The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  The subtle tale that follows was deservedly reprinted by Karl Edward Wagner in the twentieth volume of his Year’s Best Horror Stories series.

  AS VADIM STRUGGLED TO get out of the Toyota, rain slammed him back. Nearby maple branches, bereft of leaves, clung to one another. The mid winter sky was dead-grey but he noticed black storm clouds rushing to squelch even that little light.

  Five strides and Vadim hit the porch of the farmhouse, just as thunder broke. Lightning cracked a willow across the road, severing a branch. An omen, he thought, shivering, hating himself for even thinking that way. The way she had taught him to think. He hurried indoors.

  The ‘new’ part of his grandmother’s house, built seventy-five years ago, looked the same. Too-tall ceilings. Cavernous rooms. Sparsely patterned wallpaper. Under the dust covers, like stern guardians, lay furniture that Vadim had no intention of exposing. His memories were olfactory and reeked of blood and decay. He would not be here now if Lola had not gone out of the country. Lola, his younger sister, was still a baby at twenty. Lola desperately pleaded for specific memorabilia before he boarded up the property forever.

  Vadim had no such desires. His memories of years spent in this house were of dead space, the weighted stillness as heavy as his grandmother’s hand. He had distanced himself mentally and eventually physically from her insidiousness. And soon the disconnection would be permanent.

  He glanced into the kitchen. The electricity had been shut off three months ago, but lightning flashed; it was frightening how nothing had changed. Except the corner. No willow switch stood ready for duty. Still, he would not have been surprised to see his grandmother’s severe face in the doorway or hear her diseased rantings echo through the rooms.

  Vadim went to the cupboard above and to the left of the sink. Second shelf at the back. He retrieved the empty sugar bowl with the butterfly on the lid that Lola wanted. He felt no sentimental feelings, just a sense of claustrophobia, as if the past were crushed against the present, intent on devouring the boundaries, desperate to consume it. He hurried upstairs.

  The master bedroom his grandparents had shared sixteen years ago when Grandpa Bentz died was as silent as ever. The lifeless blue duvet had been flung across the foot of the bed. His grandmother ended her existence wrapped in that comforter, alone in a pool of foul-smelling excrement. Alone until her rotting flesh had been discovered. “Death only comforts the living,” she had said with authority often enough. The clock in the corner no longer ticked and Vadim was grateful.

  He crossed the short hallway and took the attic stairs to the cramped and airless rooms to which he and Lola had once been banished. In his: wall cracks, as familiar and permanent as the creases of disapproval in his grandmother’s face. A small dresser, its mirror wavy with age, unable to offer a true reflection. Vadim’s single bed – springs that creaked so easily he had been afraid to breathe. That had creaked too often in rhythm to willow switches imprinting the family’s ancient beliefs beyond his bare skin and deep into his cells.

  In Lola’s room he found the glass-unicorn music box and carried it and the sugar bowl down the narrower back stairs leading to the old part. He entered a shabby room that dated back two hundred years. Back to the fierce great-great-grandparents whom he had heard so much about. The ancestors who had immigrated from the old country where they had been persecuted. He had never felt safe in this part of the house.

  Vadim paused. Outside black clouds smothered all light. He trembled as he reached into his raincoat pocket to pull out the flashlight. The sugar bowl slipped from his fingers. It hit the sloped hardwood and, even before he dropped the beam into the pieces, Vadim knew that it had shattered. Fear gripped him, the old, suffocating terror. But no ghost bent on punishment materialized. He exhaled; his nerves were on edge.

  A flicker of blue lightning showed him something peculiar and Vadim ran the flashlight beam over the sills of the three large windows. “Mother of . . .” he whispered. Each sill was littered with fly carcasses, an inch thick. And the floor below the windows. And by the door. Thousands. No, tens of thousands. Black and iridescent green. Crisp hollowed shells that crunched beneath his soles. They clustered near the routes of egress but for them there had been no escape from this place.

  Vadim no longer worried about the sugar bowl, he just wanted out before this tomb-of-the-dead sealed him in. But Lola had only asked for one thing more. Another object to cement her fantasy of happy memories and relegate the reality to insubstantial phantoms. The two of them were all that was left now. He needed her to ground him in the present, a world cleansed of superstition. Take it easy, he thought. Grandma Bentz is gone. I’ll be out of here in five minutes.

  The door to the root cellar was locked, as it always had been, but he broke the rusted padlock easily. The hinges squeaked as the door, warped from age and the moisture embedded in this part of the house, scraped the floor.

  Mouldy air wafted out. Vadim aimed his light like a weapon into the appalling darkness. Ashamed, he watched his hand shake and heard ragged breath.

  I can’t do it, he thought. Memories of nights spent in the root cellar, crouched beneath the stairs, the smell of earth and vegetation and rot clogging his nostrils. And the sounds. Like nothing he had heard since, except in dreams. Over time he had learned to hum softly, loud enough to cover the noise, low enough not to bring down Grandma Bentz.

  The doll Lola needed had been buried in a storage trunk for a decade and a half. The trunk in the cellar. Now that he’d broken the sugar bowl, there was no way to avoid getting it.

  He stepped down into the dark pit. Cobwebs attacked his face and he gasped. “Weakling!” he admonished, repeating the word hurled so often at him. A word that must have travelled through generations.

  Along the left of the stairs was a wall of shelves stocked with pickles and preserves. He read the ageing labels from the lowest shelf up: chilli sauce; corn relish; pickled cauliflower; carrots and dills dating back to 1790. Ajar of murky contents, the yellowed label smudged. Beets, maybe. These had been here when he was a child, since before his grandmother was a girl. Every generation added to the store and Grandma Bentz had contributed the row second from the top. She had not allowed any of the jars to be touched, calling them “Memories”. Food uneaten. Life preserved forever.

  The steps creaked in familiar spots as Vadim made his way to the dirt floor. He waved the light into each corner. The steamer trunk sat furthest from the stairs. In front of the metal door.

  He placed the unicorn securely in his coat pocket and tucked the flashlight under one arm, ready to tackle this lock. But the latch was open, as if someone had expected him to come this way. Vadim glanced at the door and listened. Nothing.

  He lifted the lid of the trunk. On the left, as if unaware of her surroundings, Lola’s porcelain doll grinned up at him.

  Only two other objects competed for his attention. A piece of barn board with postcards nailed to it. A small black coffin.

  At the sight of the coffin, Vadim shook with fear and rage. Tears threatened to swell over his eyelids and he could not stop himself from yelling “Bitch!” She knew him so well. She had tricked him. Again.

  He was startled by a noise behind the door. A rat. Or his imagination. He did not believe it had been either.

  Vadim wanted to grab the doll and bolt but decades of anger solidified. And he was curious. He lifted the board and ran the light from left to right along both rows. Each Victorian card was a pastel sketch. Together the eight pictures told a story:

  Woman alone, happily swinging on porch swing.

  Man in cloak approaches.

  Man kisses woman on neck.

  Woman dead in coffin.

  Woman rises to join man.

  Man and woman kiss boy on neck.

  Boy dead in coffin.

  Boy rises to join woman and man.

  A quaint Gothic record of family madness, he thought. To be handed down from generation to generation with the silver. But he had no inten
tion of passing it further.

  Vadim placed the board carefully back into the trunk. He snatched up the doll and stuffed it in his other pocket, ready to abandon this prison forever. Yet he felt compelled to look inside the coffin. She must have known he would. “You’ll die of curiosity,” Grandma Bentz had always predicted. He had believed she intended to fulfil that prophecy.

  He picked up the crude wooden box and shook it but had no sense of what lay within. Less than a foot long, three inches at the widest part, shaped like an old-fashioned casket. A morbid miniature in flat black. The dead crawled from his memory: A nighthawk he had buried in a box he made, much like this one. His mother and father, killed in a barn fire. Grandpa Bentz – who knows how he died? It was only his grandmother’s corpse that he had not viewed. Neither he nor Lola had attended the service. Nor gone to the cemetery. “If you don’t witness the dead, how do you know they are?” Grandma Bentz had repeated at every demise, and the words haunted him now.

  Vadim used his car key to pry between the lid and the box. The birch was hard and he was careful to wedge the metal in and lift the nails without damaging the wood. Images formed in his mind, gruesome pictures, parts severed from the living, stolen away from the light, drained of vitality, suspended in darkness forever to shrivel and emaciate slowly.

  The lid was a quarter-inch above the box and he was sweating. Suddenly time and space expanded. Endless. Hopeless. The eternity he had always feared clawed at the edges of his consciousness.

  There was no point in hesitating and Vadim no longer considered it. Instead he struggled to defend himself from his most recent ancestor’s bequest. A gift that he would leave to rot in the belly of this house. That would end with him and Lola, the last of a tortured line.

  He yanked the lid away. The root cellar became a frozen grave. “What did you expect?” he chided, his voice unfamiliar and cold in the hollowness.

  A sharp wooden stake lay inside the casket. Who had she intended it for? She had forced him to this point just as she had meticulously nurtured every dark and savage impulse in him. He threw his head back and laughed until tears flowed and then he began to howl like the doomed animal he felt himself to be. Scratching behind the door brought him to his senses.

  Vadim took the stake out and dropped the coffin back into the trunk, then slammed the lid. The sound was heavy and final in the stillness. But he was not sure what to do. Every possibility seemed annihilating. And he had no idea which act would be giving in to her iron will and which constituted resisting.

  While he waited, thinking, listening, Vadim spun the stake in his fingers, the tip pointing toward him, and then away. Him. Away. But he did not hesitate long. All too soon the metal door opened inward.

  ROBERT BLOCH

  Hungarian Rhapsody

  ROBERT BLOCH WAS BORN IN CHICAGO but lived in Los Angeles for many years. His interest in horror first blossomed when he originally saw Lon Chaney Sr’s performance in the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera. After discovering the pulp magazine Weird Tales, he began corresponding with author H.P. Lovecraft, who advised him to try his own hand at writing fiction. The rest, as they say, is history.

  After his first story was published in 1934, Bloch quickly established himself as a popular and prolific short-story writer, and by the 1940s he had begun to develop his own unique style of twisted psychological horror and grim graveyard humour. Although he wrote more than two dozen novels, over 400 short stories, and numerous scripts for TV and movies, he will always be identified with his 1959 novel Psycho and Alfred Hitchcock’s subsequent film version. His wonderfully entertaining autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, was published in 1993, the year before he died.

  Over the years the author wrote numerous stories about vampirism, and choosing one for this collection proved to be more difficult than I had expected. In the end I picked ‘Hungarian Rhapsody’ because it had not been anthologized quite so often as some of his other, more famous, tales. It is a fine example of 1950s paranoia and Bloch’s renowned sense of black humour.

  RIGHT AFTER LABOR DAY the weather turned cold and all the summer cottage people went home. By the time ice began to form on Lost Lake there was nobody around but Solly Vincent.

  Vincent was a big fat man who had purchased a year-round home on the lake early that spring. He wore loud sports-shirts all summer long, and although nobody ever saw him hunting or fishing, he entertained a lot of weekend guests from the city at his place. The first thing he did when he bought the house was to put up a big sign in front which read SONOVA BEACH. Folks passing by got quite a bang out of it.

  But it wasn’t until fall that he took to coming into town and getting acquainted. Then he started dropping into Doc’s Bar one or two evenings a week, playing cards with the regulars in the back room.

  Even then, Vincent didn’t exactly open up. He played a good game of poker and he smoked good cigars, but he never said anything about himself. Once, when Specs Hennessey asked him a direct question, he told the gang he came from Chicago, and that he was a retired business man. But he never mentioned what business he had retired from.

  The only time he opened his mouth was to ask questions, and he didn’t really do that until the evening Specs Hennessey brought out the gold coin and laid it on the table.

  “Ever see anything like that before?” he asked the gang. Nobody said anything, but Vincent reached over and picked it up.

  “German, isn’t it?” he mumbled. “Who’s the guy with the beard – the Kaiser?”

  Specs Hennessey chuckled. “You’re close,” he said. “That’s old Franz Joseph. He used to be boss of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, forty–fifty years ago. That’s what they told me down at the bank.”

  “Where’d you get it, in a slot-machine?” Vincent wanted to know.

  Specs shook his head. “It came in a bag, along with about a thousand others.”

  That’s when Vincent really began to look interested. He picked up the coin again and turned it in his stubby fingers. “You gonna tell what happened?” he asked.

  Specs didn’t need any more encouragement. “Funniest damn thing,” he said. “I was sitting in the office last Wednesday when this dame showed up and asked if I was the real-estate man and did I have any lake property for sale. So I said sure, the Schultz cottage over at Lost Lake. A mighty fine bargain, furnished and everything, for peanuts to settle the estate.

  “I was all set to give her a real pitch but she said never mind that, could I show it to her? And I said, of course, how about tomorrow, and she said why not right now, tonight?

  “So I drove her out and we went through the place and she said she’d take it, just like that. I should see the lawyer and get the papers ready and she’d come back Monday night and close the deal. Sure enough, she showed up, lugging this big bag of coins. I had to call Hank Felch over from the bank to find out what they were and if they were any good. Turns out they are, all right. Good as gold.” Specs grinned. “That’s how come I know about Franz Joseph.” He took the coin from Vincent and put it back in his pocket. “Anyway, it looks like you’re going to have a new neighbor out there. The Schultz place is only about a half-mile down the line from yours. And if I was you, I’d run over and borrow a cup of sugar.”

  Vincent blinked. “You figure she’s loaded, huh?”

  Specs shook his head. “Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t. But the main thing is, she’s stacked.” He grinned again. “Name’s Helene Ester-hazy. Helene, with an e on the end. I saw it when she signed. Talks like one of them Hungarian refugees – figure that’s what she is, too. A countess, maybe, some kind of nobility. Probably busted out from behind the Iron Curtain and decided to hole up some place where the Commies couldn’t find her. Of course I’m only guessing, because she didn’t have much to say for herself.”

  Vincent nodded. “How was she dressed?” he asked.

  “Like a million bucks.” Specs grinned at him. “What’s the idea, you figuring on marrying for money, or something? I tell you,
one look at this dame and you’ll forget all about dough. She talks something like this ZaZa Gabor. Looks something like her, too, only she has red hair. Boy, if I wasn’t a married man, I’d—”

  “When she say she was moving in?” Vincent interrupted.

  “She didn’t say. But I figure right away, in a day or so.”

  Vincent yawned and stood up.

  “Hey, you’re not quitting yet, are you? The game’s young—”

  “Tired,” Vincent said. “Got to hit the sack.”

  And he went home, and he hit the sack, but not to sleep. He kept thinking about his new neighbor.

  Actually, Vincent wasn’t too pleased with the idea of having anyone for a neighbor, even if she turned out to be a beautiful redheaded refugee. For Vincent was something of a refugee himself, and he’d come up north to get away from people; everybody except the few special friends he invited up during summer weekends. Those people he could trust, because they were former business associates. But there was always the possibility of running into former business rivals – and he didn’t want to see any of them. Not ever. Some of them might nurse grudges, and in Vincent’s former business a grudge could lead to trouble.

  That’s why Vincent didn’t sleep very well at night, and why he always kept a little souvenir of his old business right under the pillow. You never could tell.

  Of course, this sounded legitimate enough; the dame probably was a Hungarian refugee, the way Specs Hennessey said. Still, the whole thing might be a very clever plant, a way of moving in on Vincent which wouldn’t be suspected.

  In any case, Vincent decided he’d keep his eye on the old Schultz cottage down the line and see what happened. So the next morning he went into town again and bought himself a very good pair of binoculars, and the day after that he used them when the moving van drove into the drive of the Schultz place half a mile away.