I make my rounds, like a faith healer. Each day I spend a little time with each one of them. With Alice and with Burt and with Linda down the hill; and they take from me. They don’t leave anything in exchange, though. It’s not barter, it’s theft. And the worst part of it is I always needed that, I always let them rob me. What sick need was it that gave them entrance to my soul?Even the pack rat leaves some worthless object when it steals a worthless object. I’d take anything from them: the smallest anecdote, the most used-up thought, the most stagnant concept, the puniest pun, the most obnoxious personal revelation . . . anything! But all they do is sit there and stare at me, their mouths open, their ears hearing me so completely they empty my words of color and scent . . . I feel as though they’re crawling into me. I can’t stand any more . . . really I can’t.
The mouth of the alley was blocked.
Shadows moved there.
Burt, the box-boy. Nancy and Alice and Linda. Sid, the failure. John, who walked with a rolling motion. And the doctor, the juke-box repairman, the pizza cook, the used-car salesman, the swinging couple who swapped partners, the discotheque dancer . . . all of them.
They came for him.
And for the first time he noticed their teeth.
The moment before they reached him stretched out as silent and timeless as the decay that ate at his world. He had no time for self-pity. It was not merely that Eddie Burma had been cannibalized every day of the year, every hour of the day, every minute of every hour of every day of every year. The awareness dawned unhappily – in that moment of timeless time – that he had let them do it to him. That he was no better than they, only different. They were the feeders – and he was the food. But no nobility could be attached to one or the other. He needed to have people worship and admire him. He needed the love and attention of the masses, the worship of monkeys. And for Eddie Burma that was a kind of beginning to death. It was the death of his unselfconsciousness; the slaughter of his innocence. From that moment forward, he had been aware of the clever things he said and did, on a cellular level below consciousness. He was aware. Aware, aware, aware!
And awareness brought them to him, where they fed. It led to self-consciousness, petty pretensions, ostentation. And that was a thing devoid of substance, of reality. And if there was anything on which his acolytes could not nourish, it was a posturing, phony, empty human being.
They would drain him.
The moment came to a timeless climax, and they carried him down under their weight, and began to feed.
When it was over, they left him in the alley. They went to look elsewhere.
With the vessel drained, the vampires moved to other pulsing arteries.
– Los Angeles, 1963, 1965, 1968
KIM NEWMAN
Andy Warhol’s Dracula Anno Dracula 1978–79
KIM NEWMAN HAS WON the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the Children of the Night Award, the Fiction Award of the Lord Ruthven Assembly and the International Horror Critics Guild Award.
His novels include The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum, Back in the USSR (with Eugene Byrne), Life’s Lottery and the acclaimed Anno Dracula sequence – comprising the title novel, plus The Bloody Red Baron and Judgment of Tears (a.k.a. Dracula Cha Cha Cha). An English Ghost Story is currently being developed as a movie from a script by the author, while The Matter of Britain is another collaboration with Byrne.
As “Jack Yeovil” Newman has published a number novels loosely inspired by the heroic fantasy “Warhammer” and Apocalyptic “Dark Future” role-playing games. These include Drachenfels, Beasts in Velvet and Genevieve Undead. Silver Nails is a recent collection of five stories set in the Games Workshop universe and featuring the author’s recurrent character, vampire heroine Genevieve Dieudonné.
Under his own name, Newman’s extremely clever short fiction, which is often linked by recurring themes and characters, has been collected in The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Famous Monsters, Seven Stars, Unforgivable Stories and Dead Travel Fast. Where the Bodies Are Buried contains four interconnected novellas, and Time and Relative is a prequel to the BBC-TV series in Telos Publishing’s “Doctor Who Novellas” series. Newman has also edited the alternate-history music anthology In Dreams with Paul J. McAuley.
His short story “Week Woman” was adapted for the Canadian TV series The Hunger, and in 2001 the author wrote and directed a 100second short film, Missing Girl, for cable TV channel The Studio.
Newman’s original contribution to this anthology was ‘Red Reign’ – the very first story in the acclaimed Anno Dracula sequence. As a treat for fans of the series, we decided to replace it in this volume with one of the most recent entries set in that same alternate history.
“Two editors – Ellen Datlow and Peter Crowther – asked for novellas at the same time,” Newman recalls, “and I was planning another in the series that ought eventually to become Johnny Alucard. So I did a deal that they each get a bite at publishing it, read up a lot on Andy Warhol and wrote the thing.
“Readers interested in the cameo appearance characters, as strong a feature of this series as directors appearing as actors in John Landis films, are referred to
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Designed to stand alone, ‘Andy Warhol’s Dracula’ – along with seven more tales and other linking material – will eventually comprise the fourth and possibly final book in the Anno Dracula series.
For Sara and Randy
AS NANCY SNUFFED, HER blood curdled. The taste of vile scabs flooded his mouth. He pushed her away, detaching fangs from her worn wounds. Ropes of bloody spittle hung from her neck to his maw. He wiped his mouth on his wrist, breaking their liquid link. A last electric thrill shuddered, arcing between them. Her heart stopped.
He had pulled her backward onto the bed, holding her down to him as he worked at her throat, her hands feebly scrabbling his sides. Empty, she was dead weight on top of him. He was uncomfortably aware of the other garbage in the bed: magazines, bent spoons, hypodermic needles, used Kleenex, ripped and safety-pinned clothes, banknotes, congealed sandwiches, weeks of uneaten complimentary mints. A package of singles – Sid’s ‘My Way’ – had broken under them, turning the much-stained mattress into a fakir’s bed of nails. Vinyl shards stabbed his unbroken skin.
Johnny Pop was naked but for leopard-pattern briefs and socks, and the jewellery. Prizing his new clothes too much to get them gory, he had neatly folded and placed the suit and shirt on a chair well away from the bed. His face and chest were sticky with blood and other discharges.
As the red rush burst in his eyes and ears, his senses flared, more acute by a dozenfold. Outside, in iced velvet October night, police sirens sounded like the wailings of the bereaved mothers of Europe. Distant shots burst as if they were fired in the room, stabs of noise inside his skull. Blobby TV light painted a neon cityscape across ugly wallpaper, populated by psychedelic cockroaches.
He tasted the ghosts of the Chelsea Hotel: drag queens and vampire killers, junkies and pornographers, artists and freaks, visionaries and wasters. Pressing into his mind, they tried to make of his undead body a channel through which they could claw their way back to this plane of existence. Their voices shrieked, clamouring for attention. Cast out of Manhattan, they lusted for restoration to their paved paradise.
Though his throat protested, Johnny forced himself to swallow. Nancy’s living blood had scarcely been of better quality than this dead filth. Americans fouled their bodies. Her habits would have killed her soon, even if she hadn’t invited a vampire into Room 100. He didn’t trouble himself with guilt. Some people were looking for their vampires, begging all their lives for death. His nosferatu hold upon the world was tenuous. He could only remain on sufferance. Without the willing warm, he would starve and die. They fed him. They were to blame for him.
Dead blood, heavy with Tuinol and Dilaudid, smote his brain, washing away the ghosts. H
e had to be careful; this city was thronged with the truly dead, loitering beyond the ken of the warm, desperate for attention from those who could perceive them. When he was feeding, they crowded around. Having been dead, however briefly, he was a beacon for them.
He yowled and threw the meat-sack off him. He sat up in the bed, nerves drawn taut, and looked at the dead girl. She was ghost-white flesh in black underwear. The flowering neck wound was the least of the marks on her. Scarifications criss-crossed her concave tummy. Pulsing slits opened like gills in her sides, leaking the last of her. The marks of his talons, they were dead mouths, beseeching more kisses from him.
Since arriving in America, he’d been careful to take only those who asked for it, who were already living like ghosts. They had few vampires here. Drained corpses attracted attention. Already, he knew, he’d been noticed. To prosper, he must practise the skills of his father-in-darkness. First, to hide; then, to master.
The Father was always with him, first among the ghosts. He watched over Johnny and kept him from real harm.
Sid, Belsen-thin but for his Biafra-bloat belly, was slumped in a ratty chair in front of blurry early early television. He looked at Johnny and at Nancy, incapable of focusing. Earlier, he’d shot up through his eyeball. Colours slid and flashed across his bare, scarred-and-scabbed chest and arms. His head was a skull in a spiky fright-wig, huge eyes swarming as Josie and the Pussycats reflected on the screen of his face. The boy tried to laugh but could only shake. A silly little knife, not even silver, was loosely held in his left hand.
Johnny pressed the heels of his fists to his forehead, and jammed his eyes shut. Blood-red light shone through the skin curtains of his eyelids. He had felt this before. It wouldn’t last more than a few seconds. Hell raged in his brain. Then, as if a black fist had struck him in the gullet, peristaltic movement forced fluid up through his throat. He opened his mouth, and a thin squirt of black liquid spattered across the carpet and against the wall.
“Magic spew,” said Sid, in amazement.
The impurities were gone. Johnny was on a pure blood-high now. He contained all of Nancy’s short life. She had been an all-American girl. She had given him everything.
He considered the boy in the chair and the girl on the bed, the punks. Their tribes were at war, his and theirs. Clothes were their colours, Italian suits versus safety-pinned PVC pants. This session at the Chelsea had been a truce that turned into a betrayal, a rout, a massacre. The Father was proud of Johnny’s strategy.
Sid looked at Nancy’s face. Her eyes were open, showing only veined white. He gestured with his knife, realizing something had happened. At some point in the evening, Sid had stuck his knife into himself a few times. The tang of his rotten blood filled the room. Johnny’s fangs slid from their gum-sheaths, but he had no more hunger yet. He was too full.
He thought of the punks as Americans, but Sid was English. A musician, though he couldn’t really play his guitar. A singer, though he could only shout.
America was a strange new land. Stranger than Johnny had imagined in the Old Country, stranger than he could have imagined. If he drank more blood, he would soon be an American. Then he would be beyond fear, untouchable. It was what the Father wanted for him.
He rolled the corpse off his shins, and cleaned himself like a cat, contorting his supple back and neck, extending his foot-long tongue to lick off the last of the bloodstains. He unglued triangles of vinyl from his body and threw them away. Satisfied, he got off the bed and pulled on crusader white pants, immodestly tight around crotch and rump, loose as a sailor’s below the knee. The dark purple shirt settled on his back and chest, sticking to him where his saliva was still wet. He rattled the cluster of gold chains and medallions – Transylvanian charms, badges of honour and conquest – that hung in the gap between his hand-sized collar-points.
With the white jacket, lined in blood-red silk, Johnny was a blinding apparition. He didn’t need a strobe to shine in the dark. Sid raised his knifehand, to cover his eyes. The boy’s reaction was better than any mirror.
‘Punk sucks,’ said Johnny, inviting a response.
‘Disco’s stupid,’ Sid sneered back.
Sid was going to get in trouble. Johnny had to make a slave of the boy, to keep himself out of the story.
He found an unused needle on the bed. Pinching the nipple-like bulb, he stuck the needle into his wrist, spearing the vein perfectly. He let the bulb go and a measure of his blood – of Nancy’s? – filled the glass phial. He unstuck himself. The tiny wound was invisibly healed by the time he’d smeared away the bead of blood and licked his thumbprint. He tossed the syrette to Sid, who knew exactly what to do with it, jabbing it into an old arm-track and squirting. Vampire blood slid into Sid’s system, something between a virus and a drug. Johnny felt the hook going into Sid’s brain, and fed him some line.
Sid stood, momentarily invincible, teeth sharpening, eyes reddened, ears bat-flared, movements swifter. Johnny shared his sense of power, almost paternally. The vampire buzz wouldn’t last long, but Sid would be a slave as long as he lived, which was unlikely to be for ever. To become nosferatu, you had to give and receive blood; for centuries, most mortals had merely been giving; here, a fresh compact between the warm and the undead was being invented.
Johnny nodded towards the empty thing on the bed. Nobody’s blood was any good to her now. He willed the command through the line, through the hook, into Sid’s brain. The boy, briefly possessed, leaped across the room, landing on his knees on the bed, and stuck his knife into the already dead girl, messing up the wounds on her throat, tearing open her skin in dozens of places. As he slashed, Sid snarled, black fangs splitting his gums.
Johnny let himself out of the room.
They were calling him a vampire long before he turned.
At the Silver Dream Factory, the Mole People, amphetamine-swift dusk-til-dawners eternally out for blood, nicknamed him ‘Drella’: half-Dracula, half-Cinderella. The coven often talked of Andy’s ‘victims’: first, cast-offs whose lives were appropriated for Art, rarely given money to go with their limited fame (a great number of them now truly dead); later, wealthy portrait subjects or Inter/VIEW advertisers, courted as assiduously as any Renaissance art patron (a great number of them ought to be truly dead). Andy leeched off them all, left them drained or transformed, using them without letting them touch him, never distinguishing between the commodities he could only coax from other people: money, love, blood, inspiration, devotion, death. Those who rated him a genius and those who ranked him a fraud reached eagerly, too eagerly, for the metaphor. It was so persistent, it must eventually become truth.
In Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (1995), supervamp Mary Woronov (Hedy/The Shoplifter, 1965; The Chelsea Girls, 1966) writes: ‘People were calling us the undead, vampires, me and my little brothers of the night, with our lips pressed against the neck of the city, sucking the energy out of scene after scene. We left each party behind like a wasted corpse, raped and carelessly tossed aside . . . Andy was the worst, taking on five and six parties a night. He even looked like a vampire: white, empty, waiting to be filled, incapable of satisfaction. He was the white worm – always hungry, always cold, never still, always twisting.’ When told that the artist had actually turned vampire, Lou Reed arched a ragged eyebrow and quizzed, Andy was alive? ’ In the multitude of memoirs and word or song portraits that try to define Andy Warhol, there is no instance of anyone ever using the adjective ‘warm’ about him.
Valerie Solanas, who prompted Andy’s actual turning, took superstitious care to shoot him with home-made silver bullets. She tried wrapping .32 ammunition in foil, which clogged the chambers, before resorting to spray-paint in the style of Billy Name (Linich), the silver-happy decorator of the Factory who coffined himself in a tiny back room for two years, coming out only at dead of night to forage. The names are just consonants short of anagrams: Andy Warhola, Wlad Draculya; Valerie Solanas, Van Helsing. Valerie’s statement, the
slogan of a fearless vampire killer: ‘he had too much control over my life.’ On the operating table – 4:51 p.m., Monday, 3 June, 1968 – Andy Warhol’s heart stopped. He was declared clinically dead but came back and lived on, his vision of death and disaster fulfilled and survived. The stringmeat ghost of the latter years was sometimes a parody of his living self, a walking Diane Arbus exhibit, belly scars like zippers, Ray-Ban eyes and dead skin.
Warhola the Vampyre sloped nosferatu-taloned through the seventies, a fashion-setter as always, as – after nearly a century in the open in Europe – vampirism (of a sort) at last established itself in America. He had no get, but was the fountainhead of a bloodline. You can still see them, in galleries or People, on the streets after dark, in the clubs and cellars. Andy’s kids: cloned creatures, like the endless replications of his silk-screen celebrity portraits, faces repeated until they become meaningless patterns of colour dots. When alive, Andy had said he wanted to become a machine and that everybody should be alike. How did he feel when his wishes were coming true’? How did he feel about anything? Did he feel? Ever? If you spend any amount of time trying to understand the man and his work, you can’t help but worry that he’s reaching from beyond the grave and forcing you to become Valerie.
Consider the signs, the symptoms, the symbols: that pale, almost-albino face, simultaneously babyish and ancient, shrinking like a bucket of salted slugs when exposed to the sun; the sharp or battered black clothes, stiff from the grave; the goggle-like dark glasses, hypnotic black holes where eyes should be; the Slavic monotone of the whispery voice and the pared-down, kindergarten vocabulary; the covert religiosity, the prizing of sacred or silver objects; the squirrelling-away of money and possessions in a centuried lair; even the artificial shocks of grey-white-silver hair. Are these not the attributes of a classical vampire, Dracula himself? Look at photographs taken before or after June 1968, and you can’t tell whether he is or isn’t. Like the murgatroyds of the 1890s, Andy was a disciple before he became a vampire. For him, turning was dropping the seventh veil, the last chitinous scrap of chrysalis, a final stage in becoming what he had always meant to be, an admission that this was indeed what was inside him.
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