Anno Dracula (26 page)

They plummeted to the pavement.

* * *

Meinster sprang up like a cat. Kate, badly shaken, rolled into the gutter. Rice, knees and ankles broken, howled as the bones knit back together.

People rushed forward.

‘I have surrendered,’ Meinster announced, ‘to these flowers of English and Irish vampire maidenhood.’

A black-clad figure swarmed up the front of the Embassy, to the broken window. Flames were already pouring out, blackening the sill.

There was gunfire inside the building.

Richard Jeperson helped her stand and brush herself down, showing real concern. His style was more Charles Beauregard than Edwin Winthrop: she wondered how long he could last under the likes of Ruthven and Croft, not to mention Margaret Thatcher.

Along with the police, TV crews surged forward.

She heard commentators chattering, speculating on the rapid pace of events.

Another vampire was tossed out of the window, turning to a rain of ashes. Hamish Bond was doing his job. Kate thought Orlok might give him a fight, then she saw Dravot, out of his police helmet, signalling a cadre of black ninja-suited men, vampires all, to move in. Britain had been working for a century to create the vampires it needed rather than the ones imposed upon it.

The front door was smashed. Vampires crawled head-down from the flat roof and lizard-swarmed in through upper-storey windows. It was over in moments.

Jeperson and she were separated from the action by a press of people. Between riot shields, she saw Meinster and Ruthven facing each other, warily but without going for the throat. It was as if they were looking in reflecting mirrors for the first time since their turning.

‘What was the point?’ she asked. ‘This was all arranged between them. This wasn’t a siege, it was a pantomime. It’s not about vampires, it’s about communism.’

Jeperson was sad-eyed.

‘You of all people know Romania,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen what happens in the satellite countries. There’s no real
detente
. We have to get rid of the whole shoddy system. Nicolae Ceauşescu is a monster.’

‘And Meinster is better?’

‘He isn’t worse.’

‘Richard,
you
don’t know. You weren’t there during the Terror. When people like Meinster, and people like Ruthven, are in charge, people like you, and people like me, get shoved into locked boxes. It happens slowly, without a revolution, without fireworks, and the world grows cold and hard. Ruthven’s back and you’re supporting Meinster. How long will it be before we start praying for Dracula?’

‘I’m sorry, Kate. I
do
understand.’

‘Why was I here?’

‘To be a witness. For history. Beauregard said that about you. Someone outside the Great Game has to know. Someone has to judge.’

‘And approve?’

Jeperson was chilled. ‘Not necessarily.’

Then, he was pulled away too. She was in a crowd.

A cheer rose up. A line of people, hands on heads, bent over, scurried out of the Embassy door. The hostages. Among them was Orlok, with the poodles. She would have bet he’d survive.

She tripped over thick cable, and followed it back out of the press of bodies. A BBC OB van hummed with activity.

This was news. She was a newspaperwoman.

Somewhere near, she would find a phone. It was time to call her editor.

A
t midnight, 1980 flew away across the Pacific and 1981 crept in from the East. A muted cheer rose from the pretty folk around the barbecue pit, barely an echo of the raucous welcome to a new decade, which had erupted at the last Paradise Cove New Year party.

Of this company, only Geneviève clung to the old - the proper -manner of reckoning decades, centuries and (when they came) millennia. The passing of time was important to her; born in 1416, she’d let more time pass than most. Even among vampires, she was an elder. Five minutes ago - last year, last decade - she’d started to explain proper dating to a greying California boy, an ex-activist they called ‘the Dude’. His eyes, already glazed from the weed he’d been toking throughout the party, grew heavy-lidded. She doubted he’d drawn a straight breath since Jefferson Airplane changed their name. She quite liked the Dude’s eyes, in any condition.

‘It’s as simple as this,’ she reiterated, hearing the French in her accent (‘eet’s’, ‘seemple’, ‘ziss’) which only came out when she was tipsy (‘teep-see’) or trying for effect. ‘Since there was no Year Nothing, the first decade ended with the end of Year Ten
AD
; the first century with the end of ad 100; the first millennium with the end of ad 1000. Now, at this moment, a new decade is to begin. 1981 is the first year of the 1980s, as 1990 will be the last.’

Momentarily, the Dude looked as if he understood, but he was just concentrating to make out her accented words. She saw insight spark in his mind, a vertiginous leap which made him want to back away from her. He held out his twisted, tufted joint.

‘Man, if you start questioning time,’ he said, ‘what have you got left? Physical matter? Maybe you question that next, and the mojo won’t work any more. You’ll think holes between molecules and sink through the surface of the Earth. Drawn by gravity. Heavy things should be left alone. Fundamental things, like the ground you walk on, the air you breathe. You do breathe, don’t you, man? Suddenly it hits me, I don’t know if you do.’

‘Yes, I breathe,’ she said. ‘When I turned, I didn’t die. That’s not common.’

She proved her ability to inhale by taking a toke from the joint. She didn’t get a high like his; for that, she’d have to sample his blood as it channelled the intoxicants from his alveoli to his brain. She had the mellow buzz of him, from saliva on the roach as much as from the dope smoke. It made her thirsty.

Because it was just after midnight on New Year’s Eve, she kissed him. He enjoyed it, non-committally. Tasting straggles of tobacco in his beard and the film of a cocktail - white Russian - on his teeth and tongue, she sampled the ease of him, the defiant crusade of his back-burnered life. She understood now precisely what the expression ‘ex-activist’ meant. If she let herself drink, his blood would be relaxing.

Breaking the kiss, she saw more sparks in his eyes where her face was not reflected. Her lips were sometimes like razors, even more than her fang-teeth. She’d cut him slightly, just for a taste, not even thinking, and left some of herself on his tongue. She swallowed: mostly spit, but with tiny ribbons of blood from his gums.

French kissing was the kindest form of vampirism. From the minute exchange of fluid, she could draw a surprising sustenance. For her, just now, it was enough. It took the edge off her red thirst.

‘Keep on breathing, man,’ said the Dude, reclaiming his joint, smiling broadly, drifting back towards the rest of the party, enjoying the unreeling connection between them. ‘And don’t question time. Let it pass.’

Licking her lips daintily, she watched him amble. He wasn’t convinced 1980 had been the last year of the old decade and not the first of the new. Rather, he wasn’t convinced that it mattered. Like a lot of Southern Californians, he’d settled on a time that suited him and stayed in it. Many vampires did the same thing, though Geneviève thought it a waste of longevity. In her more pompous moments, she felt the whole point was to embrace change while carrying on what was of value from the past.

When she was born and when she was turned, time was reckoned by the Julian Calendar, with its annual error of eleven minutes and fourteen seconds. Thinking of it, she still regretted the ten days - the 5th to the 14th of October, 1582 - Pope Gregory XIII had stolen from her, from the world, to make his sums add up. England and Scotland, ten days behind Rome, held out against the Gregorian Calendar until 1752. Other countries stubbornly stuck with Julian dating until well into the twentieth century: Russia had not chimed in until 1918, Greece until 1923. Before the modern era, those ten-day shifts made diary-keeping a complex business for a necessarily much-travelled creature. In his 1885 journal, maintained while travelling on the continent and later excerpted by Bram Stoker, Jonathan Harker refers to May the 4th as the eve of St George’s Day, which would have been April the 22nd back home in England. Those leap-frogged weeks had been far much more jarring than the time-zone-hopping she sometimes went through as an air passenger.

The Paradise Cove Trailer Park Colony had been her home for all of four years, an eyeblink which made her a senior resident among the constitutionally impermanent peoples of Malibu. Here, ancient history was Sonny and Cher and
Leave It to Beaver,
anything on the ‘golden oldies’ station or in off-prime time re-run.

Geneviève - fully, Geneviève Sandrine de l’Isle Dieudonné, though she went by Gené Dee for convenience - had once paddled in the Atlantic and
not known
what lay between France and China. She was older than the name ‘America’; had she not turned, she’d probably have been dead before Columbus brought back the news. In all those years, ten days shouldn’t matter, but supposedly significant dates made her aware of that fold in time, that wrench which pulled the future hungrily closer, which had swallowed one of her birthdays. By her internal calendar, the decade would not fully turn for nearly two weeks. This was a limbo between unarguable decades. She should have been used to limbos by now. For her, Paradise Cove was the latest of a long string of pockets out of time and space, cosy coffins shallowly buried away from the rush of the world.

She was the only one of her kind at the party; if she took ‘her kind’ to mean vampires - there were others in her current profession, private investigation, even other in-comers from far enough out of state to be considered foreign parts. Born in Northern France under the rule of an English king, she’d seen enough history to recognise the irrelevance of nationality. To be Breton in 1416 was to be neither French nor English, or both at the same time. Much later, during the Revolution, France had scrapped the calendar again, ducking out of the 1790s, even renaming the months. In the long term, the experiment was not a success. That was the last 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 Terror’. 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’ 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 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. Setting, rather - she was looking west. 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.