“You chickening out?”
“No, Henry,” I said. His voice had been quiet and shaky. I took pains that mine sound firm. “Memorizing. We want to be able to find that dead section again.”
He’d nodded. “Good thinking, smart boy.”
Pete looked back with us. Stand of three trees close together there. Unusually big tree over on the right. Kind of a semi-clearing, on a crest. Shouldn’t be hard to find.
We glanced at each other, judged it logged, then turned and headed away, into a place no one had been for nearly ten years.
The forest floor led away gently. There was just enough moonlight to show the ground panning down towards a kind of high valley lined with thick trees.
As we walked, bent over a little with unconscious caution, part of me was already relishing how we’d remember this in the future, leaping over the event into retrospection. Not that we’d talk about it, outside the three of us. It was the kind of thing which might attract attention to the town, including maybe attention from this side of the fence.
There was one person I thought I might mention it to, though. Her name was Lauren and she was very cute, the kind of beautiful that doesn’t have to open its mouth to call your name from across the street. I had talked to her a couple times, finding bravery I didn’t know I possessed. It was she who had talked about Seattle, said she’d like to go hang out there some day. That sounded good to me, good and exciting and strange. What I didn’t know, that night in the forest, was that she would do this, and I would not, and that she would leave without us ever having kissed.
I just assumed . . . I assumed a lot back then.
After a couple of hundred yards we stopped, huddled together, shared one of my cigarettes. Our hearts were beating heavily, even though we’d been coming downhill. The forest is hard work whatever direction it slopes. But it wasn’t just that. It felt a little colder here. There was also something about the light. It seemed to hold more shadows. You found your eyes flicking from side to side, checking things out, wanting to be reassured, but not being sure that you had been after all.
I bent down to put the cigarette out in the snow. It was extinguished in a hiss that seemed very loud.
We continued in the direction we’d been heading. We walked maybe another five, six hundred yards.
It was Henry who stopped.
Keyed up as we were, Pete and I stopped immediately too. Henry was leaning forward a little, squinting ahead.
“What?”
He pointed. Down at the bottom of the rocky valley was a shape. A big shape.
After a moment I could make out it was a building. Two wooden storeys high, and slanting. You saw that kind of thing, sometimes. The sagging remnant of some pioneer’s attempt to claim an area of this wilderness and pretend it could be a home.
Pete nudged me and pointed in a slightly different direction. There was the remnants of another house further down. A little fancier, with a fallen-down porch.
And thirty yards further, another: smaller, with a false front.
“Cool,” Henry said, and briefly I admired him.
We sidled now, a lot more slowly and heading along the rise instead of down it. Ruined houses look real interesting during the day. At night they feel different, especially when lost high up in the forest. Trees grow too close to them, pressing in. The lack of a road, long overgrown, can make the houses look like they were never built but instead made their own way to this forgotten place, in which you have now disturbed them; they sit at angles which do not seem quite right.
I was beginning to wonder if maybe we’d done enough, come far enough, and I doubt I was the only one.
Then we saw the light.
After Pete asked his question in the bar, there was silence for a moment. Of course we remembered that night. It wasn’t something you’d forget. It was a dumb question unless you were really asking something else, and we both knew Pete wasn’t dumb.
Behind us, on the other side of the room, came the quiet, reproachful sound of pool balls hitting each other, and then one of them going down a pocket.
We could hear each other thinking. Thinking it was a cold evening, and there was thick snow on the ground, as there had been on that other night. That the rest of the town had pretty much gone to bed. That we could get in Henry’s truck and be at the head of a hiking trail in twenty minutes, even driving drunkard slow.
I didn’t hear anyone thinking a reason, though. I didn’t hear anyone think why we might do such a thing, or what might happen.
By the time Pete had finished his cigarette our glasses were empty. We put on our coats and left and crunched across the lot to the truck.
Back then, on that long-ago night, suddenly my heart hadn’t seemed to be beating at all. When we saw the light in the second house, a faint and curdled glow in one of the downstairs windows, my whole body suddenly felt light and insubstantial.
One of us tried to speak. It came out like a dry click. I realized there was a light in the other house too, faint and golden. Had I missed it before, or had it just come on?
I took a step backwards. The forest was silent but for the sound of my friends breathing. “Oh, no,” Pete said. He started moving backwards, stumbling. Then I saw it too.
A figure, standing in front of the first house.
It was tall and slim, like a rake’s shadow. It was a hundred yards away but still it seemed as though you could make out an oval shape on its shoulders, the colour of milk diluted with water. It was looking in our direction.
Then another was standing near the other house.
No, two.
Henry moaned softly, we three boys turned as one, and I have never run like that before or since.
The first ten yards were fast but then the slope cut in and our feet slipped, and we were down on hands half the time, scrabbling and pulling—every muscle working together in a headlong attempt to be somewhere else.
I heard a crash behind and flicked my head to see Pete had gone down hard, banging his knee, falling on his side.
Henry kept on going but I made myself turn around and grab Pete’s hand, not really helping but just pulling, trying to yank him back to his feet or at least away.
Over his shoulder I glimpsed the valley below and I saw the figures were down at the bottom of the rise, speeding our way in jerky blurred-black movements, like half-seen spiders darting across an icy windowpane.
Pete’s face jerked up and I saw there what I felt in myself, and it was not a cold fear but a hot one, a red-hot melt-down as if you were going to rattle and break apart.
Then he was on his feet again, moving past me, and I followed on after him towards the disappearing shape of Henry’s back. It seemed so much further than we’d walked. It was uphill and the trees no longer formed a path and even the wind seemed to be pushing us back. We caught up with Henry and passed him, streaking up the last hundred yards towards the fence. None of us turned around. You didn’t have to. You could feel them coming, like rocks thrown at your head, rocks glimpsed at the last minute when there is time to flinch but not to turn.
I was sprinting straight at the fence when Henry called out. I was going too fast and didn’t want to know what his problem was. I leapt up at the wire.
It was like a truck hit me from the side.
I crashed the ground fizzing, arms sparking and with no idea which way was up. Then two pairs of hands were on me, pulling at my coat, cold hands and strong.
I thought the fingers would be long and pale and milky but then I realized it was my friends and they were pulling along from the wrong section of the fence, dragging me to the side, when they could have just left me where I fell and made their own escape.
The three of us jumped up at the wire at once, scrabbling like monkeys, stretching out for the top. I rolled over wildly, grunting as I scored deep scratches across my back that would earn me a long, hard look from my mother when she happened to glimpse them a week later. We landed heavily on the other side, stil
l moving forward, having realized that we’d just given away the location of a portion of dead fence. But now we had to look back, and what I saw—though my head was still vibrating from the shock I’d received, so I cannot swear to it—was at least three, maybe five, figures on the other side of the fence. Not right up against it, but a few yards back.
Black hair was whipped up around their faces, and they looked like absences ill-lit by moonlight.
Then they were gone.
We moved fast. We didn’t know why they’d stopped, but we didn’t hang around. We didn’t stick too close to the fence either, in case they changed their minds.
We half-walked, half-ran, and at first we were quiet but as we got further away, and nothing came, we began to laugh and then to shout, punching the air, boys who had come triumphantly out the other side.
The forest felt like some huge football field, applauding its heroes with whispering leaves. We got back to town a little after two in the morning. We walked down the middle of the deserted main street, slowly, untouchable, knowing the world had changed: that we were not the boys who had started the evening, but men, and that the stars were there to be touched. That was then.
As older men we stood together at the fence for a long time, recalling that night.
Parts of it are fuzzy now, of course, and it comes down to snap-shots: Pete’s terrified face when he slipped, the first glimpse of light at the houses, Henry’s shout as he tried to warn me, narrow faces the color of moonlight. They most likely remembered other things, defined that night in different ways and were the centre of their recollections. As I looked now through the fence at the other forest I was thinking how long a decade had seemed back then, and how you could learn that it was no time at all.
Henry stepped away first. I wasn’t far behind. Pete stayed a moment longer, then took a couple of steps back. Nobody said anything. We just looked at the fence a little longer, and then we turned and walked away.
Took us forty minutes to get back to the truck.
The next Thursday Henry couldn’t make it, so it was just me and Pete at the pool table. Late in the evening, with many beers drunk, I mentioned the fence.
Not looking at me, chalking his cue, Pete said that if Henry hadn’t stepped back when he did, he’d have climbed it.
“And gone over?”
“Yeah,” he said.
This was bullshit, and I knew it. “Really?”
There was a pause. “No,” he said, eventually, and I wished I hadn’t asked the second time. I could have left him with something, left us with it. Calling an ass cute isn’t much, but it’s better than just coming right out and admitting you’ll never cup it in your hand.
The next week it was the three of us again, and our walk in the woods wasn’t even mentioned. We’ve never brought it up since, and we can’t talk about the first time any more either. I think about it sometimes, though.
I know I could go out walking there myself some night, and there have been slow afternoons and dry, sleepless small hours when I think I might do it: when I tell myself such a thing isn’t impossible now, that I am still who I once was. But I have learned a little since I was fifteen, and I know now that you don’t need to look for things that will suck the life out of you. Time will do that all by itself.
Sisters
Charles de Lint
If you read Charles de Lint (and you should, if you don’t) you might be surprised (if delighted) to find one of his stories in this anthology. Widely credited with having pioneered the contemporary fantasy genre, with (so far) thirty-six novels and nineteen books of short fiction—including The Mystery of Grace, The Blue Girl, Moonheart, The Onion Girl, and Widdershins—and known as a master in his field, de Lint has won many honors for his fiction, including the World Fantasy Award and the Aurora. Most of de Lint’s fiction has been written for adults, but he’s also penned several books for young people. He’s not, however, written many vampire stories.
“Sisters” is one of two stories featuring Apples—a sixteen-year-old vampire who received “the Gift” from a stranger during a Bryan Adams (remember him?) concert—and her younger sister Cassie. The first story, “There’s No Such Thing,” was published in 1991. “Sisters” first appeared as an original story in de Lint’s World Fantasy Award-nominated YA collection Strays and Waifs in 2002. It has never been published elsewhere. Written while the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer was shaping the pop cultural image of the vampire, “Sisters” offers a different view of adolescence and undeath.
One: Appoline
It’s not like on that TV show, you know where the cute blond cheerleader type stakes all these vampires and they blow away into dust? For one thing, they don’t disappear into dust, which would be way more convenient. Outside of life in televisionland, when you stake one, you’ve got this great big dead corpse to deal with, which is not fun. Beheading works, too, but that’s just way too gross for me and you’ve still got to find some place to stash both a head and a body.
The trick is to not turn your victim in the first place—you know, drain all their blood so that they rise again. When that happens, you have to clean up after yourself, because a vamp is forever, and do you really want these losers you’ve been feeding on hanging around until the end of time? I don’t think so.
The show gets a lot of other things wrong, too, but then most of the movies and books do. Vamps don’t have a problem with mirrors (unless they’re ugly and don’t want to look at themselves, I suppose), crosses (unless they’ve got issues with Christianity), or garlic (except who likes to smell it on anybody’s breath?). They don’t have demons riding around inside them (unless they’ve got some kind of satanic inner child), they can’t turn into bats or rats or wolves or mist (I mean, just look at the physics involved, right?) and sunlight doesn’t bother them. No spontaneous combustion—they just run the same risk of skin cancer as anybody else.
I figure if the people writing the books and making the movies actually do have any firsthand experience with vampires, they’re sugar-coating the information so that people don’t freak out. If you’re going to accept that they exist in the first place, it’s much more comforting to believe that you’re safe in the daylight, or that a cross or a fistful of garlic will keep them at bay.
About the only thing they do get right is that it takes a vamp to make a vamp. You do have to die from the bite and then rise again three days later. It’s as easy as that. It’s also the best time to kill a vamp—they’re kind of like ragdolls, all loose and muddy-brained, for the first few hours.
Oh, and you do have to invite us into your house. If it’s a public place, we can go in the same as anyone else.
What’s that? No, that wasn’t a slip of the tongue. I’m one, too. So while I like the TV show as much as the next person, and I know it’s fiction, blond cheerleader types still make me twitch a little.
- 2 -
Appoline Smith was raking yellow maple leaves into a pile on the front lawn when the old four-door sedan came to a stop at the curb. She looked up to find the driver staring her. She didn’t recognize him. He was just some old guy in his thirties who’d been watching way too many old Miami Vice reruns. His look—the dark hair slicked back, silk shirt opened to show off a big gold chain, fancy shades—was so been there it was prehistoric. The pair of dusty red-and-white velour dice hanging from the mirror did nothing to enhance his image.
“Why don’t you just take a picture?” she asked him.
“Nobody likes a lippy kid,” he said.
“Yeah, nobody likes a pervert either.”
“I’m not some perv’.”
“Oh really? What do you call a guy cruising a nice neighbourhood like this with his tongue hanging out whenever he sees some teenage girl?”
“I’m looking for A. Smith.”
“Well, you found one.”
“I mean, the initial ’A,’ then ’Smith.’”
“You found that, too. So why don’t you check it off
on your life list and keep on driving?”
The birder reference went right over his head. All things considered, she supposed most things would go over his head.
“I got something for you,” he said.
He reached over to the passenger’s side of the car’s bench seat, then turned back to her and offered her an envelope. She supposed it had been white once. Looking at the dirt and a couple of greasy fingerprints smeared on it, she made no move to take it. The guy looked at her for a long moment, then shrugged and tossed it onto the lawn.
“Don’t call the cops,” he said and drove away.
As if they didn’t have better things to do than chase after some guy in a car making pathetic attempts to flirt with girls he happened to spy as he drove around. He was one of just too many guys she’d met, thinking he was Lothario when he was just a loser.
She waited until he’d driven down the block and turned the corner before she stepped closer to look at the envelope he’d left on the lawn.
Okay, she thought, when she saw that it actually had “A. Smith” and the name of her street written on it. So maybe it wasn’t random. Maybe he was only stalking her.
She picked up the envelope, holding it distastefully between two fingers.
“Who was in the car?”
She turned to see her little sister limping down the driveway towards her and quickly stuck the envelope in her jacket pocket.
“Just some guy,” she told Cassie. “How’re you doing?”
Cassie’d had a bad asthma attack this morning and was still lying down in the rec room watching videos when Apples had come out to rake leaves.
“I’m okay,” Cassie told her. “And besides, I’ve got my buddy,” she added, holding up her bronchodilator. “Can I help?”
“Sure. But only if you promise to take it easy.”
It wasn’t until a couple of hours later that Apples was able to open the envelope. She took it into the bathroom and slit the seal, pulling out a grimy sheet of paper with handwriting on it that read:
Vampires: The Recent Undead Page 5