Anno Dracula (51 page)

Quentin looked inside. ‘There’s blood on ’em. Oh well, doesn’t matter. What would you like this week?’

Alucard stepped over the shrunken scrawn that had been Kit Carruthers and considered the display of specials. The Video Archives had a name-themed double-bill offer: Stan Brakhage with Stan Laurel, Monty Python with Monte Hellman, Margaret Duras with Margaret O’Brien. None quite tickled his present fancy.

‘I’ll take Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly in
Xanadu.
Madonna and Sean Penn in
Shanghai Surprise.
And Mr Martin’s last screen credit, which was, I believe,
Muff-Diving Miss Daisy
.’

Jack Martin was trying to express gratitude. He hoped Alucard would stick around while he fetched a screen treatment from his car. Maybe Ron Bass would be more amenable for the Dolly Parton thing.

‘Xanadu
,’ said Quentin. ‘That’s the third time this year.’

‘It’s an important film.’

‘No argument from me, Mr Alucard. From where I sit, Olivia was gypped out of Best Performance in a Musical or Comedy for
Two of a Kind.
I guarantee she’ll be remembered as the Jean Arthur of the ’90s.’

The kid lay the girl out on the counter and scouted around for the tapes — he remembered to shut the cash register, which Kit had made him open. The girl shed all her shapeshifts. A ropey mask of reptile skin hung off her face.

‘Anything else?’ asked Quentin. ‘I’ve got in prime bootlegs of
My Living Doll
episodes which didn’t make it to syndication. Julie Newmar is hot.’

‘I’ll take the girl.’

Quentin was surprised but not upset.

‘Sure. You caught her, you keep her.’

Alucard slung the still-limp kitten over his shoulder and collected his rental videos.

‘Explain things to the police, Quentin. I’m in something of a hurry. Meetings.’

‘Right-a-rootie, Mr Alucard. Just one more thing...’

Quentin was reaching under the counter, for a script.

‘I have to go. We’ll talk next time.’

Martin was on his feet, still hyped that John Alucard knew who he was, but just starting to be afraid as well. He saw Quentin’s script - some viper thing called
Bloody Pulp
- and reacted with instinctive territorial hostility.

‘Tell Mr Martin about your project,’ Alucard suggested.

Quentin’s eyes flashed behind his shades and he turned to the screenwriter, prepared to unload a full-length reading on him.

Alucard carried his rentals and the vampire girl out of the video store, stepping around the broken glass on the sidewalk. He slid Holly into the passenger seat of the Camaro and restrained her with the seatbelt. She murmured. In sleep, Holly had now reverted to her original face, freckled and pretty under skag make-up and shed skin. Using her wig, he wiped dead stuff off her and then threw it in the gutter. Older than a new-born, but fatherless. She’d been wasted on Kit Carruthers. He would have Visser dig up background on the pair of them.

She woke up a few minutes later, as he hit the freeway.

‘What’s happening?’ she asked. ‘Who are you? What do you want? Where’s Kit?’

‘Carruthers is out of the picture, honey. I’m John Alucard.’

‘What are you going to do to me?’

‘I’m going to make you a star.’

‘Cool.’ She put her heels up on the dashboard. ‘You got a radio here. I like to listen to music.’

He showed her how to turn it on. She spun the dial until she hit Cyndi Lauper. As they drove into the city, she sang along with ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’. He didn’t join in. When the song was over, she turned off the radio.

‘Now you sing, John Alucard.’

He thought a moment, and began ‘Hooray for Hollywood’.

Her name was Holly Sargis Carruthers. She and her husband were poor white trash from the hills, turned by a wannabe den-master in 1959. They’d destroyed the elder fool and taken off on a spree. Kit and Holly were the vampires Middle America was afraid of. From nothing and with nothing. Childishly destructive and beyond reason. The couple on the run, on the road. Taking cars, cash and lives. In and out of institutions. In and out of each other’s skulls. They’d stuck together because they knew no better. They had no get, which was a mercy.

Unlike Alucard, Holly had a reflection, of sorts, shimmering in and out of focus. An interesting effect.

Visser didn’t understand why Alucard had taken Holly in.

‘She’ll turn on you one night,’ he said.

Alucard looked across the moon-lounge at the girl curled up on the couch.

‘I have no worries.’

‘You’re the master, Mr A.’

‘Yes, Visser, I am.’

The private detective hadn’t been to the estate before. His eye kept wandering to some detail. A painting or a bit of statuary. They didn’t impress him as pleasing objects, but he had an idea what they must have cost. It was how he judged Holly too. In the long term, Visser thought the girl would be expensive.

‘How are things with the parole board? Are we any closer to securing a ticket-of-leave for Mr Manson?’

Visser grinned.

‘Three down, which gives us a majority. Two left.’

‘It had better be unanimous.’

‘The hold-outs won’t be bought easy, but there are grey areas. Always are in their position. Either you keep someone innocent locked up or you let out someone horribly guilty. They can’t win. One of our hold-outs gave Janos Skorzeny early release — setting him free to tear through that sorority house. He’ll be tricky to persuade, but Manson not being a viper counts in our favour. The other hold-out has a daughter in Immortology. She’ll switch her vote if we get her the kid back.’

‘That can be done.’

‘Thought so. Then, Charles Manson, America’s most famous vampire hater, will be a free man for a limited window. You can even fix it to get him over to Europe, just so long as he’s electronically tagged. All you have to do is persuade him to get up on a stage with a whole horde of vampires. There, I can’t help you. We can get him all the smokes he wants, but he knows he’s going back inside and not really coming out. Your Pale Anti-Defamation League types will ensure that.’

‘I can swing them, too. Chapman has owed me big time since that breakfast food fiasco. It’ll be a great occasion. And Manson is, before everything else, a frustrated performer. All he ever really wanted was an audience.’

Visser’s eyebrows went up and down.

The duet of the Short Lion and Timmy V was still under negotiation, but Alucard had another team-up coup in mind to top the first half of the show. He envisioned Charles Manson and the pop singer Ralph Rockula standing side by side among columns of light and dark to belt out a catchy hymn to mutual amity between vampires and the warm. It was all very well to use the proven ‘Imagine’ for the finale, but for this he wanted a hit whose copyright rested with John Alucard Productions. Chained teams of songwriters were working for hire. He intended to add enough to the lyric - ‘Pale and Tan, Man to Man... Warm and Cool, Golden Rule’ - to personally get a credit and claim performance rights fees forever.

Visser left. His garlic whiff lingered.

‘Don’t like him,’ said Holly.

‘Few do,’ Alucard confirmed.

‘I like
Beverly.’

‘Leave her alone, Kitten. She’s much too useful as she is.’

‘Spoilsport.’

The girl was posing gauchely, letting her kimono fall open. She had tattoos around her arms and across her belly. Several were snakes winding about the name ‘Kit’.

‘Do we need those? Really?’

Holly was thoughtful. He projected himself into her mind again, feeding her his image of her future self, her final snakeskin, the girl in the spotlight.

‘Guess not,’ she said.

Her little face screwed up in concentration. Her tattoos dwindled and vanished.

‘There now, that’s better.’

She looked as if she was about to hiccough. She indicated that she needed a vessel. He gave her a seashell ashtray. She squirted a thin stream of blended inks into it. Holly’s body control was remarkable. Alucard had noticed that straight off, when she changed. Kit used to call her his bendy toy. She was plastic fantastic - she could squeeze through a drainpipe or elongate across a room.

He took a handkerchief and wiped her chin.

‘Nice Kitten.’

He’d decided to call her that for the moment. Kitten.

‘Miaow,’ she said, stretching. Her midriff thinned and her backbone popped up a few extra vertebrae. ‘Thirsty.’

He was weaning her off warm blood.

She crawled against his chest and fussed with his shirt-buttons.

‘Very well,’ he said.

With a thumbnail, he drew a bloody line on his breast. Kitten lapped at his welling wound. He gave her just a taste.

When Kit died, he’d torn a part of her mind away. Over the years, they’d dribbled into each other, becoming halves of a single entity. It happened with evenly matched vampires, as opposed to the master-slave relationships elders cultivated with new-born get.

It was good that there was so much missing. Kitten was easier to teach.

Kitten liked Beverly because Alucard had his Renfield fetch a whole new wardrobe for her. The clothes she’d arrived in were impossible and the call-girl leftovers strewn around the mansion only a little more suitable. Beverly went up and down Rodeo Drive with his Platinum card, picking nice things from Maxfield and Madeleine Gallay, as if dressing a doll. Kitten now had outfits for every occasion, in various lengths to suit the shapes she could choose.

He put Kitten down on the couch. She dabbed her lips dry. After tasting him, she was quicker, smarter, more open. He was almost skull-walking her. He saw himself as she saw him, filling her world. Sharing the suppleness of her body, he experimentally doubled the length of his fingers, adding extra knuckles. It was just a trick. She had done the same thing, his thought sparking in her body.

‘Teach me to fly, John.’

He was amused.

‘Not yet, Kitten.’

‘Pretty please.’

‘You will fly. I promise.’

She mewed with pleasure.

Sometimes, it was as if Kitten had always lived at the castle. She knew she’d once gone by other names, but when she went back into her memory and found herself in a passenger seat, she’d turn to the driver and see only a blank face. Something had happened to her head. Stuff had been spilled. She didn’t exactly miss what was gone, but was eager to fill the hole with something. When John let her taste his blood, she had all the answers. They rarely stuck in her mind, popping like bubbles after moments, but she was the better for her glimpses of truth.

This evening, they were receiving. Beverly helped her select a gown for the occasion, something elegant in black from Versace. A golden mesh studded with pearls fitted over her crown like a hairnet, a single teardrop pearl dangling dead centre of her high forehead, matching her Spanish earrings.

Her hair was purged of the dyes and treatments that used to mar its silkiness. Her default colouring had gone from straw to gold. Even among vampires, chameleon hair was an unusual talent. It took concentration to wake the roots and force the new hue through all the tiny channels. But this kitten could change her spots. Under her pearl net, she wished for tiger stripes, streaks of velvet black and reddish blonde.

‘Good girl,’ said Beverly, surprised. ‘If you could teach that, you’d make a million dollars.’

John’s personal assistant was a warm, light-skinned black woman. She earned more than the last four generations of her family put together, but was still on the LA equivalent of starvation wages. Kitten was under orders not to touch, but knew Beverly was interested. The woman wondered what it would be like to give blood, to John or to Kitten. She’d stayed in the job longer than others because of that barely admitted fascination, but she was too handy a Renfield to waste.

Kitten stood, steady on four-inch heels. In the dressing-room mirror her Versace hung elegantly under the skull-shaped veil of pearls. Her face was there, too, from some angles. A watery transparent mask.

Beverly nodded approval.

‘You’ll kill ’em, Kitten. You really will.’