The Vampire Sextette

by Edited by Marvin Kaye

  "Remember, lick," she said. "Don't suck. You won't be able to take a full fangs-on."

  His throat pulsed, as he swallowed.

  With a roar, the boy let the girl go. He had the eyes and the fangs, even more than Dirk Diggler's Dracula. He moved fast, a temporary newborn high on all the extra senses and the sheer sense of power.

  The dhampire put on wraparound mirror shades, ran razor-nailed hands through his gelled hair and stalked off to haunt the La-La night. Within a couple of hours, he would be a real live boy again. By that time, he could have got himself into all manner of scrapes.

  Nico squeezed shut her wound. Geneviève caught her pain. The silver knife would be dangerous if it flaked in the cut. For a vampire, silver rot was like bad gangrene.

  "It's not my place to say anything," began Geneviève.

  "Then don't," said Nico, though she clearly received what Geneviève was thinking. "You're an elder. You can't know what it's like."

  She had a flash that this newborn would never be old. What a pity.

  "It's a simple exchange," said the girl. "Blood for blood. A gallon for a scratch. The economy is in our favour. Just like the President says."

  Geneviève joined Nico at the edge of the property.

  "This vampire trip really isn't working for me," said Nico. "That boy, Julian, will be warm again in the morning, mortal and with a reflection. And when he wants to, he'll be a vampire. If I'm not here, there are others. You can score drac on Hollywood Boulevard for twenty-five dollars a suck. Vile stuff, powdered, not from the tap, but it works."

  Geneviève tidied Nico's hair. The girl lay on her lap, sobbing silently. She hadn't just lost blood.

  This happened when you became an elder. You were mother and sister to the whole world of the undead.

  The girl's despair passed. Her eyes were bright, with Julian's blood.

  "Let's hunt, Elder, like you did in Transylvania."

  "I'm from France. I've never even been to Romania."

  Now she mentioned it, that was odd. She'd been almost everywhere else. Without consciously thinking of it, she must have been avoiding the supposed homeland of the nosferatu.

  "There are human cattle out there," said Nico. "I know all the clubs. X is playing at the Roxy, if you like West Coast punk. And the doorman at After Hours always lets us in, vampire girls. There are so few of us. We go to the head of the line. Powers of fascination."

  "Human cattle" was a real newborn expression. This close to dawn, Geneviève was thinking of her cosy trailer and shutting out the sun, but Nico was a race-the-dawn girl, staying out until it was practically light, bleeding her last as the red circle rose in the sky.

  She wondered if she should stick close to the girl, keep her out of trouble. Why? She couldn't protect everyone. She barely knew Nico, probably had nothing in common with her.

  She remembered Moondoggie. And all the other dead, the ones she hadn't been able to help, hadn't tried to help, hadn't known about in time.

  This girl really was none of her business.

  "What's that?" said Nico, head darting. There was a noise from beyond the fence at the end of the garden.

  Dominating the next property was a three-storey wooden mansion, California cheesecake. Nico might have called it old. Now Geneviève's attention was drawn to it, her night eyes saw how strange the place was. A rusted-out pickup truck was on cinderblocks in the yard, with a pile of ragged auto tires next to it. The windshield was smashed out, and dried streaks—which any vampire would have scented as human blood, even after ten years—marked the hood.

  "Who lives there?" Geneviève asked.

  "In-bred backwoods brood," said Nico. "Orson says they struck it rich down in Texas, and moved to Beverly Hills. You know: swimming pools, movie stars…"

  "Oil?"

  "Chili sauce recipe. Have you heard of Sawyer's Sauce?" Geneviève hadn't. "I guess not. I've not taken solid foods since I turned, though if I don't feed for a night or two I get this terrible phantom craving for those really shitty White Castle burgers. I suppose that if you don't get to the market, you don't know the brand names."

  "The Sawyers brought Texas style with them," Geneviève observed. "That truck's a period piece."

  The back porch was hung with mobiles of bones and nail-impaled alarm clocks. She saw a napping chicken, stuffed inside a canary cage.

  "What's that noise?" Nico asked.

  There was a wasplike buzzing, muted. Geneviève scented burning gas. Her teeth were on edge.

  "Power tool," she said. "Funny time of the night for warm folks to be doing carpentry."

  "I don't think they're all entirely warm. I saw some gross Grandpaw peeping out the other night, face like dried leather, licking livery lips. If he isn't undead, he's certainly nothing like alive."

  There was a stench in the air. Spoiled meat.

  "Come on, let's snoop around," said Nico, springing up. She vaulted over the low fence dividing the properties and crept across the yard like a four-legged crab.

  Geneviève thought that was unwise, but followed, standing upright and keeping to shadows.

  This really was none of her business.

  Nico was on the porch now, looking at the mobiles. Geneviève wasn't sure whether it was primitive art or voodoo. Some of the stick-and-bone dangles were roughly man-shaped.

  "Come away," she said.

  "Not just yet."

  Nico examined the back door. It hung open, an impenetrable dark beyond. The buzzing was still coming from inside the ramshackle house.

  Geneviève knew sudden death was near, walking like a man.

  She called to Nico, more urgently.

  Something small and fast came, not from inside the house but from the flatbed of the abandoned truck. The shape cartwheeled across the yard to the porch and collided purposefully with Nico. A length of wood pierced the vampire girl's thin chest. A look, more of surprise than pain or horror, froze on her face.

  Geneviève felt the thrust in her own heart, then the silence in her mind. Nico was gone, in an instant.

  "How do you like your stake, ma'am?"

  It was Barbie. Only someone truly witless would think stake puns the height of repartee.

  This time, Geneviève wouldn't let her get away.

  "Just the time of night for a little leech-on-a-spit," said the Slayer, lifting Nico's deadweight so that her legs dangled. "This really should be you, Frenchie. By the way, I don't think you've met Simon's brother, Sidney. Frenchie, Sidney. Sidney, hellbitch creature of the night fit only to be impaled and left to rot in the light of the sun. That's the formalities out of the way."

  She threw Nico away, sliding the dead girl off Sidney the Stake. The newborn, mould already on her still-startled face, flopped off the porch and fell to the yard.

  Geneviève was still shocked by the passing, almost turned to ice. Nico had been in her mind, just barely and with tiny fingers, and her death was a wrench. She thought her skull might be leaking.

  "They don't cotton much to trespassers down Texas way," said Barbie, in a bad cowboy accent. "Nor in Beverly Hills, neither."

  Geneviève doubted the Sawyers knew Barbie was here.

  "Next time, the Overlooker says I can do you, too. I'm wishing and hoping and praying you ignore the warning. You'd look so fine on the end of a pole, Frenchie."

  An engine revved, like a signal. Barbie was bounding away, with deerlike elegance.

  Geneviève followed.

  She rounded the corner of the Sawyer house and saw Barbie climbing into a sleek black Jaguar. In the driver's seat was a man wearing a tweed hunting jacket with matching bondage hood. He glanced backwards as he drove off.

  The sports car had vanity plates: OVRLKER1.

  Gravel flew as the car sped off down the drive.

  "What's all this consarned ruckus?" shouted someone from the house.

  Geneviève turned and saw an American gothic family group on the porch. Blotch-faced teenage boy, bosomy but slack-eyed girl in a pol
ka-dot dress, stern patriarch in a dusty black suit, and hulking elder son in a stained apron and crude leather mask. Only the elder generation was missing, and Geneviève was sure they were up in rocking chairs on the third storey, peeking through the slatted blinds.

  "That a dead'n'?" asked the patriarch, nodding at Nico.

  She conceded that it was.

  "True dead'n'?"

  "Yes," she said, throat catching.

  "What a shame and a waste," said Mr. Sawyer, in a tone that made Geneviève think he wasn't referring to a life but to flesh and blood that was highly salable.

  "Shall I call the sheriff, Paw?" asked the girl.

  Mr. Sawyer nodded gravely.

  Geneviève knew what was coming next.

  "… there's just one thing I don't understand, miss."

  "Lieutenant, if there were 'just one thing' I didn't understand, I'd be a very happy old lady. At the moment, I can't think of 'just one thing' I do understand."

  The detective smiled craggily.

  "You're a vampire, miss. Like this dead girl, this, ah, Nico. That's right, isn't it?"

  She admitted it. Orson Welles had lent her a crow-black umbrella which she was using as a parasol.

  "And this Barbie, who again nobody else saw, was, ah, a living person?"

  "Warm."

  "Warm, yes. That's the expression. That's what you call us."

  "It's not offensive."

  "That's not how I take it, miss. No, it's that aren't vampires supposed to be faster than a warm person, harder to catch hold of in a tussle?"

  "Nico was a newborn, and weakened. She'd lost some blood."

  "That's one for the books."

  "Not any more."

  The detective scratched his head, lit cigar end dangerously near his hair. "So I hear. It's called 'drac' on the streets. I have friends on the Narco Squad. They say it's a worse blight than heroin, and it's not illegal yet."

  "Where is this going, Lieutenant?"

  He shut his notebook and pinned her with his eye.

  "You could have, ah, taken Miss Nico? If you got into a fight with her?"

  "I didn't."

  "But you could have."

  "I could have killed the Kennedys and Sanford White, but I didn't."

  "Those are closed cases, as far as I'm concerned. This is open."

  "I gave you the plate number."

  "Yes, miss. OVRLKER1. A Jaguar."

  "Even if it's a fake plate, there can't be that many English sports cars in Los Angeles."

  "There are, ah, one thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two registered Jaguars. Luxury vehicles are popular in this city, in some parts of it. Not all the same model."

  "I don't know the model. I don't follow cars. I just know it was a Jaguar. It had the cat on the bonnet, the hood."

  "Bonnet? That's the English expression, isn't it?"

  "I lived in England for a long time."

  With an Englishman. The detective's sharpness reminded her of Charles, with a witness or a suspect.

  Suspect.

  He had rattled the number of Jaguars in Greater Los Angeles off the top of his head, with no glance at the prop notebook. Gears were turning in his head.

  "It was a black car," she said. "That should make it easier to find."

  "Most automobiles look black at night. Even red ones."

  "Not to me, Lieutenant."

  Uniforms were off, grilling the Sawyers. Someone was even talking with Welles, who had let slip that Geneviève was working for him. Since the client had himself blown confidentiality, she was in an awkward position; Welles still didn't want it known what exactly she was doing for him.

  "I think we can let you go now, miss," said the detective.

  She had been on the point of presenting him her wrists for the cuffs.

  "There isn't 'just one more thing' you want to ask?"

  "No. I'm done. Unless there's anything you want to say."

  She didn't think so.

  "Then you can go. Thank you, miss."

  She turned away, knowing it would come, like a hand on her shoulder or around her heart.

  "There is one thing, though. Not a question. More like a circumstance, something that has to be raised. I'm afraid I owe you an apology."

  She turned back.

  "It's just that I had to check you out, you know. Run you through the books. As a witness, yesterday. Purely routine."

  Her umbrella seemed heavier.

  "I may have got you in trouble with the state licensing board. They had all your details correctly, but it seems that every time anyone looked at your license renewal application, they misread the date. As a European, you don't write an open four. It's easy to mistake a four for a nine. They thought you were born in 1916. Wondered when you'd be retiring, in fact. Had you down as a game old girl."

  "Lieutenant, I am a game old girl."

  "They didn't pull your license, exactly. This is really embarrassing, and I'm truly sorry to have been the cause of it, but they want to, ah, review your circumstances. There aren't any other vampires licensed as private investigators in the state of California, and there's no decision on whether a legally dead person can hold a license."

  "I never died. I'm not legally dead."

  "They're trying to get your paperwork from, ah, France."

  She looked up at the sky, momentarily hoping to burn out her eyes. Even if her original records existed, they'd be so old as to be protected historical documents. Photostats would not be coming over the wire from her homeland.

  "Again, miss, I'm truly sorry."

  She just wanted to get inside her trailer and sleep the day away.

  "Do you have your license with you?"

  "In the car," she said, dully.

  "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to surrender it," said the detective. "And that until the legalities are settled, you cease to operate as a private investigator in the state of California."

  At sunset, she woke to another limbo, with one of her rare headaches. She was used to knowing what she was doing tonight, and the next night, if not specifically then at least generally. Now, she wasn't sure what she could do.

  Geneviève wasn't a detective any more, not legally. Welles had not paid her off, but if she continued working on John Alucard for him she'd be breaking the law. Not a particularly important one, in her opinion… but vampires lived in such a twilight world that it was best to pay taxes on time and not park in towaway zones. After all, this was what happened when she drew attention to herself.

  She had two other ongoing investigations, neither promising. She should make contact with her clients, a law firm and an Orange County mother, and explain the situation. In both cases, she hadn't turned up any results and so would not in all conscience be able to charge a fee. She didn't even have that much Welles could use.

  Money would start to be a problem around Valentine's Day. The licensing board might have sorted it out by then.

  (in some alternate universe)

  She should call Beth Davenport, her lawyer, to start filing appeals and lodging complaints. That would cost, but anything else was just giving up.

  Two people were truly dead. That bothered her, too.

  She sat at her tiny desk, by a slatted window, considering her telephone. She had forgotten to switch her answering machine on before turning in, and any calls that might have come today were lost. She had never done that before.

  Should she rerecord her outgoing message, stating that she was (temporarily?) out of business? The longer she was off the bus, the harder it would be to get back.

  On TV, suspended cops, disbarred private eyes, and innocent men on the run never dropped the case. And this was Southern California, where the TV came from.

  She decided to compromise. She wouldn't work Alucard, which was what Welles had been paying her for. But, as a concerned—indeed, involved—citizen, no law said she couldn't use her talents unpaid to go after the Slayer.

  Since this was a police ca
se, word of her status should have filtered down to her LAPD contacts but might not yet have reached outlying agencies. She called Officer Baker, a contact in the Highway Patrol, and wheedled a little to get him to run a license plate for her.

  OVRLKERl.

  The callback came within minutes, excellent service she admitted was well worth a supper and cocktails one of these nights. Baker teased her a while about that, then came over.

  Amazingly, the plate was for a Jaguar. The car was registered in the name of Ernest Ralph Gorse, to an address in a town up the coast, Shadow Bay. The only other forthcoming details were that Gorse was a British subject—not citizen, of course—and held down a job as a high-school librarian.

  The Overlooker? A school librarian and a cheerleader might seem different species, but they swam in the same tank.

  She thanked Baker and rang off.

  If it was that easy, she could let the cops handle it. The Lieutenant was certainly sharp enough to run a Gorse down and scout around to see if a Barbie popped up. Even if the detective hadn't believed her, he would have been obliged to run the plate, to puncture her story. Now he was obliged to check it out.

  But wasn't it all too easy?

  Since when did librarians drive Jaguars?

  It had the air of a trap.

  She was where the Lieutenant must have been seven hours ago. She wouldn't put the crumpled detective on her list of favourite people, but didn't want to hear he'd run into another of the Sharp brothers. Apart from the loss of a fine public servant who was doubtless also an exemplary husband, it was quite likely that if the cop sizing her up for two murders showed up dead, she would be even more suitable for framing.

  Shadow Bay wasn't more than an hour away.

  Welles's final Dracula project came together in 1981, just as the movies were gripped by a big vampire craze. Controversial and slow-building, and shut out of all but technical Oscars, Coppola's Dracula proved there was a substantial audience for vampire subjects. This was the film era of Werner Herzog's Renfield, Jeder fur Sich und die Vampir Gegen Alle, a retelling of the story from the point of the fly-eating lunatic (Klaus Kinski); of Tony Scott's The Hunger, with Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as New York art patrons Miriam and John Blaylock, at the centre of a famous murder case defended by Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver); of John Landis's Scream, Macula, Scream, with Eddie Murphy as Dracula's African-get Prince Mamuwalde, searching for his lost bride (Vanity) in New York—best remembered for a plagiarism lawsuit by screenwriter Pat Hobby that forced Paramount to open its books to the auditors; of Richard Attenborough's bloated, mammoth, Oscar-scooping Varney, with Anthony Hopkins as Sir Francis Varney, the vampire Viceroy overthrown by the Second