Read Online Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha by Kim Newman - Free Book Online
Authors: Kim Newman
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servants of the day shift, who rarely lasted long, were eager to keep him happy. Not a cruel fellow, he liked a little bowing and scraping. He felt he’d earned his leisure. It had taken not a little ingenuity and hard graft to get him here.
Sunlight danced around, flashing off the dragon-scale panes of the conservatory roof, illuminating columns of swirling dust, making angular patterns on the old carpet. Tom felt warmth on his face and was tempted to close his eyes and doze. He might not have to spend the day in a casket lined with Boston soil, but he’d still been up all night. Even the heart-punching coffee couldn’t keep him awake forever. His habit was to siesta in the afternoon and early evening, to be out of the way when the dead rose.
Was his distaste just an American prejudice? There weren’t many living dead in the States. Prohibition hadn’t driven them out completely in the ’20s, but they remained an underground presence, not the mushroom growth they were in Europe. Legal restrictions on their practices were stringently enforced. Tom fancied himself free from most convention, but something about the creatures crawled behind his eyes.
He opened his dressing gown at the throat and undid the top buttons of his Ascot Chang shirt. Dickie’s shirt, originally. He hoped he was tanning. A Mediterranean brown would make the bite-marks stand out less. And he didn’t want to be mistaken for one of the dead. He was with them so much that a wall was rising around him, separating him from the living.
It wasn’t until he came to Europe, head a-buzz with his aunt’s tales of bloodsucking monsters on every street corner, that he really found out anything about the dead. They weren’t so fearsome.
In his own small way, he was a predator on the dead.
In Greece for no very good reason, Tom had run into Richard Fountain, a youngish newlydead. They knew each other from a weekend party in the Hamptons to which Tom had not exactly been invited. Dickie, now on the run from a tiresome girlfriend and a God-awful Cambridge College, was glad of the company, and took him back to his beach-house on Cyprus. Somehow, the Englishman picked up the idea that Tom was from money but estranged from it, a remittance man. Tom could never work out why life in England had become intolerable for Dickie, but it had, driving him south-east in a restless search for something indefinable. His course had led him to a dead peasant named Chriseis, who had turned him on their first night and ditched him in the dark.
Together, Tom and Dickie knocked around a little, hopping from island to island, having the usual adventures. Dickie, hooked on new experience, was obsessed with the dead of Greece. He rooted around everywhere for traces of Chriseis’s bloodline, which he supposed went back to the vorvolukas of recent times and the lamiae of antiquity. It was a bit of a yawn but nothing that couldn’t be coped with. After all, being bored was better than being in prison. It was Tom’s intention never to go to jail. He loathed the idea of enforced proximity, of being in a tiny space with another man or men not of his choosing.
Through Dickie, Tom realised something important about the dead. When their teeth were stuck in your neck and your blood was washing around their mouths, they were in no position to notice you going through their pockets.
In his ignorance, Tom had thought the dead needed blood to survive the way the living needed water. It wasn’t true. Warm blood could be like dope, or alcohol, or sex, or espresso, or sugar. Anything from a desperate addiction to a mild weakness. When the red thirst was on them, their famed powers of insight and persuasion turned to fuzz and fudge.
At first, Dickie was apologetic about bleeding Tom, and profusely grateful afterward. He didn’t know the ropes. He said ‘excuse me’, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ every time he bit some poor warm fool. Then he began to display an arrogant streak, as if
Sunlight danced around, flashing off the dragon-scale panes of the conservatory roof, illuminating columns of swirling dust, making angular patterns on the old carpet. Tom felt warmth on his face and was tempted to close his eyes and doze. He might not have to spend the day in a casket lined with Boston soil, but he’d still been up all night. Even the heart-punching coffee couldn’t keep him awake forever. His habit was to siesta in the afternoon and early evening, to be out of the way when the dead rose.
Was his distaste just an American prejudice? There weren’t many living dead in the States. Prohibition hadn’t driven them out completely in the ’20s, but they remained an underground presence, not the mushroom growth they were in Europe. Legal restrictions on their practices were stringently enforced. Tom fancied himself free from most convention, but something about the creatures crawled behind his eyes.
He opened his dressing gown at the throat and undid the top buttons of his Ascot Chang shirt. Dickie’s shirt, originally. He hoped he was tanning. A Mediterranean brown would make the bite-marks stand out less. And he didn’t want to be mistaken for one of the dead. He was with them so much that a wall was rising around him, separating him from the living.
It wasn’t until he came to Europe, head a-buzz with his aunt’s tales of bloodsucking monsters on every street corner, that he really found out anything about the dead. They weren’t so fearsome.
In his own small way, he was a predator on the dead.
In Greece for no very good reason, Tom had run into Richard Fountain, a youngish newlydead. They knew each other from a weekend party in the Hamptons to which Tom had not exactly been invited. Dickie, now on the run from a tiresome girlfriend and a God-awful Cambridge College, was glad of the company, and took him back to his beach-house on Cyprus. Somehow, the Englishman picked up the idea that Tom was from money but estranged from it, a remittance man. Tom could never work out why life in England had become intolerable for Dickie, but it had, driving him south-east in a restless search for something indefinable. His course had led him to a dead peasant named Chriseis, who had turned him on their first night and ditched him in the dark.
Together, Tom and Dickie knocked around a little, hopping from island to island, having the usual adventures. Dickie, hooked on new experience, was obsessed with the dead of Greece. He rooted around everywhere for traces of Chriseis’s bloodline, which he supposed went back to the vorvolukas of recent times and the lamiae of antiquity. It was a bit of a yawn but nothing that couldn’t be coped with. After all, being bored was better than being in prison. It was Tom’s intention never to go to jail. He loathed the idea of enforced proximity, of being in a tiny space with another man or men not of his choosing.
Through Dickie, Tom realised something important about the dead. When their teeth were stuck in your neck and your blood was washing around their mouths, they were in no position to notice you going through their pockets.
In his ignorance, Tom had thought the dead needed blood to survive the way the living needed water. It wasn’t true. Warm blood could be like dope, or alcohol, or sex, or espresso, or sugar. Anything from a desperate addiction to a mild weakness. When the red thirst was on them, their famed powers of insight and persuasion turned to fuzz and fudge.
At first, Dickie was apologetic about bleeding Tom, and profusely grateful afterward. He didn’t know the ropes. He said ‘excuse me’, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ every time he bit some poor warm fool. Then he began to display an arrogant streak, as if
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