castle, and then another, and another, until he was the source of a pilgrimage.
His servants begged him to leave, or at least to halt the flow of half-baked mortality. But he found he enjoyed the little hippies not so much for the quality of their company as the fact that they sought him out. They capered and gyrated for his amusement, ate his banquets, made up terrible, overwrought poetry that they loved to recite to him after dinner, and dared one another, in hushed tones, to bare their necks for him, even though he never asked them to. Was he or wasn’t he? He never revealed himself, keeping his own counsel and instructing the Brides and his servants to do likewise.
Gradually he came to trust his admirers as he had once trusted his Gypsies. They proved worthy of that trust, if only because no one who could do anything about him listened to their conjectures about the Court of the Crimson King. His most ardent groupies were ineffectual and inarticulate, and therefore, harmless.
For that harmlessness, Dracula pitied them. In their bearded costumes and banshee hair, they whirled and swirled and postured. I’m so… so much, man! He wondered if they were actually more controlled and controlling than their middle-class comrades who had gotten Beatle cuts and stayed home with their families. Among the scruffy little vagabonds, each stunt, each pronouncement, each thought was scrutinized, analyzed, compared against an unfathomable standard of intellectual prowess they didn’t possess and karmic serendipity that did not exit:
I said “red,” man, and the Captain walked into the room!
Whoa, heavy! Check it out! You just told me that and he left the room!
He was sorry that there was no such thing as karmic serendipity. It would have made his long life more interesting.
So, like the hundreds of thousands of this time, he turned to drugs. The children took an astonishing variety of drugs: hashish, marijuana, Thai sticks, peyote, mushrooms, and pills of all shapes and sizes. They popped the pills as one might vitamins; they smoked their hemp and hashish like cigarettes, and the rest they cooked with butter and honey and nibbled like Turkish Delight.
But none of it worked on Dracula. He tried everything, smoking and popping and even shooting up as well as sucking the blood of some child who was high or tripping or strung out. Nothing worked.
Nor could they explain to him what it felt like. Mostly they lay on the cold castle floors with the same vacant delirium that accompanied one of his feedings, making trails with their hands and quoting song lyrics. It was a terrible waste to him that the expansion of these inarticulate, unformed minds yielded nothing more than an increased capacity for vacuousness. Whereas he, with his supernatural lifespan and deep connection to the very mythos of this race, possessed a mind worth expanding, and he couldn’t do it.
He kept hoping one of them would rise like cream to the top, someone with whom he could explore and converse, that from this one he could learn the secrets of the drug-taker’s universe. He continued to encourage their pilgrimages to his castle, their whisperings and invasions of his privacy. (Is he or isn’t he? It’s so trippy, the man’s so white!) The young men all wanted to have sexual intercourse with the Brides, and the young girls wanted to have sexual intercourse with him. That was all right; he was into their scene of promiscuity. Breasts and thighs and hips and sex organs, so much writhing flesh brimming with ramthroat red; it was groovy, as they said.
But after a while, it was all only a series of repeat performances, endlessly repeatable. There was not a one among them he would consider Changing. He had not Changed anyone in almost a century. The hippie children became tiresome and he considered impaling them all. But someone on the outside was bound to find out and then there would be hell to pay. The authorities in America were currently as repressive and autocratic as he had been in his prime. They didn’t torture their victims physically, as he had; instead they lied about them to the press and threw them in prisons on trumped-up charges. Had he possessed the same means of mass communication in his day back in Carpathia, he might have done the same thing. It certainly was effective.
Then his lieutenant, Alexsandru, came to him one day with excellent news: Dr. Timothy Leary wanted to pay him a visit.