THE DANCING DEAD
Penelope was all a-flutter, like a little bat. Tom wasn't the only one to notice. He overheard one of the waiters call her Signorina Pipistrella. Perhaps it was what they called all dead women behind their backs. If so, it was unwise. Like bats, the dead had big, sensitive ears. He knew Penelope could segue from desperate gaiety to homicidal rage on the spin of a coin.
They were under the Baths of Caracalla, searching out some new cabaret. Penelope had heard wondrous whispers of a coloured singing group from America, the Kool-Tones. She was one of those Europeans who valued American exports for their vitality and brashness. Tom suspected he fell into that category of American himself, though he didn't care to think of himself as either vital or brash. The last thing he wanted was to traipse through a city thousands of years older than New York in search of some doo-wop spades who couldn't get a paying gig in Harlem.
The Kit Kat Klub was mostly underground, its entrance among ruins. An orange neon sign fizzled among the remnants of a classical frieze. Everyone was aware of the vulgarity, and took pains to distance themselves by passing ironic comment.
'It's like transforming the Taj Mahal into a music hall,' snipped Penelope.
Though he'd never seen it, Tom thought the Taj Mahal vulgar enough without cocktail waitresses dressed as French maids or crooning contortionists. Popular taste had never been good. He'd heard from something disgustingly old that classical Rome had been a hideous riot of bad taste, marble covered with violent layers of ghastly paint. Busts which now seemed the essence of white serenity had originally looked like demonstration masks for circus makeup.
They sat at a good table near the stage, talking and laughing loudly enough to drown out the struggling Kool-Tones as they did their worst to 'Blue Moon'. Penelope jabbered to everybody but Tom, though under her wrap her clawed hand was hooked around his elbow. It was as if she were clinging to him for support, or to remind herself that one toy was still hers alone. He wondered if she were old enough to melt to nothing if her heart were punctured by silver. Probably not. She was one of those Victorians. She'd dwindle to a ragged skeleton with wisps of white hair. And maggots.
Since Princess Asa's dressing-down, Penelope had run on the edge of hysteria, under a compulsion to be terribly amusing and modern. She'd rounded up this group of second-stringers and parasites from the palazzo and various bolt-holes around the city, and was leading them on yet another expedition. 'Damned by dawn,' was her motto.
He was the only living man at the table except for another American, a yard-wide, corn-fed Kansas quarterback named Kent. He had won a body-beautiful contest back home and been brought to Rome to appear as Ercole in Dino de Laurentiis's motion picture of The Argonauts. It had just been announced that Sylvia Koscina was to replace Malenka in the role of Medea. Kent's hair was dyed a blue-black that would register as lustrous on film. His blocky, hero face was made thoughtful by sensible glasses, which didn't disguise eyes that missed little.
Penelope's dead friends were the minor poet Roger Penderel, still trading thinly on the desperate disillusion he'd picked up in the First World War; Irena Dubrovna, a catty little Serbian frail who kept making scratches in the tablecloth and apologising; the English avant garde painter Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, sporting a beret and a foot-long cigarette holder; Nico Otzak, a strange, breathy German blonde thing who was either very lost or very drugged; an extremely boring 700-year-old Count; and an obscene little hunchback who communicated only in neanderthal grunts.
From somewhere, Penelope had dug up a bright-eyed newlydead American couple, the Addamses. They laid it on thick, with off-the-peg copies of fashions set by the writers Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom, the husband in an offensive pinstripe suit and the wife a clinging silk shroud. Their faces were whited-up, their hair dyed black. Mr Addams had made his money in railways and munitions, and treated his wife and himself to death and resurrection as a retirement present. She wore sweet little bat earrings.
After the Kool-Tones had finished, with 'Flying Saucers Rock 'n' Roll', the Kit Kat Klub offered the once-in-a-lifetime-and-thank-heavens-for-it pairing of the stately Bianca Castafiore, the 'Milanese Nightingale', and the 'beat poet' Max Brock, a Yank in a false beard. The poet began free-associating run-together words, many inappropriate for mixed company, while the diva screeched wordlessly behind him.
'This is my Song for Europe,' Brock began:
A sad serenade of Sisyphean solicitude,
Strangling the strange seraphim of shameless slop
Gurgling in a gutter of galloping garbage
Gorging itself on gross guppies of Grecian goo,
Humiliatingly humping Henry Harry Herman Herbert Hoover
Haruspex of horribility, holocaust of human heartburn,
While in the icebox, it is the children's hour...
La Castafiore hit a high note that made the dead react like dogs to a silent whistle, gritting their fangs and jamming napkins in their ears. Tom realised he was enjoying the performance.
I spent my birthday in a telephone box,
Sorting out your present of igneous rocks...
Max Brock paused, aghast that he had accidentally produced a rhyming couplet, and stamped around the stage in fury, tossing rhetorical questions into the audience like hand grenades.
'What's the taste of purple? When's the colour of February? What's on second? Why did the bat cross the moon? What's the thirty-nine steps? Who is the Mother of Tears?'
Someone hissed. Seriously. Not like a disgruntled patron, but like an angry serpent from hell.
Max Brock turned his back on the audience. La Castafiore shrieked a trill. Glasses exploded all around the club. Shards and blood spattered over the table.
'Cool, man,' someone shouted. 'Straight from the fridge!'
Irena laughed like a kitten and Nico looked at the girl as if she were dinner. Penderel made a drunken point about metre, and hailed Max Brock the greatest poet of an age that couldn't, by very definition, produce even a good poet.
'You say he's great, but not good?' asked Mr Addams, eyebrows doing a Groucho wiggle. 'That seems to be a contradiction.'
'I say he's great, and utterly dreadful. This is the age of dreadful. Don't you agree Mr Hancock?'
'Not half,' said the English painter, who was taking napkins out of his ears and might not have heard the question. 'I should cocoa. That bloke's got a flaming nerve.'
'I like that in a man,' cooed Mrs Addams, sucking in her cheeks to make a black bow of her mouth.
'Who is your favourite poet, Mr Kent?' Penelope asked, cruelly.
'Walt Whitman,' he replied.
'Very Herculean,' she commented, tartly.
Tom admired romantics and decadents, but recognised a puritan-American streak in himself that deplored moderns who might think themselves romantic or decadent. Like this mob.
'Eddy Poe, the writer on Argonauts, says he hasn't written poetry since he turned,' said Kent. 'He claims creativity dries up when you become a vampire.'
'In my case, that's not true,' said Penderel. 'I was a mediocre verse-man when alive.'
'My genius is immortal, mush,' said Hancock, aggressively. 'I'm AB negative, you know. It's all I can drink.'
'No offence,' said Kent, 'but I've met so few of you. Vampires.'
'Oscar Wilde wrote "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" after he turned,' said Mrs Addams. 'You have to admit that's good.'
Penelope's eyes narrowed. She didn't care for talk of Wilde. Even doubly dead, he was an embarrassment.
'Dali is a vampire,' Nico said.
'Never liked him,' Hancock moaned. 'All those bowler hats.'
'But Picasso is a warm man,' put in Kent. 'And T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Shostakovich, Joe DiMaggio, Ludwig Wittgenstein, William Faulkner. None of them turned. Yet they're the century's best.'
'Their careers have ended, or will end,' said Mrs Addams. 'To turn is to change, to embrace a darkness within. It must be a spur to creativity. Since I turned vampire, I have been far better able to express myself.'
She was what they used to call a 'murgatroyd'. Having risen from the grave, she was determined to dress the part. Almost invisible on her jet hair was a black lace veil, weighted by black pearls. Her low-cut, floor-length dress had trails like octopus tentacles. Her pallor was artificially heightened, with strategic dabs of violet shadow.
Kent, who had a mind inside his muscle, was working through a private problem.
'Maybe there are better ways to become immortal. Through work, perhaps? Or by having children?'
Penelope was on the point of ripping off Tom's arm.
'I'll take immortality any way I can get it, old fellow,' said Penderel, signalling the waitress to come open her vein into his beer stein. 'Sometimes it doesn't last long.'
Kent shrugged, Hercules shoulders straining his lightweight blue suit. He'd have looked conservative but for the red and yellow swirl of his hand-painted necktie.
'What about the existentialists?' asked Mrs Addams. 'Surely, their ideal modern man is a vampire? A being outside hypocrisy and convention? A creature alone in the night? Appetites and urges unfettered by history?'
'History is all some of us have,' said the Carpathian, Oblensky.
Tom had read Camus and Sartre and didn't see what all the fuss was about. Thin books with thinner stories.
'History could end at any moment,' said Nico, making an explosion in the air with her fingers. 'Ka-pow!'
'Ah yes,' mused Penderel, 'the boom-boom Bomb.'
A dance band began playing. Penelope cut short the philosophy by forcing everyone onto the floor. She claimed Tom for herself, and partnered Kent with Mrs Addams, Penderel with Nico, Hancock with Irena, and Mr Addams with the surprisingly light-footed and enthusiastic hunchback. Count Oblensky scooped a warm film extra out of the crowd, and nibbled her throat sickeningly.
Penelope, brought up not to look into her dancing partner's eyes, held her spine ramrod straight, stretching her lovely neck to advantage.
The dead made dance halls tricky prospects. They clung to the fashions of their lifetimes, yet wished to be seen to embrace the modern. Penelope had learned to dance when the waltz was dominant, but elders were schooled in mediaeval gavottes or rowdy Russian kicking. Moderns carried over elements of the Charleston or the jitterbug.
The band played neutral dance music. A skinny crooner sang 'Volare' as if he meant it. The floor accommodated everyone's writhing. Mercifully, it was dark.
Penelope was thinking. Tom knew that made her dangerous.
Her hand crept up his back, fingers settling around his neck. She twisted his head and looked at him. Her fangs were out.
'Beautiful, blank-faced Tom,' she said. 'I wonder what goes on in there. But, also, I wonder what goes on in here.'
She touched the extended finger of her free hand to her head then her heart.
'Do I really feel anything?'
Tom was uncomfortable. Did she want him to reassure her of her humanity, or confirm her elite estrangement from the living?
'Or only imitations of feelings? Animal instincts tricked up for a complicated brain. I wasn't prepared for any of this, Tom. I was going to be a wife and mother. A hostess, a lady of some standing.'
Her tongue slipped across her fangs.
'Am I even a woman?'
Tom would rather have answered one of Max Brock's nonsense questions.
'I'm dead, Tom,' she said, piteously. 'Hold me.'
'I am holding you, Penny.'
'Yes.'
They danced on, not missing a step.
Tom knew he would have to tread carefully. He was close enough to see how unstable Penelope really was. She could pose as an ornament, displaying pleasure and amusement in such a way as not to stretch her face out of its beautiful true. But sometimes, there were cracks. And beyond cracks, the chasm.
Princess Asa was behind some of it. For a Victorian to be treated as a vassal by a mediaeval tyrant was humiliation enough. But the Princess was just the most recent irritant. Penelope's moods went deeper, and her troubles back to the age of Wilde and the Terror.
In the end, it was Dracula. And perhaps her onetime fiance, this Charles. Tom knew both men were nearby, yet distant from Penelope. Had she come to Rome because of them?
'I'm sorry, Tom,' she said, hugging him. 'It's unfair of me to go on like this.'
He relaxed. She was thinking about him for a moment, not herself. Excellent.
'I'm also sorry about this, but...' She bit his neck, deeper than usual, opening the old bite-wounds. The pain was a shock. Her fingers dug into his ribs. She sucked ferociously.
They were still dancing. Others were bleeding. No one noticed.
For the first time, Tom felt panic.
The dead were dangerous. Really.
She set him down gently on a chair, letting him slip from her hands. He couldn't move his limbs or even hold up his head. As he slipped into a daze, he saw Penelope dab her lips with a napkin.
She looked as if she had made a decision.