Dracula Cha Cha Cha (Anno Dracula #3)

Dracula Cha Cha Cha (Anno Dracula #3) Page 45

Back when this settlement was called something like Grenewyche, the monastery of St Bartolph's commanded a river view which meant the abbot could exact tithes from cargo ships. The monks' taxing reputation was inflated by tales of missing maids and subterranean oblations at obscene altars. With the Dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII used St Bartolph's as a prison for a while. The mediaeval building crumbled under the Tudors and Stuarts. Sir Christopher Wren and his assistant Nicholas Dyer rebuilt it in 1710 as an afterthought to the Royal Naval College, semi-officially known as the School for Discipline. In 1869, the cadets lashed Admiral-Headmaster Ashleigh to death with his own cat o' nine tails during a dry-land mutiny. After that, the Navy got shot of St Bartolph's. It became an outpost of the University of London.

Between the wars, Professor Elwyn Clayton and the 'St Bartolph's Set', a clique of Victorian new-borns and Carpathian left-behinds, made a noise about a project to uncover (or whitewash) the vampire heritage. Kate had owned a copy of Clayton's The Whole History of the Undead since its 1938 publication, and still not finished reading it. During the War, St Bartolph's was requisitioned back into naval use as a facility for training saboteurs. Needing extra classroom space to perfect infernal devices, the Navy threw up huts in Wren's spacious quadrangle. Typically, the prefabs remained in use. Kate dreaded to think what state they were in. One wing of the college was destroyed by a V-weapon in 1945. Clayton, who stayed in his chambers against direct orders from Winston Churchill, was killed by the rocket. Disciples talked of his eventual return. The School of Vampirism he founded remained the foremost in England, if not the world. Lately, however, its status was challenged: St Bartolph's was often outbid for important documents by Faber, an American cow college with alumni endowments to spend and a policy of not admitting vampires to study their own history. The blown-apart wing was replaced by a controversial plate glass-and-concrete hothouse designed by Santonix, the award-winning but certifiable architect. Jim Graham said the St Bartolph's annexe was a masterpiece  -  but he lived in Shepperton and never had to look at it.

This was the last week of the academic year at St Bartolph's. Many Third Year students must have beetled off after taking finals, and would be back  -  or not  -  for graduation, or at least the posting of their results. Kate arrived mid-afternoon, after the shadows started lengthening to offer refuge. Like all educational institutions with a mixed warm-vampire student body, St Bartolph's offered a staggered day: one set of lectures and tutorials starting at nine in the morning; another, overlapping set starting at four in the afternoon, the out-of-the-coffin hour. Young bloods could get their studies done and be ready to go out on the town at midnight. Tutorial groups weren't strictly segregated, but the split schedule nudged the living and the living dead to stick with their own kind.

A group of tanned, long-haired kids came out of the old wing  -  their lecture just finished. Among paisley blouses, denim bell-bottoms, applique sunflowers and Donovan hats, Kate saw a tall girl enveloped in a violet djellaba, half-masked by blue aviator goggles. A token vampire? She hung adoringly on the arm of a warm boy. He wore a Shane fringed jacket and had a guitar slung over his shoulder. Was the girl called a 'scab hag' by other vampires? Did live birds who fancied her boyfriend call her 'viper' behind her back? Hey, maybe everyone liked the pale kid? A morning spent contemplating the works of Caleb Croft had poisonous after-effects.

'Hello,' she said to the students.

'Fuzz,' a youth sneered. 'Vampire fuzz.'

'No,' she said, omitting to mention she was working with the police. 'I'm a reporter.'

'Worse,' said a girl with Indian braids and a headband. Did she pack a scalping knife under her embroidered waistcoat?

Kate had a fold-out map of the campus, but all the names had been changed, seemingly in the last five minutes. As a ploy to avert Revolution, Vice-Chancellor Goodrich let the student body vote on what their lecture halls were called. British heroes were out, radical chic was in. The Harry Paget Flashman Refectory became Che Guevara Hall, the Horatio Hornblower Library was now the Jean-Luc Godard Collective. Professor Bowles-Ottery's George Edward Challenger Biology Laboratory transformed into the Unlimited Dream Factory. A dayglo psychedelic mural exhorted passersby to 'Pop a BOP'.

'If it's about Bowles-Ottery, man,' said the vampire's boyfriend, 'he's on sabbatical. Floated away on a multi-coloured cloud. Awaa' wi' the fairies.'

Many journalists had filed stories about Bowles-Ottery.

'I'm trying to find the Sir Francis Varney Theatre,' she said.

If her immediate reception was lightly chilly, dropping that name inspired a big freeze. If they'd known anything about Sir Francis, it'd have been worse. But they stopped ragging her.

'Varney  -  that's Mamuwalde, isn't it?' said one of the warm guys. 'Dru?'

The warm youths looked to the vampire girl. She shrugged in her djellaba.

'Oh yeah,' she said, reluctantly. 'The Tent. You can't miss it. Go past the main building and it's in the meadow. The Prince Mamuwalde Theatre.'

And watch out for the Black Monks,' said Dru's boyfriend.

The vampire shuddered and her friends laughed.

Kate was surprised these kids had that much sense of history, then perceived they didn't mean ghosts of the pirate monks of the Middle Ages. These Black Monks were some new shower. A pop group, a motorcycle gang or a political faction, perhaps? A variety of hallucinogenic mushroom? The students moved on before she could ask for an explanation.

'Ricky Strange is appearing at Groover's tonight,' Dru told her boyfriend, 'and I'm not missing the freak-out of the month because of bloody Enoch!'

The vampire girl had been reminded she wasn't like her friends. There'd be a lot of that about, if things kept up. Kate remembered the Notting Hill blood riots of '58. Then: Teds with razor-edge crucifixes; now: skinheads with silver-toed Doc Martens. The haters of '68 had adopted a bubblegum hit as an anthem of what they called 'human pride', mockingly chanting 'Hey, ninety-eight point six, it's good to have you back again'. Body temperature lower than the norm was a trait of all vampire bloodlines.

Beyond the main building, she found the Prince Mamuwalde Theatre.

The outdoor stage was shadowed by a vast, bat-shaped canvas roof stretched over a frame, like a circus tent lifting off in a high wind. White chairs were arranged for an audience. This graduation ceremony would be here, but it was a music venue too. Reparata and the Delrons played here last month, according to posters. Jethro Tull were booked in a week. The College Dramatic Society would stage a reading of MacBird! next Friday if Goodrich didn't ban it.

Professor Croft was using the shade for his seminar group.

He was in front of the stage, perched on an umbrella shooting stick. He wore a dark-purple corduroy blazer, a mod hip-length cape, a straw hat which didn't suit him and a long St Bartolph's scarf. He gestured and talked, hands more expressive than his face.

Now Kate understood who the Black Monks were.

They sat in a semi-circle at Croft's feet, cowls down. His students wore black habits. A small group, eight or nine: mostly men, all vampires. The robes were academic as much as monkish, and marked them out as a group, a tribe. She'd seen the Black Monks before, she realised: at the demo yesterday and in Nolan's party pics. They mostly wore their hair like Croft: long, but styled  -  a Regency dandy look, not let-it-all-hang-out hippiedom.

Janey Mack, of all the vampire elders in the world, Corpseface Croft gets to be a style icon!

Kate swallowed her spit and drew in her fangs. She sat in the back row, and eavesdropped.

Croft was talking about the Dracula Declaration. Everyone alive in 1885 remembered where they were when they heard the news  -  vampires were real, they were here, they were taking over! People her age competed to see their first vampire, to talk with one... and, though few said it out loud, to be bitten, turned. If her family hadn't been in Dublin that year, Kate would've had bragging rights. She was friends with Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker, Dracula's first English get. Considering what happened to poor Lucy, Kate might not have had the courage to turn if she'd seen her chum as a vampire. Which was getting ahead of her memory. Kate's first vampire was a Carpathian Guardsman named Kostaki, who visited the Reeds' Chelsea home when her father, a Classics Professor at Trinity and London, brought his family back to London. Kostaki quizzed Father about his circle of suspect friends, which included enemies of the state like Bram Stoker and Abraham Van Helsing. The vampire wore the sort of uniform she associated with comic opera, but it wasn't funny on him. He had a handlebar moustache and pointed ears, and turned out to be more honourable than most elders. Kate's second vampire, she realised years later, was the Englishman who sat in the unmarked carriage outside the house while Kostaki paid his call. Caleb Croft, already a secret policeman.

The Dracula Declaration meant something different to Croft.

For him, already a vampire, it was the moment when he could come out of hiding.

'Until the Declaration, we hadn't even known how many other vampires there were, how spread across the world,' the Professor said. 'A few vampires imagined themselves unique, the only creatures of their kind ever made. Those cats were in for a shock, you better believe it! Many shunned humans except as prey, living like mad hermits in castles, caves or tombs. I passed for warm, hiding among crowds. My fortune was gone, dribbled away over decades. My connections, once of the highest, came to mean nothing, zip, nada, zilch. My title and estate passed to heirs when I could no longer explain why I was still alive...'

...and why all those chambermaids were sickly or dead.

'I got good at changing my name, home and profession every dozen years. When Dracula came, I was in London, one of the few vampires already in the city he would make his capital. I was a thief-taker. Not an official Scotland Yard pig with a badge and rules to follow, but what they called in the Wild West a bounty hunter. Back then, "dead or alive" mostly meant dead and there were no complaints if the beef was paler than on the wanted poster.

'I'd tracked and killed Styles, the Haymarket Strangler. I bled him white. I turned the corpse in at Islington Police Station. While I waited for my five sovereigns blood money, a constable named Thackeray showed me the Dailygraph. Queen Victoria was to remarry. Thackeray was more fussed that Prince Dracula was a foreigner than that he was four hundred years old. It didn't sink in when the warm were only told. They had to see. But for me  -  for vampires all over  -  being told was enough. We were reborn, baby, reborn! Most of us knew who Dracula was, what kick he was on. King of the Cats, yeah? Some even put him down for it, like who did he think he was, you know? At that moment, I was pretending to drink tea. Whenever Thackeray was distracted, I poured a slosh into a plant pot. I'd mastered the skill of pretending to eat and drink, a trick none of you have any use for.

'When Thackeray said "What does it mean, vampire?" it was like a blood-rush... a sudden clarity, a profound change. I openly poured away my tea and showed my fangs. Thackeray didn't understand. A woman saw my face and screamed. Some vampires went on a tear. Too early. They were caught and killed. Dracula had them impaled himself. That was my first job for him...'

It struck Kate that Croft might never have actually met Dracula. Even at the height of his power, he was a jumped-up thief-taker. He only betrayed the Count when his patron did. Lord Ruthven had carried off living among the warm better than Croft, periodically returning as a bogus son and inheriting his own title. It was a forgotten division in the community. For centuries, vampire elders from 'civilised' nations like Great Britain and France looked down on Central European brutes of the Dracula stripe. None of them stirred from elegant lassitude to bring off anything on the scale of Dracula's coup, so most bent the knee, accepting Vlad Tepes as King of the Cats.

Croft had stuck with the name he happened to be using at the time of the Declaration. He didn't reclaim the title of Lord Charles Croydon.

'Vampires who turned after lived a different world,' Croft continued. 'Your world, my friends. Many  -  most!  -  didn't last. They changed too fast, had a false sense of invulnerability, couldn't see how things really were. Dracula was their God and their downfall. That must shock you. But, remember, Dracula didn't survive, didn't hold power long. Now he's truly dead. Dead and gone and done with and put away and finished. Endsville, man. As vampires, we must get past him, get around him. Tomorrow, I want to talk about his long fall, and what we can learn from it. Do you dig?'

Kate expected applause.

Instead, a young man nodded sagely and said, 'Yeah, we dig.'

Kate recognised the hat-doffing undertaker/ringmaster from the Sunday morning procession. The chin and the grin. The sexy sadist.

'I expected no less, Mr DeBoys,' said Croft.

Two vampires appeared, sat either side of Kate, leaning in to grip her arms. Tiny, blonde French dollies with identical faces. One with bunches, the other with a pony-tail; one with heart-shaped sunglasses, the other sucking on a lollipop. They wore halter tops, short-shorts and flip-flops. They looked under fifteen, but were older than sin. Kate remembered the sisters from Rome, where they'd freelanced for the Soviets. Cathy Castel and Pony Tricot, the ye-ye vampire twins. They weren't students: there was nothing they needed to be taught. So, Professor Croft hired bodyguards? Not commonplace in the groves of academe. Had he fed Carol and Laura to the twins? They shared a vicious, nasty streak.

Croft deigned to notice her now.

'Katharine Reed,' he said, introducing her. 'You'll remember I assigned you her journalism from the Reign...'

That was what Dracula cronies called the Terror! She always forgot.

'You can learn a great deal from Miss Reed.'

...not that he'd learnt anything from her when he was out to have her head on a pole and smash the hidden presses which printed her newssheets.

DeBoys eyed her, grinning ferally. She felt that stab of attraction. She guessed he was just playing at being dangerous. He was Head Boy: the sort who might leave a plump, bleeding baby on Teacher's desk. The other Black Monks had followed his lead at the demo.

The twins eased her out of her seat and walked her towards the seminar group.

They were shorter than her by inches and she was reckoned titchy. Kate knew that since quitting Rome and Smert Spionem, Cathy and Pony had worked for Mossad  -  kidnapping the American Nazi propagandist Howard W Campbell Jr to stand trial in Israel  -  and the Unione Corse, the Corsican mafia. The Diogenes Club had a report that the twins had fallen out and taken opposite sides of the barricades in the recent Paris street-fighting. If that were true, they'd patched things up since May.

'What might we do for you, Miss Reed?' asked Croft.

She shrugged out of the twins' grip. More accurately, they let her go.

An interview, for the eightieth anniversary...'

'Of what?'

'The downfall. You were just talking about it.'

Ah, yes, I suppose so... the Old Queen's passing.'

'I'm sure you've more reminiscences you'd like to share, or are they just for this select circle of. students?'

'I am happy to rap for your article, but there must be quid pro quo. If I consent to an interview, you must share your perspective with the group. My young friends will have many questions for you.'

'Yes Miss, we'd be ever so interested,' said DeBoys, silky smooth.

'Of course,' she said, hoping she hadn't made a mistake.