by Kim Newman
MONSTER opens mouth and ALISON’s voice comes out.
FX: ALISON’s voice
I could tear through the wall. Leap a tall building at a single bound.
MONSTER and GALA close in on VALERIE.
VALERIE
What are you going to do to me?
MONSTER takes off VALERIE’s coat and drops it on the floor. VALERIE crosses her arms over her chest. MONSTER laughs.
MONSTER
Don’t flatter yourself, Mum. You’re just going outside for a little walk. It’s only a thousand miles to Anchorage. I understand it’s not as chilly out there as it was when I first came to this part of the world. Which is, in a general sense, your own damned fault.
VALERIE
I’ll freeze. I’ll die.
MONSTER and GALA are manoeuvring her towards an exit.
MONSTER
Well, try not to. Farewell, friend…
Whimpering, VALERIE is shoved out into the snow.
FX: howling winds.
MONSTER
Sounds like a storm coming. Better hurry up. Bye now…
VALERIE’s whimpering is lost in the rising noise.
MONSTER and GALA look at each other.
MONSTER
There have been technical improvements since Victor put me together.
GALA affects to ignore him. He picks up on the implicit come-on.
MYRA
Product One, Product Twelve… have you completed the course of tests?
MONSTER smiles.
MONSTER
All done. As agreed.
MYRA
That’s nice then. You’ve exceeded expectations.
MONSTER
We’ll see you when we see you.
MYRA
I look forward to it. Unwin Pharma are sure you will give the competition a run for their money.
MONSTER
There is no competition. We are successors. We make the others – we make you – obsolete.
MYRA
There is no me, Product One. I’m just a voice in the aether. I’m more like you than like them. Ice Station Apple is decommissioned. Turn the lights off when you leave.
Lights down on MYRA.
MONSTER picks up a beaker. He scrapes goo off RORY’s face into it, tops it up with goo from ALISON. He holds up the goo and contemplates it.
MONSTER
There’s lovely. Elixir Victor. The milk of Frankenstein. I gave it to him, out on the ice, when he escaped from me in death. He hadn’t suffered enough, so I brought him back and gave him his own medicine. It blew his mind – or at least his brains, which squirted out of his ears and eyes. I was forgetting my manners. My dear, how about a drink? Too strong for our late friends, but you’ll find it quite the tonic…
MONSTER gives the beaker to GALA. She looks at it, reluctant. He urges her with a nod. She lifts it to her lips and sips, likes it, then drinks deeply.
MONSTER
There, you’re well-enough made to benefit… unlike this poor human stuff. How many of us are there, I wonder? We must set about making more of us. Strong sons and daughters. Then we shall take our rightful place. On top of the world.
GALA is ecstatic and invigorated. She looks at MONSTER.
GALA
Friend?
MONSTER
You could say that.
GALA
Good.
MONSTER puts arm around GALA’s shoulders. They look out at the audience.
GALA
We belong… Alive.
YOKAI TOWN: ANNO DRACULA 1899
‘THERE ARE NO vampires in Japan,’ said Masamichi Higurashi. ‘This is the position of the Emperor.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Christina Light, the Princess Casamassima.
Geneviève Dieudonné, Acting Ship’s Doctor, was expected to be translator. She rendered the Japanese statement into simple English.
Kostaki’s red eyes gave away nothing. Christina’s frown let everyone know she was irritated.
‘But what did he mean?’ asked the Princess.
‘There should be no vampires in Japan,’ said Geneviève, in Italian. She suspected Higurashi understood English. ‘If the Emperor states something, it’s a fact. If the Emperor happens to be wrong, it’s this official’s duty to address the situation… not to correct the Emperor, but to correct the world.’
The Princess was impatient, as well she might be. The Macedonia had carried them a long way. This was a Voyage of the Foolishly Hopeful.
‘The Emperor is wrong, by the way,’ Geneviève added. ‘There were vampires – of a sort – in Japan when I was last here.’
…three hundred and fifty years ago, admittedly.
The kyuketsuki couldn’t have died out like the great auk. The Meiji reforms hadn’t even rid the country of unemployed samurai, so she presumed Japan’s ancient blood-drinkers would survive a pogrom. Yuki-Onna, the Woman of the Snow, was as eternal as the white cap of Mount Fuji. Should she lower herself to take a human title, she could claim to be Vampire Empress of Asia. Which would aptly make her Queen of the Cats. Geneviève knew Japanese shapeshifters favoured cats (bakeneko) or nine-tailed foxes (kitsune) over the bats and wolves of Dracula’s bloodline. Really, they should have presented cartes de visite to Yuki-Onna, not the temporary throne-warmer Mutsuhito. It was said her court could only be reached from the earthly plane for one night in a century, which would make securing an audience problematic. Smoke and nonsense put about to puff up her reputation. Like Dracula, Yuki-Onna hadn’t outgrown magic.
Sunset in the Land of the Rising Sun. The sky crimson over Chiba Prefecture, to the west. Higurashi’s launch had steamed from the east shore, where the city sprouted.
Geneviève remembered Tokyo as Edo, bustling military camp of the Tokugawa shogunate. The name changed in 1869, when the young Emperor moved from Kyoto and took Edo Castle for his palace. The new imperial capital was bent on becoming mercantile-political-cultural centre of the Pacific. London, New York or Paris, with earthquakes and bath-houses. The Japanese probably dismissed London as Tokyo with fog and vampires.
The Macedonia was at anchor in Tokyo Bay. On the open deck: three European vampires, petitioning for sanctuary… and one warm Japanese, professing to parlay with creatures he deemed ugly ghosts. Geneviève recognised that two women doing all the talking on their side didn’t help – especially since Christina was a terrible diplomat.
The Princess sat on a little folding chair, as if it were a throne – arranging a scene with her as centrepiece. Her white silk dress had pearls inset in the bodice. The train was wound tightly round her legs, lest it catch the wind and unfurl like a banner of surrender. She looked like a mermaid on a rock, trying not to draw attention to her tail.
Higurashi ignored her anyway.
The emissary spoke with Geneviève – expressing no surprise or pleasure that she knew his language – but treated Kostaki as their chieftain.
Great-coat stripped of insignia, the Moldavian elder seemed a ghost of himself. Without hackle and badge, his shako looked obscenely naked. When he was drummed out of the Carpathian Guard, Kostaki had put away decorations. He even cut off his moustache and shaved his head. A phrenologist might say he had a fine skull. As his doctor, Geneviève thought the rest of him was too meagre, even for a living corpse. His skin was nearly transparent, a rice-paper wrap for his bones.
Kostaki kept his red gaze on Higurashi, hand casually on his sword-hilt. He hadn’t given up the weapon with his epaulettes. It was his property, not the Guard’s. An old blade. It probably had a name – Gut-cutter, Skull-cleaver or Raven-brand. The sword would be at home in Japan, where everything sharp had a coat of arms, an official birthday and secret and public names.
‘Is he a monk?’ asked Higurashi.
Geneviève saw what the Japanese meant. Buddhist bonzes shaved their heads too, and fasting gave many a lean, ascetic look. When had Kostaki last fed?
But Japanese had a precise word for what Kostaki was.
‘Not a monk,’ she told the emissary, ‘ronin.’
A masterless samurai.
Under the Meiji Restoration, steps were taken to curtail the samurai class – seen by the regime as relics of the old, displaced shogunate. Since the suppression of the Satsuma Rebellion, many former retainers of noble houses were unemployed or in disgrace – following the warrior’s path (bushido) without direction. Some turned to freelance heroism. Others to banditry.
France was the same after the Crusades. A bad place to be the sort of person who gets robbed at swordpoint.
Like all in their party, Kostaki looked for more than shelter in a port. He needed a cause.
Higurashi bowed deferentially to the Carpathian.
In a bit of a pet, the Princess Casamassima twinkled. Sparks danced in her aura like dying fireflies. No one had voted Christina to any position of leadership, but she assumed prominence by divine right of Lightness. After marrying into her title, she turned against all it entailed and took up the cause of revolution. Her late husband can’t have been happy about that. Maintaining that ranks and titles were obsolete, she constantly insisted she not be called ‘your highness’. She was particularly sure to tell people who didn’t know she was a princess not to treat her like one. Yet her offhand manner hinted at dire consequences if she weren’t recognised as special.
To be fair, Christina Light was a rare creature. She shone… an unusual vampire trait Geneviève had only heard of. When she was stirred to emotion, her skin glowed with a lustre like her favourite pearls, her golden eyes became white flames and her dark hair rippled with violet luminescence. Like denizens of sea depths beyond the reach of the sun, she was her own candle. Something was very fishy about the Princess Casamassima. Kate Reed, always well-informed, said that the way some vampires could become mist, Christina could turn into moonbeams. Geneviève had not witnessed that – but the Princess sparkled like a chandelier when exercising her power of fascination, and burned white hot if it didn’t entirely work.
The glamour was a property of the vampire condition not shared by Geneviève’s bloodline. Life would be simpler if anyone could be made to do what she wanted… but getting one’s way all the time was bad for the character. She could instance many examples, warm and undead, of this lesson. The Princess Casamassima was at the head of that list. Prince Dracula was on it too. And Mr Mycroft Holmes of the Diogenes Club, who was at least as responsible for her being a woman without a country as Dracula himself. Britain was a country with too many puppet-masters… everyone else got their strings tangled.
She had to admire Higurashi. Christina’s fireworks didn’t jar his composure. He kept talking to Geneviève as if she were a trained monkey and keeping his eye on Kostaki as if he were the organ-grinder.
To meet the vampires, the emissary wore European formal dress – tailcoat, starched collar, red stock, diplomatic sash, top hat. He might have been the Mayor of Middlesbrough visiting a trade council. Like Kostaki, he kept a hand near his ceremonial sword, as if by studied accident. His German sabre was a subtle mark of contempt. The foreigners weren’t worth Japanese steel.
The Macedonia had steamed across oceans with its strange captain and stranger cargo, turned away from many harbours like a plague ship. Gunboats kept them out of San Francisco Bay, and followed at respectful distance until the ship quit US waters. No sanctuary for turncloaks in the Americas. They did not count as ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ for it was popularly supposed they did not breathe at all. Canada and Australia would take warm refugees from the rule of Prince Dracula, but not them – not vampires.
If any of their party showed their faces in London, they’d be impaled in public, beheaded with silver and have their ashes strewn on Rotten Row. They were against Dracula, and escaping from his dominion… but in America the Kane papers screamed that they were secretly his murder-missionaries, spreaders of his vile bloodline. Dracula was undisputed King of the Cats, and they were cats – so they must bow to him and work for the subjugation of the whole warm world. Even on the other side of the globe, his stench was on them: when Higurashi said Dorakura, he scowled as if biting into something disgusting.
Geneviève assumed the Japanese Navy had guns trained on the Macedonia. Not that there was much point. The ship was held together by rust and rancid seal-fat, more likely to be sunk by a squall than enemy action. It was all they could get and Death Larsen the only captain, alive or undead, bloody-minded enough to take on the turncloaks. Without him, they’d have to sail across the vast deep in single open coffins, paddling with their hands, dreading the rise of inescapable sun. At that, sharing a nightly table with Larsen was high price for a passage. Many warm fellows were disgusted by the way vampires fed… but the most ravening, fang-mawed ghoul was refined next to the Captain.
Yet the brute had his vanities. He was proud of his nickname. When they met in Panama City, none of the vampires were impressed by his sinister soubriquet or curious enough to ask how he came by it. His scarred lips twitched in an almost childish moué.
They had come to the Americas on the clipper Elizabeth Dane, another ill-starred ship, then crossed the Isthmus of Panama by mule-train.
‘I have read of the Demeter,’ Larsen told them, as the cargo of caskets was loaded aboard the Macedonia just as Dracula’s earth-boxes were once stowed in the hold of the ship which brought him to England. ‘On that voyage, there was but one leech and a whole crew to feed him. My ship has a hundred vampyrer… a hundred thirsty bastards. And me. I am not the fool who skippered the Demeter. My crew are not meat and drink to monsters. They are mine alone. They call me Death Larsen. Death. What a name! Death. You wonder why that is so, perhaps. Many times have I earned it. My own brother gave it me, first. He was one of you bloodsuckers – a wolf inside a man. Captain of the Ghost. Wolf Larsen is no more. If I am Death Larsen, he is Dead Larsen. A fine joke, hah hah. Dead, for he is dead, at the bottom of the sea. And my silver seal-harpoon through him. Thus I treat my own kin. You, I know not and care not for. A warning, that is all. It would be best if you kept to your boxes. Or the ship arrives in port free of leeches, and my brother has company down below – so many bats to follow one wolf.’
Fifteen years ago, perhaps, Death Larsen was the most terrifying thing in his world – then Dracula came out of Transylvania to conquer London. With him he brought horrors most of humanity had forgotten or hadn’t believed in. A warm man called Death could scarcely expect to command the fear he used to when people who were Death cast such long shadows.
Most of the party were still hibernating. The Macedonia wasn’t a passenger vessel or even really a cargo ship. Its usual business was seal-hunting, and its holds were foul with a carcass stink which would never wash away. Larsen’s crew stayed clear of the stacks of coffins, for vampire sleep was not always restful. Thirst gnawed in the stomach like a rat and even the undead dreamed. Many had nightmares of Dracula, spreading black wings. Or the mob, with fire and silver. They were devils cast out of Hell and not wanted in Heaven.
Kostaki volunteered to be supercargo, to watch over his comrades – remembering the slaver habit of tipping the goods over the side to avoid revenue cutters. With the Carpathian on watch, Captain Larsen could not just steal what they’d been able to take from England and consign them to the sea. Christina Light would not sleep away an opportunity to speak for them all, so she stayed out of the hold too.
Geneviève was roused from her padded trunk after Doskil, the ship’s doctor, cut his throat. Apparently, Death Larsen took it in mind to tear strips off him at supper. The Captain let fly a stream of inventive, vicious remarks which could, in the end, not be borne. Kostaki – former commander in the Carpathian Guard, famous across Europe for savage cruelty – professed to be appalled at the way Larsen set about murdering the little man, throwing words like small harpoons. A ship must have a sawbones and Kostaki remembered Geneviève had worked in clinics and missions in London. So, she was summoned from lassitude. Head still bleary
, she inherited Doskil’s cabin. It had been scrubbed but was permeated with spilled, spoiled blood – a sniff was enough to force her fang-teeth from their gumsheaths. It was painful and frustrating. She must look a fright, for she had to fight red thirst as a warm drunk in a berth soaked with whisky might struggle with the lure of the bottle.
Most minor injuries she had treated were caused by Death Larsen. He liked to lash out with the tarred end of a rope as much as his razored tongue. At one meal, he flicked the rope-end at a muscular, big-chinned American seaman for gobbling greens straight from the can.
‘You’ll have to find a new name, Hawk-Eye the Sailor Man,’ snarled the Captain.
She saved the Yank from having to wear a patch, but he’d never again see out of that eye.
If they couldn’t put ashore in Japan, they were stuck aboard this hellship with Death Larsen forever – or until he exhausted his crew’s capacity to take punishment, and went after the passengers. Seven vampires had already gone to dust and bone in their boxes. She could only guess how that might have happened. Death wanted them to show him the respect of fear, even if it killed them all – which it might.
Defying Dracula meant having interesting associates. Some Geneviève would steer clear of if she had a choice. In the hold were many choice nosferatu specimens. Mr Yam, a jiangshi who once tried to pull off her head, for one. The Chinese elder was an assassin who accepted too many commissions to murder (understandably unpopular) Dracula cronies. Along with committed political opponents of the regime and criminals who’d be on the run no matter who ruled England were former loyalists fallen from favour. Most were selfish rogues or fools who made the mistake of getting found out – though Kostaki was doomed to exile for stubbornly sticking by a military code of honour which was an embarrassment to superior officers and frightened the troops.