She pulled his young arm around her shoulder and began to count the fingers on his hand with delicate little taps. Across the room, Claudia was sitting on Guy’s lap, pulling his ear. They seemed to have come to good terms.
“This is really a great house,” Larry said slowly. “It’s—” He gulped. “It’s nice,” he said.
And right here it would come, Garland thought, something about how she was too lovely a girl to be in such a sordid business. To her relief, he didn’t say it. Again she must take the initiative. She pulled his hand to where it could envelop her soft breast and held it there.
“Like it?” she whispered.
He must know what was coming, but plainly he was drowned in all sorts of conflicting emotions. Uncle Whit hadn’t coached him, not nearly enough. He looked around the lamplit room with his eyes that were somehow plaintive. His beard seemed to droop.
“All right, Larry,” said Garland, “come with me.”
She got up and tugged his hand to make him get to his feet. He smiled. Of course, get him somewhere away from Claudia and Guy, there so cozy in the armchair. She picked up a lamp and led him into the hall.
“Wow,” he said. “That staircase. Spiral. Looks like something in a historical movie.”
“Does it?”
The staircase wound up into dark reaches. Gently Garland guided him and he seemed glad to be guided. She shepherded him past the torn spots in the carpeting, away from the shaky stretch of the balustrade, up to the hall above. She held up the lamp. It showed the faded roses on the carpet.
“Here,” she said, “this is my room.”
She opened the heavy door and pushed it inward. They stepped across the threshold together. She set the lamp on a table near the oriel window.
“I swear, Garland,” he muttered, “this is great. That old four-poster bed, the bench – they must be worth a lot. They’re old.”
“Older than I am,” she smiled at him.
“You’re not old, Garland. You’re beautiful.”
“So are you,” she told him truthfully.
They sat down on the bed. It had a cover of deep blue velvet with dim gold tassels. Larry seemed overwhelmed.
“I can’t tell you how lovely all this is,” he stammered.
“Then don’t try. Put your feet up. That’s right. Now relax.”
He sank back. She pulled the loose shirt collar wider. “What a beautiful neck you have.”
“Oh,” he said, “it’s Guy who’s got the neck. All those exercises, those weights he lifts.”
“Let Claudia attend to Guy. You’re here with me.”
Outside the door, a soft rustling. Garland paid no attention. Larry was quiet now, his eyes closed. Garland bent to him, her tender fingers massaging his temples, his neck. He breathed rhythmically, as though he slept. Closer Garland bent to him, her hands on his neck. Her fingers crooked, their tips pressed.
The lamplight shone on her red lips. They parted. Her teeth showed long and sharp. She crooned to him. She stopped. Her mouth opened above his neck.
Outside, voices spoke, faint, inhuman.
Garland rose quickly and went to the door. She opened it a crack.
Shapes hung there, gaunt and in ragged clothes. “Well,” she whispered fiercely, “can’t you wait?”
“Let me in,” said one of them. Eyes gleamed palely. “Let me in,” said another. “Hungry, hungry—”
“Can’t you wait?” asked Garland again. “After I’m finished, you can have him. Have what’s left.”
She closed the door on their pleas, and hurried back to where Larry lay ready, motionless, dreaming, on the bed.
SIMON CLARK
Vampyrrhic Outcast
SIMON CLARK LIVES IN DONCASTER, South Yorkshire. His early short stories were published in the small press and he made his first professional sale to BBC local radio. Since then his fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and been broadcast nationwide.
Clark’s debut novel, Nailed by the Heart, appeared in 1995 and was followed by several more titles, including Blood Crazy, Darker, King Blood, Vampyrrhic, The Fall, Judas Tree, Stranger, and the British Fantasy Award-winning The Night of the Triffids. 2003 saw the publication of Vampyrrhic Rites, the sequel to Vampyrrhic, an epic tale of Norse vampires plaguing a modern-day English town.
His short stories have been collected in Blood and Grit and Salt Snake, and he has also written prose material for the rock band U2.
“To celebrate the appearance of Vampyrrhic Rites,” explains the author, “I published ‘Vampyrrhic Outcast’ exclusively on my website. It was only intended to loosely allude to the novel, but when I began writing it I realized that once more the themes and characters of both Vampyrrhic and its sequel had got a grip on me and I began to ask myself, was ‘Vampyrrhic Outcast’ a self-contained story, or was it really the opening of Vampyrrhic volume three?
“I hadn’t consciously planned a third volume in the series. Now I’m not so sure.”
In the following story, set in the Vampyrrhic outlands, a lonely soul searches for a place of safety . . .
‘You are as the darkness of night touched by the pale light of the moon’
– from Skanda Purana (India, circa 1,000 AD)
BY THE LIGHT OF a midnight moon the town of Leppington lay sleeping. Twenty hours of heavy July rain filled the streets with pools of water that glittered silver. Each one duplicated the image of the moon. A hard disc as white as bone that oh-so-faintly revealed dead lunar seas.
The girl walked barefoot down the deserted street, her toes sinking into puddles, annihilating those shimmering copies of a faraway world.
I’m late, she told herself. I’m too late; they’ll have left without me.
Those urgent thoughts pulsed through her mind. She moved faster: a lonesome figure gliding through this remote Yorkshire town that was a desolate and eerie place at this time of night. Above still-glistening rooftops that burned with silver dashes of moonlight, she glimpsed the range of dark, forbidding hills that formed an unbroken wall as if to keep Leppington town an eternal prisoner.
Thoughts darted fiercely, prompting her to break in to a run. I’m going to leave here. You can’t keep me for ever. Once I find them they’ll take me with them. I need never return to this godforsaken graveyard of a place ever again.
She turned a corner in the street, then paused. Standing there, dwarfing the surrounding buildings, looking for all the world like a huge tombstone thrusting up out of damp earth was the Station Hotel. No lights showed through the windows in its Gothic face. It was unlikely that there would be any hotel guests . . . after all, who would willingly stay in such a grim building with its morbid adornment of gargoyles and its glowering faces carved into lintels? If by some slim chance there were any guests, they had probably chosen to escape their surroundings in sleep.
A figure appeared in the shadows of an alleyway to her right. She could see palely gleaming arms. They were bare, she noted. Their skin showed as an icy blue colour patterned with thick, black veins. There was no face – at least none she could see as it was so deeply swathed in gloom.
Whoever the stranger was, he watched her. Cold waves of fear washed through her body. She backed away from the figure as it took a step forward.
The hotel was only a hundred paces away. I could run for it. Perhaps he wouldn’t have a chance to catch me . . .
As she tensed, ready to flee for the hotel, she heard the man speak. The voice had a diseased quality to it, as if the vocal cords had been rotted by some necrotic infection. “Go back to where you came from. You don’t belong here. Go back . . .”
The moment she turned, ready to run, she stumbled, falling to her hands and knees in a pool of water that covered half the road. For a moment she froze there, shocked by both the fall and the appearance of the loathsome stranger. Dazed, she looked down into the water. The hard, gleaming disc of the moon was reflected there. And, as she watched, another pale object appeared to float alongside it. She s
aw a face – a terrible face that made her gasp. Its skin had the appearance of candle wax; there were blue tints dappling its strangely broad forehead. While the eyes—
That stare made her blood creep, as if turning it to ice in her veins. Breaking free of the hypnotic gaze, she leapt to her feet and ran toward the Station Hotel. The abrasive road surface would be ripping the bare soles of her feet, but she could not stop now.
He’s following me, she thought. I know he is. I mustn’t look back. An access path led down the side of the looming Gothic structure to the rear yard. She took it, her feet either splashing puddles or slapping down on nineteenth-century cobblestones. Please be there. Don’t leave without me . . . Only when she was round the corner of the hotel did she glance back. The courtyard was empty. Here, moonlight glinted on the cobbles. It put images in her mind of walking across the scaly back of some primeval monster. Even as she crossed the ground to a lighted window at the rear of the hotel it seemed to twitch beneath her feet, as if her imagined monster slept only fitfully and would soon wake to roar out its fury at her for disturbing it.
It will only be a moment before the man from the alley finds me here. Oh God, those eyes . . . Her stomach muscles writhed as if a fistful of worms slid through her intestines. Those evil-looking eyes. There had been no colour to them – only a glistening white like the boiled flesh of an egg. Worse, in the centre of each eye a tiny black pupil glared with such ferocity that her legs had nearly folded under her. She knew that if she looked into those eyes again she would never break free of their hold.
She glanced about the gloom-drenched courtyard. Still no sign of the figure that had frightened her so much. Yet shadows seeped along the ground, as if spreading stains of blood crept towards her. Irrationally she thought: I can’t let those shadows touch me. They are poison . . . No . . . She swayed, dizzy. No, that doesn’t make sense. That’s a mad thought. Only –
She turned her back on the areas of darkness flowing across the cobbled surface, devouring the bright licks of reflected moonlight. Even to look at those shadows made her uneasy. What was important was to get inside the hotel.
Now, that was a beautiful image. Of her standing in the brightly-lit hotel kitchen, the door locked solidly behind her, seeing familiar faces. Of not being alone. Alone she could not handle any more. Alone is a cancer of the spirit. Alone is debilitating . . . loneliness has the relentless, erosive power to grind away at confidence, at physical strength.
Just for a moment recollection of the loneliness that she had endured roared over her in a great black tide. Its grim currents carried a diffused but permanent cloud of terror. Every time she awoke she dreaded being engulfed by this awful feeling that soon something terrible would happen to her. Only she would be powerless to seek help . . . or even find anyone who could offer comfort and companionship if disaster struck.
Maybe this is what I’ve been dreading? Perhaps the sense of foreboding was a premonition of the stranger waiting for me in the alley? That I’ve always known that one day – one night! – I’d find myself alone here, and come face to face with the man who will take my life.
A sudden scraping sound made her flinch. She glanced back. Saw nothing but shadow and the gloom-filled void of the archway in the wall that led out onto the river bank. Now she could hear the hissing roar of the river itself. All this rain had swollen it, engorging the body of water into flood. Only now the sound of the river was like a voice calling her to it.
No. No! She pressed the palms of her hands against her ears. It’s this weird little town. It has that effect on you. The longer you stay the more it insinuates strange ideas into your head. For some reason, when she closed her eyes she imagined that a labyrinth of tunnels ran beneath the houses. And in these tunnels swarmed pallid, maggot-like men and women that lusted for human blood – and the warmth of a human body, one they could wind their vein-knotted arms around. Blood and body heat – beneath the skin the pair are brother and sister. The tangible embodiment of this intangible thing we call Life . . .
Now her eyes were closed and she tottered forward until she leaned against the hotel wall, her face pressing cold brick that possessed the damp, clammy touch of a dead hand. Images flew through her mind of pallid, naked forms that swam through deep waters. The River Lepping roared beyond the yard wall. And she imagined a hundred faces floating up through the swirling flood to cry out to her. Angry voices that demanded she leave this place while she still could.
No. I will not let this town put those thoughts into my head. I am sane. I am rational. I will not think about vampires.
Vampires? Even to think the word made her eyes snap open. Vampires? Why did I use that word? She shuddered to the roots of her bones. If she did not find another human being to talk to right at this moment she realized she would lose her mind. Above her head, cloud drew cobweb strands across a ghosting moon. Even the little light it cast into the yard was dying now. She must get inside the hotel. She must find human company.
Feeling her way along the wall, she reached the window that formed a block of shining yellow in that unyielding membrane of brick. Once more, her mind spun out strange ideas: Yes, the wall is a membrane. At one side are light, life, companionship and safety. While on this side . . .
Then she had reached the window. For a second the brilliance of the electric light inside dazzled her. Screwing up her eyes, she brought her face close to the glass and peered in. A dresser full of blue plates. An antique-looking stove. A Yorkshire range in black-painted iron. Brass kettle. Belfast sink. A wall clock showing half-past midnight. But where was . . . ah, there!
Angling her head to one side, she made out the vast kitchen table that dominated the room. Around it sat five men and women. They were holding a conversation – an intense one. Those that were not speaking listened solemnly. Inside was full of light – a beautiful, brilliant, Pentecostal light. It suppressed shadows; it did not yield before things that creep out of the night. The air inside would be warm; it would smell pleasantly of soap and the lingering after-aroma of freshly cooked food. She saw bottles of wine. Every now and again the men and women would sip from their glasses.
It looked wonderful. She wished she was sitting in their company drinking that red wine – a delicious rouge colour. She could imagine how it would taste, its velvety softness. Her tongue ran across her top lip while her gaze roved over the people at the table. An elegant woman dressed in black: she had long hair that was a gunmetal blue. The way she held herself suggested an aristocratic ancestry. The man sitting beside her was in his thirties. His eyes were soulful, caring, yet touched with melancholy. Three other people, in their late teens or early twenties, she guessed, sat across the table from him.
Suddenly she realized she could hear the sound of approaching footsteps. It must be the stranger from the alleyway. It has to be. He’s followed me here. She glanced to the corner of the building, expecting the loathsome figure to appear at any moment. Nothing yet. But the slow footfalls sounded louder. Quickly, she tapped on the window-pane with her fingernails. The group inside still talked. Some serious subject that involved them deeply. She tapped again.
Why don’t they hear me?
She glanced to the corner of the building. The sound of footsteps grew louder. Oh no . . . she could see a strange, humped shadow looming across the cobblestones. Her pursuer must be walking along the access path to the yard now; the street lights were behind him, throwing the grotesque shadow forward.
Heart pounding, she rapped on the window. This time it was loud enough for the men and women to swing their heads around to look in her direction. She saw their eyes widen. One of the women screamed.
“Please, let me in. I’m being followed . . . please, he’s nearly—”
Then from behind a pair of hands grasped her shoulders. She glanced fearfully down to see fingers that were bloated like raw sausages – the skin was a sickening mix of grey and blue tints, while the fingernails were ragged, purple things. So cold as well . . . the
fingers had the feel of raw meat taken from a refrigerator. That cold seeped through her clothes into her own skin, chilling the blood that ran through her veins, oozing into every secret place of her.
She tried to cry out, but shock had locked her throat tight. All she could manage was a hoarse gasping sound. The powerful hands dragged her away from the kitchen window. In seconds she had been hauled through the gateway onto the river bank. Here there were no lights. It was merely a strip of muddy ground from which bulged malformed growths of bushes and willow trees that loomed over black river water.
Even though she struggled, the grip on her shoulders was so powerful that she could not turn around to see her attacker’s face.
Oh, but she remembered it though. That dead white face. With colourless eyes centred by fierce black pupils that seemed to burn holes through her heart . . .
Despite her terror she realized that the door to the hotel had opened.
A voice called, “Who’s there?”
Once more she tried to cry out, only she was too breathless from the violence of being dragged through the witch-tangle of branches to the water’s edge. The River Lepping roared at her now. A full-blooded sound that vibrated through her body.
But even though the sound pounded at her awareness, she heard only too well what the man breathed into her ear with that toxic voice.
“Why didn’t you listen to me? I said you don’t belong here.”
“Please,” she choked out the word. “Don’t kill me . . . please don’t kill me.”
“Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you.” The man held her so that her face almost touched the water’s dark surface. She saw two faces reflected there. Both blue-white, cheeks patterned with black veins. Two faces with white staring eyes punctuated by fierce black pupils. “Don’t you understand?” he hissed. “You’re already dead.”
As the word dead, dead, dead reverberated in her ears he threw her into the river.
The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books) Page 24