He reached up into the air, and his straw hat was returned to his long fingers by the swirling smoke. The quality of Gerald’s screaming changed, to a low, whimpering sob. The Count appeared not to notice the noise, though Massingham remembered the sharpness of his ears.
The Count de Ville tapped his hat on to his head at a jaunty angle, gave the bulb-horn a final, fond poop-poop and walked into the black clouds of smoke, which seemed to part for him and then closed around him like a cloak.
Massingham thought about the future. There was probably money in it.
NOTE
‘Dead Travel Fast’ was solicited for – but not used in – an anthology of stories which set out to fill in the gaps in Stoker’s Dracula by showing what the Count was doing on his trip to London when he is only glimpsed by the novel’s many narrators. A risk of theme anthologies is that everyone has the same idea and you get a clutch of stories which read similarly: so I resolved to do a Dracula story in which he didn’t bite anyone, focusing on another aspect of the character Stoker gave him (his fascination with modern transport). Though the primary purpose was to fit in with Stoker’s text, nothing here contradicts the timeline of Anno Dracula. So, in the world of the series, this could well have happened.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kim Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne) and The Man From the Diogenes Club under his own name and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as Jack Yeovil. His non-fiction books include Nightmare Movies (due to be reissued by Bloomsbury in an updated edition), Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who.
He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines (writing Empire’s popular Video Dungeon column), has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, and scripted radio and television documentaries. His stories ‘Week Woman’ and ‘Ubermensch’ have been adapted into an episode of the TV series The Hunger and an Australian short film; he has directed and written a tiny film Missing Girl. Following his Radio 4 play ‘Cry Babies’, he wrote an episode (‘Phish Phood’) for Radio 7’s series The Man in Black.
His official website, ‘Dr Shade’s Laboratory’ can be found at www.johnnyalucard.com