The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  Davy sucked down the last of his beer, and used the heel of the bottle to bang on the door of Vor’s suite.

  I said, because it had stuck in my mind, “Did you see when Koshchei came on stage?”

  “I saw it.”

  “He caught a bottle and threw it back.”

  “I don’t care if he’s Vor’s guardian angel, his lover, or his fucking muse. He has to go.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Our stares locked. We both knew then that we would do anything necessary to get rid of Koshchei.

  I said, “I’ll call the hotel manager.”

  “Get Roy to do it. That’s what we pay him for.”

  Roy Menthorn made the call and told us that the manager would be up in ten minutes, then retreated to one of the bedrooms to play dykes and little Dutch boys with his cellphone. Davy and I paced up and down, making a serious inroad on the rider. Toad stumbled in with two girls, snagged a couple of bottles of the Polish vodka he liked – Terminator, half battery acid, half rocket fuel – and vanished. Toad had a Ph.D. in astronomy, a bad coke habit and a salary, just like Roy Menthorn. We were a very post-twentieth-century band. In the beginning, Vor was one of our employees too, but when the royalties started pouring in they made his salary seem beside the point.

  “Remember those first songs,” Davy said.

  “Written in crayon.”

  “Yeah, all different colours.”

  “On newspaper.”

  “They’re still around somewhere.”

  “He said it was the only paper he could find.”

  “I guess they’re worth a fortune,” Davy said. He shucked his beer-stained duster coat and dropped it on a sofa. “Christ, this is so fucked up.”

  “Yeah. I feel like throwing a TV out the window.”

  Davy looked at me. Sweat had left a kind of tidemark of white dye along his hairline. He said, “Has the significance of this reached you yet, man?”

  I was working on my third or fourth beer. I said, “I mean it about the TV. If there was a swimming pool down there I’d do it.”

  Davy actually went to the curtains and parted them and looked down. “A car park,” he said. “We probably couldn’t get the windows open, anyway.”

  I said, “He was such a sweet kid. Crazy, but not insane.”

  “Do you think he is now? Insane, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. That stuff Koshchei feeds him . . .”

  “The fucker offered it to me once,” Davy said.

  “Did you take it?” I was genuinely interested.

  “Fuck no. You’re the one who does drugs.”

  “That’s why he offered it to you.”

  “Probably. He makes it himself. Boils up these roots, chews them and lets them ferment.”

  “Chews them?”

  “He told me that saliva helps the fermentation.”

  “Some kind of Russian Masato,” I said.

  “Masato?”

  “Amazonian Indians make it from boiled manioc.”

  “Well, I never did think he was Russian.”

  “Wherever he’s from, I think he’s some kind of shaman. Remember the time he was caught pissing in Vor’s mouth? I read later that Siberian shamans get high by eating fly agaric mushrooms, and anyone who drinks their piss gets high too. Their bodies purify the drug, and it comes out in the piss.”

  Davy ignored this and said, “How much will it cost to get rid of him, do you think?”

  “No more than cancelling the rest of the tour, I suppose. Roy would know.”

  “It’ll be worth it.”

  The hotel manager came up with a couple of security people, and insisted on unlocking the door to Vor’s suite himself. Davy pushed past, and I was right behind him. The room was very dark, and stank of sweat and incense. The only light came from a lamp covered in a skull-and-crossbones scarf, and a sliver shining at the bottom of the bathroom door.

  Vor lay on a sofa under a heap of fur coats, naked and sweating. His eyes were rolled back, showing mostly white, but he was breathing normally. His face had lost all its baby fat and his skin was as bloodless as parchment – a skull with cheekbones by Dior. There was a glass half-full of a thick milky liquid on the floor; Davy picked it up between thumb and forefinger, sniffed, made a face. We both knew what it was, and what we had to do. Roy was still sweet-talking the manager as we closed and locked the door and went into the bathroom.

  Koshchei was wallowing in the huge scallop-shell bath, dreadlocks spread amongst a snow of iridescent bubbles. Their lavender scent didn’t do much to disguise his strong odour. He was watching a portable TV hooked up to an extension cable and tuned to CNN.

  Davy shut the door, leaned against it and said, “Where are the others?”

  “The others?”

  “The twins. Normal Norman. The rest of Vor’s . . . people.”

  “I have sent them away. They are gone back to the house, or they are gone to where they first came from. It does not matter to me.”

  “So now it’s just you and him,” Davy said. “Nice and cosy under those furs.”

  Koshchei said nothing, his narrow face still turned to the TV.

  Davy said, “We want to know what happened tonight.”

  “The boy is resting. When he wakes you ask him.”

  “He was as high as the moon,” Davy said. “He didn’t sing a note. Just howled through two numbers and then collapsed.”

  Koshchei smiled.

  “We want you to go,” I said.

  “I make him what he is,” Koshchei said. “You know that. So you also know you must put up with me.”

  “Not any more,” I said.

  “I think very much so. We are barely begun.”

  “You’re killing him with that shit,” Davy said.

  “You have what you want, and he does not yet die.”

  Davy started a rant about lawyers, restraining orders, illegal entry into the country. “We’ll get Vor into rehab,” he said. “We’ll get him away from you any way we can.”

  “I think not.”

  “Quit watching the fucking TV and look at me!”

  “I do not think you would like that.”

  Davy pushed away from the door and reached for the remote, which lay on the edge of the bath, but Koshchei snatched it and held it up for a moment before dropping it into the bubbles and smiling at us.

  “Fucker,” Davy said, and kicked the TV into the bath.

  A fat blue spark filled the room, filled the inside of my head. All the lights went out. A fire alarm started somewhere and a moment later one of the security men burst through the door, his torch swinging wildly across white tiles and the smoke which hung over the bubble-filled bath.

  Koshchei was gone. So was Vor.

  “They’re at the house,” Davy said.

  It was two weeks later. Vor had placed ads in the NME and Rolling Stone, a single line of tiny white type centred on an all-black page announcing the death of Liquid Television. Davy and I had a big fight about it – Davy wanted to sue for breach of contract, I wanted to let it go. I was in London, in my flat. It was the middle of the afternoon, and Davy’s phone call had woken me.

  I said, “I know. It’s over, Davy.”

  “No. No way is it over. We have a number one album in five countries. We have a video in heavy rotation on MTV.”

  “I still feel bad about that video.”

  “It saved us, man.”

  I had known that Vor wouldn’t or couldn’t handle a video shoot, so I had surreptitiously filmed him at work in the studio, using a couple of cheap web cameras. The director of the video for “Spook Speak” – fresh from an award-winning ad campaign for some Belgian beer – had used computer trickery to patch footage of Vor’s face over a Pinocchio-like puppet.

  Davy said, “I need more of your foresight. I need your help to get him away from that creature.”

  “You tried to kill Koshchei. If he wanted, he could press charges.”

  “He won�
�t, for the same reason Colonel Tom never let Elvis tour outside the States. Because he isn’t supposed to be here.”

  My flat was a penthouse overlooking Tower Bridge. I looked down twenty floors at the Thames’s brown waters and said into the phone, “We have a number one album. We had a number one single for two weeks, before that boy band knocked us out. We had a good run. We should leave it. Move on.”

  “So why have you been keeping tabs on him?”

  “I don’t want Vor to get hurt,” I said. It was a confession.

  “Neither do I. And he’s going to die if we don’t get rid of Koshchei. So what are we going to do?”

  “I’m seeing Toad tomorrow. Come with me.”

  “What does Toad know?”

  “He’s been hired on for Vor’s new project. And he’s been hanging around the house.”

  Davy laughed. “You never cease to amaze me, man. When and where?”

  We met in a restaurant at Chelsea Harbour. Davy gave Toad the third degree, and Toad answered every question with his usual amiability. He told us that being in the house was like being on the set of the remake of Performance as directed by Aleister Crowley, that the Twins were down in the basement and never came up, that Normal Norman had snuck a drink of the white stuff and thrown a fit and then disappeared.

  “People come and go all the time, auditioning for this mysterious big project, and Vor just lies there on the bed. Stuff disappears. He buys more.”

  Davy said, “And Koshchei is there.”

  While Toad and I ate our steaks, he was working his way through a bottle of Chablis.

  “He comes and goes,” Toad said. “I think he got all he wanted from Vor.”

  “What did he get?” I said.

  Toad shrugged. “I dunno. But he isn’t as attentive any more. I know he doesn’t think much of Vor’s big project. They had a fight about it.”

  Davy said, “Call me when Koshchei is there. We need to talk.”

  “I don’t think it’ll help,” Toad said. “Like I said, him and Vor aren’t so close any more.”

  Vor’s house was a big, white neo-Palladian pile in Belsize Park, screened from the road by tall chestnut trees. The gravel drive was covered in their wet, hand-shaped leaves; the house seemed dark and deserted. I parked the ancient Escort van (Davy had bought it that morning from a dealer in High Barnet, cash, no names, no pack drill) and, carrying the tool bag between us, Davy and I slouched through the front door, which stood wide open.

  The entrance hall and its marble staircase went up three storeys. The huge chandelier lay in ruins on the floor; the air was dark and freezing, and stank foully. Something moved in the far corner, and Davy swung the beam of his torch around, spotlighting the Twins. They hunched together, naked, in a matted caul of their own hair. They were sucking each other’s fingers down to the bones, and whimpered and mewed until Davy turned the light away from them.

  I whispered, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  “Just back me up,” Davy said, and called out loudly, asking if anyone was home.

  No sound came back except for the echo of his voice.

  I said, “He isn’t human. No one lives through having a TV dumped in their bath.”

  “It was a trick,” Davy said.

  “We should wait for Toad.”

  “It’s all a trick. Sleight of hand. Come on.”

  We started up the stairs.

  Toad was on the second-floor landing.

  He lay on his back in a circle painted with his own blood. A drumstick protruded from each eye socket. When I saw him, I dropped my side of the tool bag, and things clattered noisily down the stairs. Davy grabbed what was left and went on. I took a deep breath, and followed.

  Vor’s bedroom was lit only by a big lava lamp shaped like a space rocket, bubbling redly in one corner. Vor was lying in the four-poster, under a sheet stained with urine and spilled food. He must have been there for days. Incense tapers were burning in bunches, layering the air with veils of acrid blue smoke, but the stink from the bed was overpowering.

  The windows were tented with heavy black drapes, the glass painted with thick silver paint. When I tried to pry one open, I found that it had been nailed shut.

  Perhaps the noise woke Vor. He giggled and said, “I’m dreaming. He wouldn’t let you in here.”

  “He’s gone,” Davy said. “He took what he wanted and now he’s gone.”

  “Not quite,” Koshchei said.

  He stood in the doorway to the bathroom, thin as a Live Aid extra, piss-elegant in an electric-blue shaitung silk suit and sequinned cowboy boots. Smoke eddied around him in the gloom as, with a conjuror’s grace, he plucked a live chick from his tangle of dread-locks. For a moment, he allowed it to stand on his open palm – a yellow ball of fluff that cheeped hopefully as it looked around with bright black eyes – then he stuffed it into his mouth and devoured it with a wet crunching noise. A thin rill of blood ran down his chin when he smiled.

  He said, “I always come back. I always finish what I begin. I like to think of it as a duty.”

  Davy said, “We’re taking him away from you.”

  Koshchei dabbed chick blood from his chin with a black handkerchief and shook it into nothingness – or into the dark, smoky air. He said, “I’ll stay, I think. The boy deserves nothing less.”

  “We’re taking him to hospital,” I said. My mouth was dry, burning with the taste of the incense smoke, and I was getting a headache.

  “Oh, I think not. You see, you have come at just the right moment.”

  Davy said, “You fuck people up, you drain them of everything they have – and then what? You walk away? Not this time. We saw what you did to Toad. You can’t walk away from murder.”

  “The Twins killed him,” Koshchei said calmly. “They have grown very protective. As for this boy, I admit that I used him – but then, so did you. You’re not interested in the boy, only in what he can do for you. You’re jealous of me because I went to the source directly. And without me, he would not have gone where he did. Without me, he would have been no more than one more silly, vainglorious child with a talent for delivering bad poetry with utter conviction. With me, he has been to a place few have even glimpsed.”

  “I could have got there by myself,” Vor said.

  His voice seemed to come from a pit far beneath the bed. The room was so full of smoke now that the walls were disappearing. My sight throbbed with headachy red.

  “You could not have gone there without me,” Koshchei told him. “And I could not have gone there without you. That’s the deal. That’s always the deal.” He stared at Davy and me through the gathering murk. “I get so little, compared to what I give. Surely you two gentlemen do not begrudge me.”

  Vor said, “I chose to do it. I wanted it so much, and he showed me how. Fuck off, both of you. You don’t know what he did for me.”

  “You’re too stoned or ill to know what you want,” Davy said.

  “I don’t want anything any more,” Vor said, and closed his eyes and drew the sheet over his face. His bed was like a catafalque, receding through red-lit smoke.

  “You see,” Koshchei said. “There is nothing you two gentlemen can—”

  Davy shot him. The muzzle flash lit up the room, made everything solid and distinct for a moment. Koshchei slammed into the door and Davy shot him again and he sat down, blood on his white face and blood on his hand when he took it away from his chest. He looked up at Davy, smiling, and Davy shot him five more times and threw the gun down. He’d bought it that morning, too, in a pub in Dalston.

  Koshchei coughed a little spray of blood, brought his hand to his mouth and coughed again. Something moved in his white throat and he spat the bullets into his palm and held them up and dropped them to the floor and laughed.

  We both went for him then, driven by anger and fear and desperation. Davy stabbed him so hard that the blade of the hunting knife went through his shoulder and stuck in the door frame; I hit him a roundhouse
blow with the lump hammer, and that laid him out.

  We looked at each other, both of us breathing hard, both of us speckled and spattered with Koshchei’s blood. Then I turned away and was sick.

  “We should finish him off,” Davy said, without conviction. “Cut his throat. Smash his skull.”

  “I’m not up for it,” I said. “Besides, shooting him didn’t work, so stabbing him probably won’t work either.”

  “Yeah. So we’ll try Plan B.”

  We worked the knife out of Koschei, got him onto the bed and wrapped him in a sodden red velvet throw, binding it tightly with electrical cable. Smoke swirled around us; we choked on its acrid fumes. Davy threaded the hose down Koschei’s oesophagus and jammed the plastic funnel between his teeth; I poured in the mixture of weedkiller and bleach until it ran back out of his nose, mixed with bloody chyme. Then we finished wrapping him in black plastic sheeting and rolled the heavy bundle downstairs.

  The damp cold air outside began to clear my head. As we were lifting our victim into the back of the van, I said, “We should go back for Vor.”

  “I’ll call an ambulance,” Davy said. He dialled 999 as I started the van, gave Vor’s address as I tore out of the driveway, threw the mobile out of the window as we cut through the heavy traffic at Swiss Cottage. We kept the windows down as we drove, and my head began to clear as I navigated stop-go traffic along the Euston Road. “The ambulance men will find all the blood,” I said. “And they’ll find Toad. They’ll find his body.”

  “A break-in. A struggle, the villains long gone.”

  “Vor saw us.”

  “Vor is out of his head. Nothing he says will be believed. When we get back I’ll start damage control, get Roy on the case. But first we have to dump this sack of shit.”

  We headed east across Shoreditch, through the City (there was a horrible moment when a policeman on duty at one of the checkpoints stared hard at our van, but he let us past), and along the A13, the four-square tower of Canary Wharf pirouetting past tangles of slip roads and Georgian terraces, traffic heavy on the sodium-lit dual carriageway and roundabouts of Dagenham, growing lighter after we passed the Blackwall Tunnel and the blister of the Millennium Dome.