception hall. Artificial moonglobes shone through a blue-and-green stained glass
faux
ceiling, casting bat signals on red-and-white, honeycomb-locked, skull-motif floor tiles.

The girl, pinned in the harsh crossbeams of three movement-sensitive spotlights, had a waist-length fall of raven hair, pale skin surgically taut over model-sharp cheekbones, clunky platinum man-in-the-moon earrings, and a carmine mouth held open in permanent Pepsodent rictus by ivory fangs. A high-collared, floor-length black cape covered her body: she could have been one of those Malay
penanggalan
creatures - a lovely-faced head floating above a sac of bloody innards.

He descended his main staircase, footfalls muffled by thick carpet, eyes on the vampire girl. These nights, Heidi delivered more suitable product than her predecessor, Madame Alex. He’d made the call ten minutes ago and someone fitting his individual requirements was express-delivered to Castle Dracula 90210. He would send Heidi a present, a collectible plate signed by the surviving cast of
Gilligan’s Island.

‘I am Alucard,’ he said. ‘I bid you welcome.’

Acoustics in the hall were perfect for the timbre of his voice. The girl reacted as if his greeting had come at her from all directions at once.

‘Come freely and of your own will and leave something of the happiness you bring.’

Red-nailed white hands slid out of the front of her cape and travelled up to her throat. The cloak slithered off slim, bare arms, parting like stage curtains. With a practised twitch, she tossed cape-wings back over broad shoulders and displayed her goods, hands on hips.

She was a big-busted hardbody, a product of aerobics, implants and directed shapeshifting. Her scarlet swimsuit was cut in a V that went below the navel, straps barely covering her nipples. Black leather spike-heeled knee-boots added six inches to her height.

Her knowing smile suggested she expected to make an impression.

‘You can call me Vampi,’ said the girl.

Oh dear.

The girl - Vampi, doubtless with a little bat over the i - didn’t yet realise how special a client John Alucard was, how big a noise he could make in this town and how much he could do for (and to) her. That had been the Father’s strength. No one believed the stories about him until it was too late.

The girl strode towards the stairs, puzzled by the follow-spots. She frowned and giggled, eyes blurring red. Her silicone shivered.

To Alucard, Vampi was more dead flesh, a drac package with a date stamp. Admittedly, the wrapping was superior. Hollywood was full of tens. Beauty-contest runners-up and high school athletes had been flooding the town since the 1920s. Most didn’t become movie stars but they got together and bred good-looking kids. Los Angeles was brimful with the third or fourth crop of beauties, an infestation of hunks and honeys, ace faces and knockout figures. Excluding character actors and screenwriters, you could go months without running into anyone ugly.

‘Leave your cloak and come upstairs,’ he said.

She tapped a cameo at her throat and the cape fell away. She turned to catch it, giving him a view of her taut butt: thong-divided buns of steel, untanned skin of velvet. Necrophagous Arabian Nights ghouls and South American plane-crash rugby players always started cannibal cook-outs by eating ass, the choicest meat cut on the human body.

Vampi came up the stairs towards him, swaying with practised ease on her heels.

He stretched out his right hand for her. She was taken with the large ruby on his long forefinger. She bowed her head to consider the ring.