Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (41 page)

Marcello, hidden behind his dark glasses, walked back toward the cliffs. Her desperate love was burned away, but she had no ill-will for him. He was as lost as everyone else. She understood he’d given up journalism and become a publicity agent for all the new Malenkas.

Charles, Dracula, Marcello. All gone.

Kate was dizzyingly free of all but the ghosts.

The three women stood by the sea.

‘I’m on a flight back to London this afternoon,’ Kate said. ‘I’m not sorry to go. Things will have piled up. And I need to earn some money. The
Guardian
wants to pack me off to Cuba, to cast an eye over this Castro fellow and see what I make of him.’

‘I’m going to Greece,’ Geneviève said. ‘Then, maybe Australia. I thought I’d look into this rocketry business. I’ve been staying put these last few years. It’s time to travel again.’

Unspoken between them was that they all thought it best to stay away from Rome. If they met any vampires, elders or not, they’d advise them gently to give the eternal city a wide berth. There was someone there quite old enough, and jealous of her position.

Penelope paddled, letting the water into her shoes.

‘I’d like to visit Pamela’s grave,’ Penelope said. ‘It’s in the hill country, in India. My cousin was important to me. I realise now how I have deliberately veered between trying to be exactly like her and trying to be nothing like her.’

Penelope explained as if asking permission.

Kate didn’t know what to do. She ought to break the story. Penelope would be a heroine to many. Funds were already being raised for the defence of her fall guy.

She had only just forgiven Penelope for everything else that was between them. This latest addition to the load would take some coping with.

‘I’ll never tell,’ Geneviève said. She still croaked a little.

Penelope thanked Geneviève and shook her hand.

Dracula’s smoke poured out over the sea.

‘Me neither,’ Kate said. ‘Probably.’

Penelope smiled coldly and kissed her.

‘I only said “probably”.’

‘I know what you mean. I’ve always known what you meant. And remember that, despite everything I have told you and everything we have been through together, I am still Penny and you are still Katie.’

Kate saw the frost in Penny’s eyes. She was changing again, emerging from another cast-off snakeskin.

‘Tag,’ Penny said, ‘you’re it.’

Penelope tapped her shoulder solemnly and ran off toward some rocks.

Geneviève didn’t understand at all.

‘It’s a game, Gené,’ Kate explained. ‘We were children together, remember?’

The elder vampire looked solemn and seemed younger than ever.

‘Tag, You’re It?’

‘That’s right,’ Kate said, tapping Geneviève’s chest. And now you’re it.’

She ran away, not very fast.

Geneviève caught on, and by the time Kate reached the rocks, her friend was waiting for her, to tag her back. Laughing, Kate feinted towards Geneviève — who eluded her with the fleetness of a vampire elder and the cunning of a sixteen-year-old French girl — and leaped across a pool to tag Penny, who fell over, splashing, and reached out to find Kate had darted away.

‘Tag, you’re it,’ Kate said.

She ran past the still-burning pyre, skipping through the ashy sand, dodging between the undertaker and the attendants, furiously pursued by Penelope.

‘I’ll get you yet, Katie Reed,’ Penny shouted, without malice. ‘Just you wait…’

Kate ran along the beach, away from the fire.

ANNO DRACULA 1968

AQUARIUS

1

S
unday morning, before nine. A godly hour, the smug might say. Church bells were pealing in Greenwich and Blackheath. Merciless June. A cloudless sky. Blazing sun. Shade hard to find.

Like most vampires, Kate Reed was no fan of early summer. Nights passed in seconds, days crawled for a week. Her cheeks and the backs of her hands tingled with the beginnings of burns. She ought to be senseless in her tightly curtained flat, cocooned under her continental quilt. Ideally, she’d be in the Southern Hemisphere.

Grass shone golden-green, as if coated with reflective paint. She had a choice: oversize el cheapo sunglasses and calming turquoise blur or clear National Health specs and headache-making focus. Prescription shades, her idea of decadent luxury, cost what she made in a month. A
good
month. For a while, she’d got through daylight with the home-made option: granny glasses, tinted with felt-tip pen. Those got trampled by a police horse outside the American Embassy.
The Guardian
spiked her copy on the Grosvenor Square demo. Too partisan. And where was the vampire angle? Editors looked to her for that.

This morning, there was a vampire angle. So she could sell it…

…if the papers had room for a little murder. Monday: Andy Warhol shot in New York… Wednesday: Robert Kennedy killed in California… Yesterday: James Earl Ray, assassin of Martin Luther King, arrested at Heathrow Airport… Ongoing death tolls: Vietnam, Biafra, Kôr. Soviet tanks massing on the Transylvania border. American riot cops loaded for bear in Watts, Selma and Jerusalem’s Lot. France preparing an above-ground Gamma Bomb test on Bali Ha’i. The Troubles kicking off again in Belfast.

That was the week, that was…

Twelve months ago, 1967 — the year of The Monkees. The Summer of Love. Kate had certainly been
in
love last summer. Twice. Not concurrently. She wasn’t
that kind of girl,
or hadn’t been so far. Now, 1968 — the Year of the Monkey. The Summer of Something Else. The Burning Season? She’d lost the taste of last year’s loves: a warm Hells’ Angel, Frank Mills, and a vampire vicar, Algernon Ford. Neither trustworthy, both ‘trips’… as the young were saying. The young also said ‘never trust anyone over a hundred and thirty’. She wasn’t that old. Yet.

It was coming down. The Age of Aquarius. The Permissive Society. The Kali-Yuga. The Revolution. Flower Power. Helter Skelter. The Hallucination Generation. Fear and Loathing. The White Heat of Technology. The Green Green Grass of Home.

No more water. the fire next time.

Jesus Saves… with the Woolwich.

Go to work on an egg! Burn, baby, burn!

Commercialisation. Radicalisation. Decimalisation.

People who’d been excited or apprehensive were now elated or terrified. It was no longer enough to report news. Journalists had to
anticipate,
comment on breaking waves, name and package trends for general consumption.

She was writing more for
New Worlds
than
The Grauniad.
Michael Moorcock, the editor, encouraged her to chronicle the New Terror. He reminded her of Frank Harris, her father-in-darkness, but was a much better writer. Mike coaxed something half-decent out of her. Along with the porny purple passages of Horatio Stubbs’s serial
Harelipped in the Bed,
her supposedly inflammatory piece lost
NW
its Arts Council grant. She was still waiting to be paid. Mike was rattling out
Seaton Begg
paperbacks for rhino to plough back into the magazine. She needed fashion commissions from
Woman
or
Compact
to pay the rent. Unless they came through, she’d have to ghost ‘confessions’ to go between pin-ups in
Bikini Girl
or
Wow Magazine.
‘I Was a “Groupie Girl” for a Gore-Crazed Groover!’ ‘House of Thwacks!’ ‘Soho After Sunset!’

Squinting through Tizer-bottle specs, she acclimatised to the glare. She was in Greenwich, just outside Maryon Park. Some students wanted to use the tennis courts. They were kept back by blue-uniformed, tit-helmeted policemen.

As soon as she saw fuzz, Kate realised she was dressed like a burglar: black pocketless fly-on-the-thigh trousers, horizontally striped black and orange t-shirt with a cartoon bee on the front, black plimsolls, slightly ratty grey cardigan with sleeves long enough to cover her hands, oversized black peaked cap with a pom-pom. Her shoulder-bag wasn’t labelled ‘SWAG’, but was cavernous enough to stash loot.

She showed her press-card. Fred Regent, a young plod she knew, let her pass. Kate was expected. A posh athlete complained and was ignored.

This was once Hanging Woods, a haunt of highwaymen. Then, Charlton Sandpits. Now, the place was tamed. One of those leafy public spaces the English loved to keep tidy but would prefer people not use. No litter, no dogs, no children, no vampires. A familiar, alien place, like the abandoned suburbs, cracked launch-pads and drained swimming pools J.B. Graham wrote about in
New Worlds.
So quiet you wouldn’t know you were in a city.

Keeping to the path, she passed the tennis courts and walked over a gentle hill. The park was mostly grassy slopes, trees straining against dark green slat fences. She saw people near the treeline. A copper got in her way, gauntlet out in sign language for ‘stop in the name of the law’. His helmet’s blue visor was down, blanking his face.

Being a woman, mouthy, Irish, a leftie and a blood-drinker, she’d had her differences with the police. Even before the Terror, peelers shoved her about. Kate had been arrested as a suffragette and insurgent, as a rebel and rabble-rouser. She’d marched to Aldermaston and against Vietnam. She’d been force-fed, hosed down, truncheoned and garlic-sprayed. She’d been interned without trial, locked up for her own protection and bound over to keep the peace.

Helmet-head wasn’t a riot cop. The visor meant something else. He wore B Division sleeve flashes. He was a vampire.

‘Let her through, Herrick,’ said a plainclothes officer. ‘You know who she is.’

The pig stepped aside like a robo-man. Without seeing Herrick’s face, she could picture his expression. Lips a straight line. Eyes red flints. No love lost.

Press credentials wouldn’t get her into Maryon Park this morning if she were only on a crime beat. The early morning call made that clear. She was invited in her capacity as Associate Member of the Diogenes Club. Her
shadowy
capacity. Funny how you could be an enemy of the state and a secret civil servant at the same time.

She knew the OiC, Detective Superintendent Bellaver. He had a doleful, surprisingly groovy moustache. Most officers under him were vampires, but the Yard liked a living super at B Division. Old coppers’ tales about the undead being not ‘creative’ enough for high-level police work were still trotted out. Your basic biter made a decent enough plod, all right. Nothing puts the wind up a scrote like a fang-flash and a speed-burst. But when it comes to a whodunit, you want a live mind on the job. The thinking was shite, but Kate was happy to leave that argument to vampire cops. Bloodsuckers in blue did her few favours. If anything,
nosferatu
filth tended to be bigger bastards than warm police just to prove they weren’t soft on their own kind.

Detective Sergeant Griffin, a vampire, handed Bellaver a polystyrene cup of tea. The swirly violet pattern of Griffin’s trendy Nehru jacket hurt her eyes. Bellaver took a swig of brown liquid and made a face as if a tramp had pissed in it. He looked like that most of the time, and no wonder.

B Division was Scotland Yard’s unit for crimes involving ‘the vampire community’. Kate thought being called a ‘community’ was one step from mandatory bat symbol armbands. After that came internment camps, then scythes and stakes.

Anticipating a Soviet crackdown on the limited reforms of Transylvania’s Premier Torgu, Central European undead had been arriving in Britain since spring. Six weeks ago, the Tory MP Enoch Powell delivered an alarmist speech about Carpathian immigrants. He invoked ‘rivers of blood’ and not in any metaphorical sense. Lord Ruthven threw him out of the Shadow Cabinet, which only made him more popular with an aggrieved, resentful section of the warm population. Powell’s followers were as keen on marching as any radical student and more prone to bursts of the old ultra-violence. Enoch was too patrician and parliamentarian to endorse street-fighting. Others were happy to carry flaming torches. Extremists like Lorrimer Van Helsing — supposedly descended from Dracula’s arch-enemy, though Kate knew Abraham Van Helsing and couldn’t remember him having children — came close to advocating extermination. The boot-boys had a craze for what they charmingly called ‘Drakky Bashing’. Early morning assaults on lone vampires by gangs of short-haired thugs seldom prompted thorough police investigations.