Anno Dracula (59 page)

‘We have been allowing space to an inventor,’ said Massingham. ‘I fear we have become a safe harbour for an arrant crackpot, but you might find some amusement at the bizarre results of his efforts.’

He led the Count through the double doors.

Several shots sounded, rattling the tin roof of the shed. Bursts of fire lit the gloom.

Immediately, Massingham was afraid that de Ville was the victim of an assassination plot. Everyone knew these Balkan nobs were pursued by anarchists eager to pot them with revolvers in revenge for injustices committed down through the centuries by barbarous ancestors.

A stench of sulphur stung his nostrils. Clouds of foul smoke were wafting up to the roof. There was a slosh and a hiss as a bucket of water was emptied on a small fire.

The reports had been not shots but small explosions. It was just Foley’s folly, again. Massingham was relieved, but then annoyed when he wiped his brow with his cuff to find his face coated with a gritty, oily discharge.

Through smoke and steam, he saw Foley and his familiar, the boy
Gerald, fussing about a machine, faces and hands black as Zulus’, overalls ragged as tramps’. George Foley was a young man, whose undeniable technical skills were tragically allied to a butterfly mind that constantly alighted upon the most impractical and useless concepts.

‘My apologies, Count,’ said Massingham. ‘I am afraid that this is what one must expect when one devotes oneself to the fantastic idea of an engine worked by explosion. Things will inevitably blow up.’

‘Combustion,’ snapped Foley. ‘Not explosion.’

‘I crave your pardon, Foley,’ said Massingham. ‘Infernal combustion.’

Foley’s written proposals were often passed round the under-managers for humorous relief.

‘Internal,’ squeaked Gerald, an eleven-year-old always so thickly greased and blackened that it was impossible to tell what the colour of his hair or complexion might be. ‘Internal combustion, not infernal.’

‘I believe my initial choice of word was apt.’

‘That’s as may be, Massingham, but look...’

The device that had exploded was shaking now, emitting a grumble of noise and spurts of noxious smoke. A crank was turning a belt, which was turning a wheel. Massingham had seen such toys before.

‘Five times more efficient than steam,’ Foley said. ‘Maybe ten, a dozen...’

‘And five times more likely to kill you.’

‘In the early days of steam, many were killed,’ said the Count. He gazed into Foley’s engine, admiring the way the moving parts meshed. It was a satisfyingly complicated toy, with oiled pistons and
levers and cogs. A child’s idea of a wonderful machine.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Foley, ‘and you are...’

‘This is the Count de Ville,’ explained Massingham. ‘An important connection of the firm, from overseas. He is interested in railways.’

‘Travel,’ said the Count. ‘I am interested in travel. In the transport of the future.’

‘You have then chanced upon the right place, Count,’ said Foley. He did not offer a dirty hand, but nodded a greeting, almost clicking his heels. ‘For in this workshop is being sounded the death-knell of the whole of the rest of the factory. My transport, my horseless carriage, will make the steam engine as obsolete as the train made the stagecoach.’

‘Horseless carriage?’ said the Count, drawing out the words, rolling the idea around his mind.

‘It’s a wonder, sir,’ said Gerald, eyes shining. Foley tousled the boy’s already-greasy bird’s nest of hair, proud of his loyal lackey.

Massingham suppressed a bitter laugh.

Foley led them past the still-shaking engine on its fixed trestle, to a dust-sheeted object about the size of a small hay-cart. The inventor and the nimble Gerald lifted off the canvas sheet and threw it aside.

‘This is my combustion carriage,’ said Foley, with pride. ‘I shall have to change the name, of course. It might be called a petroleum caleche, or an auto-mobile.’

The invention sat squarely on four thick-rimmed wheels, with a small carriage-seat suspended above them to the rear of one of Foley’s combustion engines.

‘There will be a housing on the finished model, to keep the elements out of the engine and cut down the noise. The smoke will be discharged through these pipes.’

‘The flat wheel-rims suggest this will not run on rails,’ said the Count.

‘Rails,’ Foley fairly spat. ‘No, sir. Indeed not. This will run on roads. Or, if there are no roads, on any reasonably level surface. Trains are limited, as you know. They cannot venture where rail-layers have not been first, at great expense. My carriage will be free, eventually, to go everywhere.’

‘Always in a straight line?’

‘By means of a steering apparatus, the front wheels can be turned like a ship’s rudder.’

Massingham was impatient with such foolishness.

‘My dear Count,’ said Foley, ‘I foresee that this device, of which Mr Massingham is so leery, will change the world as we know it, and greatly for the better. The streets of our cities will no longer be clogged with the excrement of horses. No more fatalities or injuries will be caused by animals bolting or throwing their riders. And there will be no more great collisions, for these carriages are steerable and can thus avoid each other. Unlike horses, they do not panic; and, unlike trains, they do not run on fixed courses. Derailments, obviously, are out of the question. The first and foremost attribute of the combustion carriage is its safety.’

The Count walked round the carriage, eyeing its every detail, smiling with his sharp teeth. There was something animal-like about de Ville, a single-mindedness at once childish and frightening.

‘May I?’ The Count indicated the seat.

Foley hesitated but, sensing a potential sponsor, shrugged.

De Ville climbed up into the seat. The carriage settled under his weight. The axles were on suspension springs, like a hansom cab. The Count ran his hands around the great steering-wheel, which
was as unwieldy and stiff as those that worked the locks on a canal. There were levers to the side of the seat, the purpose of which was unknown to Massingham, though he assumed one must be a braking-mechanism.

Beside the wheel was a rubber-bulbed horn. The Count squeezed it experimentally.

Poop-poop!

‘To alert pedestrians,’ explained Foley. ‘The engine runs so quietly that the horn will be necessary.’

The Count smiled, eyes rimmed with red delight. He poop-pooped again, evidently in love. His craze for trains was quite forgotten. Poop-poop had trumped toot-toot.

Foreigners were a lot like children.

‘How does it start?’

‘With a crank.’

‘Show me,’ de Ville ordered.

Foley nodded to Gerald, who darted to the front of the contraption with a lever and fitted it into the engine. He gave it a turn, and nothing happened. Massingham had seen this before. Usually, the dignitaries summoned to witness the great breakthrough had retreated by the time the engine caught. Then it would only sputter a few moments, allowing the carriage to lurch forward a yard or two before at best stalling and at worst exploding.

If Foley’s folly blew up and killed the Count, Massingham would have to answer for it. The man clearly had an impulse towards death.

Gerald cranked the engine again, and again, and...

... nipped out of the way sharpish. Small flames burst in the guts of the machine, and the pistons began to pump.

The carriage moved forward, and the Count poop-pooped the
blasted horn again. He would have been as happy with the noise-maker alone as the whole vehicle.

Slowly, the carriage trundled towards the open doors of the workshop. Foley looked alarmed, but didn’t protest. Picking up more speed than usual, the carriage disappeared out of the doors. The Count’s straw hat blew off and was wafted up towards the roof by the black smoke that poured thickly from the pipes at the rear of the machine.

Massingham, Foley and Gerald followed the carriage to the doorway. Astonished, they saw the Count piloting the machine, with growing expertise, yanking hard on the steering-wheel and turning in ever tighter circles, circumnavigating the pile of rails, weaving in and out between sheds and buildings.

A cat shot out of the way, its tail flat. Workmen passing by stopped to stare. A small crowd gathered, of idle hands distracted from their appointed tasks. Some of the directors poked their heads out, silk hats held to their heads.

It was a ridiculous sight, but somehow stirring. The Count was very intent, very serious. But the machine just looked silly, not majestic like a steam engine. Still, Massingham had a glimpse of what Foley saw in the thing.

The Count poop-pooped the horn. Someone cheered.

Gerald, delighted, danced in the wake of the carriage.

The Count made a hard turn and suddenly the boy’s legs were under the front wheels. Bright blood spurted up into the oily engine, as if it were Moloch demanding sacrifice.

Foley shouted. Massingham felt a hammer-blow to his heart.

The Count seemed not to have realised what he had done, and drove on, grinding the boy under the carriage, merrily poop-pooping
the damnable horn. The wheel-rims were reddened, and left twin tracks of blood for twenty feet in the rutted earth. Workmen rushed to help the boy, who was yelling in pain, legs quite crushed, face white under the dirt.

De Ville found the brake and brought the carriage to a halt.

Foley was too shocked to speak.

The Count stepped down, exhilarated.

‘What a marvellous transport,’ he declared. ‘It will indeed be the machine of the future. I share your vision, Mr Foley. You will make the world a swifter, purer place. These vehicles will be armoured, making each driver a warrior apart from others, a knight whose mind is one with that of his steed. You have invented a movable castle, one which can be equipped for assault and defence. The carriage can serve as refuge, land-ironclad, vehicle of exploration and finally casket or tomb. I shall be among the first purchasers of your wonderful carriage. You may number me as a sponsor of its manufacture. I shall not rest until the whole world runs on infernal combustion.’

He reached up into the air, and his straw hat was returned to his long fingers by the swirling smoke. The quality of Gerald’s screaming changed, to a low, whimpering sob. The Count appeared not to notice the noise, though Massingham remembered the sharpness of his ears.

The Count de Ville tapped his hat on to his head at a jaunty angle, gave the bulb-horn a final, fond poop-poop and walked into the black clouds of smoke, which seemed to part for him and then closed around him like a cloak.

Massingham thought about the future. There was probably money in it.

N
OTE

‘Dead Travel Fast’ was solicited for – but not used in – an anthology of stories which set out to fill in the gaps in Stoker’s
Dracula
by showing what the Count was doing on his trip to London when he is only glimpsed by the novel’s many narrators. A risk of theme anthologies is that everyone has the same idea and you get a clutch of stories which read similarly: so I resolved to do a Dracula story in which he didn’t bite anyone, focusing on another aspect of the character Stoker gave him (his fascination with modern transport). Though the primary purpose was to fit in with Stoker’s text, nothing here contradicts the timeline of
Anno Dracula
. So, in the world of the series, this could well have happened.

Kim Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes
The Night Mayor
,
Bad Dreams
,
Jago
, the
Anno Dracula
novels and stories,
The Quorum
,
The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories
,
Life’s Lottery
,
Back in the USSA
(with Eugene Byrne) and
The Man From the Diogenes Club
under his own name and
The Vampire Genevieve
and
Orgy of the Blood Parasites
as Jack Yeovil. His non-fiction books include
Nightmare Movies
(due to be reissued by Bloomsbury in an updated edition),
Ghastly Beyond Belief
(with Neil Gaiman),
Horror: 100 Best Books
(with Stephen Jones),
Wild West Movies
,
The BFI Companion to Horror
,
Millennium Movies
and BFI Classics studies of
Cat People
and
Doctor Who
.

He is a contributing editor to
Sight & Sound
and
Empire
magazines (writing
Empire
’s popular Video Dungeon column), has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, and scripted radio and television documentaries. His stories ‘Week Woman’ and ‘Ubermensch’ have been adapted into an episode of the TV series
The Hunger
and an Australian short film; he has directed and written a tiny film
Missing Girl
. Following his Radio 4 play ‘Cry Babies’, he wrote an episode (‘Phish Phood’) for Radio 7’s series
The Man in Black
.

His official website, ‘Dr Shade’s Laboratory’ can be found at
www.johnnyalucard.com

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