The Other Side of Midnight

by Kim Newman

  “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 polka-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.

  “D
o 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 case, 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

  Indian Mutiny; of Brian DePalma’s remake of Scarface, an

  explicit attack on the Transylvania Movement, with Al Pacino as Tony Sylvana, a Ceausescu cast-out rising in the booming drac trade and finally taken down by a Vatican army led by James Woods.

  Slightly ahead of all this activity, Welles began shooting quietly, without publicity, working at his own pace, underwritten by the last of his many mysterious benefactors. His final script combined elements from Stoker’s fiction with historical fact made public by the researches of Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu-associates as far back as D Is for Dracula-and concentrated on the last days of the Count, abandoned in his castle, awaiting his executioners, remembering the betrayals and crimes of his lengthy, weighty life. This was the project Welles called The Other Side of Midnight. From sequences filmed as early as 1972, the director culled footage of Peter Bogdanovich as Renfield, while he opted to play not the stick insect vampire but the corpulent slayer, finally gifting the world with his definitive Professor Van Helsing. If asked by the trade press, he made great play of having offered the role of Dracula to Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, or Robert DeNiro, but this was a conjurer’s distraction, for he had fixed on his Count for some years and was now finally able to fit him for his cape and fangs.

  Welles’s final Dracula was to be John Huston.

  Gates, ibid.

  She parked on the street but took the trouble to check out the Shadow Bay High teachers’ parking lot. Two cars: a black Jaguar (OVRLKER1), a beat-up silver Peugeot (“I have a French car”).

  Geneviève checked the Peugeot and found LAPD ID on display. The interior was a mess. She caught the after-whiff of cigars.

  The school was as unexceptional as the town, with that faintly unreal movie-set feel that came from newness. The oldest building in sight was put up in 1965. To her, places like this felt temporary.

  A helpful map by the front steps of the main building told her where the library was, across a grassy quadrangle. The school grounds were dark. The kids wouldn’t be back from their Christmas vacation. And no evening classes. She had checked Gorse’s address first and found no one home.

  A single light was on in the library, like the cover of a gothic romance paperback.

  Cautious, she crossed the quad. Slumped in the doorway of the library was a raincoated bundle.

  Her heart plunging, she knelt and found the Lieutenant insensible but still alive. He had been bitten badly and bled. The ragged tear in his throat showed he’d been taken the old-fashioned way-a strong grip from behind, a rending fang bite, then sucking and swallowing. Nonconsensual vampirism, a felony in anyone’s books, without the exercise of powers of fascination to cloud the issue. It was hard to mesmerise someone with one eye, though some vampires worked with whispers and could even put the fluence on a blind person.

  There was another vampire in Shadow Bay. By the
look of the leavings, one of the bad uns.

  Perhaps that explained Barbie’s prejudice. It was always a mistake to extrapolate a general rule from a test sample of one.

  She clamped a hand over the wound, feeling the weak pulse, pressing the edges together.

  Whoever had bitten the detective hadn’t even had the consideration to shut off the faucet after glutting themselves. The smears of blood on his coat and shirt collar overrode her civilised impulses: her mouth became sharp-fanged and full of saliva. That was a good thing. A physical adaption of her turning was that her spittle had antiseptic properties. Vampires of her bloodline were evolved for gentle, repeated feedings. After biting and drinking, a full-tongued lick sealed the wound.

  Angling her mouth awkwardly and holding up the Lieutenant’s lolling head to expose his neck, she stuck out her tongue and slathered saliva over the long tear. She tried to ignore the euphoric if cigar-flavoured buzz of his blood. She had a connection to his clear, canny mind.

  He had never thought her guilty. Until now.

  “Makes a pretty picture, Frenchie,” said a familiar girlish voice. “Classic Bloodsucker 101, vamp and victim. Didn’t your father-in-darkness warn you about snacking between meals? You won’t be able to get into your party dresses if you bloat up. Where’s the fun in that?”

  Geneviève knew Barbie wasn’t going to accept her explanation. For once, she understood why.

  The wound had been left open for her.

  “I’ve been framed,” she said around bloody fangs.

  Barbie giggled, a teen vision in a red ra-ra skirt, white ankle socks, mutton-chop short-sleeved top, and faux metallic choker. She had sparkle glitter on her cheeks and an Alice band with artificial antennae that ended in hobbling stars.

  She held up her stake and said, “Scissors cut paper.”

  Geneviève took out her gun and pointed it. “Stone blunts scissors.”

  “Hey, no fair,” whined Barbie.

  Geneviève set the wounded man aside as carefully as possible and stood up. She kept the gun trained on the Slayer’s heart.