Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories Read online

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ALSO BY KIM NEWMAN

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  FAMOUS MONSTERS

  A DRUG ON THE MARKET

  ILLIMITABLE DOMINION

  JUST LIKE EDDY

  AMERIKANSKI DEAD AT THE MOSCOW MORGUE

  THE CHILL CLUTCH OF THE UNSEEN

  ONE HIT WANDA

  IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?

  THE INTERVENTION

  RED JACKS WILD

  SARAH MINDS THE DOG

  THE SNOW SCULPTURES OF XANADU

  THE PALE SPIRIT PEOPLE

  ÜBERMENSCH!

  COASTAL CITY

  COMPLETIST HEAVEN

  UNE ÉTRANGE AVENTURE DE RICHARD BLAINE

  FRANKENSTEIN ON ICE

  YOKAI TOWN: ANNO DRACULA 1899

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  ALSO BY KIM NEWMAN AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  ANNO DRACULA

  ANNO DRACULA: THE BLOODY RED BARON

  ANNO DRACULA: DRACULA CHA CHA CHA

  ANNO DRACULA: JOHNNY ALUCARD

  ANNO DRACULA 1999: DAIKAIJU (FORTHCOMING 2017)

  ANGELS OF MUSIC

  THE SECRETS OF DREARCLIFF GRANGE SCHOOL

  AN ENGLISH GHOST STORY

  PROFESSOR MORIARTY: THE HOUND OF THE D’URBERVILLES

  JAGO

  THE QUORUM

  LIFE’S LOTTERY

  BAD DREAMS

  THE NIGHT MAYOR

  VIDEO DUNGEON (FORTHCOMING 2017)

  Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

  Print edition ISBN: 9781781165706

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781781165713

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: January 2017

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ‘Famous Monsters’. Originally published in Interzone, 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘A Drug on the Market’. Originally published in Dark Terrors 6, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘Illimitable Dominion’. Originally published in Poe, 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘Just Like Eddy’. Originally published in Interzone, 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue, Or: Children of Marx and Coca-Cola’. Originally published in 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘The Chill Clutch of the Unseen’. Originally published in Quietly Now: An Anthology in Tribute to Charles L. Grant, 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘One Hit Wanda’. Originally released in Thirteen, 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘Is There Anybody There?’ Originally published in The New English Library Book of Internet Stories, 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘The Intervention’. Originally published in Gathering the Bones, 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘Red Jacks Wild’. Originally published in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘Sarah Minds the Dog’. Originally published in Tales From Beyond the Pale, 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘The Snow Sculptures of Xanadu’. Originally published in Ego, 1991. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘The Pale Spirit People’. Originally published in Interzone, 1994. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘Übermensch!’ Originally published in New Worlds 1, 1991. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘Coastal City’. Originally published in The Time Out Book of New York Short Stories, 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘Completist Heaven’. Originally published in The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, 1994. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘Une étrange aventure de Richard Blaine’. Originally published in The Time Out Book of Paris Short Stories,1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ‘Frankenstein on Ice’. Originally performed in The Ghost Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, 2016.

  ‘Yokai Town: Anno Dracula 1899’. Original to this collection.

  Copyright © 2017 by Kim Newman. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  For Simret

  FAMOUS MONSTERS

  YOU KNOW, I wouldn’t be doing this picture if it wasn’t for Chaney Junior’s liver. They said it was a heart attack, but anyone who knew Lon knows better. Doing all these interviews with the old-timers, you must have heard the stories. They don’t tell the half of it. I didn’t get to work with Lon till well past his prime. Past my prime too, come to that. It was some Abbott and Costello piece of shit in the fifties. Already, he looked less human than I do. Wattles, gut, nose, the whole fright mask. And the stink. Hell, but he was a good old bastard. Him and me and Brod Crawford used to hit all the bars on the Strip Friday and Saturday nights. We used to scare up a commotion, I can tell you. I guess we were a disgrace. I quit all that after I got a tentacle shortened in a brawl with some hophead beatniks over on Hollywood Boulevard. I leaked ichor all over Arthur Kennedy’s star. That’s all gone now, anyway. There aren’t any bars left I can use. It’s not that they won’t serve me – the Second War of the Worlds was, like, twenty-five years ago now, and that’s all forgotten – but no one stocks the stuff any more. It’s easy enough to get. Abattoirs sell off their leavings for five cents a gallon. But this California heat makes it go rancid and rubbery inside a day.

  Anyway, just before Lon conked out – halfway through a bottle of Wild Turkey, natch – he signed up with Al to do this picture. It was called The Mutilation Machine back then. It’s Blood of the Cannibal Creature now. Al will change it. He always does. The footage with Scott Brady and the bike gang is from some dodo Al never got finished in the sixties. Something a-Go-Go, that’s it. Lousy title. Cycle Sadists a-Go-Go. It must be great being a film historian, huh? What with all this confusion and crapola. Do you know how they were paying Lon? Bottles. When Al wanted him to walk across a room in a scene, he’d have the assistant director hold up a bottle of hooch off-camera and shake it. Lon would careen across the set, knocking things and people over, and go for the booze, and Al would get his shot. I don’t suppose I’m all that much better off. One of the backers is a wholesale butcher, and he’s kicking in my fee in pig blood. I know you think that sounds disgusting, but d
on’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

  For a while, it looked like Lon would last out the picture. Al got the scene where he’s supposed to pull this kootch-kootch dancer’s guts out. He was playing Groton the Mad Zombie, by the way. So it’s not Chekhov. Al has already cut the scene together. Okay, so there’s some scratching on the neg. Al can fix it. He’s going to put on some more scratches, and make them look like sparks flying out of Lon. Groton is supposed to be electric. Or atomic. One or the other. The girl keeps laughing while Lon gets his mitts inside her sweater, but they can dub some screams in, and music and growling, and it’ll be okay. At least, it’ll be as okay as anything ever is in Al’s movies. Did you catch Five Bloody Graves? It was a piece of shit. After this, he wants to do a picture with Georgina Spelvin and the Ritz Brothers called The Fucking Stewardesses. You can bet he’ll change that title.

  But one scene is all there is of Lon. So, when he buys the farm Al calls me up. I don’t have an agent any more, although I used to be with the William Morris crowd. I do all my deals myself. I couldn’t do a worse job than some of the people in this business. I used to be handled by a guy called Dickie Nixon, a real sleazo scumbag. He was the one who landed me in Orbit Jocks, and screwed me out of my TV residuals. Anyway, I know Al. I worked for him once before, on Johnny Blood Rides Roughshod. That was the horror western that was supposed to put James Dean back on the top. What a joke. The fat freak kept falling off his horse. It turned out to be a piece of shit. Al and me worked something out on this one, and so here I am in Bronson Caverns again, playing Groton the Mad Zombie. They’ve rewritten the script so I can be Lon in all the early scenes. I know it sounds ridiculous, what with the shape and everything. But, hell, I can cram myself into a pair and a half of jeans and a double-size poncho. In the new script, my character is a Martian – I mean, I can’t play an Eskimo, can I? – but when John Carradine zaps me with the Mutilation Machine I turn into a human being. Well, into Groton the Mad Zombie. It’s the most challenging part that’s come my way in years, even if the film is going to be a total piece of shit. I’m hoping my performance will be a tribute to Lon. I’ve got the voice down. ‘George, lookit duh rabbits, George.’ Now I’m working on the walk. That’s difficult. You people walk all weird. No matter how long I hang around you, I still can’t figure out how you manage with just the two legs.

  I’m an American citizen, by the way. I was hatched in Los Angeles. Put it down to the Melting Pot. Mom flopped down in the twenties, when the Old World political situation started going to hell. She’d been through WWI and couldn’t face that again. It’s in the culture, I guess. When your head of government is called the High War Victor you know you’re in trouble. I’m not that way. I’m mellow. A typical native Californian, like my twenty-eight brood siblings. I’m the only one of us left now. The rest all died off or went back to the skies. I can’t let go. It’s showbiz, you know. It’s in the ichor. You must understand that if you do all these interviews. What do you call it, oral history? It’s important, I suppose. Someone should take all this down before we all die out. Did you get to Rathbone? There was a guy with some stories. I never got on with him though, despite all those pictures we did together. He lost some relatives in the First War of the Worlds, and never got around to accepting that not all non-terrestrials were vicious thugs.

  I suppose you’ll want to know how I got into the movies? Well, I’m that one in a million who started as an extra. It was in the late thirties, when I’d barely brushed the eggshell out of my slime. Four bucks a day just for hanging around cardboard nightclubs or walking up and down that street where the buildings are just frontages. In Swing Time, I’m in the background when Fred and Ginger do their ‘Pick Yourself Up’ routine. They were swell, although Rogers put my name down on some list of communist sympathisers in the fifties and I nearly had to go before HUAC. Do I look like a commie? Hell, how many other Americans can blush red, white and blue?

  I didn’t stay an extra long. I suppose I’m noticeable. There were very few of us in Hollywood, and so I started getting bit parts. Typically, I’d be a heavy in a saloon fight, or an underworld hanger-on. If you catch The Roaring Twenties on a re-run, look out for me during the massacre in the Italian restaurant. Cagney gets me in the back. It’s one of my best deaths. I’ve always been good at dying.

  My big break came when 20th Century-Fox did the Willie K’ssth films. Remember? Rathbone played Inspector Willie K’ssth of the Selenite Police Force. Willie K’ssth Takes Over, Willie K’ssth and the Co-Eds, Willie K’ssth On Broadway, and so on. There were more than twenty of them. I was Jimbo, Willie’s big, dumb Martian sidekick. I did all the comedy relief scenes – going into a tentacle-flapping fright in haunted houses, getting hit on the head and seeing animated stars in fight sequences. The films don’t play much now, because of the Selenite pressure groups. They hate the idea of a human actor in the role. And when Earl Derr Biggers was writing the books in the twenties, the Grand Lunar had them banned on the Moon. I don’t see what they were bothered about. Willie always spots the killer and comes out on top. He usually gets to make a bunch of human beings look ridiculous as well. In not one of the books or movies did Jimbo ever guess who the murderer was, even when it was blatantly obvious. And it usually was. For a while, I was typed as the dumb, scared Martie. Some of my siblings said I was projecting a negative image of the race, but there was a Depression on and I was the only one of the brood in regular work. I’ve got nothing against Selenites, by the way, although the Grand Lunar has always had a rotten Sapient Rights record. It’s no wonder so many of them headed for the Earth.

  After the New York Singe, I was quickly dropped from the series. We were halfway through Willie K’ssth On Coney Island when the studio quietly pulled my contract. They rewrote Jimbo as a black chauffeur called Wilbur Wolverhampton and got Stepin Fetchit to do the role. They still put out the film under its original title, even though there wasn’t a Coney Island any more. I’d have sued, but there was a wave of virulent anti-Martian feeling sweeping the country. That was understandable, I guess. I had relatives in New York, too. Suddenly, forty years of cultural exchange was out of the porthole and we were back to interspecial hatred. Nobody cared that Mom was a refugee from High War Victor Uszthay in the first place, and that since his purges most of her brood siblings were clogging up the canals. I was pulled out of my apartment by the Beverly Hills cops and roughed up in a basement. They really did use rubber hoses. I’ll never forget that. I ended up in an internment camp, and the studio annexed my earnings. The hate mail was really nasty. We were out in the desert, which wasn’t so bad. I guess we’re built for deserts. But at night people in hoods would come and have bonfires just outside the perimeter. They burned scarecrows made to look like Martians and chanted lots of blood and guts slogans. That was disturbing. And the guards were a bit free with the cattle prods. It was a shameful chapter in the planet’s history, but no one’s researched it properly yet. The last interview I did was with some Martian-American professor doing a thesis on Roosevelt’s treatment of so-called ‘enemy aliens’. He was practically a hatchling, and didn’t really understand what we had to go through. I bet his thesis will be a piece of shit. There were rumours about this camp in Nevada where the guards stood back and let a mob raze the place to the ground with the Marties still in it. And who knows what happened in Europe and Asia?

  Then the cylinders started falling, and the war effort got going. Uszthay must have been a bigger fool than we took him for. With Mars’s limited resources, he couldn’t possibly keep the attack going for more than six months. And Earth had cavorite, while he was still using nineteenth-century rocket cannons. Do you know how many cylinders just landed in the sea and sunk? So, Roosevelt got together with the world leaders in Iceland – Hitler, Stalin, Oswald Cabal – and they geared up for Earth’s counter-invasion. Finally, I got all the hassles with my citizenship sorted out, and the authorities reluctantly admitted I had as much right to be called an American as any other
second-generation immigrant. I had to carry a wad of documentation the size of a phone book, but I could walk the streets freely. Of course, if I did I was still likely to get stoned. I did most of my travelling in a curtained car. According to what was left of my contract, I owed 20th a couple of movies. I assumed they’d pay me off and I’d wind up in an armaments factory, but no, as soon as I was on the lot I was handed a stack of scripts. Suddenly, everyone was making war pictures.

  The first was Mars Force, which I did for Howard Hawks. I was loaned to Warners for that. It was supposed to be a true story. I don’t know if you remember, but the week after the Singe a handful of foolhardy volunteers climbed into their Cavor Balls and buzzed the red planet. They didn’t do much damage, but it was Earth’s first retaliative strike. In the movie, they were after the factories where the elements for the heat rays were being synthesised. In real life, they just flattened a couple of retirement nests and got rayed down. In Mars Force, I played the tyrannical Security Victor at the factories. I spent most of the film gloating over a crystalscope, looking at stock footage of the smoking plains where New York used to be. I also got to drool over a skinny terrestrial missionary, snivel in fear as the brave Earthmen flew over in their Christmas tree ornaments and be machine-gunned to death by John Garfield. It was typical propaganda shit, but it was a pretty good picture. It stands up a lot better than most of the other things I did back then.

  I was typecast for the rest of the war. I’ve raped more nurses than any actor alive – although what I was supposed to see in you sandpaper-skinned bipeds is beyond me. And I did a lot of plotting, scheming, saluting, backstabbing, bombing, blasting, cackling, betraying, sneering and strutting. I saw more action than Patton and Rommel put together, and without ever stepping off the backlots. The furthest I ever went for a battle was Griffith Park. I had a whole set of shiny, slimy uniforms. I played every rank we had going. In Heat Ray! I even got to play Uszthay, although that’s like asking Mickey Mouse to play John the Baptist. I soon lost count of the number of times I had to swear to crush the puny planet Earth in my lesser tentacles. I got killed a lot. I was shot by Errol Flynn in Desperate Journey, bombed by Spencer Tracy in Thirty Seconds Over Krba-Gnsk, and John Wayne got me in Soaring Tigers, The Sands of Grlshnk and The Fighting Seabees. In Lunaria, Bogart plugs me as I reach for the crystalphone on the launchfield. Remember that one? Everyone says it’s a classic. It got the Academy Award that year. Claude Rains asks Bogart why he came to Lunaria, and Bogart says he came for the atmosphere. ‘But there’s no atmosphere on the Moon,’ says Rains. ‘I was misinformed.’ I wanted the role of the freedom fighter who floats off to Earth with Ingrid Bergman at the end, but Jack Warner chickened out of depicting a sympathetic Martie and they made the character into a Selenite. Paul Henreid could never keep his antennae straight. I had to make do with being another Inferior War Victor. No one believed there were any anti-Uszthay Martians. That’s typical Earthbound thinking.