Dracula Cha Cha Cha (Anno Dracula #3) 6

The seminar moved indoors to Croft's rooms in the Santonix wing. He had a suite to himself. That must infuriate the lesser lights of the School of Vampirism.

The outer office was the domain of Miss Brabazon, a middle-aged secretary. One lens of her Lennon specs was black. She gave Croft a sheaf of messages he handed back dismissively. The twins settled on low, amorphous orange chairs. Bored with blowing bubblegum balloons through fangs, they lit Gitanes. Pony shoved a tiny button in her ear and tuned a transistor radio to whatever the Light Programme changed its name to last year (Kate knew it was BBC Radio 1 but wouldn't admit it). She nodded mindlessly to The Move, The Flower People or The Small Faces. Cathy flipped through Cue and found pictures of Toby Dammit in open-necked shirts. Kate had written for 'Britain's first teenage newspaper' until her interview with Jimi Hendrix  -  mostly about Vietnam and Malcolm X, until the subs got to it  -  came out headlined 'that's the man who plays guitar with his teeth and says each frizzy strand of his hair is a vindication'.

Kate followed Croft into an inner sanctum.

Remembering her father's cluttered study, she was surprised Croft could teach without a single book in sight. No pictures hung on the black walls, though a neon-faced twenty-four-hour clock might count as art. Executive toys were stranded on his concrete slab desk: a Newton's Cradle and a Drinking Bird. Students sat in chrome-tube-and-leather slings. The Professor had a diabolical mastermind swivel chair with a control panel in one arm. He pressed a button. Tinted window-blinds rolled down, minimising painful sunlight. Conceivably, other buttons opened a trapdoor to a piranha tank or fired laser beams at the School of Humanities.

She considered the Black Monks.

Eric DeBoys, star pupil and leading light, stuck close to her all the way into the building and up to this room, showing off his teeth and  -  she could swear  -  trying to exercise a power of fascination on her. She'd developed immunity to vampire mesmerism before detachable shirt collars went out. Was DeBoys smitten? More likely, he tried it on with any woman who crossed his path. She slapped herself mentally for her instinctive prickle of interest. The last thing she needed in her life (or her knickers) was another vampire knob.

If he wanted trouble, he could always apply to the twins. Cathy and Pony would leave Eric DeBoys lying in a pool of blood and laugh about it all the way home.

She had gathered names and noted significant traits of the rest of the seminar group.

The blokes were a mixed bag. Most were negligible knock-offs of DeBoys. Scrawdyke, a scruffy git with a strident, Northernish voice, projected lethargic aggression. Hair sprouted from every part of his face except his chin. Withnail, a slender glutton, possessed thirsty eyes and an actorish gait. Mo?se King, a brutal toff, had scars around his little boy mouth and, she suspected, exercise books full of poetry he'd never let anyone read. Simon Armstrong was a bespectacled, over-eager swot; the others picked on him because he let his infatuation with Croft show.

Two of the men were more interesting. James Eastman, a longarmed, sceptical American, was hollow-eyed and black-stubbled, and spoke in a whispery, dry rasp. In this group, the symptoms were unusual. He was fasting, defying his vampire hunger by abstaining from human blood. A spiritual trip? Self-punishment? Plain masochism? He didn't wear the black robes, and looked like an outlaw biker in stained denim jacket and scuffed leather britches. Keith Kenneth, a vulpine predator, was Eastman's mirror: a decadent rather than an ascetic, pallor pinked with recent indulgence. He wore a loose purple silk shirt and matching velvet trews under his robe. A choker of love beads didn't quite cover a maroon bruise on his throat. How did he get that? If anyone here was Bellaver's killer, Keith was the most likely prospect. She could see him prowling noisy disco darks for biteable pick-ups. Had he sighted Carol or Laura and just pounced?

There were two girls. Anna Franklyn approximated monk's habit with a shimmering green-black sari and headscarf. A dark, exotic woman with a pixie haircut, she showed a stretch of tight olive-tan midriff. No longer a new-born, Anna might be about Kate's age, a Victorian holdover. She was of an odd bloodline, Indian rakasha or Malay naga. Her sinuous, serpentine manner betokened a reptile totem, not the bat or rat of a European strigoi or nosferatu. She was notionally Simon's girlfriend, if only because DeBoys didn't choose to take her away yet. Fran, a full-bodied vamp, was no one's but her own. She wore a black velvet dress with a plunging front that showed off ginormous bazooms; the only monklike aspect of her ensemble was a rope-belt resting on generous hips. On a whim, she might pass an afternoon in bed with one or more of the unattached (or attached) lads, but she was a free agent. Fran had newly healed bites which matched Keith's. Had they torn into each other? In Kate's day, newborns were advised not to attempt mutual vampirism, which tended to lead lovers to bleeding each other out. This new generation were up for any kink. She wondered if Fran had laid Caleb Croft, then realised that of course she had. Ice grinding on ice. Ugh.

Most of the Black Monks followed DeBoys' lead, as if he were the apostle who passed on the Professor's dictates. None of them loved or liked him, or each other, much. That was a problem with small, mostly-male, exclusively vampire groups: so much competition for attention or favour, they never got anything done. Who'd split the order and strike out on his own? Who'd stick around and wither away? Eastman was a prime candidate to hit the road, with Sartre, Camus and Roquentin packed in his Harley's saddlebags and mirrored sunglasses over red eyes. Armstrong would be here until he was a used-up shell. In two hundred years, he'd be parroting Croft's lectures to new generations of soul-dead students.

The Professor sat behind his desk. He set the Newton's Cradle clacking. The perpetual motion bird dipped to drink. The eye and ear were drawn to the desk and the man behind it. Like Marcus Monserrat's disco lights. Hah, Croft needed tools! His eyes weren't enough. His powers of fascination were weak. It was unlikely he'd mindwiped Thomas Nolan. Unless this was a feint. He wouldn't be the first vampire to adopt a pose of feebleness to gull prey, only showing steel, sinew and fang at the last moment. She was not a good detective: she could talk herself out of any insight, consider a knot from so many angles she never got her fingers into it.

'Would you care to sit here, by me?' Croft asked her.

Of course, she would not care to. But she did, in a plain wooden guest chair.

'Point of order,' said Scrawdyke. 'Does the group recognise the visiting speaker's status as a vampire elder?'

Kate showed her teeth, satisfying everyone except Scrawdyke.

'I don't shapeshift,' she said. 'And it's still rude to ask a lady's age.'

Scrawdyke was going to say something, but DeBoys slapped the back of his head, stirring up an unwashed bird's nest of hair. Reluctantly, Scrawdyke didn't press his point. Technically, she wasn't an elder, but she let it ride.

Croft leaned back like a guest on Dee Time, waiting for a question to prompt an anecdote. She'd asked for an interview after all. Croft set it up as a performance piece.

'"A profound change", you said,' she began. 'I believe you meant the Dracula Declaration changed us all.'

Croft nodded. 'Obviously,' he said.

'I'm interested in what you changed from, Professor Croft. The vampire you were when the world didn't believe in vampires.'

He was wary. As I said, I was an itinerant... a ghost of myself.'

'Why didn't you take back your name? Most did.'

'Charles Croydon was dead. His life gone. Part of the past.'

'Forgive me if this seems indelicate, but how did he feed? Charles Croydon?'

As a predator feeds,' he said. 'By fascination or force. You must dig this. We are all vampires here.'

Anna Franklyn's head oscillated like a cobra's. James Eastman ground his fangs.

'The practicalities were different,' she said. 'When you couldn't admit what you were, when there were no socially acceptable ways of drinking blood.'

'Social acceptability is an artificial construct. We are far beyond those. By our nature.'

'Our nature as vampires?'

'Our nature as predators.'

The living  -  she couldn't even think of the expression 'the warm'  -  Lord Charles Croydon had been exactly like the vampire Caleb Croft. Only money and influence saved him from being strung up in Hanging Woods. 'By fascination or force.' She knew what he meant. He was a murderer and a rapist. Frilly shirts and bright shoe-buckles didn't make him any less a thug. Turning enabled him to predate on a larger scale. Centuries on, he was an old murderer and a rapist. He survived by growing cautious and adapting to the times. But how easy was it to stop being an unrestrained monster? If Croft thought he'd get away with it, he'd use and dispose of Carol Thatcher and Laura Bellows in a trice. But could he think he'd get away with it?

'You were born with a title. Do you still feel entitled?'

Croft wasn't rising to that. 'That'sjust wordplay,' he said. 'Sophistry, man. We're beyond that here. I expected better of you. Reed, as I get your vibe, you've always wanted to be equal... equal with whom?'

'I remember when women didn't have the vote.'

Scrawdyke put his hand up, was ignored, and put it down again, yawning to pretend he just wanted a stretch.

'So, you want to be equal with men? Cool. And, since you're Irish, equal with the English, right? Under the law...'

'In Ulster, right now, the rights of the Catholic minority are...'

'But you're not Catholic. You're the daughter of Dr Pierce Plunkett Reed, of Trinity College and King's, London. A Dublin Protestant. an Ascendancy Prod, right?'

She admitted it.

'And, darling girl, you're a vampire. You are not equal, you can't be equal. You have risen above.'

Croft swivelled in his chair, and addressed his circle.

'Friends, get this: Katharine Reed is still here, eighty years A.D. Consider the Galapagos turtle. They can live for centuries. Like us. But they hatch in the sea and new-borns have to crawl across the beach to safety. Sea birds, predators, haunt the beach, and snatch  -  how many hatchlings? Five in ten, nine in ten? It's a feeding frenzy. Carnage. The slaughter of a generation. Of the weak, or the unlucky, or the unwary. It was like that for new-borns in the wake of the Dracula Declaration. Most didn't make it across the beach. Kate Reed did. Study her, learn her secret. It may save your life.'

She was uncomfortable. DeBoys eyed her wolfishly.

Anna  -  who was Kate's age or older  -  looked at the floor. Croft had never made a turtle speech about her, evidently.

Of course, in this story, the Professor was the butcher bird. Some new-borns of the 1880s succumbed to disease or carelessness. Not a few were killed in the Terror. The regime's chief shrike was Caleb Croft.

'What is your secret?' asked Armstrong, notebook ready.

'"Diet and lots of sleep",' she said.

'That's from Elisabeth Bathory's paperback,' said Mo?se.

'And she took it from Herbert von Krolock,' Kate responded. 'Almost all the witty things ascribed to vampire socialites are Herbert bon mots passed around and polished up. Most of us lose the ability to be funny after a century or so. If an elder makes a joke, he usually has to say "ho ho ho" afterwards to be sure you know to laugh.'

'Point of etiquette,' said Scrawdyke. 'Generalisations are unhelpful. Give specific instances.'

She smiled and shrugged.

'You've ducked the question, luv,' said Keith Kenneth. Or was he Kenneth Keith? 'Keeping your secret?'

'It wouldn't be a secret if I blabbed everywhere, would it?'

If Kate had a secret, she didn't know what it was. Not of the Dracula bloodline, she escaped the rot which cut down many of her generation, but it wasn't as if she was particularly careful. She'd put herself in harm's way often. Too often. How many times can you be sole survivor of some catastrophe and shrug it off? On the principle that a tightrope walker shouldn't look down, she didn't like to consider the occasions when she'd nearly tumbled.

Even now, she was in a lions' den, taking questions from cubs.

'I wouldn't take me as an example,' she said.

Armstrong wrote that down.

'What are your thoughts on the Before?' asked DeBoys.

'Point of explanation,' said Scrawdyke. 'DeBoys means...'

'I know what he means,' she said, hastily. 'B.D. Before Dracula. I had little experience of it. We didn't know what was coming. It wasn't like decimal coinage. We weren't told the thing would happen, given a date to expect it by and charts in the papers to learn so you're ready for it. When I was a girl, when I was warm, we'd barely heard of vampires. They weren't even worth not believing in. Angels or ghosts or the soul or a truly good man. we talked often about whether those existed. My father wrote A Counterblast to Agnosticism. He was one Protestant who took the "protest" part seriously. He had decided opinions on Irish beliefs. At a meeting of the Home Rule League, he told Parnell that Ireland would never be a nation until we stopped wittering on about the wee folk. He had no patience with the Celtic folklore with which some Nationalists dressed up the Cause. Before the Dracula Declaration, vampires seemed like fairies. Children's stories. The scholars who credited them, Calmet or Hesselius or Abronsius, were marginal crackpots. One thing which happened A.D. was a revival of all manner of nonsensical beliefs on the principle of "if there are vampires, then why could there not be..." boggarts or gorgons or the Easter Rabbit or two-headed llamas? That took a while to die out. There are modern equivalents of such foolishness, like flying saucers or the vanishing police box.'

If more people knew about the Mother of Tears, the epidemic of credulousness might take fire again. That was the least of the reasons why Kate hadn't written about the creature who secretly ruled Rome.

Scrawdyke tried to put up his hand, but several of the others stopped him.

'So you admit you can't understand what it was like for Caleb B.D.?'

DeBoys used Croft's Christian name. The name he had taken. Why Caleb? Was the former Charles Croydon sticking with his initials? Vampires often did that, so their names matched the initials on their luggage. Or else they went in for anagrams like 'Carmilla' or 'Alucard'. Croft might be working his way through Bible names. Caleb of the Tribe of Judah was one of the spies Moses sent into Canaan, who came back and said the land could be taken.

'Oh, I can understand,' she said. 'I can understand what it was like  -  what it is like  -  for a lot of people in a lot of situations. It's called empathy. A trait not often associated with vampires and virtually absent in elders.'

DeBoys grinned.

'...but it has its uses.'

'There were glories in the old days,' said DeBoys. 'When there was more of a nightly challenge... when we  -  vampires  -  weren't so common...'

The Black Monks would defend their Black Abbot, of course.

'I didn't expect to hear that at a university. Aren't children today into throwing off the dead weight of history? It's the time of the season, the age of Aquarius, the Now Generation, the Happening Thing. Aren't you with-it?'

'Mr DeBoys follows his own course,' said Croft. With pride, or resignation, or. something else?

'And we follow it with him,' said Withnail, smirking to show he saw the joke in that. 'Black Monks all, and hellfire to quaff...'

All the students snapped their fingers. A private joke. A prearranged response to a trigger phrase.

Scrawdyke snapped so hard he broke bones. He winced, gripping the finger while it healed.

Eastman, a hold-out against the joke, scowled. Kate decided she liked him.

Croft allowed himself an indulgent smile. She'd forgotten how disgusting that was.

'What are the Black Monks?' she asked.

DeBoys' fangs glinted. 'We are vampires among vampires,' he said.