The Mammoth Book of Dracula (13 page)

“She’s a doll, all right. Have a gander at that, bub.”The rat-like man who ran the kiosk nodded at a calendar hanging from the back wall.

Miss Page on a beach, in the sunshine—oh how she caused him to long for the sun!—wearing a sparse swimsuit. Smiling her engaging, teasing smile, her lithe body with the come-hither tilt of her hips ...

“You buyin’?”

He turned toward the rat of a man. One glance at those rodent eyes and the creature was made nearly dumb, only murmuring, “Go ahead. Take it, mister.”

Vlad threw the photoplay volume at the vendor. He did not need these cheap imitations. By sunrise, he would possess the flesh and blood woman of his desires.

~ * ~

Klaw’s studio lay hidden in the warehouse district, protected by meat packing plants and dry goods wholesalers. Vlad had been here before, many times, searching for Bettie. But as dumb luck would have it, either she was elsewhere, or else accompanied by a gaggle of friends. Even when he’d staked out this premises nightly when they first began to shoot
Teaserama,
he could not find her alone. Tonight, though, he was determined. Tonight he would gain admittance to the building, then to the studio. And finally to Miss Page herself.

He waited until he saw someone head towards the entrance. No sooner had they entered the main door than he was behind, catching the door as it closed, calling out.

A young man delivering sandwiches from a delicatessen turned, a startled look denting his freckly face. It took no time for Vlad to embed the proper words in his brain, and the youth soon repeated the magic phrase, “Sure, come on in.”

Once inside, the warehouse was a maze of doors. Some sported signs: Friedman’s Fruitcakes; The Button Hole; Crown Cork and Can ... He wandered the twenty storeys, disregarding the doors which obviously did not house a film studio on the other side, pressing his ear to the ones that gave little or no indication of what lay within. Finally, after much searching, he heard voices:

“Don’t worry, honey, just gimme a big smile. It’s gonna be all right.” This accompanied by the sound of what might have been a crank.

It was do or die the true death. He knocked and heard a “Damn!”

The man who appeared at the crack the door opened was of ordinary height, with a dark moustache and intense, red-rimmed eyes. “Yeah?” he said suspiciously.

“I am searching for Bettie Page.”

“You and a two thousand other guys,” he said. “What’s your business with her?”

It took only seconds to mesmerize this man and to gain admittance.

Within lay a film studio in one large space, or what remained of it. The area was almost barren. Boxes had been packed and stacked near the door. Tripods were propped against the wall, and cameras and film canisters had been gathered together. A woman in midlife, the only other person in the room, wanted to know, “Irving, who’s this guy?”

The man named Irving shook his head, as if waking from sleep.

“You a fed?” she asked.

“Nah. He don’t look the type,” Irving said.

“I am searching for Miss Page. Where may I find her?”Vlad said.

“That’s anybody’s guess. She took off last week, like all the others, God knows where. Just after they started in on us.”

“Make yourself clear!” Vlad demanded, impatience rising alongside the fear gnawing up his spine.

“The House of Representatives. You know, the federal government? Don’t you read the papers?”

The woman moved closer. “The House Unamerican Activities Committee. They figure we film smut and that ain’t exactly American or something.”

“Meaning?” Vlad asked, but after five centuries walking the earth, he already understood.

“Meaning,” the man said, “they shut us down. That there’s all that’s left. A copy.”

Vlad walked to the canister the man pointed at and picked it up.
Teaserama
the label read. All that remained of Bettie Page.

“Hey! You can’t take that!” the man shouted, as Vlad turned towards the door, cradling the canister against his stone-cold heart.

One look from the Price of Darkness, a look not intended to mesmerize, a look that conveyed a depth of pain no mortal could bear to see for long, caused Irving Klaw to say softly—and Vlad knew it was not out of terror but out of empathy—“I got the original anyways, or Friedman does. Take it. You need her.”

And he did.

<>

~ * ~

NANCY HOLDER

Blood Freak

NANCY HOLDER is the
New York Times
bestselling co-author of the
Wicked
young adult dark fantasy series (with Debbie Viguie), which has been optioned by DreamWorks. Their new series,
Crusade,
was launched in 2010, followed by yet another collaborative series,
The Wolf Springs Chronicles,
in 2011.

She has written many novels, short stories and episode guides for shows such as
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Hellboy, Saving Grace,
and others. Holder is also the writer on the
Domino Lady
comic for Moonstone. She wrote theYA horror
Possessions
trilogy for Razorbill, and has received four Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers Association.

She lives in San Diego, California, with her formidable daughter, Belle; their two cats, David and Kittnen Snow Vampire; and their two fairy dogs, Welsh Corgis Panda and Tater, who really do fly on Midsummer’s Night.

It is the Swinging Sixties, and Dracula feels reborn. Always a natural leader, he now finds himself surrounded by young people who regard him as a figure of mystery and great power ...

~ * ~

CAPTAIN BLOOD. THE Bat Man. He lived in a real castle, that is to say, someone built it to live in, not to film it, in the middle of the Borrego Desert. That is to say, east of San Diego, that Republican bastion of the Military Industrial Complex of Amerika, north of the Mexican border, where you could score lids of grass for five bucks a pop. His craggy, Scottish castle had been in some John Carradine movie, which some people found more trippy than the rumour that the current owner was a vampire.

Blood was his freak. No surprise, Pranksters: because if you travelled the rippling sidewinder dessication to that
Shock!
Theater on the mesa, you had to have resources, interior (that is to, say, grey matter) and exterior (that is to say, eyes and ears) that the average headfeeder either did not have or use very well. So you synthesized; that is to say, you took things in. You figured things out.

You were observant. You grokked the fullness of the situation.

Going to the castle was the Great Bloodfreak Trek, the GBT, and you did it straight enough to drive, stoned enough to take the edge off, beating on the dashboard to the arhythmic spasms of your carotid artery and the great good muscle that pumped it all together now. You and whatever merry band you had banded with could not help but hear the stories at the gas stations where you copped a pee and the bars where you guzzled whatever was cheapest (“We don’t serve no hippies”; “Right on, man, we don’t eat ‘em”). The bourgeoisie crossing themselves like flipped-out movie extras, and cops warning you off the rumble-crunching dirtrock road. Go back, go back, go back, you stupid kids; he really is a fuckin’ bloodsucker.

So are mosquitoes, baby. It’s all one big mandala. He was out front with it,
he liked to suck people’s blood,
and if you pretended not to grok his trip and showed up on his doorstep anyway, that was your bullshit, not his.

~ * ~

Vlad Dracula was no longer certain if he was mesmerized or bored to tears by the antic dances of the counterculture. In the fifties —Kerouac and the beats, bongos and a fascination with Italy—he had moved from San Francisco with his servants and his Brides and sought refuge in the desert. In San Francisco there had been too much scrutiny, too many questions, and then a woman he had entertained a number of times began writing poetry that she read in coffee shops:

He is my biterman, Daddy-o,

he ramthroats my red trickle

down.

Thus identified, he had fled.

In the desert, he had hibernated for a time, missing the chill and the rain of San Francisco, the cold and the snow of Europe. But he had existed undetected, and kept himself fed, enjoying his homesickness as only someone who is very old can enjoy the sublime delicacy of emotions less intense than grief or despair—wistfulness, nostalgia, the watercolour washes of faint regret. But for him this was a game; he could leave any time he wanted.

Then came the changeling children, with their psychedelia and their excesses that reminded him of the oldest of his old days. The pageantry and drama of his Transylvanian court, the blood baths and virgins and the joy of opulence and extremity. Somehow one confused flower child stumbled to his castle, and then another, and another, until he was the source of a pilgrimage.

His servants begged him to leave, or at least to halt the flow of half-baked mortality. But he found he enjoyed the little hippies not so much for the quality of their company as the fact that they sought him out. They capered and gyrated for his amusement; ate his banquets; made up terrible, overwrought poetry which they loved to recite to him after dinner; and dared one another, in hushed tones, to bare their necks for him, even though he never asked them to. Was he or wasn’t he? He never revealed himself, keeping his own counsel and instructing the Brides and the servants to do likewise.

Gradually he came to trust his admirers as he had once trusted his Gypsies. They proved worthy of that trust, if only because no one who could do anything about him listened to their conjectures about the Court of the Crimson King. His most ardent groupies were ineffectual and inarticulate, and therefore, harmless.

For that harmlessness, Dracula pitied them. In their beaded costumes and banshee hair, they whirled and swirled and postured.
I’m so ... so much, man!
He wondered if they were actually more controlled and controlling than their middle-class comrades who had gotten Beatle cuts and stayed home with their families. Among the scruffy little vagabonds, each stunt, each pronouncement, each thought was scrutinized, analysed, compared against an unfathomable standard of intellectual prowess they didn’t possess and karmic serendipity that did not exist:

I said “red” man, and the Captain walked into the room!

Whoa, heavy! Check it out! You just told me that and he left the room!

He was sorry that there was no such thing as karmic serendipity. It would have made his long life more interesting. So, like the hundreds of thousands of this time, he turned to drugs. The children took an astonishing variety of drugs: hashish, marijuana, Thai sticks, peyote, mushrooms, and pills of all shapes and sizes. They popped the pills as one might vitamins; they smoked their hemp and hashish like cigarettes, and the rest they cooked with butter and honey and nibbled like Turkish Delight.