by Kim Newman
“And why am I here?”
Martin looked around to make sure he wasn’t overheard, and whispered, “This is it, this is his.
Debbie’s a front. This is un film de John Alucard.”
“It’s not Orson Welles.”
“But it’s a start.”
A dark girl, kimono loose, walked through the kitchen, carrying a couple of live white rats in one hand, muttering to herself about “the Master.” Martin tried to say hello, but she breezed past, deeply into her role, eyes drifting. She lingered a moment on Geneviève, but wafted out onto the patio and was given a mildly sarcastic round of applause.
“That’s Kelly Nicholls,” said Martin. “She plays Renfield. In this version, it’s not flies she eats, not in the usual sense. This picture has a great cast: Dirk Diggler as Dracula, Jennifer Welles as Mina, Holly Body as Lucy, Big John Holmes as Van Helsing.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this yesterday?”
“I didn’t know then.”
“But you’re the screenwriter. You can’t have been hired and written the whole thing to be shot this afternoon.”
“I’m the rewriter. Even for the adult industry, their first pass at the script blew dead cats. It was called Dracula Sucks, and boy did it ever. They couldn’t lick it, as it were. It’s the subject, Dracula.
You know what they say about the curse, the way it struck down Coppola in Romania. I’ve spent the day doing a page one rewrite.”
Someone shouted, “Quiet on set,” and Martin motioned Geneviève to come outside with him to watch the shooting.
“The next scene is Dracula’s entrance. He hauls the three vampire bitches-pardon the expression-off Jonathan and, ah, well, you can imagine, satiates them, before tossing them the baby in a bag.”
“I was just offered a role in the scene. I passed.”
Martin harrumphed. Unsure about this whole thing, she began to follow.
A movement in an alcove distracted her. A pleasant-faced warm young man sat in there, hunched over a sideboard. He wore evening dress trousers and a bat-winged black cloak but nothing else. His hair was black and smoothed back, with a prominent widow’s peak painted on his forehead. For a supposed vampire, he had a decent tan.
He had a rolled-up ten-dollar bill stuck in his nose.
A line of red dust was on the sideboard. He bent over and snuffed it up. She had heard of drac but never seen it.
The effect on the young man was instant. His eyes shone like bloodied marbles. Fang-teeth shot out like switchblades.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he said. “Instant vamp!”
He flowed upright, unbending from the alcove, and slid across the floor on bare feet. He wasn’t warm, wasn’t a vampire, but something in between-a dhampire-that wouldn’t last more than an hour.
“Where’s Dracula?” shouted Boris Adrian. “Has he got the fangs-on yet?”
“I am Dracula,” intoned the youth, as much to himself, convincing himself. “I am Dracula!”
As he pushed past her, Geneviève noticed the actor’s trousers were held together at the fly and down the sides by strips of Velcro. She could imagine why.
She felt obscurely threatened. Drac-manufactured from vampire blood-was extremely expensive and highly addictive. In her own veins flowed the raw material of many a valuable fangs-on instant vamp fugue. In New York, where the craze came from, vampires had been kidnapped and slowly bled empty to make the foul stuff.
Geneviève followed the dhampire star. He reached out his arms like a wingspread, cloak billowing, and walked across the covered swimming pool, almost flying, as if weightless, skipping over sagging puddles and, without toppling or using his hands, made it over the far edge. He stood at poolside and let the cloak settle on his shoulders.
“I’m ready,” he hissed through fangs.
The three fake vampire girls in the gazebo huddled together, a little afraid. They weren’t looking at Dracula’s face, his hypnotic eyes and fierce fangs, but at his trousers. Geneviève realised there were other properties of drac that she hadn’t read about in the newspapers.
The long-haired kid who had spoken to her was working a pulley. A shiny cardboard full moon rose above the gazebo. Other assistants held bats on fishing lines. Boris Adrian nodded approval at the atmosphere.
“Well, Count, go to it,” the director ordered. “Action.”
The camera began to roll as Dracula strode up to the gazebo, cloak rippling. The girls writhed over the prone guy, Jonathan Harker, and awaited the coming of their dark prince.
“This man is mine,” said Dracula, in a Californian drawl that owed nothing to Transylvania. “As you all are mine, you vampire bitches, you horny vampire bitches.”
Martin silently recited the lines along with the actor, eyes alight with innocent glee.
“You never love,” said the least-fanged of the girls, who had short blonde hair, “you yourself have never loved.”
“That is not true, as you know well and as I shall prove to all three of you. In succession, and together. Now.”
The rip of Velcro preceded a gasp from the whole crew. Dirk Diggler’s famous organ was bloodred and angry. She wondered if he could stab a person with it and suck their blood, or was that just a rumour like the Tijuana werewolf show Martin spent his vacations trying to track down.
The “vampire bitches” huddled in apparently real terror.
“Whatever he’s taking, I want some of it,” breathed Martin.
Later, in an empty all-night diner, Martin was still excited about Debbie Does Dracula. Not really sexually, though she didn’t underestimate his prurience, but mostly high on having his words read out, caught on film. Even as “Bram Stroker,” he had pride in his work.
“It’s a stopgap till the real projects come through,” he said, waving a deadly cigarette. “But it’s cash in hand, Gené. Cash in hand. I don’t have to hock the typewriter. Debbie wants me for the sequel they’re making next week, Taste the Cum of Dracula, but I may pass. I’ve got something set up at Universal, near as damn it. A remake of Buck Privates, with Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. It’s between me and this one other guy, Lionel Fenn, and Fenn’s a drac-head from the East with a burnout date stamped on his forehead. I tell you, Gené, it’s adios to “Bram Stroker” and “William Forkner” and “Charles Dickings.” You’ll be my date for the premiere, won’t you? You pretty up good, don’t you? When the name Jack Martin means something in this town, I want to direct.”
He was tripping on dreams. She brought him down again.
“Why would John Alucard be in bed with Boris Adrian?” she asked.
“And Debbie Griffith,” he said. “I don’t know. There’s an invisible barrier between adult and legit.
It’s like a parallel world. The adult industry has its own stars and genres and awards shows. No one ever crosses. Oh, some of the girls do bit parts. Kelly was in The Toolbox Murders, with Cameron Mitchell.”
“I missed that one.”
“I didn’t. She was the chickie in the bath, who gets it with a nail gun. Anyway, that was a fluke.
You hear stories that Stallone made a skin flick once, and that some on-the-skids directors take paying gigs under pseudonyms.”
“Like ‘Bram Stroker’?”
Martin nodded, in his flow. “But it’s not an apprenticeship, not really. Coppola shot nudies, but that was different. Just skin, no sex. Tame now. Nostalgia bait. You’ve got to trust me, Gené, don’t tell anyone, and I mean not anyone, that I’m ‘Bram Stroker.’ It’s a crucial time for me, a knife edge between the big ring and the wash-out ward. I really need this Buck Privates deal. If it comes to it, I want to hire you to scare off Fenn. You do hauntings, don’t you?”
She waved away his panic, her fingers drifting through his nicotine cloud.
“Maybe Alucard wants to raise cash quickly?” she suggested.
“Could be. Though the way Debbie tells it, he isn’t just a sleeping partner. He originated the whole idea, got her and Boris to
gether, borrowed Dirk from Jack Homer, even-and I didn’t tell you this-supplied the bloody nose candy that gave Dracula’s performance the added frisson.”
It was sounding familiar.
“Did he write the script?” she asked. “The first script?”
“Certainly no writer did. It might be Mr. A. There was no name on the title page.”
“It’s not a porno movie he wants, not primarily,” she said. “It’s a Dracula movie. Another one.
Yet another one.”
Martin called for a coffee refill. The ancient, slightly mouldy character who was the sole staff of the Nighthawks Diner shambled over, coffee sloshing in the glass jug.
“Look at this guy,” Martin said. “You’d swear he was a goddamned reanimated corpse. No offence, Gene, but you know what I mean. Maybe he’s a dhamp. I hear they zombie out after a while, after they’ve burned their bat cells.”
Deaf to the discussion, the shambler sloshed coffee in Martin’s mug. Here, in Jack Martin heaven, there were infinite refills. He exhaled contented plumes of smoke.
“Jack, I have to warn you. This case might be getting dangerous. A friend of mine was killed last night, as a warning. And the police like me for it. I can’t prove anything, but it might be that asking about Alucard isn’t good for your health. Still, keep your ears open. I know about two John Alucard productions now, and I’d like to collect the set. I have a feeling he’s a one-note musician, but I want that confirmed.”
“You think he only makes Dracula movies?”
“I think he only makes Dracula.”
She didn’t know what she meant by that, but it sounded horribly right.
There was night enough left after Martin had peeled off home to check in with the client.
Geneviève knew Welles would still be holding court at four in the morning.
He was running footage.
“Come in, come in,” he boomed.
Most of the crew she had met the night before were strewn on cushions or rugs in the den, along with a few newcomers, movie brats and law professors and a very old, very grave black man in a bright orange dashiki. Gary, the cameraman, was working the projector.
They were screening the scene she had seen shot, projecting the picture onto the tapestry over the fireplace. Van Helsing tormented by vampire symbols. It was strange to see Welles’s huge, bearded face, the luminous skull, the flapping bat and the dripping dagger slide across the stiff, formal image of the mediaeval forest scene.
Clearly, Welles was in midperformance, almost holding a dialogue with his screen self, and wouldn’t detach himself from the show so she could report her preliminary findings to him.
She found herself drifting into the yard. There were people there, too. Nico, the vampire starlet, had just finished feeding, and lay on her back, looking up at the stars, licking blood from her lips and chin. She was a messy eater. A too-pretty young man staggered upright, shaking his head to dispel dizziness. His clothes were Rodeo Drive, but last year’s in a town where last week was another era.
She didn’t have to sample Nico’s broadcast thoughts to put him down as a rich kid who had found a new craze to blow his trust-fund money on, and her crawling skin told her it wasn’t a sports car.
“Your turn,” he said to Nico, nagging.
She kept to the shadows. Nico had seen her, but her partner was too preoccupied to notice anyone. The smear on his neck gave Geneviève a little prick of thirst.
Nico sat up with great weariness, the moment of repletion spoiled. She took a tiny paring knife from her clutch purse. It glinted, silvered. The boy sat eagerly beside her and rolled up the left sleeve of her loose muslin blouse, exposing her upper arm. Geneviève saw the row of striped scars she had noticed last night. Carefully, the vampire girl opened a scar and let her blood trickle. The boy fixed his mouth over the wound. She held his hair in her fist.
“Remember, lick,” she said. “Don’t suck. You won’t be able to take a full fangs-on.”
His throat pulsed, as he swallowed.
With a roar, the boy let the girl go. He had the eyes and the fangs, even more than Dirk Diggler’s Dracula. He moved fast, a temporary newborn high on all the extra senses and the sheer sense of power.
The dhampire put on wraparound mirror shades, ran razor-nailed hands through his gelled hair and stalked off to haunt the La-La night. Within a couple of hours, he would be a real live boy again.
By that time, he could have got himself into all manner of scrapes.
Nico squeezed shut her wound. Geneviève caught her pain. The silver knife would be dangerous if it flaked in the cut. For a vampire, silver rot was like bad gangrene.
“It’s not my place to say anything,” began Geneviève.
“Then don’t,” said Nico, though she clearly received what Geneviève was thinking. “You’re an elder. You can’t know what it’s like.”
She had a flash that this newborn would never be old. What a pity.
“It’s a simple exchange,” said the girl. “Blood for blood. A gallon for a scratch. The economy is in our favour. Just like the President says.”
Geneviève joined Nico at the edge of the property.
“This vampire trip really isn’t working for me,” said Nico. “That boy, Julian, will be warm again in the morning, mortal and with a reflection. And when he wants to, he’ll be a vampire. If I’m not here, there are others. You can score drac on Hollywood Boulevard for twenty-five dollars a suck. Vile stuff, powdered, not from the tap, but it works.”
Geneviève tidied Nico’s hair. The girl lay on her lap, sobbing silently. She hadn’t just lost blood.
This happened when you became an elder. You were mother and sister to the whole world of the undead.
The girl’s despair passed. Her eyes were bright, with Julian’s blood.
“Let’s hunt, Elder, like you did in Transylvania.”
“I’m from France. I’ve never even been to Romania.”
Now she mentioned it, that was odd. She’d been almost everywhere else. Without consciously thinking of it, she must have been avoiding the supposed homeland of the nosferatu.
“There are human cattle out there,” said Nico. “I know all the clubs. X is playing at the Roxy, if you like West Coast punk. And the doorman at After Hours always lets us in, vampire girls. There are so few of us. We go to the head of the line. Powers of fascination.”
“Human cattle” was a real newborn expression. This close to dawn, Geneviève was thinking of her cosy trailer and shutting out the sun, but Nico was a race-the-dawn girl, staying out until it was practically light, bleeding her last as the red circle rose in the sky.
She wondered if she should stick close to the girl, keep her out of trouble. Why? She couldn’t protect everyone. She barely knew Nico, probably had nothing in common with her.
She remembered Moondoggie. And all the other dead, the ones she hadn’t been able to help, hadn’t tried to help, hadn’t known about in time.
This girl really was none of her business.
“What’s that?” said Nico, head darting. There was a noise from beyond the fence at the end of the garden.
Dominating the next property was a three-storey wooden mansion, California cheesecake. Nico might have called it old. Now Geneviève’s attention was drawn to it, her night eyes saw how strange the place was. A rusted-out pickup truck was on cinderblocks in the yard, with a pile of ragged auto tires next to it. The windshield was smashed out, and dried streaks-which any vampire would have scented as human blood, even after ten years-marked the hood.
“Who lives there?” Geneviève asked.
“In-bred backwoods brood,” said Nico. “Orson says they struck it rich down in Texas, and moved to Beverly Hills. You know: swimming pools, movie stars…”
“Oil?”
“Chili sauce recipe. Have you heard of Sawyer’s Sauce?” Geneviève hadn’t. “I guess not. I’ve not taken solid foods since I turned, though if I don’t feed for a night or two I get
this terrible phantom craving for those really shitty White Castle burgers. I suppose that if you don’t get to the market, you don’t know the brand names.”
“The Sawyers brought Texas style with them,” Geneviève observed. “That truck’s a period piece.”
The back porch was hung with mobiles of bones and nail-impaled alarm clocks. She saw a napping chicken, stuffed inside a canary cage.
“What’s that noise?” Nico asked.
There was a wasplike buzzing, muted. Geneviève scented burning gas. Her teeth were on edge.
“Power tool,” she said. “Funny time of the night for warm folks to be doing carpentry.”
“I don’t think they’re all entirely warm. I saw some gross Grandpaw peeping out the other night, face like dried leather, licking livery lips. If he isn’t undead, he’s certainly nothing like alive.”
There was a stench in the air. Spoiled meat.
“Come on, let’s snoop around,” said Nico, springing up. She vaulted over the low fence dividing the properties and crept across the yard like a four-legged crab.
Geneviève thought that was unwise, but followed, standing upright and keeping to shadows.
This really was none of her business.
Nico was on the porch now, looking at the mobiles. Geneviève wasn’t sure whether it was primitive art or voodoo. Some of the stick-and-bone dangles were roughly man-shaped.
“Come away,” she said.
“Not just yet.”
Nico examined the back door. It hung open, an impenetrable dark beyond. The buzzing was still coming from inside the ramshackle house.
Geneviève knew sudden death was near, walking like a man.
She called to Nico, more urgently.
Something small and fast came, not from inside the house but from the flatbed of the abandoned truck. The shape cartwheeled across the yard to the porch and collided purposefully with Nico. A length of wood pierced the vampire girl’s thin chest. A look, more of surprise than pain or horror, froze on her face.
Geneviève felt the thrust in her own heart, then the silence in her mind. Nico was gone, in an instant.
