Chapter 97: Hotel Transylvania Needs Rock and Roll
The party had arrived before the party officially started.
The carriages came in from the beach road as the last of the sunset finished its business — pumpkin carriages, coffin carriages, vehicles that had been assembled from materials that reflected their owners' specific relationships with conventional transportation. Each one announced itself with the specific sound of wheels on cobblestone that hadn't been laid for human comfort, and each one deposited guests who moved toward the hotel entrance with the ease of people arriving somewhere they'd been before and were glad to be back.
Rango stood at the window with Mavis, who was providing the commentary with the warm enthusiasm of someone who had been watching this parade from this window for over a century and had not gotten tired of it.
"The pumpkin carriage is Wayne and Wanda," she said. "Werewolf family. Northern part of the island. They have a lot of children. A lot."
Rango looked at the carriage. At the family emerging from it, which was numerous in the specific way of a family that had committed entirely to the concept.
"Werewolves and Vampires," he said. "On the same guest list."
Mavis looked at him with the puzzled expression of someone encountering an assumption they don't recognize.
"Why wouldn't they be?" she said.
He thought about Luke — Shadow Hunter field leader, werewolf, married to Jocelyn, running containment operations in the northeast with the organized professionalism of someone who had built a framework for that relationship. He thought about the Shadow Hunter files on vampire elders, which described a different kind of dynamic.
"Human communities," he said. "The relationship between those categories tends to be — complicated."
"That's a human community problem," Mavis said, pleasantly. "Wayne argues with Dad sometimes. Dad argues back. Then they play cards and stay up until four in the morning." She returned to the window. "The gem-inlaid carriage is Murray. He's been alive for thousands of years and considers himself the wisest person on the island. He might be right, which makes him very difficult at dinner parties."
The coffin-shaped carriage — black lacquer, gold fittings, the aesthetic of something that had been custom-built for someone with specific requirements and significant resources — opened to produce a figure wrapped in bandaging that communicated both tremendous age and a careful attention to presentation.
"Murray," Rango confirmed.
"And that—" Mavis pointed at a large shape being transported on what appeared to be an industrial flatbed — "is Frank. He's—"
"Frankenstein's monster," Rango said.
"He prefers Frank," Mavis said. "He's the kindest person I know. He cried at my last birthday party. Wanda had to lend him a handkerchief." She watched Frank's transport navigate the gate with the specific focus of someone who had seen this parking challenge many times and was hoping it went better than usual. "He has to wind up every few steps. It helps if you offer."
Frank's arrival was followed by a series of guests that Rango catalogued with the specific attention of someone who had been working in supernatural categories for eight months and was encountering a concentration of them that made the Staten Island engagement look like a sample size.
Slime entities — genuinely gelatinous, moving with the specific locomotion of something that had solved the problem of getting from point A to point B using different physics than legs. Zombies in the functional rather than the horror-movie sense — moving carefully, greeting other guests with the particular deliberateness of something that had learned to compensate for coordination limitations through conscientiousness. Witches on brooms who parked in the designated area with the practiced ease of frequent visitors. A spider entity who navigated the entrance with the specific challenge of managing eight points of contact through a door designed for two.
And at the entrance, greeting everyone: two dried human heads mounted on either side of the door, who opened their eyes when guests approached and said — in the specific warm register of someone who had been doing hospitality for a very long time — Welcome to Hotel Transylvania. So glad you came.
The skeleton band was in the courtyard.
They were dressed in the specific aesthetic of the Coco (2017) Día de Muertos visual vocabulary — the flower motifs, the traditional instruments, the specific joyful energy of a band that had been playing music for longer than most of their audience had been anything — and they were performing with the commitment of something that loved what it was doing.
The music was genuinely good.
The totem on Rango's palm was running at the specific temperature of the sustained supernatural concentration — not threat-level, just the ambient reading of being in a room that contained entities spanning every category he'd encountered and several he hadn't.
The reading of being in the most comprehensively supernatural room he'd ever been in in his life.
Which included the Cabin's lower levels in Hutchinson's description, the Staten Island engagement, and Anna Manina's fortieth-floor apartment.
This was more.
"You're not afraid," Mavis said, watching his face.
"I'm assessing," Rango said.
"That's different from afraid?"
"Usually," he said.
She smiled. "Good. Because they can smell fear. Not literally — well, some of them literally. Murray definitely can. But generally."
"Good to know," Rango said.
"Also," she said, "don't let the Invisible Man startle you. He looks invisible, obviously, but he has a very distinctive cologne. If you smell lavender and there's nobody there, that's Griffin. He's very sensitive about being acknowledged."
"I'll acknowledge the lavender," Rango said.
"He'll appreciate that," Mavis said, and pulled his hand toward the stairs.
The ballroom of Hotel Transylvania at full occupancy had the specific atmosphere of somewhere that had been designed for exactly this — for the specific combination of entities currently in it, moving and talking and eating and existing in the particular proximity of a party where everyone knew each other and had been doing this for a very long time.
The worm-based pastry spread on the tables was, apparently, excellent. The guests were working through it with the focused appreciation of people encountering something they'd been looking forward to. Toothless had been given his own table — a practical decision by the skeleton serving staff, who had assessed his appetite at introductions and made the correct logistical conclusion — and was operating at that table with the single-minded efficiency of something for whom the worm pie situation had been revelatory and who intended to follow up on it comprehensively.
Ted was at the drinks tower.
He had located a Slime entity and established a rapport with it through the specific mechanism of sitting beside something at a party and sharing a drink, which worked across more category boundaries than most people expected. They were, as best as Rango could tell from across the room, having a genuine conversation — Ted gesturing in the way he did when he was making a point, the Slime entity producing a quality that might have been the Slime equivalent of laughing.
Ted had been at parties in more categories of venue than Rango had been alive, and it showed.
"These two," Rango said, watching them, "could be anywhere."
"They fit," Mavis said, and she sounded pleased about it.
A gargoyle materialized from the left side of the room with the specific momentum of something large that moved faster than its size suggested it should. Three meters tall, wings folded against its back, the specific physicality of something that had been made from stone and had become something else.
It looked at Mavis with the expression that Rango had learned to recognize as a cross-species constant — the specific expression of someone who had decided in advance that a particular person was going to be glad to see them and was deploying that assumption at full force.
"Mavis," the gargoyle said. "You look—"
"Mr. Gargoyle," Mavis said, with the pleasant but positioned tone of someone who had been navigating this specific dynamic for multiple birthdays. "This is my friend Rango. He's visiting the island."
The gargoyle looked at Rango.
At the blue face paint.
At the general presentation.
"Frankenstein's monster?" it said, uncertainly. "You don't look right."
"Explain," Rango said, "what 'don't look right' means, and be careful about how you do it."
"I just mean—" the gargoyle's wings shifted — "you're not — ugly enough. Frankenstein's monsters are usually—"
"If the next word is a category description," Rango said pleasantly, "I'd reconsider."
The gargoyle looked at him.
Rango looked back.
The gargoyle, who was three meters tall and made of something between stone and flesh and had been alive for a significant portion of recorded history, made a recalculation.
"You have good bone structure," it said instead. "For your type."
"Thank you," Rango said.
Mavis steered them toward the center of the room with the practiced ease of a host managing traffic, and leaned close to Rango's ear as they moved:
"That's his version of a compliment," she said. "He doesn't give them often. You did something right."
"I looked like I wasn't going to be interesting to argue with," Rango said.
"That," she said, "is exactly what you did."
He acquired a drink from a passing skeleton waiter — something that bubbled in a way that liquids in his experience didn't usually bubble but which tasted, on the first careful sip, genuinely good — and settled into the specific stance of someone working a room with purpose.
The gargoyle had been useful before Rango had redirected the conversation — it had mentioned the Dark Forest in a way that confirmed it lived there and knew it well. That was information. The party was information. Every entity in this room was information about the island and what had been here long enough to call it home.
He worked the room the way he worked the museum after hours — present, attentive, letting the conversations find their own shape while noting what each one contained.
The mummy, Murray, was conducting what appeared to be a philosophical debate with a pair of witches about the nature of temporal experience from the perspective of something that had existed across multiple civilizational collapses. Rango listened for four minutes and extracted two pieces of information about the Dark Forest's eastern approach that Murray didn't know he was providing.
The Invisible Man, Griffin, acknowledged Rango when Rango said — into the space beside a drinks table that smelled strongly of lavender — "Good evening, Griffin. Mavis mentioned you'd be here." The Invisible Man's response was surprised and warm, which told Rango that this particular courtesy wasn't common and that Griffin kept track of who provided it.
Frank — enormous, gentle, the specific warmth of Frankenstein (1931) understood correctly, which was that the monster was never the monster — had been talking to Ted and had apparently made Ted laugh at something, which was a capability that earned points in Rango's assessment of anyone.
Wayne and Wanda's children were everywhere simultaneously, which was the werewolf family's contribution to the party's ambient energy, and Wayne himself was at the far end of the room telling a story to a cluster of guests that involved several vivid physical demonstrations. Wanda watched this with the expression of a woman who had seen this story many times and still found the audience's reaction entertaining.
On the highest floor of the hotel, in the room that Rango had identified on his way in as the room that had a specific quality of privacy — the kind of privacy that contained something important — Dracula stood in front of a painting.
He did this every year on Mavis's birthday.
The woman in the painting had Mavis's eyes and Mavis's smile and the specific quality of warmth that Mavis had inherited completely and expressed in every room she entered. She had been gone for over a century. Dracula spoke to the painting the way you spoke to people you'd loved for a very long time and missed with a specificity that didn't become general with time.
"She's eighteen," he said. "A hundred and eighteen. She was supposed to — by now she should have—" he stopped. "She's happy. She's genuinely happy tonight. There's a human in the hotel and I haven't liked any of it except that Mavis is happier than I've seen her in years and I don't know what to do with that information."
He touched the frame.
"He has something in his palm," he said. "I've seen three things in my four hundred years that produced that reading. Your grandfather's ring. The key to the island's center that's been in my vault for eighty years. And whatever this Winchester is carrying." He paused. "He arrived through the storm. The Night Fury bonded with him. His grandfather was here forty years ago and I gave him the same room." He looked at the painted face. "I'm either making the right decision or the wrong one. I've been making decisions for four hundred years and I still can't always tell."
He held the painting's frame for a moment.
"She's going to want to go to the Dark Forest," he said. "After tonight. I know my daughter. She's going to want to go, and the Winchester is going to take her, and I'm going to have to — let that happen." He exhaled. "You would have done it better than me. You always knew when to hold and when to open the hand."
He turned from the painting.
And then remembered.
The song.
He'd told Mavis there was going to be a special surprise. The surprise was supposed to be Rango singing, which was a story that had been constructed in real time under pressure and had not been followed up on in any operational sense.
He moved.
In the ballroom, Rango was mid-conversation with the gargoyle — they'd found their way back to each other, and the gargoyle, it turned out, was considerably more interesting than its initial approach had suggested — when the black mist appeared and Dracula materialized at his elbow.
"The song," Dracula said.
Rango looked at him.
"The special surprise," Dracula said. "That I told Mavis about. That you suggested. Earlier."
"I suggested it as an explanation for why we were in the courtyard at two in the morning," Rango said.
"Yes," Dracula said. "And Mavis has been looking forward to it since that conversation, which was—" he checked — "fourteen hours ago, which is fourteen hours of anticipation that I am now responsible for delivering on." His eyes communicated the specific urgency of a parent who has made a promise on behalf of someone else and is now facing the accounting. "What are you going to sing?"
Rango looked at the ballroom.
At the skeleton band, who had transitioned between sets with the professionalism of musicians who had been playing together for long enough that transition was seamless.
At the room full of entities spanning every supernatural category he'd encountered and several he hadn't.
At Mavis, across the room, laughing at something Frank had apparently said, the specific full laugh of someone who was genuinely having the best night they'd had in a very long time.
"What does she like?" Rango said.
"Rock," Dracula said, immediately, with the specific certainty of someone who had strong opinions about this and had been suppressing them for the duration of the conversation. "Hotel Transylvania needs rock and roll. It has always needed rock and roll. The skeleton band is excellent but they are not rock and roll." He looked at Rango. "Can you do rock?"
Rango thought about this.
He had been, in various phases of his life, competent at several things. He had never been in a situation that required the specific intersection of those things with a ballroom full of supernatural entities and a Night Fury eating worm pastries at a dedicated table.
"What kind of rock?" he said.
"Any kind," Dracula said. "All of it. She's one hundred and eighteen years old and she has never heard live rock and roll because I—" he stopped — "because the opportunities haven't presented themselves." He held Rango's gaze with the specific sincerity of a parent who has identified a gap in his child's life and is asking for help filling it. "Please."
Rango looked at the skeleton band.
At their instruments.
At the room.
At Ted, who had apparently been listening to this conversation from the drinks table, and who gave him the specific look of someone who wanted to know what was going to happen next and was reserving his advice until after the decision.
"Talk to the band," Rango said. "Ask if they know You Shook Me All Night Long."
Dracula looked at him.
"AC/DC," Rango said. "1980. Back in Black. Ask them."
Dracula turned and was at the skeleton band before Rango finished the sentence, speaking rapidly in a language that the band apparently understood, because the lead skeleton nodded and said something back, and there was a brief consultation among the musicians, and then the lead skeleton turned back to Dracula and said, in the specific tone of a musician who has been asked whether they know a song they absolutely know:
Yeah. We know that one.
Dracula returned.
"They know it," he said.
"Good," Rango said. He looked at the ballroom. At Mavis, who hadn't noticed this exchange yet. "Give me two minutes."
He found Ted.
"You Shook Me All Night Long," he said. "You know it?"
"I know every song," Ted said. "That's a strong opener for this room."
"Can you back me up?"
Ted looked at the skeleton band.
At the room.
At the specific assembled supernatural density of the party.
"Back in Ghana," he said, "there was a principle: if you're going to do a thing, do the thing completely."
"Is that a yes?" Rango said.
"That's a yes," Ted said. He slid off the drinks table. "Also, for the record, this is going to be extraordinary."
"For the record," Rango said, "I know."
The song started the way AC/DC intended it to start — not with a suggestion, with a statement. The skeleton band locked into the rhythm the way bands locked into a rhythm when they knew a song in the way that only came from playing it for a very long time, and Ted provided the specific backing that a small bear with excellent timing and no self-consciousness about performing provided.
The room turned.
Not immediately — first the people closest to the band, then the people near them, then the whole room, the specific ripple of attention spreading outward from the source.
Mavis turned.
Saw Rango at the front.
Her expression did something that Dracula, watching from the back of the room, would remember specifically for the next four hundred years.
It was the expression she'd had as a child when she first understood what music was — not heard it, understood it, the moment when sound organized itself into something that required a response from the body rather than just the ears.
She'd been four years old.
She was a hundred and eighteen now, and the expression was identical.
The room began to move the way rooms moved when the music was right — not the organized movement of dancing in the formal sense, the organic movement of beings that had bodies and rhythm and were in proximity to something that addressed both simultaneously.
Wayne was first — the werewolf's specific relationship with rhythm was biological rather than aesthetic, and he was on his feet before the first verse finished. Wanda followed, which started a chain reaction in the werewolf children that was both impressive and slightly chaotic.
Frank, who cried at birthday parties, was already working on that.
Murray observed the proceedings with the expression of someone who had been alive long enough to see the invention of music and who was updating his assessment of it with this new data.
The gargoyle, who had been standing near the wall with the posture of someone who didn't dance and had never danced, was moving. Not dancing, technically. But moving, which was more than the gargoyle had done at any previous party that anyone present could recall.
Toothless stopped eating.
He turned from his table.
His tail started.
By the second chorus, the tail was fully operational and he had relocated from the dedicated table to the dance floor, where he was occupying space with the specific joyful energy of a Night Fury who had discovered that rock and roll agreed with him deeply.
Dracula stood at the back of the room.
He looked at his daughter, who was dancing in the middle of the party she'd been planning for six months, in the ballroom of the hotel she'd lived in for a hundred and eighteen years, to a song she'd never heard before, with a smile on her face that was the specific smile of someone who is exactly where they are supposed to be.
He looked at the human who was causing this.
At the blue face paint. At the totem on his palm. At the specific quality of someone who had arrived through a storm that wasn't supposed to let people through and had walked into his hotel and his daughter's birthday party and had done this.
He thought about the painting upstairs.
About what she would have said.
She's ready, Drac. Open the hand.
He looked at Mavis one more time.
Then he walked to the edge of the dance floor.
And — with the specific dignity of a four-hundred-year-old vampire who had decided that the occasion required it — he started to move.
Not dramatically.
But he moved.
And the room, which had been watching him not move for as long as anyone had been watching him at parties, registered this with the specific delight of people who had been waiting for exactly this and had almost given up.
Wayne pointed.
Wanda covered her mouth.
Several of the werewolf children stopped what they were doing.
Frank, who was already crying, cried harder.
Ted, from his position behind Rango, said into the music: "I want it on the record that I predicted this would be extraordinary."
"Noted," Rango said.
"Also—" Ted looked at Dracula, moving on the edge of the dance floor with the focused determination of someone doing something they have decided to do completely — "in Ghana, we had a saying."
"What was it?"
"A father who dances at his daughter's party," Ted said, "has already admitted everything he needed to admit."
The skeleton band ran it to the end without dropping a beat.
When it finished, the room was different than it had been when it started — not dramatically, just in the specific way that rooms were different after something had happened in them that everyone present would remember.
Mavis found Rango in the quiet after the applause.
She was slightly out of breath.
Her expression was the specific expression of someone who has just received something they didn't know they needed and is still processing the receiving.
"Thank you," she said.
"It's your birthday," Rango said.
"I know." She looked at her father, who was accepting congratulations from Wayne with the slightly embarrassed composure of someone who had done a thing and was not going to discuss it. "He danced."
"He danced," Rango confirmed.
"He hasn't danced since—" she stopped. Looked at the painting on the far wall, which was the same woman from the room upstairs, hung here where the whole party could see her. "A very long time."
Rango looked at the painting.
At Dracula.
At Mavis.
"The Dark Forest," Mavis said, quietly, so that only Rango could hear. "After the party. You said."
"After the party," he confirmed.
She nodded once.
The party wasn't over.
But something had been decided.
[Reader Event Active]
500 Power Stones = +1 Extra Chapter
10 Reviews = +1 Extra Chapter
Thanks for reading!
20+advance chapters on P1treon Soulforger