Anno Dracula (65 page)

The two singers, a youth and a child, stood in their respective circles of light winding pure, cold voices around each other. Out on the hillside, a hundred thousand points of light burned, fires against the coming of dawn.

The vampires sang of what was to come. Of the world without heaven or hell, without property or theft. Of the world with peace and order, with love and obedience. As they finished, there was a moment of silence, like the long seconds between lightning and thunder, pregnant with applause and acclaim.

The silence lengthened.

The singers were both astonished, robbed of their power, wondrous at what could turn off such an inevitable hurricane of noise.

He stepped out through the door in the backdrop. Alone.

The singers knew him at once. Even they were humbled.

He flung open the wings of his scarlet-lined black cloak, displaying the red dragon on his black silk tunic, and walked across the stage.

He needed no microphone.

‘I bid you welcome to my house,’ he announced to the multitudes on the mountainside, and to the billions watching around the world. ‘Come freely. Go safely, and leave some of the happiness you bring.’

Like a divine wind, it rushed at the stage. The sound of the people, of
his
people. More than applause and cheering, it was a massed cry of triumph and sacrifice and homage and love. It was his right.

There was only one more announcement to make. It needed to be said aloud.

‘I... am... Dracula.’

N
o wonder the old Count picked London as the capital of his vampire empire. Grey cloud rendered the sky sunless at two in the afternoon, as if the day had given up early. Streetlamps stubbornly refused to shine, but everyone drove with headlights on. The well-lit cheer of January sales shops just reminded Kate Reed of the prevailing misery. It was as cold and wet as it could be without actual rain. At least there was no fog. The Clean Air Acts of the 1950s had dispelled the city’s ‘pea-soupers’ forever.

She was in a quiet square, one of many corners removed from the flow and bustle of the metropolis. Even a hundred years ago most of these Georgian mansions had been sub-divided into flats, carved up in the first of many calamitous property gold rushes. Buildings bristled with satellite dishes and estate agents’ signs.

Crazy prices. Boom and bust.

Her landlord kept offering to buy her out of the tenancy agreement she’d signed with his father (‘They call
me
a bloodsucker, ha-ha!’) in 1955. The son still believed he could make a packet by getting rid of his sitting tenants and the ground-floor launderette and converting the building into a yuppie hive. Holloway Road was bound to gentrify. The first espresso machine had already been sighted north of Highbury and Islington Tube Station. But the long-lived clung to their few legal rights, an inconvenience for anyone who wanted to cash out and retire to Spain. Kate would give in eventually and accept her cut of the silly money floating about London even after the last stock market quake. She thought the landlord might be on the point of switching from carrot to stick.

An instinct sharpened over a century suggested she was often - indeed, now - shadowed by someone stealthy enough to stay out of her eyeline whenever she turned. To whit: someone more dangerous than her.

Once, when she had semi-official status with the Diogenes Club, she’d have had Nezumi, her former neighbour, watching her back. A thousand-year-old schoolgirl who could do as much damage with a hockey stick as a samurai sword was always welcome on any dangerous jaunt. The last Kate had heard, the Japanese vampire was working in the public sector, as
yojimbo
for the Nakatomi Corporation.

The address she sought was marked by a blue plaque. Henry Jekyll ‘chemist and natural scientist’ lived here from 1868 to 1902. He was honoured for scientific researches into the vampire condition, but Kate remembered the name from a run of minor scandals. The good doctor was known for keeping bad company: vivisectionists, bully boys, resurrection men, low people of all sorts. A string of murders was laid at the back door of this house, attributed to a monkeyish lout named Edward Hyde, bosom pal (and more?) of Dr Jekyll. Hyde, infamous after skewering a vampire Member of Parliament, eluded the long arm of the law and apparently escaped to the Continent or the Americas.

In the 1880s and ’90s, when Dracula ruled England, ordinary villains often got away with crimes that in more reasonable times would have been punished. Last Sunday’s
Independent
had run a piece on the papers of Sir Rodger Baskerville, unsealed fifty years after his peaceful death in bed surrounded by doting grandchildren. It seemed the West Country baronet had acceded to his title in 1889 by contriving the deaths in improbable circumstances of relatives who stood between him and the family fortune. No one had been around to stop him. The most notable criminal investigators of the period tended to be labelled enemies of the crown they had once served, and got packed off to the Tower or the internment camp at Devil’s Dyke. Only a lifelong tendency to mouse-like unnoticeability had preserved Kate from such a fate.

She was more and more reminded of those times.

Last year, on the eve of April Fool’s Day, she’d taken part in a peaceful protest against Mrs Thatcher’s Poll Tax and found herself - for the second time - caught in Trafalgar Square between rioters and the police. Memories of the Bloody Sunday of 1887, when radicals were left dead after the melée, came back in a rush as a young vampire plod battered her with a plexiglass shield and dragged her off to be charged with breach of the peace.

Mrs Thatcher was gone now. But Dracula was back.

It had to be true. She’d seen it on television.

There was no point in dawdling on the pavement. She felt in her blood that someone was in the square, out of sight, intent upon her. It was beyond her skills to lure her stalker into the open. He, she or it was just a distraction. She had a call to make.

The names by the buzzers were mostly typed or dymo-taped, but the one she was looking for was scrawled in a spidery hand on a yellowed strip of card.

Just the surname: Pretorius.

Or Pretorious or Praetorius, no one seemed quite sure how it was spelled. From the card, it was impossible to tell.

She pressed the entry-phone button and waited.

She tried to suppress unease. Whoever was tracking her shouldn’t have the satisfaction of knowing she was spooked. She was, after all, a bloodsucking fiend. She ought to be beyond fearing the reaper.

The door clicked open with an insect buzz and she stepped into a dreary hallway. The tile floor was dusty and scuffed. Two expensive-looking bicycles were chained to a clunky old radiator. A junk-shop table was piled with circulars, letters and rolled magazines.

Most of the mansion was carved into flats, but Pretorius leased a separate building accessible across a courtyard. She understood it had once been Jekyll’s laboratory.

The man appeared at the end of the passage. Ancient but spry, with cracked papery skin and an arrangement of fine, white, flyaway hair, he wore a white medical smock which flowed down past his ankles. He was not a vampire but she recognised in him the symptoms of a long, long life.

She’d run into other shady characters who persisted in clinging to warmth, preserving themselves like living Egyptian mummies. The Daughter of the Dragon ran an investment bank from a glass tower in Docklands, built where the Lord of Strange Deaths once operated opium dens and smuggling rackets.

‘Reed, I presume,’ Pretorius snipped. ‘Come in, come in. No need to stand on ceremony. My time is too valuable to waste on faffing about.’

‘Quite,’ she replied.

He turned and scuttled through a door. Following him, she found herself in the courtyard. Little light filtered down into the stone well.

‘Cheerless, is it not? Your Victorian friends loved their Sunday gloom like a scourge.’

‘Hardly
my
Victorian friends.’

He stopped short and turned to her.

‘But you are
that
Katharine Reed, are you not? The Irish insurrectionist and scribbler?’

‘That’s me all right. I just don’t think of myself as a typical Victorian.’

He barked. It took seconds to register as a laugh.

‘Nonsense. Look at you. Buttoned up to the neck and down to the ankle. Hair up under your hat, with just one long red strand out of place. And those wire-framed spectacles. You dress like a governess.’

‘I narrowly escaped that fate, I admit. By taking on a career.’

‘And becoming a monster?’

‘A vampire.’

‘Quibbles, quibbles. Monsters, vampires, men, women. All the same. Blood and bone and meat and that vital spark. Enter my lair, Ms Reed.’

He pulled open a door in the wall.

The laboratory was a barn-like space, musty with trapped air and stale chemicals. Alcoves were curtained off with sacking. Against the walls stood benches piled with complex arrangements of tubes and retorts. Dozens of specimens were displayed in sealed test tubes, marked with runes she couldn’t interpret. A patched-together computer grew out of a roll-top desk bored through with cable-holes, a walnut-veneer ’50s television cabinet housing the monitor, an old Remington portable typewriter hooked up with a thousand copper wires as a keyboard.

Pretorius took a stoppered bottle of clear liquid and a couple of beakers down from a shelf.

‘Would you like some gin? It’s my only weakness.’

He unstoppered the bottle. At five paces, her nose and eyes stung. He must distil the juniper himself, refining spirits that could legally be classed as a poison.

She waved a polite turn down.

‘Don’t mind if I tipple? I promise not to topple.’

He giggled at his wordplay, decanted a calculated measure, showed her his teeth, and took a sip. Perhaps it wasn’t just gin. Maybe it was his
elixir vitae.
She had no idea how old he was. Geneviève had said he looked this age in 1959. The only picture in his
Guardian
cuttings file was from 1935; it showed exactly this face lurking at the back of a society wedding. Something about the Pretorius countenance was mediaeval. He might be a heretical monk or a cynical inquisitor.

‘Do sit down. Clear off that chair.’

She lifted a pile of petit-point magazines, labelled with the address of a nearby dentist, and settled in a battered old armchair. The furniture was her vintage. She remembered Uncle Diarmid, who’d gently tugged her into journalism, spending his last, gout-ridden years in just such a chair, railing against the injustices of the world and the poor prose of those who now wrote for the journals he’d kept alive during the Terror.

Pretorius preferred to stand. Not a tall man, he liked a dramatic backdrop. It struck her that this scientific clutter might not actually work. The apparatus was put together like a live-in sculpture, to give the impression of a mad scientist’s lair.

‘So, the famous Kate Reed comes a-calling? She must be on the trail of a story. What story, pray, could interest such a distinguished lady scribbler? Only one springs to mind this cold, cold January.’

‘Dracula.’

The scientist looked up at the corners of his space, mobile eyebrows vibrating like antennae. He arranged his wrinkles into a wry smile.

‘That name. So familiar, yet so strange. Three syllables. Dra. Cu. La.’ He threw in a Transylvanian flourish, fluttering his dry-stick fingers, gesturing with an imaginary cape. ‘Count Dracula. Prince Dracula. King of the Cats.
Vampirus Rex Redivivus.
He who was dead and walks once more.’

‘You watch television, then?’

‘Avidly. Though the medium has not recovered from the cancellation of
Crossroads
.’

‘You’ve seen the Concert for Transylvania?’

‘Who hasn’t?’

The finale had been repeated more often than the
Monty Python
Dead Parrot sketch. Whole talk shows and quickie paperbacks were devoted to picking over what had actually happened barely a month ago, after the Short Lion and Timmy V finished squawking through ‘Imagine’.

‘“I... am... Dracula,”’ quoted Pretorius. ‘Easy to say, of course.’

She remembered Marlon Brando repeating the line for a whole night’s shoot. In Transylvania.

‘But hard to mean,’ she said.

‘Oh yes. Very hard to mean.’

‘I saw Dracula dead. In Rome, in 1959. I saw his head struck off. I was covered with his blood. Later, on a beach, I saw his body burned. Ashes scattered.’

Pretorius nodded.

‘You performed the autopsy, Doctor. My friend Geneviève Dieudonné identified the body in the morgue where you were working.’

‘I remember. Pretty girl. Blonde. Nice smile, if you like smiles.’

‘Was there anything unusual about the corpse? Something that didn’t get into the reports?’

‘My dear Ms Reed, there was
everything
unusual about the corpse. It was
Count Dracula.
Don’t you understand? He was not - as you are not -a
natural
being. We are all law-breakers now, violating a dozen of God’s ordinances every day. Just by wearing spectacles, you refuse to accept the heavenly verdict of myopia. And by turning vampire, you venture into regions where science can be of only limited help. The Count journeyed far further. You have turned and stopped. He kept turning, turning, turning.’