It has been a tenet of Western culture that a vampire cannot be an artist. For a hundred years, there has been fierce debate on the question. The general consensus on many careers is that many a poet or a painter was never the same man after death, that posthumous work was always derivative self parody, never a true reaction to the wondrous new nightlife opened up by the turning. It is even suggested that this symptom is not a drawback of vampirism but proof of its superiority over life; vampires are too busy being to pass comment, too concerned with their interior voyages to bother issuing travel reports for the rest of the world to pore over.
The tragedies are too well known to recap in detail. Poe reborn, struggling with verses that refuse to soar; Dali, growing ever richer by forging his own work (or paying others to); Garbo, beautiful for ever in the body but showing up on film as a rotting corpse; Dylan, born-again and boring as hell; de Lioncourt, embarrassing all nosferatu with his MOR goth rocker act. But Andy was the Ultimate Vampire before turning. Surely, for him, things would be different.
Alas, no.
Between his deaths, Andy worked continuously. Portraits of Queens and inverted Tijuana crucifixes. Numberless commissioned silk-screens of anyone rich enough to hire him, at $25,000 a throw. Portraits of world-famous boxers (Mohammed Ali, Apollo Creed) and football players (O.J. Simpson, Roy Race) he had never heard of. Those embarrassingly flattering likenesses, impossible to read as irony, of the Shah, Ferdinand and Imelda, Countess Elisabeth Bathory, Victor Von Doom, Ronnie and Nancy. And he went to a lot of parties, at the White House or in the darkest dhampire clubs.
There’s nothing there.
Believe me, I’ve looked. As an academic, I understand exactly Andy’s dilemma. I too was considered a vampire long before I turned. My entire discipline is reputed to be nothing more than a canny way of feeding off the dead, prolonging a useless existence from one grant application to the next. And no one has ever criticized elder vampires for their lack of learning. To pass the centuries, one has to pick up dozens of languages and, in all probability, read every book in your national library. We may rarely have been artists, but we have always been patrons of the arts.
Among ourselves, the search has always been on for a real vampire artist, preferably a creature turned in infancy, before any warm sensibility could be formed. I was tempted in my reassessment of Andy’s lifelong dance with Dracula to put forward a thesis that he was such a discovery, that he turned not in 1968 but, say, 1938, and exposed himself by degrees to sunlight, to let him age. That would explain the skin problems. And no one has ever stepped forth to say that they turned Andy. He went into hospital a living man and came out a vampire, having been declared dead. Most commentators have suggested that he was transfused with vampire blood, deliberately or by accident, but the hospital authorities strenuously insist this is not so. Sadly, it won’t wash. We have to admit it; Andy’s best work was done when he was alive; the rest is just the black blood of the dead.
– Conklin, ibid.
Johnny lay broken on the sidewalk, a snow angel with cloaklike wings of pooled, scarlet-satin blood. He was shot through with silver and wood, and smoking from a dousing in flame. He was a ghost, locked in useless, fast-spoiling meat. The Father was loosed from him, standing over his ruin, eyes dark with sorrow and shame, a pre-dawn penumbra around his shoulders.
The Vampire Killers were dead or wounded or gone. They had not bought his true death easily. They were like him in one way; they had learned the lesson of Dracula, that only a family could take him down. He had known there were hunters on his track; he should have foreseen they would band together, and taken steps to break them apart as the Father would have done, had done with his own persecutors.
With the New York sunrise, he would crumble to nothing, to a scatter of drac on the snow.
Bodies moved nearby, on hands and knees, faces to the wet stone, tongues lapping. Dhampires. Johnny would have laughed. As he died, he was being sucked up, his ghost snorted by addicts.
The Father told him to reach out, to take a hold.
He could not. He was surrendering to the cold. He was leaving the Father, and letting himself be taken by Death. She was a huge-eyed fake nun.
The Father insisted.
It wasn’t just Johnny dying. He was the last link with the Father. When Johnny was gone, it would be the end of Dracula too.
Johnny’s right hand twitched, fingers clacking like crabclaws. It had almost been cut through at the wrist, and even his rapid healing couldn’t undo the damage.
The Father instructed.
Johnny reached out, fingers brushing a collar, sliding around a throat, thumbnail resting against a pumping jugular. He turned his head, and focused his unburst eye.
Rudy Pasko, the betrayer, the dhampire.
He would kill him and leave the world with an act of vengeance.
No, the Father told him.
Rudy’s red eyes were balls of fear. He was swollen with Johnny’s blood, overdosing on drac, face shifting as muscles under the skin writhed like snakes.
‘Help me,’ Johnny said, ‘and I’ll kill you.’
Rudy had boosted a car, and gathered Johnny together to pour him into the passenger seat. The dhampire was on a major drac trip, and saw the light at the end of his tunnel. If he were to be bitten by Johnny in his current state, he would die, would turn, would be a dhampire no longer. Like all the dhamps, his dearest wish was to be more, to be a full vampire.
It wasn’t as easy as some thought. They had to be bitten by the vampire whose blood they had ingested. Most street drac was cut so severely that the process was scrambled. Dhampires had died. But Rudy knew where the blood in him had come from. Johnny realized that his Judas had betrayed him not just for silver, but because Rudy thought that if he spilled enough of Johnny’s blood, he could work the magic on his own. In the British idiom that he had learned from Sid, Rudy was a wanker.
They arrived at Andy’s town house just before dawn.
If Johnny could get inside, he could survive. It wasn’t easy, even with Rudy’s help. During the fight, he had shape-shifted too many times, sustained too many terrible wounds, even lost body parts. He had grown wings, and they’d been shredded by silver bullets, then ripped out by the roots. Important bones were gone from his back. One of his feet was lopped off and lost in the street. He hoped it was hopping after one of his enemies.
He had tasted some of them, the Vampire Killers. In Doyle’s blood, he found a surprise: the drac-busting cop was a secret dhampire, and had dosed himself up to face Johnny. The knifeman, who had vampire blood in him from a strange birth, had stuffed himself with garlic, to make his blood repulsive.
The blood was something. He was fighting now.
Rudy hammered on Andy’s door, shouting. Johnny had last seen Andy at 54, at the party he had left. He should be home by now, or would be home soon. As dawn approached, Johnny felt himself smoking. It was a frosty All Hallows’ morn, but the heat building up like a fever inside him was monsoon-oppressive and threatened to explode in flames.
Johnny’s continued life depended on Andy having made it home.
The door was opened. It was Andy himself, not yet out of his party clothes, dazzled by the pinking end of night. Johnny felt waves of horror pouring off the artist, and understood exactly how he must look.
‘It’s just red, Andy. You use a lot of red.’
Rudy helped him into Andy’s hallway. The gloom was like a welcoming cool in midsummer. Johnny collapsed on the chaise longue, and looked at Andy, begging.
Only one thing could cure him. Vampire blood.
His first choice would have been the Churchward woman, who was almost an elder. She had survived a century and was of a fresh bloodline. But Penny was gone, fleeing the city and leaving them all in the bloody lurch.
It would have to be Andy. He understood, and backed away, eyes wide.
Johnny realized he didn’t even know what Andy’s bloodline was. Who had made him?
A
ndy was horrified. He hated to be touched. He hated to give anything, much less himself.
Johnny had no choice. He reached out with what was left of his mind and took hold of the willing Rudy. He made the dhamp, still hopped up on prime drac, grab Andy by the arms and force him across the lobby, bringing him to the chaise longue as an offering for his Master.
‘I’m sorry, Andy,’ said Johnny.
He didn’t prolong the moment. Rudy exposed Andy’s neck, stringy and chalky, and Johnny pounced like a cobra, sinking his teeth into the vein, opening his throat for the expected gush of life-giving, mind-blasting vampire blood. He didn’t just need to take blood, he needed a whole ghost, to replace the tatters he had lost.
Johnny nearly choked.
He couldn’t keep Andy’s blood down. His stomach heaved, and gouts poured from his mouth and nose.
How had Andy done it? For all these years?
Rudy looked down on them both, wondering why Johnny was trying to laugh, why Andy was squealing and holding his neck, what the frig was going down in the big city?
Andy wasn’t, had never been, a vampire.
He was still alive.
Johnny at last understood just how much Andy Warhol was his own invention.
Andy was dying now, and so was Johnny.
Andy’s blood did Johnny some good. He could stand up. He could take hold of Rudy, lifting him off his feet. He could rip open Rudy’s throat with his teeth and gulp down pints of the dhamp’s drac-laced blood. He could toss Rudy’s corpse across the lobby.
That taken care of, he cradled Andy, trying to get the dying man’s attention. His eyes were still moving, barely. His neck-wound was a gouting hole, glistening with Johnny’s vampire spittle. The light was going out.
Johnny stuck a thumbnail into his own wrist and poured his blood into Andy’s mouth, giving back what he had taken. Andy’s lips were as red as Rita Hayworth’s. Johnny coaxed him and finally, after minutes, Andy swallowed, then relaxed and let go, taking his first and final drac trip.
In an instant, as it happens sometimes, Andy Warhol died and came back. It was too late, though. Valerie Solanas had hurt him very badly, and there were other problems. The turning would not take.
Johnny was too weak to do anything more.
Andy, Warhola the Vampyre at last, floated around his hallway, relishing the new sensations. Did he miss being a magnificent fake?
Then the seizures took him and he began to crumble. Shafts of light from the glass around the door pierced him, and he melted away like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Andy Warhol was a vampire for only fifteen minutes.
Johnny would miss him. He had taken some of the man’s ghost, but it was a quiet spirit. It would never compete with the Father for mastery.
Johnny waited. In a far corner, something stirred.
He had written his own epitaph, of course. ‘In the future, everyone will live for ever, for fifteen minutes.’
Goodbye, Drella. At the end, he gave up Dracula and was left with only Cinderella, the girl of ashes.
The rest, his legacy, is up to us.
– Conklin, ibid.
Rudy could have been a powerful vampire. He rose, turned, full of nosferatu vigour, eager for his first feeding, brain a-buzz with plans of establishing a coven, a drac empire, a place in the night.
Johnny was waiting for him.
With the last of his strength, he took Rudy down and ripped him open in a dozen places, drinking his vampire blood. Finally, he ate the American boy’s heart. Rudy hadn’t thought it through. Johnny spat out his used-up ghost. Sad little man.
He exposed Rudy’s twice-dead corpse to sunlight, and it powdered. The remains of two vampires would be found in Andy’s house, the artist and the drac dealer. Johnny Pop would be officially dead. He had been just another stage in his constant turning.
It was time to quit this city. Hollywood beckoned. Andy would have liked that.
At nightfall, bones knit and face reforming, he left the house. He went to Grand Central Station. There was a cash stash in a locker there, enough to get him out of the city and set him up on the Coast.
The Father was proud of him. Now, he could acknowledge his bloodline in his name. He was no longer Ion Popescu, no longer Johnny Pop; he was Johnny Alucard.
And he had an empire to inherit.
About the Editor
STEPHEN JONES lives in London. He is the winner of three World Fantasy Awards, three Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Awards and three International Horror Guild Awards as well as being a fifteen-time recipient of the British Fantasy Award and a Hugo Award nominee. A former television producer/director and genre movie publicist and consultant (the first three Hellraiser movies, Night Life, Nightbreed, Split Second, Mind Ripper, Last Gasp etc.), he is the co-editor of Horror: 100 Best Books, The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, Gaslight & Ghosts, Now We Are Sick, H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, Secret City: Strange Tales of London, Great Ghost Stories and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Dark Terrors, Dark Voices and Fantasy Tales series. He has written Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide, The Essential Monster Movie Guide, The Illustrated Vampire Movie Guide, The Illustrated Dinosaur Movie Guide, The Illustrated Frankenstein Movie Guide and The Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide, and compiled The Mammoth Book of Terror, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Mammoth Book of Zombies, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, The Mammoth Book of Dracula, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories By Women, Shadows Over Innsmouth, Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, Dancing With the Dark, Dark of the Night, Dark Detectives, White of the Moon, Keep Out the Night, By Moonlight Only, Don’t Turn Out the Light, Exorcisms and Ecstasies by Karl Edward Wagner, The Vampire Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Phantoms and Fiends and Frights and Fancies by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, James Herbert: By Horror Haunted, The Conan Chronicles by Robert E. Howard (two volumes), The Emperor of Dreams: The Lost Worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror, Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden, Clive Barker’s The Nightbreed Chronicles and the Hellraiser Chronicles. You can visit his website at www.herebedragons.co.uk/jones
The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books) Page 84
