by Ellen Datlow
I cry myself to sleep.
9. THE NIGHTMARE
He is underwater with them. Naked. He has been cut with a razor and the wounds gape open. The black ribbons are now bright red plastic belts and they curl around him. He sits at the table, his head back, the whites of his eyes trained on the watery blue sky and shrouded sun. The actor. And I cannot save him. He has been canceled.
And worse, I do not want to save myself. I sit next to him and slowly, but surely, every breath in my lungs escapes and rises to the surface without me. I know I no longer fight it. My pink legs stretch out before me. It’s all over. Someone keeps telling me I’m a whore, a slut, a prostitute, and I realize it does not matter because I am dying.
In a dream you’re not supposed to die. But I did.
And in that pool, Cara Ann’s pool.
But I do not want to.
Die.
10. THE RESCUE
We went shopping on Melrose Avenue, Cara Ann and I did. We also hit the other major shopping areas and had a fine dinner at the chef’s restaurant. We saw Cher or someone who looks just like her. I told Cara Ann it couldn’t be Cher because she lives in New York and Cara Ann confided her showbiz sources had informed her that she was in town working on some hot movie deal. I think she just didn’t want me to leave LA without seeing a really famous movie star, bigger than P. C. Bergman. Poor Pete.
I bought some clothes. And I’m going home soon, I think, or maybe I’ll never go home. I am very unhappy because it’s still there. This vacation has not done me a lot of good. I don’t really remember anything about it. Not like I should. Maybe I never will. Maybe I shouldn’t. I might stay another week. I might not teach this year.
I haven’t heard from the actor, but Cara Ann heard from Ben that I made quite an impression. She didn’t say what kind. She might’ve just said that to make me feel better. She is guilty about the time spent with the chef—Paulo or Paulie. Her little boy, Teddy, comes back next week. It might be nice to stay a little longer.
And it might not.
The weather continues warm. I wrote a postcard to Mom and Dad that actually said, “Wish you were here.” What if they’re on the next plane? I’m going to swim today.
I’m wearing the expensive Norma Kamali swimsuit I bought on a whim and that will take me months to pay off. I’m in the shallow end. It’s early morning and Cara Ann’s gone to work. The air’s too cool. My skin shows off a wonderful set of goose bumps. I wade deeper in. Then I see them, the pool people, and they see me. Only this time I hear them. Screaming. Someone has tied them to their chairs. Someone is raping the woman, or trying to. It’s just a shadow. God, no, the man, the man is dead. He cannot help her. And look at the woman pushing at the shadow hands and now another shadow falls across her, holding her down with his feet. No one wants to rescue her. No one. But I can. She knows I can see her.
“I’m coming to save you! I’ll save you—hold on, I’m coming—"I’ll dive in. I can do it. She doesn’t know how weak I am, how bloodless and thin. My legs feel like two trembling towers of strawberry Jell-O. But I have to do it.
“Molly!” I turn and see Pete waving at me from the gate. It’s locked. Now is not the time—he can’t stop me. Idiot’s trying to climb over the gate but I can’t wait, there isn’t time. I point at the pool people and I wade in deeper. I’ve got to take a good breath and plunge in. He’s hurting her. He has one of her breasts; he’s squeezing it hard. I can see it so plain. I can see no one cares. But I do.
“I’ll tell—everyone will know what an ass you are. Let me go, you sorry bastard—” I’m in over my head and sinking. I’m going way down on butterfly wings laden with weights. I’m a butterfly in an astronaut’s suit. I am drowning.
I could swim if I really wanted to. I could die, too. I have a choice. Why doesn’t someone help?
“We’re just going to fuck you, just like your boss does.” They were just kids, bad boys in fake leather, with knives and hard cocks, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. And I begged them to stop, to let me go. “Please, God, let me go, please.”
The water swallows me whole. Down at the bottom I see the table’s gone; the chairs are gone. The pool people have at last abandoned me. I can rescue no one but myself. A knife in the water, plunging backward. My hand shoots up. Attention class. Any questions?
The man’s hand grasps mine strongly. But I’m already climbing out of the pool.
“Are you okay?” he says.
And I kiss him. He touches my face. “You know who they were, don’t you?” he says. I nod.
“My students.”
Assault as vampire.
To put the stake through the heart of any vampire, you must first know the identity of the vampire. Denial of assault is subtle and dangerous. The assault is given a sort of power both corrosive and sickening. In order for Molly to rescue herself, she had to first acknowledge what had happened. In doing so, she puts the stake through the vampire and frees herself to live again, no longer allowing the rapists to keep raping her, again, and again, and again.
I wrote this story for all of the Mollys out there and the men like Pete who try to understand them.
And also because butterflies cannot wear astronaut suits, nor should they have to.
Melissa Mia Hall
A WEEK IN THE UNLIFE
David J. Schow
Schow’s protagonist knows how to get rid of vampires. He’s a media creation and has all the answers. …
1
When you stake a bloodsucker, the heart blood pumps out thick and black, the consistency of honey. I saw it make bubbles as it glurped out. The creature thrashed and squirmed and tried to pull out the stake—they always do, if you leave on their arms for the kill—but by the third whack it was, as Stoker might say, dispatched well and duly.
I lost count a long time ago. Doesn’t matter. I no longer think of them as being even former human beings, and feel no anthropomorphic sympathy. In their eyes I see no tragedy, no romance, no seductive pulp appeal. Merely lust, rage at being outfoxed, and debased appetite, focused and sanguine.
People usually commit journals as legacy. So be it. Call me sentry, vigilante if you like. When they sleep their comatose sleep, I stalk and terminate them. When they walk, I hide. Better than they do.
They’re really not as smart as popular fiction and films would lead you to believe. They do have cunning, an animalistic savvy. But I’m an experienced tracker; I know their spoor, the traces they leave, the way their presence charges the air. Things invisible or ephemeral to ordinary citizens, blackly obvious to me.
The journal is so you’ll know, just in case my luck runs out. Sundown. Nap time.
2
Naturally the police think of me as some sort of homicidal crackpot. That’s a given; always has been for my predecessors. More watchers to evade. Caution comes reflexively to me these days. Police are slow and rational; they deal in the minutiae of a day-to-day world, deadly enough without the inclusion of bloodsuckers.
The police love to stop and search people. Fortunately for me, mallets and stakes and crosses and such are not yet illegal in this country. Lots of raised eyebrows and jokes and nudging but no actual arrests. When the time comes for them to recognize the plague that has descended upon their city, they will remember me, perhaps with grace.
My lot is friendless, solo. I know and expect such. It’s okay.
City by city. I’m good at ferreting out the nests. To me, their kill patterns are like a flashing red light. The police only see presumed loonies, draw no linkages; they bust and imprison mortals and never see the light.
I am not foolhardy enough to leave bloodsuckers lying. Even though the mean corpus usually dissolves, the stakes might be discovered. Sometimes there is other residue. City dumpsters and sewers provide adequate and fitting disposal for the leftovers of my mission.
The enemy casualties.
I wish I could advise the authorities, work hand in hand with them. Too complicated. Too many v
ariables. Not a good control situation. Bloodsuckers have a maddening knack for vanishing into crevices, even hairline splits in logic.
Rule: Trust no one.
3
A female one, today. Funny. There aren’t as many of them as you might suppose.
She had courted a human lover, so she claimed, like Romeo and Juliet—she could only visit him at night, and only after feeding, because bloodsuckers too can get carried away by passion.
I think she was intimating that she was a physical lover of otherworldly skill; I think she was fighting hard to tempt me not to eliminate her by saying so.
She did not use her mouth to seduce mortal men. I drove the stake into her brain, through the mouth. She was of recent vintage and did not melt or vaporize. When I fucked her remains, I was surprised to find her warm inside, not cold, like a cadaver. Warm.
With some of them, the human warmth is longer in leaving. But it always goes.
4
I never met one before that gave up its existence without a struggle, but today I did, one that acted like he had been expecting me to wander along and relieve him of the burden of unlife. He did not deny what he was, nor attempt to trick me. He asked if he could talk a bit, before.
In a third-floor loft, the windows of which had been spray-painted flat black, he talked. Said he had always hated the taste of blood; said he preferred pineapple juice, or even coffee. He actually brewed a pot of coffee while we talked.
I allowed him to finish his cup before I put the ashwood length to his chest and drove deep and let his blackness gush. It dribbled, thinned by the coffee he had consumed.
5
Was thinking this afternoon perhaps I should start packing a Polaroid or some such, to keep a visual body count, just in case this journal becomes public record someday. It’d be good to have illustrations, proof. I was thinking of that line you hear overused in the movies. I’m sure you know it: "But there’s no such THING as a vampire!” What a howler; ranks right up there alongside "It’s crazy—but it just might work!” and "We can’t stop now for a lot of silly native superstitions!”
Right; shoot cozy little memory snaps, in case they whizz to mist or drop apart to smoking goo. That bull about how you’re not supposed to be able to record their images is from the movies, too. There’s so much misleading information running loose that the bloodsuckers—the real ones—have no trouble at all moving through any urban center, with impunity, as they say on cop shows.
Maybe it would be a good idea to tape-record the sounds they make when they die. Videotape them begging not to be exterminated. That would bug the eyes of all those monster movie fans, you bet.
6
So many of them beleaguering this city, it’s easy to feel outnumbered. Like I said, I’ve lost count.
Tonight might be a good window for moving on. Like them, I become vulnerable if I remain too long, and it’s prudent operating procedure not to leave patterns or become predictable.
It’s easy. I don’t own much. Most of what I carry, I carry inside.
7
They pulled me over on Highway Ten, outbound, for a broken left tail-light. A datafax photo of me was clipped to the visor in the highway patrol car. The journal book itself has been taken as evidence, so for now it’s a felt-tip and high-school notebook paper, which notes I hope to append to the journal proper later.
I have a cell with four bunks all to myself. The door is solid gray, with a food slot, unlike the barred cage of the bullpen. On the way back I noticed they had caught themselves a bloodsucker. Probably an accident; they probably don’t even know what they have. There is no sunrise or sunset in the block, so if he gets out at night, they’ll never know what happened. But I already know. Right now I will not say anything. I am exposed and at a disadvantage. The one I let slip today I can eliminate tenfold, next week.
8
New week. And I am vindicated at last.
I relaxed as soon as they showed me the photographs. How they managed documentation on the last few bloodsuckers I trapped, I have no idea. But I was relieved. Now I don’t have to explain the journal—which, as you can see, they returned to me immediately. They had thousands of questions. They needed to know about the mallets, the stakes, the preferred method of killstrike. I cautioned them not to attempt a sweep-and-clear at night, when the enemy is stronger.
They paid serious attention this time, which made me feel much better. Now the fight can be mounted en masse.
They also let me know I wouldn’t have to stay in the cell. Just some paperwork to clear, and I’m out among them again. One of the officials—not a cop, but a doctor—congratulated me on a stout job well done. He shook my hand, on behalf of all of them, he said, and mentioned writing a book on my work. This is exciting!
As per my request, the bloodsucker in the adjacent solitary cell was moved. I told them that to be really sure, they should use one of my stakes. It was simple vanity, really, on my part. I turn my stakes out of ashwood on a lathe. I made sure they knew I’d permit my stakes to be used as working models for the proper manufacture of all they would soon need.
When the guards come back I really must ask how they managed such crisp eight-by-tens of so many bloodsuckers. All those names and dates. First-class documentation.
I’m afraid I may be a bit envious.
This is a vampire story with no vampires in it. From punk vampires to porn vampires to gay vampires to vampirism-as-AIDS, vampire fiction has become conventional, a category unto itself. As a genre it is by and large ultraconservative, moribund, demographic, derivative, totally safe, and utterly dull, dull, dull. Grave wavers who wet themselves over today’s endlessly recycled bloodsucker might do well to exhume and rediscover the only two fundamental American vampire novels of this century—Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Les Whitten’s Progeny of the Adder. From them sprang, ultimately, the entire culture of pop vampirism as we know it today.
Distaste for such an adulterated gimmick as traditional vampirism played a big part in the creation of the above-mentioned books. It’s the ultimate challenge: Transcend me if you can.
It is the oversaturation of vampire lore, and the trivialist’s lust to accumulate ever more of it, that is itself a new form of vampirism.
The vampire hunter of unlife is a creature who feeds off your hunger to believe in vampires.
David J. Schow
LIFEBLOOD
Jack Womack
Womack, known for his science fiction novels, has only been writing short fiction in the last two years. His first story, also horror, was chosen for The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Fourth Annual Collection. "Lifeblood” shows how the rituals of religious orthodoxy can be easily perverted to create one’s own personal religion—deliberately or unconsciously. Judging from these two stories, Womack is an expert in the psychological obsessions that run our lives and hasten our deaths.
“One of the Pre-Raphaelites, I forget which,” the woman said, “buried a manuscript of his unpublished poems with his wife, or perhaps it was his sister, when she died. Several years later he decided he wanted to publish them after all, so he and his friends went to her grave one night and dug her up and retrieved them. Before they reburied her, he combed her hair.”
The man and the woman met on Sunday afternoons at the pastry shop on Amsterdam below 111th Street. This particular afternoon, they were talking about love.
“I never realized theologians could be so romantic,” he said.
“Those stories were never taught, you know,” she said, laughing. “I had to find them, or rather they found me.”
They’d been friends for years. They sat there, drinking coffee and sharing a slice of strudel, speaking with the ease and comfort that so rarely lovers, or even brothers and sisters, know.
“A woman I knew in graduate school died a couple of weeks ago,” she said. “By the time I heard, the funeral was over. I should have gone.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “She must not have been v
ery old.” “Younger than me, actually. I’ve never told you about her. About what happened. I’ve always felt responsible for her falling in love.” “Romance, again—” “It was such a long fall,” she said. “So tell me about it.”
“The first time I met Leah was in October of my second year. She lived next door to my friend Alice, in an apartment building on Claremont. When I saw her there in the hall I remembered she was in the class I was taking on Dante. She was very thin and pale, and wore long-sleeved sweaters in the warmest weather. If I’d thought about her at all before then, it was only to wonder whether she was an anorexic or an addict, for I remembered that there were those who called her both. She was neither, in fact. She and Alice already knew each other, and she joined us that evening, and we talked.”
“About what?”
“Nothing serious, as I recall. She’d transferred to Barnard from out west for her last two undergraduate years, and like Alice was in the comparative literature department. Leah was extremely intelligent, and so sweet as an angel, or such was the impression she found it impossible not to give. She was so talkative it was easy to tell how shy she truly was. Sometimes she’d say something in such a way, with such offhand yet careful phrasing, that I suspected she’d memorized a number of lines that could serve her well in any social situation, and repeated them as she’d had them told to her.
“Sometime before I left Alice’s she went back to her place, to her studies, she said, though shortly afterward we heard her leave. When she’d gone I asked Alice when they’d met. She told me Leah had cut herself one morning, and needed help.”