In the Footsteps of Dracula

by Stephen Jones

  He was a well-preserved fifty-something, with spiky black hair that was going gray above the ears. His eyes were a deep blue, cracked by tiny red veins. The brightness of his lips might have been augmented by lip-gloss, or it might have been an anomaly linked to the complete lack of pigmentation in the rest of his face. He was wearing an expensive charcoal-gray silk shirt that, despite himself, Wren felt an impulse to reach out and touch.

  They chatted for a few minutes, Schreck taking an intelligent interest in Wren’s posters and CDs. He was appreciative of Joy Division, but utterly dismissive of the Cure: “They don’t express despair, they fabricate it as a lifestyle option. Entertainment.”

  There was a trace of Middle Europe in Schreck’s voice: not so much an accent as a weight hanging around the vowels, like a second voice you couldn’t quite hear. Behind his deliberate politeness, Wren could sense a rather icy self-possession.

  The cellar and its rumored contents weren’t mentioned. Rent arrangements were discussed as if this were a purely normal tenancy. Perhaps it would be that easy. But just before leaving, Schreck told him: “Don’t go on holiday without letting me know. Even a weekend. It might not be convenient. And trust matters.” He let that sink in before wishing Wren goodnight and quietly closing the door.

  It was the last and hottest summer of the 1990s. Wren had trouble sleeping, and began doing some of his design work at night. His main contract, with a magazine publisher in Birmingham, only required him to be there in the afternoons.

  He struck up a friendship with one of the sub-editors, a tall blonde girl called Alison; they met for a drink a few times, but she wouldn’t get involved with him. Once she phoned another man from the office, and the tone of her voice made Wren realize just how far he was from getting close to her.

  The heat and lack of sleep helped to turn his disappointment into obsession. The inside of his head was a notice-board covered with photographs of Alison. If he’d been able to download his compulsive daydreams onto his Apple Mac, he could have designed a whole magazine about her. Whenever he had to go into the office, he felt tense and scared.

  The house was a partial escape from the summer. The air seemed thinner somehow, as if the leaded windows did more than just weaken the sunlight. It had once been a Victorian family house, and seemed to recover some of its old character after dark, when the shadows erased the new wood-chip wallpaper from the deep stairwell. Wren’s flat, on the second floor, had been a family bedroom once. He tried not to think about that too much.

  Schreck’s late-evening visits became a regular event, with Wren sometimes being invited down to the landlord’s ground-floor flat to share a drink and a video. Schreck had a brilliant collection of old films, mostly in black and white: Hitchcock, Polanski; film noirs from the 1940s; Universal horror films with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; German expressionist films like Nosferatu and Pandora’s Box; erotic art-films by Warhol and Fassbinder; trash with a Ph.D in the architecture of its own back passage. He was particularly enthusiastic about old horror and crime B-movies, and the way they had been used to get subversive and dangerous material past the barriers of a hidebound audience.

  “True Gothic nightmare camouflaged as schlock. Behind the plot clichés and cheap special effects, such a world of ambiguity, guilt, narcotics, lust. Such dark, terrible eyes staring at you.” Schreck was inclined to get maudlin when he was drunk.

  His fridge and drinks cabinet housed a crystal garden of wonders. He and Wren sat for hours in the flickering light of the screen, drinking strong Polish vodka with tomato juice or bittersweet liqueurs that glowed like the moon through clouds.

  Wren stored up the cold, stark landscapes of these films to protect him from the burning days. The alcohol helped too, as long as he had an extra hour or so to sleep off the worst of it. Spirits had a power that beer entirely lacked: the effect stayed with you all day, like a rose of ice slowly melting into your gut. A private darkness. Sometimes he made shallow cuts in his arms with a razor blade and licked the blood, then ran cold water over the skin. It made him feel in control. The occasional robbery helped too, though the firm were keeping a low profile until the nights drew in.

  Wren enjoyed the strategy aspect of it, the sense of winning a game. His fear of guard-dogs, armed security guards, police roadblocks, was sharp but limited. It was easier to live with than the way he felt about Alison. And the sense of discipline reassured him. Whatever they took, including money, came back to the house and was stored in the various parts of the basement for Schreck and his invisible overlords to look after.

  One Friday night, after the successful liberation of a few grand’s worth of state-of-the-art computer games from an underground depot, Wren and two other thieves celebrated with a night at a private club. They’d invited the security guard whom they’d prevented from raising the alarm to join them, but he’d opted to lie low for a while. The club was dark and echoing, and so humid that it seemed about to rain. It was full of criminals pretending to be businessmen, and businessmen pretending to be criminals. Two young female strippers posed awkwardly on the narrow stage, feigning interest in each other. Around a small table, several middle-aged men were ostentatiously cutting up lines of snow.

  Wren and the other two sat at the bar, knocking back malt whiskies and Black Russians. A few young women drifted quietly among the tables, waiting. The air was cobwebbed with a predictable desire, like something designed and fabricated on a page of broken light. Wren drank steadily, chewing ice, watching the two mirror-balls pull shreds of color across the girls’ pale faces and arms.

  Some time later, he wasn’t sure how late, the three of them ended up in a tiny side room with a thin, dark-haired girl wearing a red tunic. There was a black-velvet futon in the middle of the floor. Wren felt strangely exposed, aware of the two men watching as the girl undressed him and pushed him down onto the futon beneath her.

  His hands struggled with her underwear. Then she was kneeling over him, her bony hands holding down his outstretched arms. His companions knelt on either side, watching closely. Wren felt trapped. A mixture of humiliation and joy took him over, reducing him to a living snarl. As he came, he caught her earlobe between his teeth and bit. A metallic smear of blood glued his dry lips to her skin. The girl pulled away, her face tight with rage. Wren licked his lips and watched as the other two pacified the girl with money and apologies. Neither of them touched her.

  Occasionally, in the house, he’d see Schreck with visitors or overhear them talking. Mostly, he assumed, it was business. Did Schreck have a boyfriend? There had been a couple of rough-looking teenage lads, but neither had been a regular visitor. Just because people said the Count was queer didn’t necessarily make it true. Rumor was a separate kind of reality.

  Maybe they said Wren was driving his stake into the Count. He did wonder, when he sobered up after one of their late-night drinking sessions, if anything was going on. Drinking buddies were more than friends sometimes, it was a well-known phenomenon. At college, he’d known blokes who were officially straight get rat-arsed together and end up cuddling, or even exchanging hand-jobs. But if Schreck was trying to get him that way, he’d already passed up quite a few opportunities. The thought of Schreck grabbing his balls one of these nights didn’t worry him too much. What seemed more likely, and more threatening, was that the old madman was falling for him and might never let him go. There was an edge to their nocturnal films and bottles that Wren didn’t understand. It was getting to him. But he didn’t know what would happen if he tried to cry off. There was something protective about Schreck, almost motherly. His sharp nails, the mints he chewed to sweeten his breath. Probably a Catholic, or a Jew. How would he treat you if you stopped being one of his family?

  By late summer, Wren suspected he’d already got into something he couldn’t get out of. And then there were the dreams.

  It was like an extension of some of Schreck’s older films into the monochrome world they evoked: forests, empty streets, crumbling build
ings, the moon behind clouds. Tiny figures were scattered across the landscape: either dolls or babies, their faces closed and blank. Tree-branches, prams and other debris floated in a disused canal, behind railings almost eaten through with rust. Everything was still, as after some terrible event.

  Wren (or whoever he had become) was always lost, trying to find someone or escape from someone. The story never revealed itself to him. Somewhere behind a wall, or in the next street, it was still going on. He could just hear the echoes of someone crying, or screaming, or snarling with rage, or groaning in pleasure. But he didn’t know where the sounds came from.

  At some point near the end of each dream, he looked at the moon and saw through a black frame into another world: a darkened room where Schreck’s face was watching him. The only colors in the entire dream were the red of Schreck’s lips and the deep blue of his eyes, which never met Wren’s own.

  One night in mid-August, Wren visited a rock nightclub in the city center. It was billed as a Goth/Alternative/Industrial night. A damaged mirror-ball stood on a concrete pillar at the end of the street. The club itself resembled a derelict warehouse with speakers and lights installed at the last moment. The walls were unevenly coated with posters advertising gigs over the last few years. There were two similar concourses, each with a long curved bar stretching from the doorway to the edge of a square dance floor. The music on the first floor was mostly heavy metal, the music on the second floor a mixture of Goth and industrial. The people dancing on each floor provided a visual guide to the differences.

  Wren decided to stick to the upper venue, for several reasons. After two hours of harsh music and lukewarm beer served in plastic glasses, his enthusiasm was waning. Very few of the girls seemed to be unattached; perhaps they were only here for the music. Feeling lonely and unexpectedly drunk, he stumbled onto the adhesive dance floor just as a new track began.

  The rapid, scratching guitar caught him by surprise; then he recognized it. Lou Reed snarling You killed your European son / You spit on those under 21, then a glass breaking, then five minutes of tense, atonal noise. He’d heard it before, of course; but never at this volume, or in such an appropriate context. The sound of a tune broken down painfully into its elements.

  Wren shut his eyes and wondered about the future. The clean, computerized life wasn’t going to happen. But what would take its place? Barbarism? Terror? What instincts had to be accepted before humanity was real again?

  The Velvet Underground track was more than thirty years old, but it was still shocking. Schreck was right about the 1980s, he realized. That era had taken everything that was disturbing and turned it into a lifestyle option, a product. Now society was discovering how real it all was. You better say so long.

  Later, the music became more plaintive and the floor stickier. Couples folded into the shadows, joined inseparably at the mouth. There were fewer people dancing. The toilets were a no-man’s-land, splattered with piss and vomit. In a small side-room where the bar only served Budweiser, Wren successfully chatted up a pale young woman with spiky black hair and a non-human skull tattooed on her left shoulder. Her name was Lucy. They danced together, embracing awkwardly, before stumbling around various bits of human wreckage to the exit. Outside, the night was starry and relatively cool. They caught the night bus rather than wait for a taxi. Someone behind them vomited onto the floor. Wren and Lucy kissed, filling their mouths and nostrils with each other.

  They hardly slept that night. Wren was feverish, hungry for something he couldn’t define. Lucy was kind, affectionate, caring. He wanted none of it. The first time they made love, it took him a long while to come. The second time, near dawn, he asked her to bite him. She nibbled his tense shoulder. “Harder. Bite.” He dug his nails into her spine. Angrily, she bit down hard. When he saw the blood smeared across her mouth, Wren came at once. His entire body ached from the effort. Lucy seemed a bit nauseated. She dabbed at the wounded shoulder with a handkerchief, wincing at her own teeth-marks.

  In the morning, she left before Wren was properly awake. He washed the bite, put two plasters over it and went back to bed. Having slept through half the day, he felt restless and disorientated in the evening.

  Toward midnight, he caught a late bus into Tyseley. The inert husks of derailed trains crowded the railway depot, like abandoned chrysalides. Asset-stripping in a crudely literal sense, two years after the sell-off. The whitewashed exteriors of old factories and workshops glowed faintly, picked out by the street-lamps. A stray dog foraged patiently in a litter-bin. Here and there, lights behind closed shutters indicated night work—some of it, perhaps, the same kind of night work that Wren and his colleagues were involved in. There were no exposed windows, anywhere. Cars and vans drove along the Warwick Road, none of them ever turning off or stopping. Wren knew his way around here by night better than in daylight. He walked down a side street between a Catholic church and a disused canal, the water glinting through battered railings. Where a flattened stone bridge crossed the canal, he could see a patch of waste-ground with a boarded-up house and a weeping willow tree. A pigeon groaned from somewhere behind the tree. Wren thought suddenly of the Chinese willow pattern on bowls he’d eaten from as a child.

  It was colder than the previous night. He could smell burning wood. Was that a fire in the distance, or just a red security light in a factory yard? He stepped forward until he was under the tree, its long yellowish leaves touching him. Their ends were dry. The sound of machinery, like guitar chords, rose from the bass-line of the distant traffic. And then, quite abruptly, the gentle movement of the willow leaves stopped. Wren felt a white breath pass over him, as if he were an image on a screen. There was a faint sound of cracking and tearing; then silence and a cascade of dry filaments, as the tree shed all its leaves at once.

  When he told Schreck about his experience with the Velvet Underground song in the nightclub, the landlord smiled gently. “Oh yes. Lou Reed . . . such a gifted boy. In those days. He was so real. David Bowie stole his thunder, of course—but it wasn’t the same. Bowie could change his image at the drop of an eyelash, but Reed could change his soul. You can hear it in those songs, the danger.”

  Wren didn’t tell him about Lucy or the dying tree. In any case, Schreck was away on business a lot of the time now, so Wren saw much less of him. It gave the tenant a chance to sort himself out.

  The inability to sleep normal hours was messing him up, and the dreams were starting to undermine his waking life. His GP referred him to a counselor, who kept asking him about his parents. No, he thought angrily, I wasn’t abused. I wasn’t even scared of them. But when he thought back to how his parents had seemed—their heavy bodies, their violence toward each other, their nocturnal outcries of love or fury—it was hard not to think of Schreck, because Schreck made him feel like a child. A silent witness.

  In October, his contract with the magazine publisher ended. He invited Alison round to his flat for a valedictory meal. Rather to his surprise, she accepted.

  That weekend turned out to be a slightly inconvenient one for Wren. Schreck and Matthews were both away, sorting out an urgent problem somewhere in North Yorkshire. Wren had been warned to expect a large consignment of hash at some point over the weekend. Schreck had given him the money and the key to the basement. In all probability, the deal had been engineered to test Wren’s reliability. It was petty stuff, in all respects: the cash, the weed and the arrangement. Taking the mediocre seriously was what life in the West Midlands was all about. He hoped it wouldn’t clash with Alison’s visit. Then again, maybe it would give him a chance to impress her—and even an excuse to get her stoned.

  Wren spent hours cleaning the flat beforehand. His eyes had become used to a certain level of dirt and rubbish, and the flat seemed unfamiliar without it. He was surprised to discover some rusty stains inside the bathroom door, where the towel normally hung. He must have cut himself one night, probably when drunk, and forgotten about it. Alison turned up punctually at eight, wearing
a blue-black coat he’d not seen before. The night behind her was still and clear, stars and street-lamps glowing as if painted in the doorway.

  They shared a bottle of white wine and some mushroom pâté, followed by grilled mackerel in garlic sauce. The Velvet Underground’s third album, the quiet one, unwound strands of melody from the black speakers at either end of the room.

  Alison glanced appreciatively round the flat. “This is a really nice place. Bit gloomy though. Like you spend all your time in here with the curtains drawn. All these records, posters, books. Most people, you see their flats and there are no books at all.” She smiled, her mouth resting a little tensely on her knuckles. Then her eyes narrowed. “The house is a bit creepy, don’t you think? It’s so featureless. Like a hostel or something. And there’s not enough light.”

  “The landlord’s a vampire,” Wren said. “That’s why I put garlic in the sauce. To protect you.”

  Alison’s eyes widened in an expression of dawning terror. Then she cracked up, giggling hard, and almost choked on a fishbone. Wren jumped to his feet, but she waved him back down and coughed into her hand.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She nodded. Her face was flushed; her pale blue eyes glittered with moisture. She ran a hand through her blonde fringe, pulling it back. They stared at each other. Feeling more scared than he could have imagined possible, Wren reached out and touched the back of her hand. She gripped his fingers. Lou Reed sang gently, bitterly, about loss and sin. Thought of you as everything I’ve had but couldn’t keep. As Wren stood up and came round the small table toward her, she lifted her face to kiss him.

  They progressed from wine to cognac and mint chocolate-chip ice cream. The stereo fell silent. Wren felt somewhat at a loss for words. He’d anticipated making some convoluted verbal pass; but it had happened almost too easily. As if trying to regain control, Alison started to run through her past impressions of him.