The Mammoth Book of Dracula (15 page)

“Yes,” Dracula agreed.

Dracula led him to the turret room where the already-bubbling hot tub was. They got in, sighing with the heat, and Leary poured two glasses of deep, rich Hungarian wine from a bottle on the deck. He handed one to Dracula, who
could
drink it, contrary to folk myth, and they toasted.

“To the incredible possibilities of existence,” Leary said, and Dracula found tears in his eyes for that which was not to be, a long and enduring friendship with this extraordinary man.

They drank. Above them, in the skylight, the full moon glowed. Dracula leaned back in the hot water, to discover the beautiful hands of Rosemary kneading his shoulders. He smiled at her and closed his eyes while Leary spoke of something; of what he was not sure, the religion Leary had founded or the beauty of LSD or any of a number of topics. His muscles relaxed, releasing the tension of centuries. He drank more wine, unable, as mortals were, to get drunk.

Words in Leary’s soft voice spoke of change and optimism for the future, and the unfolding of mankind, and the need to fly out of oneself

and change

and Rosemary melted the furrows out of Dracula’s brow

and change and the next thing Dracula was aware of was a sharp, deep penetration in his neck, and sucking. Slowly he opened his eyes and said, “You tricked me,” but he didn’t know how.

Yet, as the blood seeped out of him, the room melted down itself and became a stunning, incandescent forest. Beatific women smiled down on him like the Madonnas of Russian Orthodox icons. His muscles were completely gone, his veins, his arteries, his princely blood. That was okay; that was, as they said, groovy.

He saw the melodies of his homeland—blood red, crimson, scarlet, vermilion; he heard the colours of his life—Gothic chants and Gregorian chants, the keening of lonely wolves and the sweet, ethereal voices of his Brides. The sweeping gales of the children of the night. The laughter of the bat; the plaintive whispers of rodents.

Beautiful, beautiful; chimes in the back portion of his mind, promising him midnight, one, two, three, in the depths of the black night in Carpathia. The splendour that he was, more magnificent than ever he had remembered. The miracle that he was, and the endless possibilities for expression given to him.

“I can catch my soul,” he whispered. “It’s so beautiful.”

Leary said, “You made it, Vladimir. You’re tripping.”

And Dracula immediately crashed.

No longer tripping, no longer mesmerized, no longer relaxed. His eyes flew open and he said, “Bastard. Out of my sight. Betrayer. Thief.”

“But, Vlad,” Leary began.

Dracula flung himself at him, teeth bared, preparing for the kill, when Leary flew out of reach.

Flew.

Rosemary looked frightened, and backed away from them both.

“I’ve been Changed,” Leary said. He opened his mouth and showed Dracula his teeth.

“There’s only one way to settle this,” Dracula said, rising from the dripping water in all his majesty. He was the King of the Vampires; he would not let this usurper survive another minute.

“Settle it?” Leary asked, perplexed.

“Yes, you idiot.” Dracula advanced, sneering at him. The King of Peace and Love. He had no idea what violence he would commit as a vampire.

Leary backed away, ran up against the side of the tub, and crawled out. “What a minute. Wait.” Perhaps he was beginning to understand he had made a terrible miscalculation.

Then Alexsandru rushed in. “The FBI! They’re at the gates!”

Suddenly everyone was scrambling. Into clothes and coats, passports and money stuffed into hands, the fugitives sneaking through the dungeon to the unguarded rear of the castle. The flower children, rising to the occasion, harassing and teasing the authorities.

The Learys took flight, and were safe.

The FBI were too stupid to see what Dracula was, and left after stern warnings about harbouring criminals.

Dracula was alone with his motley crew, and as he looked up at the setting moon, he wept.

~ * ~

Years later, after the flowers and the pharmacopoeia and the dogeared copies of the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
were locked in attic trunks, it was said that Leary died. It was said that his head was severed from his body and frozen. It was said that he had requested this action in the hope that he could be revived in a more advanced time and brought back to life.

When Alexsandru told Dracula of this, Captain Blood laughed. No one knew exactly why. Some claimed it was because he remembered Leary so fondly. Others, that he found Leary’s hope for a second chance as a disembodied head typically Leary, and very amusing.

And still others, that he had ordered the beheading, because that was one way to kill a vampire.

But everyone agreed that of a night, he took the hand of his best beloved Bride, who looked very much like Rosemary Leary, and they flew together over the rippling sidewinder dessication, shadows like condors against the full and glowing desert moon.

~ * ~

For Alan Scrivener, dear and respected friend.

<>

~ * ~

BRIAN LUMLEY

Zack Phalanx
is
Vlad the Impaler

BRIAN LUMLEY produced his early work very much under the influence of the
Weird Tales
authors, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, and his first stories and books were published by the then “dean of macabre publishers”, August W. Derleth, under the now legendary Arkham House imprint.

Lumley began writing full time in 1980, and four years later completed his breakthrough novel
Necroscope®
featuring Harry Keogh, a psychically endowed hero who is able to communicate with the teeming dead.
Necroscope
has now grown to sixteen big volumes, published in fourteen countries and many millions of copies. In addition,
Necroscope
comic books, graphic novels, a role-playing game, quality figurines and a series of audio books in Germany have been created from the popular series.

Along with the
Necroscope
titles, Lumley is also the author of more than forty other books. He is the winner of a British Fantasy Award, a
Fear
Magazine Award, a Lovecraft Film Festival Association “Howie”, the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award and, most recently, he was a recipient of the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the World Fantasy Convention’s Lifetime Achievement Award -both in 2010!

His latest volume,
Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer,
is a long novella from Subterranean Press featuring Harry Keogh, while his next book is a futuristic short vampire novel entitled
The Fly-By-Nights.

Back in Transylvania, a Hollywood film crew is about to discover that some old legends never die ...

~ * ~

HARRY S. SKATSMAN, Jr., was livid. He was a tiny, fat, cigar-chewing, fire-eating, primadonna-taming, scene-shooting ball of absolutely
livid
livid. Of all things: an accident! And on his birthday, too! Zack Phalanx, superstar, “King of the Bad Guys”, had been involved in some minor accident back in Beverly Hills; an accident which, however temporarily, had curtailed his appearance on location.

Skatsman groaned, his scarlet jowls drooping and much of the anger rushing out of him in one vast sigh. What if the accident was worse than he’d been told? What if Zack was out of the film (horrible thought) permanently? All that so-expensive advance publicity—all the bother over visas and work permits, and the trouble with the local villagers—all for nothing. Of course, they could always get someone to fill Zack’s place (Kurt Douglash, perhaps?) but it wouldn’t be the same. In his mind’s eye Skatsman could see the headlines in the film rags already:
“Zack Phalanx WAS Vlad the Impaler!”

The little fat man groaned again at this mental picture, then leaned forward in his plush leather seat and snarled (he never spoke to anyone, always snarled) at his driver: “Joe, you sure the message said Zack was only
slightly
hurt? He didn’t
stick
himself on his steering wheel or something?”

“Yeah, slightly hurt,” Joe grunted. “Minor accident.” Joe had been driving his boss now for so many years, on location in so many parts of the world, that Skatsman’s snarls no longer fazed him—

—But they fazed most everyone else.

Even as the big car ploughed steadily through mid-afternoon mist as it rose up out of the valleys on old, winding roads that were often only just third class, high above in the village-sized huddle of caravans, huts and shacks, up in the glowering Carpathian Mountains, Harry S. Skatsman’s colleagues prepared themselves for all hell let loose when the florid, fiery little director returned.

They all knew now that Zack Phalanx had been injured, that his arrival at Jlaskavya airport had been “unavoidably delayed”. And they knew moreover just exactly what that meant where Skatsman was concerned. The little fat man would be utterly unapproachable, poisonous, raging one minute and sobbing the next in unashamed frustration, until “Old Grim-Grin” (as Phalanx was fondly known in movie circles) showed up. Then they could shoot his all-important scenes.

This dread of the director in dire mood was shared by all and sundry, from the producer, Jerry Sollinger (a man of no mean status himself), right down to Sam “Sugar” Sweeney, the coffee-boy—who was in fact a man of sixty-three—and including sloe-eyed Shani Silarno, the heroine of this, Skatsman’s fourteenth epic.

Oh, there was going to be a fuss, all right, but what—they all asked among themselves—would the fuss really be all about? For in all truth Zack Phalanx’s scenes were not to be many. His magic box-office name on the billboards, starred as Vlad the Impaler himself, was simply to be a draw, a “name” to pull the crowds. For the same reason Shani Silarno was cheesecake, though certainly she had far more footage than the grim, scarfaced, sardonic, ugly, friendly “star” of the picture.

And most of that picture, filmed already, had been dashed off to Hollywood for the usual pre-release publicity screenings—except for the Phalanx scenes, which, now that the star was known to be out of it, however temporarily, Jerry Sollinger had explained away in a hastily drummed-up, fabulously expensive telephone call as being simply too terrific, too fantastically
good
to be shown in any detail before the actual premier. Of course, the gossip columnists would know better, but hopefully before they got their wicked little claws into the story Phalanx would be out here in Romania and all would be well...

But meanwhile the important battle scenes, all ketchup and zenf though they were, would have to wait on the arrival of Old Grim-Grin, injured in some minor traffic accident.

Producer Jerry Sollinger was beginning to wish he’d never heard of Vlad the Impaler; or rather, that Harry S. Skatsman had never heard of him. Sollinger could still remember when first the fat little director had snarled into his office to slam down upon his desk a file composed of bits and pieces of collected facts and lore concerning one Vlad Dracula. This Vlad—Vlad being a title of some sort, possibly “Prince”—had been a fifteenth-century warlord, a Wallach of incredible cruelty. Like his ancestors before him, he had led his people against wave after wave of invading Turks, Magyars, Bulgars, Lombards and others equally barbaric, to beat them back from his princedom eyrie in the foreboding mountains of Carpathia.