The Vampire Sextette Read online

  time she—Citizen Dieudonné—had really lived in her native land; the gory

  business soured her not only on her own nationality but humanity in general. Too

  many eras earned names like "the Tenor." Vampires were supposed to be

  obscenely bloodthirsty, and she wasn't blind to the excesses of her kind, but the

  warm drank just as deeply from open wounds and usually made more of a mess

  of it.

  From the sandy patio beside her chrome-finished Airstream trailer, she looked

  beyond the gaggle of folks about the pit, joking over franks impaled on skewers.

  The Dude was mixing a pitcher of White Russians with his bowling buddies,

  resuming a months-long argument over the precise wording of the opening

  narration/song of

  Branded. An eight-track in an open-top car played "Hotel

  California," The Eagles's upbeat but ominous song about a vampire and her

  victims. Some were dancing on the sand, shoes in a pile that would be hard to sort

  out later. White rolls of surf crashed on the breakers, waves edged delicately up to

  the beach.

  Out there was the Pacific Ocean and the curve of the Earth, and beyond the

  blue horizon, as another shivery song went, was a rising sun. Dawn didn't worry

  her; at her age, as long as she dressed carefully—sunglasses, a floppy hat, long

  sleeves—she wouldn't even catch a severe tan, let alone frazzle up into dust and

  essential salts like some nosferatu of the Dracula bloodline. She had grown out of

  the dark. To her owl eyes, it was no place to hide, which meant she had to be

  careful where she looked on party nights like this. She liked living by the sea: its

  depths were still impenetrable to her, still a mystery.

  "Hey, Gidget," came a rough voice, "need a nip?"

  It was one of the surfers, a shaggy bear of a man she had never heard called

  anything but Moondoggie. He wore frayed shorts, flip-flops, and an old blue shirt,

  and probably had done since the 1950s. He was a legendary veteran of tubes and

  pipes and waves long gone. He seemed young to her, though his friends called

  him an old man.

  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 then-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 the situation,

  clearing 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 almost as 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 looking glasses 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 among the rich. 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-ofan-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, when the Transylvanian Count

  came to London and changed the world. Among other things, the founding of his

  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 by an inner drive to be extreme. 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; and 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

  Valentine 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 with 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, Scientology,

  Psycho-Plasmics. Another snatch of song: "The Voice said Daddy there's a

  million pigeons, waiting to be hooked on new religions."

  As always, she stuck it out until the party died. All the hours of the night rolled

  away, and the rim of the horizon turned from navy blue to lovely turquoise.

  January cold gathered, driving those warmer folks who were still sensible from

  their barbecues and beach towels to their beds.

  Marty Burns, sometime sitcom star and current inha
bitant of a major career

  slump, was passed out facedown 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,

  and 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 neverused sun roof. Economy of space had forced her to limit her possessions—so

  few after so long—to those that really meant the most to her. ugly jewellry 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, 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 Bram Stoker 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 as technical advisor. She hadn't heard from Kate in too long; Geneviève believed

  she was 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 reapplying for

  American citizenship; they were accepting nosferatu now, which they hadn't been

  in 1922 when she last looked into it. Meinster was one of those Dracula wanna-bes

  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.

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

  Nineteen-seventies music hadn't been much, not after the 1960s. Glam rock.

  The Bee-Gees. The Carpenters. She had liked Robert Altaian's films and Close

  Encounters, but didn't see what all the fuss was about Star Wars. 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 have to be

  padded heavily. 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. 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 had

  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 that would never

  accept nosferatu as even kissing cousins to humanity.

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

  Count Dracula

  A SCREENPLAY BY HERMAN J. MANKIEWICZ AND ORSON WELLES BASED

  ON THE NOVEL BY BRAM STOKER

  Nov. 30,1939

  Fade In

  1. Ext. Transylvania—Faint Dawn—1883

  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 grill

  work.

  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. 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 farmer than the eye can see. An ocean of sharp treetops,

  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

  towe
rs—dominates the scene, from the very peak of the mountain. It sits on the

  edge of a very terrible precipice.

  Dissolve

  3. 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. 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.

  Dissolve

  5. What Was Once a Good-Sized Prison Stockade

  All that now remains, with one exception, are the individual plots, surrounded

  by thorn fences, on which the hostages were kept, free and yet safe from each

  other and the landscape at large. (Bones in several of the plots indicate that here

  there were once human cattle, kept for blood.)

  Dissolve

  6. A Wolf Pit

  In the f.g., a great shaggy dire wolf, bound by a silver chain, is outlined against

  the fawn murk. He raises himself slowly, with more thought than an animal should

  display, and looks out across the estates of Count Dracula, to the distant light

  glowing in the castle on the mountain. The wolf howls, a child of the night, making

  sweet music.

  Dissolve

  7. A Trench Below the Walls

  A slow-scuttling armadillo. A crawling giant beetle. Reflected in the muddy

  water—the lighted window.

  Dissolve

  8. The Moat

  Angled spears sag. An old notebook floats on the surface of the water—its

  pages covered in shorthand scribble. As it moves across the frame, it discloses

  again the reflection of the window in the castle, closer than before.