Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (20 page)

‘You are very old, Charles. I should have expected that.’

She picked up the bookcase and propped it in its place. Then, with undead swiftness, she put books back on the shelves, in any old order. She just wanted them off the floor, to look neat. He would have to rearrange them later.

No.

He wouldn’t.

‘I’m dying, Penny.’

She paused and looked at him. ‘And whose fault is that, Charles? No one need die. Not really.’

‘No, Penny. I’m dying
now.’

A wash of expression disrupted Penelope’s red-lipped primness. With her startled eyes, she looked like a little girl again, arranging her dolls because there was safety in tidiness, retreating from chaos that might hurt her.

‘I am sorry, Charles.’

She was like a schoolmistress, conventionally sympathising with a charge whose tears are his own fault and who will have to learn to sleep in the bed he has made for himself.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ she continued, actually flustered. ‘I didn’t mean that. It’s difficult for me to mean what I mean. That sounds absurd. It is. I’m not a monster. I’ve tried to be, but I’m not. I feel for you. As much as I can.’

He wanted to touch her, to lay a hand of comfort on her. But he could not lift a hand.

Penelope was in the middle of the room, away from all the walls, alone. Her hands rose to her face. Books fell from her grip, very slowly. He did not hear them thump on the carpet.

She uncovered her face. Her eyes were red, her fangs extended. She looked at once fiendish and sad, a little girl playing the devil.

‘I don’t know when I stopped wanting you to turn,’ she said.

When they were engaged, she was a warm girl, desperate for them both to become vampires, to advance themselves in the world Dracula had shaped. She was dispassionate and matter-of-fact about it, unexcited by immortality or blood-drinking or all the senses of the night, but certain rising from the dead would secure invitations to the best houses, would excite the envy of friends and admirers.

Of all the vampires he had known living and undead, she had changed the most. She’d sought out Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming, and taken his blood, transforming herself. Then, learning fast, she’d purged herself of her ambitions, her limitations. Beauregard remembered her discovering how much of a monster her father-in-darkness had been and vowing to be a monster herself.

For a while, she was mediaeval, glutted on stolen blood. She turned sons- and daughters-in-darkness, creating a coven for herself.

‘They’re all gone,’ she said. ‘My get. I turned my lovers, but the weakness of will that made them susceptible to me made them poor vampires. I was taught as a little Victorian girl to prize strength of character. But everything I have done, I’ve done through weakness.’

Beauregard wanted to contradict her, but couldn’t.

‘You want to speak and can’t,’ she said, sorry as much as triumphant. ‘How I would have adored that in a husband, once upon a damned time. It was me, that time. You knew that.’

He did.

Penelope was his third vampire lover. Shortly before the turn of the century, with the Terror just over and the business of putting the country back together as yet undone, he’d been accosted one foggy night in Chelsea, dragged into a dark place between two buildings, and bitten. Raped, he supposed. He remembered sharp teeth savagely tearing open the wounds Geneviève had made gently, and thinking he was to be exsanguinated completely and left to die. There were still vampires like that in London in those days, stranded by the withdrawal of their King-Emperor, preying on the unwary.

‘I had planned to take you to the point of death and make the offer of the Dark Kiss. I imagined you begging me for life-giving blood, then becoming my slave. By turning you, I could have had you, owned you. But you don’t only take blood when you drink. You take all sorts of things. With the taste of you on my tongue, I knew you would have turned me down. As you turned down others. You would have died.’

He had recovered. He never even told Geneviève he suspected he knew who had assaulted him.

Vampire kisses were more than wounds. Some called those distinctive scabs the Seal of Dracula. Fangs weren’t darts, but hooks. Invisible threads led back to the creature who bit you. And the line ran both ways.

Penelope took his hands and looked at him, close up. She was struggling to remain in control.

‘Katie was never in the contest,’ she said. ‘And I could have bested the French person. You don’t think so, but I could have. She’s not a goddess. It was Pamela. If it hadn’t been for her, we would have been together. You’ve never seen me as me. If you ever loved me, it’s because I was her reborn, back from the grave. All your women die and come back.’

He tried to say he was sorry. He had known she was in pain, but had done nothing.

‘Do you know why I went to Art? To seek the Dark Kiss?’

He shook his head. It was a supreme effort.

‘Because he was the closest I could get to Dracula. I wanted to give myself to the vampire you hated most. I would have become one of the Prince Consort’s mindless mistresses. If you wouldn’t rule my life, then he would. He could have been like you. He is more like you than you know.’

All their lives had been a dance with Dracula. What had Kate called it, ‘the Dracula
Cha Cha Cha
’?

‘At last I have fulfilled my mother’s expectations, Charles. I have made myself useful. I am part of a Royal Household. There are dreadful things about the position. This wedding is a nightmare. Princess Asa is a witch. Dracula will wake. It’ll start all over again. The conquest. And I’ll be part of it. You didn’t stop him forever, you just set him back a century.’

That was what he was most afraid of. Was she being sincere or cruel?

‘The world needs you, Charles,’ she said.

For the last decade and a half, he had remained alert almost solely to keep close to the monster. When Dracula was found a seaside palace, in reward for his services in the war, Beauregard followed him to Italy. He had hoped they were both in permanent retirement, a slow slide to eternity.

‘I need you too, but that’s beside the point. I’ve fed tonight. A young man, an American. He thinks he’s clever, but he’s an amusement for all that.’

She unbuttoned her blouse. Underneath, she wore a black brassiere. Her white bosom still bore the circular scars left years ago by leeches.

‘I’m going to finish what I started, Charles.’

She drew a fingernail across her breast. A line of blood welled. Bright scarlet, with a coppery tang.

Perhaps this was for the best — to have no choice. To be forced to life. He could not struggle. He could barely move. Penelope would suckle him into a new life.

‘Penny?’ someone said, from across the room.

Penelope closed her blouse, flushed with embarrassment.

He felt the moment slipping away. And was not sorry.

The newcomer was Kate. He could imagine how upset she must be, on several levels, to walk into such a scene.

‘Penelope Churchward,’ Kate said, sternly. ‘What exactly do you think you’re doing?’

Penelope stood straight, determined to see it out through
hauteur.
Blood seeped through the thin material of her blouse. She looked across the room at Kate, eyes burning, fangs sharp.

‘You know exactly what I’m doing, Katie. It is what you, or the other person, should have done long ago. Very well: if your consciences bother you about saving a life, I shall step in. I have no such encumbrance. We can all debate about what a monstrous harpie I am after I’ve given Charles what he needs to live.’

Good God, she even sounded like Pamela now.

He remembered Pamela at the last, ordering the doctor to let her die and save the child. If Beauregard hadn’t hesitated, hadn’t urged the incompetent butcher to save both, perhaps his son would have lived. And perhaps the sight of him would have given Pam heart, forced her to rally, to strangle death. Perhaps.

‘Penny, I know how you feel,’ Kate said, eyes watering. ‘But you
can’t…’

Kate stepped forward. Her fangs extended too.

‘Katie, me darlin’,’ Penelope said, in the imitation brogue she had used to make fun of her friend when they were children, ‘if I have to, I’ll fight you. I admit you’re not the drip we used to think you, but I was stronger than you in the nursery and I can
destroy
you now.’

He tried to protest.

They hissed in each other’s faces.

‘Yes,’ Penelope said. ‘I can take you.’

From the doorway, Geneviève said, ‘And what about me, newborn? Can you take me?’

Penelope turned, snarling.

14

DITCHED - ITALIAN STYLE

T
om thought he might be dead. Or worse. Turned. He was very cold, and so depleted of blood that his fingers and toes tingled. He had blacked out propped in a chair, near the coat-rack. His knees had buckled, and when he woke, he was curled up behind the coats, shivering.

What had Penelope been thinking?

Actually, he knew all too well. She’d stopped seeing him as a person, and started seeing him as a convenience. Most people treated most other people like that most of the time. He certainly did.

He had been afraid she would suck his mind empty.

If she knew about Dickie Fountain, she might kill him on principle, assuming he planned to do to her what he had done to him. That wouldn’t have been fair. Penny was different, and deserved different treatment. Tom was involved with her for what he could get, he admitted that. He did not necessarily plan to destroy her.

Though…

He stood up, unsteady. He must have looked as pale as a ghost.

Music still played. ‘Papaverie Papare’. Some of the group he had come in with were still here. The Dubrovna chit wasn’t getting far in putting the moves on Kent. Tom looked about for Penny, but couldn’t find her.

A waiter was ready for him with a tonic, a thick English fruit drink dosed with vitamins and iron. Vimto. He drank it down, not minding the taste, and asked for more. It was provided.

It took a certain genius, he recognised, to spot a gap in the market and fill it. Though never advertised explicitly as such, Vimto was what the living lovers of vampires drank to get their strength back up again after a bleeding.

He had no idea if it did any good.

He was told that the signora had ordered the drink for him before leaving.

That showed some consideration.

His bites itched and it was all he could do to prevent himself scratching them raw. He seemed to have lost substance. His clothes hung loose on him. There was an insect buzz in his ears.

A third Vimto at least got liquid back into him.

What now?

On the street, among ruins, Tom let the brief chill of the dead of night clear his head. The cool wouldn’t last. He smoked a cigarette and tried to ignore the feeding and fumbling taking place all around in the dark. Mr and Mrs Addams had forced Max Brock against a column, and were furiously sucking at several bites. Mrs Addams was soothing the poet with threats about leeching away all his talent. Max Brock was looking up at the stars, at a temporary and merciful loss for words. Tom hoped the Addamses had killed the opera singer first. It was important to get one’s priorities right.

‘Ciao, Tom. You have escaped from Penelope, then?’

It was Marcello, the Italian reporter who was always hanging around, who’d been at the airport when Count Kernassy and what-was-her-name had arrived, who’d been there when that strange Irish dead girl saw the Count being murdered.

‘Other way round, old fellow.’

Marcello looked drained too, but had no obvious bites. His cheeks were sunken. The reflective lenses of his dark glasses suggested the empty eye sockets of a skull.

‘You look as if you’ve had a bad night of it,’ Tom said.

‘You too.’

‘I wouldn’t argue with that. Damn all dead bitches.’

Marcello bummed a cigarette and lit up, exhaling with weary anger.

‘I have been to Hell and back,’ the Italian announced.

‘I didn’t make it back.’

Marcello laughed.

‘I would gladly exchange you Signorina Churchward for Signorina Reed.’

‘Little Irish corpse?’

It took Marcello a moment to catch on.
‘Si.
Little Irish corpse. She has a grip, that one. Will not let go. We went to I Cessati Spiriti.’

Tom whistled.

‘I don’t suppose either of you chaps could lend a hand,’ said a deep, bone-tired voice.

It was a dead man, in a suit that had suffered. He’d plainly been in a fight. Several fights. Wounds in his clothes looked like bullet holes, and one sleeve was skinned away completely.

‘I think we’ve something in common. I’m back from Hell and abandoned by a vampire girl too.’

He took a few steps out of the dark and collapsed.

Marcello looked at Tom over the dead man’s back. He shrugged.

15