by Ellen Datlow
“In a way.”
“Do you want to find out?”
I nodded.
He didn’t touch me even in a casual way until we reached his room on the fourth floor. It was the first time I’d ever been higher than the galleria level. The lights in the hallway shone dimly, glowing with what little power was left from whatever was keeping the lobby lit up, and his hand was like fire as he pulled me out of the hallway and into the room.
His body was a layer of softness over hard muscle. I tore his clothing to get at it; he didn’t mind. Bursts of light from the outside gave me fleeting snapshots of his face. No matter what I did, he had the same expression of calm acceptance. Perhaps out of habit, covering the secret of his warmth—if the rest of us pod creatures knew he was the last (?) living thing on earth, what might we not do for this feeling of life he could arouse?
Already, his flesh wasn’t as warm as it had been. That was me, I thought, pushing him down on the bed. I was taking it from him and I couldn’t help it. Or perhaps it was just something inherent in the nature of being alive, that it would migrate to anyplace it was not.
Even so, even as he went from hot to cool, he lost nothing. Receptive, responsive, accommodating—in the silent lightning of dying stars, calm and accepting, but not passive. I was leading in this pas de deux, but he seemed to know how and where almost before I did, and was ready for it.
And now I could feel how it was happening, the way the life in his body was leached away into my own un-alive flesh. I was taking it from him. The act of taking is a distinctive one; no one who had ever taken anything had taken it quite like I took Sandor.
He gave himself up without resistance, and yet give up was not what he was doing, unless it was possible to surrender aggressively. It was as if I wanted him because his purpose was to be wanted, and he had been waiting for me, for someone to provide the wanting, to want him to death. Ersatz- Christ in the lobby had had it wrong, it never could have worked. Humans didn’t sacrifice themselves, they were sacrificed to; they didn’t give, they were alive only in the act of taking—
Somehow, even with my head on fire, I pulled away from him. He flowed with the movement like a storm tide. I fought the tangle of sheets and cold flesh against warm, and the violence felt almost as good as the sex. If I couldn’t fuck him to death, I’d settle for beating his head in, I thought dimly. We rolled off the bed onto the carpet and I scrambled away to the bathroom and slammed the door.
“Is there something wrong?”The puzzlement in his voice was so sincere I wanted to vomit.
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Why did you let me do that to you?”
He might have laughed. “Did you do something to me?”
A weak pain fluttered through my belly. There was a wetness on my thighs.
“Turn on the light,” he said. “You can now, you know. It’ll work for you, now that you’re living.”
I flipped the switch. The sudden brightness was blinding. Turning away from the lights over the sink, I saw myself in the full-length mirror on the door. The wetness on my thighs was blood.
My blood? Or his?
The pain in my belly came again.
“Jess?”
“Get away. Let me get dressed and get out of here. I don’t want this.”
“Let me in.”
“No. If you come near me, I’ll take more from you.”
Now he did laugh. “What is it you think you took?”
“Life. Whatever’s left. You’re alive and I’m one of the fading ones. I’ll make you fade, too.”
“That’s an interesting theory. Is that what you think happened?”
“Somehow you’re still really alive. Like the earth still turns, like there are still stars. Figures we wouldn’t all fade away at once, us people. Some of us would still be alive. Maybe as long as there are still stars, there’ll still be some people alive.” The sound of my laughter in the small room was harsh and ugly. “So romantic. As long as there are stars in the sky, that’s how long you’ll be here for me. Go away. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“And what will you do?” he asked. “Go back to your bloodless room and your bloodless man, resume your bloodless wait to see what the end will be? It’s all nothing without the risk, isn’t it? When there’s nothing to lose, there’s really nothing at all. Isn’t that right?”
The lock snapped and the door swung open. He stood there holding on to either side of the doorway. The stark hunger in the angular features had made his face into a predator’s mask, intent, voracious, without mercy. I backed up a step, but there was nowhere to go.
He lunged at me and caught me under the arms, lifting me to eye level. “You silly cow,” he whispered, and his breath smelled like meat. “I didn’t get cooler, you just got warmer.”
He shoved me away. I hit the wall and slid down. The pain in my shoulders and back was exquisite, not really pain but pure sensation, the un-alive, undead nerve endings frenzied with it. I wanted him to do it again, I wanted him to hit me, or caress me, or cut me, or do anything that would make me feel. Pain or pleasure, whatever there was, I wanted to live through it, get lost in it, die of it, and, if I had to die of it, take him with me.
He stood over me with the barest of smiles. “Starting to understand now?”
I pushed myself up, my hands slipping and sticking on the tiled wall.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “I think maybe you are. I think you’re definitely starting to get it.” He backed to the sink and slid a razor blade off the counter. “How about this?” He held the blade between two fingers, moving it back and forth so it caught the light. “Always good for a thrill. Your bloodless man understands that well enough already. Like so many others. Where do you think he goes when he takes his little walks up the promenade, what do you think he does when he leaves you to sit watching the hanging woman twist and turn on the end of her rope?” He laughed and popped the blade into his mouth, closing his eyes with ecstasy. Then he bared his teeth; the blood ran over his lower lip onto his chin and dripped down onto his chest.
“Come on,” he said, the razor blade showing between his teeth. “Come kiss me.”
I wasn’t sure that I leaped at him as much as the life in him pulled me by that hunger for sensation. He caught me easily, holding me away for a few teasing seconds before letting our bodies collide.
The feeling was an explosion that rushed outward from me, and as it did, I finally did understand, mostly that I hadn’t had it right at all, but it was too late to do anything about it. The only mercy he showed was to let the light go out again.
Or maybe that wasn’t mercy. Maybe that was only what happened when he drained it all out of me and back into himself, every bit of pain and pleasure and being alive.
He kept the razor blade between his teeth for the whole time. It went everywhere, but he never did kiss me.
The room was so quiet, I thought he’d left. I got up from where I’d been lying, half in and half out of the bathroom, thinking I’d find my clothes and go away now, wondering how long I’d be able to hide the damage from Jim—if damage it was, since I no longer felt anything—wondering if I would end up in the hospital, if there was already a bed with my name on it, or whether I’d be just another exotic for nightly sessions at the Kurhaus.
“Just one more thing,” he said quietly. I froze in the act of taking a step toward the bed. He was standing by the open window, looking out at the street.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Aren’t I dead enough yet?”
He laughed, and now it was a soft, almost compassionate sound, the predator pitying the prey. “I just want to show you something.”
“No.”
He dragged me to the window and forced my head out. “See it anyway, this one time. A favor, because I’m so well pleased.” He pulled my head back to make me look up at the sky. A night sky, very flat, very black, featureless, without a cloud and with no stars, none at all.
&nbs
p; “A magic lantern show, yes,” he said, as though I’d spoken. “We put the signs and wonders in the sky for you. So you wouldn’t see this.”
He forced my head down, digging his fingers more deeply into my hair. Below, in the courtyard, people wandered among a random arrangement of cylindrical things without seeing them. They were pale things, silent, unmoving; long, ropy extensions stretched out from the base of each one, sinking into the pavement like cables, except even in the dim light, I could see how they pulsed.
While I watched, a split appeared in the nearest one. The creature that pushed its way out to stand and stretch itself in the courtyard was naked, vaguely female-looking, but not quite human. It rubbed its hands over the surface of the cylinder, and then over itself. I pulled away.
“You see, that’s the other thing about your kind besides your tendency toward too little, too late,” he said conversationally as I dressed. If I tucked my shirt into my pants I could keep myself together a little better. “You miss things. You’re blind. All of you. Otherwise, you’d have seen us before now. We’ve always been here, waiting for our time with you. If even one of you had seen us, you might have escaped us. Perhaps even destroyed us. Instead, you all went on with your lives. And now we’re going on with them.” He paused, maybe waiting for me to say something. I didn’t even look at him as I wrapped my shirt around the ruin of my torso. “Don’t worry. What I just showed you, you’ll never see again. Perhaps by the time you get home, you’ll even have forgotten that you saw anything.”
He turned back to the window. “See you around the promenade.”
“First time’s the worst.”
The Ghost of Lifetimes Past fell into step beside me as I walked back along the promenade. She was definitely looking worse, wilted and eaten away. “After that,” she added, “it’s the natural order of things.”
“I don’t know you,” I said.
“I know you. We all know each other, after. Go home to your husband now and he’ll know you, too.”
“I’m not married.”
“Sure.” She smiled at me, her face breaking into a mass of lines and seams. “It could be worse, you know. They like to watch it waste me, they like to watch it creep through me and eat me alive. They pour life into us, they loan it to us, you could say, and then they take it back with a great deal of interest. And fascination. They feed on us, and we feed on them, but considering what they are, we’re actually feeding on ourselves. And maybe a time will come that will really be the end. After all, how long can we make ourselves last?”
She veered away suddenly, disappearing down a staircase that led to one of the abandoned restaurants closer to the waterline.
As I passed the tower, the hanging woman waved a greeting. There would be no horizon line on the ocean again today.
I had thought Jim would know as soon as he saw me, but I didn’t know what I expected him to do. He watched me from where he lay on the bed with his arms behind his head. Through the thin material of his shirt, I could see how he’d been split from below his collarbone down to his navel. It seems to be a favorite pattern of incision with them, or maybe they really have no imagination to speak of.
He still said nothing as I took a book from the stack on the nightstand and sat down in the chair by the window, positioning myself with my back to the room. The words on the pages looked funny, symbols for something I no longer knew anything about.
The mattress creaked as Jim got up and I heard him changing his clothes. I didn’t want to look—after all, it wouldn’t matter what I saw—and still not wanting to, I put the unreadable book aside and turned around.
The incision was actually very crude, as if it had been done with a jagged shard of glass. I wanted to feel bad at the sight, I wanted to feel sorry and sad and angry at the destruction, I wanted of feel the urge to rush to him and offer comfort. But as Sandor had pointed out, in the absence of pain, no comfort was necessary.
Abruptly, Jim shrugged and finished dressing, and I realized he’d been waiting for something, maybe for me to show him my own. But I had no desire to do that yet.
“I’m going for a walk up the promenade,” he said, heading for the door. “You can come if you want.” He didn’t look back for a response.
“Do you think,” I heard myself say just before he stepped out into the hall, “they’re everywhere? Or if we could just get home somehow …”
“Jess.” He almost smiled. “We are home.”
I followed him at a distance. He didn’t wait for me, walking along briskly but unhurriedly, and I didn’t try to catch up with him. The sky seemed darker and duller, the sounds of the people on the promenade quieter, more muffled. The trams didn’t run.
I stayed out until dark. The dying-stars show was especially spectacular, and I watched it until Sandor finally got around to coming back for me.
I was sitting on the promenade in Scheveningen on a cloudy day at the end of August. There was no horizon line on the ocean. I started thinking about vampires at the end of the world—vampires because I was sitting next to Ellen Datlow, with whom I share a fascination with vampirism and the many forms it can take, and the end of the world because of the peculiar way sky and sea melted together without even a hint of demarcation, as if there were really nothing out there. Would vampires show up at the end of it all, I wondered, and if so, what kind? Suppose the vampires were the ones who were really alive and the people were the living dead?
Sitting around thinking odd thoughts in various locations is a strange thing to do, I guess, but it’s a living.
Pat Cadigan
THE RAGTHORN
Robert Holdstock and Garry Kilworth
This may be the most traditional of the stories in the anthology, not for its vampire, which isn’t at all traditional, but in its richness of detail. This novelette is a mystery, a historically accurate study, and a classic quest story. A lovely yet chilling grace note with which to culminate this book.
Quhen thow art ded and laid in layme
And Raggtre rut thi ribbis ar
Thow art than brocht to thi lang hayme
Than grett agayn warldis dignite
Unknown (C. A.D. 1360)
September 11, 1978
I am placing this entry at the beginning of my edited journal for reasons that will become apparent. Time is very short for me now, and there are matters that must be briefly explained. I am back at the cottage in Scarfell, the stone house in which I was born and which has always been at the centre of my life. I have been here for some years and am finally ready to do what must be done. Edward Pottifer is with me—good God-fearing man that he is—and it will be he who closes this journal and he alone who will decide upon its fate.
The moment is very close. I have acquired a set of dental pincers with which to perform the final part of the ritual. Pottifer has seen into my mouth—an experience that clearly disturbed him, no doubt because of its intimacy—and he knows which teeth to pull and which to leave. After the inspection he muttered that he is more used to pulling rose thorns from fingers than molars from jaws. He asked me if he might keep the teeth as souvenirs and I said he could, but he should look after them carefully.
I cannot pretend that I am not frightened. I have edited my life’s journal severely. I have taken out all that does not relate forcefully to my discovery. Many journeys to foreign parts have gone, and many accounts of irrelevant discovery and strange encounters. Not even Pottifer will know where they are. I leave for immediate posterity only this bare account in Pottifer’s creased and soil-engrimed hands.
Judge my work by this account, or judge my sanity. When this deed is done I shall be certain of one thing: that in whatever form I shall have become, I will be beyond judgement. I shall walk away, leaving all behind, and not look back.
Time had been kinder to Scarfell Cottage than perhaps it deserves. It has been, for much of its existence, an abandoned place, a neglected shrine. When I finally came back to it, years after my mother’s death, i
ts wood had rotted, its interior decoration had decayed, but thick cob walls—two feet of good Yorkshire stone—had proved too strong for the ferocious northern winters. The house had been renovated with difficulty, but the precious stone lintel over the doorway—the beginning of my quest—was thankfully intact and undamaged. The house of my childhood became habitable again, twenty years after I left it.
From the tiny study where I write, the view into Scardale is as eerie and entrancing as it ever was. The valley is a sinuous, silent place, its steep slopes broken by monolithic black rocks and stunted trees that grow from the green at sharp, wind-shaped angles. There are no inhabited dwellings here, no fields. The only movement is the grey flow of cloud shadow and the flash of sunlight on the thin stream. In the far distance, remote at the end of the valley, the tower of a church: a place for which I have no use.
And of course—all this is seen through the branches of the tree. The ragthorn. The terrible tree.
It grows fast. Each day it seems to strain from the earth, stretching an inch or two into the storm skies, struggling for life. Its roots have spread farther across the grounds around the cottage and taken a firmer grip upon the dry stone wall at the garden’s end; to this it seems to clasp as it teeters over the steep drop to the dale. There is such menace in its aspect, as if it is stretching its hard knotty form, ready to snatch at any passing life.
It guards the entrance to the valley. It is a rare tree, neither hawthorn nor blackthorn, but some ancient form of plant life, with a history more exotic than the Glastonbury thorn. Even its roots have thorns upon them. The roots themselves spread below the ground like those of a wild rose, throwing out suckers in a circle about the twisted bole: a thousand spikes forming a palisade around the trunk and thrusting inches above the earth. I have seen no bird try to feed upon the tiny berries that it produces in mid-winter. In the summer its bark has a terrible smell. To go close to the tree induces dizziness. Its thorns when broken curl up after a few minutes, like tiny live creatures.