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

by Stephen Jones

  Deirdre had been right. Within fifteen minutes they were absorbed in the problems and nuances of the programme that they had planned for Hexham. With one exception. There was an instinctive, unspoken agreement between them that the Variations on a Theme by Calum of the Clachan should not be played this afternoon.

  When they stopped, Hamish was ready with a beer and the orange-and-lemonade that the women fancied, and which they needed after their exertions.

  “And ye’ll be glad of a wee rest before the commemoration begins.”

  “Look, after all this, you don’t imagine we’re going to be forced into playing at this shindig of yours?”

  “What else would ye be doing with your evening?”

  “Dammit, I won’t be pressured.”

  Deirdre was beside him, speaking close to his left ear. “Robert, my love, it’s too late. We should never have come here. But now we’re here, we have to go through with this.”

  People began gathering early in the evening. At first they might have been no more than regulars dropping in for a dram on their way home from work. But they were unusually silent, saving their energies, glancing now and then at the door to the back room. The younger folk looked much as you would expect teenagers at a disco to look. But older men and women who came shuffling awkwardly in had the glazed expressions of folk in a hypnotic trance.

  At last Hamish McReay opened the door, and the three musicians took their places on the low platform. At the other end of the room, trestle tables were loaded with food.

  Robert gave the lead, and the trio went into a slip-jig of Irish origins. Then a lilting strathspey. A young couple danced lightly, laughing. One elderly woman began quietly clapping in time.

  It was going to be all right, after all. A chore, to be dealt with and dismissed. A dull little local hop, nothing more. Get it over with, have a good night’s sleep, and tomorrow morning start out early for Hexham.

  As they played on, the tempo quickened. Robert found he was playing in dance rhythms that he had never come across before. His fingers kept escaping from his control, indulging themselves in fiendish double-stopping and wild swoops down a scale which had never existed before. Over and over again in the middle of a whirling passage the bow would strike the same two harsh, mocking notes of the deadly augmented fourth – the forbidden tritone interval which in medieval times had been condemned as the creation of the Devil. Some spirit was working within his head and within his fingers, stabbing out weird harmonics, double-stopping, and savage col legno bouncing off the back of the bow across the strings. And Deirdre’s cascades of accompanying chords became a whirlpool lashing all of them into a fury. The mellow tones of Fiona’s flute were becoming an eldritch shriek.

  The dancers swung more wildly and laughed more loudly. The older people, still seated, began stamping their feet, stamping faster and faster to urge the players on.

  Suddenly the clarsach, almost drowned in the racket, gave up. Deirdre sat doubled up, shaking her head, refusing to go on.

  Robert and Fiona flung aggressive arpeggios and devilish trills at each other, like jazz musicians in a cutting session, until a roar and clatter of applause brought them to a brief halt.

  “He’s back again,” said an elderly man at the back of the room, “just the way he said he’d be. Coming back to life.”

  Robert started playing again, but after two exuberant reels he found himself alone. Fiona had stopped playing, to run out onto the floor and into the arms of one of the dancers, one of those boys as dark as a gypsy. They had made a dizzying three turns of the floor when Deirdre roused herself and ran out to pull them apart. Clinging to Fiona, she looked up at her husband.

  “Robert, you must stop now.”

  Robert was aware of a mutter of discontent, but he finished a phrase with a sustained trill and then, putting his fiddle down and demonstrating to the audience how his damp fingers needed drying out, he began wiping them on a handkerchief as he marched off towards the bar.

  Several men were offering him drink. With sweat dripping from his forehead, he desperately needed a couple of pints, yet even before he was halfway through the first one he felt the world floating around him in strange swathes of sound – sound that he could somehow see rather than hear. And behind it laughter, triumphant laughter: not reassuring laughter, but something foul and derisive.

  Voices muttered close to him, some flattering, some suspicious. “Better than that feeble laddie we had to make do wi’ last year . . . Would ye not be agreeing that’s the true voice, truer this time? . . . Will he be cheatin’ on us? . . .”

  A middle-aged man to Robert’s left said: “Ye’ll be another who’ll nae come back?”

  “Well, we do have a pretty full programme, this year and next.”

  “But if ye dinna come back, there’ll be something missing from that programme. Something . . . or somebody. He has no patience with those who won’t keep him alive.” The man leaned closer, in the manner of so many public-bar soaks determined to confide a cherished belief at length. “Just before his death, Calum of the Clachan said that he’d do no more moving on. But somebody must come each year to keep the tradition alive. Let them come, and he’d be here to guide their fingers. He’d be ready to wake and take part again.”

  Robert was engulfed in an overpowering weariness. Somebody – Deirdre and Fiona, or Hamish McReay? – must have carried him upstairs. He knew nothing further until the morning, when he turned over with a groan to find the space beside him empty. Gingerly he eased himself out of bed and peered out of the little window.

  Deirdre was just lifting her clarsach into the back of the Volvo. She went round to slide into the driver’s seat, and he heard the familiar purr of the car starting, without any trouble. Then she was driving slowly down towards the church.

  Deirdre took the clarsach carefully out of the car and carried it into the church and along towards the resting place of Calum of the Clachan. For a moment she felt faint. The sagging woodwork and pallid colours had been rejuvenated. The wood shone as if newly polished. The bands of red and green were bright as if someone overnight had vigorously repainted them.

  Still, she had to do what she had come to do. She settled herself on the end of a pew, bent over her clarsach, and began a keening, crooning lullaby from the far reaches of the Hebrides. The gentleness of the harp became slowly louder, the strings fighting against her fingers, while a draught whistling round the church interior became a mocking laugh. She fought down the fear, and went on singing and playing until an indignant voice attacked her from behind.

  “Isn’t it enough that you defile the ears of my flock with your abominations of yestereve? Now you bring those blasphemies into my church? You’re playing that infernal thing a lullaby!”

  “I was attempting an exorcism.”

  The minister’s bitter laugh was as derisive as that other whistling laughter. The echoes of Calum of the Clachan refused to die, but would go on dancing, skittering in and out of the columns, through the dusty old organ pipes, vibrating in the windows. And the minister was staring hopelessly at the colours on the tomb. Would they fade over the coming year, until someone was forced to play the music of madness and bring them back to life?

  “You’ve never thought,” Deirdre said, “of . . . well, opening up the coffin? Just to see whether . . .” She faltered, unsure of what she was daring to suggest and what he, in the depths of his soul, was trying to believe or disbelieve.

  “I’ll not be the one to disturb it.” That was all he had to say.

  Now all Deirdre wanted to do was escape. Out into the open air, staggering under the weight of the harp, putting it back in the car, driving back to where Robert and Fiona were waiting for her.

  “What on earth have you been doing?” Robert demanded.

  “I was told to get out.”

  “By the minister? He wouldn’t be best pleased by having heathen music played in his church.”

  “No, not him. It was . . . something . . . in the
building itself. In that tomb. I was told to get out,” she repeated. “I was driven out. And yet,” she faltered, “one of us is wanted back.”

  As they were about to leave, Hamish McReay came out, persistently smiling. “I told you the car would start in the morning.” And he took Robert’s cheque from his pocket, tore it into shreds, and tossed them into the morning breeze. “Until next year, then.”

  “There’s no way we’re coming back here,” Robert assured him.

  But his voice was as shaky as his hands. He looked down at them and wondered how he could have played so vigorously last night, and how he would ever be able to play again. They were somehow no longer his hands. They were drained of all colour save for a pattern of blue veins bulging up through the pale skin. He was drained; utterly drained.

  Deirdre said: “Robert, please. Let me drive. You don’t look up to it.”

  He had no strength to argue.

  As they drove away from Kirkshiel, Robert was silent for a long time, watching the road ahead just as closely as if he were driving. This must be the right road, yet it felt as if they were in an utterly alien land, not knowing what was waiting for them round the next corner.

  The first time he spoke was to suggest that they stop for a breather on the edge of a tiny, weed-choked lochan. Deirdre took a bottle of spring water out of the cooler bag and some plastic cups out of the glove compartment. It was a routine they had gone through so many times before. Yet it was still alien, each movement an effort.

  Behind them, Fiona had taken her flute out. She started playing something which caused Robert to spill some of his drink on to his right knee.

  “Stop that! What on earth is it?”

  “I don’t know. It just came to me, the way it did the other day. Was given to me,” she added suddenly.

  Deirdre, very calm and self-controlled, said: “Fiona, do put it out of your mind.”

  “I’m not sure that I can.”

  At last they crossed the Cheviot Hills and headed for Hexham. Parking in front of their hotel, Deirdre looked up at the glowing façade of the abbey.

  “We made it.” Robert spoke as if they had been pursued by wild Highlanders and then Border reivers all the way. “Thank God we’re away from that dreadful place.” He was trying to wrench himself back to normality, even to make a wry joke of it. “At any rate that’s one engagement we won’t be playing again.”

  “True, they’re not really expecting you back there, Daddy. But one of us has to go back next year.”

  He turned to look into Fiona’s eyes, which somehow he could no longer recognize. Through their ivory opaqueness shone an eager, intense challenge.

  “You’re not suggesting—”

  “I shall go back next year. I have to.”

  “That’s crazy. There’s no way I’d let you.”

  “It’s no good, Daddy. Someone has to keep the music pulsating in his heart.”

  “This is obscene. You’ve let that place get on your nerves.”

  His wife touched his arm. “Robert, I don’t think you’ll be able to stop her.”

  “One of us has to go back,” intoned Fiona. “And it has to be me.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  Deirdre smiled a smile of infinite love and yet of infinite sadness, a fateful knowledge coming like grey mist out of the western waters.

  “Dearest Robert, I’m afraid that’s how it may well be.”

  MANLY WADE WELLMAN

  Chastel

  MANLY WADE WELLMAN, who died in 1986, was born in the village of Kamundongo in Portuguese West Africa. Following several childhood visits to London, he settled in the United States where he worked as a reporter before quitting his job in 1930 to write fiction full-time.

  He was one of the most prolific contributors to the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, and his tales of horror, fantasy, science fiction, crime and adventure graced the pages of such legendary titles as Weird Tales, Strange Stories, Wonder Stories, Astounding Stories and Unknown, to name only a few.

  He wrote more than seventy-five books in all genres, including mainstream novels and works on the American Civil War. He twice won the World Fantasy Award, and some of his best stories are collected in Who Fears the Devil?, Worse Things Waiting, Lonely Vigils and The Valley So Low. More recently, Night Shade Books has collected all Wellman’s short fantasy fiction in a series of five uniform hardcover editions published under the umbrella title The Selected Stories of Manly Wade Wellman.

  In ‘Chastel’, two of Wellman’s best-known characters, Lee Cobbett and Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant, join forces to battle an age-old seductress. The author revealed that the novella was based on fact:

  “The Connecticut setting for a vampire outbreak harks back to long-ago Connecticut papers, which told of such things apparently happening. It’s in the books cited here. Incidentally, both the poems I quote are actual ones.

  “I’ve puzzled over the one from Grant’s odd book, have never seen it anywhere else, and have never found anyone who had heard of it. Like Pursuivant here, I give myself to wonder if it isn’t a fake antique, like Clark Saunders’s better-known vampire poem to be found in Montague Summers.”

  “THEN YOU WON’T LET Count Dracula rest in his tomb?” inquired Lee Cobbett, his square face creasing with a grin.

  Five of them sat in the parlor of Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant’s hotel suite on Central Park West. The Judge lounged in an armchair, a wineglass in his big old hand. On this, his eighty-seventh birthday, his blue eyes were clear, penetrating. His once tawny hair and mustache had gone blizzard-white, but both grew thick, and his square face showed rosy. In his tailored blue leisure suit, he still looked powerfully deep-chested and broad-shouldered.

  Blocky Lee Cobbett wore jacket and slacks almost as brown as his face. Next to him sat Laurel Parcher, small and young and cinnamon-haired. The others were natty Phil Drumm the summer theater producer, and Isobel Arrington from a wire press service. She was blond, expensively dressed, she smoked a dark cigarette with a white tip. Her pen scribbled swiftly.

  “Dracula’s as much alive as Sherlock Holmes,” argued Drumm. “All the revivals of the play, all the films—”

  “Your musical should wake the dead, anyway,” said Cobbett, drinking. “What’s your main number, Phil? ‘Garlic Time?’ ‘Gory, Gory Hallelujah?’”

  “Let’s have Christian charity here, Lee,” Pursuivant came to Drumm’s rescue. “Anyway, Miss Arrington came to interview me. Pour her some wine and let me try to answer her questions.”

  “I’m interested in Mr Cobbett’s remarks,” said Isobel Arrington, her voice deliberately throaty. “He’s an authority on the supernatural.”

  “Well, perhaps,” admitted Cobbett, “and Miss Parcher has had some experiences. But Judge Pursuivant is the true authority, the author of Vampiricon.”

  “I’ve read it, in paperback,” said Isobel Arrington. “Phil, it mentions a vampire belief up in Connecticut, where you’re having your show. What’s that town again?”

  “Deslow,” he told her. “We’re making a wonderful old stone barn into a theater. I’ve invited Lee and Miss Parcher to visit.”

  She looked at Drumm. “Is Deslow a resort town?”

  “Not yet, but maybe the show will bring tourists. In Deslow, up to now, peace and quiet is the chief business. If you drop your shoe, everybody in town will think somebody’s blowing the safe.”

  “Deslow’s not far from Jewett City,” observed Pursuivant. “There were vampires there about a century and a quarter ago. A family named Ray was afflicted. And to the east, in Rhode Island, there was a lively vampire folklore in recent years.”

  “Let’s leave Rhode Island to H. P. Lovecraft’s imitators,” suggested Cobbett. “What do you call your show, Phil?”

  “The Land Beyond the Forest,” said Drumm. “We’re casting it now. Using locals in bit parts. But we have Gonda Chastel to play Dracula’s countess.”

  “I never knew that Dracula had a countess
,” said Laurel Parcher.

  “There was a stage star named Chastel, long ago when I was young,” said Pursuivant. “Just the one name – Chastel.”

  “Gonda’s her daughter, and a year or so ago Gonda came to live in Deslow,” Drumm told them. “Her mother’s buried there. Gonda has invested in our production.”

  “Is that why she has a part in it?” asked Isobel Arrington.

  “She has a part in it because she’s beautiful and gifted,” replied Drumm, rather stuffily. “Old people say she’s the very picture of her mother. Speaking of pictures, here are some to prove it.”

  He offered two glossy prints to Isobel Arrington, who murmured “Very sweet,” and passed them to Laurel Parcher. Cobbett leaned to see.

  One picture seemed copied from an older one. It showed a woman who stood with unconscious stateliness, in a gracefully draped robe with a tiara binding her rich flow of dark hair. The other picture was of a woman in fashionable evening dress, her hair ordered in modern fashion, with a face strikingly like that of the woman in the other photograph.

  “Oh, she’s lovely,” said Laurel. “Isn’t she, Lee?”

  “Isn’t she?” echoed Drumm.

  “Magnificent,” said Cobbett, handing the pictures to Pursuivant, who studied them gravely.

  “Chastel was in Richmond, just after the First World War,” he said slowly. “A dazzling Lady Macbeth. I was in love with her. Everyone was.”

  “Did you tell her you loved her?” asked Laurel.

  “Yes. We had supper together, twice. Then she went ahead with her tour, and I sailed to England and studied at Oxford. I never saw her again, but she’s more or less why I never married.”

  Silence a moment. Then: “The Land Beyond the Forest,” Laurel repeated. “Isn’t there a book called that?”

  “There is indeed, my child,” said the Judge. “By Emily de Laszowska Gerard. About Transylvania, where Dracula came from.”

  “That’s why we use the title, that’s what Transylvania means,” put in Drumm. “It’s all right, the book’s out of copyright. But I’m surprised to find someone who’s heard of it.”