We talked, reliving the moment of the attack, joking about putting everything behind us, although we knew that Liquid Television was over, and knew that our partnership was probably over too. The man-sized bundle of black plastic sheeting rolled heavily back and forth behind us, like a punked-up Egyptian mummy. We drove through Hornchurch and turned down a service road that stretched across the heaths of Rainham Marshes, drove past grim depots fenced with tall wire to a lonely jetty at the inshore edge.
The river was flat and dark under low clouds still underlit by the dying glow of sunset. By the van’s headlights we wrestled the heavy bundle to the end of the concrete jetty and let it drop into the water.
It splashed, sank, and floated back up, turning in the current. And then the trapped air that buoyed it blurted out, and the black plastic wrapping fell away from the corpse’s face as it sank.
It was not Koshchei. He had played his final trick. The pale face that blurred and faded as it sank into the black water was Vor’s.
Davy and I drove back in silence. We abandoned the van near Bow Tube station, the keys left in the ignition for the benefit of any teenage joyriders who might be about, rode into town in silence, parted in silence.
I have not seen Davy since.
I have been holed up in my flat for more than a month now, living on groceries and booze ordered over the Internet and delivered to my door. I ventured out only once, to a local corner where I bought every wrap of coke and heroin that the kiddie dealers were carrying.
I don’t think I’ll outlast my stash.
I’ve seen Koshchei twice.
Once while idly flicking through TV channels, on an MTV news segment about a hot new folk singer. He was standing to one side of the pub stage, solitary amongst the press of the girl’s eager audience.
And once yesterday, on the terrace of my flat, the security lights shining on his white face as he smiled at me before stepping away into the darkness beyond the rail.
I know he’ll be back. He always comes back to finish what he has begun.
DENNIS ETCHISON
It Only Comes Out at Night
WHEN DENNIS ETCHISON WAS A TEENAGER, Ray Bradbury told him to write a new short story every week for a year. He has been trying to do that since he was fifteen, but hasn’t accomplished it yet.
The winner of two World Fantasy Awards and three British Fantasy Awards, Karl Edward Wagner described him as “The finest writer of psychological horror this genre has produced”.
Born in California in 1943, Etchison’s stories have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies since 1961, and some of his best work has been collected in The Dark Country, Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss and The Death Artist. Talking in the Dark was a massive retrospective volume from Stealth Press marking the fortieth anniversary of his first professional sale. More recently his e-collection Fine Cuts, a volume of stories about Hollywood, appeared in book form from PS Publishing.
Etchison is also well-known as a novelist (The Fog, Darkside, Shadowman, California Gothic and Double Edge) and has published the movie novelizations Halloween II, Halloween III and Videodrome under the pseudonym “Jack Martin”.
As an acclaimed anthologist he has edited Cutting Edge, Masters of Darkness I-III, MetaHorror, The Museum of Horrors and Gathering the Bones, the latter an international anthology of new dark fiction from Australia, America and the United Kingdom, co-edited with Jack Dann and Ramsey Campbell.
Over the past two years Etchison has written thousands of script pages for the Twilight Zone Radio Dramas, based on Rod Serling’s original television series. The dramatic adaptations continue to be broadcast worldwide and are also available on audio cassette and CD.
As the author explains, “‘It Only Comes Out at Night’ was written for Kirby McCauley’s Frights, a classic anthology in the field and one that remains in print to this day. I’m proud to have been a part of it. I was also amazed when the story was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, since I had not thought of it as a fantasy. I suppose the oddness of the tone and the oblique, unresolved nature of the story suggested a deeper mystery beyond the sleep-deprived, hallucinatory details. I was living through a particularly stressful period at the time. You are what you write.”
Etchison also admits that he’s not sure that he has ever written a vampire story, and he may well be right. But the atmospheric tale that follows (as the title indicates) could be a vampire story, and as it is one of my favourite pieces of fiction by one of the genre’s foremost short-story writers, I decided to include it here anyway.
IF YOU LEAVE L.A. by way of San Bernardino, headed for Route 66 and points east, you must cross the Mojave Desert.
Even after Needles and the border, however, there is no relief; the dry air only thins further as the long, relentless climb continues in earnest. Flagstaff is still almost two hundred miles, and Winslow, Gallup and Albuquerque are too many hours away to think of making without food, rest and, mercifully, sleep.
It is like this: the car runs hot, hotter than it ever has before, the plies of the tires expand and contract until the sidewalls begin to shimmy slightly as they spin on over the miserable Arizona roads, giving up a faint odor like burning hair from between the treads, as the windshield colors over with essence of honeybee, wasp, dragonfly, mayfly, June bug, ladybug and the like, and the radiator, clotted with the bodies of countless kamikaze insects, hisses like a moribund lizard in the sun. . . .
All of which means, of course, that if you are traveling that way between May and September, you move by night.
Only by night.
For there are, after all, dawn check-in motels, Do Not Disturb signs for bungalow doorknobs; there are diners for mid-afternoon breakfasts, coffee by the carton; there are 24-hour filling stations bright as dreams – Whiting Brothers, Conoco, Terrible Herbst – their flags as unfamiliar as their names, with ice machines, soda machines, candy machines; and there are the sudden, unexpected Rest Areas, just off the highway, with brick bathrooms and showers and electrical outlets, constructed especially for those who are weary, out of money, behind schedule . . . .
So McClay had had to learn, the hard way.
He slid his hands to the bottom of the steering wheel and peered ahead into the darkness, trying to relax. But the wheel stuck to his fingers like warm candy. Off somewhere to his left, the horizon flickered with pearly luminescence, then faded again to black. This time he did not bother to look. Sometimes, though, he wondered just how far away the lightning was striking; not once during the night had the sound of its thunder reached him here in the car.
In the back seat, his wife moaned.
The trip out had turned all but unbearable for her. Four days it had taken, instead of the expected two-and-a-half; he made a great effort not to think of it, but the memory hung over the car like a thunderhead.
It had been a blur, a fever dream. Once, on the second day, he had been passed by a churning bus, its silver sides blinding him until he noticed a Mexican woman in one of the window seats. She was not looking at him. She was holding a swooning infant to the glass, squeezing water onto its head from a plastic baby bottle to keep it from passing out.
McClay sighed and fingered the buttons on the car radio.
He knew he would get nothing from the AM or FM bands, not out here, but he clicked it on anyway. He left the volume and tone controls down, so as not to wake Evvie. Then he punched the seldom-used middle button, the shortwave band, and raised the gain carefully until he could barely hear the radio over the hum of the tires.
Static.
Slowly he swept the tuner across the bandwidth, but there was only white noise. It reminded him a little of the summer rain yesterday, starting back, the way it had sounded bouncing off the windows.
He was about to give up when he caught a voice, crackling, drifting in and out. He worked the knob like a safecracker, zeroing in on the signal.
A few bars of music. A tone, then the voice again. “. . . Greenwich Mean Time.” T
hen the station ID.
It was the Voice of America Overseas Broadcast.
He grunted disconsolately and killed it.
His wife stirred.
“Why’d you turn it off she murmured. “I was listening to that. Good. Program.”
“Take it easy,” he said, “easy, you’re still asleep. We’ll be stopping soon.”
“. . . Only comes out at night,” he heard her say, and then she was lost again in the blankets.
He pressed the glove compartment, took out one of the Automobile Club guides. It was already clipped open. McClay flipped on the overhead light and drove with one hand, reading over – for the hundredth time? – the list of motels that lay ahead. He knew the list by heart, but seeing the names again reassured him somehow. Besides, it helped to break the monotony.
It was the kind of place you never expect to find in the middle of a long night, a bright place with buildings (a building, at least) and cars, other cars drawn off the highway to be together in the protective circle of light.
A Rest Area.
He would have spotted it without the sign. Elevated sodium vapor lighting bathed the scene in an almost peach-colored glow, strikingly different from the cold blue-white sentinels of the Interstate Highway. He had seen other Rest Area signs on the way out, probably even this one. But in daylight the signs had meant nothing more to him than FRONTAGE ROAD or BUSINESS DISTRICT NEXT RIGHT. He wondered if it was the peculiar warmth of light that made the small island of blacktop appear so inviting.
McClay decelerated, downshifted and left Interstate 40.
The car dipped and bumped, and he was aware of the new level of sound from the engine as it geared down for the first time in hours.
He eased in next to a Pontiac Firebird, toed the emergency brake and cut the ignition.
He allowed his eyes to close and his head to sink back into the headrest. At last.
The first thing he noticed was the quiet.
It was deafening. His ears literally began to ring, with the high-pitched whine of a late-night TV test pattern.
The second thing he noticed was a tingling at the tip of his tongue.
It brought to mind a picture of a snake’s tongue. Picking up electricity from the air, he thought.
The third was the rustling awake of his wife, in back.
She pulled herself up. “Are we sleeping now? Why are the lights . . .?”
He saw the outline of her head in the mirror. “It’s just a rest stop, hon. I – the car needs a break.” Well, it was true, wasn’t it? “You want the rest room? There’s one back there, see it?”
“Oh my God.”
“What’s the matter now?”
“Leg’s asleep. Listen, are we or are we not going to get a—”
“There’s a motel coming up.” He didn’t say that they wouldn’t hit the one he had marked in the book for another couple of hours; he didn’t want to argue. He knew she needed the rest-he needed it too, didn’t he? “Think I’ll have some more of that coffee, though,” he said.
“Isn’t any more,” she yawned.
The door slammed.
Now he was able to recognize the ringing in his ears for what it was: the sound of his own blood. It almost succeeded in replacing the steady drone of the car.
He twisted around, fishing over the back of the seat for the ice chest.
There should be a couple of Cokes left, at least.
His fingers brushed the basket next to the chest, riffling the edges of maps and tour books, by now reshuffled haphazardly over the first-aid kit he had packed himself (tourniquet, forceps, scissors, ammonia inhalants, Merthiolate, triangular bandage, compress, adhesive bandages, tannic acid) and the fire extinguisher, the extra carton of cigarettes, the remainder of a half-gallon of drinking water, the thermos (which Evvie said was empty, and why would she lie?).
He popped the top of a can.
Through the side window he saw Evvie disappearing around the corner of the building. She was wrapped to the gills in her blanket.
He opened the door and slid out, his back aching.
He stood there blankly, the unnatural light washing over him.
He took a long, sweet pull from the can. Then he started walking.
The Firebird was empty.
And the next car, and the next.
Each car he passed looked like the one before it, which seemed crazy until he realized that it must be the work of the light. It cast an even, eerie tan over the baked metal tops, like orange sunlight through air thick with suspended particles. Even the windshields appeared to be filmed over with a thin layer of settled dust. It made him think of country roads, sundowns.
He walked on.
He heard his footsteps echo with surprising clarity, resounding down the staggered line of parked vehicles. Finally it dawned on him (and now he knew how tired he really was) that the cars must actually have people in them – sleeping people. Of course. Well hell, he thought, watching his step, I wouldn’t want to wake anyone. The poor devils.
Besides the sound of his footsteps, there was only the distant swish of an occasional, very occasional car on the highway; from here, even that was only a distant hush, growing and then subsiding like waves on a nearby shore.
He reached the end of the line, turned back.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw, or thought he saw, a movement by the building.
It would be Evvie, shuffling back.
He heard the car door slam.
He recalled something he had seen in one the tourist towns in New Mexico: circling the park – in Taos, that was where they had been – he had glimpsed an ageless Indian, wrapped in typical blanket, ducking out of sight into the doorway of a gift shop; with the blanket over his head that way, the Indian had somehow resembled an Arab, or so it had seemed to him at the time.
He heard another car door slam.
That was the same day – was it only last week? – that she had noticed the locals driving with their headlights on (in honor of something or other, some regional election, perhaps: ‘“My face speaks for itself,”’ drawled Herman J. ‘Fashio’ Trujillo, Candidate for Sheriff); she had insisted at first that it must be a funeral procession, though for whom she could not guess.
McClay came to the car, stretched a last time, and crawled back in.
Evvie was bundled safely again in the back seat.
He lit a quick cigarette, expecting to hear her voice any second, complaining, demanding that he roll down the windows, at least, and so forth. But, as it turned out, he was able to sit undisturbed as he smoked it down almost to the filter.
Paguate. Bluewater. Thoreau.
He blinked.
Klagetoh. Joseph City. Ash Fork.
He blinked and tried to focus his eyes from the taillights a half-mile ahead to the bug-spattered glass, then back again.
Petrified Forest National Park.
He blinked, refocusing. But it did no good.
A twitch started on the side of his face, close by the corner of his eye.
Rehoboth.
He strained at a road sign, the names and mileages, but instead a seemingly endless list of past and future shops and detours shimmered before his mind’s eye.
I’ve had it, he thought. Now, suddenly, it was catching up with him, the hours of repressed fatigue; he felt a rushing out of something from his chest. No way to make that motel – hell, I can’t even remember the name of it now. Check the book. But it doesn’t matter. The eyes. Can’t control my eyes anymore.
(He had already begun to hallucinate things like tree trunks and cows and Mack trucks speeding toward him on the highway. The cow had been straddling the broken line; in the last few minutes its lowing, deep and regular, had become almost inviting.)
Well, he could try for any motel. Whatever turned up next.
But how much farther would that be?
He ground his teeth together, feeling the pulsing at his temples. He struggled to remember the last sign.
> The next town. It might be a mile. Five miles. Fifty.
Think! He said it, he thought it, he didn’t know which.
If he could just pull over, pull over right now and lie down for a few minutes—
He seemed to see clear ground ahead. No rocks, no ditch. The shoulder, just ahead.
Without thinking he dropped into neutral and coasted, aiming for it.
The car glided to a stop.
God, he thought.
He forced himself to turn, reach into the back seat.
The lid to the chest was already off. He dipped his fingers into the ice and retrieved two half-melted cubes, lifted them into the front seat and began rubbing them over his forehead.
He let his eyes close, seeing dull lights fire as he daubed at the lids, the rest of his face, the forehead again. As he slipped the ice into his mouth and chewed, it broke apart as easily as snow.
He took a deep breath. He opened his eyes again.
At that moment a huge tanker roared past, slamming an after-shock of air into the side of the car. The car rocked like a boat at sea.
No. It was no good.
So. So he could always turn back, couldn’t he? And why not? The Rest Area was only twenty, twenty-five minutes behind him. (Was that all?) He could pull out and hang a U and turn back, just like that. And then sleep. It would be safer there. With luck, Evvie wouldn’t even know. An hour’s rest, maybe two; that was all he would need.
Unless – was there another Rest Area ahead?
How soon?
He knew that the second wind he felt now wouldn’t last, not for more than a few minutes. No, it wasn’t worth the chance.
He glanced in the rearview mirror.
Evvie was still down, a lumpen mound of blanket and hair.
Above her body, beyond the rear window, the raised headlights of another monstrous truck, closing ground fast.
He made the decision.
He slid into first and swung out in a wide arc, well ahead of the blast of the truck, and worked up to fourth gear. He was thinking about the warm, friendly lights he had left behind.
The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books) Page 37