Vampyres of Hollywood

by Adrienne Barbeau; Michael Scott

  I unholstered the Glock and released the safeties. I always keep a round chambered—not necessarily good weapon craft but really good police craft. You don’t want to pull a gun in a gunfight and then have to chamber a round. Besides, even though I didn’t have them on, the Glock 17L has three safeties.

  I could now justifiably claim that I was following a witness statement and a trail of evidence leading from the SUV to the house where I believed Maral McKenzie had been taken following her abduction. I pressed the flat of my hand against the steel door and pushed. In any good movie, it would have clicked open. This one didn’t. Short of ringing the bell or using a SWAT team with an explosive charge, I wasn’t going to get in that way. I set off around the side of the house, keeping close to the wall, watching out for cameras or alarms. If there were any, I didn’t see them.

  There were no streetlights and no moonlight. I couldn’t see two feet in front of me. I kept my left hand on the stone wall, the Glock in my right, rounded a corner, and stopped, the gun snapping up, breath catching in my throat. I thought I was facing a person, but when my heart stopped hammering I realized it was nothing more than one of the countless palm trees that gave the city its name. This one was listing sharply to the left, its top directly across the wall of the estate. Shoving the gun back in its holster, I did my best to mount the tree and half climbed, half dragged myself up the trunk. Two humongous rats darted out at me from their nest in the palm fronds. I knocked one of them off the trunk and watched him land on the top of the wall. There was a loud buzzing, a small arc of light, and the damn rat’s fur burst into flames. So…electric wires embedded in the top of the wall. Whoever owned this house took their security very seriously indeed. Well, better the rat than me.

  I climbed farther up the trunk to a point where I was leaning over the wall. There was water directly below me, not a swimming pool, a moat, for God’s sake. A moat surrounding the entire house with a bridge leading from the short steel door to the house itself. It was too dark to make out anything in the water, but it sounded like there were huge fish swimming down there. I could hear their tails breaking water. There was thick vegetation on the other side of the moat, all the way up to the house. From the shadows they threw on the wall, I’d say cactus and agave, nothing you’d want to get too close to. From what I could see of the house, I was looking at several million dollars’ worth of amazing architecture in stone, glass, and steel, a real fortress.

  Most of the house was in darkness, but there was dim light in one huge room on the middle floor, probably the living room. From this angle, almost directly across from the room and with no sun to activate the privacy glass, I could see inside.

  Ovsanna was there.

  I could only see her profile. She was talking to a tall man in a tuxedo and a short girl in some punk-looking fancy gown. There was no furniture in the room, and I could barely make out other shapes standing in the darkness against the far wall. Human shapes. I pushed myself as far up the tree as I could, ignoring its ominous creaking, keeping an eye out for more rats and my feet away from the buzzing wires. Running a lethal dose of electricity through the wires was illegal, but there was probably enough to fry my nervous system and blow me off the tree. I doubted anyone inside would care if I broke my neck in the process.

  Ovsanna moved and the guy in the tux turned just enough for me to see his face—white blond hair and pale skin. The albino. The short girl reminded me of someone. Then she turned toward me and I realized she wasn’t a girl at all; she was an old woman dressed like a teenage Goth…looking astonishingly like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

  I couldn’t tell what was going on. Ovsanna looked angry. Was she giving them orders? Yelling at them? She walked toward a floor-to-ceiling marble fireplace, turned her back to it, and stood there with her arms crossed over her chest.

  There was no sign of Maral.

  More people were crowding into the room but no one was speaking. They just seemed to be standing in silent rows watching Ovsanna and the older woman. There were flame-haired women to the fore, but I couldn’t make out the details of any of the people standing in the background. They all seemed to be wrapped in black cloaks.

  Maybe it was time to get that eye test I’d been putting off.

  What the hell was going on here? And who were all these people? There were certainly enough for a party, but there was no party atmosphere: no waiters circulating with food, no streamers or balloons. No lights.

  Maybe it was a cult. Some sort of devil-worshipping coven. Now that would make great press! This was California, home of the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set, as well as a host of smaller covens. A devil-worshipping cult would just be the icing on the publicity cake: I could see the USA Today headline: “Ovsanna Moore, High Priestess of Horror.”

  Then I had a sudden horrible thought: what if it was a horror movie convention? SuzieQ had dragged me along to a convention in San Diego once. I had a good time looking at the women in costume—SuzieQ had gone dressed as Vampirella. She’d made a fortune selling eight-by-ten glossies and posing for photos and I’d spent a busy afternoon keeping fans in order. Some of the fans had been terrifying in their intensity. Looking into the room below, I thought I saw some of that same behavior. The remnants of my mother’s exceptional steak pizzaiolla soured in my stomach. Had I just closed off a road and called in Chief Barton for a horror convention? I felt a bead of cold sweat gather in my hairline, run down my forehead, and gather on the tip of my nose. I could almost feel my pension disappearing.

  Ovsanna said something and the old woman threw her head back and laughed. Then she moved closer to Ovsanna and struck her across the face. Ovsanna grabbed her by the hair, her lips curled back and she looked like she was going for the old lady’s throat with her teeth. Now the other people in the room were moving—fast.

  A woman with flaming red hair stepped right in front of her. I didn’t even see Ovsanna’s hands move, but the woman lifted right off the ground in an explosion of bright red blood and crashed into the others standing behind her. I got the briefest glimpse of the body as it hit the ground: there wasn’t a lot left of her head.

  Ovsanna fought like a wild woman, kicking, punching, and biting. I guessed she must have had knives in both hands, because every time she struck out at one of the figures I could see her slicing them open. Arterial blood sprayed everywhere.

  It wasn’t hard to see what had happened to the bodies in Rough Trade, and I guessed I knew now who killed those movie stars.

  There’s a whole lot I should have done. Getting off the tree trunk would have been a good start. Drawing my gun and firing a shot through the window was an option. But for the first time in my life I was frozen with shock and absolute terror.

  I watched Ovsanna slice her way through the people pressing in on her. And then I realized that I couldn’t see the knives she was using…because there were none.

  She was shredding people with her bare hands.

  A hulking hairy bodybuilder stepped into her path: I saw her plunge her hand right into his chest and rip out his still-beating heart. I watched as a another hairy man leapt onto her back, saw her bend backward at an impossible angle and snap him right over her head, slamming him into the floor with enough force to shatter the floorboards. Then she grabbed his legs—for a moment I even thought she was holding a tail—and swung him around like a cudgel, using his broken body to batter the others.

  What I was seeing couldn’t be real…it couldn’t be. Were they shooting a movie? Was that what this was—a location shoot for one of Ovsanna’s horror flicks? Just special effects and Eva Casale’s fake prop blood? Except…except there were no cameras…no lights…no makeup…no costumes…and definitely no director to call “cut.”

  This was no movie.

  Two women—one red haired, the other dark—leapt at Ovsanna from either side. Moving unbelievably fast, she caught both their heads and slammed them together with a crack I could hear through the window.
Blood, brain, and bone geysered up across the ceiling.

  A naked man who looked more simian than human wrapped unnaturally long arms around her. Ovsanna drove her booted heel into his bare toes, crushing them to a pulp, and as he opened his mouth to scream she reached in and wrenched out his tongue with her right hand. She kicked a second man so hard between the legs that I swear I saw his testicles stuck to the toe of her boot.

  It was a massacre and I had to do something. I had to stop her before she killed any more people. She was obviously high on something, crystal meth or PCP. Gripping the trunk of the palm tree between my thighs, I drew my gun and tried to get a bead on her. She was pinned to the floor, but she was writhing and flailing and I couldn’t get a clear shot. There were more and more people crowding into the room, pressing in on her, trying—and failing—to prevent her from lashing out with whatever killer kung fu/jujitsu shit she was using.

  I was just about to fire a warning shot into a wall when something else stepped into the room.

  Something that had no right to exist outside a nightmare. Something tall and leathery, with wings and honest-to-god horns. And a fucking tail! I was hoping that it was someone in costume when a second creature crawled into the room. On the ceiling. Ovsanna had risen and was moving toward the door when the first thing slashed at her. The blow staggered her, driving her to her knees, and suddenly the red-haired women and the hairy men were all over her, pinning her to the ground, covering her with their bodies. She managed to heave some of them off, but more and more of the leathery monsters crawled or slithered or flew into the room, and I realized then that what I’d seen standing in the shadows hadn’t been people in cloaks at all.

  I lowered the gun.

  Adrenaline was pounding through my body. My hand was shaking so hard I couldn’t aim the gun, but that didn’t matter because I didn’t know what to shoot at. I didn’t even know what I was looking at.

  The albino waded into the heaving mass of bodies and started pulling them off Ovsanna and tossing them aside. It was clear that some were dead and others were terribly injured. When he finally got to Ovsanna, she wasn’t moving. He raised her over his head in both hands like some sort of trophy; then he turned, knelt before the old woman, and laid Ovsanna at her feet.

  I was at least two hundred yards away, separated from the room by a wall of glass, but even so, I could hear the old lady’s hideous cackling as she kicked the unmoving body again and again and again….

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I realized something profound before the Ancients descended upon me.

  I realized that I hadn’t felt this alive in a century. It is our nature to kill. To rip and rend, to tear and break…and to revel in that destruction. My clan, of all clans, the Dakhanavar, are trained to guard and attack. Tonight, I’d killed a score of Bobhan Sith, Dearg Due, dhampirs, and were-creatures. I think I may have killed an Ancient, too—I certainly injured one. Its stinking blood had splashed on my face, and I had a long moment of disorientation as memories of times and places that had never been inhabited by humans crashed into my consciousness.

  Well, if I was going to die—and that seemed likely—then at least I’d go out fighting.

  I opened my eyes and the pain came, flowing along my outstretched arms and up my legs like hot metal. A misguided sense of pride was all that kept me from crying out; I didn’t want to give those bastards the satisfaction. I was in a basement, dank, musty, and echoing. It stank of old wood and mould, of rotting flesh and decaying meat, of tainted blood.

  And pain.

  It smelled of pain.

  A single bare low-wattage bulb cast yellow light over a ghastly scene. I had been crucified to a stone wall, solid silver rail spikes driven through the bones of my wrists and ankles to pin me to the solid brickwork.

  And I wasn’t alone.

  All around me, similarly crucified to the basement walls, were the Vampyres of Hollywood.

  One by one they raised their heads to look at me—Douglas Fairbanks and Orson, Peter Lorre and Theda Bara, her husband, Charles Brabin, and James Whale, Olive Thomas, Mary Pickford and Pola, even Tod Browning, and the always elusive Charlie Chaplin. Only Rudy was missing.

  “Now you mustn’t blame yourself,” Orson said immediately. I had been nailed to the end wall and he was on the wall to my right. He even managed a ghastly smile.

  “Who else do we blame?” Theda snarled.

  Olive nodded, then grimaced as her weight shifted on her outstretched arms. “It’s because of her we’re here.”

  “Ladies, ladies,” Douglas murmured, as cultured and urbane as always. “This is no time for arguments and apportioning blame.”

  “Besides,” Peter hissed, “we all know who is to blame!”

  “Enough,” I gasped. “Enough.” I turned to Douglas, who was hanging on the wall to my left. “Tell me what happened?” I asked. I tried to wrench my arm away from the wall, quite willing to pull my flesh out over the nail if necessary, but my vampyre metabolism conspired against me. My flesh kept healing around the wound, sealing the silver spike deep within my arm. The same process prevented me from Changing—but even if I had succeeded in a transformation, I would still have been pinned to the wall.

  “Save your strength,” Charlie advised.

  Tod nodded in agreement. “We tried.”

  “Douglas? What happened?”

  “Lilith,” he said simply. “Lilith happened.”

  “And Rudy. Lilith and Rudy,” Orson added. Although he’d lost some weight, his great bulk pulled him forward, stretching his arms back at a frightening angle.

  “The shrew and the slime,” lisped Peter.

  Rudy. I should have known.

  “Rudy betrayed us,” Douglas said. “We’re sure of it. We’ve talked about it over the past few hours,” he said, nodding to Hollywood’s elite pinned to the basement walls, like so many butterflies. “The attacks on your clan and then your staff were all designed with one end in mind: to bring each of us out of hiding and gather us all together in one place, your home.”

  “But you called the meeting, Douglas,” I said.

  “Yes, I did, but I realize now it was Rudy who put the suggestion to me. He was adamant that we should all come together to confront you. I remember now that he grew angry when Tod and Charlie refused to come. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, just Rudy being his manipulative self.”

  “I wouldn’t go anywhere for that egotistical deviant,” Tod croaked, voice perpetually raw from the Lucky Strikes he never quite gave up.

  “Why was it necessary to bring you all together?” I wondered. The pain was making me woozy and slow.

  “Do you know where each of us lives?” Douglas asked.

  I shook my head, then winced as the effort strained my shoulders. I looked around the room. I knew that Tod had stayed in Malibu and I knew Theda and Charles were in Manhattan, but I’d no idea where the others lived. Only Solgar knew how to contact all the Vampyres—

  “Solgar,” I snapped. “Solgar knows.”

  “Solgar is Clan Obour,” Peter lisped. “He is above reproach. He would never have betrayed us.”

  “I issued the order for Solgar to gather the clan; Rudy kept insisting upon it,” Douglas said. Even though he was in as much pain as the rest of us, his voice was even, perfectly controlled.

  “This…all of the…the killings were done so Lilith and Rudy could discover the whereabouts of the Vampyres of Hollywood? Why?” I demanded.

  “You’re not old enough to remember when Philip IV moved against the Templars in 1307,” Douglas said. “He knew if he captured some and left others free, then they would attack him, so he sent out sealed secret orders to every bailiff, deputy, and officer in his kingdom with instructions that they were not to be opened until the night of October 12, under penalty of death. On Friday, October 13, five thousand Templars were captured and imprisoned. Only twenty escaped. Philip wasn’t creative enough to conceive of that plan on his own…his mistre
ss at the time was Lilith.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to rise above the constant pain and concentrate on what Douglas was telling me. Everything that had happened—the deaths of my clan and my staff—was nothing more than a ploy to rouse the elusive Vampyres of Hollywood from their hiding places. Obviously they had been tracked from my home back to their lairs. My eyes snapped open. “And the Ancients?”

  Douglas nodded. “She needs the Ancients. No ordinary vampyre, dhampir, or were-creature is strong enough to stand against us alone. But the Ancients…the Ancients, especially banded together, have the power to destroy us.”

  “Three came to my house in Silver Lake,” Peter Lorre whispered; then his lips twisted into an ugly smile. “I may have killed one—”

  Pola nodded. “Two came for me.” She shuddered. “I swear I will never grow that old, that ugly. I will destroy myself first.”

  A thought struggled through my pain. “Why wasn’t I taken with the rest?”

  “I had an altogether more fitting end for you, my dear.” Rudolph Valentino came down the stairs. He stepped into the basement and walked slowly down the middle of the room, his dark eyes lingering on each crucified vampyre. Gone was any vestige of Rolph Valenti; no pretense that he was a theatrical agent. He hadn’t shaved and he was wearing his costume from The Son of the Sheik: high black boots over flowing pants, a brocaded blouse and vest, a cummerbund, a cloak, a scimitar, and a headdress. He looked like he’d lost his mind.

  Pola screeched and struggled against the spikes as he walked past her with barely a second glance. A ghost of a Change briefly warped her face into something feline, before the pain of the spikes in her arms brought her back to her human form.