by Ellen Datlow
And an appropriate form for capturing my own feelings about vampirism. On the one hand, admit it, it’s a pretty silly idea—a Rudolph Valentino clone in an outdated suit, posturing melodramatically, mascara applied generously to heighten the color. The horror in that figure escapes me much of the time, it seems so far removed from my own apprehensions. But go beyond that—most of us have been in relationships which left us unaccountably drained, have known people whose very presence somehow left us weakened, edgy. People feed off each other. That’s not necessarily bad; maybe it’s just a natural consequence of having a brain that can aspire, and yearn. But like anything else, some people will take it too far.
Steve Rasnic Tem
DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN
Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann
This story was first published in Oui magazine because initially none of the fantasy or science fiction magazines (including OMNI) would take it. It was too “tough” and possibly “tasteless” a subject. There is an actual vampire in this story, and in a world where humans are monstrous to each other is he any worse a monster?
Bruckman first discovered that Wernecke was a vampire when they went to the quarry that morning.
He was bending down to pick up a large rock when he thought he heard something in the gully nearby. He looked around and saw Wernecke huddled over a Musselmänn, one of the walking dead, a new man who had not been able to wake up to the terrible reality of the camp.
“Do you need any help?” Bruckman asked Wernecke in a low voice.
Wernecke looked up, startled, and covered his mouth with his hand, as if he were signing to Bruckman to be quiet.
But Bruckman was certain that he had glimpsed blood smeared on Wernecke’s mouth. “The Musselmänn, is he alive?” Wernecke had often risked his own life to save one or another of the men in his barracks. But to risk one’s life for a Musselmänn? “What’s wrong?”
“Get away.”
All right, Bruckman thought. Best to leave him alone. He looked pale, perhaps it was typhus. The guards were working him hard enough, and Wernecke was older than the rest of the men in the work gang. Let him sit for a moment and rest. But what about that blood? …
“Hey, you, what are you doing?” one of the young SS guards shouted to Bruckman.
Bruckman picked up the rock and, as if he had not heard the guard, began to walk away from the gully, toward the rusty brown cart on the tracks that led back to the barbed-wire fence of the camp. He would try to draw the guard’s attention away from Wernecke.
But the guard shouted at him to halt. “Were you taking a little rest, is that it?” he asked, and Bruckman tensed, ready for a beating. This guard was new, neatly and cleanly dressed—and an unknown quantity. He walked over to the gully and, seeing Wernecke and the Musselmänn, said, “Aha, so your friend is taking care of the sick.” He motioned Bruckman to follow him into the gully.
Bruckman had done the unpardonable—he had brought it on Wernecke. He swore at himself. He had been in this camp long enough to know to keep his mouth shut.
The guard kicked Wernecke sharply in the ribs. “I want you to put the Musselmänn in the cart. Now!” He kicked Wernecke again, as if as an afterthought. Wernecke groaned, but got to his feet. “Help him put the Musselmänn in the cart,” the guard said to Bruckman; then he smiled and drew a circle in the air—the sign of smoke, the smoke which rose from the tall gray chimneys behind them. This Musselmänn would be in the oven within an hour, his ashes soon to be floating in the hot, stale air, as if they were the very particles of his soul.
Wernecke kicked the Musselmänn, and the guard chuckled, waved to another guard who had been watching, and stepped back a few feet. He stood with his hands on his hips. “Come on, dead man, get up or you’re going to die in the oven,” Wernecke whispered as he tried to pull the man to his feet. Bruckman supported the unsteady Musselmänn, who began to wail softly. Wernecke slapped him hard. “Do you want to live, Musselmänn? Do you want to see your family again, feel the touch of a woman, smell grass after it’s been mowed? Then move.” The Musselmänn shambled forward between Wernecke and Bruckman. “You’re dead, aren’t you Musselmänn,” goaded Wernecke. “As dead as your father and mother, as dead as your sweet wife, if you ever had one, aren’t you? Dead!”
The Musselmänn groaned, shook his head, and whispered, “Not dead, my wife …”
“Ah, it talks,” Wernecke said, loud enough so the guard walking a step behind them could hear. “Do you have a name, corpse?” “Josef, and I’m not a Musselmänn.”
“The corpse says he’s alive,” Wernecke said, again loud enough for the SS guard to hear. Then in a whisper, he said, “Josef, if you’re not a Musselmänn, then you must work now, do you understand?” Josef tripped, and Bruckman caught him. “Let him be,” said Wernecke. “Let him walk to the cart himself.”
“Not the cart,” Josef mumbled. “Not to die, not—”
“Then get down and pick up stones, show the fart-eating guard you can work.”
“Can’t. I’m sick, I’m …”
“Musselmänn!”
Josef bent down, fell to his knees, but took hold of a stone and stood up. “You see,” Wernecke said to the guard, “it’s not dead yet. It can still work.”
“I told you to carry him to the cart, didn’t I,” the guard said petulantly. “Show him you can work,” Wernecke said to Josef, “or you’ll surely be smoke.”
And Josef stumbled away from Wernecke and Bruckman, leaning forward, as if following the rock he was carrying.
“Bring him back!” shouted the guard, but his attention was distracted from Josef by some other prisoners, who, sensing the trouble, began to mill about. One of the other guards began to shout and kick at the men on the periphery, and the new guard joined him. For the moment, he had forgotten about Josef.
“Let’s get to work, lest they notice us again,” Wernecke said. “I’m sorry that I—”
Wernecke laughed and made a fluttering gesture with his hand—smoke rising. “It’s all hazard, my friend. All luck.” Again the laugh. “It was a venial sin,” and his face seemed to darken. “Never do it again, though, lest I think of you as bad luck.”
“Carl, are you all right?” Bruckman asked. “I noticed some blood when—”
“Do the sores on your feet bleed in the morning?” Wernecke countered angrily. Bruckman nodded, feeling foolish and embarrassed. “And so it is with my gums. Now go away, unlucky one, and let me live.”
At dusk, the guards broke the hypnosis of lifting and grunting and sweating and formed the prisoners into ranks. They marched back to the camp through the fields, beside the railroad tracks, the electrified wire, conical towers, and into the main gate of the camp.
Josef walked beside them, but he kept stumbling, as he was once again slipping back into death, becoming a Musselmänn. Wernecke helped him walk, pushed him along. “We should let this man become dead,” Wernecke said to Bruckman.
Bruckman only nodded, but he felt a chill sweep over his sweating back. He was seeing Wernecke’s face again as it was for that instant in the morning. Smeared with blood.
Yes, Bruckman thought, we should let the Musselmänn become dead. We should all be dead….
Wernecke served up the lukewarm water with bits of spoiled turnip floating on the top, what passed as soup for the prisoners. Everyone sat or kneeled on the rough-planked floor, as there were no chairs.
Bruckman ate his portion, counting the sips and bites, forcing himself to take his time. Later, he would take a very small bite of the bread he had in his pocket. He always saved a small morsel of food for later—in the endless world of the camp, he had learned to give himself things to look forward to. Better to dream of bread than to get lost in the present. That was the fate of the Musselmänner.
But he always dreamed of food. Hunger was with him every moment of the day and night. Those times when he actually ate were in a way the most difficult, for there was never enough to satisfy him. There was the ta
ste of softness in his mouth, and then in an instant it was gone. The emptiness took the form of pain—it hurt to eat. For bread, he thought, he would have killed his father, or his wife. God forgive me, and he watched Wernecke—Wernecke, who had shared his bread with him, who had died a little so he could live. He’s a better man than I, Bruckman thought.
It was dim inside the barracks. A bare light bulb hung from the ceiling and cast sharp shadows across the cavernous room. Two tiers of five-foot-deep shelves ran around the room on three sides, bare wooden shelves where the men slept without blankets or mattresses. Set high in the northern wall was a slatted window, which let in the stark white light of the kliegs. Outside, the lights turned the grounds into a deathly imitation of day; only inside the barracks was it night.
“Do you know what tonight is, my friends?” Wernecke asked. He sat in the far corner of the room with Josef, who, hour by hour, was reverting back into a Musselmänn. Wernecke’s face looked hollow and drawn in the light from the window and the light bulb; his eyes were deep-set and his face was long with deep creases running from his nose to the corners of his thin mouth. His hair was black, and even since Bruckman had known him, quite a bit of it had fallen out. He was a very tall man, almost six feet four, and that made him stand out in a crowd, which was dangerous in a death camp. But Wernecke had his own secret ways of blending with the crowd, of making himself invisible.
“No, tell us what tonight is,” crazy old Bohme said. That men such as Bohme could survive was a miracle—or, as Bruckman thought—a testament to men such as Wernecke who somehow found the strength to help the others live.
“It’s Passover,” Wernecke said.
“How does he know that?” someone mumbled, but it didn’t matter how Wernecke knew because he knew—even if it really wasn’t Passover by the calendar. In this dimly lit barrack, it was Passover, the feast of freedom, the time of thanksgiving.
“But how can we have Passover without a seder?” asked Bohme. “We don’t even have any matzoh,” he whined.
“Nor do we have candles, or a silver cup for Elijah, or the shankbone, or haroset—nor would I make a seder over the traif the Nazis are so generous in giving us,” replied Wernecke with a smile. “But we can pray, can’t we? And when we all get out of here, when we’re in our own homes in the coming year with God’s help, then we’ll have twice as much food—two afikomens, a bottle of wine for Elijah, and the haggadahs that our fathers and our fathers’ fathers used.”
It was Passover.
“Isadore, do you remember the four questions?” Wernecke asked Bruckman.
And Bruckman heard himself speaking. He was twelve years old again at the long table beside his father, who sat in the seat of honor. To sit next to him was itself an honor. “How does this night differ from all other nights? On all other nights we eat bread and matzoh; why on this night do we eat only matzoh?
“M’a nisht’ana halylah hazeah….”
Sleep would not come to Bruckman that night, although he was so tired that he felt as if the marrow of his bones had been sucked away and replaced with lead.
He lay there in the semidarkness, feeling his muscles ache, feeling the acid biting of his hunger. Usually he was numb enough with exhaustion that he could empty his mind, close himself down, and fall rapidly into oblivion, but not tonight. Tonight he was noticing things again, his surroundings were getting through to him again, in a way that they had not since he had been new in camp. It was smotheringly hot, and the air was filled with the stinks of death and sweat and fever, of stale urine and drying blood. The sleepers thrashed and turned, as though they fought with sleep, and as they slept, many of them talked or muttered or screamed aloud; they lived other lives in their dreams, intensely compressed lives dreamed quickly, for soon it would be dawn, and once more they would be thrust into hell. Cramped in the midst of them, sleepers squeezed in all around him, it suddenly seemed to Bruckman that these pallid white bodies were already dead, that he was sleeping in a graveyard. Suddenly it was the boxcar again. And his wife Miriam was dead again, dead and rotting unburied….
Resolutely, Bruckman emptied his mind. He felt feverish and shaky, and wondered if the typhus were coming back, but he couldn’t afford to worry about it. Those who couldn’t sleep couldn’t survive. Regulate your breathing, force your muscles to relax, don’t think. Don’t think.
For some reason, after he had managed to banish even the memory of his dead wife, he couldn’t shake the image of the blood on Wernecke’s mouth.
There were other images mixed in with it: Wernecke’s uplifted arms and upturned face as he led them in prayer; the pale strained face of the stumbling Musselmänn; Wernecke looking up, startled, as he crouched over Josef… but it was the blood to which Bruckman’s feverish thoughts returned, and he pictured it again and again as he lay in the rustling, fart-smelling darkness, the watery sheen of blood over Wernecke’s lips, the tarry trickle of blood in the corner of his mouth, like a tiny scarlet worm….
Just then a shadow crossed in front of the window, silhouetted blackly for an instant against the harsh white glare, and Bruckman knew from the shadow’s height and its curious forward stoop that it was Wernecke.
Where could he be going? Sometimes a prisoner would be unable to wait until morning, when the Germans would let them out to visit the slit-trench latrine again, and would slink shamefacedly into a far corner to piss against a wall, but surely Wernecke was too much of an old hand for that. … Most of the prisoners slept on the sleeping platforms, especially during the cold nights when they would huddle together for warmth, but sometimes during the hot weather, people would drift away and sleep on the floor instead; Bruckman had been thinking of doing that, as the jostling bodies of the sleepers around him helped to keep him from sleep. Perhaps Wernecke, who always had trouble fitting into the cramped sleeping niches, was merely looking for a place where he could lie down and stretch his legs…
Then Bruckman remembered that Josef had fallen asleep in the corner of the room where Wernecke had sat and prayed, and that they had left him there alone.
Without knowing why, Bruckman found himself on his feet. As silently as the ghost he sometimes felt he was becoming, he walked across the room in the direction Wernecke had gone, not understanding what he was doing nor why he was doing it. The face of the Musselmänn, Josef, seemed to float behind his eyes. Bruckman’s feet hurt, and he knew, without looking, that they were bleeding, leaving faint tracks behind him. It was dimmer here in the far corner, away from the window, but Bruckman knew that he must be near the wall by now, and he stopped to let his eyes readjust.
When his eyes had adapted to the dimmer light, he saw Josef sitting on the floor, propped up against the wall. Wernecke was hunched over the Musselmänn. Kissing him. One of Josef’s hands was tangled in Wernecke’s thinning hair.
Before Bruckman could react—such things had been known to happen once or twice before, although it shocked him deeply that Wernecke would be involved in such filth—Josef released his grip on Wernecke’s hair. Josef’s upraised arm fell limply to the side, his hand hitting the floor with a muffled but solid impact that should have been painful—but Josef made no sound.
Wernecke straightened up and turned around. Stronger light from the high window caught him as he straightened to his full height, momentarily illuminating his face.
Wernecke’s mouth was smeared with blood.
“My God,” Bruckman cried.
Startled, Wernecke flinched, then took two quick steps forward and seized Bruckman by the arm. “Quiet!” Wernecke hissed. His fingers were cold and hard.
At that moment, as though Wernecke’s sudden movement were a cue, Josef began to slip down sideways along the wall. As Wernecke and Bruckman watched, both momentarily riveted by the sight, Josef toppled over to the floor, his head striking against the floorboards with a sound such as a dropped melon might make. He had made no attempt to break his fall or cushion his head, and lay now unmoving.
“My G
od,” Bruckman said again.
“Quiet, I’ll explain,” Wernecke said, his lips still glazed with the Musselmänn blood. “Do you want to ruin us all? For the love of God, be quiet.”
But Bruckman had shaken free of Wernecke’s grip and crossed to kneel by Josef, leaning over him as Wernecke had done, placing a hand flat on Josef’s chest for a moment, then touching the side of Josef’s neck. Bruckman looked slowly up at Wernecke. “He’s dead,” Bruckman said, more quietly.
Wernecke squatted on the other side of Josef’s body, and the rest of their conversation was carried out in whispers over Josef’s chest, like friends conversing at the sickbed of another friend who has finally fallen into a fitful doze.
“Yes, he’s dead,” Wernecke said. “He was dead yesterday, wasn’t he? Today he had just stopped walking.” His eyes were hidden here, in the deeper shadow nearer to the floor, but there was still enough light for Bruckman to see that Wernecke had wiped his lips clean. Or licked them clean, Bruckman thought, and felt a spasm of nausea go through him.
“But you,” Bruckman said, haltingly. “You were….”
“Drinking his blood?” Wernecke said. “Yes, I was drinking his blood.”
Bruckman’s mind was numb. He couldn’t deal with this, he couldn’t understand it at all. “But why, Eduard? Why?”
“To live, of course. Why do any of us do anything here? If I am to live, I must have blood. Without it, I’d face a death even more certain than that doled out by the Nazis.”
Bruckman opened and closed his mouth, but no sound came out, as if the words he wished to speak were too jagged to fit through his throat. At last he managed to croak, “A vampire? You’re a vampire? Like in the old stories?”
Wernecke said calmly, “Men would call me that.” He paused, then nodded. “Yes, that’s what men would call me…. As though they can understand something simply by giving it a name.”