Alucard smiled. Meinster was too short and prissy to be a movie villain, but Steven Berkoff had already played two a clef versions of the TM elder. If Berkoff was busy in the theatre, there was always Julian Sands.

'And there's a woman, America's first home-grown female vampire serial killer.'

'Rusty Cadigan?'

'We change the name, of course. Ratty Cardigan.'

'Good. Cons doing five hundred years have nothing to do but study law and bring nuisance suits.'

Three competing prime time drama-docs about Cadigan were in the works, with Susan Dey, Lauren Hutton and Lynda Carter flashing dental plastic as prettied-up vamps. Hoffman, Rusty's warm lawyer, had a reputation as the most voracious bloodsucker in Los Angeles. He had injuncted transmission of the specials, while co-operating with Nick Broomfield, the British filmmaker, to get his client's bizarre side of the story in a theatrical documentary, Diamond Skulls. Rival sets of victims' relatives, standing to benefit financially from their own 'based on a true story' TV movies, were in on the act with their own lawyers, as was the homicide cop who had made the arrest. By the time the legal dust settled, the public would have lost interest and found another monster to care about.

'Anyway, four or five of the worst vampires you ever saw - no offence, John - are on the dock in silver chains. Red eyes, fangs, snarls. Then the last convict, the star part, comes out of the car cage, hands shackled in old-fashioned iron. He looks at the sunset, is dazzled, and shades his eyes. He's a warm man.'

A switch flicked in Alucard's back-brain.

'You have me,' he said. 'What's a warm man doing there?'

'Doesn't matter, really. We contrive circumstances. Say his wife and family were killed by a vampire cult and he took them all down with a flamethrower and stakes. Flashback time, later in the picture. But the cult's leader had connections. A rich kid new-born. His old man a big wheel. Noise has been made in Congress. There are pale anti-defamation groups. Our man has acted just as ruthlessly as a vampire, has done as many dark deeds. So he's the first warm human to be sentenced to the Rock.'

'It couldn't happen.'

'This is the movies. Our man - Clint Eastwood, say, or Scott Glenn - is on the boat to an island full of the blood-sucking undead. The vampires he killed have fathers-in-darkness or get in the population. The whole prison is stuffed with vampires who haven't tasted warm blood since they were slammed up, and who have a collective monster jones for the red red red. And our man is the only warm, pulsing neck in the place. Two thousand nothing-to-lose honest-to-Bram Stoker bloodlusting undead monsters, and one living man in for a hundred years. How can he survive?'

'Does he?'

'Not in the end, that would be ridiculous. They have to tear him apart. He fights and fights, bests the worst of the bad guys, takes down the elder who's the king of the cons, adds to his sentence by killing more vampires. The only ending possible is that he's brutalised so much in stir that he becomes the thing he hates. He turns. We end in solitary, with his red eyes and fangs. He's howling for blood. It'll be a killer finish.'

'I don't like it. Audiences won't go for negative.'

'So he dies a hero. Refuses to turn vampire.'

'That's distasteful. No, he survives, beats the odds, and escapes.'

'No one has ever escaped from Alcatraz.'

'This is the movies. Eastwood already made it once.'

'Escape From Alcatraz, Don Siegel, 1980. But that was about the old prison.' 'Scrub Eastwood. I still like Stallone.'

'Stallone?'

'He's blue-collar for the sixpack audience, pretty enough to get in women and a few gays, and college kids like to laugh at his mumbling. We get a Frank Stallone song over the end credits. A cover of "The Green, Green Grass of Home". The point is that Stallone survives against the odds. He not only escapes from the prison, but escapes from himself. By breaking out - and he does this with the help of the Ratty character, who redeems herself and dies, but not until after they've had a steamy sex scene which ends with him letting her bite him but refusing to drink her blood and turn vampire - Stallone breaks out of his pattern of hatred for all vampires, which is really the hatred he has for himself because he couldn't save his family. The Supreme Court upholds his appeal, so he's home free and clear for the last scene at his family's graves. We have to say that not all vampires are badasses, because they're an audience too. The Granpas will like the girl who turns good in the end - we could get Brigitte Nielsen practically for free - and the nightriders will read the film as a story about the elder who tells the truth the warm wormmeat won't hear. For the elder part, I like a British voice to sell the dialogue, maybe Anthony Hopkins, Alan Rickman.'

'That's not quite where I was going with it.'

'That's the treatment I've bought.'

'You've bought it?'

'Just now. It happened so fast you didn't notice it. Adam Simon, we're going to make The Rock.'

The kid looked as if he'd taken a sledgehammer to the back of the head but discovered that it felt good.

'With Stallone, this picture is a go.'

There were three minutes left of pitch-time. Simon just sat there, scratching his curly hair.

Alucard flipped his intercom and told Beverly to have a contract ready for Adam Simon to sign on the way out.

'I should run it past my agent. And maybe my analyst.'

'Sign while it's hot. Tomorrow night, maybe I take another vampire prison picture pitch. It's in the atmosphere. Steam-engine time.'

'Yeah, you're right. Thanks, John.'

'Thank you.'

He shook the writer-director's hand.

'Have me the treatment tomorrow. I'll get it to Sly.'

'I won't sleep.'

'I wouldn't let you.'

In a cloud of glee and amazement, Simon left the office. Alucard kept the intercom open. He heard a burble of meaningless chatter between the kid and Beverly, then the vital scratching of the pen on the standard contract.

John Alucard now owned The Rock.

He ran down short-lists. As policy, he didn't care for writer-directors. He preferred to deal with mutually hostile creatives who'd jostle each other for DGA or SWG credits. None of his films had been written by fewer than twelve people and he used an average of three directors on any project.

For The Rock, he liked George Pan Cosmatos to get the master shots, to be replaced in mid-shoot by Russell Mulcahy for the style and the laughs and Peter MacDonald for the action and gore. He would be proud to release a movie with an Allan Smithee credit.

One thing was certain. Simon would end up being grateful for a small-print 'and with thanks to' mention between the location caterers and the licensed music rights in the end credits. Alucard might let him shoot the 'making of' cable documentary.

He listened to the clatter of the kid leaving the outer office, floating off the floor but trying not to bump his head against the lintel.

'Beverly,' he said.

'Yes, Master,' deadpanned his Renfield.

'I'll be expecting an express delivery from Adam Simon tomorrow afternoon. Arrange for him to bike it over.'

'At his expense?'

'How well you know me, my best beloved.'

'It's in the to-do book. I'll have his package by the time you pop out of your coffin at sunset tomorrow.'

'Excellent. Then tell security Adam Simon is never to be allowed on this lot again. Deadly force is authorised if he attempts to violate the ruling. In fact, I want you to buy a big bottle of liquid paper and obliterate his name from all our records except the legally binding contract he just signed. Your primary instruction is never again to speak the name "Adam Simon" in my presence. Am I understood?'

'Yes, Master.'

8.

Alucard parked his liver-purple Camaro in the handicapped space outside the Video Archives on Sepulveda. He was dead and you couldn't get more handicapped than that. Little people didn't see it that way. Beverly took care of parking fines. He was putting the kids of the Los Angeles Traffic Control Bureau through fancy Eastern colleges. He hoped they got brutally hazed by the Brotherhood of the Bell.

The videos he was returning were in a wino-style brown paper bag on the passenger seat. He checked the titles. Sometimes, what with all the confusion, tapes wound up in the wrong boxes. Video Archives fines added up too. Last week, he'd meant to return Can I Do It Till I Need Glasses?, sequel to If You Don't Stop It You'll Go Blind and little-known debut of Robin Williams, but the box contained a home-shot video of one of Vampi's predecessors in the act of predeceasing. Quentin, the warm kid behind the counter, made an offer on the rights, saying he had customers who went for viper snuff. A fanged snarl and a hundred dollar bill, prerolled and red-dusted, settled the business. He had the Glasses tape and his other rental selections of the week, Carol Speed in Abby, Dyanne Thorne in Greta the Torturer and Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey in Beaches. He made a mental note to approach Midler for the Transylvania Concert, though he was also tempted to see if there was a way of having her quietly killed.

Crossing the sidewalk, he saw through the windows, between cardboard standees of Cynthia Rothrock and Jessica Tandy, that a holdup was in progress. A bald-headed viper in a net-mesh muscle T-shirt and rose-tinted glasses held an unnecessarily large handgun on Quentin, who was reaching for the sky like a cowboy extra. The video kid wore a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, and was talking. Thick veins throbbed in his thin arms and wrists, and his Adam's apple bobbed under his scraggle of goatee. Dead customers lay on the floor in pretzel poses, great holes blown out of them. Pooling blood was fast going rancid. A waste. A guy in a tan suit was being bitten - chewed, rather - by an undernourished vampire girl in a Raggedy Ann red wig, spangly halter top, short shorts and cha cha heels. The victim was trying to ward off the vampire with a cassette of King Kong Lives. The critics were right - you should die before watching that.

Alucard didn't want to put off returning the tapes. He'd driven all the way out here to Hermosa Beach. As he pushed open the front door, an old-fashioned bell tinkled.

'What about that motherfucking Green Acres, man,' babbled Quentin, 'that pig Arnold sure was a smarty-pants!'

'You talkin' to me about sit-coms, ninety-eight-point-six?' asked the viper.

'Sit-coms, man. Life and death, man. No difference, not really.'

The bell finally registered, catching everyone's attention.

The bloody-mawed girl left off her meal - blood pulsed out of the dying man's neck - and fixed Alucard with violet-red cat eyes.

'Good evening,' said Alucard. 'I'm returning some tapes.'

The hold-up man angled his head up in the air with a 'why me?' eyebrow-lift and swung around to face Alucard, pointing his big gun. He did the thing rappers did on videos, holding the pistol sideways as if it were laid flat in the air. Looks fuck you cool, debatably reduces the likelihood of an automatic jamming and screws up any chance of aiming properly - though this specimen had hit what he was firing at so far. His gun was a revolver, a ridiculous Western relic with a foot-long barrel.

'Who the fuck are you?'

'A man with video tapes.'

And I'm Kit Carruthers, a viper with four convictions for murder one.'

'How careless. I have no convictions at all.'

'What I'm sayin' is: I go down, I'm for the Rock. Understand, Granpa Munster. That's as bad as it can get. I just friggin' don't care what happens. Me and Holly are going to red dust afore they take us in. We'll drag as many losers to hell with us as possible. Get it?'

'You believe in reincarnation, man?' asked Quentin. 'You all know, in a second life, we all come back sooner or later, as anything from a pussycat to a man-eating alligator...'

On cue, the cat-eyed Holly projected her nose, mouth and chin into a snout. Her skin turned to scaly hide. A thousand wickedly curved teeth gleamed, blooded. From pussycat to man-eating galligator, in a nictitation.

If it weren't for her brain-dead b-f, this little viper would have potential.

'What's he talkin' about?' said Kit.

'He's quoting the theme for My Mother, the Car.'

'This fuckin' town. Doolally La-La Ville. Got anythin' worth havin'? Or should I stake you straight off.'

'I don't care to be talked to like that.'

Kit snarled, gums receding above inch-long ivories. Tattoos swirled on his shaved head.

'Then eat silver, Granpa!'

He fired the gun one-handed, which would have broken a warm man's wrist. The kick flung his arm off to one side. Alucard knew Kit should have held his gun in a proper grip. The silver slug shot past, took off Jessica Tandy's head, and smashed through the window. Alucard got out of the way, swiftly.

Kit's eyes were goggle-open, bigger than the round rose lenses in front of them.

'Where'd he go?'

Alucard was in the porno alcove, an arched-off recess with a hand-lettered 'Pee-Wee's Playhouse' sign. A customer huddled against the far wall, clutching Lust in the Fast Lane to his forehead. He recognised the bearded middle-aged man as blacklisted screenwriter Jack Martin.

'I've seen that, Jack,' said Alucard. 'I wouldn't recommend it. Of the Rac Loring oeuvre, I'd suggest Talk Bloody to Me 3.'

Martin shut his eyes and held the box over his forehead.

'He's here, Lambchop,' hissed the gator-girl, pointing. 'In with the dirty movies.'

By the time Kit had thrown a shot at a rack of Buttman tapes, Alucard was up on the ceiling, braced in a corner. Kit pointed his gun at Martin's skull but didn't shoot him. The warm writer whimpered. If Martin made it through the next five minutes, Alucard might kick him a dialogue polish on Untitled Dolly Parton. He had been out in the cold for a long time. Another of the many lives wrecked by la belle Genevieve. They should form a support group.

Alucard skipped across the tops of the racks, arms out like wings, trusting the Father. He stayed light enough not to topple the flimsy units.

'Sister Bertrille, man,' said Quentin. 'The Flying Nun.'

Alucard descended, settling his feet on the ground.

Kit came charging out of the Playhouse, dry-firing his pistol. Click, click, click.

'All out of buwwets,' said Quentin, doing Elmer Fudd.

Kit tossed the heavy revolver like a knife, aiming for Alucard's head. The gun seemed to take an age to make it across the room, turning over and over and over. Alucard reached up and took it out of the air as if it were a dove. He squeezed and the brittle antique burst into pieces. He pitched a fistful of metal chunks - cylinder, empty cases, butt - which hammered against Kit's slab of chest.

'Who are you, Granpa?'

'Death.'

'That your name?'

'No, it's my avocation. My name is Alucard.'