In the Footsteps of Dracula

by Stephen Jones

  If you do not wish to join with me, then so be it: there is a way for you to end it. You will see that the windows are well covered with heavy velvet drapes. Outside the sun is rising and it promises to be a fine, bright day. When I have retired, you may—if you wish—draw aside those drapes to enjoy that brilliant sunshine.

  I do hope that you will not choose such a course, dearest Roisin, for we are the future.

  ROBERTA LANNES has been publishing in the science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror genres since 1985, when she sold her first horror story to Dennis Etchison for his seminal anthology Cutting Edge. Since then, her work has appeared widely in anthologies and magazines, and her short fiction has been collected in The Mirror of Night from Silver Salamander Press.

  Lannes’s work has been translated into numerous languages, and South African filmmaker Aryan Kaganof’s 1994 movie Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers included an adaptation her short story “Goodbye, Dark Love.”

  Her digital artwork has appeared in Cemetery Dance magazine, and her photographs in JPG Magazine, and she has exhibited in galleries and designed iPhone App splash screens, CD covers, calendars, and greeting cards. More recently, she collaborated with author Christopher Conlon as illustrator for his epic zombie poem When They Came Back, contributing more than fifty horror photographs to the book.

  Melancholia

  Roberta Lannes

  Like nearly everyone else in Los Angeles, Dracula is in therapy . . .

  That I am bereft, perhaps insane with grief and melancholia, is beyond dispute. That I seek to take my own life as a result, may be up for contention, but it is my choice. What I leave behind, here, is a sort of last will and testament. More testament than will, since all that I leave is the myth, and mystery.

  I, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, have lived too long a life, full of depravity on a par with no other, compulsions beyond what the great artists of pain might imagine, and a loneliness that, until recently, lies deep within me, unexamined. I have hurt many, killed some, and left others with the same affliction from which I suffer. In all my memory, I’ve brought true joy to only one. And that one is gone. I have no more reason to go on.

  Ironically, it was to love that would become my ruin. To love, and to enter analysis.

  Most know my history, or a version of it, but no one knows of the last thirteen years. No one but myself, Ashley Lark Hibbert, and Dr. Alex Bloward Ph.D, psychologist. I am telling it here so my death might be understood, and in that, so my life.

  I have worked nearly my entire existence, which will destroy the myth of my endless independent wealth, but perhaps will show all that this Dracula was far more worldly, resourceful and diverse than imagined. When I came to the City of the Angels, I found my calling working the graveyard shift at a shelter for homeless and runaway children in Hollywood.

  I have never been fond of children, but I found the bedeviled souls who ended up in the haven on Las Palmas to be clever, wicked and defiled, and therefore fascinating. That they were also wounded from this experience on the streets, and abusive homes, was of no interest to me. I wasn’t called to heal the poor bastards, just watch them sleep and keep others from wandering in to sell drugs or seduce a sorry body.

  There, I met Ashley. She came in writhing and hollering in the hands of two Christian Soldiers, a group of evangelical teenage pus-faced fanatics who “cleanse the streets of Sodom” as part of a volunteer army “sent from God.” She was tall, blonde, skinny, and no different from most of the kids brought in by the Christian Soldiers, a prostitute.

  Sitting in my office, which amounted to nothing more than a corner of a room strewn with tatami mats and sleeping bags inhabited by teenagers, I watched as they threw her into the intake seat across from me. Some of the sleeping lot woke and complained, but most snored on. They held her as I retrieved the proper forms from my desk and wearily began the futile process of writing down a string of false information, all of which would later be nothing less than confusing if used in the actual attempt of locating the girl.

  “Name?”

  “Princess Daisy.” She snarled at me.

  I wrote it down. “Age?”

  She stared at my writing. “Fifty.”

  I wrote that as well. “Address, if any?”

  “Address . . . you’ve got to be kidding. Hell, the corner of Hollywood and Vine. That’s as good as any. The motel around the corner. What difference does it make? I’ll be back on the street in an hour . . .” She rolled her eyes.

  “We’re not the police, Miss Daisy. We don’t release you. We don’t hold you, either.” I frowned at the burly idiots holding her. They loosened their grip on her and she rubbed her arms.

  “You two can go. I’ll handle the princess here.” I smiled as vacantly as I could manage.

  When they were gone, Ashley, then the princess, looked around at the sleeping forms and took me in more carefully.

  “What is this place, a hostel?”

  “It’s a shelter. A place for runaways to crash so they don’t have to sell themselves. The bullies for Jesus seem to think it’s easier to dump the lowlife here than take them into the church. I’d have thought they wanted to save them. Isn’t that what their sort do?”

  She was squinting at me in the dim light. “Wow, a deep thinker. Great. So I can go?”

  “You can go. You can also come back anytime you want to. It’s relatively clean, dry, and sometimes there’s even food and clean clothes donated by some Good Samaritan. Nothing worthy of a fashion statement, but it beats shoes with holes in them. And then there’s my scintillating company. As you can see, I don’t have anyone to converse with at these hours.”

  “Yeah, well, then, bye.” She stood, turned to go, then looked back to me. “By the way, my real name is Ashley.”

  “Nice name. Mine’s . . . Vlad.” Sometimes I use that name, though we were never the same person. One of many of my myths I resent.

  “Vlad? Russian, right?”

  “Romanian. But I’ve been in this country a long time.”

  “Sure, I’ll come visit sometimes. When it gets slow . . . you know, out there.” She pointed girlishly to the streets.

  “Whenever.” I was clearly uninterested, which somehow intrigued her.

  She sauntered out into the night, and I wasn’t to see her for a ridiculously long three hours. When she returned, she was bruised on her forehead, cheekbone, and had a nasty welt on her neck. I inquired if she wanted medical attention, but she asked only that I sit beside her while she slept on the only mat left available. I said I’d watch her, but that I needed to be at the desk for the phone, and such. She shrugged, but I could see she was hurt.

  I left at six and she was snoring as loudly as the next guy.

  Ashley began haunting the shelter, but only after she’d earned out the night. Sometimes she’d try to engage me in conversation, but mostly I sat listening to her tales of torrid and tragic family dysfunction. She was fifteen, and already had seven years of therapy behind her.

  At first, she interested me no more than any other bastard who fell into the shelter. I was simply doing my job, earning enough to keep a dark room for the daylight hours. I had my free time to ferret out a good vein before I went to work. Perhaps that was why, in part, I was often lethargic and uncaring with the kids. That and I simply have never spent enough time with anyone to develop an attachment or emotional bond.

  Then, Ashley got pregnant. I hadn’t seen her for nearly four months. She was different. Bulging a bit at the belly. And she glowed. Had put on weight.

  A Madonna. That’s what she was.

  Ashley sat down, put a stuffed makeup bag on the desk and sighed. “Vlad, you’re my only friend. I need a place to live until my baby’s born, and then I’ll split. I have enough money to pay part of the rent. I don’t do drugs, but your sort never believe that anyway. Would you take me in?”

  Maybe it was the way she looked. That I hadn’t had a meal in twenty-four hours. Or gradua
lly, I’d come to miss her and felt some kind of connection to her after all this time. Regardless of why, I said I would.

  It didn’t dawn on me until I left for home at six that I would have to tell her who I really was, and assure her silence before she could stay a night. Or day. Seemed we both worked at night and might sleep all day. An auspicious sign.

  I sat her down in the dinette and paced as I explained.

  “Okay, here’s the story. Don’t interrupt me. My name is Dracula, I am a count from Transylvania. I am commonly known as Count Dracula, and I’m far older than I can remember. I am a vampire, I survive because I live on human blood, and I can’t have you living here with me unless you understand that if you tell anyone this truth, you endanger my very existence. And ruin your chances for having a place to stay, since I’d have to leave, and you’d be summarily put back on the street.”

  She grinned. “Helloooo, Halloween was in October. This is March.”

  I froze. “You don’t believe me?”

  “Besides the fact that you have very long, ink-black hair you keep tied up in a band, have skin that’s clearly never seen the sun, and eyes the color of kiwi, I’d just say you’re a very weird guy who needs to believe he’s a guy who turns into a bat. Fine, just don’t be drinking my blood, okay? I need to keep some to feed junior, here.” She nodded down to her belly.

  “You don’t believe me.” So few had known the truth in the past, and all were in awe when they learned it. I didn’t know how to approach her incredulity.

  “Does it matter? I need you. You could be Napoleon for all I care.”

  She was right. It didn’t matter. I listed my rules for living with me, and she shrugged at all of them.

  “Anything’s better than living with my family. I sleep all day, too. But I’ll be eating a lot. I can’t seem to help that. But I won’t bug you. Promise. I’m actually grateful.”

  She looked at me then with something I came to learn later was love. Gratitude isn’t love, though that was there as well. Dr. Bloward taught me that.

  For three months we lived together. I grew more and more fond of her, to the point of distraction. I found it difficult to concentrate on my seductions in order to feed. I got sloppy, and I admit, a bit too preoccupied and aggressive. I nearly killed a woman in Los Feliz. When Ashley had the baby and gave it away, her sadness and guilt became mine. We were becoming something of a family, albeit an odd one.

  It became obvious after a few weeks that it was time for her to leave, as she’d agreed. To go back to the streets, selling herself, I imagined. Yet neither of us said anything, me because I’d come to care about her as much as I could anything, and she, I learned later, was thoroughly and blissfully in love. So she just stayed.

  One early evening, when I was about to go out to find my sustenance, she sat down on the bed as I dressed.

  “You think of me as a sister, don’t you.” It was a statement.

  “I don’t know . . . I’ve never had a sister. Do you? Think of me as a brother?”

  She chuckled. “I think knowing you’re hundreds of years old sort of kills that notion, even if you look like a man in his late twenties.”

  “Oh, so now you believe me . . . Well, does this notion include not thinking of me as a potential lover?” My preternaturally still heart fluttered.

  She squinted at me just then. “I’m . . . afraid to think of you that way. I don’t know why.”

  “As am I afraid to think of you that way.”

  She brightened a bit. “You’ve actually considered it?”

  My turn to brighten. “Well, yes, of course. You haven’t then?”

  “Oh, hell, yes, I have. I’m just afraid to . . . you know, do anything about it.”

  “We are good together, aren’t we.” It wasn’t a question, either.

  She nodded vigorously. “Yeah, really good. But can we . . . you know . . . be together? A vampire and a regular girl?”

  I was suddenly young, recalling my youth with a longing I’d never known. Had I felt this way once?

  “I don’t know, Ashley. Do you want to find out?” Please, I thought, please.

  “Could we? Vlad . . . I don’t want to go back out there. I want to stay with you.”

  “Ashley . . .” I opened my arms and she leaned warmly into me. The concussion of two conflicting feelings overwhelming me was almost unbearable. Somehow, in the months we’d lived together, we’d stayed sufficiently apart to keep my blood hunger at bay. My lechery had not so easily been contained. Suddenly, now, my appetite and my profound lust battled for preeminence. Under my nose, her jugular pulsed, and her pink and luscious girl-skin gleamed radiantly, voluptuously. The scent of her made me swoon. I thought, for so long, I couldn’t feel anything. Now I’d been tossed into a whirlpool of emotions.

  “Kiss me.” She turned her face up to mine.

  My feeding incisors began extending, and I salivated, ready for blood. I could feel my eyes burrowing into hers, turning her into a helpless victim, not a willing partner. Could I ever simply make a woman my lover?

  My Ashley froze, put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me to arm’s length. “You asshole, I’m not going to let you turn me into a snack. I want to be your lover.”

  Oh, the spirit of her! I still reel at her memory. The Prince of Darkness’s wiles weren’t going to work on such as this worldly girl.

  “I know, Ashley. My body’s taking over. I have no idea what to do.”

  She grinned. “I love it when you get all little-boy lost, and stop being that big old stuffy Dracula.”

  “All well and good, you’re happy, now. Have you any suggestions for how we can get around this . . . hunger?”

  She cocked her beautiful head and thought. Clever girl. “Well, after you eat, you don’t want to eat again for nearly two days. Why don’t you go feed yourself and then . . . we’ll see.”

  “Brilliant. I’m on my way.” And so I left Ashley sitting on my bed, waiting for her lover-boy to return.

  If only I knew then what I know now.

  We walked into Dr. Bloward’s office two months later, both of us miserable and wanting to make our union work. Ashley did the talking that first session, since she was the one with years of experience at the hands of a shrink.

  As I sat back, eyeing the man who carried his balding, portly, self with the wariness of prey, Ashley explained our plight.

  “Well, we’ve been together for about two months. At first it was great. The sex was unreal, the passion glorious, and the love was . . . like nothing I’d ever known. You should know right up front, I’m not yet eighteen, but I’ve been on my own and a prostitute for three years, so I am totally cognizant of my choice in being with Vlad. We have both had to overcome previous baggage to be together, but some of it just feels like we’re stuck in cement.”

  Alex, as he asked us to call him, turned his beady eyes on me, and asked me if Ashley had given a reasonable assessment so far. I nodded.

  “Are you ill, Vlad?”

  Ashley piped in. “Oh, yeah, I guess we have to get that out in the open, too.”

  “HIV?” Alex frowned a bit.

  “No, he’s a vampire.” She saw the incredulity in his eyes. I saw the fear.

  He chose to respond clinically. “And how long have you believed yourself to be a vampire, Vlad?”

  “I have been a vampire for over three hundred years. I’ve forgotten my childhood, much of the past. I know this is stretching credulity for you, especially since your profession is trained to vet out the psychotic or schizophrenic who believes he’s something or someone else other than he is. I can only assure you I am, unhappily now, a true vampire.” I looked away. Not ashamed, but unwilling to see the look of derision on his face.

  “You’ve forgotten your childhood?” I turned to him. His fingers were stroking his chin, considering. “What do you know of your parents?” Like ditch-diggers shrinks are, plumbing the bowels of one’s psyche for pay dirt.

  And so our first f
ew sessions went. Ashley or I talking about what we could recall of our childhoods, chronicling our declines. I grew comfortable with him quickly, which Ashley said was a mark in his favor, since her experience of therapists was that when she felt weird with one, she knew he or she was no good. I trusted her experience implicitly.

  It was during our tenth meeting we finally told him our difficulties. I was eager to be the one to spill it. Quite unlike me, but I was changing even then.

  “It has to do with jealousy, mostly. You see, I am out from dark until ten or eleven at night feeding. I don’t kill my donors, haven’t for centuries, but I must seduce them close enough to make a meal from their jugular, or another prominent vein or artery. Ashley resents this, which I completely understand, but I cannot live any differently. If I don’t acquire a donor, I won’t feed. If I don’t eat, I can’t live.

  “As for me, Ashley has taken to using the hours before we are together in the evening for supplementing our income with hooking. While I am aware her having sex with another man is a performance of sorts, as are my own seductions, I feel she should find other work and keep herself for me. I do not, I will point out, do anything more than kiss a woman, and only if she appears to expect it.”

  “How do you see what Vlad is telling me, Ashley?” Her arms were crossed on her stomach and her foot was pumping. “Well, he certainly is articulate, isn’t he? And to think English isn’t his first language . . .” She glared at me a moment. “Yeah, he’s right. I’m jealous and he’s jealous. We’re both so fucking insecure, we can’t love each other right.” She began to cry. “Help us, Alex. I love him.”

  I reached for her hand and she took it, her face going into my chest. She sobbed for a few minutes while I stroked her head.

  “I can see you love and care for each other. We need to separate the issues between you into Vlad’s and Ashley’s, not the unit of the us.” He proceeded to show us how our old “tapes” of conditioned response and reaction reflexes were controlling us, and how we might get free of them.