Anno Dracula 1999

by Kim Newman

  Molinar anticipated Dr Pretorius’s fall from favour – to be followed immediately by a fall from Floor 88. He imagined diving off the balcony alongside the alchemist. Sprouting wings through tailored vents in his Logsdail, he’d keep pace with the plummeting jackanapes. Then, after explosive impact, he’d thrust his face into a man-shaped carpet spread across flagstones and feed. He hadn’t washed with the blood of an enemy in a hundred and fifty years.

  Until that glorious night came – and, after the Ascension, who knew what plane the doctor’s Princess and Protector would occupy? – he was required to report, salute and pay attention. Pretorius never had good news.

  Molinar pulled a Victorian bell-rope that set off chimes, then had to stand on a ratty mat and look at a camera to be recognised. The bell-pull was a relic filched from the London home of the well-remembered researcher Henry Jekyll. Dr Pretorius prized ugly oddments with evil associations.

  Antique foyer mirrors reminded vampire callers that they weren’t really alive.

  Molinar didn’t care that he had no reflection. A valet trimmed his beard.

  The Princess’s guests were arriving, already causing headaches and ulcers. Senator Blutarski was drunk and pestering the prettier staff, asking where the real shindig was. The hospitality was too stuffy for his liking. He was sure an A-list orgy was getting started elsewhere in the building.

  A buzz came in on the wrist radio from Officer Saki-A in the Plaza. Some Aum Draht altercation. Saki-A worked for LI but also Bund PD. Molinar had wanted to bar all eyeheads, but Chief Inugami nixed that. The Treaty of Light was expiring and the Bund was supposed to be welcoming. After the handover, things would run smoothly. As a major employer, LI could demand whatever policing they paid for. The old dog would be let go.

  For the next few hours, he’d put up with it.

  From a security point of view, the evening would run more to his liking if no one showed up. Christina could do her party piece in an empty ballroom, debut her new gown, pirouette in sparkles, make a speech, and ascend to her mysterious higher plane. The staff would clap and cheer. The Light Channel had a global reach so the world would know how wise she was within minutes of midnight.

  Why did she need an in-person audience?

  Molinar knew the answer. The Fairy Princess was a vampire.

  Mostly too insubstantial to take blood, she drank admiration, excitement, emotion, applause. She was a draining woman. Everyone noticed that. Christina needed warm – or not-warm – bodies in the room.

  Going by traditional undead rankings, Simòn de Molinar y Vazquez was an elder and Christina Light a new-born. He was the offspring of Don Sebastian de Villanueva, turned vampire in 1521. She was one of the multitude who rushed to rebirth during the chaos that followed the Dracula Declaration of 1885. But she had her hook in him. She was the Fairy Princess and he the Coachman Rat. Not even a courtier. Staff, with a gun.

  Adventuring with Cortés in Mexico, Molinar had the Dark Kiss forced on him. He happened to be in the tent when Villanueva needed a mine canary to test a rumour. Xochitl, high priestess of Tezcatlipoca, was said to have a sorcerous knack of turning a vampire heart to dead stone with a look. She didn’t. When Molinar survived the Evil Eye of True Death, Villanueva – another blasted alchemist! – lost interest. Neglecting his obligation as father-in-darkness, he left Molinar to fend for himself – admittedly in a land where human blood was easy to come by. Bowls of fresh gore adorned every altar and pyramid.

  Like many soldier-vampires, Molinar spent centuries marching under whatever flag paid in gold rather than silver. Before Dracula, armies had a don’t ask/don’t tell policy about nosferatu berserkers. So long as they bit enemy throats, they found a billet. He ranged up and down the Americas, a continent never short of wars. He only slunk back to Europe with the French when Maximilian was shot. After the Declaration, he went to London and joined the Carpathian Guard. The wearisome company of brutal, puffed-up Slavs prompted him to petition Dracula’s Prime Minister, Lord Ruthven. Molinar became Captain of the Guard for 10, Downing Street.

  He met Christina when arresting her after a botched terrorist outrage. That was early in her career, before she embarked on her quest to establish a safe haven for vampires who didn’t recognise Dracula as King of Anything. The disembodied Princess was embedded in the stone of the Tower of London. Getting silver cuffs on her was a problem. While he puzzled it out, she glittered at him. He’d been warned of her effect on the male animal. Katharine Reed, the reporter who blew the whistle on the plot, kept insisting the Princess should be detained and guarded only by women. She should have been listened to.

  Molinar had been under the spell so long he couldn’t even say if it had worn off. He’d prospered under her patronage. Cashiered when Dracula was finally dragged off the English throne, he sought sanctuary in the Bund and was promoted swiftly through the ranks of the Princess’s socialist utopia. Christina needed her back watched while she busied herself with good works.

  The Fairy Princess didn’t want a castle, but a palace. From experience, Molinar knew a palace was a castle with fancier curtains. But Christina must shine. It was the dominant trait of her bloodline. But did she have to shine out of a towering lamp shaped like a prickly dinosaur? She reminded him of that Xochitl. Not just a priestess, but the earthly shell of a god.

  He would have liked to lock all doors, batten hatches, and do a headcount every eight hours. Even then, there’d be security issues. The Daikaiju Building showed the folly of putting all available eggs in the biggest possible basket. Its roaring stance seemed to invite ground fire – and Molinar kept imagining rocket attacks, shells bursting against windows, missiles streaking at the dragon’s eyes.

  Molinar made do with a stretched, but reliable staff. Vampires he could count on. Marit Verlaine, his Segundo, and Mitsuru Fujiwara, who ran the surveillance/communication systems. Knowing everything was the same as being everywhere, Fujiwara said. He’d tried to get a feed from Pretorius’s laboratory using robot insects, but the alchemist caught them and fed the crushed remains to his plants.

  He’d never ranked above Captain in anyone’s army. Now, he was a general. That was what Executive Vice-President meant. Kings put about that they only submitted to the burden of a crown because their subjects loved and needed them, but hired the best generals they could find. They all actually ruled by fear, the sword and the boot.

  Molinar had the keys and kept the enemies lists. From Floor 88, he could reach across the world. Light Industries was everywhere. He could have Don Sebastian dirked in Malibu tonight and be using his brain-pan as office spittoon tomorrow.

  But he still had to stand on Dr Pretorius’s mat and look in the camera.

  A screen above the lens filled with a staring eye and feathery brow.

  The door opened with a recorded creak.

  RICHARD JEPERSON

  Men with guns telling crowds to be calm seldom got what they asked for.

  With no secure perimeter around the incident, onlookers found other places to be. Few chose to linger where there was a likelihood of incineration, amputation, or having their going-out clothes splattered with a bio-terror agent. Outsiders hurried towards the Daikaiju Building. Locals scarpered to regular haunts. No one volunteered to be examined ‘for signs of contagion’.

  The CO of the Emergency Response Team wasn’t that fussed to lose the crowd.

  A casual attitude. Not what Richard expected.

  He noticed Syrie Van Epp – shoes off– smartly heading back to the Gate.

  He followed her thinking. If there was to be a secure perimeter, the logical move would be to seal the Bund – trapping the entire population and a host of invited guests in a potential hot zone. Was that the terrorist plan? A strike against a predominantly vampire community? To keep the Wall up beyond midnight?

  It took a lot to make Syrie miss a party.

  Did she know something he didn’t? She was Aum Draht, like the pair of deuces who’d tried to kill everyone. She
wasn’t in on it, since she’d been in harm’s way. Still, she might have a fair idea of the mischief capabilities of the radical wing of her fruitcake church.

  ‘Detective Azuma,’ he said, and pointed at Syrie.

  The cop’s vulture eye swivelled and he picked up Richard’s meaning.

  Azuma spoke, loudly.

  Without knowing much Japanese, Richard caught the drift from a universal copper’s tone of voice when addressing a shifty member of the public, ‘Stop right there, missy, my girl, and prepare to assist the constabulary with their enquiries.’

  Syrie froze, shoulders hitched.

  She looked like a Christian Crusade activist caught shoplifting dodgy videos in Mary Millington’s Sex Supermarket.

  One of the v-girl cops laid the traditional hand on Syrie’s bare shoulder, a symbolic ‘got you’ tag.

  Richard hadn’t acted gallantly but, even if the vampire socialite wasn’t going to spread Terror Fungus, she was a witness worth interviewing. A possible person of interest.

  He earned a sticker for being helpful to the boys in blue.

  On instinct, he trusted Azuma more than the blokes in the battletruck. Gussied-up sten guns didn’t go well with decontamination suits. They acted as if they were here to clean up not help out.

  His hunches were usually worth paying attention to.

  Nurse Nezumi surrendered her patients – the passed-out plod and the defanged suicide bomber – to the newcomers. The squad ran at a ratio of five gun-pointing goons to every one medical bag-toting clinician.

  So far, this wasn’t an outbreak – just a nasty trickle.

  He looked at his hands, which weren’t sprouting colourful fungus.

  He felt his face, which was not sliding off his skull.

  His layman’s self-diagnosis was ‘all clear’.

  He’d been close enough to breathe in a lungful of pathogen. So had Nezumi, Syrie, and a dozen others who weren’t screaming mushroom patches. Some extra factor was involved in the young officer being stricken. One for the labcoats to grapple with.

  Conscious of his hypocrisy, he pulled the manoeuvre he’d blown the whistle on Syrie for trying. Taking a few steps back from the kerb, he slipped into the mainstream of the procession. He nodded to Nezumi to come along. He had a sense the real action wasn’t down in the Plaza.

  More than ever, he needed to be at the party in the Head of the Dragon.

  All roads lead to Christina Light. She was up there, shining down.

  He shoulder-bumped someone broad, standing still amid human flow.

  Mr Horror.

  Thin lips parted to show iron fangs.

  ‘You should get those choppers seen to,’ said Richard. ‘You may have grounds to sue your dentist for malpractice.’

  Nezumi’s thumb went to the stopper of her poster tube.

  Several guns were raised.

  Richard was petard-hoisted. Mr Horror peached him out the way he’d grassed up Syrie.

  He opted to de-escalate the situation.

  ‘Everybody be a polar bear,’ he said, hands open and out but not stuck up. ‘Polar bears are cool, right? I’ll turn myself over to whoever is in charge of the medical side of things.’

  Translation: I’ll talk to a doctor, not a gunman.

  Nezumi rendered what he’d said into diplomatic Japanese.

  The guns held steady. Eyes fixed on him, glaring through helmet windows. Pigsnout breathing filters wheezed.

  The pukka ruler-of-all-he’d-conquered type ignored the developing stand-off, but one of the doctor johnnies perked up. The surviving culprit would most likely prove intransigent and/or incoherent, so Richard was the response unit’s best bet for a sitrep. Guns wavered as the doc signalled, then pointed down at the asphalt.

  A little-noted corollary to Chekhov’s First Rule of Drama is that if you give a man a rifle in Act One, he’ll immediately want to shoot someone. Towards the end of Act Two, the itch becomes too strong to resist. Act Three is guest-scripted by Quentin Tarantino.

  A wasp-waisted vampire slid throwing knives back into thigh-sheaths. Her coverall was cinched with a utility belt. Not an inherently fetching outfit, but worn well.

  Nezumi comfortably backslung her poster tube. Good girl.

  Mr Horror barred Richard’s escape until the sawbones took custody.

  Odd. Richard would not have pegged Rusty Puss as particularly civic-minded.

  He must be following orders from inside the hearse. Given half a chance, anyone who flew the Dracula standard would put one over on the Diogenes Club. The long-lived have long memories.

  Or it could be that Horowitz took it into his tiny nut to be a prick this evening. Some folk were like that.

  The doctor johnny escorted Richard to his bus.

  Only then did he clock the burning pyramid logo. He knew who these people were, or at least who they were from: EarthGuard. Most countries had similar departments. In a roundabout way, they imitated the Diogenes Club – though the French liked to point out their Opera Ghost Agency was founded earlier. Someone had to deal with affairs too terrifying for the regular police, armed forces and intelligence services. Preferably hush-hush and on the QT.

  America’s Unnameables – a Federal Bureau of Investigation, as distinct from the Federal Bureau of Investigation – were tasked with keeping a lid on paraphenomena. They’d been cooking up cover stories since the Mary Celeste and were behind a generations-long ad campaign selling the myth of unidentified flying objects. They preferred Americans watch the skies rather than worry about spooks under their noses. Germany’s Lohmann Branch and Russia’s Night Watch policed similar shadowlands. Even Wings Over the World had a Ghost Division.

  In the 1920s, the private eye Kogorō Akechi founded Japan’s Boy Detectives Club. An admirer of Mycroft Holmes, he appropriated the Diogenes Club methodology, rallying investigators against the Fiend With Twenty Faces, the Black Lizard and other threats that now seemed almost quaint. After the War, technocrats took over. The Boy Detectives lost amateur status and evolved into EarthGuard, an unpublicised branch of the JSDF.

  EarthGuard’s best remembered exploit was saving Expo 70 in Osaka – held to celebrate ‘progress and harmony for mankind’ – from an attack by a huge kappa, a grudge-holding vampire turtle.

  So, soldiers, not mercs.

  But these EarthGuard personnel weren’t acting like soldiers.

  Still, as someone said while reviewing On the Beach, whatever constituted normal behaviour in these circumstances was anybody’s guess. Most of Richard’s life had been spent ‘in these circumstances’ and he was none the wiser.

  Under General Gokemidoro, EarthGuard deployed maser tanks, soldiers in exo-skeletons, and all manner of murder-tech. For obvious reasons, Japan cooled on militarism after 1945. EarthGuard hadn’t got that memo. A faction – Kaname Kuran, Subaru Sumiyagi, Kyoichi Kagenuma – stubbornly preferred the plod of investigation to firing bigger and bigger weapons. Admittedly, they had advantages. Kuran was Christina’s chief rival – the vampire Lord of Tokyo (excluding the Bund). Sumiyagi was an onmyōji, a sorcerer who could command demons. Kagenuma was a psychic detective who solved cases by waltzing through people’s dreams. None of them were here. This Gokemidoro-sanctioned unit brought firepower not skills. Shooting at the problem had worked against the big turtle. The tactic was always high up on EarthGuard’s list of preferred options.

  The doctor helped Richard up inside the armoured dustcart.

  ‘You speak English,’ he said, voice tinny through an amplifier in his helmet.

  ‘I am English,’ Richard responded.

  ‘Princess Diana, crumpets, Merry Christmas Mr Bean,’ the doctor said. ‘Brown Windsor soup.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Richard. ‘That England.’

  He hoped the doctor hadn’t used up all his vocabulary in one burst.

  ‘I am Dr Akiba. You have been exposed to weaponised fungus with a fatality rate of one hundred percent. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, I understa
nd.’

  ‘Good. So why aren’t you dead?’

  SI MOLINAR

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said Dr Pretorius from a tennis umpire’s chair perched on fifteen-foot stilts.

  ‘The Gods despair of dawdlers.’ The alchemist wore a starched white tunic and elbow-length black rubber gloves. Goggles with a dozen adjustable lenses held back his explosion of hair. He sat in the middle of a circle of keyboards and control panels.

  Not a vampire, he was alive beyond his allotted years. He said he was pickled in spirits but made no effort to quash rumours that he’d traded his soul to the Devil. Molinar wondered if the Mad Gnome dyed his nostril hair. He had birdnest nose-plugs. His chin got pointier every time he stroked it.

  A saluting automaton – a toy soldier’s helmeted, moustached head bobbing on a spring stuck out of a vacuum cleaner – ushered Molinar into the laboratory, bleeping and burbling in robot language. Its spherical form was dented. Visitors couldn’t resist kicking it.

  The door shut behind Molinar and multiple locks engaged.

  Dr Pretorius had taken over a cathedral space in the core of the building. The name of his laboratory changed from week to week, but it was currently called the Integratron. With no exterior windows, the sanctum was cut off from direct contact with the outside world. The walls and ceiling – even support columns and sections of the floor – were hung with screens. Half emitted the bluish white glow of the Light Channel. The rest were live feeds, abstract art pieces, graphs and lifelines, disco lamps, old movies, www.porn, pirate videos, spycam views from around the building and the city, Indian cricket matches, and Transylvanian Big Brother. The wiring was a nightmare. Short circuits were part of the system. Cascades of sparks fell from the eaves. Spider-limbed mobile extinguishers crawled the walls, puffing squidgy white foam to douse fires.