7.

The Rock wasn't the worst vampire movie ever made. It wasn't even as bad as that '80s atrocity Bat-21, much less The Vampire Happening, The Lost Boys or - from what Genevieve had seen of it - Debbie Does Dracula. However, it was, in her view, dreadful. Reel after reel of straining, oiled muscles - with 'funny' lines after each spectacular killing. If not for a ridiculous shower sex scene with a new blonde actress, it could be mistaken for an amazingly well-budgeted gay porn movie intercut with butcher's training film clips. After screening buzz was that The Rock would blockbust Labor Day opening weekend records and stay on 'legs' well into the fall. It was the tentpole of the summer release schedule.

Outside the DGA cinema, a hyperactive, dark warm man was discreetly restrained by wrestler-shaped vampire bouncers in custom tuxedos. He begged departing audience members, all dressed up for the post-movie bash, to tell him if his credit was on the film. He said his name was Adam Simon. Genevieve couldn't recall if he was listed, but she'd ducked out of the endless credits crawl to avoid the Frank Stallone song 'Blood is Thicker Than Water'.

A tide of industry invitees was directed towards a cavernous ballroom where smiling, mostly fanged staff in prison uniforms - abbreviated convict denims for girls, fetishist guard leathers for boys - offered trays of canapes. Beverages for all tastes were served in battered tin cups, suitable for scraping across the cell bars to start a riot. Genevieve and Kate both took 'hot shots', measures of blood and vodka produced not by declasse mixing in a vat, but in a human shaker. The donor downed dangerous levels of spirits and was bled as soon as the alcohol hit his or her circulatory system. Another high life variant involved injections of a Holmesian seven per cent solution of cocaine or, in clubs like the Viper Room, heroin or Bowles-Ottery ergot. It was smooth and expensive, usually reserved for the 'upstairs' stock of the wealthiest Hollywood vampires. Here, gallons flowed as if from the base of the throne. People who should have known better were lapping it up. Kate pointed out a couple of grimacing warm party-goers sampling vampire fare just because it was otherwise prohibitively costly On a dais a swing combo in arrow-patterned tuxes played prison-themed tunes in fashionable-again arrangements: 'Riot in Cell Block No. 9', 'Jailhouse Rock', 'Rubber Bullets', 'Folsom Prison Blues', 'Working on the Chain Gang'. The Johnny Favorite Big Band, surprise hit of the Concert for Transylvania, was popular again, especially among American new-borns for whom the 1940s were the farthest reach of living memory. Fair enough, Genevieve supposed. She single-handedly kept in business a company which released French mediaeval chansons on CD.

Another glittering event. Everyone in sight was famous or beautiful or both. Movie stars, political figures, vampires. Popes and popsies. That put her on her guard. Some of the guests had been at Buckingham Palace in 1888 and/or Palazzo Otranto in 1959. Dracula balls tended to begin with lavish hospitality and dancing, then go on to heads stuck on spikes and the secret police pursuing early leavers.

Holly was in the crowd, wearing her own face for a change, sporting a secret-agent earpiece and a tailcoat cut to conceal a shoulder-holster. The shapeshifter had Gorse's old job, head of security for Alucard Industries. She had profited from the Overlooker's true death.

Kate, given height by heels, was accosted by a greying bear Genevieve recognised as Francis Coppola. The director, bludgeoned by The Rock, forgot to be surprised that Kate was in Los Angeles.

'Do you remember that boy?' he asked.

Kate nodded.

'I'm making Part 2,' he admitted, glumly. 'Then I'll do one from the heart.'

'God, Francis, please, don't,' said an industry figure, a sinewy woman in a red sheath dress and a dye-job buzzcut. 'Not again.'

'I liked One From the Heart,' Kate said, quietly.

Coppola sweetly kissed Kate on the cheek, and was dragged away by the bloodsucking producer. Back bent and weary, he allowed himself to be shown off, to own up that he had signed on for the next Alucard production. There were more ways of feeding off the warm than the obvious.

Two producers, an American named Dragon and a European named Drakoulias, tried to tell Genevieve and Kate they would be good for a picture they wanted to produce in Prague. Kate, a bit tipsy, strung them along, playing up her accent (as she always did when flirting) and refusing to say whether or not she was an actress or had an agent, before admitting neither of them showed up at all well on film.

'There's always video,' said Dragon. 'New media will be big. Have you heard of the Internet?'

'Digital imaging,' said Drakoulias, sagely.

Racquel Ohlrig, a stunning and practised creature, swanned across the room in a silver dress that defied several physical laws. Since her 'rescue' from the Immortologists, Racquel had done vampire porno (as 'Rac Loring'), made a John Waters movie, cut a few records, rustled up mainstream actress credits, appeared on calendars, and become a club diva. She'd be around forever. Genevieve thought that if she and the gumshoe had left the girl with Winton's hucksters, she'd be running the Church by now.

By the wet bar, Penelope Churchward was talking urgently with a waiter. She was back in Dracula's orbit, which wasn't exactly a surprise.

Kate and Genevieve stuck together, watching each other's backs. It was likely this new Count still thought they were worth murdering. Crosby, the girl from the Le Reve, was with Holly's security team, a killer-in-training. Now the Gorse business was done, who knew what orders she'd have? Again, Dracula was gathering his people. General Iorga and Diane LeFanu were here, and, representing Lord Ruthven, Caleb Croft. Among the movie stars and studio execs were Carpathian officers in blinding white uniforms.

Flanked by squat African-Americans with silver-plated guns was the Leopard Lady of Baltimore herself, Georgia Rae Drumgo. Drac Witch of the East, even without Willis Daniels or Genevieve on tap. She had turned vampire. Spotting Genevieve, she showed that her new fangs matched her tiger-striped sheath dress. The bodyguards were just for show - Georgia Rae was the fiercest predator in her pride.

This time, the Kingdom of the Cats went beyond politics, beyond crime, extending into the media, finance, manufacture, information -everything. Dracula wanted to own the culture.

'When he comes on stage, will he be a head on a stick again?' asked Kate.

That was too much to hope for.

There he was, suddenly. In the crowd. He didn't seem to have made an entrance, just appeared. Buzz spread through the guests. Heads turned.

It was Dracula. Young again. Full of plans.

She had no doubts about that.

The Count wore black Armani. Not a speck of colour about the ensemble. His perfect hair and trimmed goatee were as black and smooth as the expensive fabrics of his superbly cut shirt and jacket. His face was white as polished bone. He was no taller, no more beautiful, than the people who stepped aside for him, but he had Presence.

In London, he'd been a monster. In Italy, he was a relic. The idea of Dracula, too huge to contain in a human shape, had exploded out through his eyes and mouth. He'd drunk so deeply that drops of blood welled up through his pores. There'd been a terrible untidiness about that Dracula, a barbarian stench, a wrecker's blundering. Here, the King of the Cats had it together, locked down tight. He was compact, controlled, concentrated. His resurrection had not just been about coming back, but coming back in a shape that made sense for the turn of this century and, horrible thought, the foreseeable future. This Dracula had a Project.

He was with the blonde from the film. Sunburst flashbulbs went off. The blonde would register. He would be a black outline, an absence.

Dracula looked at her. At them.

He smiled. He knew he was in complete command, that he was unstoppable. Yet he'd been stopped before. He knew they still stood against him and respected that. He valued his enemies above his friends. He believed in hatred, trusted it more than love. Enemies couldn't fail or betray him. They kept him sharp.

'He's a monster,' Kate breathed.

Genevieve nodded.

'And we're the only two left. He owns everyone else.'

Genevieve didn't want to agree. But was worried that she would have to.

Then, slipping like a fish through the crowd, Adam Simon ran at Dracula. The hefty bouncers barrelled over guests as they tried to catch him. Simon held a bowie knife, an improbably hefty instrument. That long fat blade suggested the late Jim Bowie was compensating for something.

'You stole my movie,' he shouted.

Dracula's face was benign, puzzled. Among so many victims, he couldn't remember this one.

'Who is Adam Simon?' Genevieve asked.

Kate shrugged.

Simon shouldered aside Sylvester Stallone and made a leap at Dracula. His bowie slashed in an arc across Dracula's single-button black jacket and ruffled black shirtfront.

Everyone took in a breath.

Genevieve's heart leaped. Surely, after so long, it couldn't end like this? A lone grudge-holder with no plan, just running up to the King of the Cats with a silver sticker, bringing down the reborn empire. After the long road back from death and the rapid rise to power, would this renewed Count be cut off by a random assassin?

Simon was on the floor, yelping. The bouncers were on top of him, bearing down with all their weight. The bowie knife skittered away into Holly's hand.

'Plain steel,' she reported.

Simon could have done no harm with it except to Dracula's suit.

Kate took Genevieve's arm.

'Look,' she said, 'he's bleeding gold.'

Dracula's shirt parted around the cut, exposing dead white skin. Coins dripped out, pattering onto the floor, spilling around his shoes. He must be wearing a money-vest. Shining gold rolled away from him. The Count laughed, sprung finger-claws, and slashed at his sides, his hips, his loins, opening silky rents in his clothes, transforming himself from Oscar night elegant to shredded vampire punk. From every gape in his suit, gold spurted, coins in an almost liquid flow. More than ought to have been possible.

He extended his hands and stood, a fountain of money.

It took a moment. No one would know who was first but someone snatched a coin from the floor. Then someone else took a fistful. Five or six others dived and scrabbled. Even the richest of the crowd struggled through to pick up the spilled cash. Minimum wage catering staff and million-a-year execs jostled each other to get the gold.

Dracula let them claw and fight. He was money; he didn't care. He loved what money made of men, just as he loved what the vampire red thirst did to them. There was blood spilled too, inevitably. This spectacle, unedifying yet elegant, was what he wanted. A beautiful woman on her knees stuffed gold into an arm-length evening glove; another, with no other receptacle handy, filled her mouth with coins; men fought seriously and in play; some snatched with humour, without shame, while others filched sneakily and hoped no one would notice.

Independent of the melee, coins rolled at their feet.

Kate picked one up and showed it to Genevieve. It was old gold but new-minted, with the profile of Dracula.

'Don't bite it,' Genevieve told her friend.

Her hand, discreetly black-bandaged, throbbed. It wouldn't be better for a long time. The poison of silver had struck her; but it was nothing to the poison of gold.

Kate flicked away the coin. Francis Coppola snatched it out of the air and sadly closed his fingers around it.

Genevieve looked at Dracula.

He stood above it all, laughing through a fanged grin, clothes in tatters, face shining red and gold, eyes midnight black. There was a terrifying joy and purity to him. She understood the fear and love he could inspire, and why people would follow him into the fire. She knew how much easier life was for those who signed up with the Order of the Dragon or Alucard Industries or whatever he was calling his invisible, world-spanning kingdom. And she knew that she could never be a part of it.

Never.

With the memory of Charles, the example of Kate, and her own burning blood, she could not become one of Dracula's acolytes.

She shook her head. He knew.

The next time would be worse. Always, the next time.

'Come on, Kate,' she said. 'This isn't our party.'

'Too true, Gene.'

Leaving, they passed Penny. For a moment, the three vampire women looked at each other. At this party, they'd not even talked.

For Charles's sake, Genevieve let Penelope be. This time.

Outside the black-glass building, on Sunset, nightbirds passed by on foot and in shining automobiles. A billboard for The Rock dominated a dozen blocks.

'You have to admit it's bloody impressive,' said Kate.

'It won't be there forever. This is Los Angeles. Nothing is permanent. That'll be gone next week. It's what he's forgotten. Again. He wants to stand for all time, a statue of gold. He's a man of blood and iron and gold. Centuries will wear him down, break him in the end.'

'Us too?'

Genevieve shook her head.

'We can change. He can't. When I first came here, someone told me I was good and that I could do good. I needed to hear it. Just as you need to hear it now, Kate. We're good. We are. Sometimes, it doesn't seem that way, but it's true. Independent witnesses verify it. There won't be any money in it, but we're going into business together. The world is drowning in Dracula's gold, so we have to work on a case by case basis. We've done it before, remember? We have skills. We can figure things out. You can write and report. I can open doors. We can catch the killers and save the girls.'

Kate thought about it.

'He'd like that,' she said. 'Charles.'

Genevieve didn't have to say anything.

Arm in arm, they walked along Sunset. They weren't warm, but they were alive.

APPENDIX ONE.

'DESTROYING DRELLA'

BY KATHLEEN CONKLIN.

Paper delivered at 'Warhol's Worlds', inaugural conference of The Andy Warhol Museum (April 21-23, 1995); revised for publication as 'Warhola the Vampyre' in Who is Andy Warhol? edited by Colin MacCabe with Mark Francis and Peter Wollen (The British Film Institute and The Andy Warhol Museum, 1997).

They were calling him a vampire long before he turned.

At the Silver Dream Factory, the Mole People, amphetamine-swift dusk-til-dawners eternally out for blood, nicknamed him 'Drella'. The coven often talked of Andy's 'victims': first, cast-offs whose lives were appropriated for Art, rarely given money to go with their limited fame (a great number of them now truly dead); later, wealthy portrait subjects or Inter/VIEW advertisers, courted as assiduously as any Renaissance art patron (a great number of them ought to be truly dead). Andy leeched off them all, left them drained or transformed, using them without letting them touch him, never distinguishing between the commodities he could only coax from other people: money, love, blood, inspiration, devotion, death. Those who rated him a genius and those who ranked him a fraud reached eagerly, too eagerly, for the metaphor. It was so persistent, it must eventually become truth.

In Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (1995), supervamp Mary Woronov (Hedy/The Shoplifter, 1965; The Chelsea Girls, 1966) writes: 'People were calling us the undead, vampires, me and my little brothers of the night, with our lips pressed against the neck of the city, sucking the energy out of scene after scene. We left each party behind like a wasted corpse, raped and carelessly tossed aside... Andy was the worst, taking on five or six parties a night. He even looked like a vampire: white, empty, waiting to be filled, incapable of satisfaction. He was the white worm - always hungry, always cold, never still, always twisting.' When told that the artist had turned vampire, Lou Reed arched a ragged eyebrow and quizzed, Andy was alive?' In the multitude of memoirs and word or song portraits that try to define Andy Warhol, there is no instance of anyone ever using the adjective 'warm' about him.

Valerie Solanas took superstitious care to shoot him with homemade silver bullets. She tried wrapping .32 ammunition in foil, which clogged the chambers, before resorting to spray-paint in the style of Billy Name (Linich), the silver-happy decorator of the Factory who coffined himself in a tiny back room for two years, coming out only at dead of night to forage. The names are just consonants short of anagrams: Andy Warhola, Wlad Draculya; Valerie Solanas, Van Helsing. Valerie's statement, the slogan of a fearless vampire killer: 'He had too much control over my life.'

On the operating table - 4.51 pm, Monday, June 3, 1968 - Andy Warhol's heart stopped. He was declared clinically dead but came back and lived on, his vision of death and disaster fulfilled and survived. The stringmeat ghost of the latter years was sometimes a parody of his living self, a walking Diane Arbus exhibit, belly scars like zippers, Ray-Ban eyes and dead skin.

Warhola the Vampyre sloped nofratu-taloned through the seventies, a fashion-setter as always, as - after nearly a century in the open in Europe - vampirism (of a sort) at last established itself in America. He had no get, but was the fountainhead of a bloodline. You can still see them, in galleries or People, on the streets after dark, in the clubs and cellars. Andy's kids: cloned creatures, like the endless replications of his silkscreen celebrity portraits, faces repeated until they become meaningless patterns of coloured dots.

When alive, Andy had said he wanted to become a machine and that everybody should be alike. How did he feel when his wishes were coming true? How did he feel about anything? Did he feel? Ever? If you spend any amount of time trying to understand the man and his work, you can't help but worry that he's reaching from beyond the grave and forcing you to become Valerie.

Consider the signs, the symptoms, the symbols: that pale, almost-albino face, simultaneously babyish and ancient, shrinking like a bucket of salted slugs when exposed to the sun; the sharp or battered black clothes, stiff from the grave; the goggle-like dark glasses, hypnotic black holes where eyes should be; the Slavic monotone of the whispery voice and the pared-down, kindergarten vocabulary; the covert religiosity, the prizing of sacred or silver objects; the squirrelling away of money and possessions in a centuried lair; even the artificial shocks of grey-white-silver hair. Are these not the attributes of a classical vampire, Dracula himself? Look at photographs taken before or after June 1968, and you can't tell whether he is or isn't. Like the murgatroyds of the 1890s, Andy was a disciple before he became a vampire. For him, turning was dropping the seventh veil, the last chitinous scrap of chrysalis, a final stage in becoming what he had always meant to be, an admittal that this was indeed what was inside him.

His whole life had revolved around the dead.

Andrew Warhola was an American - born in Pittsburgh on August 6, 1928 - but his family were not. In The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (1989), Victor Bockris quotes his statement 'I am from nowhere,' but gives it the lie: 'The Warholas were Rusyns who had emigrated to America from the Ruthenian village of Mikova in the Carpathian Mountains near the borders of Russia and Poland in territory that was, at the turn of the century, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.' Introducing early the theme that comes to dominate his biography, Bockris takes care to note, 'The Carpathian Mountains are popularly known as the home of Dracula, and the peasants in Jonathan Harker's description kneeling before roadside shrines, crossing themselves at the mention of Dracula's name, resemble Andy Warhol's distant relatives.'

The third son of Ondrej and Julia Warhola grew up in Soho, an ethnic enclave that was almost a ghetto. From an early age, he seemed a changeling, paler and slighter than his family, laughably unfit for a future in the steel mills, displaying talent as soon as his hand could properly hold a pencil. Others in his situation might fantasise that they were orphaned princes, raised by peasant wood-cutters, but the Warholas had emigrated - escaped? - from the land of the vampires. Not fifty years before, Count Dracula had come out of Carpathia and established his short-lived empire in London. Dracula was still a powerful figure then, the most famous vampire in the world, and his name was spoken often in the Warhola household. Years later, in a film, Andy had an actress playing his mother claim to have been a victim, in childhood, of the Count, that Dracula's bloodline remained in her veins, passing in the womb to her last son. Like much else in Andy's evolving autobiography, there is no literal truth in this story but its hero spent years trying to wish it into reality and may even, at the last, have managed to pull off the trick. Before settling on 'Andy Warhol' as his eventual professional name, he experimented with the signature 'Andrew Alucard'.

Julia was horrified by her little Andrew's inclinations. For her, vampires were objects not of fascination but dread. A devout Byzantine Catholic, she would drag her children six miles to the wooden church of St John Chrystostom on Saline Street and subject them to endless rituals of purification. Yet, among Andy's first drawings are bats and coffins.