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

by Stephen Jones

  All the members echoed his words: “Life everlasting.”

  Farrow lifted his glass; it contained a red liquid, already beginning to darken. He sniffed, and the craving started. He put the glass to his lips and took the first sip; slightly salty, but satisfying . . . and then he couldn’t stop. He emptied his glass in one greedy gulp.

  They were watching him, amused. They took controlled sips.

  Someone laid a hand on his arm. Nurse Terry, still in uniform, had arrived.

  “Never mind, Vic, self-control comes gradually. I’m pleased to see you here.”

  The barman passed her a drink and she sipped slowly, obviously enjoying it.

  “It is blood, isn’t it?” Farrow asked.

  “Yes, of course. You see the advantage of a private club?”

  “I’ll join.”

  “But you are already a member!”

  He passed his empty to the barman. “I’ll have—”

  “Not tonight,” Terry said. “You lost a lot of blood, Vic, and that can have strange and unexpected effects. Slow down, and you will bring yourself under control. So no more till this time tomorrow.”

  “Whatever you say, Nurse.”

  Farrow was discouraged when he found that she was only interested in him as a patient; that other members showed no inclination to include him in their conversation.

  He heard quiet mention of “gradually slipping our people into positions of power”, and registered a sly glance when someone murmured “the media”. He decided to leave.

  Outside, he found himself in an odd mood. He’d got the drink he wanted – and would go back, treat the club as a drinking place – and apparently had been selected as a member. But drinking blood? He felt shame, and a touch of fear, not at all sure what he was getting into.

  Next evening, his craving was back, stronger than before. He set off early for the clubhouse, licking his lips in anticipation, but got into an argument at the bus stop.

  A fat woman with a shopping basket was in his way and, as he tried to push past, she shoved him back. “Who d’you think you are? You’ll wait till I’ve got my seat.”

  Farrow stared at her neck, his hands twitching, his teeth grating. He saw a vein just below the surface and it acted like a magnet, drawing him—

  A hand took a firm grip on his arm. “This way, Vic. I can give you a lift,”

  He left with reluctance, staring back at the fat woman with desperate longing.

  Nurse Terry had her car parked nearby. “It was lucky I had some local shopping to do. You could get into trouble like that, Vic. This is why we have a discreet drinking club.”

  He sat frozen beside her as the car purred along. He had wanted to sink his teeth into that woman’s neck and siphon off her blood. He’d needed to do that and felt as if someone had stunned him with a mallet.

  “You’ll be all right again after a drink.” Terry said. “This is something we all go through.”

  “You too?”

  “Of course. There are more of us than you realize.”

  Farrow’s head was still in a whirl when they reached the clubhouse, but after one drink, slightly larger this time, his nerves quieted down. Until he picked up a late edition that someone had left on the counter. The headline caused him to sweat in near-panic.

  A SICK MONSTER?

  A Home Office psychiatrist insists that this criminal, who takes blood from his victims, is suffering from a rare disease and must be found and treated for his addiction. The public, however, may, not agree . . .

  He was still shaken by the memory of how he’d almost attacked the fat woman, and the report shocked him.

  Edgar Shaw took the paper from him with an amused smile. “Tabloid rubbish, Mr Farrow. This sort of thing is nothing to do with us. Obviously. We shall expect you to do better on our behalf.”

  When Vic Farrow left, he decided that tomorrow he would visit the hospital and demand an explanation from Dr Gregor.

  But in the morning, Gregor refused to see him, and Nurse Terry told him, “The doctor says there’s no point in wasting his time. The truth is he’s annoyed with the lies you were writing for your paper. That’s why we arranged your accident – to give you a chance to help your fellow creatures.”

  Farrow almost stopped breathing as he struggled with disbelief.

  “It wasn’t just a transfusion you had, Vic, but a complete blood change. Surely immortality is worth a little inconvenience?”

  Dazed, Vic Farrow left the hospital. Immortality? Would that account for the strangeness he felt? He wandered along a busy street, filled with people no longer quite like himself, and into a side alley.

  He found the service entrance where bins of medical rubbish awaited collection, and rummaged until he found an empty carton. The labelling gave him a new understanding of his situation.

  FROZEN WHOLE BLOOD

  Produce of Buda-Pesth.

  Supplied by Vlad-Drac Enterprise.

  MELANIE TEM

  The Better Half

  MELANIE TEM IS AN ADOPTION SOCIAL WORKER who lives in Denver, Colorado, with her husband, the writer and editor Steve Rasnic Tern. They have four children and three grandchildren.

  Her novels include Prodigal, which won the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel, Revenant, Black River and The Tides. Two more recent titles include Slain in the Spirit and The Deceiver. The Ice Downstream is a new short-story collection.

  In 2003 Tern also had two plays produced – the one-act The Society for Lost Positives, and the full-length Comfort Me with Peaches.

  “In college I had a good friend who was beautiful, complex, vivacious, intelligent,” explains the author. “She was in love with a young man who to all appearances was dim-witted, bland, boring, shallow. Over the two years they dated, she did his papers for him, tutored him in all subjects, told him how to dress and bought his clothes for him, taught him manners and elocution and how to dance. They got married. I lost touch with them.

  “Many years later she and I crossed paths again. She was wan, haggard, nervous. She had not had a career outside the home. Her husband had become an internationally known attorney and law professor and a high-ranking military officer.

  “I found this very creepy. ‘The Better Half posits as plausible an explanation as any.”

  The story that follows is another of those vampire tales that takes an oblique view of the theme. It is no less disturbing a piece of fiction for that . . .

  KELLY OPENED THE DOOR before I’d even come close to her house. The opening and closing of the red door in the white house startled me, like a mouth baring teeth. I stopped where I was, halfway down the block. Kelly was wearing a yellow dress and something white around her shoulders. She stepped farther out onto the porch and shaded her eyes against the high July sun.

  For some reason, I didn’t want her to see me just yet. I stepped behind a thick lilac bush dotted with the hard purplish nubs of spent flowers. A small brown dog in the yard across the street yapped twice at me, then gave it up and went back to its spot in the shade.

  I hadn’t seen Kelly in fifteen years. I’d thought I’d forgotten her, but I’d have known her anywhere. In college we’d been very close for awhile. Now that I was older and more careful, I’d have expected not to understand the ardor I’d felt for her then; it distressed me that I understood it perfectly, even felt a pulse of it again, like hot blood. Watching her from a distance and through the purple and green filtering of the lilac bush, I found myself a little afraid of her.

  Later I learned that it was not Kelly I had reason to fear. But my father had died in the spring, and I was afraid of everything. Afraid of loving. Afraid of not loving. Afraid of coming home or rounding a corner and discovering something terrible that I, by my presence, could have stopped. I cowered behind the lilac bush and wished I could make myself invisible. I wondered why she’d called. I wondered savagely why I’d come. I thought about retreating along the hot bright sidewalk away from her house. I could hardly keep myself f
rom rushing headlong to her.

  Slowly I approached her. It was obvious that she still hadn’t seen me; she was looking the other way. Looking for me. I was, purposely, a few minutes late. Then she turned, and I knew with a chill that something was terribly wrong.

  It wasn’t just that she looked alien, although she was elegantly dressed on a Saturday morning in a neighborhood where a business suit on a weekday was an oddity. It wasn’t just that I felt invaded, although her house was around the corner from the diner where Daddy and I had often had breakfast, the park where we’d walked sometimes, the apartment where we’d lived. It was more than that. There was something wrong with her. I stopped again and stared.

  It was mid-July and high noon. Hot green light through the porch awning flooded her face, the same heavy brows, high cheekbones, slightly aquiline nose. She looked sick. The spots of color high on her cheeks could have been paint or fever. She was breathing hard. Even from here I could see that she was shivering violently. And around her shoulders, in the noonday summer heat, was a white fur jacket.

  I have told myself that at that point I nearly left, but I don’t think that’s true. I stood there looking at her across the neat green of the Kentucky bluegrass in her north Denver lawn. Sprinklers were on, making rainbows. I was drawn to her as I’d always been. Something was wrong, and I was about to be drenched in it, too.

  She saw me and smiled, a weak and heart-wrenching grimace. I wished desperately that I’d never come but the impulse toward self-preservation, like others throughout my life, came too late.

  “Brenda! Hello!”

  I opened the waist-high, filigreed, wrought-iron gate, turned to latch it carefully behind me, turned again to walk between even rows of pinwheel petunias. “Kelly,” I said, with an effort holding out my hand. “It’s good to see you.”

  Her hand was icy cold. I still vividly recall the shock of touching it, the momentary disorientation of having to remind myself that the temperature was nearly a hundred degrees. She leaned toward me over the porch railing, and a tiny hot breeze stirred the half-dozen windchimes that hung from the eave, making a sweet cacophony. Healthy plants hung thick around her, almost obscuring her face. I could smell both her honeysuckle perfume and the faint sickly odor of her breath. She was smiling cordially; her lips were pale pink, almost colorless, against the yellow-white of her teeth. There were dark circles under her eyes. For a moment I had the terrifying fantasy that she would tumble off the porch into my arms, and that when she hit she would weigh no more than the truncated melodies from the sway of the chimes.

  Her voice was much as I remembered it: husky, controlled, well-modulated. But I thought I’d heard it break, as though the two words she’d spoken had been almost too much for her. She took a deep breath, encircled my wrist with the thin icy fingers of her other hand, and said, “Come in.”

  I had last seen Kelly at her wedding. I’d watched the ceremony from a gauzy distance, wondering how she could bring herself to do such a thing and whether I’d ever get the chance; my father had already been sick and my mother, of course, long gone. Then I had passed through a long reception line to have her press my hand and kiss my cheek as though she’d never seen me before. Or never would again.

  Ron, her new husband, had bent to kiss me, too, and I’d made a point to cough at the silly musk of his aftershave. He was tall and very fair, with baby-soft stubble on his cheeks and upper lip. His big pawlike hands cupped my shoulders as he gazed earnestly down at me. “I love her, Brenda.” He could have been reciting the Boy Scout pledge. “Already she’s my better half.”

  Later I repeated that comment to my friends; we all laughed and rolled our eyes. Ron was always terribly sincere. He could be making an offhand remark about the weather or the cafeteria food, and from his tone and delivery you’d think he was issuing a proclamation to limit worldwide nuclear arms proliferation.

  Ron was simple. Often you could tell he’d missed the punchline of a joke, especially if it was off-color; he’d chuckle good-naturedly anyway. He had a hard time keeping up with our rapid Eastern chatter, but he’d look from one speaker to the next like an alert puppy, as if he were following right along. He was such an easy target that few of us resisted the temptation to make fun of him.

  Kelly, who was brilliant, got him through school. At first she literally wrote his papers for him; he was a poli sci major and she took languages, so it meant double studying for her, but she didn’t seem to pull any more all-nighters than the rest of us. Gradually he learned to write first drafts, which she then edited meticulously; you’d see them huddled at a table in the library, Kelly looking grim, Ron looking earnest and genial and bewildered.

  She taught him everything. How to write a simple sentence. How to study for an exam. How to read a paragraph from beginning to end and catch the drift. How to eat without grossing everybody out. How to behave during fraternity rush. At a time when the entire Greek system was the object of much derision on our liberal little campus, Ron became a proud and busy Delt; senior year he was elected president, and Kelly, demure in gold chiffon, clung to his arm.

  We gossiped that she taught him everything he knew about sex, too. That first year, before the mores and the rules loosened to allow men and women in each other’s rooms, everybody made out in the courtyard of the freshman women’s dorm. Because Kelly said they had too much work to do, they weren’t there as often as some of the rest of us; for a while that winter and spring, I spent most of my waking hours, and a few asleep, in the courtyard with a handsome and knowledgeable young man from New Jersey named Jan.

  But Ron and Kelly were there often enough for us to observe them and comment on their form. His back would be hard against the wall and his arms stiffly down around her waist. She’d be stretched up to nuzzle in his neck – or, we speculated unkindly, to whisper instructions. At first, if you said hello on your way past – and we would, just to be perverse – Ron’s innate politeness would have him nodding and passing the time of day. Kelly didn’t acknowledge anything but Ron; she was totally absorbed in him. Before long, he had also learned to ignore us, or to seem to.

  Kelly was moody, intense, determined. Absolutely focused. I knew her before she met Ron; they assigned us as roommates freshman year. There was something about her – besides our age, the sense that we were standing on a frontier – that made me tell her things I hadn’t told anybody, hadn’t even thought of before. And made me listen to her self-revelations with bated breath, as though I were witness to the birth of fine music or ferreting out the inkling of a mystery.

  In those days Kelly was already fascinated by women who had died for something they believed in, like Joan of Arc about whom she read in lyrical French, or for something they were and couldn’t help, like Anne Frank whose diary she read in deceptively robust German. I didn’t understand the words – I was a sociology major – but I knew the stories, and I loved the way Kelly looked and sounded when she read. When she stopped, there would be a rapturous silence, and then one or both of us would breathe, “Oh, that was beautiful!”

  After she met Ron, things between Kelly and me changed. At first all she talked about was him, and I understood that; I talked about Jan a lot, too. But gradually she quit talking to me at all, and when she listened it was politely, her pen poised over the essay whose editing I had interrupted.

  Ron seemed as open and expansive and featureless as the prairies of his native Nebraska. I was convinced she was wasting her life. He wasn’t good enough for her. I could not imagine what she saw in him.

  Unless it was the unlimited opportunity to play puppeteer, sculptor, inventor. I said that to her one night when we were both lying awake, trying not to be disturbed by the party down the hall. She was my best friend, and I thought I owed it to her to tell her what I thought.

  “What is it between you and Ron anyway?” I demanded, somewhat abruptly. We’d been complaining desultorily to each other about the noise and making derogatory comments about some people’s study ha
bits, and in my own ears I sounded suddenly angry and hurt, which was not what I’d intended. But I went on anyway. “What is this, a role-reversed Pygmalion, or what?”

  She was silent for such a long time that I thought either she’d fallen asleep or she was completely ignoring me this time. I was just about to pose my challenge again, maybe even get out of bed and cross the room and shake her by the shoulders until she paid attention to me, when she answered calmly. “There are worse things.”

  “Kelly, you’re beautiful and brilliant. You could have any man on this campus. Ron is just so ordinary.”

  “Ron is good for me, Brenda. I don’t expect you to understand.” But then she assuaged my hurt feelings by trying to explain. “He takes me out of myself.”

  That was the last time Kelly and I talked about anything important. It was practically the last time we talked at all. For the rest of freshman year I might have had a single room, except for intimate, hurtful evidence of her – stockings hung like empty skin on the closet doorknob to dry, bottles of perfume and makeup like a string of amulets across her nightstand – all of it carefully on her side of the room. The next year she roomed with a sorority sister, somebody whom I didn’t know and whom I didn’t think Kelly knew very well, either.

  I was surprised and a little offended to get a wedding invitation. I told myself I had no obligation to go. I went anyway, and cried, and pressed her hand. To this day I’m not sure she knew who I was when I went through the reception line. I spent most of the reception making conversation with Kelly’s parents, a gaunt pale woman who looked very much like Kelly and a tall fair robust man. They were proud of their daughter; Ron was a fine young man who would go far in this world. Her father was jocular and verbose; he danced with all the young women, several times with me. Her mother barely said a word, seldom got out of her chair; her smile was like the winter sun.

  At the time I didn’t know that I’d noticed all that about Kelly’s parents. I hadn’t thought about them in years, probably had never thought about them directly. But the impressions were all there, ready for the taking. If I’d just paid attention, I might have been warned.