The Mammoth Book of Dracula (67 page)

~ * ~

EACH DECADE’S BIG ideas struggle on into the next decade, looking more and more out of place. Then they either die or get revived. Graphic design was one of the big ideas of the eighties: everyone needed it, or thought they did. By the end of the nineties, it had been absorbed into the industries it served, and was no longer any way to make a decent living.

Two years out of college, Richard Wren was a freelance designer living on the breadline. Then a chance conversation in a rough pub near his lodgings in Tyseley got him into a new line of business. The supply side of the black economy. Car parts, office equipment, computer hardware, lifestyle accessories, even medical supplies as well as no end of pharmaceutical drugs ... it all had to come from somewhere. Straight robbery was only a part of it; often the “victim” was involved in the deal, claiming insurance as well as a cut. Or someone was going behind his employer’s back. Likewise, getting away with it had as much to do with negotiation as fast cars. It was setting up a job, and clearing up after it, that Wren was useful for. He wasn’t a hard man. He was cute, and plausible, and had a certain little-boy-lost quality that wasn’t entirely fake. As an added bonus, he knew how to handle computers. A bit of erudition and charm went a long way in the subculture of no-mark petty crime. It helped to smooth the edges and prevent mishaps. Wren’s associates weren’t into bloodshed: it had no commercial value.

He kept up the day job, such as it was. Appearances counted for everything. Still, the night work enabled him to move to a better flat. He was looking at the posh tower blocks on the edge of the city centre when Matthews, a locksmith with a useful collection of duplicates, told him about the vacant fiat in Schreck’s house. Wren knew what that meant. All of Schreck’s tenants worked for the same firm, and were answerable to him. Not that Schreck was the boss, as such. He was just a good fence. Good fences made good neighbours. Schreck’s basement was an almost legendary depot for all things dodgy. Being his tenant meant that you were relied upon. The rent was low, but there were attendant responsibilities. When Wren hesitated, Matthews suggested that it would not be in his financial interests to turn down the offer. Wren agreed to the verbal contract with only a flicker of unease. He was all for job security. Besides, he was curious.

Schreck had a bizarre reputation. He came from some Central European country no one had heard of, and had been one of Warhol’s crowd in late-sixties New York. He’d struggled through the seventies as a rock producer and film technician, before coming to England and getting into business crime (another big idea of the eighties). He’d brought some Warholian theatrical camp with him. Apparently he was never seen by day, and always wore black fabric: satin, velvet, that sort of thing. His face was dead white, except for the bloodshot eyes and shiny lips. Matthews and the others usually referred to him as the Count—which, after a few drinks, was sometimes slurred to the Cunt. He was as bent as a Shadow Cabinet election, obviously. But it went without saying that he had to be fucking dangerous to get away with all that. Like Ronnie Kray or something.

Wren moved into the house in early summer. It was an old detached house, newly renovated and painted white, with leaded windows that weren’t quite transparent. The district was a bright mixture of the fake-suburban and the austerely commercial, both elements having the cold smell of money. But it was only a few miles up the Warwick Road to the flaking white-trash districts of Acocks Green and Tyseley, and more criminal contacts than even Schreck would know what to do with. The landlord was away on business the weekend Wren moved in with his computer, box of CDs and four suitcases full of Top Man shirts and worn-out jeans. But on the Wednesday, just after nightfall, there was a firm knock at the door of Wren’s studio flat. “Come in.” The door swung open. Schreck was a big man: he had to stoop to get through the doorway, and his handshake wrapped around Wren’s knuckles like a boxing glove.

“Nice to meet you,” he said. “I hope you’ll be comfortable here.” He was a well-preserved fiftysomething, with spiky black hair that was going grey above the ears. His eyes were a deep blue, cracked by tiny red veins. The brightness of his lips might have been augmented by lipgloss, or it might have been an anomaly linked to the complete lack of pigmentation in the rest of his face. He was wearing an expensive charcoal-grey silk shirt that, despite himself, Wren felt an impulse to reach out and touch.

They chatted for a few minutes, Schreck taking an intelligent interest in Wren’s posters and CDs. He was appreciative of Joy Division, but utterly dismissive of the Cure: “They don’t express despair, they fabricate it as a lifestyle option.
Entertainment.”
There was a trace of Middle Europe in Schreck’s voice: not so much an accent as a weight hanging around the vowels, like a second voice you couldn’t quite hear. Behind his deliberate politeness, Wren could sense a rather icy self-possession. The cellar and its rumoured contents weren’t mentioned. Rent arrangements were discussed as if this were a purely normal tenancy. Perhaps it would be that easy. But just before leaving, Schreck told him: “Don’t go on holiday without letting me know. Even a weekend. It might not be convenient. And trust matters.” He let that sink in before wishing Wren goodnight and quietly closing the door.

It was the last and hottest summer of the nineties. Wren had trouble sleeping, and began doing some of his design work at night. His main contract, with a magazine publisher in Birmingham, only required him to be there in the afternoons. He struck up a friendship with one of the sub-editors, a tall blonde girl called Alison; they met for a drink a few times, but she wouldn’t get involved with him. Once she phoned another man from the office, and the tone of her voice made Wren realize just how far he was from getting close to her. The heat and lack of sleep helped to turn his disappointment into obsession. The inside of his head was a noticeboard covered with photographs of Alison. If he’d been able to download his compulsive daydreams onto his Apple Mac, he could have designed a whole magazine about her. Whenever he had to go into the office, he felt tense and scared.

The house was a partial escape from the summer. The air seemed thinner somehow, as if the leaded windows did more than just weaken the sunlight. It had once been a Victorian family house, and seemed to recover some of its old character after dark, when the shadows erased the new wood-chip wallpaper from the deep stairwell. Wren’s flat, on the second floor, had been a family bedroom once. He tried not to think about that too much. Schreck’s late-evening visits became a regular event, with Wren sometimes being invited down to the landlord’s ground-floor flat to share a drink and a video. Schreck had a brilliant collection of old films, mostly in black and white: Hitchcock, Polanski;
film noirs
from the forties; Universal horror films with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; German expressionist films like
Nosferatu
and
Pandora’s Box;
erotic art-films by Warhol and Fassbinder; trash with a PhD in the architecture of its own back passage. He was particularly enthusiastic about old horror and crime B-movies, and the way they had been used to get subversive and dangerous material past the barriers of a hidebound audience. “True Gothic nightmare camouflaged as
schlock.
Behind the plot clichés and cheap special effects, such a world of ambiguity, guilt, narcotics, lust. Such dark, terrible eyes staring at you.” Schreck was inclined to get maudlin when he was drunk. His fridge and drinks cabinet housed a crystal garden of wonders. He and Wren sat for hours in the flickering light of the screen, drinking strong Polish vodka with tomato juice or bittersweet liqueurs that glowed like the moon through clouds.

Wren stored up the cold, stark landscapes of these films to protect him from the burning days. The alcohol helped too, as long as he had an extra hour or so to sleep off the worst of it. Spirits had a power that beer entirely lacked: the effect stayed with you all day, like a rose of ice slowly melting into your gut. A private darkness. Sometimes he made shallow cuts in his arms with a razor blade and licked the blood, then ran cold water over the skin. It made him feel in control. The occasional robbery helped too, though the firm were keeping a low profile until the nights drew in. Wren enjoyed the strategy aspect of it, the sense of winning a game. His fear of guard dogs, armed security guards, police roadblocks, was sharp but limited. It was easier to live with than the way he felt about Alison. And the sense of discipline reassured him. Whatever they took, including money, came back to the house and was stored in the various parts of the basement for Schreck and his invisible overlords to look after.

One Friday night, after the successful liberation of a few grand’s worth of state-of-the-art computer games from an underground depot, Wren and two other thieves celebrated with a night at a private club. They’d invited the security guard whom they’d prevented from raising the alarm to join them, but he’d opted to lie low for a while. The club was dark and echoing, and so humid that it seemed about to rain. It was full of criminals pretending to be businessmen, and businessmen pretending to be criminals. Two young female strippers posed awkwardly on the narrow stage, feigning interest in each other. Around a small table, several middle-aged men were ostentatiously cutting up lines of snow. Wren and the other two sat at the bar, knocking back malt whiskies and Black Russians. A few young women drifted quietly among the tables, waiting. The air was cobwebbed with a predictable desire, like something designed and fabricated on a page of broken light. Wren drank steadily, chewing ice, watching the two mirrorballs pull shreds of colour across the girls’ pale faces and arms.

Some time later, he wasn’t sure how late, the three of them ended up in a tiny side room with a thin, dark-haired girl wearing a red tunic. There was a black velvet futon in the middle of the floor. Wren felt strangely exposed, aware of the two men watching as the girl undressed him and pushed him down onto the futon beneath her. His hands struggled with her underwear. Then she was kneeling over him, her bony hands holding down his outstretched arms. His companions knelt on either side, watching closely. Wren felt trapped. A mixture of humiliation and joy took him over, reducing him to a living snarl. As he came, he caught her earlobe between his teeth and bit. A metallic smear of blood glued his dry lips to her skin. The girl pulled away, her face tight with rage. Wren licked his lips and watched as the other two pacified the girl with money and apologies. Neither of them touched her.

Occasionally, in the house, he’d see Schreck with visitors or overhear them talking. Mostly, he assumed, it was business. Did Schreck have a boyfriend? There had been a couple of rough-looking teenage lads, but neither had been a regular visitor. Just because people said the Count was queer didn’t necessarily make it true. Rumour was a separate kind of reality. Maybe they said Wren was driving his stake into the Count. He did wonder, when he sobered up after one of their late-night drinking sessions, if anything was going on. Drinking buddies were more than friends sometimes, it was a well-known phenomenon. At college, he’d known blokes who were officially straight get rat-arsed together and end up cuddling, or even exchanging handjobs. But if Schreck was trying to get him that way, he’d already passed up quite a few opportunities. The thought of Schreck grabbing his balls one of these nights didn’t worry him too much. What seemed more likely, and more threatening, was that the old madman was falling for him and might never let him go. There was an edge to their nocturnal films and bottles that Wren didn’t understand. It was getting to him. But he didn’t know what would happen if he tried to cry off. There was something protective about Schreck, almost motherly. His sharp nails, the mints he chewed to sweeten his breath. Probably a Catholic, or a Jew. How would he treat you if you stopped being one of his family? By late summer, Wren suspected he’d already got into something he couldn’t get out of. And then there were the dreams.

It was like an extension of some of Schreck’s older films into the monochrome world they evoked: forests, empty streets, crumbling buildings, the moon behind clouds. Tiny figures were scattered across the landscape: either dolls or babies, their faces closed and blank. Tree branches, prams and other debris floated in a disused canal, behind railings almost eaten through with rust. Everything was still, as after some terrible event. Wren (or whoever he had become) was always lost, trying to find someone or escape from someone. The story never revealed itself to him. Somewhere behind a wall, or in the next street, it was still going on. He could just hear the echoes of someone crying, or screaming, or snarling with rage, or groaning in pleasure. But he didn’t know where the sounds came from. At some point near the end of each dream, he looked at the moon and saw through a black frame into another world: a darkened room where Schreck’s face was watching him. The only colours in the entire dream were the red of Schreck’s lips and the deep blue of his eyes, which never met Wren’s own.

~ * ~

One night in mid-August, Wren visited a rock nightclub in the city centre. It was billed as a Goth/Alternative/Industrial night. A damaged mirrorball stood on a concrete pillar at the end of the street. The club itself resembled a derelict warehouse with speakers and lights installed at the last moment. The walls were unevenly coated with posters advertising gigs over the last few years. There were two similar concourses, each with a long curved bar stretching from the doorway to the edge of a square dance floor. The music on the first floor was mostly heavy metal, the music on the second floor a mixture of goth and industrial. The people dancing on each floor provided a visual guide to the differences. Wren decided to stick to the upper venue, for several reasons. After two hours of harsh music and lukewarm beer served in plastic glasses, his enthusiasm was waning. Very few of the girls seemed to be unattached; perhaps they were only here for the music. Feeling lonely and unexpectedly drunk, he stumbled onto the adhesive dance floor just as a new track began.