Anno Dracula 1999

by Kim Newman

  Nezumi stepped back several more paces.

  Cottonmouth advanced, knowing she was being led.

  The woman expected a trap she couldn’t see yet. Then something occurred to her.

  ‘Nezumi, can you fly?’

  ‘No. I can only fall.’

  Nezumi did a backflip, up across the buffet tables, tumbling over the guard-rail.

  Impetus propelled her a dozen feet into empty air.

  Then gravity took over.

  She dropped.

  RICHARD JEPERSON

  ‘My condolences,’ said Radu. ‘Were you two close?’

  Richard was numb, not with shock but with empathy.

  He felt rushing air on Nezumi’s face and was weak in the knees, wobbly in his water. The girl was not fearless. He shared her terror.

  But the smash didn’t come.

  Nezumi hadn’t lied. She wasn’t nosferatu – couldn’t grow bat-wings. She couldn’t turn to light or air or fire or gentle rain. She had to obey rules other vampires defied.

  Falling from this height would make her paste on the pavement.

  Being in sync with a person at the moment of death was not something to shrug off.

  But – like the small awful sound he anticipated – that hammer didn’t fall.

  NEZUMI

  She plunged for an agonising age.

  A reflected night sky hung below her, sloping gently. City lights, stars and the moon mirrored on canopy windows. Beneath them a large unlit room. The Ruff.

  When she leaped over the safety railing, she knew the restaurant was below the Doragon no Kuchi but not how far out the lower floor stretched.

  The human pig had fallen all the way down. Being caught by the Ruff was no sure thing.

  She had only her weight to control her trajectory.

  Arms out and feet together, she made a dart of herself and rode an updraft, aiming herself at the black mirror.

  In herself, she went somewhere else…

  Nezumi seldom slept – the famous lassitude, proverbially close to death, came on her rarely – and didn’t dream. She half-imagined dreams a lie perpetuated to make vampires feel less human. A warm treasure denied the undead, talked up and gloated over. Like other things vampires were not supposed to be able to do – make art, fall in love, sunbathe, grow up. When girls talked about their dreams, Nezumi nodded along to avoid fruitless argument. Dreamers sounded as if they were making stuff up – like third-form girls who said they’d done things with boys everyone knew perfectly well they hadn’t.

  The idea of dreams was too fanciful. A melange of memory and imagination, real beyond question to the sleeper, evaporating at the instant of waking.

  How was that even possible?

  But, in those mid-air seconds, Nezumi thought she dreamed.

  Dreams, she had heard, could stretch to eternity but be over in a fingersnap.

  Now, she understood.

  She was smaller, a child wrapped in furs against the bite of winter. A warm child, not the vampire she would become. Or warm-ish. She heard things differently, as if her ears were stopped with wax. She ran beside a mountain stream of ice, arms and legs swaddled stiff. Delighted by sparkling curls, waves and ripples fashioned by the instant of freezing. Giddy from running, she lost her footing and took a tumble. She smacked her head against a rock.

  Crying and screaming, emptying her lungs. Blood in her eyes stung worse than soap.

  Then a cool, loving touch.

  A woman. Her mother, more beautiful than she should be, in a simple white robe, with no furs or leggings, not feeling the cold because she was the cold. She was the woman of the snows, the ice queen who took a woodcutter for a husband, who bore his children and lived, at least for a while, among warm men and women in the mountains.

  Yuki-Onna.

  The woman blinked, showing cat’s eyes briefly – a secret shared with only one of her daughters.

  In that blink, Nezumi knew her dream for a dream – a memory, perhaps, or a wish? She was back in her right mind, with a stab of regret that this was no great revelation of lost childhood.

  She was no ice princess, not really. More like a woodcutter’s brat.

  Her dream was a pleasing distraction, a kiss of solace before oblivion.

  A story she made up so she’d feel better. Not a lie. A dream.

  ‘My little mouse,’ said her phantom mother, licking blood from her girl’s scraped cheek. ‘My sweet little mouse. Be brave.’

  Then Nezumi smacked into glass, harder than she’d smacked into the rock.

  A thousand years on, that rock would be ground to nothing.

  She was still here.

  The sling of her poster tube cut into her throat, like the rope around that condemned man’s neck.

  The canopy cracked but did not break. She bounced and slid, palms and face pressed to ice-sheet glass. She picked up speed, as if on the upper slope of a ski-jump.

  She hammered the dented glass and got her fingers into the cracks she made.

  She worried her hands would rip off at the wrists. But she stuck fast.

  Her legs dangled over the lip of the canopy.

  Below was a sheer drop. Not even a flagpole.

  The crack-patterns spread. Glass began to break the wrong way, freeing her to fall.

  She headbutted the surface and put her shoulders into it.

  A section of the canopy fell apart and she dropped into the restaurant. The din of wind was no longer in her ears. The arctic blast was no longer in her eyes and hair.

  Time resumed its normal speed.

  She hadn’t the luxury of stopping to concentrate, to recapture a picture – cat’s eyes! – shaped in the ripples on the surface of a bowl of water.

  She had to move on.

  A frustration. Duty to her principal came before indulging her own vanity.

  Was that the reason so many vampires had no reflections? So they wouldn’t get distracted by themselves?

  All vampires were vain.

  All were clingy, dependent.

  All were selfish.

  She had heard that over and over too – from friends as well as the cruel and prejudiced. Some made exceptions for her. Some didn’t.

  ‘We love you anyway, though you can’t love us back,’ said several.

  Nezumi would rather have a thin needle of ice stuck though her heart than hear that again. Always, she responded with a smile and downcast eyes.

  ‘See, you can’t even smile properly.’

  This was a distraction too.

  She would have to be mad to jump off a building. So she was thinking like a mad person, trying to be consistent.

  She was aware of her beating heart.

  Vampires were supposed to be dead – girls were always surprised she had a pulse.

  The Ruff was closed to customers tonight. Tables were covered with cloths, but not laid for dinner. Light spilled through the broken canopy, but candles were not lit.

  She prised shards out of her hands and face. From long-ingrained habit, she cleaned her wounds thoroughly and quickly. Accelerated healing was an advantage of the vampire condition, but scratching out slivers of glass or scraps of grit sealed into her body by rapidly mended skin was a gruesome bother.

  The state of her clothes would have to be seen to later. She had worries beyond uniform infractions.

  Would Radu send a killer – Cottonmouth? – after her? Could he spare any of his people? Could he afford to let her run free?

  She must keep moving.

  The lifts were out. They were in enemy hands.

  In the gloom, red LEDs glowed. Security cameras and silent alarms.

  If Radu had taken the building, he would have all its eyes and ears.

  Time for Miss Mouse to find a mousehole.

  RICHARD JEPERSON

  Irritated that Nezumi had shown her up in front of her boss, Cottonmouth pulled a hostage out of the crowd. The merc selected a Japanese vampire who wore a tweed body stocking, Havelock half-
cape and deerstalker hat. The outfit displayed a peculiarly Asian Anglophilia Richard found touching.

  Was Cottonmouth going to kill the woman?

  A petty gesture of frustration. A death was demanded but not delivered – so this random guest would be an offering to the petty princeling?

  Richard would not let that happen.

  He would step in and get killed.

  So Nezumi would have failed in her job. The deerstalker woman would be murdered in front of him as he died. Just to rub it in. No joy all round, then.

  But still the only thing to do.

  He would have liked to find out what was up with the GEIST/YUREI primes. And what Radu thought he was doing tonight. The thing about dying he most resented was that he would miss the end of the story.

  Of all the stories.

  Cottonmouth marched the woman to the railings. The hostage didn’t resist.

  Close to the edge, wind riffled Cottonmouth’s hair and the flaps of the deerstalker.

  Cottonmouth didn’t heave the woman to her death, but tapped the back of her neck with the silvered flat of her knife.

  The woman winced and her neck stretched six inches – like a startled turtle poking its head out of its shell. Richard recognised the hostage. Lady Oyotsu, former High Priestess of the Temple of One Thousand Monsters. Presently a non-voting member of Light Industries’ Board of Directors. An early ally of Christina’s. Of the rokurokubi bloodline. Her neck extended like a fire-ladder, flexible as an anglepoise lamp. As the white fleshtube elongated, a wracking, vertebrae-clicking sound set his teeth on edge.

  Richard intuited the thing Oyotsu never told anyone that the rokurokubi trick hurt. Every extra inch was an agony, the arthritis in his knuckles amplified by the dozen. He was almost poleaxed by the wave of pain and had to concentrate to tune her out. It was a point of honour for her not to let discomfort show on her powdered face.

  ‘Can you see her?’ Cottonmouth asked, blade still in hand.

  Silver seared Oyotsu’s hackles.

  She had to grip the guard-rail to prevent over-balancing. If she stretched more than a few feet, she had to sit in an anchor pose so as not to fall over. Her neck and head were the dancing cobra; her body was the basket. The neck ranged like a grazing brontosaurus.

  Then she spotted something.

  She tried to make a verbal report, but her mouth was too far away for her voice to be heard. She took one hand off the rail and gripped Cottonmouth’s shoulder.

  Her neck pulled in. That hurt too.

  Oyotsu whispered to Cottonmouth.

  ‘There’s a broken window in the Ruff,’ the merc reported. ‘The girl is alive.’

  ‘Oh, what a nuisance,’ said Radu. ‘See what happens when you make a fuss.’

  HAROLD TAKAHAMA

  Hal was starting to worry about Lefty.

  His hand had misinterpreted – or disobeyed – a direct order. He wanted out of the building, but when he tried to go down to the street exit the hand sent him higher up.

  At least he was out of the pneumatique. And the lavender pest was off his ass.

  But he was still stuck inside the fucking robosaur.

  Lefty said this was Floor 93. Hal no longer trusted the machine not to just pick a random number. Its clicking and flashing had a nerve-grating quality, as if Jun Zero had programmed the hand to mock his past self.

  Maybe he should have called it Dr Sinister.

  He was in a winding passage. Not a corridor with doors either side, but a succession of rooms stuck together like open-ended boxes, with marked décor differences every four metres or so. Fake windows showed cheesy landscape backdrops. Furniture and fittings were nineteenth century. Set decoration from a Western or Masterpiece Theatre.

  It was a funhouse exhibit.

  The trail began in a low-ceilinged hovel. Plaster had fallen off the slatted wall in irregular shapes. He had to squeeze around an unmade brass bed that was too big for the room. Stuck on one post of the frame was a crack-faced, apple-sized head with stiff straw hair. The doll’s discarded body was curled up in a nest of grey sheets.

  This was either a child’s nightmare or a crime scene.

  Next up was a great-grandmama’s drawing room with lumpy wallpaper. He knocked his shins on a heavy, low table. Waxy, unflowering plants crammed between upholstered couches and chairs.

  This looked like a place you were summoned to and told off in.

  Then, a room full of white china. Ornaments on every sill, surface and mantel. Bigger statues on their own plinths. Nymphs getting it on. Chicks and swans. Chicks and guys with goat feet. Chicks and guys with wings. Chicks and fat cherubs. Chicks and other chicks.

  Your basic Victorian porno stash.

  Walking among the collection made small statuettes clink against each other. That was good for a shudder.

  He had a sense he wasn’t alone on Floor 93.

  And he didn’t think Lefty counted as company.

  He hurried on.

  One room was a hothouse, full of stinking orchids.

  Another was empty, as if the bailiffs had just been. Crinkled old newspapers and torn-up letters underfoot on bare wooden boards.

  Lights came on automatically when he stepped into a new room, simulating fire, oil lamps, the sun, chemical glow, gas-jets. When he moved on, the room behind went dark.

  ‘What is this?’ he asked.

  ‘The rooms of the life of Christina Light,’ said Lefty.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your hostess. This is her building.’

  Hal knew the name.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to live in any of these places.’

  ‘They were not all her choice.’

  In a library section, books were crammed into floor-to-ceiling shelves. Hal couldn’t prise one loose with a ruler. The titles he could make out were long and in flaking Italian or German. Political or religious tracts that would be hard to plough through even in English. No paperbacks, no comics, no Penthouses.

  A few rooms back, a light came on.

  So something was moving.

  It would be foolish to shout ‘hello’, but the temptation grew like an itch. Hal thought horror film heroines should pull eiderdowns over their heads… not get out of bed, pick up a candle, and go down to the basement to investigate those strange sounds. Jun Zero must have overwritten that instinct.

  Looking back, he saw something slide off the slaughtered doll’s bed. Its movement brought on a dim lamp. Someone stood in front of the light, with a sheet over their head. A cartoon ghost. Casper and Dickens’ Jacob Marley didn’t really wear bedsheets, Hal knew. Traditional Halloween spectre get-up was a winding sheet. A shroud.

  The rooms were arranged like a simple maze. After five or six in a row, a side door fed into a passage that ran the other way. From the library, he stepped sideways, out of sight of the ghost, into a railroad station waiting room circa 1875 – benches, stove, spittoons, old-timey periodicals (in Cyrillic) on a wooden rack – then hurried on.

  In a feminine chamber, he was assailed by scent. Heavy, exotic, stinging his eyes. Like Tsunako Shiki’s lavender, it failed to cover a smell of mould. Long gowns were piled on a plush bed. A choice had yet to be made. Jewel boxes he wasn’t tempted to rifle were open on a dresser.

  He was startled to catch sight of himself in a huge mirror.

  He should pick up the pace – a ghost was after him! – but was transfixed. This was his first good look at the man he’d grown into. His future self. Jun Zero.

  Yes, he was still recognisable. Not even taller.

  But his face was lean, with no wobbles on the cheeks or under the chin. Close-shaved, except for Tartar tufts at the corners of his mouth. Was that a 1999 thing? Or a Jun Zero signature?

  The hair was a shock – dyed white-blond, with sculpted spikes.

  His first thought was Asian cyberpunk Tom Cruise.

  He had microchip earrings and a bar-code tattoo under his jawline. That made Hal rethink – almost heretically. Was
Jun Zero trying a byte too much? Could he maybe afford to dial down the coolitude? At this rate, he’d pass Cruise territory and get into the Crispin Glover zone.

  He checked out his own crazy eyes.

  But were those his?

  The boudoir lighting was subdued pink. Smouldering red scarves were draped over lamps. Behind the mirror, a harsher light burned.

  What room had he passed through with a window to match this mirror?

  And who was there looking at him through one-way glass?

  The silhouette was the floating sheet spook.

  Did it have eyeholes cut out?

  No, it wasn’t a sheet. It was long, straight, white hair.

  He broke away from the mirror, heart hammering, and ran though several rooms to the next side door.

  He was in an artist’s studio. A half-finished portrait of a young woman was propped on an easel. Angry action paint splashes arced across tiled floor and brick wall. He stepped on a discarded revolver.

  He was running now.

  … a church or meeting room, with a pulpit and a skylight…

  … bare stone with inset rusty iron rings, straw on the floor – a dungeon…

  … a cot on a trunk, with a porthole in a ship’s cabin wall and painted sea beyond the glass…

  … a Japanese temple, like something from a chanbara movie… mats on the floor, paper screens, a pile of scrolls, a woodblock pillow. An altar to Yuki-Onna, the Vampire Queen of the East. His cousin Helen was keen on her, Hal remembered. She could freeze your blood, rip the jagged gore sticks out of your veins, and crunch them like popsicles. Charming!

  This Christina Light – the woman in the picture? – had travelled to Japan after her sea voyage.

  He knew who she was.

  The vampire who built the Bund.

  Hellish was obsessed with that bit of history. How a bunch of city blocks in Tokyo became vampire territory. The last Hal had seen his cousin, so far as he could remember, she was arguing with Auntie Karen about turning vamp and moving to New Orleans. That was 1990 or so. She probably had her fangs by now.