Anno Dracula (66 page)

The gin gave Pretorius strange inner fire. She wondered if she should have accepted his drink offer.

‘I know it was Dracula who died,’ she said. ‘But, thinking back, I don’t know if it was him we burned.’

The doctor barked again and his skinny body shook with mirth. He raised fingernails to his mouth, like a baroness covering a belch.

‘You think I sewed his head back on? Hooked him up to a car battery with jump-leads? Did I bring him back to life? Not just a vampire, but a zombie of science, a revivified corpse?’

Kate knew she was blushing.

‘Your assistant in Rome was...’

‘Herbert West. Little American pipsqueak.’

‘He once published a paper...’

‘...on reanimation of dead tissue through a glowing reagent. Tomfoolery, piffle, flimflammery, nonsense and bullshit. He could never get it to work. His results were more pathetic than those of... well, a name best forgotten. Let us say the American never equalled the achievements of the Swiss, and the Swiss was merely a pupil who trotted along in my tracks. A C-grade student.’

‘So West couldn’t have brought him back?’

‘A beheaded vampire? No.’

‘Could you?’

He saw the trap she had manoeuvred him into.

‘If I’d put my mind to it, I daresay I could have. I enjoy a challenge. But it seemed at the time a fruitless avenue of research. Still does. If I put my mind to it, I could develop an otherwise harmless retrovirus that would turn the whole human race a nice shade of eggshell blue. Even a scientist as pure as I, needs some sense of practical application.’

‘A blue world might exist without racism.’

‘Touché, Ms Reed. As it happens, Dracula seems to have returned without my genius.’

Kate thought of the face on television.

She’d only ever seen Dracula dead. Truly dead. When he was in England a hundred years ago, she’d gone to great lengths
not
to meet him. In exile, he had kept out of the way. Geneviève and Charles had seen him in London, at his zenith. Penelope Churchward saw him in Rome, when he was a fading presence. Penny was with the Count at the moment of death. The true death that now seemed to have been revoked.

Was this moving, living face the Count?

Dracula had lacked a reflection, but the man at the concert cast an image that could be transmitted. A strange image, like a photo-realistic Max Headroom. Fixed and perfect, while other, human, images had a slight flicker as signal lines were misread by the eye as a coherent picture.

Was she right about the face?

She wouldn’t have recognised Dracula, but she did see in this face someone she knew, or had known. He was changed, but still there.

It didn’t mean he
wasn’t
Dracula.

‘For what it’s worth, Ms Reed. I think it
is
him. It may be that somebody has to be Dracula. His bloodline is by far the most powerful, the most widespread in the world. More vampires claim descent from him than any other father-in-darkness.’

That was true. She was herself of the Dracula line, three or four times removed. Most new-borns of the 1880s were, not all to their advantage.

‘I took some of his blood in Rome,’ said Pretorius, reaching for a test tube of scarlet fluid. ‘I’ve puzzled over it ever since. Still fresh, you know. Still alive in this tube, as in the veins of his children-in-darkness. It has transformative qualities, beyond those you might know about.’

She wasn’t a shapeshifter.

No, she
chose
not to be a shapeshifter. She could do fangs and claws. She was too timid or sensible to go further, remembering what that led to. Others had gone far beyond human shape, becoming beings even she thought of as monsters. During the First World War, when Dracula was in Germany, scientists experimenting with the shapeshifting ability of his bloodline created a strain of bat-warriors. Since then, others had pursued the project. Kate stuck close to who she had been, wary of launching into unknown darknesses which might end with the loss of her self.

‘Dracula spread his bloodline,’ said Pretorius. ‘It may be there was a purpose to that we didn’t perceive. He turned his get like all vampires, by giving blood as well as taking. The gift may have concealed a surprise. A passenger, like a parasite egg. I think his unique blood trails invisible kite-strings. He has followed one of these strands to batten onto one of his get, slipped into a skull and taken up residence, to redecorate and restore.’

Kate watched and listened.

The blood in the tube moved as Pretorius gestured. She’d woken once with that stuff all over her and a murder charge in the offing. But it wasn’t to that memory Dracula’s blood called, but to the vampire strain in her veins, the blood the Count had passed to a Carpathian, who had passed it to her father-in-darkness, who had passed it to her.

What would happen if anyone drank that blood? What if, here in Jekyll’s old laboratory, she or Pretorius were to unstopper the tube and drain it down? She had already turned once. Into a vampire. If, as a vampire, she turned again, what would she become?

‘He was tired, though,’ she said. ‘His death in ’59 was as much suicide as murder.’

‘He was tired in 1959, but what about 1945 or 1888 or 1720? He used himself up many times over. It seems he has come back not as he was at the end, but as he was in his prime.’

Kate remembered to be scared.

It was dark in here, even to her vampire eyes. Pretorius stood in a shaft of light, face etched with expressive shadows. Dracula’s blood had a dark neon shine.

‘I’ve missed him, you know,’ he said. ‘Dracula makes things interesting. And these times. How he will love them, how he will fit in with them.’

She knew he was right.

Not, she hoped, about everything. But he was right about the times.

Last week she’d visited Richard Jeperson at the Diogenes Club to talk about the Dracula situation. He was the last caretaker of an abandoned building, keeping everything in his head because all the files were compromised. The club, sponsor to Charles Beauregard and Edwin Winthrop, had been levered out of its position in British Intelligence, which was now run from Cheltenham by Caleb Croft. Only Jeperson, a faded dandy, remained at his post. His Lovelies were scattered. Sergeant Dravot was assigned to a retirement colony for spies in North Wales. Hamish Bond was back on the active list, working behind the scenes in the Persian Gulf.

With Thatcher ousted by a typical Tory free-for-all backstabbing, Lord Ruthven, that great political survivor, was again Prime Minister. Jeperson said Ruthven wasn’t sorry to see Baron Meinster dead and was all too ready to do business with this new Dracula. Transylvania was now the vampire homeland Meinster had agitated for, but Dracula announced he would maintain residences in Los Angeles, London (he still owned property in Piccadilly) and New York, leaving to others the governance of a country he could call a private fiefdom.

This time, the Count was a global presence, head of a corporation registered in a land where he could write his own laws. His power was in information technology, entertainment and finance, not the petty businesses of martial conquest and political office. Under the guise of putting together the Concert for Transylvania, Dracula had assembled a fair-sized media empire. He had already scooped up enough magazine and newspaper ownerships to drive Kate out of the business if he could be bothered with her.

She was afraid the times were changing back.

‘Now Ms Reed, I have to shuffle you off. I am in the middle of a course of experiments. The previous tenant left behind interesting notes about rejuvenation and shapeshifting. I scent lucrative patents. Do you know what fools we were? My Swiss pupil, the good Dr Jekyll, the cat-torturing Moreau, life-chasing Nikola, skin-grafting Orloff, the clod West? We toiled amid bones and stinks in cramped laboratories and crypts, violating the laws of God and man. For what? To say we had done it. For the thrill of power over nature. We never,
ever,
thought about what profits there were to be had. Dracula saw clearly. In that confection of truth and fancy Stoker put together, do you recall what the Count is doing when we first meet him? Looking for
treasure.
He saw that blood, that
life,
was not enough. Always, he fed on gold. Cash. Pounds sterling. The almighty greenback dollar. When he was stabbed, he bled money. This time, I intend to license my findings. To the Body Shop or Glaxo or whoever will pay the healthiest royalty.’

She left the scientist to his money dreams.

It was full dark in the square. The presence she’d sensed earlier wasn’t gone.

Fed up, depressed and frightened by what she had learned or imagined, she decided to have it out with the landlord’s agent. She stood on the pavement and spread out her empty hands.

‘Come on, then,’ she said, letting the Irish into her voice. ‘If you think you’re hard enough...’

Her words came back to her, an echo.

For a moment, she thought she was being silly. No one was after her. No one would come out of the dark.

Then, they did.

E
arthquake, brushfire, riot and the opening weekend figures of
Hudson Hawk
changed nothing. It was as if she’d never been away.

Geneviève drove along Sunset, at sunset. Ahead, the blood-red daystar sank swiftly into shimmering haze. Windows flashed green-gold in pastel stucco facades, reflecting distant fires. Titanic billboards for the new Stallone loomed above the cityscape, visible from low Earth orbit. Everything was new, but already faded.

Ever since her flight entered California airspace, she’d expected the evil angels would come out of the sky and tear her apart. She knew better than to think twenty years away meant forgiveness and forgetting. The powers she’d upset held grudges like champions. They had the patience to carry out a plan of revenge over decades. Kate Reed, of all people, knew this... but the Irish woman was right - Los Angeles was where they both needed to be right now. If they were really marked, punishment could reach them anywhere in the world.

She passed the Church of Immortology Celebrity Drop-In Centre. People queued outside as if it were a trendy club. Scrubbed, enthusiastic vampire youths chattered non-stop to keep the half-hearted from growing bored and dropping out of the line before they passed the velvet rope to exchange donations for enlightenment. L. Keith Winton was missing on the high seas. The rumour was that he’d not long survived his own turning - a major embarrassment, since he’d had years to prepare a perfect ‘ascension’. The Immortologists were now run by her old desert acquaintances, General Iorga and Diane LeFanu. The scam might collapse. With Dracula back, lesser undead gurus were superfluous.

Like the rest of the world, Geneviève had caught the Big Comeback on television. The Dracula story had stayed at the top of the bulletins for barely two months before George Bush and Lord Ruthven went into Kuwait and the Bat-Soldiers started unloosing smart bombs over Baghdad. Now that unsatisfying little war was over, Dracula was back in the news again. His resurrection was blindly accepted in the media and his spell in True Death was vanishing from official biographies. She guessed John Alucard had tried another conjuring, one that played more like usurpation than transformation. The vampire who’d driven her out of town in 1981, whoever he had been, was obliterated. Now there was only Dracula.

The Hertz rental was a hard-top with a tinnitus of air conditioning she didn’t know how to switch off. Her bare arms and face were blasted with ice molecules. She turned on the car radio.

‘That’s the same engine under the hood,’ sang Wynonna Judd, ‘carried young Elvis to Hollywood...’

The song, ‘(Look At It Now) It’s Just Like New’, gave her a bone chill beyond the prickle of the in-car blower. America always had a soundtrack. Pop music was everywhere, like weather. The pathetic fallacy was false no longer. The whole world really reflected your emotions, sticking a pin through your heart and freezing you in place. She was the fifteenth century fox - the first songs she had heard or sung were labelled ‘early music’ in the record stores which carried that sort of thing - but she was exactly as the country singer advertised, ‘just like new’.