Brewer wasn’t sure whether the adjective referred to Jenny, or to him, or to both of them, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to feign misunderstanding. “I guess a cohort of whores is about as congenial as you can get,” he said, “if you’re that way inclined.”
He cast a calculatedly negligent glance in Jenny’s direction, and saw that he had wounded her, but Marlow remained unmoved. If the ex-vampire was as old as Brewer suspected, he was probably unmovable. He’d probably been undead for a very long time—but at least he’d had nightmares all the while. There had been a taint of Hell in his unholy existence, and might be still, even in a world which was on the verge of conquering all the Hells of old: disease, death, pain and misery.
“Where should I have looked for volunteers?” Marklow asked, in all apparent earnest. “Prisons? Cardboard City?”
“Old people’s homes?” Brewer countered, not at all earnestly. “Not sufficiently unobtrusive, I suppose. You do plan to remain unobtrusive, I suppose, even when you start serious marketing. The rich will want to keep it to themselves, of course. They appreciate confidentiality. Vampires, the lot of them—they think of mere human beings as cattle. That’s why you thought of me when you wondered how best to expand your operation, I suppose. You think I’m a kind of vampire too, because I sell illegal happy pills to pimps and whores, kids and hackers.”
“You’re not any real kind of vampire yet,” Marklow responded, mildly. “You’ll have to work at it. It sometimes takes half a dozen shots before the rickettsias are permanently established. But once they’re set, they’re set for life—and that could be a long time.”
“How long?” Brewer wanted to know.
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” Count Dracula told him. “We’re dealing with a new strain, after all.”
“How good was the old strain?” Brewer persisted.
“I don’t know,” Marklow replied, “the oldest men I ever knew had forgotten long ago how old they were. Arithmetic hadn’t been invented when they were young. Nor had writing—but fire had. Fire and wooden spears. By the time writing was invented the war was almost lost. The rickettsia almost went the way of the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, and the thousand other species neolithic man hounded to extinction. Mercifully, it survived. Mercifully, I survived with it. Now, the new era is dawning. Soon, I won’t have to hide any more. Together, you and I and all of Jenny’s friends ... we shall be the midwives of the Ubermenschen, as you so tactfully put it.”
Brewer could see that Jenny felt uncomfortable. She knew that an important boundary had been crossed when Marklow first allowed the word “vampire” to cross his lips. He was exposed now, and so was she. She was afraid—but Marklow wasn’t. He had grown out of fear long ago. He still retained the ability to terrify, but he couldn’t identify with those he terrified. He gave the impression of knowing more about his victims than they knew themselves, but he didn’t. He thought that he was still, essentially, a man—but he didn’t know human beings at all. Perhaps it had been a mistake for him to try so hard to become harmless, to become a saint instead of a devil.
“Togetherness,” Brewer told him, sardonically, “is a wonderful thing.”
Bang on cue, the doorbell rang. Not the bell that rang when someone was downstairs, outside the reinforced doors of the building, but the discreet chime which signalled that someone was at the door of the apartment.
Marklow knew as well as Brewer did that anyone with the skill to get that far without being detected didn’t need to sound the chime -that the gesture was a kind of mockery.
“Don’t get up,” Brewer said to Jenny. “I think that’s for me.”
~ * ~
Brewer had instructed the man with the rifle not to take any chances; he had seen how quickly Marklow could move and how powerfully he could hit out. The marksman fired as soon as he was sure of his shot, and Marklow slumped to the floor.
It was the shock of the impact that had felled him but the ex-vampire’s attempt to rise to his feet was all in vain. The tranquillizer-dart would have sent a horse to sleep, or even a tiger.
“Look after him,” Brewer said, as the collection squad went to pick up the body. “He’s an endangered species. Make sure you put him in a nice strong cage—and be careful when he wakes up. I dare say he can still bite, when the mood takes him.”
Jenny had got up from the settee. She still looked like a minor character in some Hollywood super-soap, but now she seemed to think that her face was in close-up and that her features had better start running the gamut of the emotions, at least from Alarm to Anxiety.
Brewer held the door open for the man from the ministry. “Jenny, this is Mr Smith,” he said, over his shoulder. “He wants you to give him a complete list of all the friends you introduced to Mr Marklow. It probably won’t matter much if it isn’t quite complete, but you’d gain a good deal of moral credit if it were—and from here on in it would be a good idea not to be overdrawn at the moral credit bank. I told your boyfriend the truth when I said that I could design a cure for what you have, given time and a big enough budget. If you want to hang on to your indigenous rickettsias you’ll have to make yourself useful.”
Mr Smith didn’t smile. Brewer hadn’t expected him to. Men from the ministry—any ministry—lost their smiling reflexes once they’d been in the job for a while.
“You bastard” Jenny said. “You sold us out!”
Brewer put on a show of being deeply wounded. “I sold you out! You were the one who told your new boyfriend all about my covert operations. You sold him my ... business associates. You even sold him your old friends, as bankrupt stock at a knockdown price. Then he wanders into my top-security lab, calm as you please, beats me up and shoots me full of bugs—bugs whose not-so-remote ancestors have had him chewing bloody holes in anything and everything warm-blooded for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Did he really think that was the right way to win me over—or was it your idea? You never did understand human nature, and he must have forgotten everything he learned when he was human himself. Not entirely surprising, I suppose, given that his disease made him closer kin to mad dogs and vampire bats. The only element of social intercourse he mastered was the art of staying hidden, masked by a legend that had become a joke ... and in the end he even forgot that.”
Jenny looked back at him with eyes that were almost as piercing, almost as threatening, as Anthony Marklow’s—but they were still baby blue in colour, and she hadn’t quite enough presence to carry off the act. She wasn’t a real vampire, after all. She only had bad dreams.
“I thought you meant it,” she said, feebly. “I really thought you meant all that stuff about being at the cutting edge of the next revolution—about the quest for immortality, the transcendence of all inherited limitations.”
“I did mean it,” he told her. “I still do. What do you think I’m doing here? It’s a question of quality control. Did you think I could entrust this kind of work, and the rewards that are likely to flow from it, to someone like him? He’s a fucking vampire, for God’s sake!”
Jenny’s burning gaze flickered from Brewer to the unsmiling Mr Smith and back again, as if to say: What’s he? What kind of quality control does he represent?
What she actually said was: “Anthony would have cut you in. He’d have made you an equal partner. The establishment won’t even cut you in. As soon as I tell this creep what he wants to know, you and I will be surplus to requirements. They’ll have it all.”
“You watch too much television,” Brewer told her. “The government isn’t a conspiracy set up to control us. I voted for the government. I sure as hell never voted for Count Dracula. And your slang’s out of date. Nobody except Simple Simon calls people creeps any more—and Simon’s so sad he gets off on collecting the business cards from public phone booths.”
“You couldn’t stand it, could you?” she retorted. “You just couldn’t stand seeing me like this. People you throw away are supposed to stay thrown away, aren�
��t they, Bru? They aren’t supposed to find someone better, to get their lives back on track. You did this because you’re jealous—bitter and twisted and jealous”
Brewer had to check Mr Smith’s face to make sure that he hadn’t cracked a smirk. Mr Smith was being very patient, even by the standards customarily observed by the establishment’s bureaucrats.
“We have to leave, Jenny,” Brewer said, quietly. “There are people waiting outside. They have to search the place, collect all this.” He waved a negligent hand at the books and CDs.
“They have no right,” she whispered—but she didn’t press the point. How could she? She knew as well as Brewer did that Anthony Marklow was guilty of any number of crimes, recent as well as ancient. She wasn’t innocent herself—not according to the ‘98 protocols. In fact, she was a dangerous felon, not to mention a willing carrier of an illegally engineered organism.
Brewer waited for her to fall into step with the man from the ministry and then he followed them, at a respectful distance.
He was confident that Jenny was wrong about him being a fool to trust the legitimate authorities. After all, he really had voted for them—and he’d taken care to post twenty copies of his twelve A-4 sheets to secret repositories all over the world, routed via Talinn and Tokyo, Ratzeburg and Palermo. Given that the net was still in its frontier phase, the chances of his new colleagues being able to locate and destroy them all were pretty slim.
He wished that he’d made more progress in the art of being intimidating, but he knew that even if he’d been a real gangster he couldn’t possibly have come to a different decision. Even gangsters couldn’t be entirely immune to the duties of citizenship; they were as dependent as anyone else on the solidarity and stability of the social order. The way he’d chosen would lead to wealth, and hence to power, as surely as any other—and by way of a bonus he’d have a special kind of fame thrown in.
From now until the end of time he’d be known as the man who’d finally put an end to the evil career of Count Dracula: the man who’d exposed the last undead vampire in the West for what he truly was.
A reputation like that would surely be enough to make eternal life worth living.
<
~ * ~
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
Dear Alison
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH is a novelist and screenwriter. Under that name he has published seventy short stories and three novels—Only Forward, Spares and One of Us—winning Philip K. Dick, International Horror Guild, August Derleth and British Fantasy Awards, as well as the Prix Morane in France.
Writing as “Michael Marshall”, he has also published five internationally bestselling thrillers, including the three-book The Straw Men series, The Intruders (currently in development as a series with the BBC) and Bad Things.
2009 saw the publication of The Servants, under the byline “M. M. Smith,” while his next Michael Marshall novel is Killer Move.
He lives in North London with his wife, son, and two cats.
As the darkness spreads, it touches many innocent lives ...
~ * ~
IT IS FRIDAY the 25th of October, and beginning to turn cold. In the street outside my study window an eddy of leaves turns hectically, flecks of green and brown lively against the tarmac. Earlier this afternoon the sky was clear and blue, bright white clouds periodically changing the light which fell into the room; but now that light is fading, painting everything with a layer of grey dust. Smaller, browner leaves are falling on the other side of the street, collecting in a drift around the metal fence in front of the house opposite. I’ll remember this. I remember most things. Everything goes in, and stays there, not tarnishing but bright like freshly cut glass. A warehouse of experience which will never fade away, but stays there to remind me what it is I’ve lost.
I’m leaving in about half an hour. I’ll post the keys back through the door, so you’ll know there is no need to look for me. And a spare set’s always useful. I’ve been building up to it all day, telling myself that I’d leave any minute now and spend the day waiting in the airport. But I always knew that I’d wait until this time, until the light was going. London is at its best in the autumn, and four o’clock is the autumn time. I’ll put the heating on before I go.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this letter. I could print it out and put it somewhere, or take it with me and post it later. Or perhaps I should just leave it on the computer, hidden deep in a sub-folder, leaving it to chance whether it will ever be discovered. But if I do that then one of the children will find it first, and it’s you I should be explaining this to, not Richard or Maddy; you to whom the primary apology is due.
I can’t explain in person, because there wouldn’t be any point. Either you wouldn’t believe me, or you would: neither would change the facts or make them any better. In your heart of hearts, buried too firmly to ever reach conscious thought, you may already have begun to suspect. You’ve given no sign, but we’ve stopped communicating on those subtler levels and I can’t really tell what you think any more. Telling you what you in some sense already know would just make you reject it, and me. And where would we go from there?
My desk is tidy. All of my outstanding work has been completed. All the bills are paid.
I’m going to walk. Not all the way—just our part. Down to Oxford Street. I’ll cross the road in front of the house, then turn down that alley you’ve always been scared of. (I can never remember what it’s called; but I do remember an evening when you forgot your fear long enough for it to be rather interesting). Then off down Kentish Town Road, past the Woolworth’s and the Vulture’s Perch pub, the mediocre sandwich bars and that shop the size of a football pitch which is filled only with spectacles. I remember ranting against the waste of space when you and I first met, and you finding it funny. I suppose the joke’s grown old.
It’s not an especially lovely area, and Falkland Road is hardly Bel Air. But we’ve lived here fifteen years, and we’ve always liked it, haven’t we? At least until the last couple of years, when it started to curdle, when our love slowly froze; when I realized what was going to happen. Before that Kentish Town suited us well enough. We liked Cafe Renoir, where you could get a reasonable breakfast when the staff weren’t feeling too cool to serve it to you. The Assembly House, wall-to-wall Victorian mirrors and a comprehensive selection of Irish folk on the jukebox. The corner store, where they always know what we want before we ask for it. All of that.
It was our place.
I couldn’t talk to you about it when it started, because of how it happened. Even if it had come about some other way, I would probably have kept silent: by the time I realized what it meant there wasn’t much I could do. I hope I’m right in thinking it’s only the last two years which have been strained, that you were happy until then. I’ve covered my tracks as well as I could, kept it hidden. So many little lies, all of them unsaid.
It was actually ten years ago, when we had only been in this house a few years and the children were still young and ours. I’m sure you remember John and Suzy’s party—the one just after they’d moved into the new house? Or maybe not: it was just one of many, after all, and perhaps it is only my mind in which it retains a peculiar luminosity. You’d just started working at Elders & Peterson, and weren’t very keen on going out. You wanted a weekend with a clear head, to tidy up the house, do some shopping, to hang out without a hangover. But we decided we ought to go, and I promised I wouldn’t get too drunk, and you gave me that sweet, affectionate smile which said you believed I’d try but that you’d still move the aspirin to beside the bed. We engaged our dippy babysitter, spruced ourselves up and went out hand in hand, feeling for once as if we were in our twenties again. I think we even splashed out on a cab.
Nice house, in its way, though we both thought it was rather big for just the two of them. John was just getting successful around then, and the size of the property looked like a bit of a statement. We arrived early, having agreed w
e wouldn’t stay too late, and stood talking in the kitchen with Suzy as she chopped vegetables for the dips. She was wearing the Whistles dress which you both owned, and you and I winked secretly to each other: after much deliberation you were wearing something different. The brown Jigsaw suit, with earrings from Monsoon that looked like little leaves. I remember them clearly, as I remember everything now. Do you still have those earrings somewhere? I suppose you must, though I haven’t seen you wearing them in a while. I looked for them this morning, thinking that you wouldn’t miss them and I might take them with me. But they’re buried somewhere, and I couldn’t find them.
By ten the house was full and I was pretty drunk, talking hard and loud with John and Howard in the living room. I glanced around to check you were having a good enough time, and saw you leaning back against a table, a plastic cup of red wine hovering around your lips. You were listening to Jan bang on about something—her rubbish ex-boyfriend, probably. With your other hand you were fumbling in your bag for your cigarettes, wanting one pretty soon but trying not to let Jan see you weren’t giving her familiar tale of woe your full attention. You were wonderful like that. Always doing the right thing, and in the right way. Always eager to be good, and not just so that people would admire you.
The Mammoth Book of Dracula - [Anthology] Page 55
