"Kim Newman - Andy Warhol's Dracula" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

Kim Newman - Andy Warhol's Dracula

As Nancy snuffed, her blood curdled. The taste of vile scabs flooded his
mouth. He pushed her away, detaching fangs from her worn wounds. Ropes of
bloody spittle hung from her neck to his maw. He wiped his mouth on his
wrist, breaking their liquid link. A last electric thrill shuddered,
arcing between them. Her heart stopped.
He had pulled her backward onto the bed, holding her down to him as he
worked at her throat, her hands feebly scrabbling his sides. Empty, she
was dead weight on top of him. He was uncomfortably aware of the other
garbage in the bed: magazines, bent spoons, hypodermic needles, used
Kleenex, ripped and safety-pinned clothes, banknotes, congealed
sandwiches, weeks of uneaten complimentary mints. A package of singles Ч
Sid's "My Way" Ч had broken under them, turning the much-stained mattress
into a fakir's bed of nails. Vinyl shards stabbed his unbroken skin.
Johnny Pop was naked but for leopard-pattern briefs and socks, and the
jewelry. Prizing his new clothes too much to get them gory, he had neatly
folded and placed the suit and shirt on a chair well away from the bed.
His face and chest were sticky with blood and other discharges.
As the red rush burst in his eyes and ears, his senses flared, more acute
by a dozenfold. Outside, in iced velvet October night, police sirens
sounded like the wailings of the bereaved mothers of Europe. Distant shots
burst as if they were fired in the room, stabs of noise inside his skull.
Blobby TV light painted neon a cityscape across ugly wallpaper, populated
by psychedelic cockroaches.
He tasted the ghosts of the Chelsea Hotel: drag queens and vampire
killers, junkies and pornographers, artists and freaks, visionaries and
wasters. Pressing into his mind, they tried to make of his undead body a
channel through which they could claw their way back to this plane of
existence. Their voices shrieked, clamoring for attention. Cast out of
Manhattan, they lusted for restoration to their paved paradise.
Though his throat protested, Johnny forced himself to swallow. Nancy's
living blood had scarcely been of better quality than this dead filth.
Americans fouled their bodies. Her habits would have killed her soon, even
if she hadn't invited a vampire into Room 100. He didn't trouble himself
with guilt. Some people were looking for their vampires, begging all their
lives for death. His nosferatu hold upon the world was tenuous. He could
only remain on sufferance. Without the willing warm, he would starve and
die. They fed him. They were to blame for him.
Dead blood, heavy with Tuinol and Dilaudid, smote his brain, washing away
the ghosts. He had to be careful; this city was thronged with the truly
dead, loitering beyond the ken of the warm, desperate for attention from
those who could perceive them. When he was feeding, they crowded around.
Having been dead, however briefly, he was a beacon for them.
He yowled and threw the meat-sack off him. He sat up in the bed, nerves
drawn taut, and looked at the dead girl. She was ghost-white flesh in
black underwear. The flowering neck wound was the least of the marks on
her. Scarifications crisscrossed her concave tummy. Pulsing slits opened
like gills in her sides, leaking the last of her. The marks of his talons,
they were dead mouths, beseeching more kisses from him.