Read Online Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha by Kim Newman - Free Book Online Page A

he’d made Tom into his slave or something. In long, rambling monologues near dawn in the beachhouse, Dickie talked about sin and evil and gratification, of the need to go beyond guilt and embrace the full human potential. Words like ‘sin’, ‘evil’, and ‘guilt’ were meaningless to Tom. He had heard them often at school and been fascinated by their meanings, but only in an academic way as if they were discredited scientific theories centuries had been wasted on. The miracle was that Dickie still saw something in all that rot.
    It became obvious to Tom that the arrangement could not last indefinitely. He’d had to cast around for a way of coming out of it comfortably.
    A few trickles of blood fogged Dickie completely, made him uncommonly suggestible. After a month or so of this communion, the dead man no longer noticed if Tom borrowed things on a permanent basis. He liked to wear Dickie’s English clothes, which were of a quality he appreciated. It was providential that they were roughly the same size.
    When he accepted death, Richard Fountain threw away his life. It was only fair, then, that Tom should pick it up. He was best placed to enjoy it, after all.
    Eventually, the set-up grew highly tiresome. Dickie’s mad fiancée tracked them down to Cyprus. She made accusations which Tom found hurtful and upsetting. To sort things out, Tom and Dickie went off one night in a boat to argue it through and Tom stuck a broken-off spar into Dickie’s chest. Though not dead long enough to turn to dust, he’d gone off like spoiled meat. Tom had tipped him over the side and watched him sink.
    He fixed it so Dickie appeared to have left for an untraceable Greek island on a fool’s search for the source of Chriseis’s bloodline, leaving behind a small income signed over into Tom’s control, ‘for the maintenance of the house’. More importantly, Dickie left written instructions that Tom should have the use of his travelling wardrobe. No one was happy, especially the fiancée and the family. The cops were involved, but investigations and insinuations fizzled out.
    Dickie was already deceased, so no murder case could be brought. Greece was one of those countries that had never rewritten its laws to accommodate the walking dead. If anyone was sought for the murder, it was the elusive Chriseis. The authorities had no incentive to search for a corpse that was probably unidentifiable mould anyway.
    The money carried Tom to Italy and, despite his reluctance to get mixed up again with the dead, eventually washed him into the Palazzo Otranto.
    And against Penelope.
    She had been dead a long time. Dickie would have said she knew the ropes. If you got close, you could tell her age. Her skin was white, but with an undertint of corruption that was almost bluish. If she were scratched with silver, Tom thought her wounds would peel open, festering. Her face and limbs were perfect, but she had scars, angry red circles, on her breasts and stomach, like bullet holes.
    On Malta, he was approached by an English subaltern who originally mistook him, because of his clothes, for Dickie, with whom he had been flogged at school. The young officer had a package, brought out from England to pay off a favour. It was to be taken to an exile in Rome. Tom was offered the use of an already-booked room at the Rinascimento in Campo de’ Fiori if he would deliver the package. Tom had planned to go on to Rome anyway, and this was as painless a way of arriving as any.
    He was tempted to peek, of course. The parcel was small enough to contain a fountain pen or a hypodermic syringe. He assumed from the roundabout method of delivery that it was an artifact on its way to a new owner, perhaps without the consent of the last one.
    The addressee was Penelope Churchward. They met at his hotel and he handed over the package, which she said was a wedding present. Afterward, she extended an invitation which, a few days later, he was pleased to take up. He knew from