Mina had nothing suitable to wear, but the situation was so surreal that it didn't seem to matter. She went to catch a Central Line tube at Ealing Broadway at nine forty-five with the queasy feeling that changes in a familiar routine always brought on.
She had never realised that the urban wilderness between Piccadilly and Oxford Street had so many hidden trails and discreet coverts but her pocket A-to-Z eventually guided her to an unmarked door with a discreet intercom and bell-push. Mina almost turned round and went home right then, but she eventually plucked up courage to press the button.
When a fuzzy voice said "Yes?" she blurted out
"Is-that-the-After-Dark-Club-Lucy-Stanwere-asked-me-to-meet-her-here?" without the slightest pause for breath.
There was an eerie buzzing sound - more like a swarm of angry wasps than placid bees - punctuated by a click.
Mina pushed the door open, and entered a gloomy corridor which led to a flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs was a desk, manned by a teenage boy in an absurdly old-fashioned suit. "Miss Mint?" he said, before she could gather her breath. "We've been expecting you. It's a pleasure to meet you."
Mina had not had time to frame a reply when the burgundy-coloured door to the left of the desk opened and Lucy Stanwere came out, accompanied by two other men, each as callow as the receptionist. They had dark complexions remisinscent of the eastern Mediterranean or the Black Sea. They too were wearing black suits, cut to standards of formality that had surely gone out with the last King George - or maybe Queen Victoria.
Lucy, by contrast, was dressed in a very now manner that was far more relaxed - louche, even - than her everyday office-wear. "Mina, darling!" she said, with a brazen bonhomie that contrasted sharply with the flinty face of public finance. "Meet Marcian and Szandor. You'll have to forgive Szandor - I'm afraid his English is a trifle primitive - but Marcian will translate for him. Come through, won't you?"
Mina was unable to respond to this invitation immediately because Marcian and Szandor were busy kissing her hands, so enthusiastically that they hadn't waited to take turns. Nor did they let go when they had finished, arranging themselves to either side of her with an affectionate politeness that she had never encountered before. She had avoided making eye-contact, her embarrassment being so intense that she had all-but-closed her eyes, but she stole sidelong glances to her left and right, observing that their expressions betrayed not the slightest hint of disgust, contempt, scorn or disapproval.
If she had dared, Mina might have felt a surge of joy, but she had could not shake the suspicion that she was about to suffer some humiliating reversal of fortune.
Marcian and Szandor escorted her through the doorway, although it didn't seem humanly possible that there was room for them to pass through it beside her. She was swept along a purple-carpeted corridor lined with darkly-varnished doors. One of the doors was half-open, and Mina couldn't help glancing in, accidentally meeting the eyes of the slim woman who was just about to close it. She recognised the face, having seen it more than once on the ten o'clock news.
"Isn't that...?" she began, turning to look at Lucy - who already had a finger to her lips.
"No names!" Lucy said. "Absolute discretion."
The image on the card had given Mina the impression that there might be a ballroom swirling with exotic couples, all engaged in a furious tango, but the whole building seemed silent, wholly insulated from the unceasing noise of the capital. The room into which Mina was ushered was actually a bedroom.
"My God!" Mina thought, as she contemplated the king-sized four-poster with the red velvet curtains. "It's not a night club at all. It's a knocking-shop for chubby-chasers!" So far as she was concerned, chubby-chasers were creatures of legend, one of whom she had always longed to meet. Like unicorns, they were exceedingly thin on the ground in Ealing. Then Mina remembered Lucy, who was only half the woman now that she had been as a teenager, and realised that there must be more to this than had yet met her eye.
"It's all right, Mina," Lucy said. "There's nothing to be afraid of. No one's going to do anything that you don't want them to do. But the time has come for you to ask yourself the question: Do I sincerely want to be thin?"
Mina swallowed a hysterical laugh. The consequent frog in her throat made it impossible to do anything but croak: "Yes".
It seemed a pitifully feeble expression of her desire, but Lucy was satisfied. "Good," she said. "No point in beating about the bush, then. Marcian and Szandor are vampires. In a few months they can drink your superfluous flesh away. You'll need to take iron tablets to help you make new blood, but their enzymes will do the rest- reorientate your metabolism to hasten conversion your adipose deposits, blah-de-blah. It won't make you feel bad. In fact, you'll feel better than you've ever felt before: full of energy, in more ways than one. Remember what I said this morning about the marvellous ability of human beings to adapt themselves?"
"Yes," Mina whispered, "but...."
"You'll have to forget all that superstitious nonsense about the undead, coffins and crosses. Vampires are just another human species - dependent relatives who followed us to the brink of extinction more than once. The're on the increase again now, though. They're not quite ready to come out of hiding, but they're making discreet diplomatic moves at every level. In the meantime... well, you'll find that the secrecy works to our advantage as well as theirs."
There was a lot to take in, but Lucy explained while Marcian and Szandor waited politely.
Mina wasn't going to be required to dance the tango; she was simply going to lie down on the bed while Marcian and Szandor drank her blood. They would remove about forty fluid ounces of blood between them, but the immediate loss of weight was insignificant by comparison with what the enzymes they would pump into her would do to her metabolism. She would immediately begin to mobilize her fat reserves, putting her blood-production into overdrive. The vampires would drain off the excess as fast as she could produce it, thus setting her on the road to paradise, or at least size twelve.
All in all, it was difficult to see a downside.
Mina found herself staring at Lucy's neck, looking for tell-tale holes.
Lucy smiled. "The fangs are just Hammer horror," she said. "It's more sucking than biting. It doesn't even leave a lovebite - there aren't any leftovers. You'll feel a slight numbness for a few hours, and your complexion might be a trifle pale, but you'll feel a lot better in yourself."
"Will I turn into a vampire too?" Mina asked, surprised at the lack of faintness in her own voice.
"No, silly," Lucy replied. "They're another human species; you can't turn into one of them any more than they can turn into bats. It's a simple matter of symbiosis. They get sustenance from us, we get fitness and an amazing sense of well-being in return. It's free-market economics at its finest - everybody profits. If you need time to think about it, that's okay. All we ask is a little discretion."
"Discretion?" Mina echoed, with a confidence she had never felt before. "To hell with discretion. Let's get on with it!"
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Author's Notes
I was always fascinated by classic vampire stories, especially by the sharp contrast between the sternly disapproving tone of such Anglo-Irish fantasies as J. Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla and Bram Stoker's Dracula and the more appreciative feverishness of such French images as The[a]ophile Gautier's Clarimonde and Charles Baudelaire's Metamorphoses of the Vampire.
I also loved the "revisionist" vampire stories of the 1970s, in which vampires became perversely heroic and sadly misunderstood victims of circumstance.
It had always seemed obvious to me that if the idea of vampirism were to be taken seriously seriously, as a state of being attainable by some kind of natural process rather than something essentially demonic, then the attraction of potential immortality would far outweigh such disadvantages as a specialist diet and an allergy to sunlight. It was in following that train of thought that I began to write vampire stories of my own.
If natural vampirism were really possible, I thought, then vampires would not be lone fugitives ruthlessly hunted by legions of stake-wielding persecutors, but the logical inheritors of the Earth. This was the idea underlying my first vampire story: an alternative history story set in the 17th century, in which vampirism - first brought to Europe by Attila the Hun (whom Dracula claims as his ancestor in Stoker's novel) - has become the greatest privilege of the aristocracy.
For a thousand years and more there has been no significant rebellion against their rule, because the secret of making vampires has been carefully conserved and its magical nature has been taken for granted. As the scientific method begins to catch on, however, with new technological devices such as the microscope to assist it, ordinary men begin to wonder whether the secret might, after all, be penetrable.
After developing the idea in a novelette called The Man Who Loved the Vampire Lady I expanded that story into the first part of an episodic novel, The Empire of Fear , which became (and remains) my most commercially-successful book.
In the novel, the heroes travel into the heart of Africa to discover the origin of the infection that causes the kind of vampirism featured in the novel, and then return home to spread the news, provoking rebellions throughout Europe. The climax of the conflict comes when an armada of ships sets out to invade the heroes' base on Malta, landing an army jointly commanded by Vlad the Impaler and Richard the Lionheart.
Continued next page...
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