The Other Side of Midnight

by Kim Newman

  KIM NEWMAN

  The Other Side of Midnight

  Kim Newman is an actor, broadcaster, film critic, and author of some of the most remarkable fantasy tales being sent our way from his hometown, London. His vampire novels include Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron, and Judgment of Tears, and the theme also surfaces in his novella, “Andy Warhol’s Dracula.” Other fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, The Quorum, as well as nonfiction books such as Millennium Movies: End of the World Cinema. His affection for the great filmmaker Orson Welles surfaces in “The Other Side of Midnight,” at once a startlingly different take (pun intended) on vampire films, yet deep down a delightfully old-fashioned homage to the same.

  AT MIDNIGHT, 1980 flew away across the Pacific, and 1981 crept in from the east. A muted cheer rose from the pretty folk around the barbecue pit, barely an echo of the raucous welcome to a new decade that erupted at the height of the last Paradise Cove New Year’s party.

  Of this company, only Geneviève clung to the old-the proper-manner of reckoning decades, centuries, and (when they came) millennia. The passing of time was important to her, born in 1416, she’d let more time pass than most. Even among vampires, she was an elder. Five minutes ago-last year, last decade-she’d started to explain her position to a greying California boy, an ex-activist they called “the Dude.” His eyes glazed over with more than the weed he’d been toking throughout the party, indeed since Jefferson Airplane went Starship. She quite liked the Dude’s eyes, in any condition.

  “It’s as simple as this,” she reiterated, hearing the French in her accent (“eet’s,” “seemple,” “ziss”) that came out only when she was tipsy (“teep-see”) or trying for effect. “Since there was no year nothing, the first decade ended with the end of year ten a.d.; the first century with the end of 100

  a.d.; the first millennium with the end of 1000 a.d. Now, at this moment, a new decade is to begin.

  Nineteen-eighty-one is the first year of the 1980s, as 1990 will be the last.”

  Momentarily, the Dude looked as if he understood, but he was just concentrating to make out her accented words. She saw insight spark in his mind, a vertiginous leap that made him want to back away from her. He held out his twisted, tufted joint. It might have been the one he’d rolled and started in 1968, replenished on and off ever since.

  “Man, if you start questioning time,” he said, “what have you got left? Physical matter? Maybe you question that next, and the mojo won’t work any more. You’ll think holes between molecules and sink through the surface of the Earth. Drawn by gravity. Heavy things should be left alone.

  Fundamental things, like the ground you walk on, the air you breathe. You do breathe, don’t you, man? Suddenly it hits me, I don’t know if you do.”

  “Yes, I breathe,” she said. “When I turned, I didn’t die. That’s not common.”

  She proved her ability to inhale by taking a toke from the joint. She didn’t get a high like his; for that, she’d have to sample his blood as it channelled the intoxicants from his alveoli to his brain. She had the mellow buzz of him, from saliva on the roach as much as from the dope smoke. It made her thirsty.

  Because it was just after midnight on New Year’s Eve, she kissed him. He enjoyed it, noncommittally. Tasting straggles of tobacco in his beard and the film of a cocktail-White Russian-on his teeth and tongue, she sampled the ease of him, the defiant crusade of his back-burnered life. She understood now precisely what the expression “ex-activist” meant. If she let herself drink, his blood would be relaxing.

  Breaking the kiss, she saw more sparks in his eyes, where her face was not reflected. Her lips were sometimes like razors, even more than her fang-teeth. She’d cut him slightly, just for a taste, not even thinking, and left some of herself on his tongue. She swallowed: mostly spit, but with tiny ribbons of blood from his gums.

  French-kissing was the kindest form of vampirism. From the minute exchange of fluid, she could draw a surprising sustenance. For her, just now, it was enough. It took the edge off her red thirst.

  “Keep on breathing, man,” said the Dude, reclaiming his joint, smiling broadly, drifting back towards the rest of the party, enjoying the unreeling connection between them. “And don’t question time. Let it pass.”

  Licking her lips daintily, she watched him amble. He wasn’t convinced 1980 had been the last year of the old decade and not the first of the new. Rather, he wasn’t convinced that it mattered. Like a lot of Southern Californians, he’d settled on a time that suited him and stayed in it. Many vampires did the same thing, though Geneviève thought it a waste of longevity. In her more pompous moments, she felt the whole point was to embrace change while carrying on what was of value from the past.

  When she was born and when she was turned, time was reckoned by the Julian calendar, with its annual error of eleven minutes and fourteen seconds. Thinking of it, she still regretted the ten days-the fifth to the fourteenth of October 1582-Pope Gregory XIII had stolen from her, from the world, to make his sums add up. England and Scotland, ten days behind Rome, held out against the Gregorian calendar until 1752. Other countries stubbornly stuck with Julian dating until well into the twentieth century; Russia had not chimed in until 1918, Greece not until 1923. Before the modern era, those ten-day shifts made diary-keeping a complex business for a necessarily much-travelled creature. The leap-frogged weeks were far much more jarring than the time-zone hopping she sometimes went through as an air passenger.

  The Paradise Cove Trailer Park Colony had been her home for all of seven years, an eye blink which made her a senior resident among the constitutionally impermanent peoples of Malibu. Here, ancient history was Sonny and Cher and Leave It to Beaver, anything on the “golden oldies” station or an off-prime-time rerun.

  Geneviève-fully, Geneviève Sandrine de l’Isle Dieudonne, though she went by Gené Dee for convenience-remembered with a hazy vividity that she had once looked at the Atlantic and not known what lay between France and China. She was older than the name “America”; had she not turned, she’d probably have been dead before Columbus brought back the news. In all those years, ten days shouldn’t matter, but supposedly significant dates made her aware of that fold in time, that wrench which pulled the future hungrily closer, which had swallowed one of her birthdays. By her internal calendar, the decade would not fully turn for nearly two weeks. This was a limbo between unarguable decades. She should have been used to limbos by now. For her, Paradise Cove was the latest of a long string of pockets out of time and space, cosy coffins shallowly buried away from the rush of the world.

  She was the only one of her kind at the party; if she took “her kind” to mean vampires-there were others in her current profession, private investigation, even other incomers from far enough out of state to be considered foreign parts. Born in northern France under the rule of an English king, she’d seen enough history to recognise the irrelevance of nationality. To be Breton in 1416 was to be neither French nor English, or both at the same time. Much later, during the revolution, France had scrapped the calendar again, ducking out of the 1790s, even renaming the months. In the long term, the experiment was not a success. That was the last time she-Citizen Dieudonné-had really lived in her native land; the gory business soured her not only on her own nationality but humanity in general.

  Too many eras earned names like “the Tenor.” Vampires were supposed to be obscenely bloodthirsty, and she wasn’t blind to the excesses of her kind, but the warm drank just as deeply from open wounds and usually made more of a mess of it.

  From the sandy patio beside her chrome-finished Airstream trailer, she looked beyond the gaggle of folks about the pit, joking over franks impaled on skewers. The Dude was mi
xing a pitcher of White Russians with his bowling buddies, resuming a months-long argument over the precise wording of the opening narration/song of Branded. An eight-track in an open-top car played “Hotel California,” The Eagles’s upbeat but ominous song about a vampire and her victims. Some were dancing on the sand, shoes in a pile that would be hard to sort out later. White rolls of surf crashed on the breakers, waves edged delicately up to the beach.

  Out there was the Pacific Ocean and the curve of the Earth, and beyond the blue horizon, as another shivery song went, was a rising sun. Dawn didn’t worry her; at her age, as long as she dressed carefully-sunglasses, a floppy hat, long sleeves-she wouldn’t even catch a severe tan, let alone frazzle up into dust and essential salts like some nosferatu of the Dracula bloodline. She had grown out of the dark. To her owl eyes, it was no place to hide, which meant she had to be careful where she looked on party nights like this. She liked living by the sea: its depths were still impenetrable to her, still a mystery.

  “Hey, Gidget,” came a rough voice, “need a nip?”

  It was one of the surfers, a shaggy bear of a man she had never heard called anything but Moondoggie. He wore frayed shorts, flip-flops, and an old blue shirt, and probably had done since the 1950s. He was a legendary veteran of tubes and pipes and waves long gone. He seemed young to her, though his friends called him an old man.

  His offer was generous. She had fed off him before when the need was strong. With his blood came a salt rush, the sense of being enclosed by a curl of wave as his board torpedoed across the surface of the water.

  Just now, she didn’t need it. She still had the taste of the Dude. Smiling, she waved him away. As an elder, she didn’t have the red thirst so badly. Since Charles, she had fed much less. That wasn’t how it was with many vampires, especially those of the Dracula line. Some nosferatu got thirstier and thirstier with passing ages, and were finally consumed by then-own raging red needs. Those were the ones who got to be called monsters. Beside them, she was a minnow.

  Moondoggie tugged at his open collar, scratching below his salt-and-pepper beard. The LAPD

  had wanted to hang a murder rap on him two years ago, when a runaway turned up dead in his beach hut. She had investigated the situation, clearing his name. He would always be grateful to his

  “Gidget,” which she learned was a contraction of “Girl Midget.” Never tall, she had turned-frozen-at sixteen. Recently, after centuries of being treated almost as a child, she was most often taken for a woman in her twenties. That was: by people who didn’t know she wasn’t warm, wasn’t entirely living.

  She’d have examined her face for the beginnings of lines, but looking glasses were no use to her.

  Shots were fired in the distance. She looked at the rise of the cliffs and saw the big houses, decks lit by fairy-light UFO constellations, seeming to float above the beach, heavy with heavy hitters.

  Firing up into the sky was a Malibu New Year tradition among the rich. Reputedly started by the film director John Milius, a famous surf and gun nut, it was a stupid, dangerous thing to do. Gravity and momentum meant bullets came down somewhere, and not always into the water. In the light of New Year’s Day, she found spent shells in the sand, or pocked holes in driftwood. One year someone’s head would be under a slug. Milius had made her cry with Big Wednesday, though. Movies with coming-of-age, end-of-an-era romanticism crawled inside her heart and melted her. She would have to tell Milius it got worse and worse with centuries.

  So, the 1980s?

  Some thought her overly formal for always using the full form, but she’d lived through decades called “the eighties” before. For the past hundred years, “the eighties” had meant the Anni Draculae, the 1880s, when the Transylvanian Count came to London and changed the world. Among other things, the founding of his brief empire had drawn her out of the shadow of eternal evening into something approaching the light. That brought her together with Charles, the warm man with whom she had spent seventy-five years, until his death in 1959, the warm man who had shown her that she, a vampire, could still love, that she had turned without dying inside.

  She wasn’t unique, but she was rare. Most vampires lost more than they gained when they turned; they died and came back as different people, caricatures of their former selves, compelled by an inner drive to be extreme. Creatures like that were one of the reasons why she was here, at the far western edge of a continent where “her kind” were still comparatively rare.

  Other vampires had nests in the Greater Los Angeles area: Don Drago Robles, a landowner before the incorporation of the state into the Union, had quietly waited for the city to close around his hacienda, and was rising as a political figure with a growing constituency, a Californian answer to Baron Meinster’s European Transylvania Movement; and a few long-lived movie or music people, the sort with reflections in silver and voices that registered on recording equipment, had Spanish-style castles along Sunset Boulevard, like eternal child rock god Timmy Valentine or silent-movie star David Henry Reid. More, small sharks mostly, swam through Angelino sprawl, battening on marginal people to leech them dry of dreams as much as blood, or-in that ghastly new thing-selling squirts of their own blood (“drac”) to sad addicts (“dhampires”) who wanted to be a vampire for the night but didn’t have the heart to turn all the way.

  She should be grateful to the rogues; much of her business came from people who got mixed up with bad-egg vampires. Her reputation for extricating victims from predators was like gold with distressed parents or cast-aside partners. Sometimes she worked as a deprogrammer, helping kids out of all manner of cults. They grew beliefs stranger than Catholicism, or even vampirism, out here among the orange groves: the Moonies, the Esoteric Order of Dagon, Scientology, Psycho-Plasmics.

  Another snatch of song: “The Voice said Daddy there’s a million pigeons, waiting to be hooked on new religions.”

  As always, she stuck it out until the party died. All the hours of the night rolled away, and the rim of the horizon turned from navy blue to lovely turquoise. January cold gathered, driving those warmer folks who were still sensible from their barbecues and beach towels to their beds.

  Marty Burns, sometime sitcom star and current inhabitant of a major career slump, was passed out facedown on the chilling sands in front of her trailer space. She found a blanket to throw over him. He murmured in liquor-and-pills lassitude, and she tucked the blanket comfortably around his neck. Marty was hilarious in person, even when completely off his face, but Salt & Pepper, the star-making show he was squandering residuals from, was puzzlingly free of actual humour. The dead people on the laugh track audibly split sides at jokes deader than they were. The year was begun with a moderate good deed, though purging the kid’s system and dragging him to AA might have been a more lasting solution to whatever was inside him chewing away.

  She would sleep later, in the morning, locked in her sleek trailer, a big metal coffin equipped with everything she needed. Of all her homes over the years, this was the one she cherished the most. The trailer was chromed everywhere it could be, and customised with steel shutters that bolted over the windows and the never-used sun roof. Economy of space had forced her to limit her possessions-so few after so long-to those that really meant the most to her. ugly jewellry from her mediaeval girlhood, some of Charles’s books and letters, a Dansette gramophone with an eclectic collection of sides, her beloved answering machine, a tacky Mexican crucifix with light-up eyes that she kept on show just to prove she wasn’t one of those vampires, two decent formal dresses and four pairs of Victorian shoes (custom-cobbled for her tiny feet) which had outlasted everything made this century and would do for decades more. On the road, she could kink herself double and rest in the trunk of her automobile, a pillar-box red 1958 Plymouth Fury, but the trailer was more comfortable.

  She wandered towards the sea line, across the disturbed sands of the beach. There had been dancing earlier, grown-ups who had been in Frankie and Annette movies trying to fit their old
moves to current music. Le freak, c’est chic.

  She trod on a hot pebble that turned out to be a bullet, and saluted Big John up on his A-list Hollywood deck. Milius had written Dracula for Francis Ford Coppola, from the Bram Stoker novel she was left out of. Not wanting to have the Count brought back to mind, she’d avoided the movie, though her vampire journalist friend Kate Reed, also not mentioned in Stoker’s fiction, had worked on it as technical advisor. She hadn’t heard from Kate in too long; Geneviève believed she was behind the Iron Curtain, on the trail of the Transylvania Movement, that odd faction of the Baron Meinster’s which wanted Dracula’s estates as a homeland for vampires. God, if that ever happened, she would get round to reapplying for American citizenship; they were accepting nosferatu now, which they hadn’t been in 1922 when she last looked into it. Meinster was one of those Dracula wanna-bes who couldn’t quite carry off the opera cloak and ruffle shirt, with his prissy little fangs and his naked need to be the new King of the Cats.

  Wavelets lapped at her bare toes. Her nails sparkled under water.

  Nineteen-seventies music hadn’t been much, not after the 1960s. Glam rock. The Bee-Gees. The Carpenters. She had liked Robert Altaian’s films and Close Encounters, but didn’t see what all the fuss was about Star Wars. Watergate. An oil crisis. The bicentennial summer. The Iran hostage crisis. No Woodstock. No swinging London. No one like Kennedy. Nothing like the Moon landing.

  If she were to fill a diary page for every decade, the 1970s would have to be padded heavily.

  She’d been to some parties and helped some people, settled into the slow, pastel, dusty ice-cream world of Southern California, a little to one side of the swift stream of human history. She wasn’t even much bothered by memories, the curse of the long-lived.

  Not bad, not good, not anything.

  She wasn’t over Charles, never would be really. He was a constant, silent presence in her heart, an ache and a support and a joy. He was a memory she would never let slip. And Dracula, finally destroyed soon after Charles’s death, still cast a long cloak-shadow over her life. Like Bram Stoker, she wondered what her life, what the world, would have been like if Vlad Tepes had never turned or been defeated before his rise to power.