by Paula Guran
She said she loved me. She said she loved me, and that she would not see me age and die and be lost to the world.
So, she killed me, emptied my head, dragged me back from the void, and then abandoned me.
The Romanian vampire, whose name Marjorie Marie was forced to forget and has never has learned again—though not for lack of trying—used to send her letters, postcards, vials of perfume, jewelry, packages wrapped in brown butcher’s paper that always found her, no matter where she was. But they stopped coming decades ago. For all Marjorie Marie knows, the woman is dead, having at last met her well-deserved undoing at the sharp end of a white-oak stake, purity punching its way through her rotten black heart. Maybe a hunter took her head. Maybe she was burned to ash and the ashes stirred with salt and holy water and scattered across the sea.
“Yeah,” says Marjorie Marie, “I was in Bucharest.”
“Well, did you find what you were looking for this time?” he asks, even though he knows she knows he already knows the answer.
Her existence has become convoluted sentences.
“It comforts me, that city does,” she says, instead of answering his question.
“You’re picking at scabs.”
Above them, a thunderclap rumbles, like the wrath of an angry god, and Marjorie Marie thinks of Washington Irving’s “odd-looking personages playing at nine-pins,” attired in their “quaint outlandish fashion.” I could lie down beneath a tree, she thinks. I could turn my own Rip Van Winkle trick and sleep away a hundred years. I could dig deep, down past the burrows of groundhogs and the trails of earthworms, into the shale and limestone bones of the mountains, and there I could sleep until this world and all my regret and even the Lady of Silver Whispers has passed from the world.
“Then why don’t you?” asks Willie Love.
“Shit,” she says, lighting another cigarette, the last from the pack of Camel Lights she took off the man from the car on 212. “You’d miss me too much.”
But I could, thinks Marjorie Marie Winthrop. I could do just that. Before too long, even Willie Love would forget me.
“I might,” he tells her. “But I might not.”
The wind carries the ecstasy and smells and tastes of the court’s orgy, and it carries the voices of the tourists on the south piazza. She can hear the roar of the flames that devoured the Overlook Mountain Hotel, the screams of those burning alive, the crash of the roof coming down in a shower of sparks that sailed away into the night, an ember cloud to rain charcoal and soot on the streets of Woodstock and Bearsville. Behind Marjorie Marie and Willie Love, the Lady calls for blood—not the blood of unfortunate mortals, but the blood of her own kind, so much richer, aged in dead veins that are as good as wine or whiskey kegs. It always comes to this, on these long winter evenings, that her appetite turns to cannibalism, and the illusion of immortality, the lie of life everlasting, comes crashing down for the one who loses the lottery.
She reaches into a velvet sack the deadly, sinful crimson of holly berries and draws out the astragulus bone of wild boar. The bag holds an assortment of foot bones from a dozen or more species and each has engraved upon it a Roman numeral. Likewise, a Roman numeral has been drawn with blue chalk upon the forehead of every one of the vampires who has answered the Lady’s beck and call to gather with her in the ruins at the top of the mountain. They all came knowing the risk, the price of her company and of the pleasures of her court. But that doesn’t make this moment any less terrible, and it doesn’t diminish the dread in each unbeating heart as she hands the bone down to her hierophant to be read out. On the stairs leading up to the south piazza, Marjorie Marie and Willie Love fall silent. He chews at the stub of his cigar, and her left hand goes to the mark above her eyebrows: XVII.
“It’s a razor-sharp, crap-shoot affair,” whispers Willie Love, parroting the lyrics of a song he heard way back in 1995. He smiles. “There is no Hell,” he says. And then, “There is no Hell like an old Hell.”
They wait for the number to be read, and Marjorie Marie knows that there’s some defeated sliver of her that is praying it will be her number, her time, her judgment justly handed down for every misdeed and for daring to play roulette by coming to this high, haunted place on this stormy night.
“You’re so full of shit,” she says to Willie Love.
“That I am, love. That I surely am.”
The Lady of Silver Whisper’s jester plays on his tin penny whistle, and even above the storm, the notes are clear as lead crystal, C and F major, the rise and fall, manic cross-fingering, dry lips and breathless breaths blown through the wooden fipple. It’s a ritual as old as her reign. It’s a ceremony as immutable as the Stations of the Cross, the Lady’s own Via Dolorosa.
“Twelve!” cries the hierophant, when the jester’s song is finished.
“Twelve,” echoes the Lady of Silver Whispers.
Marjorie Marie feels a shiver down her spine, ice in her atrophied guts, though she could not say if these sensations are born of relief or disappointment.
“ ‘Prepare the table,” says Willie love, “watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise ye princes,’ ” And then he laughs a dry and humorless laugh.
Marjorie Marie turns and peers at him with those shimmering, unreadable lynx eyes of hers.
“Isaiah, Chapter Twenty-One, verses five through nine. ‘Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.’ ”
Within the three-story cement walls of the Overlook Mountain House, beneath that roiling blizzard roof, the sacrifice is led through the muttering throng and up to the Lady’s yellowjacket récamier. The sacrifice’s name is Daciana Petrescu, who died in 1976 in Brașov. Marjorie Marie marvels briefly at the coincidence, that tonight the Lady would be treated to the blood of a Romanian, this tinker’s daughter born in a Căldărari village on the banks of the wide Danube Delta. It will only seem a coincidence to Marjorie Marie, of course, striking only the wearisome nerves of her own obsessions. Daciana Petrescu doesn’t struggle, and she doesn’t cry out or protest in any way; she goes to her doom with dignity, head held high and whatever fear she may feel she doesn’t let show. It will be a bad death, an ugly and violent death, but she’ll not give the Lady of Silver Whispers the satisfaction of seeing her terror.
“She stole so much of you,” says Willie Love. “Whoever she was, whether it was Marseilles or Paris. She mined your memories, scooped you out clean. She left you lost to fill in the gaps, to weave false recollections that may, perhaps, approach the truth, but which will never touch it”
“You’re a bastard,” she replies.
“Like Constantin, I worry for you.”
The Lady’s fangs sink into Daciana Petrescu’s throat, tearing open the carotid, and what passes for her life is sprayed across the frozen crust at the her killer’s bare feet. It wasn’t her blood, anyway; easy come, easy go.
“I should leave,” says Marjorie Marie. “I never should have come here, and I should go.”
“Will you be back next year?” asks Willie Love, doing a shoddy job of disguising his anxiety that she might not, that he might never see her again.
“I should go,” she says again, as if that’s meant to count as an answer.
“We have expended our souls,” he says. “Our creators, our executioners, they expended our souls, which are now one and the same as our flesh, in that implosion of yin and yang. And so, sweet, the only thing awaiting us is oblivion. Not Hell nor Heaven nor Purgatory. Not some pagan, pantheistic underworld. Only nothingness. Me, I take that as a scrap of comfort.”
“I’m going now. Take care of yourself, Willie Love. Watch your shadow.”
And then she breaks apart, the body of Marjorie Marie exploding into five hundred, six hundred, a thousand shrieking sparrows, a miraculous flurry of tiny bodies and frenetic wings. For a moment, all the Lady’s court—and even the gore-lipped Lady herself—turns towards that mad twittering, and the dead man who was born Hiram Levi wat
ches as the flock disappears into the sanctuary of the forest.
Caitlín R. Kiernan’s award-winning short fiction has been collected, to date, in fourteen volumes, one of which, The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories received the World Fantasy Award. Novels include The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Mythopoeic awards). Mid-World Productions has optioned both to develop into feature films. Kiernan is currently writing the screenplay for The Red Tree.
That door led to terrible things . . .
THE DOOR
Kelley Armstrong
Her earliest memory was of the door.
She’d woken in the night, hearing a noise, and padded into her parents’ room to see her mother sound asleep. Then the noise came again, a bang from the front of the house. From beyond the door.
She crept down the hall, through the living room and into the kitchen. The door was there. She inched closer, barely daring to breathe.
What if it opened?
What if something was on the other side trying to get in. Some monster from her fairy tale books. An ogre or a troll or a wicked witch.
The house was so silent she could still hear her mother breathing. Then the noise came again.
She swallowed and wrapped her arms around herself.
Something was there. Beyond the door.
She was not supposed to open the door. That was the rule. The only real rule she’d ever known. Do not open the door. Never open the door.
But if a monster was out there . . .
She had to peek. Just a peek to be sure before she ran and woke her mother.
She slid toward the door, one stockinged foot and then the other, making as little noise as possible. Then she gripped the knob and turned.
The door opened easily. On the other side . . . Well, she knew what was right on the other side, because she’d caught glimpses before. It was a tiny room with boots and shoes and other stored items. And a second door. When Momma or Daddy went out, they’d go through the first one, and then they’d close it before she’d hear them open the other. That was the real door. The one that led to terrible things, and she had no idea what those things were, nor had her parents even said they were terrible, but she knew. She just knew.
The noise came again and she struggled for breath and then continued her sliding walk toward that second door—
It opened and a figure filled it. A huge figure carrying a huge bag, and she had one brief flash of all the monsters it could be—all the trolls and the ogres—and then she heard, “Oh! What are you—?” and it was her father’s voice, and he hurried in and quickly shut the door and put down the bag before scooping her up. “What are you doing here, sweetheart? You know you aren’t supposed to open the door.”
“I heard a noise.”
“Ah, well, that would be me, very happy to be home. I didn’t mean to get in so late. But I brought you treats. Lots of treats.”
With the bag dragging from his other hand, he carried her through the inner door and kicked it shut behind them. Then he set her on the table and opened the sack. Inside she saw food. He dug down and pulled out a long box covered in bright pictures.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Candy Land. It was my first game when I was your age. Now it’s yours. And to go with it . . . ” He dug deeper and pulled out something that made her squeal, and he chuckled and handed her the red lollipop. “Candy Land and candy. The perfect match. And books, too. I brought lots of books. Now, let’s find one, and we’ll read it while you eat that lollipop, and then you’ll be ready to go back to bed. We have a big day tomorrow, putting away all the food. I have more on a wagon outside. I’ll bring it all in while you find a book you like.”
That was her first memory. Her first game, too. The first of many. Many games and many days spent playing them, the three of them. Even more than the games, her father brought books. He’d read them to her or her mother would, and soon, she could read them to herself, at least the easy ones.
There were toys, too. Action figures and stuffed animals and building blocks, and she’d act out the scenes from the books, sometimes by herself, sometimes for her parents.
Her mother would tease that Daddy brought back more books than food. Once, when she was supposed to be asleep, she heard Momma doing more than teasing about it, talking to her father in a low, anxious voice.
“She doesn’t need so much. The toys, the books, the games. Not if it means you have to stay out there longer.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “And if it makes her happy, it makes me happy.”
They were happy. Just the three of them, in their house. There was a yard, too. In books, every house had a yard, and theirs was no different. A backyard with a swing and a slide and grass and a fence, and she was not supposed to climb the fence, but she could lean against it and gaze out at the endless blue sky, the sun shining down from above.
Then, when she was old enough to read all the books, she got a surprise. They all got a surprise, or so it seemed from her parents’ whispered conversations. A baby. A girl. A little sister. Then it was the four of them, and it was as if everything started over again. Out came the baby books, with her reading them to her sister, and then Candy Land, pulled up from under the house where they’d stored it.
Some of the old toys and games and books—the ones she’d outgrown—would go away with Daddy, but the ones she couldn’t bear to part with were still there, in the storage space under the house and, later, piled up outside along the fence. She remembered once, after reading about a storm, her sister had panicked on seeing the piles of books and games along the fence.
“We have to bring them in!” she said. “They’ll get wet when it rains.”
She’d laughed at that, laughed and scooped her sister up. “Have you ever actually seen it rain, silly?”
“Well, no, but it must, right? When we sleep?”
She shook her head. “Rain is only in books. Like snow and storms and polar bears. Now, speaking of polar bears, there’s a book over here that I think you’ll like . . . ”
It was not long after that that Daddy got sick. The arguments, still quiet ones, held behind their parents’ closed bedroom door happened more often.
“I’ll go out instead now,” their mother said. “It’s my turn. You’re sick and—”
“—and I will not get any less sick by staying indoors. I’ll do it for as long as I’m able, gather as much as I can, while I can. You’ll need to go out soon enough.”
Momma cried at that. Cried so softly that she had to put her head against the door to hear the quiet sobs and their father’s equally quiet voice, soothing her, calming her, until the bed creaked and there were more whispers and sighs and then all went quiet.
Their father did not go out for as long after that. Short trips, but more of them, until the space under the house was teeming with more food than she’d ever seen. And then he could not go out, could barely leave the couch, and they’d take turns sitting with him and reading to him, or just playing and reading in the same room until, one morning, he did not wake up.
“But we’ll see him again, won’t we?” she said to their mother, after the days of crying, of grief. “That’s what the books say. That we’ll see him when we go wherever he is.”
“That sounds about right,” their mother said and hugged her hard.
Time passed. Their mother went out now, often for days on end, and despite what she’d said about their father bringing back too many books and games and toys, she did the same.
Her sister was old enough to read all the books when their mother took ill. It was as it had been with their father, a slow progression of wasting, with more frequent but shorter trips out as she filled the stockpile below the house.
When their mother became too sick to leave her bed, she stayed with he
r, bringing food and books and games. Then came the night when their mother woke her and motioned not to wake her sister, sound asleep on the other side of the bed.
“I have one more book for you to read,” Momma said, her voice a papery whisper, so soft that she had to bend to hear her.
Momma pressed a thin leather journal into her hands. “I wrote this for you. It explains everything—what happened here, what you’ll need to do, how to get food and water.” Momma took her hands and wrapped them around the book. “You will need to make a decision when you read it. What to do about the door. For your sister.”
She nodded.
“Your father did all this for you,” Momma said. “He loved you so much. We both did.” A moment’s pause and then, “Were you happy?”
She frowned, not understanding the question.
“Were you happy? Here? Like this?”
“Of course.”
Momma took her face in her hands and kissed her forehead, her lips so light she barely felt them. “I hope you still can be. I hope you both always can be. We were. In spite of everything.”
Momma lay down and rested and then, as dawn’s light slipped into the room, she gave a long rattling sigh, and her chest stopped rising and stopped falling.
She leaned over their mother and kissed her cheek. Then she carried her sister into the living room and put her on the couch. Once her sister was tucked in, she retrieved the book from her mother’s bedside and headed for the kitchen.
The door.
She’d not seen it in so long. The inner one would open and close, and she would not even bother trying to peek through anymore. She didn’t care what was out there.
Yet now . . .
She looked down at the book. She could read it first. Get answers that way. But she set it on the kitchen table and walked to the door instead. She opened the inner one. Then she moved through the tiny room that still held their father’s shoes and jacket.