by Kim Newman
He also took advantage of swooning matrons, tapping thin veins with his rat-teeth. He favoured children and short women as prey. Even with clogs on, he couldn’t look a full-grown man in the eye, let alone bite his neck. In his way, he was accomplished. He could nip a person without them noticing. If most nosferatu are wolves, de Coulteray was a mosquito. Insects are blood-drinkers too. As much nature’s vampires as the Peruvian bat or the phalaenophis orchid. It was an amusing dance to watch, with a sting and an apology at the end of it… and the blush of blood on his lips.
He pressed me for my stories, but more often he told me his own. His favourite topic was himself, and the unjust treatment he had received. Estranged from Dorga, his mother-in-darkness, he had not had an easy time of it since the Revolution.
‘The wretched trouserless ones would have to invent a decapitation machine,’ he said, as if the guillotine were designed expressly for his neck. ‘When they cut throats or shoot us, it’s merely a question of lying there till they’ve got drunk and left you to rot… then springing up and running in the other direction. But there’s no coming back from the head basket. If I hadn’t been fast on my feet and quick with my tongue, the de Coulteray line would have ended with so many others – a very curt, curtailing sort of end. Inglorious, you might say. No sooner was that over but who should come along? Bonaparte! He wanted me in the army, would you credit it! It was all I could do to stay out of the path of half the cannonballs of Europe. La, but what a dreadful time! Nothing will ever be worse than that.’
Nicolas Cerral noticed me with the tour guide and took to calling him my fiancé. At first, the captain of the ghouls meant it as a joke. Then, he thought he’d hit on the truth and stopped endeavouring to be amusing and shocking in conversation with me. I had a sense Cerral was aggrieved at the trespass on his turf. As the sole girl ghoul, I was his preferred confidante and he resented the loss. It’s also possible Cerral liked my looks and was shamed and frustrated at being cut out by such a ridiculous rival. A mistake I have made time and again over the years is assuming people with faces as young as mine are as experienced as me – not just a few years (months, really) beyond toy trains and dress-up dolls. Dracula may have a child-brain, but I am cursed – I see your lip curling, Charles! – with a child-face. It misleads many, and in turn they surprise me.
Lecturers and physicians also noticed that de Coulteray turned up wherever I happened to be. That didn’t help my cause. The Marquis was more unwanted pet than admirer – the sort of dog you idly give a spare bone, only to find it yapping at your skirts forever afterwards. What made it worse was that he couldn’t be inconspicuous if he tried. My habit was to pass unnoticed. His was to be such an enormous tent show that no one took him seriously.
The Marquis followed me from the morgue to Pitié-Salpêtrière, the teaching hospital attached to the university. He sat in on lectures, asking impertinent, humorous questions, which Professor Charcot did not appreciate. Pets, he pointedly said, were not welcome in classes. De Coulteray trailed me to student haunts and tried to persuade me to hunt with him. He offered to beguile comely barmaids or drunken bucks and share the spoils. He robbed those he bled – another practice he laughed at me for being shocked by. I thought it a foolish risk. He was more often sought by the police for the robberies than the attacks. People don’t notice fleabites but know when their pokes have been pinched.
What a strange freedom it was not to be believed in. The Devil’s greatest trick, it is said. Those who don’t believe in ghosts do not see them. Those who didn’t believe in vampires didn’t notice us, even as they put cotton wool on the fang punctures.
My studies proceeded well, but I was marked harshly. I knew from other women on the course that some professors were still set against us. A well connected, near illiterate male lackwit could pass exams by sending a crate of wine to an assessor’s house, but any excuse would be found to deduct points from a woman’s score. Categories were invented which we alone could fail – deportment, nerve, constitution, associations.
Thanks to de Coulteray, the last was a problem. The Marquis encouraged the spread of fantastic untruths about him as a distraction from the fantastic truth. People suggested that he was a disciple of Victor Frankenstein, seeking perfect body parts to sew together a Future Eve, or else a canny lust-murderer, who would guide victims to obscure corners of the morgue, leaving their stripped corpses among the other dead. Whenever we did a stock-take and checked slabs against the register, surplus stiffs were discovered – thanks to poor bookkeeping on the part of overworked servants – and boosted the myth of the tour guide as a homicidal lunatic.
In all his rumoured depravities, I was now his known associate.
I had several uncomfortable interviews with tutors and one with Inspector Daubert of the Sûreté. I found myself led into unnecessary lies – claiming the Marquis as a relative on my mother’s side, a family embarrassment I was obliged to bear for her sake. So that was the reputation of my imaginary parents blackened. De Coulteray thought it hilarious and invented amusing stories about my precocious girlhood.
He would not be deterred. I believe he was simply unromantically lonely. And I sympathised. Who would not?
I had little gossip for him about our kind, but he had plenty for me. At that time, by most reckonings, there were fewer than five hundred vampires in Europe. The Marquis de Coulteray knew something scandalous (if unverifiable) about every one of them. He put it about that Sir Francis Varney had unnatural congress with a pig’s severed head as a rite of initiation into the Order of Palladium – a nonsense invented on the spot by Lord Ruthven to make his fellow British elder look foolish before their peers. Come to think of it, that might well be true. I was less convinced by de Coulteray’s other yarns. That Baron Meinster indulged a predilection for dressing up in his late mother’s ballgown and dancing alone in his empty Transylvanian chateau, sweeping her train over dusty stone floors. That Countess Ranevskaya uses her uncanny trick of seeing into men’s hearts and minds to cheat at Écarté. That Barnabas Collins writes sickeningly sentimental three-volume novels under the pen name ‘Maud-Lynne Drivelle’.
Less amusingly, the Marquis would bring up the name of some formidable elder, then bluntly tell me he or she had just been destroyed. He quivered with terror when recounting tales of burned-down castles and dug-up graves, of heads severed by silver and hearts pierced with oak but couldn’t suppress gloating relief. In his mind, he had escaped yet again while someone more magnificent than he – of all the vampires roaming free, he was by far the least magnificent – was pinned down, done away with and gone to red dirt.
Much tosh is written about vampires being romantic, devil-may-care outlaws. The truth is we were always afraid. We could be found out and killed at any time. Being constantly terrified leads to strange fancies. You know the myths about us. What you won’t find, even in the secret files of the Diogenes Club, are all our myths about you.
De Coulteray had it in his head that something called the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith – a secret society funded by the Vatican and the House of Rothschild – was hunting vampires to extinction. So far as he was concerned, their ultimate purpose was the ruin and destruction of the Marquis de Coulteray. He detected agents of the conspiracy in every shadow. Any elder who turned to dust in his coffin had been throttled with a papally-blessed rosary. This or that politician was in the pocket of the Congregation. A final purge was coming. He had a notion of fleeing to northern latitudes where nights last for months and making a last redoubt of the undead. In visions, he was told to build a tower. It was never clear who was telling him this. He claimed regular congress with the goddess Kali. Of course, he wanted me to come to the Arctic. He urged me to abandon medicine and study architecture. He didn’t know how to build a tower and thought I’d be better at the practicalities. Having failed to put up a modest temple – no more than a pavilion, in truth – in two hundred years, even he doubted his suitability for ambitious construction projects.
After a while, I just heard the chattering – not the words. De Coulteray was being de Coulteray, and I had other things to be getting on with. Like not being expelled from the University of France.
Where were you when you heard about Dracula?
That’s a question everyone can answer – not just vampires.
Most didn’t believe it when they first heard that vampires were real. That a 450-year-old creature was marrying the widowed Queen of England. That other nosferatu were rallying to his standard, as it flew over Buckingham Palace; that many more vampires were turned – a rising generation of newborns, washing across Britain and its empire, threatening to swamp Europe with the undead. That the world was changed.
This will surprise you – I didn’t believe it either.
But, consider the source.
The first item de Coulteray had from England was unusually easy to confirm. The Paris papers carried accounts of the sensational case. A foreigner in London survived attempted assassination – presumably an anarchist plot against a titled plutocrat. A distinguished Dutch professor and a mad American cowboy were killed in self-defence by a Romanian prince. Dracula had already promoted himself from nobility to royalty in his press releases. I knew of Professor Abraham Van Helsing as ‘a specialist in obscure diseases’ but not that he had an interest in vampires. When Charcot made us read Van Helsing’s book on hysterical symptoms, students joked that his author biography must have been mistranslated – he was really ‘an obscure specialist in diseases’. De Coulteray said Van Helsing and ‘this Quimby Maurice’ were hired stooges of the Congregation. He took poor mad Jack Seward for a sinister Jesuit and swore Mina Harker was a secret Jew.
Dracula would be destroyed within the month, he was sure. I thought that quite likely.
Before everything changed, vampires who got their names in papers tended not to live long enough to enjoy celebrity. De Coulteray’s feuilleton fantasy of a secret crusade masterminded by the Wandering Jew, the galvanised corpse of Tomás de Torquemada and Comte de Saint-Germain, was ludicrous. However, a few grim crusaders knew we were real and made careers of killing us. A vampire had actually to murder warm people to attract the attention of Captain Kronos, but few of his rivals were as fastidious about exact measures of guilt or innocence. If the vampire-slayers Dr Gänsflügel and Xander Anderson hadn’t chosen victims who weren’t legally dead to torture and dismember, they would be reviled among the worst murderers in history.
A long-standing myth among vampires posits a cabal of lofty, remote elders called the Number. People who talked them up said the Seven, the Nine, the Thirteen and so on – either the number of the Number varied or no one could get the made-up story settled. The primary purpose of the Number was keeping the existence of vampires quiet. Guarding the Secret or the Covenant or the Pact or the Shadows or the Whatever We Called It. The Number liked capital letters, obviously. You won’t be surprised to learn that chief among the Number was an elder called the Master. Before Dracula took the title King of the Cats, this Master – who may be a conflation of several different elders – was ruler of our kind. He was also known as the Ancient One, the Anointed One and – among the more cynical – the Annoying One. So at the head of the table of the Number sits a One. We’ve heard nothing from the One or the Number since the Ascendancy, which suggests I was right to be sceptical about them even existing.
If de Coulteray was afraid of the Congregation, he was terrified of the Number – who sent silent killers to evaporate vampires who imperilled the Secret. The Marquis prophesied that the impudent rascal Dracula would be impaled by a falling lightning rod or garrotted with a hawthorn noose before he could make more noise on the world stage. I didn’t believe that, but I presumed Ruthven, Varney and other British elders would see Dracula’s presence in England as hunting on their preserve. They must have gamekeepers to see off the poacher. I still don’t understand why that didn’t happen. Does Lord Ruthven, for all his jack-in-office status as Prime Minister, ruefully reflect that he could have stopped all this after Van Helsing missed his shot?
It was just gossip. And fanciful theory.
Until it wasn’t.
* * *
I was taking notes at a dissection performed by Dr Petre Gheria, my least favourite lecturer.
Anatomy specimens were drawn from the morgue’s unclaimed. Their symptoms told as much about their lives as their deaths. Having hooked a ripe female corpse for his table, Gheria took every incision as an excuse for superfluous observations on the immorality of the sex – as if male Parisian down-and-outs didn’t have livers pickled like tumorous sponges or generative organs eaten away by syphilis. Gheria liked to style himself as a ‘scientific misogynist and anti-Semite’. His published papers argued that women, Jews, Negroes and – to be blunt – anyone not a middle-aged European man were physical and moral inferiors who should be subject to strict hygiene laws. It might have been significant that Gheria’s much younger wife – a former dancer, often persuaded out of retirement for charitable causes – was a popular figure with the wealthy students of the university branch of the Jockey Club.
Gheria exposed the uterus, hoping to find twins – a Jew and a girl, preferably – strangling each other with the umbilical cord. He would take that as an example of hereditary degeneracy.
There was a disturbance in the viewing room. Grieving relatives, perhaps.
I heard the shrill, trilling cry, like some sort of bird – a pigeon, perhaps.
‘Gené, Gené…’
Students got out of de Coulteray’s way as he crawled over the benches to get to me. Some yelped, others swiped at him with their notebooks. His wig was off-centre and that scent of his inescapable.
Gheria paused, scalpel hovering. He was unhappy with this interruption. I hissed furiously and – again – hoped this would all go away. Then the Marquis was next to me. His talons hooked into my sleeve.
‘Gené, Gené, we have to go to London, now! La, it’s a marvel, you’ll not credit it – I can hardly believe it myself. But it’s over.’
‘What’s over?’ asked Cerral, who was sat in front of me. ‘What’s over, you fathead ponce?’
‘The hiding,’ de Coulteray said, showing his teeth.
The bloodline of Dorga takes after the cobra. His fangs were curved needles. His jaw dislocated to show their full length. Venom sacs pulsed in his wattles.
Cerral shrank away, in surprised terror.
‘Yes, peasant scum,’ said de Coulteray, climbing up on the bench, mouth open. ‘You should cringe! Fear me, fear all that I am… for I am a vampire!’
I tugged at his coat, trying to calm him down.
‘A vampire?’ said Gheria, scalpel still in hand. ‘There are no such things.’
De Coulteray hissed. He flicked out his long, forked purple tongue.
‘Yes, there are,’ insisted de Coulteray, slurring his words. ‘And I’m not the only one here.’
Everyone looked at me.
Everyone thought about me, remembering things: my habits, my diet, my looks, my character. That time the kitten was found dead in my locker. My odd scraps of historical knowledge. My preference for dark nights over sunny days.
I saw it all on Cerral’s face – in his look of horror. I could hear the tickertape running through his head. The transparent lies brought to mind. The evidence. The proof. The truth – no longer unbelievable.
Insights I had shared on types of blood astounded specialists. Conventional haematology lagged behind vampire understanding. I hotly regretted the vanity that had prompted me to show off. I could easily have kept quiet.
So could de Coulteray… only, being him, he couldn’t.
‘Dracula, Gené… of all the elders, Count Dracula. Not the Master, not one of those Karnsteins, not Dorga. Dracula. He has delivered us. London is our sanctuary. It’s what I foresaw, but didn’t understand. The tower and the temple were the same place, and I didn’t have to build it because it was already there: the Tower of London. At last, we shal
l be what we were meant to be. Lords of the earth, Gené. And ladies. We must go now. There are trains from Gare du Nord. You speak English, don’t you? I don’t, but you’ll interpret for us. Should we need new coats? Or British umbrellas? I’ve heard about the rains and fogs of London. But Dracula will end that. There’ll be no rain, no fog, no sunny days, just moonlight, and velvet night and the stars. They are ours, Gené – the stars.’
His arms flapped as he spoke. I wondered if he was trying to turn into a bat. Or a flying snake.
Nicolas Cerral, the ghoul, produced a small cross and held it up at me.
I tugged at the chain around my neck and showed him my father’s gold cross – the one I’ve worn all these years. I pointed at it.
‘Doesn’t burn,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t hurt.’
Cerral wasn’t listening. He stood up and backed away. He wasn’t the only one. Students fell over themselves to give me a bench to myself.
‘Dieudonné’s a vampire?’ someone asked.
‘Dieudonné’s a vampire,’ Cerral confirmed.
My own fangs were sharp against my lower lip.
‘She can bite me any time she likes,’ said some rake.
No one laughed. The tour guide wasn’t ridiculous any more.
Dr Gheria’s lecture was abandoned. It was as if the lamps that directed light onto the cadaver were adjusted to illuminate me. I was picked out like a special turn in the follies, hemmed in by a circle of light.
I half expected students to break furniture to make stakes and torches.