He watched the two lovelies cavort on screen, focusing mostly on Bettie. She was young, winsome. She forced him to feel himself an anachronism, and that he could not, would not tolerate! He was Vlad Tepesh! Prince of Transylvania! King of the Living Dead! Lord of the Darkest Night! And he would have more than banality. He would have love.
As if out of a mist his celluloid vision turned toward the camera, toward him. He watched his pristine darling glide with the grace of a she-wolf. She played with the other, reveling in her role, whether as the giver or the receiver. Miss Page enjoyed herself to her naughty fullest. He longed for a woman who could enjoy herself. Who could appear so sweet and alluring and yet obviously kindle his intense passions. He deserved to enjoy himself as well. And, as always, he would have what he wanted.
The dark-haired beauty, who reminded him so much of his second wife, flirted with the camera lens. She seemed to stare right at him, a brazen, teasing look, one that he felt moved to tame. The other on screen punished her mildly—he would be more firm, that was certain. But even mild chastisement titillated him. This decade was truly a turning point in history, and like nothing else he had experienced. Oh, there had been French postcards, and those mild Victorian moving pictures at the turn of the last century. And he’d encountered a sufficient share of ladies of the night during his nocturnal wanderings. But never in several centuries had he witnessed such verve, such panache, such . . . full-blown erotic expression on a woman as fresh as the one he saw before him now.
Beside him lay an assortment of publications and film canisters, all featuring Miss Page: girlie magazines with cheesecake shots; Cartoon and Model Parade No. 53; various calendars; Playboy Magazine, January 1955, featuring Bettie as the centerfold, photographed by Bunny Yeager . . .
Ah, Bunny Yeager. He remembered with pain spiking his heart the events of but one year ago. It had taken some time to find Bettie, but when he did he acted at once. He discovered that Miss Page had gone to Florida, to be photographed by Yeager. Travel arrangements were made, and he arrived in Miami at the end of an arduous journey which spanned several days of riding by night on a train, only to discover after much searching that she had gone that day to a remote tourist attraction called Rural Africa, some seventy miles north of the city, and had not yet returned.
He discovered the location of her apartment—information in this less-congested city was not difficult to obtain with his powers—and there he awaited her return. She did return, but rather than retire, she proceeded to a main building. He watched her through a window, talking animatedly with several others, dining, relaxing, sewing a small leopard-skin garment out on the verandah while she chatted, one of the adorable outfits she wore. And all the while, his ardor grew. She was as effervescent in the flesh as on the screen. He determined that this night she would be his! Finally, just after 1:00 A.M., she left the main building for her cottage close by. This was the first time he had found her alone. He watched her walk along the path, as stunned as a novice lover, unable to approach her, fearful of rejection. She entered her residence and bolted the door. He rebuked himself. How had he been reduced to this! He, a voivode, Prince of Wallachia! Destroyer of the Ottoman invaders, and the betrayers who called themselves countrymen! His childish hesitation now meant that she was inaccessible. He could not gain admittance without an invitation, and without contact with Miss Page, he would not receive one.
The frustration drove him to her window in the alley at the back, where he peered inside through a break in the Venetian blinds. He watched her undress for bed. He held his breath; the sight of her sublime physique stunned him to silence. Such beauty felt unearthly, as if a cloud had parted and this angel had fallen from Heaven—did they know she was missing? Unaware, his fingernails clawed the screen over the window. Only when she turned, a delicious look of terror streaking her features, did he realize what he had done. Quick to remedy the situation, he decided that when she came to the window, he would instill the thought in her mind, through the glass, to open the window, to admit him. He pulled the screen away, for a better contact, and watched her snatch an article of clothing with which to cover herself and hurry toward him until she was so close he could only see her waist. He paused, waiting for the blind to lift. “I’ll give you two seconds to get away from this window or I’ll blow your brains out!”
Startled by her booming voice, he had no idea she possessed a weapon. The pistol would not harm him, of course, but the noise would draw others. His sense returned and he retreated, biding his time until the following night, when he would find a way to meet her outdoors, to look into her eyes, to capture her will and make her his own.
But the following evening she was gone. Inquiries let him know that the photo shoot had been completed and Miss Page had returned to New York. He felt devastated. Thwarted like a mere schoolboy. Unable to grasp this failure. There had seemed nothing to do but return to New York himself and plot out a further opportunity.
Varietease finished and the end of the film spun off the feeder reel. It was one of his favorites, but he liked the others as well, the ones with the girls play-spanking each other. The one where Miss Page helped tie another to an oak. Miss Page was a woman of unusual thespian talents. She excelled as both the discipliner and the disciplined, and that he found exceptional. He especially enjoyed that odd contraption, so like a medieval instrument of torture, on which a woman tied Miss Page, spread-eagled, upright, only to pull on both ends of the rope and lift the enchanting Bettie off the ground. Four centuries of seduction of increasingly insipid mortals had left him a tad jaded; his libido had grown as quiet as had his once-beating heart. And now, at this juncture in history, in this metropolis of New York City, he was revived. Had he been capable of tears, he would have cried them—tears of joy.
A glance out the window and he could see how the night quivered. He felt youthful, driven by something other than pure bloodlust. This city was the hub of the universe. The dawn, as it were, of a proverbial new day. It also teemed with human beings. Finding blood was never a problem. Finding Miss Page alone had been. She was popular, always busy, always accompanied. Two years of effort on his part had resulted in constant frustration. But he sensed that time, though eternal, held an urgency he had not experienced for centuries, and he valued that tension.
He snapped off the projector and grabbed up his cane to begin the search for Miss Bettie Page.
Irving Klaw’s studios, he had only recently learned, lay close by, in a warehouse. Rumor had it, Klaw was shooting Teaserama, and Vlad hastened to make his way there before the filming was completed. En route, he stopped at a kiosk to flip through a new publication, with still photos from Strip-o-Rama, one of her films. There was the sparkling Miss Page, in all her titillating glory! This era was indeed marvelous. Nothing left to the imagination. He felt he had finally come home in a sense, returning full-circle to the core of life. Finally society was opening, like the wounds of pierced flesh, and the lifeblood poured forth for all to drink at will. And at the center, Miss Page, a woman into whom he seriously wanted to sink his fangs.
“She’s a doll, all right. Have a gander at that, bub.” The rat-like man who ran the kiosk nodded at a calendar hanging from the back wall. Miss Page on a beach, in the sunshine—oh how she caused him to long for the sun!—wearing a sparse swimsuit. Smiling her engaging, teasing smile, her lithe body with the come-hither tilt of her hips . . .
“You buyin’?”
He turned toward the rat of a man. One glance at those rodent eyes and the creature was made nearly dumb, only murmuring, “Go ahead. Take it, mister.”
Vlad threw the photoplay volume at the vendor. He did not need these cheap imitations. By sunrise, he would possess the flesh and blood woman of his desires.
Klaw’s studio lay hidden in the warehouse district, protected by meat-packing plants and dry goods wholesalers. Vlad had been here before, many times, searching for Bettie. But as dumb luck would have it, either she was elsewhere, or else accompanied b
y a gaggle of friends. Even when he’d staked out this premises nightly when they first began to shoot Teaserama, he could not find her alone. Tonight, though, he was determined. Tonight he would gain admittance to the building, then to the studio. And finally to Miss Page herself.
He waited until he saw someone head toward the entrance. No sooner had they entered the main door than he was behind, catching the door as it closed, calling out.
A young man delivering sandwiches from a delicatessen turned, a startled look denting his freckly face. It took no time for Vlad to embed the proper words in his brain, and the youth soon repeated the magic phrase, “Sure, come on in.”
Once inside, the warehouse was a maze of doors. Some sported signs: FRIEDMAN’S FRUITCAKES; THE BUTTON HOLE; CROWN CORK AND CAN . . . He wandered the twenty storeys, disregarding the doors which obviously did not house a film studio on the other side, pressing his ear to the ones that gave little or no indication of what lay within. Finally, after much searching, he heard voices:
“Don’t worry, honey, just gimme a big smile. It’s gonna be all right.” This accompanied by the sound of what might have been a crank.
It was do or die the true death. He knocked and heard a “Damn!” The man who appeared at the crack the door opened was of ordinary height, with a dark mustache and intense, red-rimmed eyes. “Yeah?” he said suspiciously.
“I am searching for Bettie Page.”
“You and a two thousand other guys,” he said. “What’s your business with her?”
It took only seconds to mesmerize this man and to gain admittance. Within lay a film studio in one large space, or what remained of it. The area was almost barren. Boxes had been packed and stacked near the door. Tripods were propped against the wall, and cameras and film canisters had been gathered together. A woman in mid-life, the only other person in the room, wanted to know, “Irving, who’s this guy?”
The man named Irving shook his head, as if waking from sleep.
“You a fed?” she asked.
“Nah. He don’t look the type,” Irving said.
“I am searching for Miss Page. Where may I find her?” Vlad said.
“That’s anybody’s guess. She took off last week, like all the others, God knows where. Just after they started in on us.”
“Make yourself clear!” Vlad demanded, impatience rising alongside the fear gnawing up his spine.
“The House of Representatives. You know, the federal government? Don’t you read the papers?”
The woman moved closer. “The House Un-American Activities Committee. They figure we film smut and that ain’t exactly American or something.”
“Meaning?” Vlad asked, but after five centuries walking the earth, he already understood.
“Meaning,” the man said, “they shut us down. That there’s all that’s left. A copy.”
Vlad walked to the canister the man pointed at and picked it up. Teaserama the label read. All that remained of Bettie Page.
“Hey! You can’t take that!” the man shouted, as Vlad turned toward the door, cradling the canister against his stone-cold heart. One look from the Prince of Darkness, a look not intended to mesmerize, a look that conveyed a depth of pain no mortal could bear to see for long, caused Irving Klaw to say softly—and Vlad knew it was not out of terror but out of empathy—“I got the original anyways, or Friedman does. Take it. You need her.”
And he did.
NANCY HOLDER is a five-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association; she has also received accolades from the American Library Association, the American Reading Association, the New York Public Library, and RT Booksellers.
She and Debbie Viguié co-authored the New York Times best-selling Wicked series for Simon and Schuster. They have continued their collaboration with the Crusade and the Wolf Springs Chronicles series, along with The Rules, an homage to Wes Craven. She is also the author of the young adult horror series Possessions for Razorbill. She wrote the official movie novelizations for Wonder Woman, Crimson Peak, and the recent Ghostbusters reboot, and has sold many novels and book projects set in the MTV Teen Wolf, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Hellboy, and Smallville universes.
Mary Shelley Presents, her new Kymera Press comic book series showcasing the work of women Victorian horror writers, debuted at San Diego Comic-Con. She has taught Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine for more than a decade, sold approximately 200 published short stories and essays, and is an editor and writer of comic books, graphic novels, and pulp fiction for Moonstone Books, where much of her work centers around Sherlock Holmes.
Blood Freak
Nancy Holder
It is the Swinging Sixties, and Dracula feels reborn. Always a natural leader, he now finds himself surrounded by young people who regard him as a figure of mystery and great power . . .
Captain Blood. The Bat Man. He lived in a real castle, that is to say, someone built it to live in, not to film it, in the middle of the Borrego Desert. That is to say, east of San Diego, that Republican bastion of the Military Industrial Complex of Amerika, north of the Mexican border, where you could score lids of grass for five bucks a pop. His craggy, Scottish castle had been in some John Carradine movie, which some people found more trippy than the rumor that the current owner was a vampire.
Blood was his freak. No surprise, Pranksters: because if you traveled the rippling sidewinder desiccation to that Shock! Theater on the mesa, you had to have resources, interior (that is to, say, gray matter) and exterior (that is to say, eyes and ears) that the average headfeeder either did not have or use very well. So you synthesized; that is to say, you took things in. You figured things out.
You were observant. You grokked the fullness of the situation.
Going to the castle was the Great Bloodfreak Trek, the GBT, and you did it straight enough to drive, stoned enough to take the edge off, beating on the dashboard to the arrhythmic spasms of your carotid artery and the great good muscle that pumped it all together now. You and whatever merry band you had banded with could not help but hear the stories at the gas stations where you copped a pee and the bars where you guzzled whatever was cheapest (“We don’t serve no hippies;” “Right on, man, we don’t eat ’em”). The bourgeoisie crossing themselves like flipped-out movie extras, and cops warning you off the rumble-crunching dirt-rock road. Go back, go back, go back, you stupid kids; he really is a fuckin’ bloodsucker.
So are mosquitoes, baby. It’s all one big mandala. He was out front with it, he liked to suck people’s blood, and if you pretended not to grok his trip and showed up on his doorstep anyway, that was your bullshit, not his.
Vlad Dracula was no longer certain if he was mesmerized or bored to tears by the antic dances of the counterculture. In the fifties—Kerouac and the beats, bongos and a fascination with Italy—he had moved from San Francisco with his servants and his Brides and sought refuge in the desert. In San Francisco there had been too much scrutiny, too many questions, and then a woman he had entertained a number of times began writing poetry that she read in coffee shops:
He is my biterman, Daddy-o,
he ramthroats my red trickle down.
Thus identified, he had fled.
In the desert, he had hibernated for a time, missing the chill and the rain of San Francisco, the cold and the snow of Europe. But he had existed undetected, and kept himself fed, enjoying his homesickness as only someone who is very old can enjoy the sublime delicacy of emotions less intense than grief or despair—wistfulness, nostalgia, the watercolor washes of faint regret. But for him this was a game; he could leave any time he wanted.
Then came the changeling children, with their psychedelia and their excesses that reminded him of the oldest of his old days. The pageantry and drama of his Transylvanian court, the blood baths and virgins and the joy of opulence and extremity. Somehow one confused flower child stumbled to his castle, and then another, and another, until he was the source of a pilgrimage.
Hi
s servants begged him to leave, or at least to halt the flow of half-baked mortality. But he found he enjoyed the little hippies not so much for the quality of their company as the fact that they sought him out. They capered and gyrated for his amusement; ate his banquets; made up terrible, overwrought poetry which they loved to recite to him after dinner; and dared one another, in hushed tones, to bare their necks for him, even though he never asked them to. Was he or wasn’t he? He never revealed himself, keeping his own counsel and instructing the Brides and the servants to do likewise.
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 8