The newscast had reached the entertainment round-up, which in this town came before major wars on other continents. A fluffy-haired woman in front of the Hollywood sign was talking about the latest studio craze: Dracula pictures. A race was on between Universal and Paramount to get their biopics of the Count to theatres. At Universal, director Joel Schumacher and writer-producer Jane Wagner had cast John Travolta and Lily Tomlin in St George's Fire, at MGM, producer Steven Spielberg and director Tobe Hooper had Peter Coyote and Karen Allen in Vampirgeist. There was no mention of Orson Welles - or, unsurprisingly, Boris Adrian - but another familiar name came up.

John Alucard.

'Hollywood dealmakers have often been characterised as bloodsuckers,' said the reporter, 'but John Alucard is the first actually to be one. Uniquely, this vampire executive is involved in both these competing projects, as a packager of the Universal production and as associate producer of the MGM film. Clearly, in a field where there are too few experts to go around, John Alucard is in demand. Unfortunately, Mr A - as Steven Spielberg calls him - is unable because of his image impairment to grant interviews for broadcast media, but he has issued a statement to the effect that he feels there is room for far more than two versions of the story he characterises as "the most important of the last two centuries". He goes on to say, "There can be no definitive Dracula, but we hope we shall be able to conjure a different Dracula for every person." For decades Hollywood has stayed away from this hot subject but, with the Francis Coppola epic of a few years ago cropping up on Best of All Time lists, it seems we are due, like the Londoners of 1885, for a veritable invasion of Draculas. This is Kimberly Wells, for Channel 6 KDHB Update News, at the Hollywood sign.'

She switched the television off. The whole world, and Orson Welles, knew now what John Alucard was doing, but the other part of her original commission - who he was and where he came from - was still a mystery. He had come from the East, with a long line of credit. A source had told her he had skipped New York ahead of an investigation into insider-trading or junk bonds, but she might choose to put that down to typical Los Angeles cattiness. Another whisper had him living another life up in Silicon Valley as a consultant on something hush-hush and sci-fi President Reagan's people were calling the Strategic Defense Initiative. Alucard could also be a Romanian shoe salesman with a line in great patter, who had quit his dull job and changed his name the night he learned his turning vampire wasn't going to take in the long run, and set out to become the new Irving Thalberg before he rotted away to dirt.

There must be a connection between the movie-making mystery man and the high school librarian. Alucard and Gorse. Two vampires in California. She had started asking around about one of them, and the other had sent a puppet to warn her off.

John Alucard could not be Count Dracula.

Not yet, at least.

19.

On her way up into the Hollywood Hills to consult the only real magician she knew, she decided to call on Jack Martin, to see if he wanted to come along on the trip. The movie mage would interest him.

The door of Martin's shack hung open.

Her heart skipped. Loose manuscript pages were drifting out of Martin's home, catching on the breeze, and scuttling along Beverly Glen Boulevard, sticking on the manicured hedges of the million-dollar estates.

She knocked on the door, which popped a hinge and hung free.

'Jack?'

Had Gorse got to him?

She ventured inside, prepared to find walls dripping red and a ruined corpse lying in a nest of torn-up screenplays.

Martin lay on a beat-up sofa, mouth open, snoring slightly. He was no more battered than usual. A Mexican wrestling magazine was open on his round stomach.

'Jack?'

He came awake, blearily.

'It's you,' he said, cold.

His tone was like a silver knife.

'What's the matter?'

'As if you didn't know. You're not good to be around, Gene. Not good at all. You don't see it, but you're a wrecker.'

She backed away.

'Someone tipped off the Writers' Guild about the porno. My ticket got yanked, my dues were not accepted. I'm off the list. I'm off all the lists. All possible lists. I didn't get Buck Privates. They went with Lionel Fenn.'

'There'll be other projects,' she said.

'I'll be lucky to get Buck's Privates.'

Martin had been drinking, but didn't need to get drunk to be in this despair hole. It was where he went sometimes, a mental space like Ensenada, where he slunk to wallow, to soak up the misery he turned into prose. This time, she had an idea he wasn't coming back, he was going lower than ever, and would end up a beachcomber on a nighted seashore, picking broken skulls out of bloody seaweed, trailing bare feet through ink-black surf, becoming the exile king of his own dark country.

'It just took a phone call, Gene. To smash everything. To smash me. I wasn't even worth killing. That hurts. You, they'll kill. I don't want you to be near me when it happens.'

'Does this mean our premiere date is off?'

She shouldn't have said that. Martin began crying, softly. It was a shocking scene, upsetting to her on a level she had thought she had escaped from. He wasn't just depressed, he was scared.

'Go away, Gene,' he said.

20.

This was not a jaunt any more. Jack Martin was as lost to her as Moondoggie, as her licence.

How could things change so fast? It wasn't the second week of January, wasn't the Julian 1980s, but everything that had seemed certain last year, last decade, was up for debate or thrown away.

There was a cruelty at work. Beyond Gorse.

She parked the Plymouth and walked across a lawn to a ranch-style bungalow. A cabalist firmament of star-signs decorated the mail-box.

The mage was a trim, fiftyish man, handsome but small, less a fallen angel than a fallen cherub. He wore ceremonial robes to receive her into his sanctum sanctorum, an arrangement of literal shrines to movie stars of the 1920s and 30s: Theda Bara, Norma Desmond, Clara Bow, Lina Lamont, Jean Harlow, Blanche Hudson, Marion Marsh, Myrna Loy. His all-seeing amulet contained a long-lashed black and white eye, taken from a still of Rudolph Valentino. His boots were black leather motorcycle gear, with polished chrome buckles and studs.

As a boy, the mage - Kenneth Anger to mortals of this plane - had appeared as the Prince in the 1935 Max Reinhardt film of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In later life, he had become a filmmaker, but for himself not the studios (his 'underground' trilogy consisted of Scorpio Rising, Lucifer Rising and Dracula Rising), and achieved a certain notoriety for compiling Hollywood Babylon, a collection of scurrilous but not necessarily true stories about the seamy private lives of the glamour gods and goddesses of the screen. A disciple of Aleister Crowley and Adrian Marcato, he was a genuine movie magician.

He was working on a sequel to Hollywood Babylon, which had been forthcoming for some years. It was called Transylvania Babylon, and contained all the gossip, scandal and lurid factoid speculation that had ever circulated about the elder members of the vampire community. Nine months ago, the manuscript and all his research material had been stolen by minions of a pair of New Orleans-based vampire elders who were the focus of several fascinating, enlightening and perversely amusing chapters. Genevieve had recovered the materials, though the book was still not published as Anger had to negotiate his way through a maze of injunctions and magical threats before he could get the thing in print.

She hesitated on the steps that led down to his slightly sunken sanctum. Incense burned before the framed pictures, swirling up to the low stucco ceiling.

'Do you have to be invited?' he asked. 'Enter freely, spirit of dark.'

'I was just being polite,' she admitted.

The mage was a little disappointed. He arranged himself on a pile of harem cushions and indicated a patch of Turkish carpet where she might sit.

There was a very old bloodstain on the weave.

'Don't mind that,' he said. 'It's from a thirteen-year-old movie extra deflowered by Charlie Chaplin at the very height of the Roaring Twenties.'

She decided not to tell him it wasn't hymeneal blood (though it was human).

'I have cast spells of protection, as a precaution. It was respectful of you to warn me this interview might have consequences.'

Over the centuries, Genevieve had grown out of thinking of herself as a supernatural creature, and was always a little surprised to run into people who still saw her that way. It wasn't that they might not be right, it was just unusual and unfashionable. The world had monsters, but she still didn't know if there was magic.

'One man who helped me says his career has been ruined because of it,' she said, the wound still fresh. 'Another, who was just my friend, was killed.'

'My career is beyond ruination,' said the mage. 'And death means nothing. As you know, it's a passing thing. The lead-up, however, can be highly unpleasant, I understand. I think I'd opt to skip that experience, if at all possible.'

She didn't blame him.

'I've seen some of your films and looked at your writings,' she said. 'It seems to me that you believe motion pictures are rituals.'

'Well put. Yes, all real films are invocations, summonings. Most are made by people who don't realise that. But I do. When I call a film Invocation of My Demon Brother, I mean it exactly as it sounds. It's not enough to plop a camera in front of a ceremony. Then you only get religious television, God help you. It's in the lighting, the cutting, the music. Reality must be banished, channels opened to the beyond. At screenings, there are always manifestations. Audiences might not realise on a conscious level what is happening, but they always know. Always. The amount of ectoplasm poured into the auditorium by drag queens at a West Hollywood revival of a Joan Crawford picture would be enough to embody a minor djinn in the shape of the Bitch Goddess, with a turban and razor cheekbones and shoulderpads out to here.'

She found the image appealing, but also frightening.

'If you were to make a dozen films about, say, the Devil, would the Prince of Darkness appear?' she asked.

The mage was amused. 'What an improbable notion! But it has some substance. If you made twelve ordinary films about the Devil, he might seem more real to people, become more of a figure in the culture, get talked about and put on magazine covers. But, let's face it, the same thing happens if you make one ordinary film about a shark. It's the thirteenth film that makes the difference, that might work the trick.'

'That would be your film? The one made by a director who understands the ritual?'

'Sadly, no. A great tragedy of magick is that to be most effective it must be worked without conscious thought, without intent. To become a master mage, you must pass beyond the mathematics and become a dreamer. My film, of the Devil you say, would be but a tentative summoning, attracting the notice of a spirit of the beyond. Fully to call His Satanic Majesty to Earth would require a work of surpassing genius, mounted by a director with no other intention but to make a wonderful illusion, a von Sternberg or a Frank Borzage. That thirteenth film, a Shanghai Gesture or a History is Made at Night, would be the perfect ritual. And its goaty hero could leave his cloven hoofprint in the cement outside Grauman's Chinese.'

21.

Genevieve parked the Plymouth near Bronson Caverns, in sight of the Hollywood Sign, and looked out over Los Angeles, the city transformed by distance into a carpet of Christmas lights. MGM used to boast 'More stars than there were in the Heavens', and there they were, twinkling individually, a fallen constellation. Car lights on the freeways were glowing platelets flowing through neon veins. From up here, you couldn't see the hookers on Hollywood Boulevard, the endless limbo motels and real estate developments, the lost, lonely and desperate. You couldn't hear the laugh track, or the screams.

It came down to magic. And whether she believed in it.

Clearly, Kenneth Anger did. He had devoted his life to rituals. A great many of them, she had to admit, had worked. And so did John Alucard and Ernest Gorse, vampires who thought themselves magical beings. Dracula had been another of the breed, thanking Satan for eternal night-life.

She just didn't know.

Maybe she was still undecided because she had never slipped into the blackness of death. Kate Reed, her Victorian friend, had done the proper thing. Kate's father-in-darkness, Harris, had drunk her blood and given of his own, then let her die and come back, turned. Chandagnac, Genevieve's mediaeval father-in-darkness, had worked on her for months. She had transformed slowly, coming alive by night, shaking off the warm girl she had been.

In the last century, since Dracula came out of his castle, there had been a lot of work done on the subject. It was no longer possible to disbelieve in vampires. With the nosferatu in the open, vampirism had to be incorporated into the prevalent belief systems and this was a scientific age. These days, everyone generally accepted the 'explanation' that the condition was a blood-borne mutation, an evolutionary quirk adapting a strain of humankind for survival. But, as geneticists probed ever further, mysteries deepened: vampires retained the DNA pattern they were born with as warm humans, and yet they were different creatures. And, despite Max Planck's Black Blood Refractive Postulate of 1902, the laws of optics still seemed broken by the business with mirrors.

If there were vampires, there could be magic.

And Alucard's ritual - the mage's thirteen movies - might work. He could come back, worse than ever.

Dracula.

She looked up from the city-lights to the stars.

Was the Count out there, on some intangible plane, waiting to be summoned? Reinvigorated by a spell in the beyond, thirsting for blood, vengeance, power? What might he have learned in Hell, that he could bring to the Earth?

She hated to think.

22.

She drove through the studio gates shortly before dawn, waved on by the uniformed guard. She was accepted as a part of Orson's army, somehow granted an invisible arm-band by her association with the genius.

The Miracle Pictures lot was alive again. 'If it's a good picture, it's a Miracle!' had run the self-mocking, double-edged slogan, all the more apt as the so-called fifth-wheel major declined from mounting Technicolor spectacles like the 1939 version of The Duelling Cavalier, with Errol Flynn and Fedora, to financing drive-in dodos like Machete Maidens of Mora Tau, with nobody and her uncle. In recent years, the fifty-year-old sound stages had mostly gone unused as Miracle shot their product in the Philippines or Canada. The standing sets seen in so many vintage movies had been torn down to make way for bland office buildings where scripts were 'developed' rather than shot. There wasn't even a studio tour.

Now, it was different.

Orson Welles was in power and legions swarmed at his command, occupying every department, beavering away in the service of his vision. They were everywhere: gaffers, extras, carpenters, managers, accountants, make-up and effects technicians, grips, key grips, boys, best boys, designers, draughtsmen, teamsters, caterers, guards, advisors, actors, writers, planners, plotters, doers, movers, shakers.

Once Welles had said this was the best train-set a boy could have. It was very different from three naked girls in an empty swimming pool.

She found herself on Stage 1, the Transylvanian village set. Faces she recognised were on the crew: Jack Nicholson, tearing through his lines with exaggerated expressions; Oja Kodar, handing down decisions from above; Debbie W. Griffith (in another life, she presumed), behind the craft services table; Dennis Hopper, in a cowboy hat and sunglasses.

The stage was crowded with on-lookers. Among the movie critics and TV reporters were other directors - she spotted Spielberg, DePalma and a shifty Coppola - intent on kibbitzing on the master, demonstrating support for the abused genius or suppressing poisonous envy. Burt Reynolds, Gene Hackman and Jane Fonda were dressed up as villagers, rendered unrecognisable by make-up, so desperate to be in this movie that they were willing to be unbilled extras.

Somewhere up there, in a platform under the roof, sat the big baby. The visionary who would give birth to his Dracula. The unwitting magician who might, this time, conjure more than even he had bargained for.

She scanned the rafters, a hundred feet or more above the studio floor. Riggers crawled like pirates among the lights. Someone abseiled down into the village square.

She was sorry Martin wasn't here. This was his dream.

A dangerous dream.