by Kim Newman
Beside the wheel was a rubber-bulbed horn. The Count squeezed it experimentally.
Poop-poop!
‘To alert pedestrians,’ explained Foley. ‘The engine runs so quietly that the horn will be necessary.’
The Count smiled, eyes rimmed with red delight. He poop-pooped again, evidently in love. His craze for trains was quite forgotten. Poop-poop had trumped toot-toot.
Foreigners were a lot like children.
‘How does it start?’
‘With a crank.’
‘Show me,’ de Ville ordered.
Foley nodded to Gerald, who darted to the front of the contraption with a lever and fitted it into the engine. He gave it a turn, and nothing happened. Massingham had seen this before. Usually, the dignitaries summoned to witness the great breakthrough had retreated by the time the engine caught. Then it would only sputter a few moments, allowing the carriage to lurch forward a yard or two before at best stalling and at worst exploding.
If Foley’s folly blew up and killed the Count, Massingham would have to answer for it. The man clearly had an impulse towards death.
Gerald cranked the engine again, and again, and...
... nipped out of the way sharpish. Small flames burst in the guts of the machine, and the pistons began to pump.
The carriage moved forward, and the Count poop-pooped the blasted horn again. He would have been as happy with the noise-maker alone as the whole vehicle.
Slowly, the carriage trundled towards the open doors of the workshop. Foley looked alarmed, but didn’t protest. Picking up more speed than usual, the carriage disappeared out of the doors. The Count’s straw hat blew off and was wafted up towards the roof by the black smoke that poured thickly from the pipes at the rear of the machine.
Massingham, Foley and Gerald followed the carriage to the doorway. Astonished, they saw the Count piloting the machine, with growing expertise, yanking hard on the steering-wheel and turning in ever tighter circles, circumnavigating the pile of rails, weaving in and out between sheds and buildings.
A cat shot out of the way, its tail flat. Workmen passing by stopped to stare. A small crowd gathered, of idle hands distracted from their appointed tasks. Some of the directors poked their heads out, silk hats held to their heads.
It was a ridiculous sight, but somehow stirring. The Count was very intent, very serious. But the machine just looked silly, not majestic like a steam engine. Still, Massingham had a glimpse of what Foley saw in the thing.
The Count poop-pooped the horn. Someone cheered.
Gerald, delighted, danced in the wake of the carriage.
The Count made a hard turn and suddenly the boy’s legs were under the front wheels. Bright blood spurted up into the oily engine, as if it were Moloch demanding sacrifice.
Foley shouted. Massingham felt a hammer-blow to his heart.
The Count seemed not to have realised what he had done, and drove on, grinding the boy under the carriage, merrily poop-pooping the damnable horn. The wheel-rims were reddened, and left twin tracks of blood for twenty feet in the rutted earth. Workmen rushed to help the boy, who was yelling in pain, legs quite crushed, face white under the dirt.
De Ville found the brake and brought the carriage to a halt.
Foley was too shocked to speak.
The Count stepped down, exhilarated.
‘What a marvellous transport,’ he declared. ‘It will indeed be the machine of the future. I share your vision, Mr Foley. You will make the world a swifter, purer place. These vehicles will be armoured, making each driver a warrior apart from others, a knight whose mind is one with that of his steed. You have invented a movable castle, one which can be equipped for assault and defence. The carriage can serve as refuge, land-ironclad, vehicle of exploration and finally casket or tomb. I shall be among the first purchasers of your wonderful carriage. You may number me as a sponsor of its manufacture. I shall not rest until the whole world runs on infernal combustion.’
He reached up into the air, and his straw hat was returned to his long fingers by the swirling smoke. The quality of Gerald’s screaming changed, to a low, whimpering sob. The Count appeared not to notice the noise, though Massingham remembered the sharpness of his ears.
The Count de Ville tapped his hat on to his head at a jaunty angle, gave the bulb-horn a final, fond poop-poop and walked into the black clouds of smoke, which seemed to part for him and then closed around him like a cloak.
Massingham thought about the future. There was probably money in it.
NOTE
‘Dead Travel Fast’ was solicited for – but not used in – an anthology of stories which set out to fill in the gaps in Stoker’s Dracula by showing what the Count was doing on his trip to London when he is only glimpsed by the novel’s many narrators. A risk of theme anthologies is that everyone has the same idea and you get a clutch of stories which read similarly: so I resolved to do a Dracula story in which he didn’t bite anyone, focusing on another aspect of the character Stoker gave him (his fascination with modern transport). Though the primary purpose was to fit in with Stoker’s text, nothing here contradicts the timeline of Anno Dracula. So, in the world of the series, this could well have happened.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kim Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne) and The Man From the Diogenes Club under his own name and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as Jack Yeovil. His non-fiction books include Nightmare Movies (due to be reissued by Bloomsbury in an updated edition), Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who.
He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines (writing Empire’s popular Video Dungeon column), has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, and scripted radio and television documentaries. His stories ‘Week Woman’ and ‘Ubermensch’ have been adapted into an episode of the TV series The Hunger and an Australian short film; he has directed and written a tiny film Missing Girl. Following his Radio 4 play ‘Cry Babies’, he wrote an episode (‘Phish Phood’) for Radio 7’s series The Man in Black.
His official website, ‘Dr Shade’s Laboratory’ can be found at www.johnnyalucard.com
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Kim Newman
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