Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories Read online

  Then the war ended, and suddenly there were no more Martian roles. In fact, suddenly there were no more Martians period. The allies did a pretty fair job of depopulating the old planet. Since then, we’ve been a dying race. We’re feeble, really. Every time the flu goes round, I have to go to funerals. There was a rash of anti-war movies. There always is after the zapping is over. Remember A Walk in the Dust or Terrestrial Invaders? I didn’t get work in those. All you ever saw of the Martian troops were bodies. There were plenty of newsreel scenes of big-eyed orphans waving their tentacles at the camera in front of the sludging ruins of their nests. Those movies didn’t do any business. The whole solar system was tired of war. They started making musicals. I can’t do what you people call dancing, so those were lean years. I did a bit of investing, and set up my own business. I thought I’d hit on the ideal combination. I opened a Martian bar and a kosher butcher’s shop back to back. The Jews got the meat, and the Marties got the drainings. It was a good idea, and we did okay until the riots. I lost everything then, and went back to acting.

  I did some dinner theatre. Small roles. I thought my best performance was as Dr Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest, but there weren’t many managements willing to cast me in spite, rather than because of my race. I tried to get the backing to put on Othello in modern dress with the Moor as a Martian, but no one was interested. When Stanley Kramer bought up Worlds Apart, the hot bestseller about the persecution of Martians on Earth, I put in a bid for the lead, but Stanley had to say no. By then, I was too associated with the stereotype Jimbo Martie. He said audiences wouldn’t take me seriously. Maybe he was right, but I’d have liked to take a shot at it. As you must know, Ptyehshdneh got the part and went on to be the first non-terrestrial to walk off with the Best Actor statuette on Oscar night. I’m not bitter, but I can’t help thinking that my career in the last twenty years would have been very different if Kramer had taken the chance. Ptyeh’ is such a pretty Martie, if you know what I mean. Not much slime on his hide.

  Of course, Willie K’ssth came back on television in the early fifties. They made twenty-six half-hour episodes with Tom Conway under the beak and me back as dumb Jimbo. The series is still in syndication on graveyard shift TV. I get fan mail from nostalgia-buff insomniacs and night watchmen all over the country. It’s nice to know people notice you. I saw one of those episodes recently. It was a piece of shit. But at the time it was a job, right? It didn’t last long, and I was more or less on the skids for a couple of years. I was on relief between guest spots. I’m in a classic Sergeant Bilko, where they’re trying to make a movie about the canal Bilko is supposed to have taken in the war. Doberman wins a Dream Date With a Movie Star in a contest and all the platoon try to get the ticket off him. Finally, Bilko gets the ticket and turns up at the Hollywood nightspot, and I turn out to be the Dream Date Star. Phil Silvers has a terrific talent, and it was nice just to be funny for a change. We worked out a good little routine with the drinks and the cocktail umbrellas. I’d like to have done more comedy, but when you’ve got tentacles producers don’t think you can milk a laugh. I popped out of a box on Laugh-In once.

  The sixties were rough, I guess. I had a little bit of a drink problem, but you must have heard about that. You’ve done your research, right? Well, skipping the messy parts of the story, I ended up in jail. It was only a couple of cows all told, but I exsanguinated them all right. No excuses. Inside, I got involved in the protest movement. I was in with lots of draft evaders. They gave me some LSD, and I wound up signing a lot of petitions and, outside, going on plenty of marches. Hell, everybody now thinks the War on Mercury was a waste of time, but the planet was gung-ho about it back then. Those little jelly-breathers never did anyone any harm, but you’d creamed one planet and got a taste for it. That’s what I think. I did a bit of organizational work for the Aliens’ League, and spoke on campuses. I was on President Kissinger’s enemies list. I’m still proud of that.

  I had a few film roles while all this was going on. Nothing spectacular, but I kept my face on the screen. I was the priest in The Miracle of Mare Nostrum, Elvis’s partner in the spear-fishing business in She Ain’t Human, and Doris Day’s old boyfriend in With Six You Get Eggroll. The films were mostly pieces of shit. I’m unbilled in a couple of Sinatra-Martin movies because I knocked around with the Rat Pack for a couple of summers before I got politics. I get a tentacle down Angie Dickinson’s décolleté in Ocean’s 11. I know you’re going to ask me about Orbit Jocks. I was just naive. Again, no excuses. When I shot my scenes, I thought it was a documentary. They had a whole fake script and everything. I took the job because of the trip to Mars. I’d never been before, and I wanted to discover my roots. I stood in front of landmarks reading out stuff about history. Then the producers spliced in all the hardcore stuff later. I don’t know if you’ve seen the film, but the Martian in all the sex scenes is not me. It’s hard to tell with a steel cowl, but he’s got all his tentacles.

  I’m not retired. I won’t retire until they plough me under. But I’m being more selective. I’ll take a picture if I can pal around with any of the other old-timers. don’t mind working on low-budget horror movies. It’s more like the old days. The big studios these days are just cranking out bland television crap. I was asked to be a guest villain on Columbo, but I turned it down and they got Robert Culp instead. I went to a science fiction film convention last year. Forrest J Ackerman interviewed me on stage. He’s a great guy. When I finally turn tentacles-up, I’m having it in my will that I be stuffed and put in his basement with the Creature from the Black Lagoon and all that other neat stuff. Lon would have gone for that too, but humans are prejudiced against auto-icons. It’s a pity. I hope Forry can make do with just Lon’s liver. It was the heart and soul of the man anyway.

  After this, I’ve got a three-picture deal with Al. That’s not as big a thing as it sounds, since he’ll shoot them simultaneously. Blood of the Brain Eaters, Jessi’s Girls and Martian Exorcist. Then, I might go to the Philippines and make this movie they want me to do with Nancy Kwan. Okay, so it’ll be a piece of shit…

  If I had it all over again, do you know what? I’d do everything different. For a start, I’d take dancing lessons.

  A DRUG ON THE MARKET

  HAD MY FIRST London enterprise met with a lesser success, Leo Dare would not have invited me to join the consortium; and had it met with a greater, I should not have accepted his invitation.

  However, response to the patent Galvanic Girdle, an electrical aid to weight reduction, merely shaded towards the positive end of indifference. After the craze for such sparking yet health-giving devices in my own native United States, this came as a disappointment. My British partners in the endeavour preferred to make known the virtues of the marvellous modern invention through public demonstration, with testimonials from newly slender ‘Yankee’ worthies, rather than incur the apparent expense of taking advertising space by the yard in the illustrated press. This was a sorry mistake: our initial penuriousness served to alienate the proprietors of those organs. The papers took to running news items about the nasty shocks suffered by galvanised ladies of a certain age through overuse or misapplication of our battery-belt. In brief, the Fourth Estate was set against us rather than in our corner. The grand adventure of ‘slenderness – through electrocution!’ – the slogan was my own contribution to the enterprise – was frankly sluggish and slowing to a halt. I foresaw a lengthy struggle towards profitability, with the prospect of a smash always a shadow to the promise of rich dividends. I was not looking to get out – the example of New York proved that the trick could be done, and the odd singed spinster would be easy to set aside with a proper advertising campaign – but when the third post of a Tuesday brought a card from Leo Dare, requesting my presence at the birth of a consortium, my interest was pricked.

  The public does not know his name, but Leo Dare is an Alexander of the marketplace, a hero and an example among the enterprising. Unlike many of his apparent peers, he
endows no museums or galleries, seeks no title or honour and erects no statues to himself. He is not caricatured in Punch, quoted in sermons or travestied in the works of lady novelists. He has simply made, risked, lost and regained fortunes beyond human understanding. In ’82, Leo Dare cornered quap – an unpleasantly textured, slightly luminescent West African mud which is the world’s major source of elements vital to the manufacture of filaments essential in the (then uninvented) incandescent lamp. Great quantities of the radioactive stuff sat in warehouse bins for years, as rivals joked that the sharp fellow had been blunted at last. A succession of night watchmen succumbed to mystery ailments, giving rise to legends of ‘the curse of the voodoo’ and of witch-doctors conjuring doom for those who stole ‘the sacred dirt’. Then, thanks to Mr Thomas Alva Edison, control of quap became very desirable indeed and Leo Dare, clearly the reverse of cursed, cashed out in style. In ’91, he introduced pneumatic bicycle tyres and obliterated overnight the market for solid rubber. Not only do pneumatic tyres offer a more pleasant, less guts-scrambling bicycling experience but they are prone to puncture and wearing-out, necessitating frequent purchase of replacements and creating an ancillary demand for repair equipment, patches and pumps – in all of which our Alexander naturally took an interest.

  The particular genius of Leo Dare, that quality which those ‘in the know’ aptly call ‘Dare-ing’, is not in discovery or invention – for canny minds are at his beck and call to handle those tasks – but in the conversion through enterprise of intellect into affluence. The old saw has it that ‘if you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door’. In these distracting times, the world has other things on its mind than keeping apace with the latest rodent-apprehension patents, and any major advance in the field has to be brought forcibly to its attention. Even then, Better Mouse Trap must compete with inferior snares that have an established following, or lobby successfully for a Royal Seal of Approval, or simply be blessed with a more ‘catching’ name. Better Mouse Trap, Ltd. will find itself in the care of the receivers if its finely manufactured products are placed in stores beside a less worthy effort retailing at 2d cheaper under the name of Best Mouse Trap. Leo Dare could make a fine old go of Better Mouse Trap, but if he had the rights to Worse Mouse Trap, he would represent it as Best Mouse Trap of All, emblazon the box with a two-coloured illustration of an evil-looking mouse surprised by a guillotine, undercut Best Mouse Trap by ½d and put both his competitors out of business within the year. Snap! Snap! Snap! That is Leo Dare.

  ‘This is Mr William Quinn,’ said Leo Dare, introducing me to the three gentlemen and one lady cosied in armchairs and on a sofa in a private room above a fashionable restaurant in Piccadilly. ‘As you can tell from the stripe of Billy’s suit, he’s one of our transatlantic cousins. A veritable wild Red Indian among us. He’ll be looking after our advertising.’

  From the looks on the faces of those assembled, I did not impress them overmuch. As a member of a comparatively newfangled profession, I was accustomed to glances of suspicion from those whose business forefathers had managed perfectly well in a slower, smaller world without stooping to plaster their names on the sides of London omnibuses. Come to that, they had managed quite well enough without omnibuses. Our host, who had no such delusions, spoke as if I was already aboard the consortium.

  It is a peculiarity of Leo Dare that he has no premises of his own. Concerns in which he takes a controlling interest might lease or purchase offices, factories, yards, warehouses, firms of carters and distributors, even railroad trains and cars. He himself resides in hotel suites and has, as the courts would say, no fixed address. It is his practice to engage rooms temporarily for specific purposes. This well-appointed salon, with waiters and attendants firmly shut outside, was the destined birthplace of our fresh venture.

  Leo Dare is one of those fellows you can’t help looking at, but would be hard put to describe. In middle years, trim, of average stature, clean-shaven, sly-eyed, impeccably dressed but not ostentatious, he has that sense of command one finds in the best, if least decorated, generals and statesmen. He alone was standing, back to a fireplace in which a genial blaze burned, one hand behind him, one holding a small glass of what I took to be port.

  ‘Quinn, meet the rest of the consortium,’ said Leo Dare. ‘This is Enid, Lady Knowe, the philanthropist. You’ll have heard of her many charitable activities, and of course be familiar with her family name. Her late father was Knowe’s Black Biscuits.’

  ‘“An Ounce of Charcoal is a Pound of Comfort”,’ I quoted.

  Lady Knowe, a thin-faced young woman dressed like an eighty-year-old widow, winced. I tumbled at once that she didn’t care to be reminded that the funds for her philanthropy came from a species of peaty-looking (and tasting) edible brick. Knowe’s Blacks were dreaded by children entrusted to nannies who believed (or maliciously pretended to believe) their consumption was good for their digestion.

  ‘Sir Marmaduke Collynge, the distinguished parliamentarian…’

  A beef-cheeked man in clothes too small for him, Sir Marmaduke seemed to be swelling all through our meeting, indeed all through our acquaintance, as if the room were far too hot for him and he had just enjoyed an enormous meal unaugmented by Knowe’s Black Biscuits. He grunted a cheery greeting.

  ‘Hugo Varrable, our research chemist…’

  A young fellow of about my age, with long hair, a horse face and stained hands, Dr Varrable sat with a leather satchel on his lap. The chemist prized his satchel, which was stuffed to bulging with what I assumed were formulae and vials of experimental compounds.

  ‘And Richard Enfield, administrator of the estate of the late lawyer, Gabriel Utterson.’

  A well-dressed gadabout, no longer young, Mr Enfield had the high colour of a man who has spent as little time in his rainy, foggy homeland as possible. He gave a noncommittal, very English wave.

  ‘Does the name “Utterson” mean anything to you, Quinn?’ Leo Dare asked.

  I confessed that it did not. Leo Dare seemed pleased.

  ‘What about the name of Jekyll? Dr Henry Jekyll?’

  ‘Or Hyde?’ suggested Varrable, glumly.

  Of course I knew the story. A few seasons back, even the New York papers were full of little else.

  ‘Dr Jekyll was the scientifical fellow who brewed the potion that turned him into another man entirely,’ I said. ‘The dreadful murderer, Edward Hyde.’

  ‘Capital. You did follow the story.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘But, Quinn, did you believe? Do you credit that a dried-out elderly stick might, by the consumption of a chemical elixir, be transmogrified into a thriving young buck? That he might undergo a radical metamorphosis of mind and body, shucking off the respectable front of Jekyll to indulge in the licentiousness of Hyde?’

  I laughed, a little nervously. My humour was not shared by anyone in the room.

  ‘Well, Quinn. Speak up.’

  ‘Mr Dare, I read the published accounts of the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I even saw the Mansfield company’s stage dramatisation in New York, with startling theatre trickery. Knowing something of the workings of the newspaper business, I have assumed the matter blown up out of all proportion. Surely, this Jekyll simply took a drug that unseated his wits and used disguise to live a double life. He cheated the gallows by suicide, I believe.’

  ‘They were two men,’ said Mr Enfield. ‘I knew them both.’

  ‘I bow to personal experience,’ I said, still not fathoming the import of all this.

  ‘Do you not see the opportunity created by our control of the Jekyll estate and by the notoriety of his case?’

  ‘You know that I do not. But I have a strong suspicion that you do. You, after all, are Leo Dare and I am someone else. It’s your business to see overlooked opportunities.’

  ‘Spoken like a true ad man, Quinn. Just the right tone of flattery and familiarity. You’ll fit in all right, I can avow to that.’

  I was
still no wiser.

  ‘How would you react if I were to tell you that we had, working from the fragmentary papers left behind by the late Dr Jekyll, reconstructed the formula of his potion? That our clever Dr Varrable has reproduced the impurity of salts that was the key, one might also say secret, ingredient of Jekyll’s elixir of transformation and is at present applying his talents to a system whereby we might compound that miraculous brew in bulk? That our consortium has sole license for the manufacture, distribution and sale of the “Jekyll Tonic”?’

  Quiet hung in the room. I was aware of the crackling of the fire.

  ‘Surely,’ I ventured, ‘Britain has a surfeit of murderers as it is? The Police Gazette is full of ’em.’

  Leo Dare looked a little disappointed. ‘The murderousness of Hyde did not emerge for some months, remember. Initially, the experiment was a remarkable success. Jekyll became a new man, a younger, fitter, more vital man. Can you not see the possibilities?’