“Together, we tracked and destroyed that first dread fiend – the school secretary who was nagging me about getting my employment records from Jolly Old England, as it happens – and staked the bloodlusting bitch. However, it seems she spawned before we got to her, and ever since we’ve been doing away with her murderous brood. You’ll be glad to know I’ve managed to rid this town almost completely of real estate agents. When the roll is called up yonder, that must count in the plus column, though it’s my long-term plan not to be there.”
Actually, Gorse was worse than the vampires he had made up. He’d had a choice, and decided to be Evil. He worked hard on fussy geniality, modelling his accent and speech patterns on Masterpiece Theatre, but there was ice inside him, a complete vacuum.
“So, you have things working your way in Shadow Bay?” she said. “You have your little puppet theatre to play with. Why come after me?”
Gorse was wondering whether to tell her more. He pulled a half-hunter watch from his waistcoat pocket and pondered. She wondered if she could work her trick of fascination on him. Clearly, he loved to talk, was bored with dissimulation, had a real need to be appreciated. The sensible thing would have been to get this over with, but Gorse had to tell her how brilliant he was. Everything up to now had been his own story; now, there was more important stuff and he was wary of going on.
“Still time for one more story,” he said. “One more ghost story.”
Click. She had him.
He was an instinctive killer, probably a sociopath from birth, but she was his elder. The silver-bladed letter-opener was never far from his fingers. She would have to judge when to jump.
“It’s a lonely life, isn’t it? Ours, I mean. Wandering through the years, wearing out your clothes, lost in a world you never made? There was a golden age for us once, in London when Dracula was on the throne. 1888 and all that. You, famous girl, did your best to put a stop to it, turned us all back into nomads and parasites when we might have been masters of the universe. Some of us want it that way again, my darling. We’ve been getting together lately, sort of a pressure group. Not like those Transylvania fools who want to go back to the castles and the mountains, but like Him, battening onto a new, vital world, making a place for ourselves. An exalted place. He’s still our inspiration, old thing. Let’s say I did it for Dracula.”
That wasn’t enough, but it was all she was going to get now.
People were outside, coming in.
“Time flies, old thing. I’ll have to make this quick.”
Gorse took his silver pig-sticker and stood over her. He thrust.
Faster than any eye could catch, her hands locked around his wrist.
“Swift filly, eh?”
She concentrated. He was strong but she was old. The knife-point dimpled her blouse. He tipped back her chair and put a knee on her stomach, pinning her down.
The silver touch was white hot.
She turned his arm and forced it upwards. The knife slid under his spectacles and the point stuck in his left eye.
Gorse screamed and she was free of him. He raged and roared, fangs erupting from his mouth, two-inch barbs bursting from his fingertips. Bony spars, the beginnings of wings, sprouted through his jacket around the collar and pierced his leather elbow-patches.
The doors opened and people came in. Barbie and two crucifix-waving Sheriff’s Deputies.
The Slayer saw (and recognized?) the vampire and rushed across the room, stake out. Gorse caught the girl and snapped her neck, then dropped her in a dead tangle.
“Look what you made me do!” he said to Geneviève, voice distorted by the teeth but echoing from the cavern that was his reshaped mouth. “She’s broken now. It’ll take ages to make another. I hadn’t even got to the full initiation rites. There would have been bleeding and I was making up something about Tantric sex. It would have been a real giggle, and you’ve spoiled it.”
His eye congealed, frothing grey deadness in his face.
She motioned for the deputies to stay back. They wisely kept their distance.
“Just remember,” said Gorse, directly to her. “You can’t stop Him. He’s coming back. And then, oh my best beloved, you will be as sorry a girl as ever drew a sorry breath. He is not one for forgiveness, if you get my drift.”
Gorse’s jacket shredded and wings unfurled. He flapped into the air, rising above the first tier of bookshelves, hovering at the mezzanine level. His old school tie dangled like a dead snake.
The deputies tried shooting at him. She supposed she would have too.
He crashed through a tall set of windows and flew off, vast shadow blotting out the moon and falling on the bay.
The deputies holstered their guns and looked at her. She wondered for about two minutes whether she should stick with her honesty policy.
Letting a bird flutter in her voice, she said “That man . . . he was a v-v-vampire.”
Then she did a pretty fair imitation of a silly girl fainting. One deputy checked her heartbeat while she was “out”, and was satisfied that she was warm. The other went to call for back-up.
Through a crack in her eyelids, she studied “her” deputy. His hands might have lingered a little too long on her chest for strict medical purposes. The thought that he was the type to cop a feel from a helpless girl just about made it all right to get him into trouble by slipping silently out of the library while he was checking out the dead Slayer.
She made it undetected back to her car.
XXII
In her trailer, after another day of lassitude, she watched the early evening bulletin on Channel 6. Anchor-persons Karen White and Lew Landers had details of the vampire killing in Shadow Bay. Because the primary victim was a cute teenage girl, it was top story. The wounding of a decorated LAPD veteran – the Lieutenant was still alive, but off the case – also rated a flagged mention.
The newscast split-screened a toothpaste commercial photograph of “Barbara Dahl Winters”, smiling under a prom queen tiara, and an “artist’s impression” of Gorse in giant bat-form, with blood tastefully dripping from his fangs. Ernest “Gory” Gorse turned out to be a fugitive from Scotland Yard, with a record of petty convictions before he turned and a couple of likely murders since. Considering a mug shot from his warm days, Karen said the killer looked like such a nice fellow, even scowling over numbers, and Lew commented that you couldn’t judge a book by its cover.
Geneviève continued paying attention, well into the next item – about a scary candlelight vigil by hooded supporters of Annie Wilkes – and only turned the sound on her portable TV set down when she was sure her name was not going to come up in connection with the Shadow Bay story.
Gorse implied she was targeted because of her well-known involvement in the overthrow of Count Dracula, nearly a century ago. But that didn’t explain why he had waited until now to give her a hard time. She also gathered from what he had let slip in flirtatious hints that he wasn’t the top of the totem pole, that he was working with or perhaps for someone else.
Gorse had said: “You can’t stop Him. He’s coming back.”
Him? He?
Only one vampire inspired that sort of quondam rex que futurus talk. Before he finally died, put out of his misery, Count Dracula had used himself up completely. Geneviève was sure of that. He had outlived his era, several times over, and been confronted with his own irrelevance. His true death was just a formality.
And He was not coming back.
A woodcut image of Dracula appeared on television. She turned the sound up.
The newscast had reached the entertainment round-up, which in this town came before major wars on other continents. A fluffy-haired woman in front of the Hollywood sign was talking about the latest studio craze, Dracula pictures. A race was on between Universal and Paramount to get their biopics of the Count to the screens. At Universal, director Joel Schumacher and writer-producer Jane Wagner had cast John Travolta and Lily Tomlin in St George’s Fire; at MGM, producer Steven
Spielberg and director Tobe Hooper had Peter Coyote and Karen Allen in Vampirgeist. There was no mention of Orson Welles – or, unsurprisingly, Boris Adrian – but another familiar name came up.
John Alucard.
“Hollywood deal-makers have often been characterized as bloodsuckers,” said the reporter, “but John Alucard is the first actually to be one. Uniquely, this vampire executive is involved in both these competing projects, as a packager of the Universal production and as associate producer of the MGM film. Clearly, in a field where there are too few experts to go around, John Alucard is in demand. Unfortunately, Mr A – as Steven Spielberg calls him – is unable because of his image impairment to grant interviews for broadcast media, but he has issued a statement to the effect that he feels there is room for far more than two versions of the story he characterizes as ‘the most important of the last two centuries’. He goes on to say ‘there can be no definitive Dracula, but we hope we shall be able to conjure a different Dracula for every person’. For decades, Hollywood stayed away from this hot subject but, with the Francis Coppola epic of a few years ago cropping up on Best of All Time lists, it seems we are due, like the Londoners of 1885, for a veritable invasion of Draculas. This is Kimberley Wells, for Channel 6 KDHB Update News, at the Hollywood sign.”
She switched the television off. The whole world, and Orson Welles, knew now what John Alucard was doing, but the other part of her original commission – who he was and where he came from – was still a mystery. He had come from the East, with a long line of credit. A source had told her he had skipped New York ahead of an investigation into insider-trading or junk bonds, but she might choose to put that down to typical Los Angeles cattiness. Another whisper had him living another life up in Silicon Valley as a consultant on something hush-hush President Reagan’s people were calling the Strategic Defense Initiative, supposedly Buck Rogers stuff. Alucard could also be a Romanian shoe-salesman with a line in great patter who had quit his dull job and changed his name the night he learned his turning vampire wasn’t going to take in the long run and set out to become the new Irving Thalberg before he rotted away to dirt.
There must be a connection between the movie-making mystery man and the high school librarian. Alucard and Gorse. Two vampires in California. She had started asking around about one of them, and the other had sent a puppet to warn her off.
John Alucard could not be Count Dracula.
Not yet, at least.
XXIII
On her way up into the Hollywood Hills, to consult the only real magician she knew, she decided to call on Jack Martin, to see if he wanted to come along on the trip. The movie mage would interest him.
The door of Martin’s shack hung open.
Her heart skipped. Loose manuscript pages were drifting out of Martin’s home, catching on the breeze, and scuttling along Beverly Glen Boulevard, sticking on the manicured hedges of the million-dollar estates, brushing across the white-painted faces of lawn jockeys who had been coal-black until Sidney Poitier made a fuss.
She knocked on the door, which popped a hinge and hung free.
“Jack?”
Had Gorse got to him?
She ventured inside, prepared to find walls dripping red and a ruined corpse lying in a nest of torn-up screenplays.
Martin lay on a beat-up sofa, mouth open, snoring slightly. He was no more battered than usual. A Mexican wrestling magazine was open on his round tummy.
“Jack?”
He came awake, blearily.
“It’s you,” he said, cold.
His tone was like a silver knife.
“What’s the matter?”
“As if you didn’t know. You’re not good to be around, Gené. Not good at all. You don’t see it, but you’re a wrecker.”
She backed away.
“Someone tipped off the Writers Guild about the porno. My ticket got yanked, my dues were not accepted. I’m off the list. I’m off all the lists. All possible lists. I didn’t get Buck Privates. They went with Lionel Fenn.”
“There’ll be other projects,” she said.
“I’ll be lucky to get Buck’s Privates.”
Martin had been drinking, but didn’t need to get drunk to be in this despair hole. It was where he went sometimes, a mental space like Ensenada, where he slunk to wallow, to soak up the misery he turned into prose. This time, she had an idea he wasn’t coming back; he was going lower than ever, and would end up a beachcomber on a nighted seashore, picking broken skulls out of bloody seaweed, trailing bare feet through ink-black surf, becoming the exile king of his own dark country.
“It just took a phone call, Gené. To smash everything. To smash me. I wasn’t even worth killing. That hurts. You, they’ll kill. I don’t want you to be near me when it happens.”
“Does this mean our premiere date is off?”
She shouldn’t have said that. Martin began crying, softly. It was a shocking scene, upsetting to her on a level she had thought she had escaped from. He wasn’t just depressed, he was scared.
“Go away, Gené,” he said.
XXIV
This was not a jaunt any more. Jack Martin was as lost to her as Moondoggie, as her licence.
How could things change so fast? It wasn’t the second week of January, wasn’t the Julian 1980s, but everything that had seemed certain last year, last decade, was up for debate or thrown away.
There was a cruelty at work. Beyond Gorse.
She parked the Plymouth and walked across a lawn to a ranch-style bungalow. A cabalist firmament of star-signs decorated the mailbox.
The mage was a trim, fiftyish man, handsome but small, less a fallen angel than a fallen cherub. He wore ceremonial robes to receive her into his sanctum sanctorum, an arrangement of literal shrines to movie stars of the 1920s and ’30s: Theda Bara, Norma Desmond, Clara Bow, Lina Lamont, Jean Harlow, Blanche Hudson, Myrna Loy. His all-seeing amulet contained a long-lashed black-and-white eye, taken from a still of Rudolph Valentino. His boots were black leather motorcycle gear, with polished chrome buckles and studs.
As a boy, the mage – Kenneth Anger to mortals of this plane – had appeared as the Prince in the 1935 Max Reinhardt film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In later life, he had become a film-maker, but for himself not the studios (his “underground” trilogy consisted of Scorpio Rising, Lucifer Rising and Dracula Rising), and achieved a certain notoriety for compiling Hollywood Babylon, a collection of scurrilous but not necessarily true stories about the seamy private lives of the glamour gods and goddesses of the screen. A disciple of Aleister Crowley and Adrian Marcato, he was a genuine movie magician.
He was working on a sequel to Hollywood Babylon, which had been forthcoming for some years. It was called Transylvania Babylon, and contained all the gossip, scandal and lurid factoid speculation that had ever circulated about the elder members of the vampire community. Nine months ago, the manuscript and all his research material had been stolen by a couple of acid-heads in the employ of a pair of New Orleans-based vampire elders who were the focus of several fascinating, enlightening and perversely amusing chapters. Geneviève had recovered the materials, though the book was still not published, as Anger had to negotiate his way through a maze of injunctions and magical threats before he could get the thing in print.
She hesitated on the steps that led down to his slightly sunken sanctum. Incense burned before the framed pictures, swirling up to the low stucco ceiling.
“Do you have to be invited?” he asked. “Enter freely, spirit of dark.”
“I was just being polite,” she admitted.
The mage was a little disappointed. He arranged himself on a pile of harem cushions and indicated a patch of Turkish carpet where she might sit.
There was a very old bloodstain on the weave.
“Don’t mind that,” he said. “It’s from a thirteen-year-old movie extra deflowered by Charlie Chaplin at the very height of the Roaring Twenties.”
She decided not to tell him it wasn’t
hymenal blood (though it was human).
“I have cast spells of protection, as a precaution. It was respectful of you to warn me this interview might have consequences.”
Over the centuries, Geneviève had grown out of thinking of herself as a supernatural creature, and was always a little surprised to run into people who still saw her that way. It wasn’t that they might not be right, it was just unusual and unfashionable. The world had monsters, but she still didn’t know if there was magic.
“One man who helped me says his career has been ruined because of it,” she said, the wound still fresh. “Another, who was just my friend, died.”
“My career is beyond ruination,” said the mage. “And death means nothing. As you know, it’s a passing thing. The lead-up, however, can be highly unpleasant, I understand. I think I’d opt to skip that experience, if at all possible.”
She didn’t blame him.
“I’ve seen some of your films and looked at your writings,” she said. “It seems to me that you believe motion pictures are rituals.”
“Well put. Yes, all real films are invocations, summonings. Most are made by people who don’t realize that. But I do. When I call a film Invocation of My Demon Brother, I mean it exactly as it sounds. It’s not enough to plop a camera in front of a ceremony. Then you only get religious television, God help you. It’s in the lighting, the cutting, the music. Reality must be banished, channels opened to the Beyond. At screenings, there are always manifestations. Audiences might not realize on a conscious level what is happening, but they always know. Always. The amount of ectoplasm poured into the auditorium by drag queens alone at a West Hollywood revival of a Joan Crawford picture would be enough to embody a minor djinn in the shape of the Bitch Goddess, with a turban and razor cheekbones and shoulder pads out to here.”
She found the image appealing, but also frightening.
“If you were to make a dozen films about, say, the Devil, would the Prince of Darkness appear?”
The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror Page 56