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Overview
Los Angeles--City of Angels, city of dreams. But sometimes the dreams become nightmares.
Having fled New York, Victor Renquist and his small group of Nosferatu are striving to reestablish their Colony in Los Angeles. They have become a deeper, darker part of the city's nightlife. And Hollywood's glitterati are hot on the scent of a new thrill, one that outshines all others--immortality.
But someone, somewhere, is meddling with even darker powers, powers that even the Nosferatu fear. Someone is attempting to summon the entity of ancient evil known at Cthulhu.
And Renquist must overcome dissent in his own Colony, solve the riddle of the Darklost (a being brought partway along the Nosferatu path and then abandoned), and combat powerful enemies to save the world--of humans!
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429973694 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2010 |
| Series: | Renquist Quartet , #2 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 443 KB |
About the Author
Mick Farren was born in Cheltenham, England on a wet night at the end of World War II. In the 1960s, he was a member of the psychedelic, proto-punk band The Deviants. His fiction received attention in the late punk seventies with The DNA Cowboys cult trilogy. Through the 1980s and 1990s, he tempered cyberpunk with his own post-Burroughs, post-Lovecraft strangeness, while at the same time functioning as a columnist, critic, and recording artist, teaching a science fiction and horror course at UCLA, publishing a number of non-fiction works on popular culture, including a best-selling biography of Elvis Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and the bizarre-fashion history The Black Leather, and also providing Rock&Roll lyrics for bands like Metallica, Motorhead, Brother Wayne Kramer, and others. With Kramer, he created the off-Broadway musical The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, and he scripted a number of TV documentaries. He entered the 21st century with the critically acclaimed and suitably unorthodox vampire saga The Renquist Quartet, and the alternate world epic Flame of Evil. Farren died in London in July 2013.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Victor Renquist touched a control set in the armrest of the long black stretch limousine and cracked the smoked-glass divider that separated him from Lamar. "Pull over and stop, please, just as soon as you are able."
From behind the wheel, Lamar answered without glancing back. "It's kind of hard on this stretch of Mulholland, sir."
Renquist nodded. "I know that. Just pull over when you can. Pull into one of those observation areas where you look out over the city."
"You want to look at the lights, sir?"
Renquist nodded and half smiled. "I do indeed, Lamar. I want to look at the lights."
The limo continued to glide effortlessly along the night hilltop scenic twists and turns of Mulholland Drive for perhaps two more minutes, and then Lamar smoothly eased it off the road and gravel crunched under the tires. The limousine came to a gentle stop and Lamar sat, saying nothing, not even looking round, just waiting for Renquist to announce what he intended to do next.
"I think I might step out and breathe the air, Lamar, such as it is."
"Very good, Mr. Renquist."
Renquist had no real need to speak to Lamar, he could have directed his instructions directly into the man's mind, but the two of them maintained the niceties of the chauffeur-employer relationship. Lamar got out of the driver's seat and walked to the right-hand passenger door. He opened it and Victor Renquist emerged from the car. Renquist straightened and stood for a moment, as good as his word, taking one deep breath after another. A hundred years ago, the air in the Los Angeles basin had been possessed of a desert purity, but what now filled his unique undead lungs was rank with gasoline and the oppressive scents of eucalyptus, honeysuckle, and night-blooming jasmine, exhaust fumes mingled with subtropical vegetation made unnaturally lush by water all the way from Nevada. Such was the way of human madness. By day, much of the city had a half-completed ugliness, slashed by freeways, picketed by rearing billboards and littered with shoddy, rectangular cement boxes of a basic and unsophisticated architectural crudity that even the overlay of palm trees, panoramic glass, and pink-and-turquoise stucco could scarcely disguise. Fortunately, because of his very nature, Victor Renquist was never required to see LA by day, except on television or perhaps through the charcoal-tinted windows of a speeding limo. For Renquist, the lauded California sun was nothing more than a lethal anathema. His own intimate knowledge of the city was strictly that of the city by night.
He walked a few paces to where, with only a low retaining wall to protect the unwary, the side of the road fell away in an almost sheer drop of sandy cliff for thirty or forty feet. Below him, the lights of Los Angeles, immortalized in so many motion pictures, extended to the horizon in every direction. For a moment, Renquist was gripped by a genetically atavistic wistfulness as he looked out over the electric jewelfield of lights. O, but there and then to transform himself into a huge batlike thing and swoop unseen over trees and rooftops and the gaudy neon boulevards, riding the unnatural thermals thrown up by the heat of the concrete landscape. Sadly, though, such exhilaration was never to be his. The secret of shapeshifting was more than a millennium lost and gone. The last of the ectomorphs had vanished over a thousand years ago, even before he had been created, and yet some twist in his nosferatu DNA could still remember and yearn, as he stood, a tall, imposing watcher in the night, black silk shirt rippling across his back in the slight breeze, high boots planted firmly and inevitably on solid ground. At first glance, Renquist looked like a slim but powerful man in perhaps his early forties, pale featured, with dark hair that curled to his shoulders. That was, of course, until one looked into his dark, deep-set eyes. The eyes told a true story, one that most humans could never bring themselves to face. Renquist's unguarded eyes were the sole testament to how he was not only incalculably old, but also something frighteningly other than human.
He may, of course have been biased, but for him, Los Angeles by night was a place of soft, if near complete, deception; a deception that was well-suited to the needs of a predator like himself. The very pollution that plagued the city in the day and, when inversion set in, turned the sky at the horizon an ominous brown, acted as a cosmetic screen, giving the night a feel of velvet-soft focus and causing the myriad of lights to gleam and twinkle like radiant gems. For the first few moments, Renquist took in the view with the nosferatu singlesight that closely conformed to the limited range and spectrum of normal human vision, and he stared across the only slightly less than symmetrical laser geometry of Hollywood and beyond like any mere tourist. Since he was compelled to live in a world at least numerically dominated by humanity, it was only sensible to spend at least some of his time observing it as mankind did. It was a piece of calculated self-discipline designed to avoid possibly fatal oversights, overestimations, and misconceptions. One on one, the nosferatu might be infinitely superior to the humans on whom they preyed, but Renquist was well aware that he and the others like him should never fall to an overweening reliance on that superiority. They were few, a comparative handful, while human numbers were in their constantly growing billions. With the odds so stacked against them, nosferatu survival had to be a matter of constant care and vigilance.
Los Angeles always struck Renquist as a city that had begun its decline even before it had been fully built. In some respects, it reminded him of Rome, Cairo, or Constantinople, except so much was missing from the picture. It had no great mosques or cathedrals, no wondrous structures that would survive for thousands of years. The glass-and-steel towers of downtown and Century City were hardly a substitute for all the places he had known when he'd been young and when he'd been human. They hardly-competed with St. Peter's or the Coliseum, the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi Palace, or the Basilica of St. Sophie, and certainly not the with the Great Pyramid, although that was really a whole other story. At first, the transitory and ad hoc nature of the place had suited Renquist, but lately he had become bored and reclusive. The challenges were tiresomely trivial, the ambitions desperately frivolous, and the driving criteria little more than infantile materialism. Renquist would have been happy to move on, but he knew, for the time being, he was firmly anchored by the rest of the colony. The colony had adapted well to this final city on the edge of America, and their presence was not so much as suspected. Although, as in New York, an arrangement had been made with a larcenous Salvadoran orderly at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital to ensure an uninterrupted supply of packaged whole blood, the nosferatu hunted on a regular if discreet basis. Unlike the New York colony, they did not even try to exist exclusively on the plastic packs of donor hemoglobin. Such a complete self-denial of their nature and appetite for the fresh kill had only led inexorably to the condition known as Feasting, the frenzied outbreak of uncontrollable slaughter that had all but caused the colony's downfall and annihilation back in Manhattan and necessitated their flight from that city.
In certain respects, Los Angeles was a wilder, less civilized place than New York. With just a bare century of history as city behind it, it had never been sufficiently developed to divorce it from the primal underlay of tooth and claw, and hunter and hunted. Coyotes still maintained furtive territory, even in the more populated areas of the hills and canyons, prowling affluent yards and pools to snag the unwary poodle or calico cat as what, from the coyotes' point of view, was a perfectly legitimate meal. In the same way, the city was full of enough lost and dislocated souls, with no one to miss them, mourn them, or investigate their disappearance, for the nosferatu of the colony to hunt virtually at will and completely escape detection. The presence of the movie industry created a perpetual and self-renewing community of runaways and the sadly overambitious who flocked there from all over the world with tinsel dreams of making it as big as Sandra Bullock or Leonardo DiCaprio, while the poor teeming Latino nations to the south supplied a constant influx of the unknown and undocumented. It was among these that Renquist and his companions found their equivalent of the coyotes' poodles and calico cats, and the colony seemed to thrive on the arrangement.
Julia, the youngest and most headstrong of the surviving colony, had especially taken to the Hollywood social parameters like a demon duck to a dark expanse of fetid green swamp water. If Renquist suggested moving on, Julia would be the first to raise the most strident and violent of objections. Julia had always been attracted to power, and in Los Angeles she had immediately recognized it. Now that time and cash had run out on the banking barons, and the military industrial complex had moved most of its billions to the Dixiecrat South, all true power was pretty much the monopoly of the entertainment industry. Accordingly, the slim deceptive blonde, with the deep Dietrich voice, the ice blue eyes, and the iron will of a Prussian field marshal, had homed in on the town's media elite like a moth to the flame, although Renquist knew the simile worked better in reverse. Julia was much more the flame coming to burn up the unsuspecting moths. Her ruthless determination was a million degrees more all-consuming and devious than that of the most highly venal of TV or movie moguls.
Of all the surviving nosferatu colony, however, Julia was the cannon most likely to tear loose, and in this Renquist only had himself to blame. He had after all created her in the first place. Julia Aschenbach had been a budding starlet in the Nazi film industry and reputedly one of Joseph Goebbels' countless mistresses. Renquist had thought it a fine karmic joke to bring her through the Change, so he could leave one of his kind at the very heart of the Nazi hierarchy. That death sect of degenerate human butchers had disgusted even him. And not merely one of his kind. Julia had been in that very first phase when the newly transformed are young, angry, and overwhelmingly predatory. On one point, though, he had grossly miscalculated. In his general contempt for humans, Renquist had failed to examine what kind of being he was Changing. If he'd thought of the human Julia at all, it had been to dismiss her as nothing more than a stunningly airheaded beauty who would be unlikely to survive the sun, the stake, or the fire for more than a few years undead on her own. As it turned out, she was both acutely cunning and a consummate survivor. Many years later, he had learned this to his cost, perhaps the terrible cost of his beloved Cynara.
Through long twentieth-century decades, Julia had killed and prospered. She had thrown her deviant undead energy into KGB psyops, black nights of Latin American counterinsurgency, and then on, with a complete right-angle turn, so typical of her character, into achieving nocturnal bohemian fame with her own depraved performance art of the damned. She had finally sought out Renquist in New York City and demanded that he acknowledge her as his own. Julia had been accepted into the colony, albeit over the objections of some of the established members, but her plans went further than that. From the moment that she had first entered the colony and assessed the situation, her ambition had been to replace Cynara as Renquist's consort and pair-bonded hunting partner. Although it was the human, Kelly, who had been the actual agent of Cynara's passing, given time, Julia might well have engineered the deed herself.
In the microcosm of the colony, just as in the macro-world of the humans, power was the key to understanding Julia. She had seen that Renquist, as Master of the colony, wielded the ultimate power and commanded the ultimate respect, and she had become determined to be the ultimate object of his affections. It might have been more flattering if Renquist had not been very well aware that, even if he and Julia did bond, it wouldn't end there. Ultimately, Julia didn't have the personality of a consort. Eventually she would get round to challenging him for the Mastery and, in the event of that confrontation, one of them would inevitably be destroyed.
Renquist sighed out loud. Nosferatu, for all their infinite time, strength, and awesome intelligence, were intractably quarrelsome creatures. "Ah, Julia, why do I have to spend so much time watching out for you? I hardly even like you."
Lamar, who was standing at a discreet distance by the driver's door of the black limo, stiffened. "You said something, Mr. Renquist?"
Renquist turned, stepping off the train of thought named Julia and turning his attention momentarily to the human chauffeur. "It's a while since I had you drive me, isn't it Lamar?"
"That's right, Mr. Renquist."
Lamar was one of that tiny minority of humans who had a great enough awareness of their expendable subservience that they were able to subsist in close proximity with nosferatu and be pleased to do their bidding. Once upon a time, they had been known as thralls; now the word seemed to be employee. Renquist smiled coldly at the man. "I haven't been out that much in the last few months."
"So I have observed."
A hinted, although never stated, promise on the part of the nosferatu to their strange mortal retainers was that, at some time in the future, when the human had proved his or her worth, the good and faithful servant would be rewarded with the priceless gift of near-eternal life. It was, however, a promise that the nosferatu rarely kept.
"I'm sure the others are more than enough to keep you busy."
"Indeed they are, sir."
Renquist looked speculatively at Lamar. This one might make it, unless, of course he had to be sacrificed to cover the colony's tracks, or used as emergency sustenance in a crisis. "But you were wondering why I suddenly decided to go for a solitary drive on this particular night?"
"I never wonder, Mr. Renquist." And that was the absolute truth. Lamar never wondered. Lamar was possessed of a mind that functioned extremely oddly even for the brain of a human. Renquist, however, rarely invaded it. He didn't believe in routinely entering the minds of humans with whom he needed to maintain a regular or close proximity. He only scanned them when monitoring or adjustment was needed. Human servants always grew to resent too much casual intrusion, even if they weren't consciously aware of it. They became mistrustful, unreliable, and in some extreme cases, unacceptably surly and uncooperative. Some even plunged into a form of paranoid schizophrenia. Renquist had, however, scanned Lamar very thoroughly when he had first accepted him into the employ of the colony, and what he discovered in the man's mind convinced him that, in Lamar, he might well have found the ideal retainer; certainly one worth preserving, too good to waste on any casual expenditure.
Lamar was a tall, raw-boned descendent of oil field roughnecks and itinerant cowboys. He had grown up in some forsaken, flatland hamlet in West Texas border country and had suffered a hate-inducing childhood worthy of any prominent serial killer, and like any prominent serial killer, the greatest satisfaction Lamar could imagine would be to randomly murder and mutilate others of his species. Unlike his more homicidal soul mates, however, he didn't act on his impulses. Those urges remained locked away, along with the memories and imaginings, in a place so deep in his mind that it was the mental equivalent of a steel safe. He loathed being around people to the point of phobia, but found a perverse comfort in the company of nosferatu. Renquist knew that this probably wasn't the way a human mind should function, and Lamar might well be, in the terms of human society, a dangerous and ticking time bomb, but that wasn't Renquist's problem. To him and the others, Lamar was loyal, devoted, and unquestioning, and these attributes were all that the Master of a colony should care about in his human vassals.
"You're a good man, Lamar."
Lamar's face was expressionless. "Thank you, sir."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Darklost"
by .
Copyright © 2000 Mick Farren.
Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
What People are Saying About This
Erik Himmelbach, Los Angeles Reader
Mick Farren is the Dark Prince of pop fiction.
Michael Moorcock
Mick Farren brings to the vampire novel the same energy, originality,and sheer creative drive that he brought to his finest rock and roll performances.