Anno Dracula (21 page)

Eventually, Johnny arrived and displayed his prize.

Penny shook Mrs Trudeau’s hand and felt the chill coming from her. Her scarlet choker didn’t quite match her crimson evening dress. Penny could smell the musk of her scabs.

Johnny was drinking well, these nights.

Andy and Johnny sat together, close. Mrs Trudeau frowned, showing her own streak of jealousy. Penny wouldn’t be able to explain to her what Andy and Johnny had, why everyone else was superfluous when they were together. Despite the fluctuations in their relationship, they were one being with two bodies. Without saying much, Johnny made Andy choke with laughter he could never let out. There was a reddish flush to Andy’s albino face.

‘Don’t mind them,’ Penny told Mrs Trudeau. ‘They’re bats.’

‘I don’t suppose this’d do anything for you,’ said the girl from
Star Wars
whose real name Penny had forgotten, cutting a line of red powder on the coffee table with a silver razorblade.

Penny shrugged.

Vampires did bite each other. If one were wounded almost to death, an infusion of another’s
nosferatu
blood could have restorative powers. Blood would be offered by an inferior undead to a coven master to demonstrate loyalty. Penny had no idea what, if any, effect drac would have on her and wasn’t especially keen on finding out. The scene was pretty much a bore.

Princess Leia was evidently a practised dhampire. She snorted through a tubed $100 bill and held her head back. Her eyes reddened and her teeth grew points.

‘Arm wrestle?’ she asked.

Penny wasn’t interested. Dhampires all had this rush of vampire power but no real idea of what to do with it. Except nibble. They didn’t even feed properly.

Most of the people at this party were drac addicts. They went for the whole bit, black capes and fingerless black widow web gloves, Victorian cameos at the throat, lots of velvet and leather, puffy mini-dresses over thigh-boots.

Half this lot had dracced themselves up completely for a midnight screening of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
at the Waverly, and were just coming down, which meant they were going around the room pestering anyone they thought might be holding out on a stash, desperate to get back up there. There was a miasma of free-floating paranoia, which Penny couldn’t keep out of her head.

‘Wait ’til this gets to the Coast,’ said Princess Leia. ‘It’ll be monstrous.’

Penny had to agree.

She had lost Andy and Johnny at CBGBs and fallen in with this crowd. The penthouse apartment apparently belonged to some political bigwig she had never heard of, Hal Philip Walker, but he was out of town. Brooke Hayward was staying here with Dennis Hopper. Penny had the idea that Johnny knew Hopper from some foreign debauch, and wanted to avoid him - which, if true, was unusual.

She was welcome here, she realised, because she was a vampire.

It hit her that if the drac ran out, there was a direct source in the room. She was stronger than any warm person, but it was a long time since she had fought anyone. The sheer press of dhampires would tell. They could hold her down and cut her open, then suck her dry, leaving her like crushed orange pulp. For the first time since turning, she understood the fear the warm had of her kind. Johnny had changed things permanently.

Princess Leia, fanged and clawed, eyed her neck slyly, and reached out to touch her.

‘Excuse me,’ said Penny, slipping away.

Voices burbled in her mind. She was on a wavelength with all these dhampires, who didn’t know how to communicate. It was just background chatter, amplified to skull-cracking levels.

In the bedroom where she had left her coat, a Playmate of the Month and some rock n’ roll guy were messily performing dhampire sixty-nine, gulping from wounds in each other’s wrists. Penny had fed earlier and the blood did nothing for her.

A Broadway director tried to talk to her.

Yes, she had seen
Pacific Overtures.
No, she didn’t want to invest in
Sweeney Todd.

Where had anybody got the idea that she was rich?

That fat Albanian from
Animal House,
fangs like sharpened cashew nuts, claimed newfound vampire skills had helped him solve Rubik’s cube. He wore a black Inverness cape over baggy Y-fronts. His eyes flashed red and gold like a cat’s in headlights.

Penny had a headache.

She took the elevator down to the street.

While looking for a cab, she was accosted by some dreadful drac hag. It was the girl Johnny called Nocturna, now a snowy-haired fright with yellow eyes and rotten teeth.

The creature pressed money on her, a crumpled mess of notes.

‘Just a suck, precious,’ she begged.

Penny was sickened.

The money fell from the dhampire’s hands, and was swept into the gutter.

‘I think you’d better go home, dear,’ advised Penny.

‘Just a suck.’

Nocturna laid a hand on her shoulder, surprisingly strong. She retained some
nosferatu
attributes.

‘Johnny still loves me,’ she said, ‘but he has business to take care of. He can’t fit me in, you see. But I need a suck, just a little kiss, nothing serious.’

Penny took Nocturna’s wrist but couldn’t break the hold.

The dhampire’s eyes were yolk yellow, with shots of blood. Her breath was foul. Her clothes, once fashionable, were ragged and gamey.

Penny glanced up and down the street. She could use a cop, or Spider-Man. People were passing, but in the distance. No one noticed this little scene.

Nocturna brought out something from her reticule. A Stanley knife. Penny felt a cold chill as the blade touched her cheek, then a venomous sting. The tool was silvered. She gasped in pain, and the dhampire stuck her mouth over the cut.

Penny struggled, but the dhampire was suddenly strong, juiced up by pure drac. She would make more cuts and take more sucks.

‘You’re his friend,’ Nocturna said, lips red. ‘He won’t mind. I’m not being unfaithful.’

Penny supposed she deserved this.

But, as the red rush dazed Nocturna, Penny broke free of the dhampire. She dabbed her cheek. Because of the silver, the cut would stay open, perhaps even leave a scar. This one would be where it showed.

There were people nearby, watching. Penny saw their red eyes. More dhampires, out for drac, out for her blood. She backed towards the lobby, cursing Johnny Pop.

Nocturna staggered after her.

A taxi cab stormed down the street, scattering dhampires. Penny stuck out her hand and flagged it down. Nocturna howled, and flew at her. Penny wrenched open the cab door and threw herself in. She told the driver to drive off, anywhere, fast.

Nocturna and the others hissed at the window, nails scratching the glass.

The cab sped up and left them behind.

Penny was resolved. Penance was one thing, but enough was enough. She would get out of this city. The Factory could run itself. She would leave Andy to Johnny, and hope they were satisfied with each other.

‘Someday a red rain’s gonna come,’ said the taxi driver. ‘And wash the scum off the streets.’

She wished she could agree with him.

Johnny was one of the privileged few allowed into Andy’s town house to witness the artist’s levée. At high summer, it was impractical to wait for sundown before venturing out - so Johnny had to be ferried the short distance from the Bramford to East 66th Street in a sleek limo with tinted windows and hustle under a parasol up to the door of Number 57.

With the Churchward woman’s desertion, there was a blip in the smooth running of Andy’s social life and he was casting around for a replacement Girl of the Year. Johnny was wary of being impressed into taking on too many of Penny Penitent’s duties. There were already so many demands on his time, especially with that mad Bella Abzug whipping the NYPD into a frenzy about ‘the drac problem’. It wasn’t even illegal yet, but his dealers were rousted every night. His pay-offs to the families and the cops ratcheted up every week, which pushed him to raise the price of a suck, which meant the dhamps had to peddle more ass or bust more head to scrape together cash for their habit. The papers were full of vampire murders, and real vampires weren’t even suspects.

The two-storey lobby of Number 57 was dominated by imperial busts - Napoleon, Caesar, Dracula - and still-packed crates of sculptures and paintings. Things were everywhere, collected but uncatalogued, most still in the original wrapping.

Johnny sat on an upholstered
chaise longue
and leafed through a male pornographic magazine that was on top of a pile of periodicals that stretched from
The New York Review of Books
to
The Fantastic Four.
He heard Andy moving about upstairs and glanced at the top of the wide staircase. Andy made an entrance, a skull-faced spook-mask atop a floor-length red velvet dressing gown which dragged like Scarlett O’Hara’s train as he descended.

In this small, private moment - with no one else around to see - Andy allowed himself to smile, a terminally ill little boy indulging his love of dressing-up. It wasn’t just that Andy was a poseur, but that he let everyone know it and still found the reality in the fakery, making the posing the point. When Andy pretended, he just showed up the half-hearted way everyone else did the same thing. In the months he had been in New York, Johnny had learned that being an American was just like being a vampire, to feed off the dead and to go on and on and on, making a virtue of unoriginality, waxing a corpse-face to beauty. In a country of surfaces, no one cared about the rot that lay beneath the smile, the shine and the dollar. After the persecutions of Europe, it was an enormous relief.

Andy extended a long-nailed hand towards an occasional table by the
chaise longue
. It was heaped with the night’s invitations, more parties and openings and galas than even Andy could hit before dawn.

‘Choose,’ he said.

Johnny took a handful of cards, and summarised them for Andy’s approval or rejection. Shakespeare in the Park, Paul Toombes in
Timon of Athens
(‘gee, misa-anthropy’). A charity ball for some new wasting disease (‘gee, sa-ad’). An Anders Wolleck exhibit of metal sculptures (‘gee, fa-abulous’). A premiere for the latest Steven Spielberg film,
1941
(‘gee, wo-onderful’). A screening at Max’s Kansas City of a work in progress by Scott and Beth B, starring Lydia Lunch and Teenage Jesus (‘gee, u-underground’). A nightclub act by Divine (‘gee, na-aughty’). Parties by and for John Lennon, Tony Perkins (‘ugh,
Psycho’),
Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine, Jonathan and Jennifer Hart (‘ick!’), Blondie (‘the cartoon character or the band?’), Malcolm McLaren (‘be-est not’), David Johansen, Edgar Allan Poe (‘ne-evermore’), Frank Sinatra (‘Old Hat Rat Pack Hack!’).

The night had some possibilities.