Anno Dracula (27 page)

His offer was generous. She had fed off him before, when the need was strong. With his blood came a salt rush, the sense of being enclosed by a curl of wave as his board torpedoed across the surface of the water.

Just now, she didn’t need it. She still had the taste of the Dude. Smiling, she waved him away. As an elder, she didn’t have the red thirst so badly. Since Charles, she had fed much less. That wasn’t how it was with many vampires, especially those of the Dracula line. Some
nosferatu
got thirstier and thirstier with passing ages, and were finally consumed by their own raging red needs. Those were the ones who got to be called monsters. Beside them, she was a minnow.

Moondoggie tugged at his open collar, scratching below his salt-and-pepper beard. The LAPD had wanted to hang a murder rap on him two years ago, when a runaway turned up dead in his beach hut. She had investigated and cleared his name. He would always be grateful to his ‘Gidget’, which she learned was a contraction of ‘Girl Midget’. Never tall, she had turned - frozen - at sixteen. Recently, after centuries of being treated like a child, she was most often taken for a woman in her twenties. That was: by people who didn’t know she wasn’t warm, wasn’t entirely living. She’d have examined her face for the beginnings of lines, but mirrors were no use to her.

Shots were fired in the distance. She looked at the rise of the cliffs and saw the big houses, decks lit by fairy light UFO constellations, seeming to float above the beach, heavy with heavy hitters. Firing up into the sky was a Malibu New Year tradition. Reputedly started by the film director John Milius, a famous surf and gun nut, it was a stupid, dangerous thing to do. Gravity and momentum meant bullets came down somewhere, and not always into the water. In the light of New Year’s Day, she found spent shells in the sand or pocked holes in driftwood. One year, someone’s head would be under a slug. Milius had made her cry with
Big Wednesday
, though. Movies with coming-of-age, end-of-an-era romanticism crawled inside her heart and melted her. She would have to tell Milius it got worse and worse with centuries.

So, the 1980s?

Some thought her overly formal for always using the full form, but she’d lived through decades called ‘the eighties’ before. For the past hundred years ‘the eighties’ had meant the Anni Draculae, the 1880s. Among other things, the founding of Dracula’s brief empire had drawn her out of the shadow of eternal evening into something approaching the light. That brought her together with Charles, the warm man with whom she had spent seventy-five years, until his death in 1959, the warm man who had shown her that she, a vampire, could still love, that she had turned without dying inside.

She wasn’t unique, but she was rare. Most vampires lost more than they gained when they turned; they died and came back as different people, caricatures of their former selves, compelled to extremes by an inner drive. Creatures like that were one of the reasons why she was here, at the far western edge of a continent where ‘her kind’ were still comparatively rare.

Other vampires had nests in the Greater Los Angeles area. Don Drago Robles, a landowner before the incorporation of the state into the Union, had quietly waited for the city to close around his
hacienda
, and was rising as a political figure with a growing constituency, a Californian answer to Baron Meinster’s European Transylvania Movement. A few long-lived movie or music people, the sort with reflections in silver and voices that registered on recording equipment, had Spanish-style castles along Sunset Boulevard, like eternal child rock god Timmy V or silent movie star David Henry Reid. More, small sharks mostly, swam through Angelino sprawl, battening on marginal people to leech them dry of dreams as much as blood, or - in that ghastly new thing - selling squirts of their own blood (‘drac’) to sad addicts (‘dhampires’) who wanted to be a vampire for the night but didn’t have the heart to turn all the way.

She should be grateful to the rogues; much of her business came from people who got mixed up with bad egg vampires. Her reputation for extricating victims from predators was like gold to distressed parents or cast-aside partners. Sometimes she worked as a deprogrammer, helping kids out of all manner of cults. They grew beliefs stranger than Catholicism, or even vampirism, out here among the orange groves: the Moonies, the Esoteric Order of Dagon, Immortology, Psychoplasmics.

As always, she stuck it out until the party died. All the hours of the night rolled away and red light cast the shadows of clifftop homes onto the beach. January cold gathered, driving those warmer folks who were still sensible from their barbecues and beach-towels to their beds.

Marty Burns, sometime sit-com star and current inhabitant of a major career slump, was passed out face down on the chilling sands in front of her trailer space. She found a blanket to throw over him. He murmured in liquor-and-pills lassitude. She tucked the blanket comfortably around his neck. Marty was hilarious in person, even when completely off his face, but
Salt & Pepper,
the star-making show he was squandering residuals from, was puzzlingly free of actual humour. The dead people on the laugh-track audibly split sides at jokes deader than they were. The year was begun with a moderate good deed, though purging the kid’s system and dragging him to AA might have been a more lasting solution to whatever was inside him, chewing away.

She would sleep later, in the morning, locked in her sleek trailer, a big metal coffin equipped with everything she needed. Of all her homes over the years, this was the one she cherished the most. The trailer was chromed everywhere it could be, and customised with steel shutters that bolted over the windows and the never-used sun roof. Economy of space forced her to limit her possessions - so few after so long - to those that really meant the most to her: ugly jewellery from her mediaeval girlhood, some of Charles’s books and letters, a Dansette gramophone with an eclectic collection of sides, her beloved answering machine, a tacky Mexican crucifix with light-up eyes that she kept on show just to prove she wasn’t one of
those
vampires, a rubber duck with a story attached, two decent formal dresses and four pairs of Victorian shoes (custom-cobbled for her tiny feet) which had outlasted everything made this century and would do for decades more. On the road, she could kink herself double and rest in the trunk of her automobile, a pillar-box red 1958 Plymouth Fury, but the trailer was more comfortable.

She wandered towards the sea-line, across the disturbed sands of the beach. There had been dancing earlier, grown-ups who had been in Frankie and Annette movies trying to fit their old moves to current music.
Le freak, c’est chic.

She trod on a hot pebble that turned out to be a bullet, and saluted Big John up on his A-list Hollywood deck. Milius had written
Dracula
for Francis Ford Coppola, from the novel she was left out of. Not wanting to have the Count brought back to mind, she’d avoided the movie, though her vampire journalist friend Kate Reed, also not mentioned in Stoker’s fiction, had worked on it.

She hadn’t heard from Kate in too long; Geneviève knew she’d spent some time behind the Iron Curtain, on the trail of the Transylvania Movement, that odd faction of the Baron Meinster’s which wanted Dracula’s estates as a homeland for vampires. God, if that ever happened, she would get round to re-applying for American citizenship; they were accepting
nosferatu
now, which they hadn’t been in 1917 when she last looked into it. Meinster was one of those Dracula wannabes who couldn’t quite carry off the opera cloak and ruffle shirt, with his prissy little fangs and his naked need to be the new King of the Cats. She’d already seen him make a grab for the title once, and get bloody egg on his face -but the absence of Dracula made even a metaphorical empty throne a temptation to the ambitious.

Wavelets lapped at her bare toes. Her nails sparkled under water.

1970s music hadn’t been much, not after the 1960s. Glam rock. The Bee Gees. The Carpenters. Disaster movies.
M*A*S*H.
Burt Reynolds. The zipless fuck. Watergate. An oil crisis. The Bicentennial Summer. The Iran hostage crisis. No Woodstock. No Swinging London. No one like Kennedy. Nothing like the Moon Landing.

If she were to fill a diary page for every decade, the 1970s would be heavily padded. She’d been to some parties and helped some people, settled into the slow, pastel, dusty ice-cream world of Southern California, a little to one side of the swift stream of human history. She wasn’t even much bothered by memories, the curse of the long-lived.

Not bad, not good, not anything.

She wasn’t over Charles, never would be really. He was a constant, silent presence in her heart, an ache and a support and a joy. He was a memory she would never let slip. And Dracula, finally destroyed soon after Charles’s death, still cast a long cloak-shadow over her life. And Kate’s, and Penelope Churchward’s too - and who knew what Penny was up to these days? Without Charles - without Dracula - they were all three adrift. It struck Geneviève that if anyone rose to take the place of the two dead men they’d spent their lives clinging to or running from, she, Kate and Penny would end up together, like the three witches in
Macbeth
- prophesying, misleading and anointing, in thunder, lightning or in rain. Once, it’d have been a tragedy. Now, it’d be a sit-com.

Like Bram Stoker, she wondered what her life, what the world, would have been like if Vlad Tepes had never turned or been defeated before his rise to power.

Might-have-beens and the dead. Bad company.

John Lennon was truly dead, too. Less than a month ago, in New York, he’d taken a silver bullet through the heart, a cruel full stop for the 1970s, for what was left of the 1960s. Annie Wilkes, Lennon’s killer, said she was the musician’s biggest fan, but that he had to die for breaking up the Beatles. Geneviève didn’t know how long Lennon had been a vampire, but she sadly recognised in the dirge ‘Imagine’ that copy-of-a-copy voidishness characteristic of creatives who turned to prolong their artistic lives, but found the essential thing that made them who they were, that powered their talent, gone, and that the best they could hope for was a kind of rarefied self-plagiarism. Mad Annie might have done John a favour, making him immortal again. Currently the most famous vampire-slayer in the world, she was a heroine to the bedrock strata of warm America which would never accept vampirekind as even kissing cousins to humanity.

What, she wondered as the sun touched the sky, would this new decade bring?

A SCREENPLAY

by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles

Based on the novel of Bram Stoker

Nov 30, 1939

Fade In

1.    EXT. TRANSYLVANIA - FAINT DAWN - 1885

Window, very small in the distance, illuminated. All around this an almost totally black screen. Now, as the camera moves slowly towards this window, which is almost a postage stamp in the frame, other forms appear: spiked battlements, vast granite walls, and now, looming up against the still-nighted sky, enormous iron grillwork.

Camera travels up what is now shown to be a gateway of gigantic proportions and holds on the top of it - a huge initial ‘D’ showing darker and darker against the dawn sky. Through this and beyond we see the gothic-tale mountaintop of Dracula’s estate, the great castle a silhouette at its summit, the little window a distant accent in the darkness.

Dissolve

(A series of setups, each closer to the great window, all telling something of:)

2.    EXT. THE LITERALLY INCREDIBLE DOMAIN OF VLAD,
COUNT DRACULA

Its right flank resting for forty miles along the Borgo Pass, the estate truly extends in all directions farther than the eye can see. An ocean of sharp tree-tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through the forests. Designed by nature to be almost completely vertical and jagged - it was, as will develop, primordial forested mountain when Dracula acquired and changed its face - it is now broken and shorn, with its fair share of carved peaks and winding paths, all man-made.

Castle Dracula itself - an enormous pile, compounded of several demolished and rebuilt structures of varying architecture, with broken battlements and many towers - dominates the scene from the very peak of the mountain. It sits on the edge of a very terrible precipice.

Dissolve

3.    EXT. THE VILLAGE

In the shadows, literally the shadows, of the mountain. As we move by, we see that the peasant doors and windows are shuttered and locked, with crucifixes and obscene clusters of garlic as further protection and sealing. Eyes peep out, timid, at us. The camera moves like a band of men: purposeful, cautious, intrepid, curious.

Dissolve

4.    EXT. FOREST OF STAKES

Past which we move. The sward is wild with mountain weeds, the stakes tilted at a variety of Dutch angles, the execution field unused and not seriously tended for a long time.