“Isn’t it obvious? Bram’s entire reason for writing his quaint book was to expunge his guilt.”
“So Dracula drank your blood and you became like him.”
“It isn’t that easy, Detective, I assure you. He drained me to the point of death, then made me drink of his blood. You needn’t worry about his victims—they won’t be coming back unless he transformed them, and frankly vampires don’t like the competition.”
“But he turned you.”
“Yes,” she said, and for the first time Jackson saw her jaded irony fail, “I suppose he loved me.”
Jackson looked closely at her, her legs sliding from under the folds of the silk skirt, then forced his gaze up to meet hers. “In the book you were feeding on children.”
She did look away, with a shame that actually surprised him. “I was . . . you have to understand that I was like a newborn myself, cast into a strange new life without guidance. Dracula was being pursued then and couldn’t help me. After, though, he did come back. He gave up on Mina and came back to me. He taught me how to use my new gifts, and made me remember who I’d been. He took me to London. We even become part of society . . . but then he left. He grew tired of the people, the cities. He was homesick. So he left and I stayed. We haven’t been together since.”
“Why do you think this,” Jackson gestured at the files on the desk, “is him?”
“I did see him two months ago,” she began, her voice barely above a whisper. “He must have found out I was married to David, a mention in a magazine perhaps. One night he appeared outside my bedroom window. He was half-formed, hovering, just . . . watching. He didn’t come in, or speak. After a while he just . . . drifted away. He was very lost.”
Jackson waited until she could look at him again before saying, “Even if it is him . . . what do you want? Do you think you can save him?”
“Oh no, Detective. I want you to help me kill him.”
Before Jackson could react, she was bending over him, one hand gliding down his shoulder. “Why aren’t you married, Detective Jackson?”
His shoulder jerked away from her touch. “Who said I’m not?”
She picked up his left hand, held it up between them. “No ring.”
He had to admit, “Okay, I’m not. But you are.”
She was pulling him out of the chair now, to his feet, her arms going around his waist. “I’ve been married eight times this century. It’s a convenient cover for the way I have to live, and provides me with income.”
“And that’s all?” he asked, as her hands moved up his back.
“Let’s just say I . . . do seek my pleasures elsewhere.” A few seconds later, when her teeth slid easily into his throbbing neck, it was the greatest moment of Jackson’s life.
Another sunup . . . another sundown . . .
Even though he had fed the night before—completely drained two of them—he hungered again. Maybe it was the drugs he had ingested with last night’s blood, or, more likely, the blood itself was the drug. Only when he was taking in the sweet, rich essence did the pictures in his mind fade. Only then could he rest in peace.
He left his sanctuary and let the night wind take him.
A third-floor window in a downtown hotel. One of those to which the government housing program paid $400 a night to shelter its indigent.
He entered. Two men were passed out drunk on cots in the first room. He took them both without a sound and moved on. In the next room a woman saw him and started to scream—until he ripped her throat out. A third man there. On to the next room . . . and the next . . .
He came to a family, parents and three young children, all sleeping in two beds, only a curtain separating them. He took the parents silently, then tore the curtain aside and faced the children.
The children . . .
The world in 1969 had belonged to the children.
Dracula had finally forsaken his dreary, war-torn homeland for the New World. That had been in the 1950s, a time he had found depressingly dull and spiritless. But his financial fortunes had multiplied enough to keep him there.
And then times had changed again, as they always did, and he felt reborn. It was summer 1969, the City of Angels. He was now fabulously rich, constantly surrounded by gorgeous young people dressed in flamboyant clothing. It amused him that their colors were DayGlo. He loved the lively music, the open sexuality, the intense communal gathering that took place on the Sunset Strip every Saturday night. He owned movie studios, record companies, apartment buildings and one old Art Deco theater, which he planned to renovate soon. He dressed in velvets and silk brocades, frequented the Whisky and the Velvet Turtle, and his head reeled with LSD-laced blood. He became a figure of mystery and intense speculation among the Strip’s habitués, and so was very popular.
All in all, it was a great time to be undead.
It was late on one of those same Saturday nights when he smelled something wafting down from the hills above and to the west. It was something that cut through the haze of marijuana smoke, something he had not smelled since the last war: blood, newly spilled, a great quantity. It was nearly 4:00 in the morning. He was just leaving his last club of the night, accompanied by two staggering youthful companions. He planned to invite them to his limo, ply them with hashish, then taste them both, taking only a little, leaving them to spend the rest of the evening passed out in the rear seat while he flew home just before sunrise. His chauffeur, whom he liked to call “Renfield,” was exceedingly discreet.
But the scent, impossible for mortal senses to define, tugged at him, a pull as old and natural as the killer instinct. He halfheartedly excused himself from his prey, moved like a sleepwalker to a dark corner, and there transformed.
On batwings he followed the aroma north, past the Strip, into the hills. Over the sprawling mansions of Beverly Hills, past the winding Coldwater Canyon, up to a place where Christmas tree lights twinkled incongruously in the warm night. He set down nearby, on an expanse of lawn, nearly swooning from the proximity of the scent.
It did not take him long to find the source. There were two bodies on the front lawn, one man and one woman. They had been stabbed, butchered. In a car in the driveway, a third corpse reposed over the steering wheel, bullet holes a testament to his life’s end.
But the inside of the house was where the strongest smells were emanating from, and, in a daze of lust and repulsion, Dracula followed the bloodscent.
There was gore everywhere, on walls, on floors, on furnishings. He turned off a short entryway into a living room, and saw another man and woman. They, like the two outside on the grass, had been savaged, mindlessly stabbed over and over, obviously within the last hour or two. The length of rope connecting them, each end knotted around their necks, showed they had also been hanged. An American flag was draped over the back of the couch.
Dracula ignored the masked body of the man and moved to kneel by the woman. He looked at her face, heartrendingly beautiful even in death, and thought: I know her.
It took a moment for his mind—a mind filled with thousands of faces, collected over centuries—to process her image. Then it came to him. Of course. He had seen her two years earlier, in a film. A vampire film. An absurd film, but well crafted and not without its merits. He had thought her beautiful even then.
Now she lay at his feet, victim of a slaughter so terrible it left even him, history’s great parasite, sickened.
As he looked down, he realized something else: she had been pregnant, quite far along. And the child within her . . .
No!
It had been, astonishingly, untouched by the attack, and was moving feebly. He let his fingers rest on her swollen, scarlet side, while emotions he had not felt in over twenty-five years flooded to the surface: hatred, compassion, disgust, but mostly rage. Rage. Rage.
The child stopped moving.
The first light of false dawn was glowing in the sky outside as he staggered up, the night over. He left the house the way he had come, out t
he front door. It was only then that he saw the message scrawled there, scrawled in blood which his senses told him belonged to the exquisite corpse within:
PIG
It rang in his head as he found his way home.
PIG
All that warm, rich life reduced to a word, a word describing a filthy farm animal.
PIG
When he took to his coffin, it was still there. And during the day that followed,
PIG
It became the axe that found the cracks already widened in his carefully kept sanity, and five centuries were shattered with the final stroke.
“You’re sure this is it?”
Jackson shone his flashlight around the interior of the deserted theater, seeing only splintering wood and peeling plaster. Lucy came up behind, entwining herself around him. “Yes, but don’t worry—he’s not here right now.”
Jackson had spent the rest of last night and today in a drained, rapturous haze. He kept recalling the rush that had filled him as she’d taken him, like an orgasm igniting every cell of his body. She hadn’t taken that much, not even enough to cause him to lose consciousness.
What he’d lost was his soul.
He could think of nothing but her. And a part of him hated her for that.
He’d received the call about the massacre at the shelter early, not long after he’d arrived home. It looked like the skid row killer—Dracula, he forced himself to think the name—had gone mad, killing ten adults and one toddler, and injuring two children. Jackson had gone to the hospital to question the tiny victims, but they were in critical condition, comatose, probably dying.
And all he’d thought about was her.
She’d come to him as usual, except this time there were no words. An embrace, a long kiss, the slick warmth of her tongue on his, her teeth at his neck, then in . . .
Later, she told him they would kill Dracula tonight.
He drove her unquestioningly to the theater. He didn’t even feel astonishment when she lifted him in her arms so they could enter over the ten-foot boards blocking the entrance.
Her plan was to locate Dracula’s coffin, hide until he had returned and dawn was at hand, then open the shopping bag she had brought along, remove from it a wooden stake, and drive it through Dracula’s heart. Then, to be sure, they would drag his body into morning sunlight, and Jackson would hold it there until the remains were completely obliterated.
When Jackson objected—“But the sun”—Lucy had assured him that she had no intention of sacrificing herself. She would occupy Dracula’s coffin, safe from the light, watched over by Jackson, until the next dusk.
Now they stood in the vast, echoing space that was the old theater, Jackson’s senses afire where she touched him, desolate when she removed herself.
“The coffin is somewhere above us. I can smell it.”
The scent led them back into the lobby, through a door on which fading letters read PRIVATE, and up stairs to a long corridor. Offices, rehearsal rooms and tech booths lined the hall; a door at the end opened onto a large storage space for set pieces, flats and props. Jackson saw a black square overhead, and nodded at it.
“A painted-over skylight. That’s good for us.”
Lucy barely acknowledged him, then fixed her attention on something else. “There it is.”
She pushed past cobwebbed couches and coat-racks, rusted lamps and shattered mirrors, to where a coffin rested in a far corner.
It was hardly what Jackson had expected. An ebony box that had once been highly-polished, but was now as tarnished as the dilapidated pieces around it. No family crest or crouched gargoyle marked it. It looked as if it belonged here, a simple prop that could have graced any number of plays, but now lay dusty and forgotten.
Lucy opened it and turned away, flinching. Even Jackson gagged at the stench.
The inside of the coffin was painted brown with layers of dried blood.
“God,” Lucy muttered, stepping back, “he has become a monster.” She sagged into a chair that barely supported her weight. She covered her face with one hand and looked away from him.
Jackson realized she was sobbing.
“Lucy . . . what . . .”
He knelt by her, caressing a leg.
“Seeing him this way, what’s become of him . . . I knew it would be bad, but this . . .”
“Then we’re doing the right thing.”
Lucy tried to look up, nodding. “We are, but . . . it’s still hard for me. I loved him so.”
Jackson pulled back from her as if she had struck him. “You . . . loved him? But he—”
She cut him off, almost irritated. “Yes, I loved him. He’s the only one I’ve ever really loved. He gave me my life, how could I not love him? No one could ever mean to me what he does. All the rest, they’re just . . . ghosts.”
“Including me?”
Lucy stood, realizing her mistake, turning to him with a poor attempt at a smile. She put her arms around him, but he was stiff. “It’ll be different when I’m free of him . . . and you’ll be the one who’s there when that happens.”
Jackson let himself be drawn into her embrace, gave his senses over to her . . . but his mind was replaying what she’d said, and weighing chances.
For the first time since his resurrection, he had no desire to feed.
He floated, insubstantial, over the city, dimly aware that he was searching for something. Whatever it was—romance, reason, adventure, simplicity—it was not to be found, not in this place or time. His ways were completely dead, and not even blood would comfort him now.
When the horizon began to pale, he saw the colors there preceding the coming of the sun, and made his first truly conscious decision in days, maybe years:
I will greet the light this morning.
But, as the sky turned pink and gold around him, it was his unconscious instincts that took over, the primordial will to survive that told humans to breathe and his kind to flee the day. And so it was, with an inward scream of disappointment, that he realized he was once again in his coffin prison, the lid closing over him, sealing him away from the release promised by the light.
They had watched silently as Dracula had entered the room, mist seeping through a ceiling vent into the coffin, then coalescing into a gaunt figure who reached a hand up to pull the lid shut.
Now Lucy handed a stake and mallet to Jackson; he took them, half-numb with the sudden realization that she had always meant for him to do this. She crept up to the coffin now and paused there, her face unreadable. Then, finally, she laid her fingers on the lid, looked to Jackson and mouthed two words:
The heart.
Jackson nodded, then tightened his grip on the arcane tools and waited.
She flung the lid back.
Jackson looked down and froze.
The thing in the coffin was neither the handsome vampire Prince of cinema nor the rat-faced historical Vlad. No, what Jackson saw was a hollow-eyed and stained specter, past all delusions of vanity or care, clad in clothing so old and stained it was impossible to identify either color or style. Dracula exuded neither menace nor allure, just great age and sad, apathetic madness.
A cry of dismay escaped Lucy.
Dracula’s eyes opened. They fixed on Lucy’s.
“My Prince,” she breathed.
There was no response. Without breaking her gaze, Lucy ordered Jackson: “Do it.”
Jackson moved the tip of the stake over Dracula’s chest, guessing where the heart would be. He settled the point and raised the mallet, gathering force for the blow.
Dracula’s features clouded over, and he spoke one word.
“Lucy.”
Lucy cried out again, and saw Jackson swinging the mallet. “Wait—!” She was too late. The mallet struck the wooden stake with enough force to drive it all the way through Dracula’s body. Cold blood splattered Jackson’s hands and arms, but he pounded the stake a second time, to be sure.
A long hiss was the only sound. The
n even that was gone.
Lucy stared, aghast. Jackson dropped the mallet and started to reach for her, but pulled back, seeing his gore-covered fingers. Instead he moved up to her, so close he could feel her trembling.
“Lucy,” he said softly, “you know it had to be done.”
She wouldn’t look at him.
He bent to pull the body from the coffin, to let the sun send it to its final rest, but Lucy suddenly turned on him, pushing him away so roughly he staggered. “No! I won’t let you touch him!”
She closed the lid gently.
“What about you? The coffin . . .”
“I don’t need it,” she answered in a voice as cold as his blood had been. “There’s an old trunk in the corner. I’ll use that.”
She kissed the ebony surface gently, let her fingers rest there for a moment, then crossed to the trunk.
“You won’t touch him,” was all she said.
Jackson nodded, and she lowered herself in, closing the darkness around her. He waited a few moments, to be sure day had painted the world outside, then he hefted the coat-rack up. A few thrusts shattered the black-coated glass overhead, and rich morning sunlight streamed into the room.
He walked back to the trunk and positioned himself at the far end.
He pushed until it lay full under the sun, and then he opened it.
Lucy barely had time to scream before the burning began. When she sprang halfway up, he pushed her back down and held her there while she writhed beneath him. When her struggles began to weaken, she looked up at him, her skin black and blistering, and asked why.
A thousand reasons flooded Jackson’s mind:
Because you’d have come to hate me for what I did today.
Because I’m just a ghost.
Because you used me.
Because you didn’t love me.
Because you’re a monster, just like he was.
Because you don’t belong here.
But he said nothing.
When it was over, he turned to the coffin and scraped it across the floorboards a few feet at a time, his muscles straining. Once gold pooled over it, he flung the lid open, ready for anything, except what he saw:
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 30