Anno Dracula (23 page)

The cab parked outside the Bramford. It was full night, and a thin frost of snow lay on the sidewalks, slushing in the gutters.

Johnny got out and paid off the cab driver.

Familiar mad eyes. This was someone else he had encountered in the past year. Travis. The man had changed: the sides of his head were shaved and a Huron ridge stood up like a thicket on top of his skull.

The cabbie got out of the vehicle.

Johnny could tear this warm fool apart if he tried anything. He could not be surprised.

Travis extended his arm, as if to shake hands. Johnny looked down, and suddenly there was a pistol - shot out on a spring device - in the man’s hand.

‘Suck on this,’ said Travis, jamming the gun into Johnny’s stomach and pulling the trigger.

The first slug passed painlessly through him as if he were made of water. There was an icy shock, but no hurt, no damage. An old-fashioned lead bullet. Johnny laughed out loud. Travis pulled the trigger again.

This time, it was silver.

The bullet punched into his side, under his ribs, and burst through his back, tearing meat and liver. A hurricane of fire raged in the tunnel carved through him. The worst pain of his
nosferatu
life brought him to his knees, and he could
feel
the cold suddenly - his jacket was back at 54 - as the wet chill of the snow bit through his pants and at the palm of his outstretched hand.

Another silver bullet, through the head or the heart, and he would be finished.

The cab driver stood over him. There were others, in a circle. A crowd of Fearless Vampire Killers. The silent nun. The black man with wooden knives. The black man with the crossbow. The cop who’d sworn to break the Transylvania Connection. An architect, on his own crusade to avenge a family bled dead by dhamps. The ageing beatnik from the psychedelic van, with his smelly tracking dog. A red-skinned turncoat devil boy with the tail and sawn-off horns. The exterminator with the skull on his chest and a flame-thrower in his hands.

This company of stone loners was brought together by a single mission, to put an end to Johnny Pop. He had known about them all, but never guessed they might connect with each other. This city was so complicated.

The cop, Doyle, took Johnny’s head and made him look at the Bramford.

Elvira was dead on the front steps, stake jutting from her cleavage, strewn limbs like the arms of a swastika. Rudy scuttled out of the shadows, avoiding Johnny’s eyes. He hopped from one foot to another, a heavy briefcase in his hands. The arrow man made a dismissive gesture, and Rudy darted off, hauling what cash he could take. The Vampire Killers hadn’t even needed to bribe him with their own money.

There was a huge crump, a rush of hot air, and the top floor windows all exploded in a burst of flame. Glass and burning fragments rained all around. His lair, his lieutenants, his factory, a significant amount of money, his coffin of earth. All gone in a moment.

The Vampire Killers were grimly satisfied.

Johnny saw people filling the lobby, rushing out onto the streets.

Again, he would have an audience.

The Father was strong in him, his ghost swollen, stiffening his spine, deadening his pain. His fang-teeth were three inches long, distending his jaw. All his other teeth were razor-edged lumps. Fresh rows of piranhalike fangs sprouted from buds he had never before suspected. His nails were poison daggers. His shirt tore at the back as his shoulders swelled, loosing the beginnings of black wings. His shoes burst and rips ran up the sides of his pants.

He stood up, slowly. The hole in his side was healed over, scabbed with dragonscales. A wooden knife lanced at him, and he batted it out of the air. Flame washed against his legs, melting the snow on the sidewalk, burning away his ragged clothes, hurting him not a bit.

Even the resolute Killers were given pause.

He fixed all their faces in his mind.

‘Let’s dance,’ Johnny hissed.

Johnny lay broken on the sidewalk, a snow angel with cloak-like wings of pooled, scarlet-satin blood. He was shot through with silver and wood, and smoking from a dousing in flame. He was a ghost, locked in useless, fast-spoiling meat. The Father was loosed from him, standing over his ruin, eyes dark with sorrow and shame, a pre-dawn penumbra around his shoulders.

The Vampire Killers were dead or wounded or gone. They had not bought his true death easily. They were like him in one way: they had learned the lesson of
Dracula,
that only a family could take him down. He had known there were hunters on his track; he should have foreseen they would band together and taken steps to break them apart, as the Father would have done, had done with his own persecutors.

With the New York sunrise, he would crumble to nothing, to a scatter of drac on the snow.

Bodies moved nearby, on hands and knees, faces to the wet stone, tongues lapping. Dhampires. Johnny would have laughed. As he died, he was being sucked up, his ghost snorted by addicts.

The Father told him to reach out, to take a hold.

He could not. He was surrendering to the cold. He was leaving the Father, and letting himself be taken by Death. She was a huge-eyed fake nun.

The Father insisted.

It wasn’t just Johnny dying. He was the last link with the Father. When Johnny was gone, it would be the end of Dracula too.

Johnny’s right hand twitched, fingers clacking like crab-claws. It had almost been cut through at the wrist, and even his rapid healing couldn’t undo the damage.

The Father instructed.

Johnny reached out, fingers brushing a collar, sliding around a throat, thumbnail resting against a pumping jugular. He turned his head, and focused his unburst eye.

Rudy Pasko, the betrayer, the dhampire.

He would kill him and leave the world with an act of vengeance.

No, the Father told him.

Rudy’s red eyes were balls of fear. He was swollen with Johnny’s blood, overdosing on drac, face shifting as muscles under the skin writhed like snakes.

‘Help me,’ Johnny said, ‘and I’ll kill you.’

Rudy had boosted a car and gathered Johnny together to pour him into the passenger seat. The dhampire was on a major drac trip and saw the light at the end of his tunnel. If he were to be bitten by Johnny in his current state, he would die, would turn, would be a dhampire no longer. Like all the dhamps, his dearest wish was to be more, to be a full vampire. It wasn’t as easy as some thought. They had to be bitten by the vampire whose blood they had ingested. Most street drac was cut so severely that the process was scrambled. Dhampires had died. But Rudy knew where the blood in him had come from. Johnny realised that his Judas had betrayed him not just for money, but because Rudy thought that if he spilled enough of Johnny’s blood, he could work the magic on his own. In the British idiom Johnny had learned from Sid, Rudy was a wanker.

They arrived at Andy’s town house just before dawn.

If Johnny could get inside, he could survive. It wasn’t easy, even with Rudy’s help. During the fight, he had shapeshifted too many times, sustained too many terrible wounds, even lost body parts. He had grown wings, and they’d been shredded by silver bullets, then ripped out by the roots. Important bones were gone from his back. One of his feet was lopped off and lost in the street. He hoped it was hopping after one of his enemies.

He had tasted some of them, the Vampire Killers. In Doyle’s blood, he found a surprise: the drac-busting cop was a secret dhampire, and had dosed himself up to face Johnny. The knifeman, who had vampire blood in him from a strange birth, had stuffed himself with garlic, to make his blood repulsive.

The blood was something. He was fighting now.

Rudy hammered on Andy’s door, shouting. Johnny had last seen Andy at 54, at the party he had left. He should be home by now, or would be home soon. As dawn approached, Johnny felt himself smoking. It was a frosty All Hallows’ morn, but the heat building up like a fever inside him was monsoon-oppressive and threatened to explode in flames.

Johnny’s continued life depended on Andy having made it home.

The door was opened. It was Andy himself, not yet out of his party clothes, dazzled by the pinking end of night. Johnny felt waves of horror pouring off the artist and understood exactly how he must look.

‘It’s just red, Andy. You use a lot of red.’

Rudy helped him into Andy’s hallway. The gloom was like a welcoming cool in midsummer. Johnny collapsed on the
chaise longue
and looked at Andy, begging.

Only one thing could cure him. Vampire blood.

His first choice would have been the Churchward woman, who was almost an elder. She had survived a century and was of a fresh bloodline. But Penny was gone, fleeing the city and leaving them all in the bloody lurch.

It would have to be Andy. He understood and backed away, eyes wide.

Johnny realised he didn’t even know what Andy’s bloodline was. Who had made him?

Andy was horrified. He hated to be touched. He hated to give anything, much less himself.

Johnny had no choice. He reached out with what was left of his mind and took a hold of the willing Rudy. He made the dhamp, still hopped up on prime drac, grab Andy by the arms and force him across the lobby, bringing him to the
chaise longue
as an offering for his Master.

‘I’m sorry, Andy,’ said Johnny.

He didn’t prolong the moment. Rudy exposed Andy’s neck, stringy and chalky, and Johnny pounced like a cobra, sinking his teeth into the vein, opening his throat for the expected gush of life-giving, mind-blasting vampire blood. He didn’t just need to take blood, he needed a whole ghost, to replace the tatters he had lost.

Johnny nearly choked.

He couldn’t keep Andy’s blood down. His stomach heaved, and gouts poured from his mouth and nose.

How had Andy done it? For all these years?

Rudy looked down on them both, wondering why Johnny was trying to laugh, why Andy was squealing and holding his neck. What the frig was going down in the big city?

Andy wasn’t, had never been, a vampire.

He was still alive.

Johnny at last understood just how much Andy Warhol was his own invention.

Andy was dying now and so was Johnny.

Andy’s blood did Johnny some good. He could stand up. He could take hold of Rudy, lifting him off his feet. He could rip open Rudy’s throat with his teeth and gulp down pints of the dhamp’s drac-laced blood. He could toss Rudy’s corpse across the lobby.

That taken care of, he cradled Andy, trying to get the dying man’s attention. His eyes were still moving, barely. His neck wound was a gouting hole, glistening with Johnny’s vampire spittle. The light was going out.

Johnny stuck a thumbnail into his own wrist and poured his blood into Andy’s mouth, giving back what he had taken. Andy’s lips were as red as rubies. Johnny coaxed him and finally, after minutes, Andy swallowed, then relaxed and let go, taking his first and final drac trip.

In an instant, as it happens sometimes, Andy Warhol died and came back. It was too late, though. Valerie Solanas had hurt him very badly and there were other problems. The turning would not take.