“He was more a father to me than any human family. More a mother. More anything.”
On the subject, Meinster was blind. To him, Dracula was the King of the Cats, the fount of wisdom and destiny, a God and a champion. Kate knew too many vampires like the Baron, forcing themselves to be what they imagined Dracula had been, hoping to become everything he was but not knowing the whole story.
“At the end, he wanted to die,” she said. “I saw that.”
“You saw what you wanted to see, Katharine. You are not of his direct bloodline.”
“I wish that were true.”
“Heresy,” shouted Rice, raising her gun and fiddling with anything that might be a safety catch. “She defiles the name of the Father-in-Darkness.”
Meinster nodded, snake-swift. The old nosferatu, rodent-ears twitching, took the new-born’s gun away from her.
“Thank you, Orlok,” acknowledged Meinster.
Kate looked again at the reeking thing. She knew who Graf von Orlok was. During the Terror, when London rose against the rule of Dracula, he had been in command of the Tower where the “traitors” were kept. If she had been less fortunate during her underground period, she might have met Orlok before. Several of her friends had, and not survived.
Sometimes, she forgot to be afraid of vampires. After all, she was a bloodsucking leech too and no one was ever afraid of her. Sometimes, she remembered.
Now, looking at the spark in Orlok’s grubby eyes, she remembered the first vampires she had seen, when she was a warm girl and the dead were rising all around.
In her heart, nightmare spasmed.
“Katharine, I will prevail,” said the Baron.
“How? The British Government doesn’t negotiate with terrorists.”
Meinster laughed.
“What’s a terrorist, Katharine? You were a terrorist. And you’ve just had a conversation with the Home Secretary. Once upon a time, you were a wanted insurrectionist and Orlok was a lawful authority. Once Nicolae Ceauşescu was a terrorist, my partisan comrade, and the Nazis were our enemy.”
That was true.
“And, in our homeland, you were unjustly accused of murder, hunted by corrupt police. Then, when you came to me in the mountains, we had common cause. Nothing has really changed. We have been adrift, I’ll admit. Since He passed, we have pretended to be humans, to be just another of the many races of mankind, but we are not. You’ve never lived with your own kind, Katharine. You’ve spent a century working with them, fighting for the cattle. Yet they still fear and loathe you. Here in England, the warm are polite and pretend not to despise us; but in our homeland, you must have seen the truth. Vampires are hated. And we must be hated. Our inferiors must hate and fear and respect us. He knew that. His was the vision we must struggle to bring about. We must be the princes of the earth, not the servants of men. Then, believe me, He will rise again. What you saw was an illusion. Dracula does not die and become dust.”
Meinster was trembling with excitement, a boy dreaming of Christmas morning.
Kate saw Patricia Rice adoring her father-lover-fiend.
“First, Transylvania …”
Meinster let it hang.
“I’ve seen who’s out there,” said Kate. “I know what they can do. Having hostages won’t help. You had one card, and you’ve played it badly.”
She nodded at Patricia Rice.
“On the contrary, she was my masterstroke. Are you not, dearest Patty-Pat?”
He reached out and touched Rice’s face. She squirmed against his hand, like one of his fanged poodles.
“She will be my Elena, when I rule. The first of my Elenas.”
The Baron gave orders to Orlok, in rapid Romanian. Kate only picked up a few words. One of them, of course, was moarte – “death”.
“First, the fire,” said the Baron, sweeping over a candelabrum. Flames caught a tablecloth and swarmed over the furniture. The hostages began screaming. “Now, we make a dramatic departure.”
He leaped up onto a windowsill and posed against the tall opening. Searchlights outside swung to light him up. He was a swashbuckling figure, cloak swept back over his shoulders.
“To me, my brides.”
Rice hopped up to nestle under one arm. He stretched the other out, beckoning to Kate.
“Become a bride of Dracula, my fiery Irish colleen.” “That’s far too presumptuous, Baron.”
Orlok picked her up and tossed her to Meinster.
“Comfy?” he asked the two. Kate saw Rice almost swoon in delight, but didn’t understand it herself.
Apart from all other considerations, she knew Meinster was gay.
He leaned against the windows and smashed through. For a moment, Kate assumed the Baron, like his supposed father-in-darkness, could grow wings and fly. Then gravity and reality took over.
They plummeted to the pavement.
Meinster sprang up like a cat. Kate, badly shaken, rolled into the gutter. Rice, knees and ankles broken, howled as the bones knit back together.
People rushed forward.
“I have surrendered,” Meinster announced, “to these flowers of English and Irish vampire maidenhood.”
A black-clad figure swarmed up the front of the Embassy, to the broken window. Flames were already pouring out, blackening the sill.
There was gunfire inside the building.
Richard Jeperson helped her stand and brush herself down, showing real concern. His style was more Charles Beauregard than Edwin Winthrop: she wondered how long he could last under the likes of Ruthven and Croft, not to mention Margaret Thatcher.
Along with the police, TV crews surged forward.
She heard commentators chattering, speculating on the rapid pace of events.
Another vampire was tossed out of the window, turning to a rain of ashes. Hamish Bond was doing his job. Kate thought Orlok might give him a fight, then she saw Dravot, out of his police helmet, signalling a cadre of black ninja-suited men, vampires all, to move in. Britain had been working for a century to create the vampires it needed rather than the ones imposed upon it.
The front door was smashed. Vampires crawled head-down from the flat roof and lizard-swarmed in through upper-storey windows. It was over in moments.
Jeperson and she were separated from the action by a press of people. Between riot shields, she saw Meinster and Ruthven facing each other, warily but without going for the throat. It was as if they were looking in reflecting mirrors for the first time since their turning.
“What was the point?” she asked. “This was all arranged between them. This wasn’t a siege, it was a pantomime. It’s not about vampires, it’s about communism.”
Jeperson was sad-eyed.
“You of all people know Romania,” he said. “You’ve seen what happens in the satellite countries. There’s no real détente. We have to get rid of the whole shoddy system. Nicolae Ceauşescu is a monster.”
“And Meinster is better?”
“He isn’t worse.”
“Richard, you don’t know. You weren’t there during the Terror. When people like Meinster, and people like Ruthven, are in charge, people like you, and people like me, get shoved into locked boxes. It happens slowly, without a revolution, without fireworks, and the world grows cold and hard. Ruthven’s back and you’re supporting Meinster. How long will it be before we start praying for Dracula?”
“I’m sorry, Kate. I do understand.”
“Why was I here?”
“To be a witness. For history. Beauregard said that about you. Someone outside the Great Game has to know. Someone has to judge.”
“And approve?”
Jeperson was chilled. “Not necessarily.”
Then, he was pulled away too. She was in a crowd.
A cheer rose up. A line of people, hands on heads, bent over, scurried out of the Embassy door. The hostages. Among them was Orlok, with the poodles. She would have bet he’d survive.
She tripped over thick cable, and followed it ba
ck out of the press of bodies. A BBC OB van hummed with activity.
This was news. She was a newspaperwoman.
Somewhere near, she would find a phone. It was time to call her editor.
NEIL GAIMAN
Click-clack the Rattlebag
NEIL GAIMAN HAS written lots of books and short stories and comics and things for adults and children and monsters. He is Professor in the Arts at Bard College in New York, is married to Amanda Palmer, and no longer has any idea where he is living.
“I was in Australia, in the house of critic and old friend Peter Nicholls,” he recalls, “and I wanted to write something small and scary, for a book with monsters in it. I remembered a house I had been in in Ireland, one that scared me when I had walked through it in the dark, and crafted this story, with no idea whether it worked or not until I read it in Melbourne Public Library the following day.
“I recorded it last year and we put it up on audible.com and audible.co.uk, for Hallowe’en, with Audible donating money to charity for each free download. It raised a lot of money for very good causes. And, according to people on Twitter, caused a few of them to sleep that night with the lights on, just to be on the safe side.”
“BEFORE YOU TAKE me up to bed, will you tell me a story?”
“Do you actually need me to take you up to bed?” I asked the boy.
He thought for a moment. Then, with intense seriousness, “Yes, actually I think you do. It’s because of, I’ve finished my homework, and so it’s my bedtime, and I am a bit scared. Not very scared. Just a bit. But it is a very big house, and lots of times the lights don’t work and it’s a sort of dark.”
I reached over and tousled his hair.
“I can understand that,” I said. “It is a very big old house.” He nodded. We were in the kitchen, where it was light and warm. I put down my magazine on the kitchen table. “What kind of story would you like me to tell you?”
“Well,” he said, thoughtfully. “I don’t think it should be too scary, because then when I go up to bed, I will just be thinking about monsters the whole time. But if it isn’t just a little bit scary then I won’t be interested. And you make up scary stories, don’t you? I know she says that’s what you do.”
“She exaggerates. I write stories, yes. Nothing that’s been published, yet, though. And I write lots of different kinds of stories.”
“But you do write scary stories?”
“Yes.”
The boy looked up at me from the shadows by the door, where he was waiting. “Do you know any stories about Click-clack the Rattlebag?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Those are the best sorts of stories.”
“Do they tell them at your school?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes.”
“What’s a Click-clack the Rattlebag story?”
He was a precocious child, and was unimpressed by his sister’s boyfriend’s ignorance. You could see it on his face. “Everybody knows them.”
“I don’t,” I said, trying not to smile.
He looked at me as if he was trying to decide whether or not I was pulling his leg. He said, “I think maybe you should take me up to my bedroom, and then you can tell me a story before I go to sleep, but a very not-scary story because I’ll be up in my bedroom then, and it’s actually a bit dark up there, too.”
I said, “Shall I leave a note for your sister, telling her where we are?”
“You can. But you’ll hear when they get back. The front door is very slammy.”
We walked out of the warm and cosy kitchen into the hallway of the big house, where it was chilly and draughty and dark. I flicked the light switch, but nothing happened.
“The bulb’s gone,” the boy said. “That always happens.” Our eyes adjusted to the shadows. The moon was almost full, and blue-white moonlight shone in through the high windows on the staircase, down into the hall. “We’ll be all right,” I said.
“Yes,” said the boy, soberly. “I am very glad you’re here.” He seemed less precocious now. His hand found mine, and he held onto my fingers comfortably, trustingly, as if he’d known me all his life. I felt responsible and adult. I did not know if the feeling I had for his sister, who was my girlfriend, was love, not yet, but I liked that the child treated me as one of the family. I felt like his big brother, and I stood taller, and if there was something unsettling about the empty house I would not have admitted it for worlds.
The stairs creaked beneath the threadbare stair carpet.
“Click-clacks,” said the boy, “are the best monsters ever.”
“Are they from television?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think any people know where they come from. Mostly they come from the dark.”
“Good place for a monster to come.”
“Yes.”
We walked along the upper corridor in the shadows, walking from patch of moonlight to patch of moonlight. It really was a big house. I wished I had a flashlight.
“They come from the dark,” said the boy, holding onto my hand. “I think probably they’re made of dark. And they come in when you don’t pay attention. That’s when they come in. And then they take you back to their … not nests. What’s a word that’s like nests, but not?”
“House?”
“No. It’s not a house.”
“Lair?”
He was silent. Then, “I think that’s the word, yes. Lair.” He squeezed my hand. He stopped talking.
“Right. So they take the people who don’t pay attention back to their lair. And what do they do then, your monsters? Do they suck all the blood out of you, like vampires?”
He snorted. “Vampires don’t suck all the blood out of you. They only drink a little bit. Just to keep them going, and, you know, flying around. Click-clacks are much scarier than vampires.”
“I’m not scared of vampires,” I told him.
“Me neither. I’m not scared of vampires either. Do you want to know what Click-clacks do? They drink you,” said the boy.
“Like a Coke?”
“Coke is very bad for you,” said the boy. “If you put a tooth in Coke, in the morning, it will be dissolved into nothing. That’s how bad Coke is for you and why you must always clean your teeth, every night.”
I’d heard the Coke story as a boy, and had been told, as an adult, that it wasn’t true, but was certain that a lie which promoted dental hygiene was a good lie, and I let it pass.
“Click-clacks drink you,” said the boy. “First they bite you, and then you go all ishy inside, and all your meat and all your brains and everything except your bones and your skin turns into a wet, milk-shakey stuff and then the Click-clack sucks it out through the holes where your eyes used to be.”
“That’s disgusting,” I told him. “Did you make it up?” We’d reached the last flight of stairs, all the way in to the big house.
“No.”
“I can’t believe you kids make up stuff like that.”
“You didn’t ask me about the rattlebag,” he said.
“Right. What’s the rattlebag?”
“Well,” he said, sagely, soberly, a small voice from the darkness beside me, “once you’re just bones and skin, they hang you up on a hook, and you rattle in the wind.”
“So what do these Click-clacks look like?” Even as I asked him, I wished I could take the question back, and leave it unasked. I thought: Huge spidery creatures. Like the one in the shower that morning. I’m afraid of spiders.
I was relieved when the boy said, “They look like what you aren’t expecting. What you aren’t paying attention to.”
We were climbing wooden steps now. I held on to the railing on my left, held his hand with my right, as he walked beside me. It smelled like dust and old wood, that high in the house. The boy’s tread was certain, though, even though the moonlight was scarce.
“Do you know what story you’re going to tell me, to put me to bed?” he asked. “It doesn’t actually have to be scary.”
“Not really.”
“Maybe you could tell me about this evening. Tell me what you did?”
“That won’t make much of a story for you. My girlfriend just moved in to a new place on the edge of town. She inherited it from an aunt or someone. It’s very big and very old. I’m going to spend my first night with her, tonight, so I’ve been waiting for an hour or so for her and her housemates to come back with the wine and an Indian takeaway.”
“See?” said the boy. There was that precocious amusement again. But all kids can be insufferable sometimes, when they think they know something you don’t. It’s probably good for them. “You know all that. But you don’t think. You just let your brain fill in the gaps.”
He pushed open the door to the attic room. It was perfectly dark, now, but the opening door disturbed the air, and I heard things rattle gently, like dry bones in thin bags, in the slight wind. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. Like that.
I would have pulled away, then, if I could, but small, firm fingers pulled me forward, unrelentingly, into the dark.
NICHOLAS ROYLE
Dead End
NICHOLAS ROYLE IS the author of First Novel, as well as six earlier novels including The Director’s Cut, Antwerp and Regicide, and a shortstory collection, Mortality. He has edited sixteen anthologies, from Darklands, in 1991, to four volumes of the annual Best British Short Stories series, running from 2011 to the present.
A senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, he also runs Nightjar Press and works as an editor for Salt Publishing, where he has been responsible for Alison Moore’s Man Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse, Stephen McGeagh’s Habit and Alice Thompson’s Burnt Island, amongst other titles.
“I was on holiday in the south-west of France when I learned, via Twitter, that Alison Moore’s first novel, The Lighthouse, which I had acquired and edited for Salt, had been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was in many ways an idyllic holiday, in glorious surroundings, but it’s funny how the darkness is never far away.”
A RAGGED SCREAM TEARS through the leaden heat. He sees a fountain of blood erupt from a body torn in half. Hears – or imagines he hears – the nauseating grind of a siren. Flash of a dentist’s overhead light. Muscles tensed to snapping point. Then the eyes, in close-up. James Garner’s from Grand Prix, but they could be anybody’s. They could be his.
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