Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (49 page)

‘Katharine Reed,’ he said, introducing her. ‘You’ll remember I assigned you her journalism from the Reign…’

That was what Dracula cronies called the Terror! She always forgot.

‘You can learn a great deal from Miss Reed.’

…not that he’d learnt anything from her when he was out to have her head on a pole and smash the hidden presses which printed her newssheets.

DeBoys eyed her, grinning ferally. She felt that stab of attraction. She guessed he was just playing at being dangerous. He was Head Boy: the sort who might leave a plump, bleeding baby on Teacher’s desk. The other Black Monks had followed his lead at the demo.

The twins eased her out of her seat and walked her towards the seminar group.

They were shorter than her by inches and she was reckoned titchy. Kate knew that since quitting Rome and Smert Spionem, Cathy and Pony had worked for Mossad — kidnapping the American Nazi propagandist Howard W Campbell Jr to stand trial in Israel — and the
Unione Corse,
the Corsican mafia. The Diogenes Club had a report that the twins had fallen out and taken opposite sides of the barricades in the recent Paris street-fighting. If that were true, they’d patched things up since May.

‘What might we do for you, Miss Reed?’ asked Croft.

She shrugged out of the twins’ grip. More accurately, they let her go.

An interview, for the eightieth anniversary…’

‘Of what?’

‘The downfall. You were just talking about it.’

Ah, yes, I suppose so… the Old Queen’s passing.’

‘I’m sure you’ve more reminiscences you’d like to share, or are they just for this select circle of. students?’

‘I am happy to rap for your article, but there must be
quid pro quo.
If I consent to an interview, you must share your perspective with the group. My young friends will have many questions for you.’

‘Yes Miss, we’d be ever so interested,’ said DeBoys, silky smooth.

‘Of course,’ she said, hoping she hadn’t made a mistake.

9

T
he seminar moved indoors to Croft’s rooms in the Santonix wing. He had a suite to himself. That must infuriate the lesser lights of the School of Vampirism.

The outer office was the domain of Miss Brabazon, a middle-aged secretary. One lens of her Lennon specs was black. She gave Croft a sheaf of messages he handed back dismissively. The twins settled on low, amorphous orange chairs. Bored with blowing bubblegum balloons through fangs, they lit Gitanes. Pony shoved a tiny button in her ear and tuned a transistor radio to whatever the Light Programme changed its name to last year (Kate knew it was BBC Radio 1 but wouldn’t admit it). She nodded mindlessly to The Move, The Flower People or The Small Faces. Cathy flipped through
Cue
and found pictures of Toby Dammit in open-necked shirts. Kate had written for ‘Britain’s first teenage newspaper’ until her interview with Jimi Hendrix — mostly about Vietnam and Malcolm X, until the subs got to it — came out headlined ‘that’s the man who plays guitar with his teeth and says each frizzy strand of his hair is a vindication’.

Kate followed Croft into an inner sanctum.

Remembering her father’s cluttered study, she was surprised Croft could teach without a single book in sight. No pictures hung on the black walls, though a neon-faced twenty-four-hour clock might count as art. Executive toys were stranded on his concrete slab desk: a Newton’s Cradle and a Drinking Bird. Students sat in chrome-tube-and-leather slings. The Professor had a diabolical mastermind swivel chair with a control panel in one arm. He pressed a button. Tinted window-blinds rolled down, minimising painful sunlight. Conceivably, other buttons opened a trapdoor to a piranha tank or fired laser beams at the School of Humanities.

She considered the Black Monks.

Eric DeBoys, star pupil and leading light, stuck close to her all the way into the building and up to this room, showing off his teeth and — she could swear — trying to exercise a power of fascination on her. She’d developed immunity to vampire mesmerism before detachable shirt collars went out. Was DeBoys smitten? More likely, he tried it on with any woman who crossed his path. She slapped herself mentally for her instinctive prickle of interest. The last thing she needed in her life (or her knickers) was another vampire knob.

If he wanted trouble, he could always apply to the twins. Cathy and Pony would leave Eric DeBoys lying in a pool of blood and laugh about it all the way home.

She had gathered names and noted significant traits of the rest of the seminar group.

The blokes were a mixed bag. Most were negligible knock-offs of DeBoys. Scrawdyke, a scruffy git with a strident, Northernish voice, projected lethargic aggression. Hair sprouted from every part of his face except his chin. Withnail, a slender glutton, possessed thirsty eyes and an actorish gait. Moïse King, a brutal toff, had scars around his little boy mouth and, she suspected, exercise books full of poetry he’d never let anyone read. Simon Armstrong was a bespectacled, over-eager swot; the others picked on him because he let his infatuation with Croft show.

Two of the men were more interesting. James Eastman, a longarmed, sceptical American, was hollow-eyed and black-stubbled, and spoke in a whispery, dry rasp. In this group, the symptoms were unusual. He was fasting, defying his vampire hunger by abstaining from human blood. A spiritual trip? Self-punishment? Plain masochism? He didn’t wear the black robes, and looked like an outlaw biker in stained denim jacket and scuffed leather britches. Keith Kenneth, a vulpine predator, was Eastman’s mirror: a decadent rather than an ascetic, pallor pinked with recent indulgence. He wore a loose purple silk shirt and matching velvet trews under his robe. A choker of love beads didn’t quite cover a maroon bruise on his throat. How did he get that? If anyone here was Bellaver’s killer, Keith was the most likely prospect. She could see him prowling noisy disco darks for biteable pick-ups. Had he sighted Carol or Laura and just pounced?

There were two girls. Anna Franklyn approximated monk’s habit with a shimmering green-black sari and headscarf. A dark, exotic woman with a pixie haircut, she showed a stretch of tight olive-tan midriff. No longer a new-born, Anna might be about Kate’s age, a Victorian holdover. She was of an odd bloodline, Indian
rakasha
or Malay
naga.
Her sinuous, serpentine manner betokened a reptile totem, not the bat or rat of a European
strigoi
or
nosferatu.
She was notionally Simon’s girlfriend, if only because DeBoys didn’t choose to take her away yet. Fran, a full-bodied vamp, was no one’s but her own. She wore a black velvet dress with a plunging front that showed off ginormous bazooms; the only monklike aspect of her ensemble was a rope-belt resting on generous hips. On a whim, she might pass an afternoon in bed with one or more of the unattached (or attached) lads, but she was a free agent. Fran had newly healed bites which matched Keith’s. Had they torn into each other? In Kate’s day, newborns were advised not to attempt mutual vampirism, which tended to lead lovers to bleeding each other out. This new generation were up for any kink. She wondered if Fran had laid Caleb Croft, then realised that of course she had. Ice grinding on ice. Ugh.

Most of the Black Monks followed DeBoys’ lead, as if he were the apostle who passed on the Professor’s dictates. None of them loved or liked him, or each other, much. That was a problem with small, mostly-male, exclusively vampire groups: so much competition for attention or favour, they never got anything done. Who’d split the order and strike out on his own? Who’d stick around and wither away? Eastman was a prime candidate to hit the road, with Sartre, Camus and Roquentin packed in his Harley’s saddlebags and mirrored sunglasses over red eyes. Armstrong would be here until he was a used-up shell. In two hundred years, he’d be parroting Croft’s lectures to new generations of soul-dead students.

The Professor sat behind his desk. He set the Newton’s Cradle clacking. The perpetual motion bird dipped to drink. The eye and ear were drawn to the desk and the man behind it. Like Marcus Monserrat’s disco lights. Hah, Croft needed
tools
! His eyes weren’t enough. His powers of fascination were weak. It was unlikely he’d mindwiped Thomas Nolan. Unless this was a feint. He wouldn’t be the first vampire to adopt a pose of feebleness to gull prey, only showing steel, sinew and fang at the last moment. She was not a good detective: she could talk herself out of any insight, consider a knot from so many angles she never got her fingers into it.

‘Would you care to sit here, by me?’ Croft asked her.

Of course, she would not care to. But she did, in a plain wooden guest chair.

‘Point of order,’ said Scrawdyke. ‘Does the group recognise the visiting speaker’s status as a vampire elder?’

Kate showed her teeth, satisfying everyone except Scrawdyke.

‘I don’t shapeshift,’ she said. ‘And it’s still rude to ask a lady’s age.’

Scrawdyke was going to say something, but DeBoys slapped the back of his head, stirring up an unwashed bird’s nest of hair. Reluctantly, Scrawdyke didn’t press his point. Technically, she wasn’t an elder, but she let it ride.

Croft leaned back like a guest on
Dee Time,
waiting for a question to prompt an anecdote. She’d asked for an interview after all. Croft set it up as a performance piece.

‘“A profound change”, you said,’ she began. ‘I believe you meant the Dracula Declaration changed us all.’

Croft nodded. ‘Obviously,’ he said.

‘I’m interested in what you changed
from,
Professor Croft. The vampire you were when the world didn’t believe in vampires.’

He was wary. As I said, I was an itinerant… a ghost of myself.’

‘Why didn’t you take back your name? Most did.’

‘Charles Croydon was dead. His life gone. Part of the past.’

‘Forgive me if this seems indelicate, but how did he feed? Charles Croydon?’

As a predator feeds,’ he said. ‘By fascination or force. You must dig this. We are all vampires here.’

Anna Franklyn’s head oscillated like a cobra’s. James Eastman ground his fangs.

‘The practicalities were different,’ she said. ‘When you couldn’t admit what you were, when there were no socially acceptable ways of drinking blood.’

‘Social acceptability is an artificial construct. We are far beyond those. By our nature.’

‘Our nature as vampires?’

‘Our nature as predators.’

The living — she couldn’t even think of the expression ‘the warm’ — Lord Charles Croydon had been exactly like the vampire Caleb Croft. Only money and influence saved him from being strung up in Hanging Woods. ‘By fascination or force.’ She knew what he meant. He was a murderer and a rapist. Frilly shirts and bright shoe-buckles didn’t make him any less a thug. Turning enabled him to
predate
on a larger scale. Centuries on, he was an
old
murderer and a rapist. He survived by growing
cautious
and adapting to the times. But how easy was it to stop being an unrestrained monster? If Croft thought he’d get away with it, he’d use and dispose of Carol Thatcher and Laura Bellows in a trice. But
could
he think he’d get away with it?

‘You were born with a title. Do you still feel
entitled
?’

Croft wasn’t rising to that. ‘That’sjust wordplay,’ he said. ‘Sophistry, man. We’re beyond that here. I expected better of you. Reed, as I get your vibe, you’ve always wanted to be equal…
equal with whom?’

‘I remember when women didn’t have the vote.’

Scrawdyke put his hand up, was ignored, and put it down again, yawning to pretend he just wanted a stretch.

‘So, you want to be equal with men? Cool. And, since you’re Irish, equal with the English, right? Under the law…’

‘In Ulster, right now, the rights of the Catholic minority are…’

‘But you’re not Catholic. You’re the daughter of Dr Pierce Plunkett Reed, of Trinity College and King’s, London. A Dublin Protestant. an Ascendancy Prod, right?’

She admitted it.

‘And, darling girl, you’re a vampire. You are not equal, you can’t be equal. You have
risen above.’

Croft swivelled in his chair, and addressed his circle.

‘Friends, get this: Katharine Reed is still here,
eighty years
A.D. Consider the Galapagos turtle. They can live for centuries. Like us. But they hatch in the sea and new-borns have to crawl across the beach to safety. Sea birds,
predators,
haunt the beach, and snatch — how many hatchlings? Five in ten, nine in ten? It’s a feeding frenzy. Carnage. The slaughter of a generation. Of the weak, or the unlucky, or the unwary. It was like that for new-borns in the wake of the Dracula Declaration. Most didn’t make it across the beach. Kate Reed did. Study her, learn her secret. It may save your life.’

She was uncomfortable. DeBoys eyed her wolfishly.

Anna — who was Kate’s age or older — looked at the floor. Croft had never made a turtle speech about her, evidently.

Of course, in this story, the Professor
was
the butcher bird. Some new-borns of the 1880s succumbed to disease or carelessness. Not a few were killed in the Terror. The regime’s chief shrike was Caleb Croft.