V-Squad

V-SQUAD

by

Pamela Marcantel

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Pamela Marcantel on Smashwords

V-Squad

Copyright © 2011 by Pamela Marcantel

Cover Design by Thomas Marcantel

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

Disclaimer

This book is a work of fiction. Except for historical figures, any resemblance on the part of the characters to actual persons – living, dead, or undead – is entirely coincidental and not the intention of the author.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 – Vampires at 7 O'Clock

Chapter 2 – Mr. Roosevelt Broadens His Mind

Chapter 3 – Ninja Incognito

Chapter 4 – Eddie Makes an Impression

Chapter 5 – Damn Those Vampires

Chapter 6 – A Night on the Town

Chapter 7 – Aboard the Queen

Chapter 8 – England

Chapter 9 – Aylsdon Estate

Chapter 10 – Blood in the Shadows

Chapter 11 – Behind the Fireplace

Chapter 12 – The Reckoning

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CHAPTER ONE

VAMPIRES AT 7 O'CLOCK

He loved movies, the vampire did, and had ever since the first nickelodeons appeared a little over two decades ago. The stories they told engaged his imagination as nothing else, even the magic lanterns of the last century, had for ages of time. He tried to be in the city at least once a week to attend a screening.

And so, when Dracula premiered at the Beacon Theater in New York City on February 12, 1931, to a theater filled almost to capacity with a little over two thousand mortals, there was one vampire among them.

He might have chosen to go to the movies anyway but on this particular evening was drawn there more out of curiosity than by any real expectation of seeing his kind accurately depicted. Humans in this otherwise enlightened age might have created a splendid cultural cornucopia filled to bursting with other marvels in addition to moving pictures, but they were part of a race that had misrepresented the undead for centuries. There was no reason to suppose that their prejudicial ignorance had changed just because they now surrounded themselves with fancier trinkets. Indeed, the creators of Nosferatu had been among the first to make what the vampire suspected would prove to be a long line of cinematic false impressions. He had seen the German film about six years ago, and as with Stoker's Dracula its eerie mysticism, though entertaining, was stubbornly wrong-headed.

The simple truth, the one mortals would not have imagined even had they known that his kind actually existed, was that real vampires were rather ordinary, even dull, and certainly nothing like their literary and cinematic versions. In a word, they were decidedly mundane; admittedly frightening, some of them, but more like their human counterparts than not.

Still, his interest had been piqued despite his certainty that the movie's Count Dracula would prove to be just another melodramatic contrivance without any trace of reality. The lurid tone of the Previews of Coming Attractions advertising the film (In all the annals of living HORROR . . . ONE NAME stands out as the epitome of EVIL!) pretty much assured that. But for him curiosity was stronger than ennui and so to the motion picture house he went. He was a movie fan after all.

All the evening papers had reported that the Universal film studio expected audiences all across the country to faint at the horrors depicted on the screen, but that was mostly a publicity stunt to drum up more business. Nevertheless, the advertisement must have worked. Substantial numbers of eager New Yorkers showed up that night in spite of the fact that few ordinary people had heard of its star, Bela Lugosi, or attended the stage play on which the film was based.

The line of humans waiting to purchase their tickets stretched the length of an entire city block. As he stood in their midst bundled against the cold north wind, the vampire hoped that no one noticed that, unlike all of them, no frosty exhalation escaped his nose and mouth. To make sure that he had extra cover, he slipped a hand to the scarf around his neck and pulled it over the lower part of his face. The steady thump-thumps of their overlapping heartbeats told him that the creatures laughing and chatting all around him were relaxed and without fear; no one gave him a second glance. He was not afraid of them, but didn't make a habit of looking for trouble either.

For the most part he avoided human contact altogether except in his business dealings, and even then he preferred to use intermediaries who asked no troublesome questions and whose loyalties were absolute. Early on he had maintained relationships with the living, even going so far as to marry a few along the way, but it seemed that just when he became attached to them, they succumbed to the limits of their finite mortality. Given that tendency to come and go all too quickly, they no longer offered him a real comradeship that he could count on. Now he preferred the company of those like himself, most of whom last saw the dawn before the American republic was a gleam in Thomas Jefferson's eye.

The vampire was and for a long time had been a wealthy man with oil- and cattle-producing land holdings in the West. He owned substantial shares in Ford Motor Company, US Steel, and the Southern Pacific Railroad, as well as a diamond mine in South Africa, but unlike others of his class he never meddled in politics, considering that, too, only a temporary current through history. The public was not at all aware of him. He maintained his privacy and kept his name out of the newspapers. Almost eight hundred years old, he knew how to prevent his being discovered. When it became necessary for him to feed, he frequently hunted in the more lawless areas of the city where one less scoundrel was no one's loss. He would do so again tonight, once the movie ended.

The theatre was ahead of him now by about fifty yards. Only a couple of years old, the grand movie palazzo in the heart of the entertainment district sat right next to the even more imposing Manger Hotel. The vampire had attended the theatre's opening in 1927 when Gloria Swanson starred in The Loves of Sunya, a rather undistinguished film to have inaugurated such an impressive establishment.

Upon first entering the Beacon's lobby, a visitor found himself overcome by the immense space, a vast rotunda supported by Art Deco columns and hung with an elaborate crystal chandelier. Completing the marvelous effect was the mezzanine pipe organ decorated with gold filigree that loomed above the orchestra level entrance. Once inside the auditorium, one drank in the high, golden walls and the scarlet seats which stretched upward in three tiers. The overall impression reminded the vampire of the wonderment he still felt whenever he visited one of Europe's magnificent cathedrals. That thought must have occurred to someone else, too (undoubtedly a public relations man), because the Beacon was sometimes known as the Cathedral of the Motion Picture.

The irony lurking within that appellation made the vampire smile. Tonight, when the house lights dimmed and the projector's glow flashed coldly upon the screen, the subject of public veneration would be a vampire, the only creature on earth without a soul.

His thoughts wandered to Bram Stoker and his friend Conan Doyle, both of whom he had known some forty years earlier. Back then, Stoker was the forty-one-year-old manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. Doyle, a young doctor who would become his great friend, happened to be in the city on business when the two of them met first the vampire and then each other. Together they had shared a grand adventure in which they were allies against a truly monstrous evil, one that later inspired Stoker's notorious creation. The vampire always regretted that he had not revealed his true nature to them; that it had been Doyle and not Stoker who in the end had divined it; and that as a result, the first vampire novel had rendered his kind using the worst possible representative as a model.

The opportunity to correct Stoker's fallacy was long gone now. He died in 1912, the same month that the Titanic collided with human vanity and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic. To the vampire's sorrow, Doyle left the world just this past summer. The vampire had not seen him since 1888.

He turned his face toward the night sky as the first snowflake of the evening, then another, fell to earth. He was impervious to cold and actually enjoyed brisk weather. There was something invigorating about it, he found, a kind of clean quality that electrified and enlivened the air. Besides, he was technically dead, a cold thing himself, and therefore well-suited to wintertime.

He felt the humans around him move forward, so he opened his eyes and found himself looking up at the theatre's colorful marquee: DRACULA, it read, and below that, BELA LUGOSI. The ticket window was just ahead. People in front of him shuffled their feet by inches, and he crept toward the entrance along with the rest of them. When it was his turn at the ticket window, he gave a dollar to the gum-chewing female teller, said, One, please, and pocketed the ticket and his change.

He crossed the threshold into the lobby, and the buttery smell of popcorn invaded his nostrils. A sickening nausea immediately assaulted him. Humans seemed to enjoy it—though he never quite understood why they ate it almost exclusively during movies—but since it was something that had been unknown when he was alive, its appeal was in all senses of the word foreign to him. Eager to escape its overpowering odor and the warmth of the lobby that closed in on him like the most confining coffin, he made a beeline for the double doors a smiling attendant waited to open for him.

He entered the darkened theatre and took his seat just as the Movietone newsreel's headline proclaimed NAZIS MAKE GAINS IN GERMAN GOVERNMENT in large white letters upon the screen. The baritone-voiced newsreader solemnly intoned, In Germany, the National Socialists under the leadership of Adolph Hitler continue to make gains in local elections—

Sure enough, there he was, a comic opera figure with a Charlie Chaplin mustache, stepping out of a car into a nighttime crowd of waving, excited teenagers.

Here, he attends a concert at a school in Mannheim, the narrator continued, where young people greet him enthusiastically.

Hitler's uniformed henchmen surrounded him protectively as he shook hands with worshipful fans amid a forest of hand-held torches. People in the crowd tried to elbow one another out of the way in their attempts to reach out to touch him. A bodyguard in a black leather coat emerged from behind Ernst Röhm and peered dangerously over the Führer's shoulder—

The vampire gasped at the sight of that face.

Countless numbers of creatures had found the man-in-the-newsreel's appearance enticingly pleasant, but the vampire knew him for the monster behind the public image.  That face had shadowed his nightmares for nearly eight centuries.  His waking life, too. That was the worst of all. Hell wasn’t just a mythical region of the afterlife but a real place. He had seen it. He had been there. And long after he escaped it, for centuries, the dark kingdom had ruled his mind, leaving him alone with Longchamps and the far-reaching hunt, across six continents and an endless ocean of time . . .

  He would not do this.  Not again. Not tonight.

  He put a hand over his eyes and commanded his attention away from the familiar cave of the past, back into the here and now.  The quest would have to wait, as it often had over the years, for some other, more fortuitous time. 

  This was his current reality, this movie theater in New York, and here he sat, waiting to see an entertainment designed for humans innocently unaware that there were beings in this world who brought real horrors to all they touched.  Their world never would have imagined that a creature such as Longchamps existed in the flesh.  He belonged to a less civilized time and a place where few mortals would have felt free to experience a frisson of artificial terror while munching snacks that hardly qualified as food. 

It occurred to the vampire that right up until the past few moments he had been no different from anyone else here on this night of nights. Like the rest of the audience, he had not anticipated seeing genuine evil, not in this most prosaic of places, this temple to modern entertainment. The young century, with all its gadgets and conveniences, all its democratic ideals, had made him complacent, too.  He beheld that now with a clarity as cold as the light flickering upon the screen. That the unpredictable still could seek out and find one even of his advanced age, teased him with an unfamiliar sense of humility.

  The newsreader wrapped up his presentation with the type of forced cheeriness that invariably characterized the Movietone reels (. . . so it's a great night for Adolph Hitler in Mannheim. You certainly can't say that the German people don't love you, Herr  Hitler!). The vampire registered that, and the ensuing fanfare that concluded the news, with only half of his attention.  The devil was in Germany now and an ally of the Nazis.  That was where he would have to go to pick up the trail that had grown cold these past fifty years.

The image that had momentarily blighted his mind faded from the screen.  The Universal Studio logo, an airplane circling the spinning earth, dissolved to the title card, a stylized bat overlaid by the legend, Carl Laemmle Presents 'DRACULA' By Bram Stoker.  The accompanying music consisted of the first several bars of the Overture from Swan Lake.

Such lovely, even romantic music, to have been selected to complement the spectacle that the movie-makers promised to be so fantastic, so evil, so degrading, you wonder if it isn't all a dream, a nightmare! No matter how many centuries passed, he knew that he would never come to understand how humans could be so naïve, so stupid, so . . . tasteless. At least, in terms of their aesthetic sensibilities.

Although he determined that he would keep an open mind, at first the film didn't command his interest. He noticed the teenage boys tossing popcorn at one another a couple of rows ahead of him and two girls sitting in front of them who, engrossed by the events upon the screen and oblivious to the boys, shared their own box of popcorn; and the young man who sat with a gallant, protective arm around his girlfriend, amused that she gripped his arm in genuine fright. Gradually, though, he became sufficiently aware of the melodrama onscreen to feel the humor rise within him.

Not only were there no terrors unfolding before him, predictably neither was there any reality as he knew it. No vampire of his acquaintance—or anywhere else, he suspected—ever recoiled at the sight of a mere crucifix, much less with such ludicrous affectation as this human portraying Dracula did.

Unable and not really willing to contain himself, the vampire laughed out loud.

The man sitting in front of him turned and gave him an annoyed frown, but the vampire didn't care. Thoroughly amused, he grinned at the flickering images on the screen. This movie promised to be nearly as funny as the Chaplin films he so enjoyed.

Renfield sucked his bleeding finger and said reassuringly to Dracula, It's nothing, only a scratch, and his host responded with an absurdly ravenous, almost erotic leer. The vampire in the audience gave up any pretence at self-control and guffawed loudly.

This time he was marginally aware that several people growled at him with overt irritation, and although normally considerate enough to be mindful of those around him, at this moment he didn't care what they thought. The story playing out on the screen was so idiotic that he found it quite wonderful. He could scarcely wait to see what inventive inanities would appear next.

Lugosi did not disappoint him. He produced a bottle that he held reverently, as though it were something holy, and then said to Renfield in elaborately e-nun-ci-a-ted ca-den-ces, This is very old wine. I hope you like it. He then proceeded to pour some into a goblet, looking very much like a waiter at one of the vampire's favorite hunting spots in the city, The Stork Club.

The movie vampire offered the goblet to Renfield, who noticing that his host had not poured any for himself, asked, Aren't you drinking?

Lugosi then delivered what would prove to be the vampire's favorite line of the entire night: I never drink . . . wine.

He doubled over with laughter. It had been awhile since he had so thoroughly surrendered to the temptation to wallow in unrestrained mirth, immoderately, almost uncomprehendingly, as a child would. He couldn't wait to share that one with his friends.

The man sitting in front of him angrily flung himself from his seat and stomped out of the theater. That prompted further gales of hilarity from the vampire of such intensity that he had no doubt that he resembled a human in the grip of an epileptic fit.

The next thing he knew, a uniformed usher was approaching him.

The man said quietly and with the kind of calm an orderly at a madhouse might use in the presence of an inmate, Sir, would you come with me, please?

Oh, well, thought the vampire, it had been fun. Truly it had. He was glad he had come after all.

He rose from his seat and followed the man up the long, carpeted path to the lobby.

The usher led him to the theater manager, a dapper fellow in a neat gray suit. After barely glancing at the vampire, he asked his minion, Is this him?

Yes sir.

The manager gave him an appraising look. The vampire smiled back at him, wondering what this fellow would say if he were to extend his fangs.

Sir, the man began, while I appreciate your right to enjoy the movie, several people have complained that your laughter is disruptive, and—

That's quite all right. I've seen enough anyway.

Almost as amusing as the movie were the humans' stunned expressions. Clearly, they had expected him to put up a fight.

"I