upon the fatal sun.
“Let’s go in the hot tub,” Leary said suddenly one evening, shedding his clothes. The girls threw theirs off as well.
Dracula had once been warned that he couldn’t immerse himself in water, but he had found this to be untrue. The hot tub almost warmed his cold flesh. So he took off his clothes—the king of the undead!—and joined Leary and the young virgins in the water.
“Admission,” Leary said. “We’d make enough money to fund the film.”
“I’m a nobleman,” Dracula replied. “I have obligations of hospitality.”
“Vladimir, you’ve got to shed these outmoded thought patterns,” Leary chided him. Though the girls bobbed and grinned, Leary ignored them, talking only to Dracula. It was apparent that the man was faithful to his wife and would continue to be so. Dracula found that admirable, if somewhat stifling. He would like very much for his wife to have a reason to retaliate against ill treatment. She was that stunning.
The girls got tired and left. Leary leaned forward and whispered, “Bite me. I want to know what it feels like.”
“So you believe I’m really a vampire?” Dracula asked. “I’m not just another acid trip for the little kiddies?”
Leary looked surprised. “I believed in you before I got here, man. Why do you think I came?”
Dracula was momentarily embarrassed. He had assumed the sophisticated Leary believed that he, Dracula, was simply another guru of the times, a charismatic leader who attracted rootless, searching kids. Dracula had taken pride in the notion that there was something intrinsically fascinating about him besides the fact that he was a supernatural being.
But over the course of the days and weeks, it became apparent that that was the only thing Leary found fascinating about him. Leary interrupted Dracula’s musings, both when they were alone and in front of his hippie children of the night. He debated him, and handily won, as Dracula didn’t have many facts and figures to pull from his head, while the well-read, well-connected Leary did.
He revitalized many of the young hippies who came to the castle, as a decent guru should. In their quest for coolness, they had become radicalized: they were leftist, cynical, and unhappy.
But Leary lambasted them: “You can’t do good unless you feel good,” he told them. It became the phrase of the day on the GBT.
The goal became to be happy, to feel good, to grow and learn. And it became obvious to Dracula that his groupies believed Leary could teach them how.
Leary, and not he.
They ate his food and slept in his rooms and barns and outbuildings and bothered his horses and hit on his servants, all the while discussing What Tim Said, What Tim Meant, What Tim Did. They lost sight of the fact that they were guests and became squatters; that they were visitors who had become denizens. They stopped cleaning up after themselves, because Leary didn’t. They stopped saying “thank you,” because Leary never did.
But worst of all, they stopped being afraid of Dracula. Was he or wasn’t he? No one cared. Their minds dwelled now on all the confounding possibilities Leary presented them with so much charm and enthusiasm that they didn’t appear to realize he was casting pearls before swine. At least, that was how Dracula saw it all.
One day Alexsandru came to him, bowed deeply, and told him with all deference that the great lord must reassert his position, and that His Grace the Count must tell Leary to leave. Dracula promised to do both.
But it was difficult. In this modern country, he possessed no authority to compel the hippie children to do anything, least of all respect him because he had once been more ruthless than any of the leaders they distrusted. And he didn’t want Leary to leave, because as dominating as Leary was, he was the most interesting person Dracula had ever met.
“I sense you have cognitive dissonance about something,” Leary ventured one night in the hot tub. “How about this?”
Then he suggested a wild plan: that on the next full moon, when the forces of night were strongest, he, Leary, would ingest terrific quantities of LSD and other drugs, he would then hypnotize Dracula into a receptive state, and then he would bite Dracula.
“It will Change you,” Dracula told him.
Leary smiled. “It’ll Change you, too.”
So, Leary tempted Dracula into making him a vampire by promising him an acid trip. That was what it boiled down to, when Dracula examined the offer from all sides. Was it worth it? He