Mina breezed through the interview panel for Lucy's job, so the farewell party was a double celebration. It got so wild by midnight that some jumped-up office-boy from Procurement blurted out the office rumor which held that Mina and Lucy were lesbian lovers. Far from feeling appalled or insulted, Mina was delighted that she should be thought so versatile, so desirable and so interesting. She told Szandor about it when he visited her on the following Sunday-Sundays having now become their regular date-but he didn't laugh. It wasn't that vampires didn't have a sense of humor, just that they found different things amusing.
'Anyway,' Mina said, 'the promotion will mean a hike in salary, so I'll be able to buy a house. You could move in if you wanted to-it might be more convenient.'
He laughed at that. 'Sank you very much,' he said, 'but it vouldn't be right.'
'Where do you live now?' she asked, for the first time. 'Do you have a job of your own-night security or something.'
Szandor's gaze, though still fond, became troubled. 'I cannot tell you vere I liff,' he said. 'As for jops, ve liff as ve liffed in the old country, as communists-real communists, not those Soffiet bastards. Effer since.…' He broke off.
'Ever since what?' Mina prompted, assuming he was thinking about something that had happened after the collapse of communism, in Bosnia or Chechnya or wherever he had recently come from.
'Effer since the Stone Age,' he said. 'Ven you began to vork in bronze…ve vere neffer a part of that. The vorld of vork, of jops…is not ours.'
Mina realized then how little she actually knew about the vampire way of life, and how they occupied themselves when they were not feeding. She realized, too, how wide the gulf between the two human species must be, if all of history since the end of the Stone Age had been sap history, never recognizing, let alone involving the ultras, except as myth and shadow, mystery and threat. And yet, the ultras lived in a world that saps had remade, an ecosphere that saps had spoiled, on the edges of a global civilization organized and driven by sap machines and money.
Mina nearly asked Szandor what the communist vampires did for money, but realized that she didn't have to. They obtained their money as they obtained their blood, from their sapient groupies-not, evidently, in weekly handouts, but at intervals nevertheless adequate to their peculiar needs. In all probability, they were content to wait until their victims were used up; who else, after all, but her one and only dependent was a groupie likely to appoint as her heir?
Vampires could afford to be patient, and had certainly had abundant opportunity to acquire the habit.
How many victims, Mina wondered, had Szandor had before her? Far more, she guessed, than she had had hot dinners of her own…that being, at the end of the day, exactly what she was. It wouldn't be right for him to move in with her, she realized, for exactly the same reasons that it wouldn't be right for her to move into a battery cage or a veal crate. She was no longer the fat cow she had been in spring, but she would be a cow for as long as she might live.
After that reverie there was only one question that she needed to ask.
'Szandor,' she said, 'do you love me? Do you really love me?'
The ultra paused in his appreciation of the wonderfully appetizing blood that he was sucking from her breast to say: 'Yes, my darlink. I loff you ferry much.'
Mina knew that it was true. He loved her, not as a boy-child is obliged to love the mother at whose teat he sucks, nor as a farmer is obliged to love his prize cattle, nor as saps were obliged by their carefully selected hormones to love one another, but freely. He loved her in his own unique way, as only a vampire could love a member of his sister species, who provided the substance of his life in a single miraculous red stream.
When her lover had gone, after kissing her hand as any over-polite European might have done in saying
au revoir, Mina went to the full-length mirror that she had bought only the previous day, and stood naked before it to make a critical study of the skin that sagged loosely about her ten stone two pound frame.
There was still a way to go, but she was getting there.
The skin would tighten up in time; even at thirty-three she still had enough adaptability to continue tightening its grip on her compacted flesh.
She would never reach perfection, but every day, in every way, she was getting better and better-and how many hard-working saps could honestly say that…except for all the others who were secretly in bed with the real reds?
All in all, she told herself, more in self-congratulation than in a spirit of self-discipline, it's quite impossible to see a downside.
Much at Stake by Kevin J. Anderson
Bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson has written nearly 100 novels, many of them co-written with Doug Beason, with his wife Rebecca Moesta, or with Brian Herbert, with whom he continues Frank Herbert's Dune saga. His most recent original projects are the Saga of Seven Suns series, which concluded with last year's The Ashes of Worlds, and his nautical fantasy epic Terra Incognita, the first of which, The Edge of the World, came out in June. A Batman/Superman tie-in novel was also released earlier this year, and a new Dune novel, The Winds of Dune, is due in August.
Anderson says that one of the appeals of vampire fiction is that the mythos has grown so rich and varied over the past century or so, it gives writers plenty of room to operate with their imaginations. 'My story takes place on the periphery of actual vampire fiction…more a story about vampires than a story with vampires,' he said.
'Much at Stake' is a different sort of Dracula story; its protagonist is famed actor Bela Lugosi, the star of the original 1931 Dracula film, and explores some of his personal background as well as the history behind vampire legends.
Bela Lugosi stepped off the movie set, listening to his shoes thump on the papier-mache flagstones of Castle Dracula. He swept his cape behind him, practicing the liquid, spectral movement that always evoked shrieks from his live audiences.
The film's director, Tod Browning, had called an end to shooting for the day after yet another bitter argument with Karl Freund, the cinematographer. The egos of both director and cameraman made for frequent clashes during the intense seven weeks that Universal had allotted for the filming of
Dracula. They seemed to forget that Lugosi was the star, and he could bring fear to the screen no matter what camera angles Karl Freund used.
With all the klieg lights shut down, the enormous set for Castle Dracula loomed dark and imposing. Universal Studios had never been known for its lavish productions, but they had outdone themselves here. Propmen had found exotic old furniture around Hollywood, and masons built a spooky fireplace big enough for a man to stand in. One of the most creative technicians had spun an eighteen-foot rubber-cement spiderweb from a rotary gun. It now dangled like a net in the dim light of the closed-down set.
On aching legs, Lugosi walked toward his private dressing room. He never spoke much to the others, not his costars, not the director, not the technicians. He had too much difficulty with his English to enjoy chitchat, and he had too many troubling thoughts on his mind to seek out company.
Even during his years of portraying Dracula in the stage play, he had never socialized with the others. Perhaps they were afraid of him, seeing what a frightening monster he could become in his role. After 261 sell-out performances on Broadway, then years on the road with the show, he had sequestered himself each time, maintaining the intensity he had built up as Dracula, the Prince of Evil, drawing on the pain in his own life, the fear he had seen with his own eyes. He projected that fear to the audiences. The men would shiver; the women would cry out and faint, and then write him thrilling and suggestive letters. Lugosi embodied fear and danger for them, and he reveled in it. Now he would do the same on the big screen.
He closed the door of the dressing room. All of the others would be going home, or to the studio cafeteria, or to a bar. Only Dwight Frye remained late some nights, practicing his Renfield insanity. Lugosi thought about going home himself, where his third wife would be waiting for him, but the pain in his legs felt like rusty nails, twisting beneath his kneecaps, reminding him of the old injury. The one that had taught him fear.
He sat down on the folding wooden chair-Universal provided nothing better for the actors, not even for the film's star-but Lugosi turned from the mirror and the lights. Somehow, he couldn't bear to look at himself every time he did this.
He reached to the back of his personal makeup drawer, fumbling with clumsy fingers until he found the secret hypodermic needle and his vial of morphine taped out of sight.
The filming of
Dracula had been long and hard, and he had needed the drug nearly every night. He would have to acquire more soon.
Outside on the set, echoing through the thin walls of his dressing room, Lugosi could hear Dwight Frye practicing his Renfield cackle. Frye thought his portrayal of the madman would make him a star in front of the American audiences.
But though they screamed and shivered, none of them understood anything about fear. Lugosi had found that he could mumble his lines, wiggle his fingers, and leer once or twice, and the audiences still trembled. They enjoyed it. It was so easy to frighten them.
Before Universal decided to film
Dracula, the script readers had been very negative, crying that the censors would never pass the movie, that it was too frightening, too horrifying. 'This story certainly passes beyond the point of what the average person can stand or cares to stand,' one had written.
As if they knew anything about fear! He stared at the needle, sharp and silver, with a flare of yellow reflected from the makeup lights-and Van Helsing thought a wooden stake would be Lugosi's bane! He filled the syringe with morphine. His legs tingled, trembled, aching for the relief the drug would give him. It always did, like Count Dracula consuming fresh blood.
Lugosi pushed the needle into his skin, finding the artery, homing in on the silver point of pain… and release. He closed his eyes….
In the darkness behind his thoughts, he saw himself as a young lieutenant in the 43rd Royal Hungarian Infantry, fighting in the trenches in the Carpathian Mountains during the Great War. Lugosi had been a young man, frightened, hiding from the bullets but risking his life for his homeland-he had called himself Bela Blasko then, from the Hungarian town of Lugos.
The bullets sang around him in the air, mixed with the explosions, the screams. The air smelled thick with blood and sweat and terror. The mountain peaks, backlit at night by orange explosions, looked like the castle spires of some ancient Hungarian fortress, more frightening by far than the crumbling stones and cobwebs the set builders had erected on the studio lot.
Then the enemy bullets had crashed into his thigh, his knee, shattering bone, sending blood spraying into the darkness. He had screamed and fallen, thinking himself dead. The enemy soldiers approached, ready to kill him… but one of his comrades had dragged him away during the retreat.
