Princess Leia was evidently a practised dhampire. She snorted through a tubed $100 bill and held her head back. Her eyes reddened and her teeth grew points.

'Arm wrestle?' she asked.

Penny wasn't interested. Dhampires all had this rush of vampire power but no real idea of what to do with it. Except nibble. They didn't even feed properly.

Most of the people at this party were drac addicts. They went for the whole bit, black capes and fingerless black widow web gloves, Victorian cameos at the throat, lots of velvet and leather, puffy mini-dresses over thigh-boots.

Half this lot had dracced themselves up completely for a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Waverly, and were just coming down, which meant they were going around the room pestering anyone they thought might be holding out on a stash, desperate to get back up there. There was a miasma of free-floating paranoia, which Penny couldn't keep out of her head.

'Wait 'til this gets to the Coast,' said Princess Leia. 'It'll be monstrous.'

Penny had to agree.

She had lost Andy and Johnny at CBGBs and fallen in with this crowd. The penthouse apartment apparently belonged to some political bigwig she had never heard of, Hal Philip Walker, but he was out of town. Brooke Hayward was staying here with Dennis Hopper. Penny had the idea that Johnny knew Hopper from some foreign debauch, and wanted to avoid him - which, if true, was unusual.

She was welcome here, she realised, because she was a vampire.

It hit her that if the drac ran out, there was a direct source in the room. She was stronger than any warm person, but it was a long time since she had fought anyone. The sheer press of dhampires would tell. They could hold her down and cut her open, then suck her dry, leaving her like crushed orange pulp. For the first time since turning, she understood the fear the warm had of her kind. Johnny had changed things permanently.

Princess Leia, fanged and clawed, eyed her neck slyly, and reached out to touch her.

'Excuse me,' said Penny, slipping away.

Voices burbled in her mind. She was on a wavelength with all these dhampires, who didn't know how to communicate. It was just background chatter, amplified to skull-cracking levels.

In the bedroom where she had left her coat, a Playmate of the Month and some rock n' roll guy were messily performing dhampire sixty-nine, gulping from wounds in each other's wrists. Penny had fed earlier and the blood did nothing for her.

A Broadway director tried to talk to her.

Yes, she had seen Pacific Overtures. No, she didn't want to invest in Sweeney Todd.

Where had anybody got the idea that she was rich?

That fat Albanian from Animal House, fangs like sharpened cashew nuts, claimed newfound vampire skills had helped him solve Rubik's cube. He wore a black Inverness cape over baggy Y-fronts. His eyes flashed red and gold like a cat's in headlights.

Penny had a headache.

She took the elevator down to the street.

15.

While looking for a cab, she was accosted by some dreadful drac hag. It was the girl Johnny called Nocturna, now a snowy-haired fright with yellow eyes and rotten teeth.

The creature pressed money on her, a crumpled mess of notes.

'Just a suck, precious,' she begged.

Penny was sickened.

The money fell from the dhampire's hands, and was swept into the gutter.

'I think you'd better go home, dear,' advised Penny.

'Just a suck.'

Nocturna laid a hand on her shoulder, surprisingly strong. She retained some nosferatu attributes.

'Johnny still loves me,' she said, 'but he has business to take care of. He can't fit me in, you see. But I need a suck, just a little kiss, nothing serious.'

Penny took Nocturna's wrist but couldn't break the hold.

The dhampire's eyes were yolk yellow, with shots of blood. Her breath was foul. Her clothes, once fashionable, were ragged and gamey.

Penny glanced up and down the street. She could use a cop, or Spider-Man. People were passing, but in the distance. No one noticed this little scene.

Nocturna brought out something from her reticule. A Stanley knife. Penny felt a cold chill as the blade touched her cheek, then a venomous sting. The tool was silvered. She gasped in pain, and the dhampire stuck her mouth over the cut.

Penny struggled, but the dhampire was suddenly strong, juiced up by pure drac. She would make more cuts and take more sucks.

'You're his friend,' Nocturna said, lips red. 'He won't mind. I'm not being unfaithful.'

Penny supposed she deserved this.

But, as the red rush dazed Nocturna, Penny broke free of the dhampire. She dabbed her cheek. Because of the silver, the cut would stay open, perhaps even leave a scar. This one would be where it showed.

There were people nearby, watching. Penny saw their red eyes. More dhampires, out for drac, out for her blood. She backed towards the lobby, cursing Johnny Pop.

Nocturna staggered after her.

A taxi cab stormed down the street, scattering dhampires. Penny stuck out her hand and flagged it down. Nocturna howled, and flew at her. Penny wrenched open the cab door and threw herself in. She told the driver to drive off, anywhere, fast.

Nocturna and the others hissed at the window, nails scratching the glass.

The cab sped up and left them behind.

Penny was resolved. Penance was one thing, but enough was enough. She would get out of this city. The Factory could run itself. She would leave Andy to Johnny, and hope they were satisfied with each other.

'Someday a red rain's gonna come,' said the taxi driver. 'And wash the scum off the streets.'

She wished she could agree with him.

16.

Johnny was one of the privileged few allowed into Andy's town house to witness the artist's levee. At high summer, it was impractical to wait for sundown before venturing out - so Johnny had to be ferried the short distance from the Bramford to East 66th Street in a sleek limo with tinted windows and hustle under a parasol up to the door of Number 57.

With the Churchward woman's desertion, there was a blip in the smooth running of Andy's social life and he was casting around for a replacement Girl of the Year. Johnny was wary of being impressed into taking on too many of Penny Penitent's duties. There were already so many demands on his time, especially with that mad Bella Abzug whipping the NYPD into a frenzy about 'the drac problem'. It wasn't even illegal yet, but his dealers were rousted every night. His pay-offs to the families and the cops ratcheted up every week, which pushed him to raise the price of a suck, which meant the dhamps had to peddle more ass or bust more head to scrape together cash for their habit. The papers were full of vampire murders, and real vampires weren't even suspects.

The two-storey lobby of Number 57 was dominated by imperial busts - Napoleon, Caesar, Dracula - and still-packed crates of sculptures and paintings. Things were everywhere, collected but uncatalogued, most still in the original wrapping.

Johnny sat on an upholstered chaise longue and leafed through a male pornographic magazine that was on top of a pile of periodicals that stretched from The New York Review of Books to The Fantastic Four. He heard Andy moving about upstairs and glanced at the top of the wide staircase. Andy made an entrance, a skull-faced spook-mask atop a floor-length red velvet dressing gown which dragged like Scarlett O'Hara's train as he descended.

In this small, private moment - with no one else around to see - Andy allowed himself to smile, a terminally ill little boy indulging his love of dressing-up. It wasn't just that Andy was a poseur, but that he let everyone know it and still found the reality in the fakery, making the posing the point. When Andy pretended, he just showed up the half-hearted way everyone else did the same thing. In the months he had been in New York, Johnny had learned that being an American was just like being a vampire, to feed off the dead and to go on and on and on, making a virtue of unoriginality, waxing a corpse-face to beauty. In a country of surfaces, no one cared about the rot that lay beneath the smile, the shine and the dollar. After the persecutions of Europe, it was an enormous relief.

Andy extended a long-nailed hand towards an occasional table by the chaise longue. It was heaped with the night's invitations, more parties and openings and galas than even Andy could hit before dawn.

'Choose,' he said.

Johnny took a handful of cards, and summarised them for Andy's approval or rejection. Shakespeare in the Park, Paul Toombes in Timon of Athens ('gee, misa-anthropy'). A charity ball for some new wasting disease ('gee, sa-ad'). An Anders Wolleck exhibit of metal sculptures ('gee, fa-abulous'). A premiere for the latest Steven Spielberg film, 1941 ('gee, wo-onderful'). A screening at Max's Kansas City of a work in progress by Scott and Beth B, starring Lydia Lunch and Teenage Jesus ('gee, u-underground'). A nightclub act by Divine ('gee, na-aughty'). Parties by and for John Lennon, Tony Perkins ('ugh, Psycho'), Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine, Jonathan and Jennifer Hart ('ick!'), Blondie ('the cartoon character or the band?'), Malcolm McLaren ('be-est not'), David Johansen, Edgar Allan Poe ('ne-evermore'), Frank Sinatra ('Old Hat Rat Pack Hack!').

The night had some possibilities.

17.

Andy was in a sulk. Truman Capote, lisping through silly fangs, had spitefully told him about an Alexander Cockburn parody, modelled on the lunch chatter of Warhol and Colacello with Imelda Marcos as transcribed in Inter/VIEW. Andy, of course, had to sit down in the middle of the party and pore through the piece. In Cockburn's version, Bob and Andy took Count Dracula to supper at Mortimer's Restaurant on the Upper East Side and prodded him with questions like 'Don't you wish you'd been able to spend Christmas in Transylvania?' and 'Is there still pressure on you to think of your image and act a certain way?'

Johnny understood the real reason that the supposedly unflappable artist was upset was that he had been scooped. After this, Andy wouldn't be able to run an interview with Dracula. He'd been hoping Johnny would channel the Father's ghost, as others had channelled such Inter/ VIEW subjects as the Assyrian wind demon Pazuzu and Houdini. Andy didn't prize Johnny just because he was a vampire; it was important that he was of the direct Dracula line.

He didn't feel the Father with him so much, though he knew he was always there. It was as if he had absorbed the great ghost almost completely, learning the lessons of the Count, carrying on his mission on Earth. The past was fog, now. His European life and death were faint, and he told varying stories because he remembered differently each time. But in the fog stood the red-eyed, black-caped figure of Dracula, reaching out to him, reaching out through him.

Sometimes, Johnny Pop thought he was Dracula. The Churchward woman had almost believed it, once. And Andy would be so delighted if it were true. But Johnny wasn't just Dracula.

He was no longer unique. There were other vampires in the country, the city, at this party. They weren't the Olde Worlde seigneurs of the Transylvania Movement, at once arrogant and pitiful, but Americans, if not by birth then inclination. Their extravagant names had a copy-of-a-copy paleness, suggesting hissy impermanence: Sonja Blue, Santanico Pandemonium, Skeeter, Scumbalina. Metaphorical (or actual?) children-in-darkness of Andy Warhol, the first thing they did upon rising from the dead was - like an actor landing a first audition - change their names. Then, with golden drac running in their veins, they sold themselves to the dhamps, flooding to New York where the most suckheads were. In cash, they were richer than most castle-bound TM elders, but they coffined in camper vans or at the Y, and wore stinking rags.

Andy snapped out of his sulk. A vampire youth called Whistler paid homage to him as the Master, offering him a criss-crossed arm. Andy stroked the kid's wounds, but held back from sampling the blood.

Johnny wondered if the hook he felt was jealousy.

18.

Johnny and Andy lolled on the backseat of the limo with the sun-roof open, playing chicken with the dawn.

The chatter of the night's parties still ran around Johnny's head, as did the semi-ghosts he had swallowed with his victims' blood. He willed a calm cloud to descend upon the clamour of voices and stilled his brain. For once, the city was quiet.

He was bloated with multiple feedings - at every party, boys and girls offered their necks to him - and Andy seemed flushed enough to suggest he had accepted a few discreet nips somewhere along the course of the night. Johnny felt lassitude growing in him, and knew that after relieving himself and letting the Good Catholics go to work, he would need to hide in the refrigerated coffin unit that was his New York summer luxury for a full day.

The rectangle of sky above was starless pre-dawn blue-grey. Red tendrils were filtering through, reflected off the glass frontages of Madison Avenue. The almost-chill haze of four a.m. had been burned away in an instant, like an ancient elder, and it would be another murderously hot day, confining them both to their lairs for a full twelve hours.

They said nothing, needed to say nothing.

19.

The Hallowe'en party at 54 was desperately lavish. Steve made him Guest of Honour, naming him the Official Spectre at the Feast.

In a brief year, Johnny had become this town's favourite monster. Andy was Vampire Master of New York, but Johnny Pop was Prince of Darkness, father and furtherer of a generation of dhamps, scamps and vamps. There were songs about him ('Fame, I'm Gonna Live Forever'), he had been in a movie (at least his smudge had) with Andy (Ulli Lommel's Drac Queens), he got more neck than a giraffe, and there was a great deal of interest in him from the Coast.

Cakes shaped like coffins and castles were wheeled into 54, and the Man in the Moon sign was red-eyed and fang-toothed in homage. Liberace and Elton John played duelling pianos, while the Village People - the Indian as the Wolf Man, the Cowboy as the Creature From the Black Lagoon, the Construction Worker as the Monster, the Biker as Dracula, the Cop as the Thing From Another World, the Soldier as the Hunchback of Notre Dame - belted out a cover of Bobby 'Boris' Pickett's 'The Monster Mash'.

The day drac became a proscribed drug by act of Congress, Johnny stopped manufacturing it personally and impressed a series of down-on-their-luck nosferatu to be undead factories. The price of the product shot up again, as did the expense of paying off the cops and the mob, but his personal profits towered almost beyond his mind's capacity to count. He knew the bubble would burst soon, but was ready to diversify, to survive into another era. It would be the eighties soon. That was going to be a different time. The important thing was going to be not drac or fame or party invites, but money. Numbers would be his shield and his castle, his spells of protection, invisibility and fascination.

He didn't dance so much, now. He had made his point. But he was called onto the floor. Steve set up a chant of 'Johnny Pop, Johnny Pop' that went around the crowd. Valerie Perrine and Steve Guttenberg gave him a push. Nastassja Kinski and George Burns slapped his back. Peter Bogdanovich and Dorothy Stratten kissed his cheeks. He slipped his half-caped Versace jacket off and tossed it away, cleared a space, and performed, not to impress or awe others as before, but for himself, perhaps for the last time. He had never had such a sense of his own power. He no longer heard the Father's voice, for he was the Father. All the ghosts of this city, of this virgin continent, were his to command and consume.

Here ended the American Century. Here began, again, the Anni Draculae.

20.