Anno Dracula (58 page)

Alucard’s fangs were sharp in his mouth. It happened in this office sometimes, independent of feeding. There was so much need and desire in the air.

‘I’m glad you feel so strongly, Francis. I want you to make a film for me, for 1992.’

Francis was jarred from his fantasy. He was cautious and cunning again, survivor of Hollywood jungles, the cultured San Franciscan among LA barbarians.

‘Medium-high budget. Star names. Commercial subject. I can presell this to the whole world. You will direct but not produce, not write. You’ll forgive me for bringing it up, but I’ll insist on a tight schedule and personally oversee the shoot. I’ll have Peter Hyams on speed dial in case you fall behind. It’ll be shot here on the lot, in the studio. I’ve got writers on staff who can take care of the script. The effects work we can farm out. I know you enjoy tinkering, but you’ll only get a few months to play this game.’

Francis was waiting for the trap to snap shut.

‘What’s the title, John?’

‘John Alucard presents A Francis Coppola Film,
Dracula Part
II.’

‘Dracula died at the end of my film.’

‘Vito died in
The Godfather.
Impersonating Dracula, incidentally. You still made
Part IT

‘There was Michael.’

‘There’s always a Michael. And Dracula only died because Stoker wanted him to. In the real world, he lived on, until 1959, remember? Who knows, perhaps longer than that.’

Francis was conflicted. He needed a summer picture to raise his stock for the films he wanted to make. He didn’t want anyone else doing a sequel to his
Dracula.
He was keen to work with studio resources again. But he knew he couldn’t match the first film under John Alucard conditions.

‘I won’t do a sequel whose most notable feature is that it’s easy to get financed. It’d be like grabbing some crusading lawyer best-seller off the racks and shooting it with this year’s Tab Hunter. Everything I’ve done so far has meant something.’

‘Tonight for Sure? Dementia
13?’

‘They meant something to me at the time. They opened things up.’ And
Dracula II
means something to me.’

The sentence sank into Francis’s brain.

‘It won’t be a masterpiece, Francis.’

The director’s eyes widened.

‘It doesn’t have to be. It will, however, change minds. About the first film. About you. About me. About Him.’

‘Dracula?’

‘Yes, the Father and Furtherer.’

Alucard looked into Francis’s glasses and saw the spark in the director’s mind. He was remembering that John Alucard bit into human necks and drank blood.

‘Brando is too difficult, too fat, too expensive. He wouldn’t come back for
Godfather
II.’

‘I don’t want Brando. I see Dracula younger. This is the love story.’

‘There’s a
love story
?’

‘Dracula came to England to get married. He made the Queen young again.’

‘I’ve been trying to find something for Sofia,’ said Coppola.

‘Your daughter?’ Alucard remembered the little girl on the set in Transylvania. He tried to see her as a princess. ‘Excellent. Fine casting as the young Queen Victoria. We’ll get her the Academy Award for her birthday if you like. Can’t fix it for Meryl every year. Feel free to use your nephew and sister in the cast too and your father for the score. This is a story about family.’

‘A royal family.’

‘You’re like him, you know. You were a father to me once, when I gave you a staff and found shelter in your crew. And He was a father to me first, when he turned me.’

Francis didn’t follow.

‘A staff?’

‘Do you still have it?’

Alucard allowed his face to shift a little. Recognition sparked in Francis’s mind. He dredged for a name.

‘Ion?’

Alucard nodded.

‘I owe three debts, Francis. One of my benefactors is beyond repayment, though he is with me still.’ He nodded towards the Warhol Carmilla. ‘With this project, I hope to go some way to settling the other two, to you and to Him.’

Francis was astonished.

Overwhelmed, for one of the few times in his life, he wound up signing a contract.

Holly and Penny sat in the back of the pink Rolls, shaded from the high sun by a tinted plexiglass bubble, as one of John’s warm security people drove them out to Mojave Wells. Penny leafed through
The Lady
while Holly looked at sand and rocks. She’d seen a million miles of landscape through fly-specked windshields - much of it like this, Mars with cactuses. Alien worlds weren’t really like California desert, John had told her;
Planet of the Apes
and a few
Star Trek
episodes were shot here and that made people think far-off planets seemed like a stretch of barren Earth a few hours’ drive away from LA. The artefacts left behind by these expeditions were forgotten lens caps, faded strips of marker tape on rocks and expired call-sheets with waitresses’ phone numbers scrawled in the margins.

‘There it is,’ Holly said. ‘Manderley Castle.’

Penny folded away an article about what to wear at Crufts and cocked an eyebrow at the turrets rising from the desert.

‘So it is,’ she said. ‘Should have been left where it was, if you ask me. There’ll be a gaping hole in Kent, thanks to some megalomaniac millionaire. Yanks think they can buy anything and transplant it. As it happens, they usually can. But not all English roses flourish in this foreign soil.’

John didn’t own this castle, but had connections to the people who did. It was a retreat for the Church of Immortology. Some of the
nosferatu
celebs and demi-celebs who hung about John’s parties swore Immortology was the one true vampire faith. Penny, sniffy about tax write-off religions, told Holly not to pay attention to talk like that.

The chauffeur parked the Rolls in the courtyard and released the DeLorean-style door-hatches. The one-of-a-kind custom vehicle had been put at Penny’s disposal.

For over a month, since the night of the Wild Hunt, Holly had been wheedling and nagging at both Penny and John to be allowed to take the next step. Penny, usually hard to convince, had turned round and become her supporter.

Holly wished John were here, but he had business in town. There was a crisis on
The Rock.
A new writer, Martin Amis, had been brought in to explain Sean Connery’s accent. John had to smooth things over.

Feraru’s blood had changed her.

She had never bled another vampire to nothing before. She’d drunk Porthos’s blood to be turned and exchanged blood with Kit, whom she was remembering more. She’d been turned inside out by John Alucard’s blood and Penny had let her take drops of her own rich red in water. But it was different with Feraru. As the vampire emptied his last into her, she’d swallowed a soulseed, something that expanded inside her.

Penny had been shocked when Holly turned into the English Romanian. Until now, Holly had only been able to shapeshift into human-animal forms. With Feraru, the shift was perfect, good enough to fool anyone. Standing over a brown mummy no longer recognisable as Feraru, she was the real man, the original. The feeble cast-off on the ground seemed fake. John had Holly spend time with Crainic, who corrected her few errors. When she became Feraru, she could call up his mind, his self, and live inside it, knowing everything he’d known, remembering his short, silly life and death as a man and a vampire. With Penny and Crainic, she’d spent a night as Feraru, going from club to club and to a meeting of TM sympathisers in Malibu. She could pilot her shifted body and call to mind the names of those Feraru knew, to give all the right answers and ask the right questions. She’d bled Feraru’s warm mistress and the girl hadn’t known the difference.

John was pleased with her. That made her pleased with herself.

Penny was a little frightened, but she needn’t be.

Holly would never hurt Penny.

And if she did, it wouldn’t be killing. Penny would live on, inside. Just as Feraru lived on. He was like a boxed videotape on a shelf, taken down and played from time to time.

Holly had other videotapes now. Vampires John had had her drain. A rock singer named Josie Hart, who would appear at the Concert for Transylvania, and whose music was now the soundtrack running in the back of Holly’s mind. A businessman named Frene, a spoiler of the stock market, whose interests she kept up at long distance, doing his voice over the phone, signing his papers. It was important she have her own money, and keeping up Frene’s life and accounts was useful for that. A precocious eternal child named Rudolph, whose inoffensiveness made him a handy back-up shape if escape were ever called for. These selves had been picked carefully. Penny thought there might be a limit to the number of vampires Holly could store, but Holly was certain she had room for more.

On the dull trip to Mojave Wells, she experimented with her four secondary selves, shuffling between them. Her clothes became tight or loose as her shape changed completely. She wore a backless ballet leotard, Nikes and a padded hunter’s vest. The ensemble did well for everything but Frene’s big feet, which were cramped in the puffy shoes, and Rudolph’s little legs, which made the leotard comically baggy.

In the shadow of Manderley Castle, Holly was her default self. She looked up at the battlements and saw a man. His white face surmounted a tall, cloaked body. Then the cloak unfolded of its own accord and spread out into a bat-wing silhouette.

‘Don’t mind him,’ said Penny. ‘He likes to show off.’

The vampire leaped up onto the battlements and stepped off, into the air.

Holly had never seen anything so beautiful.

Tonight, she would learn to fly.

The vampire landed casually, folded away his wings, and shifted into more human form. He was a GI Joe-handsome young man in a black jump-suit, slit to bare-skin under the sleeves, down the sides and at the back. The garment was fixed only at wrists and ankles and belt.

‘Meet Banshee, an old friend,’ said Penny.

The grinning youth kissed the Englishwoman, but his eyes were on Holly.

‘This is your fledgling?’

‘Don’t judge by appearances,’ said Penny.

At Penny’s nod, Holly took off her vest and shifted. Banshee’s wings were transformed arms, veined membranes stretched between his wrists and ankles. Her black-feathered spread grew out of her back like a classic angel’s, leaving her arms free. New muscle ropes wormed around under her skin, settling in her chest and shoulders.

‘For show,’ said Banshee. ‘She can’t get in the air with those.’

‘You’ll be surprised,’ said Penny.

Other people were present.

‘This is General Count Iorga,’ said Penny, indicating a paunchy elder in a black polyester leisure suit, ‘late of the Carpathian Guard and the Imperial German army, now of the Church of Immortology and the State of California.’

Holly thought Iorga a sad relic. He clicked his heels and nodded, as if meeting a junior officer about to be promoted above him. From the number of titles and footnotes Penny used, Holly gathered Iorga needed to compensate by inflating his letterhead.

‘And this is, uh, Mrs Meinster,’ said Penny, gesturing at an ordinary-looking vampire woman.

‘Baroness
Meinster,’ corrected the creature, radiating hostility.

‘She’s taking care of the interests of her husband, Baron Meinster of the Transylvania Movement.’

Holly shifted inside her mind, channelling Feraru, who remembered this woman. The Baroness, an Englishwoman who had in life been named Patricia Rice, was the most fanatical of her husband’s followers. A former art student, she’d already designed the flags, uniforms and postage stamps of the new country her husband intended to rule. She was working on a National Anthem too, but unable to get ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ out of her head. Baroness Meinster longed to sing the lead in
Evita
at the opera house her husband promised to build in Timişoara.

Penny didn’t think much of her countrywoman. She recognised that once, long ago, she’d been rather too much like Patricia Rice.

It was keen, knowing what everyone was thinking. She’d picked up the knack. Holly had to remember to be herself but had an advantage over everyone in mindshot.

Except John. His skull was shut, even though she’d tasted his blood.

A shadow rose and terror clutched Holly’s heart.

‘This is Graf von Orlok,’ said Penny.

She hadn’t sensed
his
mind either. The elder was barely human, a yellow-domed skull with flared rat-ears and greening fang front-teeth. His nails curled in on themselves, his long coat had seen centuries of wear and his smell was a miasma which made even undead eyes water. Banshee, stereotypically fearless, held himself stiff and alert at Orlok’s approach.

The elder said nothing but looked at Holly and knew everything. His lips twitched.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ said the Baroness.

The plan agreed with the Transylvanians was the sacrifice of Banshee, a veteran of the US Bat-Soldier Program. With his fresh young blood in her, Holly could soar above the canyons like an eagle.

She fixed Banshee with Josie’s eyes and sang a wordless tune - inaudible to warm human ears - which resonated with all the vampires save the plodding Patricia.