by Kim Newman
It is said that Taira will return as a giant dragon. Note that – not just a dragon, but a giant dragon. A reptile as tall as a volcano wading through the city. Majin might want earthquakes, fire and deaths in the hundreds of thousands. Not a comforting prospect.
We fled Dracula and came halfway round the world for this.
* * *
I had to lift successive layers of mosquito netting to reach my patient. The mesh curtains should be packed away for winter, but the butterflies and scorpions of Jisatsu No Niwa don’t mind the snow. Yuki-Onna is still in eclipse. The nets were brittle with rime and stung my bare fingers. Stoves burned throughout the building, but the temple was colder than ever.
Christina was propped up on pillows in a day-bed. She wore a lovely pale-blue furisode. Her reattached arm was in a black silk sling. Her face was no longer bruised, but her right eye looked like red glass.
Incense sticks burned, sweetening the air. Lady Oyotsu – face perfectly white, teeth perfectly black – sat quietly by the patient. Her neck extended a mere nine inches from her collar. Unobtrusive attendants saw to their needs. One young monk had an angry weal on his neck and bleached white patches on his saffron robe. Christina had seen to her own red thirst without lowering herself to alley dogs.
I asked her to look at my finger as I passed it in front of her face.
‘I see perfectly,’ she said. ‘I’m sure my eye will go back to normal soon.’
‘Thank you for your diagnosis, doctor,’ I said. ‘Do you want a second opinion?’
She was impatient. ‘Very amusing,’ she said, not meaning it.
Her eye wasn’t just bloodshot. It was coloured, with faint difference between scarlet iris, crimson pupil and pinkish ‘white’.
‘Are you seeing red?’
‘Not literally,’ she said.
I looked at her arm and asked her to wiggle her fingers. She couldn’t. I eased off the sling and furisode and examined her shoulder. There wasn’t even a scar. Her skin, which needed no powder, was unblemished. The bone was set and in its socket. I squeezed and prodded… but got no reaction.
‘It can’t be helped,’ said Christina.
‘Are you sure you’re American and Italian?’ I asked. ‘That sounds English.’
She smiled, weakly. A martyr’s simper. ‘I have spent too much time in London. I have got into bad habits.’
‘I’ll say. Do you mind if I stick pins in you?’
‘What on earth good will that do?’
‘It might make me feel better.’
‘Stick away, then.’
I probed her shoulder with a lancet. The tiny hole healed at once. ‘Nothing wrong there. Have you any feeling at all in your arm?’
‘What’s feeling?’
‘Are you enjoying this?’
‘You tell me,’ she said.
She slipped her left hand into my hair and took the back of my neck in a firm grip. She forced me to look into her red eye. I remembered how strong she was. I had cause to be thankful for her strength. Last night, she prevented me from abasing myself. Today, she just made me uncomfortable.
After making her point, she let go.
‘You should have healed completely,’I said. ‘Even after what happened. I don’t know the Oblensky line well.’
‘It’s very fine. I shopped around.’
‘Wonderful. Perhaps I should have pulled the arm right off and let you grow a new one. Like a lizard.’
Christina was thoughtful.
‘No, that wouldn’t have worked.’
‘I grew new toes once,’ I said. ‘That’s my d’Acques blood. I’ve seen vampires recover from worse.’
‘Five years ago, I turned to light and couldn’t change back when I wanted to. Your friend Kate Reed was there. She thought it amusing. She’s not laughing much now, I fancy. It took weeks to pull myself together. And I’m not sure I should have. It might have been better to accept the change. Since then, I’ve not been the same person – not entirely. I don’t know if everything came back from the light or if it’s in the proper place. I don’t feel as much as before, not while I’m just flesh and blood. The arm is just the latest loss. I can’t feel my face. It might as well be marble. My heart doesn’t beat at all. I can’t be sure, but I think I might be immune to things that kill other vampires. When I’m light, my essence – whatever it is that’s me – is scattered. I still think like myself, but the body is gone. There’s no heart to stick a stake through. No skin to cut with silver. I’m not what I was, not the vampire I turned into. I’ve never stopped turning. Even after feeding, there’s just… a distant memory of what feeling was. Only when I’m light do I feel, and then it’s like I have liquid lightning in me.’
‘How much shape can a shapeshifter shift?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It’s something we say. Vampire doctors. A question we can’t answer. For so long there weren’t enough vampires for us to study. Now there are too many and things change too fast for us to keep up. It doesn’t help that for all of human history before 1885 the chief concern of specialists in the study of vampirism was how to kill us. I suppose you should be thankful your flesh didn’t decide to mangle itself into the semblance of an umbrella, a potato or a burning bush.’
She thought about that for a moment. Lady Oyotsu’s head swayed.
‘Christina, I’m not sure I can help,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise. It makes you sound like Kate Reed.’
I put my lancet back in the bag. At the moment, laid out in comfort, Christina seemed fine. She radiated a little light. Not enough to read a newspaper by.
‘Thank you for looking after me,’ she said. ‘I believe in thanks, not apologies.’
‘It’s my profession, Princess. I’ll send you a bill.’
She smiled, not weakly now. ‘You don’t love me, do you?’
‘This isn’t the time…’
‘It’s always the time. We should be friends, Geneviève.’
‘I don’t think – with respect, Princess – you have friends.’
She was thoughtful. ‘Maybe not, but you do. Kate is your friend. Kostaki is your friend, though he wants to be more – even Drusilla follows you about like a lamb and tries to get your attention. The yōkai women copy your hair and wonder what they’d look like in your dresses.’
I doubted my current look – girl run off to sea, disguised as a cabin boy – would catch on. ‘Why don’t you move out of the temple?’ I suggested. ‘We can find you a room in the dorm. It’d be easier to treat you. And you’d be away from this bloody cold.’
She shook her head. ‘I am proving you wrong. Giri. Obligation. I understand it. I always have, I think. Duty. It comes with position and privilege—’
‘Which you want to tear down.’
‘Yes, but I’m not fool enough to think I don’t have them. You have friends, Gené. Lovers, if you can find them. I will have followers. I will be worshipped. I will be loved. I don’t say this from pride or because it’s what I want, but because it’s what must be… so I may carry out my duty.’
I found I was frightened of Christina Light again.
Kostaki had said it. Light was not kind to vampires.
‘One thing, though,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to love me; you don’t have to like me. It’s easier for us both if you don’t. Because I have to stay and you have to leave. Dru told me that – in so many words, and you know that’s rare for her. I must continue my journey by staying in one place – this place. Soon, this won’t be Yōkai Town. This will be a mountain. My mountain, not yours. You are tied to too much else in the world. People and causes and your own whims. But, Gené, sometime you’ll have to learn to love us.’
‘Us?’
‘Vampires. You don’t love vampires, do you?’
I was taken aback.
‘What’s to love?’ I said.
‘Exactly.’
She seized me – not with her free hand, but s
omething like the light she had shone in the Suicide Garden. An unbreakable grip, many degrees of magnitude greater than an ordinary power of fascination. I could not look away. Her skin shimmered, luminous oil on water. I saw the pillows through her head as she became transparent. A vampire ghost, or a vampire’s ghost; an apparition, or an angel.
‘You don’t see the worth in us,’ she said. ‘The beauty. The potential. You see only red thirst. And you hate that. It’s a dishonourable obligation and you feed in shame. You don’t have a reflection because you don’t need one. You see Dracula and think you’re the same as him. A monster. A repentant, abstinent, holier-than-mere-bloodthirsty-immortals monster, but a monster for all that. You love the warm in the abstract and the particular. Your Charles – Mr Beauregard of the Diogenes Club – you love him. That’s part of your story. Everyone knows it. Kate loves him too, of course. That must be a trial for you both. I should like to meet this extraordinary man, though I’d better not, to avoid disappointment. There have been and will be others. All warm, living, not vampires. You couldn’t love Kostaki, though he would die for you. You don’t even look at him and wonder – the way men and women look at each other and wonder – how it would be. Why can’t you love a vampire, Gené? Is it because you can’t love yourself?’
She let go of me, and ducked out of further conversation by falling into deep lassitude.
At that moment, if my Gladstone bag contained a wooden stake or silver knife I’d have tested her theory that she was immune to such things. She was blinding.
14
BEFORE DRACULA (CONTINUED)
The French newspapers all dismissed their London correspondents by cablegram, then had to rehire them at increased rates. Each boat train brought further confirmation. Vampires were real. A vampire ruled Britain.
You are an insider, Charles, a habitué of the corridors of power. You were given briefings from the first. The Diogenes Club knew – and know – much the general public would scarcely credit. And they didn’t see Dracula coming. Imagine what it was like for those who read the news in the papers or heard it in a café. Suddenly, without precedent, an unbelievable thing had incontrovertibly happened. A blood-drinking monster was Britain’s new Prince Regent. The worst person in the world commanded the greatest empire on earth. What would he do? What would he not do?
All hotels in Paris were booked out by English parties. Gentlemen who could not secure their usual discreet rooms for liaisons were put out by this British invasion. Society doctors were summoned to treat real or imagined bite wounds. A rumour went around that anyone bitten would inevitably turn and be compelled to spread the infection. Hoteliers reminded of this old wives’ tale were less happy to have Londoners in residence, and began presenting bills to urge the now-settled English to quit. Many refused, though faces were slapped and bellboys kicked down stairs.
Ambassadors were recalled. Did this mean war? If so, between whom? Should British administration of the Suez Canal be contested? Alarmist journals imagined Dracula’s Britain might ally with Bismarck’s Germany and split helpless France between them. It was said French women fetched prices above £25 in Piccadilly Circus, for their blood was especially piquant to elder vampires (this is nonsense). Sinister procurers – Jewish, naturally – were reputedly at large in Paris, with chloroform pads in their pockets, harvesting fair tributes for the leech-lords of London. Vendors of crucifixes, icons, statues of the Madonna and other portable religious knick-knacks enjoyed a boom. Pilferers stripped churches of sacred objects. The franc was strong against the pound. The price of silver rose and rose again. Chefs complained of speculators trying to get a monopoly on garlic – and withholding it from the catering trade, because matrons afraid of vampires under their beds paid a higher price for a bulb than a restaurant would for a bushel. Take garlic out of a Frenchman’s soup and you might as well light the fuse to another revolution.
The character of those fleeing Britain changed. The first arrivals were rich enough to charter a special train or wire ahead for the best suites. The next wave were less well off. Gare du Nord was overwhelmed with terrified folks who had gathered up all they could carry and run for their lives. Some were escaping newly turned family members. Demons prowled the streets of London. A vampire plague was running like scarlet fever through households, districts, professions, towns – the whole country.
Then the British closed the ports. That meant an increase in small boat traffic across the Channel, and the establishment of camps around Calais and Dunkirk – and Le Havre and Bruges – for les anglais. You know how wretched conditions became after a few weeks. Fifteen years on, despite all that’s happened, the tents and shacks are still there. A few of the original refugees remain, queuing for their monthly tea ration and waiting till it’s safe to go home. They were the first displaced people of the Anni Draculae, just as we in Yōkai Town are the latest.
The British government suspended the Continental telegraph service – or cut the wires. The London correspondents stopped filing. With the public hungry for news of this greatest story of the day, the press were driven to interview British exiles. Some started demanding money to spin fanciful, picturesque tales. Many of which, of course, were true.
I had my own concerns.
A black cross was burned into the front door of my house. A live bat was crucified to it. I nursed the animal for a while, dripping milk into its mouth with a pipette, but it died. I was being stubborn. Bats are rodents. I’ve literally bled more of those than you’ve had hot dinners. I’m not even nosferatu, so I feel no kinship with the vermin. Even when it’s rubbed in my face that all right-thinking Christians would put poison down if they thought it’d get me out of their house… or country.
Garlic – by now, ruinously expensive – was smeared around my windows and on my doorstep. The jeannot-come-lately vampire hater who did that didn’t even get his folklore straight. It’s the odourless flowers, not the smelly bulbs, which traditionally deter vampires. A belt and braces measure. Superstitious vampires who shrink from flowers also wouldn’t cross a threshold without an invitation. Besides, it was my house… I lived there and nothing was going to shut me out of it.
Someone set a fire in the unused outdoor privy a week later. It didn’t spread to the house. I reported the burned-down jakes to the police and was assured they took such things seriously. All citizens were protected by French law, for the moment. A trifling legal matter was yet to be settled – whether the dead could hold citizenship. I grew weary of repeating, to warm and vampire alike, that we of the d’Acques line turn without dying. I am long-lived, not back from the grave. If you want a reanimated corpse, look to those mouldy nosferatu, wurdalak, strigoi, vrykolakas and upiorski bloodlines. The gendarmes spent more time confirming that the implied accusation (vampirism) made against me by the lout with the tinderbox was true than poking around the charred patch for evidence.
Every few days, a policeman – not always the same one – paid a call. Not to say the bat abuser or arsonist (I presumed they were separate salauds) had been apprehended, but with questions about other matters. I was required to prove my innocence in a number of petty assault cases. A vampire panic caught on. When the Sûreté needed someone to take blame, vampires vaulted over Jews and Arabs to win the uncoveted Most Convenient Culprit Award. To avoid prosecution, surviving duellists claimed sword wounds were vampire bites. If the till was empty, vampires were behind it! If the girl was pregnant, why – look at the bruises on her neck! – she was the innocent victim of a vampire’s powers of fascination!
The Great Vampire, hooded head of Les Vampires, called a press conference in the Jardin du Luxembourg at high noon on a sunny day to insist he wasn’t a vampire… and none of his confederates were either. It was a matter of policy that vampires were not admitted to Les Vampires, so there. Parisians could be reassured that those robbing, murdering and swindling them were one hundred per cent not undead. I’m sure that came as a huge relief. The mysterious Irma Vep, long-serving lie
utenant to a succession of Great Vampires, did not attend the conference. We’ve always had suspicions about her. As you know, the mask and body-stocking conceal a multitude of sins – including ours. When reporters asked the Great Vampire to doff his hood to show an unfanged face, he vanished in a cloud of crimson smoke. An impressive feat – which undercut his stated purpose of convincing the public he was not a supernatural creature.
The next day, a detailed, tetchy letter from the Great Vampire appeared in Le Figaro explaining that he had made his exit under the cover of cleverly applied stage magic. He included a recipe for smoke bombs, which the paper refrained from printing, lest its junior readers make mischief. Had I the ear of the Sûreté – rather than presenting a lingering smell in its oversensitive nose – I would have advised the inspector who held the criminal conspiracies portfolio to look among Paris’s active or just-retired conjurers for the true identity of the Great Vampire. Maybe that worthy flic had more important things on his desk. For instance, a list of all the cats reported missing near my house. Oh, and reopening the dossier on that rash of pick-pocketings where victims robbed of wallets and watches felt light-headed and had unexplained pinprick wounds.
I kept working my shifts at the morgue and going to lectures.
Before, I had been a novelty – and ignored, patronised, picked on or joked about – as a woman. Being exposed as a vampire was, at first, more of the same. Fellows who formerly flirted with me transferred their attentions to other female students. A few eager new faces popped up with a ‘scientific’ interest in my condition. Professor Cataflaque, one of the dustier lecturers, was eager to do a paper on my ‘disease’, and tempted me with an offer of co-authorship. His ice-blue eyes and wet mouth deterred me from the collaboration. I had no desire to be a talking specimen.
I assumed Nicolas Cerral was responsible for writing my name on a tag and leaving it on an empty slab at the morgue. ‘Vampires sleep here,’ someone added – as if the audience might miss the joke.
