Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

by Kim Newman

  Brides, sons, ghosts, curses, revenges, evils, horrors, brains, dogs, bloods, castles, daughters, houses, ladies, brothers, ledgers, lodgers, hands, returns, tales, torments, infernos, worlds, experiments, horror chambers… of Frankenstein.

  I hit the exhaustion wall and burn through it. My life functions are at such a low level that I can continue indefinitely. I’m plugged into Channel 1818. It’s my duty to stay the course.

  Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Redford and Newman, Astaire and Rogers, Mickey and Donald, Tango and Cash, Rowan and Martin, Bonnie and Clyde, Frankie and Annette, Hinge and Bracket, Batman and Robin, Salt and Pepa, Tich and Quackers, Amos and Andy, Gladstone and Disraeli, Morecambe and Wise, Block and Tackle… Meet Frankenstein.

  I can barely move, but my eyes are open.

  Credits roll, too fast to jot down. These films exist for one showing and are lost. Each frame is unique, impossible to recreate. I daren’t even leave the room to get a pack of blank videotapes. It is down to me. I must watch and I must remember. My mind is the screen on which these Frankensteins perform.

  The Frankenstein Monster is played by… Bela Lugosi (in 1931), Christopher Lee (in 1964), Lane Chandler, Harvey Keitel, Sonny Bono, Bernard Bresslaw, Meryl Streep, Bruce Lee, Neville Brand, John Gielgud, IceT, Rock Hudson, Traci Lords.

  The experience is priceless. A red sun rises outside, and I draw the curtains.

  ‘Now I know what it feels like to be a god,’ croaks Edward G. Robinson.

  I will stay with the channel.

  ‘We belong dead,’ intones Don Knotts.

  I will watch.

  ‘To a new world of gods and monsters,’ toasts Daffy Duck.

  UNE ÉTRANGE AVENTURE DE RICHARD BLAINE

  ‘GO, MY DARLING, and God bless you, Ilsa.’ It’s like a hammer to the back of the head.

  In an instant, everything good is gone.

  The world is hell.

  Ink running in the rain. A wet letter in my hands. Water pouring off the brim of my fedora. An insistent tug at the sleeve of my trenchcoat. Clouds of steam. A train, about to leave.

  ‘That’s the last call, Mr Richard,’ Sam says. ‘Do you hear me? Come on, Mr Richard. Let’s get out o’ here.’

  It’s hard, but I can do it. My guts are lying on the rain-soaked platform, but I can walk without tripping in them. Sure, I can. It’s easy.

  Forget Ilsa.

  Get out of Paris.

  Now.

  ‘En voiture,’ the man shouts.

  This is the last train out. The one we were supposed to take together. To freedom and safety.

  Damn her. Damn her rotten silky hide. Damn.

  ‘Come on, Mr Richard. Come on.’

  Yeah. Let’s go. Fade.

  Clicking heels. A bark of gunfire. Men in grey uniform advance down the platform, pushing through panicky would-be passengers. The train lurches, wheels screaming. Sam is up in the carriage door, humping our cases.

  I step up, resolved.

  I can live without her. I can go on. Dead inside, maybe, but moving.

  A hand closes on my shoulder.

  ‘Mr Richard Blaine?’

  It’s a harsh voice, rasping. German.

  The train shifts, moving off. I see more than panic in Sam’s eyes as he slides away.

  This just puts the cherry on top of the day. The Germans are in Paris. And so am I.

  ‘I’m an American citizen,’ I tell the Nazi. ‘Neutrality is my religion.’

  ‘That was not how you conducted yourself in Spain or Ethiopia, my friend.’

  I shrug, stomach plunging. My dossier is evidently extensive and annotated.

  ‘SS Standartenführer Professor Doktor Franz Six,’ says the officer. I believe him.

  Six is a small man, almost bald but still young, blue eyes cold behind steel-rimmed spectacles, uniformed in black with silver lightning-flash insignia. His trenchcoat is the colour of midnight. His cap-peak is like the razor-bill of a predatory bird.

  Field-grey goons close around me. The train has gone.

  It doesn’t really matter. The way I feel, summary execution would be a blessing.

  Damn Ilsa.

  ‘Your assistance is required by the Third Reich,’ says Six.

  ‘The Third Reich seems to be doing quite well on its own.’

  The station is being occupied. German soldiers search through the unlucky crowds, looking for faces they’ve memorised, matching identity papers against names on a list. French railwaymen are standing down, their duties assumed by military policemen. All further trains are cancelled.

  Someone makes a break for it. There are shots.

  ‘Indeed, this is an encouraging day for the Reich, Mr Blaine. However, I’m charged with an especial mission for the Führer, one with which you can be of great help.’

  ‘With which? Fine grammar.’

  Six smiles, showing sharp little teeth. It would be a mistake to think him soft or stupid.

  The station is emptying of civilians. Rain washes down over deserted platforms. Abandoned suitcases are soaked. Someone has left behind a double-bass.

  Filtering out the excess people reveals who it was that spotted me for Six. A wiry youth, with an impertinent forelock that stands up stiff as a wood-shaving. He has piggy little eyes and baggy plus-fours. With him is an annoying little white dog.

  I recognise him vaguely, from around the cafés and cabarets. Though just a kid, he’s some sort of a reporter. Though French, he’s a fascist. Six nods, and he scurries over, dog at his heels.

  ‘Our young friend has been of some help,’ Six tells me, ‘but he doesn’t have the sensitivities for the job. Unlike you.’

  The kid’s eyes glitter. I have no friends here. He must have wanted to be Nazi Puppet Number One, and now he’s just one of the gang.

  We’re all standing in the rain, which doesn’t seem to bother Six. It’s as if he has an invisible shield around him, a bubble of warmth and confidence. Hitler gives these monkeys something special.

  ‘My friend, I’m responsible for the apprehension of certain individuals. Well, not so much individuals as types. Until they are in our hands, we cannot truly say we have taken Paris.’

  ‘I should think that about now, you could say what you want and nobody will holler.’

  Six giggles. It’s like needles scraping your skull.

  ‘You are on my list, Mr Blaine. Paris is important to you, and you to her.’

  Her. Yes, the city is a woman. Ten minutes ago she was a sweetheart. Now I know she’s a whore.

  The damned letter is a wet lump under my shoe.

  ‘You’re too late for that. I don’t care about Paris. I don’t care about anyone.’

  ‘You only think that, Mr Blaine. Paris is a part of you. In your sentimental fugues, you may think it the better part of you, but it is your weakness. It is why you are, as it were, surrounded.’

  ‘This is a waste of time,’ the kid hisses, in French.

  ‘I think not,’ says Six. ‘I think we have an understanding.’

  Whatever. I’m not doing anything else. Any principles I had have been washed away by the rain. Without Ilsa, I might just as well be a Nazi. I’ll make a good one. I’ll have just the right attitude.

  I nod.

  ‘Excellent,’ the Nazi smiles. ‘We three shall round them up, all the types on our list, all the creatures of the city. When we have them, we shall have taken Paris body and soul.’

  The kid’s dog barks. I kick it in the head.

  Just like a Nazi.

  * * *

  The first individual on Six’s little list isn’t even a human being. That doesn’t matter. Rick Blaine, dog-kicker extraordinaire, isn’t afraid of anything that crawls or climbs, swims or slouches.

  The ape is halfway up a building, waving a straight razor and jabbering in what sounds like Hungarian. Its gums are a scarlet wound. Its long limbs and round body are covered with a thick, bristly black pelt.

  ‘Have Göring get into a b
iplane and shoot King Kong off his perch,’ I suggest.

  Six giggles again.

  They want the ape alive. It figures.

  I shrug, and walk into the empty street. An armoured car is parked at the kerb. The ape throws chunks of masonry at it. It could pitch for the Dodgers, hits the swastika on the hood every time.

  I’ve got an automatic in my pocket. I could do better with a banana.

  ‘Hey, Ingagi,’ I yell, getting the monkey’s attention.

  Strictly, it’s an orangutan. It waves its razor.

  I catch the ape’s eye. It’s not stupid. It doesn’t recognise me, but it knows me, senses that we have something in common. We’re both foreigners in this city, but we both have a connection with it that runs deep.

  ‘Come down,’ I shout, feeling dumb.

  The ape tenses, and I think it’s about to launch itself into space and crash down on me in a tumble of scrabbling hands and slicing blade. My strength is that I don’t care. My guts have already been torn out, and they might as well be strewn in the gutter of the Rue Morgue as anywhere else.

  Meekly, the orangutan climbs down to the street. It folds its razor closed with a neat click and gives it up to me. Six’s storm troopers rush in with a net and wrap the ape up into a chattering ball.

  Six and the kid reporter watch me. The Nazi applauds, slowly. I am being mocked but I don’t care.

  The ape is miserable, betrayed, chewing at the wires of the net, struggling with the six goons who are loading him into the armoured car. I don’t care. Something tiny and hot and nasty is growing where my heart used to be.

  If this is what the world (Ilsa) wants me to be, then fine. I’ll be the best damn Nazi in Paris, sieg heil and über alles.

  ‘You’ve done well, my friend,’ purrs the doctor.

  Give me a medal, buddy.

  * * *

  Our expedition under Paris is a major adventure. In a motor-launch requisitioned from the river police, we whizz through the sewers, bowed low so as not to scrape our hats off on the tunnel roofs, leaving waves of disturbed shit in our wake. None of the maps the Germans have dug up is of much help: the city sits atop an uncharted labyrinth of interconnecting tunnels, sewers, caverns, catacombs, hide-outs and lost worlds that date back to the Romans and beyond. Down here, we’re relying on my mysterious and new-found instincts.

  I have talents I didn’t know about. I’ve always lived half-in and half-out of the world. Dr Six has chosen me well. I can home in on the individuals on his list because I have a kinship with them but am estranged from them. I can thank Ilsa for that, at least.

  I wonder if she’s on the list too. Six has never let me see it, if indeed it is written down and not just in his head. She’d fit in with some of the others. We have rounded up a good many women: a barefoot gypsy dancer reputed to be a sorceress, with a goat for a familiar; an Irish singer with a blank face and a bell-pure voice, along with her terrified and terrifying Hebrew manager; a consumptive artists’ model, spitting blood into her handkerchief; a beautiful commissar, seduced by silk undies. Sweethearts and whores, gamines and adventuresses, royal mistresses and gutter-waifs. All on the list, all in custody.

  We chug through the tunnels, casting cones of light ahead and aft. Six, the reporter, the white dog, and a platoon of standard-issue storm troopers. The soldiers don’t like being down under the streets, in the dark, in the shit. They mutter together, heedless of their boss’s enthusiasm for the chase.

  Six tried to persuade the pipe-puffing policeman who surrendered so meekly to join us on this trip under the city. The inspector regretfully declined, saying that though he was forced to recognise the authority of the new masters of the city he could not lend himself to such an enterprise.

  Damn the flic. He was elaborately almost sorry for me, and I didn’t need his pity. No wonder the city fell. Everyone was so weak, so frail. Most of the creatures we were hunting were crippled by their desperate, illusionary loves. Paris is the city of the Insanely Romantic.

  I sense a presence.

  ‘There,’ I say, pointing ahead.

  Searchlights are directed. There is a man in the water, swimming.

  ‘It’s the ex-convict,’ says the reporter. ‘The fugitive thief.’

  Six giggles.

  Our boat gains on the man. Waves of sewage drag at him. He flails. Is he trying to drown himself rather than be recaptured? He’s been on the run most of his life, in and out of the Château d’If and Ȋle du Diable.

  He is hauled out of the water in a sorry state. He lies in the boat, breathing heavily, stinking.

  We emerge into a cavernous space, an underground lake in a cathedral-arched chamber. The searchlights play upon a vaulted roof hundreds of feet above us. Six whistles in awe.

  The lake is big enough to harbour an island. It is a long shape, like a sea-monster lying on the surface. We pass by, and I see it’s not a true island but a man-made thing. Rows of rivets stand out on its metal hide. A serrated, horn-like protrusion juts out between eye-like green windows. It is abandoned, I sense. Left here to distract us. I wave us on.

  ‘Keep going,’ I say. ‘It’s just a lost toy.’

  Music sounds. Thin, reedy organ-tones.

  I know this is one of the prizes of Paris, one of the types at the head of the list. Six smiles at me. The Opéra Ghost is nearby, driven out of the extensive cellars of the Paris Opéra into the larger catacombs. I know something of this creature’s story. His tragedy is an impossible love, too.

  The boat crosses the lake, our lights playing on the far shore.

  ‘Be careful,’ I say. ‘This guy is known for devilish trickiness. There’ll be traps.’

  One of Six’s troopers, having conquered the world, begins to sneer and his head is sheared in two just below his eyes. A flying guillotine. The Nazi crumples and splashes into the water, leaving behind the top of his head, still in its helmet, rolling in the flat bottom of the boat.

  I kill the searchlight. We all crouch in the dark.

  The music swells in mocking triumph.

  It occurs to me that the ex-convict has led us into a trap. It was only a matter of time before the names on our list caught on to what we were doing and began cooperating. How many others are out there?

  We collide with the shore and pile out of the boat. A jagged ripping and a scream. Some new, clever device. There is a gleam of gloom up ahead, through a tunnel. I blink and get night vision. The organ chords pour at us. The musician has lost the tune, and is improvising in a frenzy.

  I tap Six on the epaulette and nod ahead.

  We are to proceed, with caution.

  The journalist steps into the tunnel first, and is yanked off his feet. I hear him gurgling as he dangles. A noose is cinched round his throat.

  His white dog leaps up round his kicking heels, yapping.

  My arm up to protect me, I run into the tunnel. Six and his men are behind me.

  I know there are enemies up ahead.

  Not just the Opéra Ghost, but the masked Master Thief, the Poet Swordsman, the Vengeful Count, the Pianist With the Knife-Thrower’s Hands, the Tramp From the River, the Children of Paradise, the Queen’s Musketeers. A full swoop of Six’s types. With them apprehended, there would only be a few very small fish – boulevardiers and ex-patriots – to gather.

  ‘Friends, friends,’ I shout. ‘I have led them to you. I’m one of you, not one of them. Vive la France! Liberté, égalité, frat—’

  A cold hand closes on my mouth and yanks me from the tunnel. A nose pokes at my face. Cold steel lies across my Adam’s apple.

  The duellist wears a huge hat and a froth of lace round his throat. But it is impossible to look away from his prodigious nose, which sprouts from his face like a swollen bulb. If I look at his eyes, the tip of his nose goes out of focus and seems even bigger.

  ‘What are you staring at, American?’ he asks.

  I try to shrug, but am held firm.

  ‘You have such lovely eyes,’ I say.
>
  He laughs, lustily.

  ‘Take me to your leader,’ I say.

  ‘We’ve no leader,’ he replies. ‘We’re too rowdy a lot for leaders.’

  I understand. ‘Take me to him, to the master of the machine in the lake.’

  A smile curls in the shadow of the nose. ‘He is dead. The spectre plays for his funeral.’

  I am pulled through a secret door. Candelabra light up the space all around. I see the thin black back of the man at the organ. Bone-white hands play over the keys. He turns and I see his skull-face, enormous eyes active in a white mask of death.

  Others are here.

  A thief in immaculate evening dress, face half-masked. His companion, a sylph-like woman in a black body-stocking that shows only her eyes. A hollow-eyed aesthetic adventurer, delighted at last to have sunk as low as is possible in Paris. A young girl, trained from infancy to be a courtesan. A lazy-eyed apache loafer, cigarette dangling from his snarl, a tight-skirted floozy at the end of his leash. The captain of the good ship Atalante and his child wife. A young man with the look of a philosopher who has discovered futility or has been nauseated by the wallpaper of the world. And the older ones, older even than my big-nosed friend. A couple of Englishmen, one dashing in disguise, the other ready to go to the tumbril for a friend. A woman cackling bloodily over her knitting. The swordsmen and the gallants, the ones whose legends have grown with the city. Shambling in the shadows is a form more twisted than the ape of the Rue Morgue, hiding behind pillars, face hidden in shame.

  ‘We are Paris,’ says my captor.

  He is right. These people are the heart of the city. When you think about Paris, you have to think about one or two or all of them. You may not find them there when you arrive, but they are why you go there.

  I’m one of them.

  Yet not.

  I can forget Paris. I want to, in fact. Ilsa saw to that.

  When all these people are gathered up in the pens under the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol where Six has been assembling them, and are shipped out in cattle-trucks to some death camp of the spirit the Nazis have built in the East, then I’ll be free of Paris. The city will mean nothing to me.