The Mammoth Book of Dracula (61 page)

Masterton was born in Edinburgh in 1946. His career as a horror writer began almost accidentally in 1975. Up until then, as the editor of both
Penthouse
and
Forum
magazines, he had been making his name as the writer of hugely successful sex-instruction manuals, such as
How To Drive Your Man Wild in Bed.
When the bottom fell out of the sex-manual market, however, he offered his publishers
The Manitou,
a story about a Native American medicine-man who is reborn in the present day to take his revenge on the white man. It was subsequently filmed with Tony Curtis as the star.

The author has followed it with more than a hundred horror novels and stories. His latest books include
Blind Panic
(which is a fifth and final “Manitou” novel),
Fire Spirit, Ghost Music, Descendant, Demon’s Door, The 9th Nightmare
(a finale to his “Night Warriors” series) and
Petrified,
a tale of gargoyles. He lives close to Epsom racecourse with his wife, Wiescka.

Even a vampire cannot always halt the march of progress ...

~ * ~

HE SLEPT, AND dreamed ...

He remembered the blood, and the battles. The extraordinary clanking of swords, like cracked church bells, and the low hair-raising moan of men who were fighting to the death. He remembered how sharpened wooden stakes were thrust into the cringing bodies of weeping men, and how they were hoisted aloft, so that the stakes would slowly penetrate them deeper and deeper, and they would scream and thrash and wave their arms in anguish. He remembered how he had looked up at them, looked them in the eye, and smiled at their pain.

He remembered his own death, like the shutting of an owl’s eye; and his own resurrection. The strange confusion of what he had become; and what he was. He remembered walking through the forests in torrential rain. He remembered arriving at a village. He remembered the women he had lusted after, and the blood he had tasted, and the wolves howling in the dark Carpathian mountains.

He remembered days and nights, passing as quickly as a flicker-book. Sun and rain and clouds and thunderstorms. He remembered kisses thick with passion. Breasts running with rivulets of blood. He remembered Brighton in the sunshine, and Warsaw in the fog. He remembered heavy, seductive perfumes, and women’s thighs. Carriages, cars, railway-trains, aeroplanes. Conversations, arguments. Telegrams. Telephone calls.

It went on for ever, and sometimes he lost track of time. Sometimes he had written letters to some of his closest friends, only to realize halfway through that they must have been dead for two hundred years. He had hunched over his desk, in such a spasm of grief that he could scarcely breathe. He had stopped writing letters—and, even when he received them, which was very rarely, he didn’t open them any more.

But every day a new day dawned, and every night the sun went down; and almost every dusk he pushed open the lid of his casket and rose from his bed of friable soil to feed on whoever he could find.

~ * ~

One night, early in October, he opened the cellar trap to find that the hallway was empty. All the furniture had gone. The hallstand with its hat-hooks and mirrors; the Chinese umbrella-stand beside the door. Even the carpets had gone. He stepped out onto the bare boards in his black, highly-polished shoes, turning around and around as he did so. The pictures had gone. The landscapes of Sibiu and the Somesu Mic. Even the painting of Lucy, with her white, white dress and her white, white face.

He walked from room to room in rising disbelief. The entire house had been stripped. The dining-table and chairs were all gone, the sideboard gone, the velvet curtains taken down. Everything he owned—his chairs, his clocks, his books, his Dresden porcelain, even his clothes—everything was gone.

He couldn’t understand it. For the first time in his existence he felt seriously unnerved. For the first time in his life he actually felt
vulnerable.

It had been so much easier when he had been able to hire servants—people who could handle the daytime running of the house. But in the past twenty years, servants had been increasingly difficult to find and even when he
had
found them, they had turned out to be demanding and unreliable and dishonest. As soon as they realized that he was never around during the day, they had taken time off whenever they felt like it, and they had pilfered some of his finest antique silver.

One night, in a pub, he had met a builder, a mournful Welshman called Parry, and he had managed to organize some repairs to the roof and a new front gate, but it had been years since he had been able to find a gardener, and the house was densely surrounded by thistles and plantains and grass that reached as high as the living-room window. He hated unkempt gardens, just as he hated unkempt graveyards, but as time passed he began to grow to enjoy the seclusion. The weeds not only screened him from the world outside, they deterred unwelcome visitors.

But now his seclusion had been devastatingly invaded, and he had lost everything he possessed. All the same, he gave thanks that the cellar trap had remained undetected. It matched the parquet floor so closely that it was almost impossible to discern. He was in constant fear that somebody would find his sleeping body during the hours of daylight—not a priest or any one of those scientists who had once hunted the undead. Real death, when it came, would not be unwelcome. No, what he was afraid of was injury or mutilation. This part of the city, once fashionable, was now plagued by gangs of youths whose idea of an evening’s entertainment was to throw petrol over sleeping tramps and set them alight; or to break their legs with concrete blocks. Death he could accept—but he couldn’t bear the thought of living for ever while he was burned or crippled.

He went upstairs. The bedrooms were empty, too. He touched the shadowy mark on the wall where a portrait of Mina had hung. Then he threw back his head and let out a roar of rage that made the windows shake in their sashes, and started the neighbourhood’s dogs barking.

~ * ~

Shortly after eleven o’clock, he found a girl standing in a bus shelter, smoking a cigarette and chewing gum at the same time. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen or seventeen, and she still had that post-pubescent plumpness that he particularly relished. She had long blonde hair and she was wearing a black leather jacket and a short red dress.

He crossed the street. It was raining—a fine, prickling rain—and the road-surface reflected the streetlights and the shop-windows like the water in a dark harbour. He approached the girl directly and stood looking at her, his hand drawn up to his overcoat collar.

“You’ll remember me the next time you see me, won’t you, mate?” she challenged him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You remind me so much of somebody I used to know.”

“Oh, that’s original. Next thing you’ll be asking me if I come here often.”

“I’m—I’m looking for some company, that’s all,” he told her. Even after all these years, he still found it went against the grain to approach women so bluntly.

“I don’t know, mate. I’ve got to be home by twelve or my mum’ll go spare.”

“A quick drink, maybe?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to miss my bus.”

“I have plenty of money. We could have a good time.” Inside, his sensibilities winced at what he was having to say.

The girl looked him up and down, still smoking, still chewing. “You look like a big strong bloke,” she suggested. “We could always do it here. So long as you’ve got a johnny.”

He looked around. The street was deserted, although an occasional car came past, its tyres sizzling on the wet tarmac. “Well...” he said, uncertainly. “I was thinking of somewhere a little less public.”

“It’s up to you,” she said. “My bus’ll be here in five minutes.”

He was just about to refuse her offer and turn away when she flicked her hair with her hand, revealing the left side of her neck. It was radiantly white, so white that he could see the blueness of her veins. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.

“All right,” he said, tightly. “We’ll do it here.”

“Twenty quid,” she demanded, holding out her hand.

He opened his thin black wallet and gave her two ten-pound notes. She took a last drag on her cigarette, flicked it into the street, and then she hoisted up her dress to her waist and tugged down her white Marks & Spencer pants. Somewhere in his mind he briefly glimpsed Lucy’s voluminous petticoats, the finest white cotton trimmed with Nottingham lace, and the way in which she had so demurely clasped her thighs tightly together.

He kissed the girl on the forehead, breathing in the smell of cigarette-smoke and shampoo. He kissed her eyelids and her cheeks. Then he tried to kiss her lips but she slapped him away. “What are you trying to do? Pinch my gum? I thought we were supposed to be having it off, not kissing.”

He grasped her shoulders and stared directly into her eyes. He could tell by the expression on her face that she had suddenly begun to realize that this wasn’t going to be one of her usual encounters, twenty pounds for a quick one. “What?” she asked him. “What is it?”

“One kiss,” he said. “Then no more. I promise.”

“I don’t like kissing. It gives you germs.”

“This kiss you will enjoy more than any other kiss you have ever had.”

“No, I don’t want to.” She reached down and tried to tug her panties back up.

“You’re going to go back on our bargain?” he asked her.

“I told you. I don’t like kissing. Not men like you. I only kiss blokes I’m in love with.”

“Yet you don’t mind having sex with me, here, in the street, somebody you don’t even know?”

“That’s different.”

He let go of her, and lowered his arms. “Yes,” he said, rather ruefully. “That’s different. But there was a time when it was the greatest prize that a man could ever win from a woman.”

She laughed, a silly little Minnie Mouse laugh. That was when he gripped her hair and hit her head against the back of the bus shelter, as hard as he could. The glass frame holding the timetable smashed, and the timetable itself was splattered in blood.

As she sagged, he held her up to prevent her from dropping to the ground. Then he looked around again to make sure that the street was still empty. He hoisted her up, and carried her around the bus shelter and into the bushes behind it. He found himself half-climbing, half-sliding down a steep slope strewn with discarded newspapers, empty lager cans and plastic milk-crates. The girl lolled in his arms, her head hanging back, her eyes closed, but he could tell by the bubbles of froth that were coming from her mouth that she wasn’t dead.

He took her down into a damp, dark gully, smelling of leaf-mould. He laid her down, and with shaking hands he unzipped her jacket and wrestled it off her. Then he tore open her dress, exposing her left breast. He knelt astride her, lowered his head, and with an audible crunch he sank his teeth into her neck, severing her carotid artery.

The first spurt went right over his shoulder, spattering his coat. The second hit his cheek and soaked his collar. But he opened his mouth wide, and he caught the next spurt directly on his tongue, and swallowed, and went on swallowing, with a choking, cackling sound, while the girl’s heart obligingly pumped her blood directly down his throat.

~ * ~

Whether he was driven by rage for his lost possessions, or by disgust for the world in which he now found himself, or by sheer greed, he went on an orgy of blood-feeding that night. He slid into a suburban bedroom and drank a young wife dry while her husband slept beside her. He found a young homeless boy under a railway arch and left him white-faced and lifeless in his cardboard bash, staring up at the sodium-tainted sky. He hated the colour of that sky, and he longed for the days when nights had been black instead of orange.

By the end of the night, he had left nine people dead. He was so gorged with blood that his stomach was swollen, and he had to stop in the doorway of Boots the Chemist and vomit some of it up, adding to the splatter of regurgitated curry that was already there.