The Mammoth Book of Dracula (24 page)

Like most Americans, he didn’t understand. Though he could
see
she was a tiny woman with red hair and glasses, the mind of an aged aunt in the body of an awkward cousin, Francis could not rid himself of the impression that vampire women were ravening predators with unnatural powers of bewitchment, lusting after the pounding blood of any warm youth who happens along. She was sure he hung his door with garlic and wolfsbane, but half-hoped for a whispered solicitation.

After a few uncomfortable nights in Communist-approved beer-halls, she had learned to stay in her hotel room while in Bucharest. People here had memories as long as her lifetime. They crossed themselves and muttered prayers as she walked by. Children threw stones.

She stood at her window and looked out at the square. A patch of devastation, where the ancient quarter of the capital had been, marked the site of the palace Ceausescu was building for himself. A three-storey poster of the Saviour of Romania stood amid the ruins. Dressed like an orthodox priest, he held up Dracula’s severed head as if he had personally killed the Count.

Ceausescu harped at length about the dark, terrible days of the past when Dracula and his kind preyed on the warm of Romania to prevent his loyal subjects from considering the dark, terrible days of the present when he and his wife lorded over the country like especially corrupt Roman Emperors. Impersonating the supplicant baker in
The Godfather,
Francis had abased himself to the dictator to secure official cooperation.

She turned on the radio and heard tinny martial music. She turned it off, lay on the narrow, lumpy bed—as a joke, Fred Forrest and Francis had put a coffin in her room one night—and listened to the city at night. Like the forest, Bucharest was alive with noises, and smells.

It was ground under, but there was life here. Even in this grim city, someone was laughing, someone was in love. Somebody was allowed to be a happy fool.

She heard winds in telephone wires, bootsteps on cobbles, a drink being poured in another room, someone snoring, a violinist sawing scales. And someone outside her door. Someone who didn’t breathe, who had no heartbeat, but whose clothes creaked as he moved, whose saliva rattled in his throat.

She sat up, confident she was elder enough to be silent, and looked at the door,

“Come in,” she said, “it’s not locked. But be careful. I can’t afford more breakages.”

~ * ~

His name was Ion Popescu and he looked about thirteen, with big, olive-shiny orphan eyes and thick, black, unruly hair. He wore an adult’s clothes, much distressed and frayed, stained with long-dried blood and earth. His teeth were too large for his skull, his cheeks stretched tight over his jaws, drawing his whole face to the point of his tiny chin.

Once in her room, he crouched down in a corner, away from a window. He talked only in a whisper, in a mix of English and German she had to strain to follow. His mouth wouldn’t open properly. He was alone in the city, without community. Now he was tired and wanted to leave his homeland. He begged her to hear him out and whispered his story.

He claimed to be fifty-two, turned in 1937. He didn’t know, or didn’t care to talk about, his father- or mother-in-darkness. There were blanks burned in his memory, whole years missing. She had come across that before. For most of his vampire life, he had lived underground, under the Nazis and then the Communists. He was the sole survivor of several resistance movements. His warm comrades had never really trusted him, but his capabilities were useful for a while.

She was reminded of her first days after turning. When she knew nothing, when her condition seemed a disease, a trap. That Ion could be a vampire for forty years and never pass beyond the newborn stage was incredible. She truly realized, at last, just how backward this country was.

“Then I hear of the American film, and of the sweet vampire lady who is with the company. Many times, I try to get near you, but you are watched.
Securitate.
You, I think, are my saviour, my true mother-in-the-dark.”

Fifty-two, she reminded herself.

Ion was exhausted after days trying to get close to the hotel, to “the sweet vampire lady”, and hadn’t fed in weeks. His body was icy cold. Though she knew her own strength was low, she nipped her wrist and dribbled a little of her precious blood onto his white lips, enough to put a spark in his dull eyes.

There was a deep gash on his arm, which festered as it tried to heal. She bound it with her scarf, wrapping his thin limb tight.

He hugged her and slept like a baby. She arranged his hair away from his eyes and imagined his life. It was like the old days, when vampires were hunted down and destroyed by the few who believed. Before Dracula.

The Count had changed nothing for Ion Popescu.

~ * ~

Bistritz, a bustling township in the foothills of the Carpathian Alps. Harker, carrying a Gladstone Bag, weaves through crowds towards a waiting coach and six. Peasants try to sell him crucifixes, garlic and other lucky charms. Women cross themselves and mutter prayers.

A wildly gesticulating photographer tries to stop him slowing his pace to examine a complicated camera. An infernal burst of flash-powder spills purple smoke across the square. People choke on it.

Corpses hang from a four-man gibbet, dogs leaping up to chew on their naked feet. Children squabble over mismatched boots filched from the executed men. Harker looks up at the twisted, mouldy faces.

He reaches the coach and tosses his bag up. Swales, the coachman, secures it with the other luggage and growls at the late passenger. Harker pulls open the door and swings himself into the velvet-lined interior of the carriage.

There are two other passengers. Westenra, heavily moustached and cradling a basket of food. And Murray, a young man who smiles as he looks up from his Bible.

Harker exchanges curt nods of greeting as the coach lurches into motion.

Harker’s Voice:
I
quickly formed opinions of my travelling companions. Swales was at the reins. It was my commission but sure as shooting it was his coach. Westenra, the one they called “Cook”, was from Whitby. He was ratcheted several notches too tight for Wallachia. Probably too tight for Whitby, come to that. Murray, the fresh-faced youth with the Good Book, was a rowing blue from Oxford. To look at him, you’d think the only use he’d have for a sharpened stake would be as a stump in a knock-up match.

Later, after dark but under a full moon, Harker sits up top with Swales. A wind-up phonograph crackles out a tune through a sizeable trumpet.

Mick Jagger sings “Ta-Ra-Ra-BOOM-De-Ay”.

Westenra and Murray have jumped from the coach and ride the lead horses, whooping it up like a nursery Charge of the Light Brigade.

Harker, a few years past such antics, watches neutrally. Swales is indulgent of his passengers.

The mountain roads are narrow, precipitous. The lead horses, spurred by their riders, gallop faster. Harker looks down and sees a sheer drop of a thousand feet, and is more concerned by the foolhardiness of his companions.

Hooves strike the edge of the road, narrowly missing disaster.

Westenra and Murray chant along with the song, letting go of their mounts’ manes and doing hand-gestures to the lyrics. Harker gasps but Swales chuckles. He has the reins and the world is safe.

Harker’s Voice:
I think the dark and the pines of Romania spooked them badly, but they whistled merrily on into the night, infernal cake-walkers with Death as a dancing partner.

~ * ~

In the rehearsal hall, usually a people’s ceramics collective, she introduced Ion to Francis.

The vampire youth was sharper now. In a pair of her jeans—which fit him perfectly—and a
Godfather II
T-shirt, he looked less the waif, more like a survivor. Her Biba scarf, now his talisman, was tied around his neck.

“I said we could find work for him with the extras. The gypsies.”

“I am no gypsy,” Ion said, vehemently.

“He speaks English, Romanian, German, Magyar and Romany. He can coordinate all of them.”

“He’s a kid.”

“He’s older than you are.”

Francis thought it over. She didn’t mention Ion’s problems with the authorities. Francis couldn’t harbour an avowed dissident. The relationship between the production and the government was already strained. Francis thought—correctly—that he was being bled of funds by corrupt officials, but could afford to lodge no complaint. Without the Romanian army, he didn’t have a cavalry, didn’t have a horde. And without the location permits that still hadn’t come through, he couldn’t shoot the story beyond Borgo Pass.

“I can keep the rabble in line, maestro,” Ion said, smiling.

Somehow, he had learned how to work his jaws and lips into a smile. With her blood in him, he had more control. She noticed him chameleoning a little. His smile, she thought, might be a little like hers.

Francis chuckled. He liked being called “maestro”. Ion was good at getting on the right side of people. After all, he had certainly got on the right side of her.

“Okay, but keep out of the way if you see anyone in a suit.”

Ion was effusively grateful. Again, he acted the age he looked, hugging Francis, then her, saluting like a toy soldier. Martin Sheen, noticing, raised an eyebrow.

Francis took Ion off to meet his own children—Roman, Gio and Sofia—and Sheen’s sons Emilio and Charley. It had not sunk in that this wiry kid, obviously keen to learn baseball and chew gum, was in warm terms middle-aged.

Then again, Kate never knew whether to be twenty-five, the age at which she turned, or 116. And how was a 116-year-old supposed to behave anyway?

Since she had let him bleed her, she was having flashes of his past: scurrying through back-streets and sewers, like a rat; the stabbing pains of betrayal; eye-searing flashes of firelight; constant cold and red thirst and filth.

Ion had never had the time to grow up. Or even to be a proper child. He was a waif and a stray. She couldn’t help but love him a little. She had chosen not to pass on the Dark Kiss, though she had once—during the Great War—come close and regretted it.

Her bloodline, she thought, was not good for a newborn. There was too much Dracula in it, maybe too much Kate Reed.

To Ion, she was a teacher not a mother. Before she insisted on becoming a journalist, her whole family seemed to feel she was predestined to be a governess. Now, at last, she thought she saw what they meant.

Ion was admiring six-year-old Sofia’s dress, eyes bright with what Kate hoped was not hunger. The little girl laughed, plainly taken with her new friend. The boys, heads full of the vampires of the film, were less sure about him. He would have to earn their friendship.

Later, Kate would deal with Part Two of the Ion Popescu Problem. After the film was over, which would not be until the 1980s at the current rate of progress, he wanted to leave the country, hidden in among the rest of the production crew. He was tired of skulking and dodging the political police, and didn’t think he could manage it much longer. In the West, he said, he would be free from persecution. She knew he would be disappointed. The warm didn’t really
like
vampires in London or Rome or Dublin any more than they did in Timisoara or Bucharest or Cluj. It was just more difficult legally to have them destroyed.

~ * ~

Back in the mountains, there was the usual chaos. A sudden thunderstorm, whipped up out of nowhere like a djinn, had torn up real and fake trees and scattered them throughout the valley, demolishing the gypsy encampment production designer Dean Tavoularis had been building. About half a million dollars’ worth of set was irrevocably lost, and the bunker itself had been struck by lightning and split open like a pumpkin. The steady rain poured in and streamed out of the structure, washing away props, documents, equipment and costumes. Crews foraged in the valley for stuff that could be reclaimed and used.

Francis acted as if God were personally out to destroy him.

“Doesn’t anybody else notice what a disaster this film is?” he shouted. “I haven’t got a script, I haven’t got an actor, I’m running out of money, I’m all out of time. This is the goddamned Unfinished Symphony, man.”

Nobody wanted to talk to the director when he was in this mood. Francis squatted on the bare earth of the mountainside, surrounded by smashed balsawood pine-trees, hugging his knees. He wore a stetson hat, filched from Quincey Morris’s wardrobe, and drizzle was running from its brim in a tiny stream. Eleanor, his wife, concentrated on keeping the children out of the way.

“This is the worst fucking film of my career. The worst I’ll ever make. The
last
movie.”

The first person to tell Francis to cheer up and that things weren’t so bad would get fired and be sent home. At this point, crowded under a leaky lean-to with other surplus persons, Kate was tempted.