by Kim Newman
“Where does it say vampires have to do kung fu fighting? Everyone else in this country carries a gun, why not me?”
For a moment, she almost felt sorry for Barbie the Slayer. Her forehead crinkled into a frown, her lower lip jutted like a sulky five-year-old’s, and tears of frustration started in her eyes. She had a lot to learn about life. If Geneviève got her wish, the girl would complete her education in Tehachapi Womens’ Prison.
A silver knife slipped close to her neck.
“Paper wraps stone,” suaved a British voice.
“Barbie doesn’t know, does she? That you’re nosferatu?”
Ernest Ralph Gorse, high-school librarian, was an epitome of tweedy middle-aged stuffiness, so stage English that he made Alistair Cooke sound like a Dead End Kid. He arched an elegant eyebrow, made an elaborate business of cleaning his granny glasses with his top-pocket hankie, and gave out a little I’m-so-wicked moue that let his curly fangs peep out from beneath his stiff upper lip.
“No, ‘fraid not. Lovely to look at, delightful to know, but frightfully thick, that’s our little Barbara.”
The Overlooker-“Yes,” he had admitted, “bloody silly name, means nothing, just sounds ‘cool’ if you’re a twit”-had sent Barbie the Slayer off with the drained detective to call at the hospital ER and the Sheriff’s office. Geneviève was left in the library in the custody of Gorse. He had made her sit in a chair, and kept well beyond arm’s length.
“You bit the Lieutenant?” she stated.
Gorse raised a finger to his lips and tutted.
“Shush now, old thing, mustn’t tell, don’t speak it aloud. Jolly bad show to give away the game and all that rot. Would you care for some instant coffee? Ghastly muck, but I’m mildly addicted to it.
It’s what comes of being cast up on these heathen shores.”
The Overlooker pottered around his desk, which was piled high with unread and probably unreadable books. He poured water from an electric kettle into an oversize green ceramic apple. She declined his offer with a headshake. He quaffed from his apple-for-the-teacher mug, and let out an exaggerated ahh of satisfaction.
“That takes the edge off. Washes down cop cut nicotin very nicely.”
“Why hasn’t she noticed?”
Gorse chuckled. “Everything poor Barbara knows about the tribes of nosferatu comes from me.
Of course, a lot of it I made up. I’m very creative, you know. It’s always been one of my skills.
Charm and persuasion, that’s the ticket. The lovely featherhead hangs on my every word. She thinks all vampires are gruesome creatures of the night, demons beyond hope of redemption, frothing beasts fit only to be put down like mad dogs. I’m well aware of the irony, old thing. Some cold evenings, the hilarity becomes almost too much to handle. Oh, the stories I’ve spun for her, the wild things she’ll believe. I’ve told her she’s the Chosen One, the only girl in the world who can shoulder the burden of the crusade against the forces of evil. Teenage girls adore that I’m-a-secret-Princess twaddle, you know. Especially the Yanks. I copped a lot of it from Star Wars. Bloody awful film, but very revealing about the state of the national mind.”
Gorse was enjoying the chance to explain things. Bottling up his cleverness had been a trial for him. She thought it was the only reason she was still alive for this performance.
“But what’s the point?”
“Originally, expedience. I’ve been ‘passing’ since I came to America. I’m not like you, sadly. I can’t flutter my lashes and have pretty girls offer their necks for the taking. I really am one of those hunt-and-kill, rend-and-drain sort of nosferatu. I tried the other way, but courtship dances just bored me rigid, and I thought, well, why not? Why not just rip open the odd throat? So, after a few months here in picturesque Shadow Bay, empties were piling up like junk mail. Then the stroke of genius came to me. I could hide behind a Vampire Slayer, and since there were none in sight I made one up.
I checked the academic records to find the dimmest dolly bird in school and recruited her for the cause. I killed her lunk of a boyfriend-captain of football team, would you believe it?-and a selection of snack-type teenagers. Then, I revealed to Barbara that her destiny was to be the Slayer. Together, we tracked and destroyed that first dread fiend-the school secretary who was nagging me about getting my employment records from Jolly Old England, as it happens-and staked the bloodlusting bitch. However, it seems she spawned before we got to her, and ever since we’ve been doing away with her murderous brood. You’ll be glad to know I’ve managed to rid this town almost completely of real estate agents. When the roll is called up yonder, that must count in the plus column, though it’s my long-term plan not to be there.”
Actually, Gorse was worse than the vampires he had made up. He’d had a choice, and decided to be evil. He worked hard on fussy geniality, modelling his accent and speech patterns on Masterpiece Theatre, but there was ice inside him, a complete vacuum.
“So, you have things working your way in Shadow Bay?” she said. “You have your little puppet theatre to play with. Why come after me?”
Gorse was wondering whether to tell her more. He pulled a half-hunter watch from his waistcoat pocket and pondered. She wondered if she could work her trick of fascination on him. Clearly, he loved to talk, was bored with dissimulation, had a real need to be appreciated. The sensible thing would have been to get this over with, but Gorse had to tell her how brilliant he was. Everything up to now had been his own story; now there was more important stuff, and he was wary of going on.
“Still time for one more story,” he said. “One more ghost story.”
Click. She had him.
He was an instinctive killer, probably a sociopath from birth, but she was his elder. The silver-bladed letter opener was never far from his fingers. She would have to judge when to jump.
“It’s a lonely life, isn’t it? Ours, I mean. Wandering through the years, wearing out your clothes, lost in a world you never made? There was a golden age for us once, in London when Dracula was on the throne. Eighteen eighty-eight and all that. You, famous girl, did your best to put a stop to that, turned us all back into nomads and parasites when we might have been masters of the universe.
Some of us want it that way again, my darling. We’ve been getting together lately, sort of like a pressure group. Not like those Transylvania fools who want to go back to the castles and the mountains, but like Him, battening onto a new, vital world, making a place for ourselves. An exalted place. He’s still our inspiration, old thing. Let’s say I did it for Dracula.”
That wasn’t enough, but it was all she was going to get now.
People were outside, coming in.
“Time flies, old thing. I’ll have to make this quick.”
Gorse took his silver pig sticker and stood over her. He thrust.
Faster than any eye could catch, her hands locked around his wrist.
“Swift filly, eh?”
She concentrated. He was strong, but she was old. The knife point dimpled her blouse. He tipped back her chair and put a knee on her stomach, pinning her down.
The silver touch was white hot.
She turned his arm and forced it upwards. The knife slid under his spectacles and the point stuck in his left eye.
Gorse screamed, and she was free of him. He raged and roared, fangs erupting from his mouth, two-inch barbs bursting from his fingertips. Bony spars, the beginnings of wings, sprouted through his jacket around the collar and pierced his leather elbow patches.
The doors opened, and people came in. Barbie and two crucifix-waving sheriff’s deputies.
The Slayer saw
(and recognised?)
the vampire and rushed across the room, stake out. Gorse caught the girl and snapped her neck, then dropped her in a dead tangle.
“Look what you made me do!” he said to Geneviève, voice distorted by the teeth but echoing from the cavern that was his reshaped mouth. “She’s broken now. It’ll take ages to
make another. I hadn’t even got to the full initiation rites. There would have been bleeding, and I was making up something about tantric sex. It would have been a real giggle, and you’ve spoiled it.”
His eye congealed, frothing grey deadness in his face.
She motioned for the deputies to stay back. They wisely kept their distance.
“Just remember,” said Gorse, directly to her, “You can’t stop Him. He’s coming back. And then, oh my best beloved, you will be as sorry a girl as ever drew a sorry breath. He is not big on forgiveness, if you get my drift.”
Gorse’s jacket shredded, and wings unfurled. He flapped into the air, rising above the first tier of bookshelves, hovering at the mezzanine level. His old-school tie dangled like a dead snake.
The deputies tried shooting at him. She supposed she would have, too.
He crashed through a tall set of windows and flew off, vast shadow blotting out the moon and falling on the bay.
The deputies holstered their guns and looked at her. She wondered for about two minutes whether she should stick with her honesty policy.
Letting a bird flutter in her voice, she said, “That man… he was a v-v-vampire.”
Then she did a pretty fair imitation of a silly girl fainting. One deputy checked her heartbeat while she was “out,” and was satisfied that she was warm. The other went to call for backup.
Through a crack in her eyelids, she studied “her” deputy. His hands might have lingered a little too long on her chest for strict medical purposes. The thought that he was the type to cop a feel from a helpless girl just about made it all right to get him into trouble by slipping silently out of the library while he was checking out the dead Slayer.
She made it undetected back to her car.
In her trailer, after another day of lassitude, she watched the early evening bulletin on Channel 6.
Anchorpersons Karen White and Lew Landers had details of the vampire killing in Shadow Bay.
Because the primary victim was a cute teenage girl, it was top story. The wounding of a decorated LAPD veteran-the Lieutenant was still alive, but off the case-also rated a flagged mention. The newscast split-screened a toothpaste commercial photograph of “Barbara Dahl Winters,” smiling under a prom queen tiara, and an “artist’s impression” of Gorse in giant bat form, with blood tastefully dripping from his fangs. Ernest “Gory” Gorse turned out to be a fugitive from Scotland Yard, with a record of petty convictions before he turned and a couple of likely murders since.
Considering a mug shot from his warm days, Karen said the killer looked like such a nice fellow, even scowling over numbers, and Lew commented that you couldn’t judge a book by its cover.
Geneviève continued paying attention, well into the next item-about a scary candlelight vigil by hooded supporters of Annie Wilkes-and turned the sound on her portable TV set down only when she was sure her name was not going to come up in connection with the Shadow Bay story.
Gorse implied she was targeted because of her well-known involvement in the overthrow of Count Dracula nearly a century ago. But that didn’t explain why he had waited until now to give her a hard time. She also gathered from what he had let slip in flirtatious hints that he wasn’t the top of the totem pole, that he was working with or perhaps for someone else.
Gorse had said: “You can’t stop Him. He’s coming back.”
Him? He?
Only one vampire inspired that sort of quondam rex que futurus talk. Before he finally died, put out of his misery, Count Dracula had used himself up completely. Geneviève was sure of that. He had outlived his era, several times over, and been confronted with his own irrelevance. His true death was just a formality.
And He was not coming back.
A woodcut image of Dracula appeared on television. She turned the sound up.
The newscast had reached the entertainment roundup, which in this town came before major wars on other continents. A fluffy-haired woman in front of the Hollywood sign was talking about the latest studio craze, Dracula pictures. A race was on between Universal and Paramount to get their biopics of the Count to the screens. At Universal, director Joel Schumacher and writer-producer Jane Wagner had cast John Travolta and Lily Tomlin in St. George’s Fire; at MGM, producer Steven Spielberg and director Tobe Hooper had Peter Coyote and Karen Allen in Vampirgeist. There was no mention of Orson Welles-or, unsurprisingly, Boris Adrian-but another familiar name came up.
John Alucard.
“Hollywood dealmakers have often been characterised as bloodsuckers,” said the reporter, “but John Alucard is the first actually to be one. Uniquely, this vampire executive is involved in both these competing projects, as a packager of the Universal production and as associate producer of the MGM film. Clearly, in a field where there are too few experts to go around, John Alucard is in demand. Unfortunately, Mr. A-as Steven Spielberg calls him-is unable because of his image impairment to grant interviews for broadcast media, but he has issued a statement to the effect that he feels there is room for far more than two versions of the story he characterises as ‘the most important of the last two centuries.’ He goes on to say, ‘There can be no definitive Dracula, but we hope we shall be able to conjure a different Dracula for every person.’ For decades, Hollywood stayed away from this hot subject but, with the Francis Coppola epic of a few years ago cropping up on Best of All Time lists, it seems we are due, like the Londoners of 1885, for a veritable invasion of Draculas. This is Kimberley Wells, for Channel 6 KDHB Update News, at the Hollywood sign.”
She switched the television off. The whole world, and Orson Welles, knew now what John Alucard was doing, but the other part of her original commission-who he was and where he came from-was still a mystery. He had come from the East, with a long line of credit. A source had told her he had skipped New York ahead of an investigation into insider-trading or junk bonds, but she might choose to put that down to typical Los Angeles cattiness. Another whisper had him living another life up in Silicon Valley as a consultant on something hush-hush President Reagan’s people were calling the Strategic Defense Initiative, supposedly Buck Rogers stuff. Alucard could also be a Romanian shoe salesman with a line of great patter who had quit his dull job and changed his name the night he learned his turning vampire wasn’t going to take in the long run and set out to become the new Irving Thalberg before he rotted away to dirt.
There must be a connection between the moviemaking mystery man and the high-school librarian.
Alucard and Gorse. Two vampires in California. She had started asking around about one of them, and the other had sent a puppet to warn her off.
John Alucard could not be Count Dracula.
Not yet, at least.
On her way up into the Hollywood Hills, to consult the only real magician she knew, she decided to call on Jack Martin, to see if he wanted to come along on the trip. The movie mage would interest him.
The door of Martin’s shack hung open.
Her heart skipped. Loose manuscript pages were drifting out of Martin’s home, catching on the breeze, and scuttling along Beverly Glen Boulevard, sticking on the manicured hedges of the million-dollar estates, brushing across the white-painted faces of lawn jockeys who had been coal black until Sidney Poitier made a fuss.
She knocked on the door, which popped a hinge and hung free.
“Jack?”
Had Gorse gotten to him?
She ventured inside, prepared to find walls dripping red and a ruined corpse lying in a nest of torn-up screenplays.
Martin lay on a beat-up sofa, mouth open, snoring slightly. He was no more battered than usual.
A Mexican wrestling magazine was open on his round tummy.
“Jack?”
He came awake, blearily.
“It’s you,” he said, cold.
His tone was like a silver knife.
“What’s the matter?”
“As if you didn’t know. You’re not good to be around, Gené. Not good at all. You don’t
see it, but you’re a wrecker.”
She backed away.
“Someone tipped off the Writers’ Guild about the porno. My ticket got yanked; my dues were not accepted. I’m off the list. I’m off all the lists. All possible lists. I didn’t get Buck Privates. They went with Lionel Fenn.”
“There’ll be other projects,” she said.
“I’ll be lucky to get Buck’s Privates.”
Martin had been drinking, but didn’t need to get drunk to be in this despair hole. It was where he went sometimes, a mental space like Ensenada, where he slunk to wallow, to soak up the misery he turned into prose. This time, she had an idea he wasn’t coming back; he was going lower than ever and would end up a beachcomber on a nighted seashore, picking broken skulls out of bloody seaweed, trailing bare feet through ink black surf, becoming the exile king of his own dark country.
“It just took a phone call, Gené To smash everything. To smash me. I wasn’t even worth killing.
That hurts. You, they’ll kill. I don’t want you to be near me when it happens.”
“Does this mean our premiere date is off?”
She shouldn’t have said that. Martin began crying, softly. It was a shocking scene, upsetting to her on a level she had thought she had escaped from. He wasn’t just depressed, he was scared.
“Go away, Gené,” he said.
This was not a jaunt any more. Jack Martin was as lost to her as Moondoggie, as her license.
How could things change so fast? It wasn’t the second week of January, wasn’t the Julian 1980s, but everything that had seemed certain last year, last decade, was up for debate or thrown away.
There was a cruelty at work. Beyond Gorse.
She parked the Plymouth and walked across a lawn to a ranch-style bungalow. A cabalist firmament of star signs decorated the mailbox.
The mage was a trim, fiftyish man, handsome but small, less a fallen angel than a fallen cherub. He wore ceremonial robes to receive her into his sanctum sanctorum, an arrangement of literal shrines to movie stars of the 1920s and ‘30s: Theda Bara, Norma Desmond, Clara Bow, Lina Lamont, Jean Harlow, Blanche Hudson, Myrna Loy. His all-seeing amulet contained a long-lashed black-and-white eye, taken from a still of Rudolph Valentino. His boots were black leather motorcycle gear, with polished chrome buckles and studs.
