by Ellen Datlow
“Again she cried, ‘What have you done?’
“‘Holy water,’ I said. ‘I’ve injected holy water into my veins.’
“She let out another wail which made my ears sing. Her hands reached for me and I saw those long nails, like talons, ready to slash at an artery, but the fear was gone from me. I just wanted her back in bed with me. I no longer cared for the consequences.
“‘Please?’ I said, reaching for her. ‘Help me? I want you to help me.’
“She withdrew from me then and sprang to the window. It was getting close to dawn: The first rays of the sun were sliding over the horizon.
“‘You fool,’ she said, and then she was gone, out into the murk. I jumped up and looked for her through the window, but all I could see was the mist on the river, curling its way around the rotten stumps of an old jetty.
“Once I had recovered my common sense and was out of her influence, I remember thinking to myself that I would have to make a collar—a silver collar …”
The fire spat in the grate and I jerked upright. I had no idea how long Sam had been talking but the peat was almost all ashes. “The tide,” I said, alarmed. “I must leave.”
“I haven’t finished,” he complained, but I was already on my feet. I opened the door and began to walk quickly down the narrow path we had made through the heather, to where my boat lay, but even as I approached it, I could see that it was lying on its side in the slick, glinting mud.
Angry, I looked back at the croft on the hillside. He must have known. He must have known. I was about to march back and take Sam to task, when I suddenly saw the croft in a new perspective. It was like most dwellings of its kind—timber framed, with sods of earth filling the cracks, and stones holding down the turf on the roof. But it was a peculiar shape—more of a mound than the normal four walls and a roof—and was without windows.
My mind suddenly ran wild with frightening images of wood, earth, and rocks. The wooden coffin goes inside the earth and the headstone weights it down. A mound—a burial mound. He hadn’t been able to stay away from her. The same trap that had caught her…
I turned back to the boat and tried dragging it across the moonlit mud, toward the distant water, but it was too heavy. I could only inch it along, and rapidly became tired. The muscles in my arms and legs screamed at me. All the time I labored, one side of my mind kept telling me not to be so foolish, while the other was equally insistent regarding the need to get away. I could hear myself repeating the words. “He couldn’t stay away from her. He couldn’t stay away.”
I had covered about six yards when I heard a voice at my shoulder—a soft, dry voice, full of concern.
“Here, John, let me help you …”
Sam did help me that day, more than I wished him to. I don’t hate him for that, especially now that so many years have passed. Since then I have obtained this job, of night ferryman on the loch, helping young ladies like the one I have in the skiff with me now—a runaway, off to join her lover.
“Don’t worry, “I try to reassure her, after telling her my story, “we sailors are fond of our tales. Come and join me by the tiller. I’ll show you how to manage the boat. Do I frighten you? I don’t mean to. I only want to help you…”
Writers are so often asked where they get their ideas from and nine times out of ten I can’t reply because I don’t know myself. However, in this case I know exactly where it came from—-my daughter’s dream. A couple of nights before her wedding, Chantelle had a nightmare. She told me at breakfast the following morning that she dreamed she had discovered that Mark (her fiance) was a vampire and that she had to wear a silver collar on their wedding night. So the main ingredient of the story was handed to me on a platter, the credit going to prenuptial nerves.
This is my first story involving the vampire myth. I’m not so much interested in the idea of the creatures themselves as I am in why we need them. Why do we invent blood-sucking monsters to feed our fascination? The idea that blood is a sacred substance, with properties of determining nobility or peasantry, racial superiority or inferiority, criminality or decency, goes back a long way and is still with us in various forms. Blue blood, bad blood, red-blooded youths. A whole mythological web has been woven out of this ordinary red, viscous fluid, that is important to us, but no more so than our kidneys. Anybody fancy writing a kidney-eating monster story? Ah, you laugh?
I think we need vampires, not because they drain our lifeblood, but because they change us into someone else and give us the gift of immortality. To live forever—now there’s the rub.
Garry Kilworth
TRY A DULL KNIFE
Harlan Ellison®
In my late teens I became an avid Ellison reader. I remember reading “Try a Dull Knife” in 1969 and the chill it gave me. It was one of the stories that helped formulate the concept behind this book. So here it appears, happily, in Blood Is Not Enough.
It was pachanga night at The Cave. Three spick bands all going at once, each with a fat momma shaking her meat and screaming ǃVaya! The sound was something visible, an assault in silver lamé and screamhorn. Sound hung dense as smog-cloud, redolent as skunk-scent from a thousand roaches of the best shit, no stems or seeds. Darkness shot through with the quicksilver flashes of mouths open to show gold bridgework and dirty words. Eddie Burma staggered in, leaned against a wall and felt the sickness as thick as cotton wool in his throat.
The deep scar-burn of pain was bleeding slowly down his right side. The blood had started coagulating, his shirt stuck to his flesh, but he dug it: it wasn’t pumping any more. But he was in trouble, that was the righteous truth. Nobody can get cut the way Eddie Burma’d been cut and not be in deep trouble.
And somewhere back out there, in the night, they were moving toward him, coming for him. He had to get through to—who? Somebody. Somebody who could help him; because only now, after fifteen years of what had been happening to him, did Eddie Burma finally know what it was he had been through, what had been done to him … what was being done to him … what they would certainly do to him.
He stumbled down the short flight of steps into The Cave and was instantly lost in the smoke and smell and twisting shadows. Ethnic smoke, Puerto Rican smells, lush shadows from another land. He dug it; even with his strength ebbing, he dug it.
That was Eddie Burma’s problem. He was an empath. He felt. Deep inside himself, on a level most people never even know exists, he felt for the world. Involvement was what motivated him. Even here, in this slum nightclub where intensity of enjoyment substituted for the shallow glamour and gaucherie of the uptown boîtes, here where no one knew him and therefore could not harm him, he felt the pulse of the world’s life surging through him. And the blood started pumping again.
He pressed his way back through the crowd, looking for a phone booth, looking for a toilet, looking for an empty booth where he could hide, looking for the person or persons unknown who could save him from the dark night of the soul slipping toward him inexorably.
He caromed off a waiter, Pancho Villa moustache, dirty white apron, tray of draft beers. “Hey, where’s the gabinetto?” he slurred the request. His words were slipping in their own blood.
The Puerto Rican waiter stared at him. Uncomprehending. “¿Perdón?”
“The toilet, the pissoir, the can, the head, the crapper. I’m bleeding to death, where’s the potty?”
“Ohhh!” Meaning dawned on the waiter. “¡Excusado … atavío!” He pointed. Eddie Burma patted him on the arm and slumped past, almost falling into a booth where a man and two women were groping one another darkly.
He found the door to the toilet and pushed it open. A reject from a Cuban Superman film was slicking back his long, oiled hair in an elaborate pompadour before the foggy mirror. He gave Eddie Burma a passing glance and went back to the topography of his coiffure. Burma moved past him in the tiny room and slipped into the first stall.
Once inside, he bolted the door, and sat down heavily on the lidless toilet. He
pulled his shirt up out of his pants, and unbuttoned it. It stuck to his skin. He pulled, gently, and it came away with the sound of mud squished underfoot. The knife wound ran from just below the right nipple to the middle of his waist. It was deep. He was in trouble.
He stood up, hanging the shirt on the hook behind the door, and pulled hanks of toilet paper from the gray, crackly roll. He dipped the paper in a wad, into the toilet bowl, and swabbed at the wound. Oh, God, really deep.
Then nausea washed over him, and he sat down again. Strange thoughts came to him, and he let them work him over:
This morning, when I stepped out the front door, there were yellow roses growing on the bushes. It surprised me; I’d neglected to cut them back last fall, and I was certain the gnarled, blighted knobs at the ends of the branches—still there, silently dead in reproach of my negligence—would stunt any further beauty. But when I stepped out to pick up the newspaper, there they were. Full and light yellow, barely a canary yellow. Breathing moistly, softly. It made me smile, and I went down the steps to the first landing, to get the paper. The parking lot had filled with leaves from the Eucalyptus again, but somehow, particularly this morning, it gave the private little area surrounding and below my secluded house in the hills a more lived-in, festive look. For the second time, for no sensible reason, I found myself smiling. It was going to be a good day, and I had the feeling that all the problems I’d taken on—all the social cases I took unto myself—Alice and Burt and Linda down the hill—all the emotional cripples who came to me for succor—would shape up, and we’d all be smiling by end of day. And if not today, then certainly by Monday. Friday, the latest.
I picked up the paper and snapped the rubber band off it. I dropped the rubber band into the big metal trash basket at the foot of the stairs, and started climbing back up to the house, smelling the orange blossoms and the fine, chill morning air. I opened the paper as I climbed, and with all the suddenness of a freeway collision, the morning calm vanished from around me. I was stopped in mid-step, one leg raised for the next riser, and my eyes felt suddenly grainy, as though I hadn’t had enough sleep the night before. But I had.
The headline read: EDWARD BURMA FOUND MURDERED.
But… I was Eddie Burma.
He came back from memories of yellow roses and twisted metal on freeways to find himself slumped against the side of the toilet stall, his head pressed to the wooden wall, his arms hanging down, the blood running into his pants top. His head throbbed, and the pain in his side was beating, hammering, pounding with a regularity that made him shiver with fear. He could not sit there, and wait.
Wait to die, or wait for them to find him.
He knew they would find him. He knew it.
The phone. He could call…
He didn’t know whom he could call. But there had to be someone. Someone out there who would understand, who would come quickly and save him. Someone who wouldn’t take what was left of him, the way the others would.
They didn’t need knives.
How strange that that one, the little blonde with the Raggedy Ann shoebutton eyes, had not known that. Or perhaps she had. But perhaps also the frenzy of the moment had overcome her, and she could not simply feed leisurely as the others did. She had cut him. Had done what they all did, but directly, without subtlety.
Her blade had been sharp. The others used much more devious weapons, subtler weapons. He wanted to say to her, “Try a dull knife.” But she was too needing, too eager. She would not have heard him.
He struggled to his feet, and put on his shirt. It hurt to do it. The shirt was stained the color of teak with his blood. He could barely stand now.
Pulling foot after foot, he left the toilet, and wandered out into The Cave. The sound of “Mamacita Lisa” beat at him like gloved hands on a plate glass window. He leaned against the wall, and saw only shapes moving moving moving in the darkness. Were they out there? No, not yet; they would never look here first. He wasn’t known here. And his essence was weaker now, weaker as he died, so no one in the crowd would come to him with a quivering need. No one would feel it possible to drink from this weak man, lying up against a wall.
He saw a pay phone, near the entrance to the kitchen, and he struggled toward it. A girl with long dark hair and haunted eyes stared at him as he passed, started to say something, then he summoned up strength to hurry past her before she could tell him she was pregnant and didn’t know who the father was, or she was in pain from emphysema and didn’t have doctor money, or she missed her mother who was still in San Juan. He could handle no more pains, could absorb no more anguish, could let no others drink from him. He didn’t have that much left for his own survival.
My fingertips (he thought, moving) are covered with the scars of people I’ve touched. The flesh remembers those touches. Sometimes I feel as though I am wearing heavy woolen gloves, so thick are the memories of all those touches. It seems to insulate me, to separate me from mankind. Not mankind from me, God knows, for they get through without pause or difficulty—but me, from mankind. I very often refrain from washing my hands for days and days, just to preserve whatever layers of touches might be washed away by the soap.
Faces and voices and smells of people I’ve known have passed away, but still my hands carry the memories on them. Layer after layer of the laying-on of hands. Is that altogether sane? I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it for a very long time, when I have the time.
If I ever have the time.
He reached the pay phone; after a very long time he was able to bring a coin up out of his pocket. It was a quarter. All he needed was a dime. He could not go back down there, he might not make it back again. He used the quarter, and dialed the number of a man he could trust, a man who could help him. He remembered the man now, knew the man was his only salvation.
He remembered seeing him in Georgia, at a revival meeting, a rural stump religion circus of screaming and Hallelujahs that sounded like !H!A!L!L!E!L!U!J!A!H! with dark black faces or red necks all straining toward the seat of God on the platform. He remembered the man in his white shirtsleeves, exhorting the crowd, and he heard again the man’s spirit message.
“Get right with the Lord, before he gets right with you! Suffer your silent sins no longer! Take out your truth, carry it in your hands, give it to me, all the ugliness and cesspool filth of your souls! I’ll wash you clean in the blood of the lamb, in the blood of the Lord, in the blood of the truth of the word! There’s no other way, there’s no great day coming without purging yourself, without cleansing your spirit! I can handle all the pain you’ve got boiling around down in the black lightless pit of your souls! Hear me, dear God hear me … I am your mouth, your tongue, your throat, the horn that will proclaim your deliverance to the Heavens above! Evil and good and worry and sorrow, all of it is mine, I can carry it, I can handle it, I can lift it from out of your mind and your soul and your body! The place is here, the place is me, give me your woe! Christ knew it, God knows it, I know it, and now you have to know it! Mortar and trowel and brick and cement make the wall of your need! Let me tear down that wall, let me hear all of it, let me into your mind and let me take your burdens! I’m the strength, I’m the watering place… come drink from my strength!”
And the people had rushed to him. All over him, like ants feeding on a dead beast. And then the memory dissolved. The image of the tent revival meeting dissolved into images of wild animals tearing at meat, of hordes of carrion birds descending on fallen meat, of small fish leaping with sharp teeth at helpless meat, of hands and more hands, and teeth that sank into meat.
The number was busy. It was busy again.
He had been dialing the same number for nearly an hour, and the number was always busy. Dancers with sweating faces had wanted to use the phone, but Eddie Burma had snarled at them that it was a matter of life and death that he reach the number he was calling, and the dancers had gone back to their partners with curses for him. But the line was still busy. Then he looked at the numbe
r on the pay phone, and knew he had been dialing himself all that time. That the line would always always be busy, and his furious hatred of the man on the other end who would not answer was hatred for the man who was calling. He was calling himself, and in that instant he remembered who the man had been at the revival meeting. He remembered leaping up out of the audience and taking the platform to beg all the stricken suffering ones to end their pain by drinking of his essence. He remembered, and the fear was greater than he could believe. He fled back to the toilet, to wait for them to find him.
Eddie Burma, hiding in the refuse room of a sightless dark spot in the netherworld of a universe that had singled him out for reality. Eddie Burma was an individual. He had substance. He had corporeality. In a world of walking shadows, of zombie breath and staring eyes like the cold dead flesh of the moon, Eddie Burma was a real person. He had been born with the ability to belong to his times; with the electricity of nature that some called charisma and others called warmth. He felt deeply; he moved through the world and touched; and was touched.
His was a doomed existence, because he was not only an extrovert and gregarious, but he was truly clever, vastly inventive, suffused with humor, and endowed with the power to listen. For these reasons he had passed through the stages of exhibitionism and praise-seeking to a state where his reality was assured. Was very much his own. When he came into a room, people knew it. He had a face. Not an image, or a substitute life that he could slip on when dealing with people, but a genuine reality. He was Eddie Burma, only Eddie Burma, and could not be confused with anyone else. He went his way, and he was identified as Eddie Burma in the eyes of anyone who ever met him. He was one of those memorable people. The kind other people who have no lives of their own talk about. He cropped up in conversations: “Do you know what Eddie said … ?” or “Guess what happened to Eddie?” And there was never any confusion as to who was the subject under discussion.