BLOODY PIT OF HORROR

She thought she should look for Kate. There was nothing here for her at the party.

Genevieve was momentarily distracted by Orson Welles. He was so enormous. His cravat would have served most people as a cloth for an occasional table. He produced objects from every pocket of every jacket. Birds, mice, drinks, coins.

Didn't anyone here ever get tired of all this? She knew one person did. Him. Prince Dracula. He wasn't here yet. But he was on his way. That changed the feel of the party. Kate's scuffle with Princess Asa had helped the chill along. It showed how uncertain everything was.

What would Dracula do when he got here?

He was capable of having the doors locked and burning the palace down, holding out to the last so he could follow his guests to Hell. Or he could be a gracious host and send everyone away with a Renaissance masterpiece as a party favour.

She remembered the last time. In 1888, when she'd stood beside Charles at the foot of a throne in the sty Dracula had made of Buckingham Palace, surrounded by monsters and victims.

The Prince had taken a few knocks since then.

Genevieve looked around. Apart from Welles, she'd lost sight of them all: Kate, Penelope, Asa, Bond, Kate's journalist escort, Penelope's Tom. All she saw were the famous dress extras.

The music changed. A march played, something pompous and magnificent. Great curtains parted. Attendants held them aside like nurses keeping open a giant's chest cavity during heart surgery. A pair of empty thrones stood on a dais. Genevieve recognised one as having been stolen from Buckingham Palace. It was Victoria's, with the arms of Vajda tacked over the lion and the unicorn. The other, taller chair was something stark and mediaeval, a cathedral-shaped gothic throne from the reign of the Impaler.

Columns of blue fire rose, threatening the curtains. Trumpets lifted, and sounded a fanfare.

'He's coming up from his tomb,' Welles said. 'What an effect. It's like Ivan the Terrible meets the Wizard of Oz.'

'He's a whiz of a wiz all right,' she said.

The blue flames twisted like barber's poles, and puffed into the shape of dragon wings.

'That's the effect I wanted for my Caesar.'

Warm monarchs liked towers, the undead favoured lairs. A living king might descend to be among his subjects, but the King Vampire must come up from underground.

A funnel of cold grave air shivered the fire dragons and billowed the curtains. A section of floor slid open and a couple of minor guests fell into the abyss.

Princess Asa, veiled now, strode to the edge of the pit and knelt, touching the floor with her forehead. She was intent on cancelling out the presumption she had shown in taking the name of Dracula in vain.

'They say this will be their first meeting,' Welles commented. 'Tonight, Dracula will look on the face of his bride. Old-fashioned, isn't it?'

Genevieve wasn't surprised. This was a dynastic match.

There was a rumble in the depths of the palace, and a clanking of vast iron chains. A platform was being hauled up by the bodily effort of dozens of servants. A flutter of the curtain gave her a glimpse of sweating, shirtless bodies and huge black chain-links.

From out of the depths rose a head.

She recognised Dracula: thick scarlet lips, rope-like twists of moustache and eyebrow, jet black fall of oiled hair, aquiline nose, nostrils like flared tunnels, hatchet cheekbones, protruding fangs like sharp thumbs. And red eyes, swimming in blood. There was more blood around his mouth. The Prince's face was a stiff mask.

The platform clicked into place.

Dracula's head surmounted a black, all-enveloping cloak which rose from a circle on the floor and completely concealed his frame. He was much thinner than she remembered, a round-shouldered scarecrow.

The fanfare concluded. The blue flames settled into their jets and burned orange. Applause began and swelled to hysterical clapping. Women sighed and prostrated themselves, captivated by Dracula's musk. Men looked with hatred, envy, arousal and love. Vampire elders went down on their knees. Genevieve hotly refused to bow to this monster. He was not her king, her commander.

He was just an elder, one of many.

'My God,' breathed Welles, 'I never dreamed. Such presence, such power. He is a dark god, a prince of hell, an avatar of the apocalypse.'

She couldn't see it, but was alone in that.

Welles huffed as he sank to his knees, an elephant doing a trick. No one save her dared look into the monster's face. She saw something was wrong.

Had Dracula gone blind? His eyes were red marbles.

The last echoes of the fanfare died. Applause petered out. A sobbing woman got control of herself. Silence. Someone coughed. Il principe said nothing. His head hung there. A trickle of blood ran from one exposed fang, along a feeler of moustache, dripped onto the cloak, and slid down a fold.

Princess Asa looked up and cast back her veil, exposing her face. Dracula paid her no attention.

'My prince...' she said.

Genevieve stepped forward, dreading the pull that would come when she entered Dracula's zone of power, the clash she'd feel as his mind tried to enfold and dominate hers. But there was nothing.

She walked across the room, through the frozen crowd.

A whisper began. Was this a wax statue?

She stepped over the Princess, who was struggling with incomprehension. She looked up into Dracula's face. It might as well have been a Halloween pumpkin, with a carved grin. The candle inside guttered, and the eyes jerked to focus on her, in a spasm.

Genevieve reached out and took a fold of Dracula's cape. She whipped it away and cast it across the room. The voluminous garment fell in a heap, exposed swathes of scarlet lining like slashes in the hide of a brave bull at the end of the corrida.

Someone  -  the Princess?  -  screamed.

Dracula's head was stuck on a wooden pole. It had been raggedly sawn off.

...minutes later, she was running down a passageway. Plastered walls gave way to rough stone. Attendants ran with her, the flames of their torches trailing the low roof.

A steward  -  Klove  -  was guiding her to Dracula's lair.

After all, there was more to his body than his head.

The Princess was in shock, demanding that the murderers be put to the sword. The Carpathian Guard had sealed off the palazzo. Half the catering staff turned out to be policemen. Inspector Silvestri kept pace with her. He was the detective in charge of the Crimson Executioner case.

The name had been spoken first in a whisper. Now, it was being yelled from the battlements.

The Crimson Executioner! If this was his work, then it was the most daring coup of all time. Not even Abraham Van Helsing had been able to carry off the head of Vlad Tepes. Prince Dracula had died before, of course  -  even, she was sure, had been beheaded  -  but this was true death.

That roll of the eyes, a final focusing on her, was the last of his tenacious spirit, fleeing the flesh, disappearing into the wherever. Any other elder of his age would have turned to dust, but Dracula's great will staved off bodily dissolution.

There were offers already to buy the head. The Inspector had left it in the care of Edgar Poe. Famous quacks  -  Drs Hichcock, Schuler, and Genessier  -  were promoting their services for the autopsy. Ze do Caix?o had already tried to get close to Princess Asa and put in a bid for the funeral.

Orson Welles was with them, keeping up astonishingly for someone of his bulk. He'd been caught by the Ariadne thread of story, and was following it to the end.

Cobweb curtains parted and the small party entered a tomb.

The body lay half-out of a magnificent catafalque, still leaking profusely at the neck-stump. Dracula had been wearing a suit of midnight black. A red flower was pinned to his chest with a silver sticker.

The painted ceiling and walls of the tomb, which might date back to Ancient Rome, were redecorated with modern-art splatters of rich blood. The Prince had drunk an ocean of blood in his undeath. It all poured forth now in a ghastly torrent. The place stank of the death of Dracula. It was indescribably foul.

Her attention was drawn by the silver knife in il principe's heart. It was a familiar object, one she had supposed long lost. The silver scalpel of Jack the Ripper. Charles Beauregard had smuggled it into Buckingham Palace, to free Queen Victoria of her bondage. Now it had been used to end another royal vampire's life. The red flower was a frozen clot of Dracula's heartsblood.

'Someone is here still,' Silvestri said.

Genevieve heard whimpering, sensed movement. She looked at Welles's grey face floating in the gloom. Klove drew a curtain aside. Cold air flowed into the tomb.

An exhausted woman tumbled out, covered from head to foot in blood. Kate's round glasses were thickly painted red, her hair was matted with gore.

PART FOUR

FUNERAL RITES

NOTICE OF DEATH FROM THE TIMES OF LONDON. AUGUST 9TH, 1959

The true death is announced of Count Dracula, formerly Prince of Wallachia, Voivode of Transylvania and Prince Consort of Great Britain. Born in 1431, turned vampire in 1476, Dracula was in warm life a ruler of his homeland and defender of Christianity against the Turk. As an elder vampire, Dracula was a central figure of the modern age. By marrying Queen Victoria in 1886 and disseminating his bloodline in Britain, he established himself not only as a statesman and world leader but as father-in-darkness to fresh generations of vampire breeds. Before Dracula, vampires were covert creatures, considered by most sources to be legendary spirits. His presence in London made public the existence of the nosferatu.

Though he was driven from the throne of Britain in 1897 and fell from power in Germany with the defeat of the Kaiser in 1918, Dracula survived the eddying tides of this turbulent century for far longer than most of his critics would have believed possible. Having signed the Croglin Grange Treaty with the Allied powers in 1943, he rallied an underground of elder and newborn vampires in South Eastern Europe to assist the invasions of Greece and the Carpathian Nations. Without his influence, victory in the Second World War might have been a far costlier and more protracted affair. Since the War, Dracula has lived in modest retirement near Rome, though the recent announcement of his engagement to Princess Asa Vajda fuelled speculation that a return to the stage of international politics was imminent. Tributes have poured in from surviving wartime Allied leaders: Lord Ruthven, President Eisenhower, Marshal Zhukov, and General de Gaulle. Alone among his peers, Winston Churchill has refused to pay homage in death to the King Vampire.

It has become a commonplace in recent years for the new-born vampires of the 1880s and '90s, bewildered by the rapid changes of the atomic age, to express nostalgia for the certainties and values of Dracula's comparatively brief reign in England. The accepted image of Dracula as a tyrannic monster was enshrined by Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and the concluding chapter of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918). This traditional portrait is qualified in revisionary, sympathetic biographies like Montagu Summers's Dracula: His Kith and Kin (1928) and Colin Wilson's The Impaler (1957), though the old view is reinforced with conviction by Alan Clark's The Monsters (1958) and Asa Briggs's The Age of Impalement: 1885 - 1918 (1959). Daniel Farson's controversial Vlad the Imposter (1959) advances the theory that the vampire Count Dracula was not the former Vlad Tepes, but an as-yet unidentified Transylvanian who assumed the name and title. Farson lists many discrepancies between Dracula's accounts of himself and what can be established of Vlad but, with his passing, it is unlikely this question will ever be resolved. In death as in life, the Prince took pains to maintain his air of mystery.

In Rome, a suspect is in custody in connection with the murder but no announcement has been made of an arrest or charges. Police Chief Francesco Polito has declared all effort will be made to bring the murderer to justice. It is speculated that the destruction of the most famous of all elders is the latest in a series of atrocities carried out by a vampire slayer who goes colourfully by the name of the Crimson Executioner. Garlands of traditional black flowers have been sent by well-wishers to Buckingham Palace, where they pose an embarrassment for a Royal Household which would perhaps prefer not to be reminded that Dracula was once Prince Consort. The disposal of the estates and fortunes has yet to be decided; it appears that, after defying death for five hundred years, the Count died intestate. The corpse is in the custody of the Rome police, but pressure is growing in demand for release and burial. Nicolae Ceau?escu, President of Romania, has refused permission for reinterral of the remains in their original grave on the island monastery of Snagov, and Lord Ruthven, the Prime Minister, has ruled that a space in Westminster Abbey is 'Sadly, out of the question'.

See also (in our weekend-special edition):

*DRACULA, AS I REMEMBER HIM, by the Prime Minister, Lord Ruthven

*THE END OF AN ERA: THE PASSING OF THE FIRST AMONG VAMPIRES, by Dennis Wheatley

*UNSOLVED CRIMES: THE FIVE HUNDRED YEAR CAREER OF VLAD TEPES, by Catriona Kaye

*DRACULA: STATESMAN, GENERAL, HERO, by Enoch Powell

*IS DRACULA REALLY DEAD?, by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

*...AND GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD RUBBISH!, by John Osborne.