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

by Stephen Jones

  Bending close to the smudged silk lining, Cobbett seemed to catch an odor of stuffy sharpness, like dried herbs. He snapped off his light and frowned in the dark. Then he groped back to the door, emerged into the open, and headed for the theater again.

  “Mr Cobbett,” said the beautiful voice of Gonda Chastel.

  She stood at the graveyard’s edge, beside a sagging willow. She was almost as tall as he. Her eyes glowed in the moonlight.

  “You came to find the truth about my mother,” she half-accused.

  “I was bound to try,” he replied. “Ever since I saw a certain face at a certain window of a certain New York hotel.”

  She stepped back from him. “You know that she’s a—”

  “A vampire,” Cobbett finished for her. “Yes.”

  “I beg you to be helpful-merciful.” But there was no supplication in her voice. “I already realized, long ago. That’s why I live in little Deslow. I want to find a way to give her rest. Night after night, I wonder how.”

  “I understand that,” said Cobbett.

  Gonda Chastel breathed deeply. “You know all about these things. I think there’s something about you that could daunt a vampire.”

  “If so, I don’t know what it is,” said Cobbett truthfully.

  “Make me a solemn promise. That you won’t return to her tomb, that you won’t tell others what you and I know about her. I – I want to think how we two together can do something for her.”

  “If you wish, I’ll say nothing,” he promised.

  Her hand clutched his.

  “The cast took a five-minute break, it must be time to go to work again,” she said, suddenly bright. “Let’s go back and help the thing along.”

  They went.

  Inside, the performers were gathering on stage. Drumm stared unhappily as Gonda Chastel and Cobbett came down the aisle. Cobbett sat with Laurel and Pursuivant and listened to the rehearsal.

  Adaptation from Bram Stoker’s novel was free, to say the least. Dracula’s eerie plottings were much hampered by his having a countess, a walking dead beauty who strove to become a spirit of good. There were some songs, in interesting minor keys. There was a dance, in which men and women leaped like kangaroos. Finally Drumm called a halt, and the performers trooped wearily to the wings.

  Gonda Chastel lingered, talking to Laurel. “I wonder, my dear, if you haven’t had acting experience,” she said.

  “Only in school entertainments down South, when I was little.”

  “Phil,” said Gonda Chastel, “Miss Parcher is a good type, has good presence. There ought to be something for her in the show.”

  “You’re very kind, but I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said Laurel, smiling.

  “You may change your mind, Miss Parcher. Will you and your friends come to my house for a nightcap?”

  “Thank you,” said Pursuivant. “We have some notes to make, and we must make them together.”

  “Until tomorrow evening, then Mr Cobbett, we’ll remember our agreement.”

  She went away toward the back of the stage. Pursuivant and Laurel walked out. Drumm hurried up the aisle and caught Cobbett’s elbow.

  “I saw you,” he said harshly. “Saw you both as you came in.”

  “And we saw you, Phil. What’s this about?”

  “She likes you.” It was half an accusation. “Fawns on you, almost.”

  Cobbett grinned and twitched his arm free. “What’s the matter, Phil, are you in love with her?”

  “Yes, God damn it, I am. I’m in love with her. She knows it but she won’t let me come to her house. And you – the first time she meets you, she invites you.”

  “Easy does it, Phil,” said Cobbett. “If it’ll do you any good, I’m in love with someone else, and that takes just about all my spare time.”

  He hurried out to overtake his companions.

  Pursuivant swung his cane almost jauntily as they returned through the moonlight to the auto court.

  “What notes are you talking about, Judge?” asked Cobbett.

  “I’ll tell you at my quarters. What do you think of the show?”

  “Perhaps I’ll like it better after they’ve rehearsed more,” said Laurel. “I don’t follow it at present.”

  “Here and there, it strikes me as limp,” added Cobbett.

  They sat down in the Judge’s cabin. He poured them drinks. “Now,” he said, “there are certain things to recognize here. Things I more or less expected to find.”

  “A mystery, Judge?” asked Laurel.

  “Not so much that, if I expected to find them. How far are we from Jewett City?”

  “Twelve or fifteen miles as the crow flies,” estimated Cobbett. “And Jewett City is where that vampire family, the Rays, lived and died.”

  “Died twice, you might say,” nodded Pursuivant, stroking his white mustache. “Back about a century and a quarter ago. And here’s what might be a matter of Ray family history. I’ve been thinking about Chastel, whom once I greatly admired. About her full name.”

  “But she had only one name, didn’t she?” asked Laurel.

  “On the stage she used one name, yes. So did Bernhardt, so did Duse, so later did Garbo. But all of them had full names. Now, before we went to dinner, I made two telephone calls to theatrical historians I know. To learn Chastel’s full name.”

  “And she had a full name,” prompted Cobbett.

  “Indeed she did. Her full name was Chastel Ray.”

  Cobbett and Laurel looked at him in deep silence.

  “Not apt to be just coincidence,” elaborated Pursuivant. “Now then, I gave you some keepsakes today.”

  “Here’s mine,” said Cobbett, pulling the foil-wrapped bit from his shirt pocket.

  “And I have mine here,” said Laurel, her hand at her throat. “In a little locket I have on this chain.”

  “Keep it there,” Pursuivant urged her. “Wear it around your neck at all times. Lee, have yours always on your person. Those are garlic cloves, and you know what they’re good for. You can also guess why I cut up a lot of garlic in our spaghetti for dinner.”

  “You think there’s a vampire here,” offered Laurel.

  “A specific vampire.” The Judge took a deep breath into his broad chest. “Chastel. Chastel Ray.”

  “I believe it, too,” declared Cobbett tonelessly, and Laurel nodded. Cobbett looked at the watch on his wrist.

  “It’s past one in the morning,” he said. “Perhaps we’d all be better off if we had some sleep.”

  They said their good nights and Laurel and Cobbett walked to where their two doors stood side by side. Laurel put her key into the lock, but did not turn it at once. She peered across the moonlit street.

  “Who’s that over there?” she whispered. “Maybe I ought to say, what’s that?”

  Cobbett looked. “Nothing, you’re just nervous. Goodnight, dear.”

  She went in and shut the door. Cobbett quickly crossed the street.

  “Mr Cobbett,” said the voice of Gonda Chastel.

  “I wondered what you wanted, so late at night,” he said, walking close to her.

  She had undone her dark hair and let it flow to her shoulders. She was, Cobbett thought, as beautiful a woman as he had ever seen.

  “I wanted to be sure about you,” she said. “That you’d respect your promise to me, not to go into the churchyard.”

  “I keep my promises, Miss Chastel.”

  He felt a deep, hushed silence all around them. Not even the leaves rustled in the trees.

  “I had hoped you wouldn’t venture even this far,” she went on. “You and your friends are new in town, you might tempt her specially.” Her eyes burned at him. “You know I don’t mean that as a compliment.”

  She turned to walk away. He fell into step beside her. “But you’re not afraid of her,” he said.

  “Of my own mother?”

  “She was a Ray,” said Cobbett. “Each Ray sapped the blood of his kinsmen. Judge Pursuivant told me
all about it.”

  Again the gaze of her dark, brilliant eyes. “Nothing like that has ever happened between my mother and me.” She stopped, and so did he. Her slim, strong hand took him by the wrist.

  “You’re wise and brave,” she said. “I think you may have come here for a good purpose, not just about the show.”

  “I try to have good purposes.”

  The light of the moon soaked through the overhead branches as they walked on. “Will you come to my house?” she invited.

  “I’ll walk to the churchyard,” replied Cobbett. “I said I wouldn’t go into it, but I can stand at the edge.”

  “Don’t go in.”

  “I’ve promised that I wouldn’t, Miss Chastel.”

  She walked back the way they had come. He followed the street on under silent elms until he reached the border of the churchyard. Moonlight flecked and spattered the tombstones. Deep shadows lay like pools. He had a sense of being watched from within.

  As he gazed, he saw movement among the graves. He could not define it, but it was there. He glimpsed, or fancied he glimpsed, a head, indistinct in outline as though swathed in dark fabric. Then another. Another. They huddled in a group, as though to gaze at him.

  “I wish you’d go back to your quarters,” said Gonda Chastel beside him. She had drifted after him, silent as a shadow herself.

  “Miss Chastel,” he said, “tell me something if you can. Whatever happened to the town or village of Griswold?”

  “Griswold?” she echoed. “What’s Griswold? That means gray woods.”

  “Your ancestor, or your relative, Horace Ray, came from Griswold to die in Jewett City. And I’ve told you that I knew your mother was born a Ray.”

  Her shining eyes seemed to flood upon him. “I didn’t know that,” she said.

  He gazed into the churchyard, at those hints of furtive movement.

  “The hands of the dead reach out for the living,” murmured Gonda Chastel.

  “Reach out for me?” he asked.

  “Perhaps for both of us. Just now, we may be the only living souls awake in Deslow.” She gazed at him again. “But you’re able to defend yourself, somehow.”

  “What makes you think that?” he inquired, aware of the clove of garlic in his shirt pocket.

  “Because they – in the churchyard there – they watch, but they hold away from you. You don’t invite them.”

  “Nor do you, apparently,” said Cobbett.

  “I hope you’re not trying to make fun of me,” she said, her voice barely audible.

  “On my soul, I’m not.”

  “On your soul,” she repeated. “Good night, Mr Cobbett.”

  Again she moved away, tall and proud and graceful. He watched her out of sight. Then he headed back toward the motor court.

  Nothing moved in the empty street. Only one or two lights shone here and there in closed shops. He thought he heard a soft rustle behind him, but did not look back.

  As he reached his own door, he heard Laurel scream behind hers.

  Judge Pursuivant sat in his cubicle, his jacket off, studying a worn little brown book. Skinner, said letters on the spine, and Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. He had read the passage so often that he could almost repeat it from memory:

  “To lay this monster he must be taken up and burned; at least his heart must be; and he must be disinterred in the daytime when he is asleep and unaware.”

  There were other ways, reflected Pursuivant.

  It must be very late by now, rather it must be early. But he had no intention of going to sleep. Not when stirs of motion sounded outside, along the concrete walkway in front of his cabin. Did motion stand still, just beyond the door there? Pursuivant’s great, veined hand touched the front of his shirt, beneath which a bag of garlic hung like an amulet. Garlic – was that enough? He himself was fond of garlic, judiciously employed in sauces and salads. But then, he could see himself in the mirror of the bureau yonder, could see his broad old face with its white sweep of mustache like a wreath of snow on a sill. It was a clear image of a face, not a calm face just then, but a determined one. Pursuivant smiled at it, with a glimpse of even teeth that were still his own.

  He flicked up his shirt cuff and looked at his watch. Half past one, about. In June, even with daylight savings time, dawn would come early. Dawn sent vampires back to the tombs that were their melancholy refuges, “asleep and unaware,” as Skinner had specified.

  Putting the book aside, he poured himself a small drink of bourbon, dropped in cubes of ice and a trickle of water, and sipped. He had drunk several times during that day, when on most days he partook of only a single highball, by advice of his doctor; but just now he was grateful for the pungent, walnutty taste of the liquor. It was one of earth’s natural things, a good companion when not abused. From the table he took a folder of scribbled notes. He looked at jottings from the works of Montague Summers.

  These offered the proposition that a plague of vampires usually stemmed from a single source of infection, a king or queen vampire whose feasts of blood drove victims to their graves, to rise in their turn. If the original vampires were found and destroyed, the others relaxed to rest as normally dead bodies. Bram Stoker had followed the same gospel when he wrote Dracula, and doubtless Bram Stoker had known. Pursuivant looked at another page, this time a poem copied from James Grant’s curious Mysteries of All Nations. It was a ballad in archaic language, that dealt with baleful happenings in “The Towne of Peste” – Budapest?

  It was the Corpses that our Churchyardes filled

  That did at midnight lumberr up our Stayres;

  They suck’d our Bloud, the gorie Banquet swilled,

  And harried everie Soule with hydeous Feares . . .

  Several verses down:

  They barr’d with Boltes of Iron the Churchyard-pale

  To keep them out; but all this wold not doe;

  For when a Dead-Man has learn’d to draw a naile,

  He can also burst an iron Bolte in two.

  Many times Pursuivant had tried to trace the author of that verse. He wondered if it was not something quaintly confected not long before 1880, when Grant published his work. At any rate, the Judge felt that he knew what it meant, the experience that it remembered.

  He put aside the notes, too, and picked up his spotted walking stick. Clamping the balance of it firmly in his left hand, he twisted the handle with his right and pulled. Out of the hollow shank slid a pale, bright blade, keen and lean and edged on both front and back.

  Pursuivant permitted himself a smile above it. This was one of his most cherished possessions, this silver weapon said to have been forged a thousand years ago by St Dunstan. Bending, he spelled out the runic writing upon it:

  Sic pereant omnes inimici tui, Domine

  That was the end of the fiercely triumphant song of Deborah in the Book of Judges: So perish all thine enemies, O Lord. Whether the work of St Dunstan or not, the metal was silver, the writing was a warrior’s prayer. Silver and writing had proved their strength against evil in the past.

  Then, outside, a loud, tremulous cry of mortal terror.

  Pursuivant sprang out of his chair on the instant. Blade in hand, he fairly ripped his door open and ran out. He saw Cobbett in front of Laurel’s door, wrenching at the knob, and hurried there like a man half his age.

  “Open up, Laurel,” he heard Cobbett call. “It’s Lee out here!”

  The door gave inward as Pursuivant reached it, and he and Cobbett pressed into the lighted room.

  Laurel half-crouched in the middle of the floor. Her trembling hand pointed to a rear window. “She tried to come in,” Laurel stammered.

  “There’s nothing at that window,” said Cobbett, but even as he spoke, there was. A face, pale as tallow, crowded against the glass. They saw wide, staring eyes, a mouth that opened and squirmed. Teeth twinkled sharply.

  Cobbett started forward, but Pursuivant caught him by the shoulder. “Let me,” he said, advancing toward th
e window, the point of his blade lifted.

  The face at the window writhed convulsively as the silver weapon came against the pane with a clink. The mouth opened as though to shout, but no sound came. The face fell back and vanished from their sight.

  “I’ve seen that face before,” said Cobbett hoarsely.

  “Yes,” said Pursuivant. “At my hotel window. And since.”

  He dropped the point of the blade to the floor. Outside came a whirring rush of sound, like feet, many of them.

  “We ought to wake up the people at the office,” said Cobbett.

  “I doubt if anyone in this little town could be wakened,” Pursuivant told him evenly. “I have it in mind that every living soul, except the three of us, is sound asleep. Entranced.”

  “But out there—” Laurel gestured at the door, where something seemed to be pressing.

  “I said, every living soul,” Pursuivant looked from her to Cobbett. “Living,” he repeated.

  He paced across the floor, and with his point scratched a perpendicular line upon it. Across this he carefully drove a horizontal line, making a cross. The pushing abruptly ceased.

  “There it is, at the window again,” breathed Laurel.

  Pursuivant took long steps back to where the face hovered, with black hair streaming about it. He scraped the glass with his silver blade, up and down, then across, making lines upon it. The face drew away. He moved to mark similar crosses on the other windows.

  “You see,” he said, quietly triumphant, “the force of old, old charms.”

  He sat down in a chair, heavily. His face was weary, but he looked at Laurel and smiled.

  “It might help if we managed to pity those poor things out there,” he said.

  “Pity?” she almost cried out.

  “Yes,” he said, and quoted:

  ‘“ . . . Think how sad it must be

  To thirst always for a scorned elixir,

  The salt of quotidian blood.”’

  “I know that,” volunteered Cobbett. “It’s from a poem by Richard Wilbur, a damned unhappy poet.”

  “Quotidian,” repeated Laurel to herself.