Vampires: The Recent Undead
Page 42
“And the, ah, r-reason for your d-discharge—”
“Oh, the usual. ‘Psychotic.’ As far as I could see, the word meant only that they didn’t know what they were dealing with. At that time, neither did I.”
“The story . . . you wrote it?”
“Have you ever known an athlete who could write, or a bookworm who didn’t want to?”
“And the things you told me about Ned—”
“Were true. But of course about me. Hasn’t it occurred to you that Ned discharged his rage while I buried mine deep? That if there was a maniac in the family, it was far more likely to be me? What kind of a lousy doctor are you, anyway?”
Despite the harsh words his voice was eerily tranquil, and he smiled when Bloch turned his head to see how far he was from the door.
Then he turned back, staring at Milton’s bent and narrow frame, and his thoughts might as well have been written on his face. This bag of bones—what do I have to fear from him?
Suddenly his voice boomed out. “Ralph O’Meagan, I’m delighted to make your acquaintance at last!”
He stretched out his fat hand and as he did the yellow wall bellied out and burst, blowing away the room and the whole illusion of the world called real.
Gaping, letting his hand drop nervelessly, Bloch stared now at the smudge of fire in the west, now at the rising moon in the east.
A raw wind blew; delighted shrieks echoed from the roller coaster; the calliope was hooting, and Milton hummed along: Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed—
“Welcome to my world,” he said, standing back.
Swift trotters were drumming on the earth and splashing in the pools and Bloch whirled as the huge humpbacked beast came at him out of the sunset, smoke jetting from its nostrils, small red eyes glinting like sardonyx.
“What did I do?” Bloch cried, waving his fat hands. “I wanted to help! What did I do?”
The boar struck his fat belly with lethal impact and his lungs exploded like balloons. He lived for a few minutes, writhing, while it delved into his guts. Milton leaned forward, hugging himself, breathlessly watching.
The scene was elemental. Timeless. The beast rooting and grunting, the sunset light unchanging, cries of joy from the roller coaster, and the calliope hooting on: Could we but relive that sweet moment divine/We’d find that our love is unaltered by time.
“Now you’re really part of the fantasy,” he assured Dr. Bloch.
Not that Bloch heard him. Or anything else.
Life returned to normal in Sun & Moon Metaphysical Books where, of course, things were never totally normal.
Milton’s days went by as before, opening the shop, chatting with the occasional customer, closing it again. Drowsy days spent amid the smell of old books, a smell whose color, if it had a color, would he brownish gray.
Serena House called to inquire about their lodger—Dr. Bloch had left Milton’s number when he went out. Milton expressed astonishment over the disappearance, offered any help he could give. Next day a bored policewoman from Missing Persons arrived to take a statement. Milton described how Bloch had visited the shop, chatted, and left.
“He was one of my best customers,” he said. “Any idea what might have happened to him?”
“Nothing yet,” said the cop, closing her notebook. “It’s kind of like Judge Crater.”
More than you know, thought Milton. Where Bloch’s bones lay it was always 1948, and whole neighborhoods had been built over the spot, a palimpsest of fill and tarmac and buildings raised, razed and raised again. Milton’s voice was confident and strong and totally without a stutter as he chatted with the policewoman, and he could see she believed what he told her.
After she left, the afternoon was dull as usual. Around four Milton got up from his desk and took down his copy of Montague Summers’s The Vampire in Europe.
He hefted it, did not open it, put it back on the shelf and addressed its author aloud.
“Reverend Summers, you’re a fool. Thinking the undead drink blood. No, we suck such life as we have from rage and memories. It must be a nourishing diet, because we live on. And on. And on. And on. I knew that when I wrote my story.”
An hour later, after closing the shop, he entered Ned’s room and for a time stood gazing into the mirror. The sun was going down. As the room darkened, he heard the unseen beast rubbing its nap of stiff hair against the wall and smelled the morning-breath odor of unfresh blood that always attended it.
Was it something or somebody? Was it his creature, or himself? Did he dream its world, or did it dream his? Milton brooded, asking himself unanswerable questions while his image faded slowly into the brown shadows, until the glass held nothing, nothing at all.
To the Moment
Nisi Shawl
Nisi Shawl packs a lot into this very short story: an intriguing and original concept of the vampire plus sex, death, procreation, and a dollop of horror.
Shawl’s story collection Filter House, lauded by Ursula K. Le Guin as “superb,” and by Samuel R. Delany as “simply amazing,” won the 2008 James Tiptree, Jr. Award and was nominated for a 2009 World Fantasy Award. Shawl is the coauthor of Writing the Other, a guide to developing characters of varying racial, religious, and sexual backgrounds, and one of the founding members of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the representation of people of color in the fantastic genres. She is the editor of Aqueduct Press’s WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity, and a coeditor of Strange Matings: Octavia E. Butler, Feminism, Science Fiction, and African American Voices, forthcoming from Seven Stories. Her speaking engagements include presentations at Duke University, Stanford University, and Smith College. In May 2011 she will be the Guest of Honor for the feminist science fiction convention WisCon. She blogs at nisi-la.livejournal.com.
We are not extinct. There are sixteen of us, and I’m pregnant. I only just found out.
I like to travel. Not by plane, because on long flights I get restless, and the changes in air pressure hurt. My cavities ache terribly with every ascent and landing, unless I’ve managed to fill them completely in the last few minutes before boarding. This is difficult to do at almost any airport.
Usually I take a train wherever I want to go. But at times there are oceans in my way.
So I am on a ship, a big white cruiser headed south through the Atlantic. Prior to sailing, I glutted myself with blood enough to last the entire voyage, under normal circumstances.
The circumstances are not normal.
The sun is bright, but winter-thin. I’m wearing a coat of ivory wool and large, hexagonal sunglasses with honey-colored frames. They make me think of bees. The wind does what it wants with my long, dark hair; nothing pretty or symmetrical. I don’t care. I’ve been told I resemble Jackie Onassis since 1971. Monkeys always assume I’m beautiful, no matter how I look.
There’s one sitting next to me where I stand on deck. I’ve been considering him casually since we started out from Lisbon two days ago. Balding—lots of testosterone. From England—skin that lovely rose-flooded milkiness they get in these Northern latitudes. Wife weak with sea-sickness before we left the harbor.
Now I’m afraid. I’m pregnant, and this monkey is far, far too tempting. He reaches up with a long, possessive arm and pulls me down beside him. He doesn’t care who sees. He wants them to see.
I do care. I ought to leave, to come for him later, when he’s alone.
He leans over to nuzzle my ear, masking the sound of the wind and the waves with his noisy breath and blood. Canvas snaps, flapping loose from the frame of a nearby chair. The gulls come and make their cries, high and wheedling. Strollers on the deck below have brought table scraps to feed them. Little beggars. They snatch what is offered from the air: a crust of someone’s sandwich, a crisp, a bit of pink tomato. They feed flying in the light, which reveals the beautiful separateness of all things. While I must go below.
I take him to my cabin. He has his own, since his wife, e
ven on dry land, is a semi-invalid, and they can well afford it. But the two adjoin, so I take him to mine, because there will be noise. I even say that’s why I want to go there, and he smiles. He’s so sure I’ll be the source of that noise.
We take off our clothes in the dark, stuffy room. I could have a better one, if I wanted. But this cabin, so low down, is more isolated. Insulated by emptiness on either side.
I have removed my glasses. My eyes are adjusted now and I can see how self-conscious he is without his clothes. He bumps against the bed and sits down, then fumbles for the light switch. I kneel on the floor in front of him and make him stop. It’s easy. I let my tongues relax and wrap around his penis, which is a good size, not too big. Things are going well, considering.
Then, amazingly, he resists. An unusually strong-minded monkey, this one. He pushes me away by my shoulders, slides his hands into my armpits and lifts. He’s trying to get me to sit on him, he mumbles how he’s always wanted to do it this way. The soft hairs covering his legs brush the backs of my thighs, my calves, as I obediently slide my knees up beside his hips. He rolls his penis against my pubic bone in a practiced move, which might excite me if I had a clitoris. He makes me taste his antiseptic, minty lips, the breath between them laden with the odors of coffee, sugar, flour, eggs. Breakfast. Then he pushes me away again, grappling me into position. He is strong, but I could fight him. I don’t. I want this. I need it. I have given up trying to make myself be careful and use my mouth.
He does scream. I do too, and shout Oh God, I’m coming, I’m coming, so if anyone hears us they’ll stay away. It lasts a little long for an orgasm, but after a couple of minutes he stops thrashing on the bed and lies still, deflating. I pump and pump. The rosy goodness suffuses me, warming my womb. When I’m done I fall into a dream, sliding slowly off the monkey and curling up next to him on the soiled sheets.
D. is with me and we’re on a mountain in Costa Rica, in the seven-sided house he had them build. He tries to tell me why it’s better, how the design dissipates the energy of earthquakes, which are common, but I am looking at the green, a green so very green I think my eyes will turn to emeralds before the sun has set. Behind a distant peak it goes, but the green does not go with it. Instead the valleys brim with green darkness, leaf-filled shadows expanding and thickening, clotting up the night with a truer, deeper green.
I realize my companion has been silent for some time. “D.,” I say, “it’s good to be here, really here. Do you know what I mean?” He nods and touches the back of my neck. His sensitivity to the moment must be, in large part, responsible for the lengthiness of his life. Nine hundred years without even a half-hearted attempt at suicide. That’s good, for a male. Soon he will be fully mature.
I find myself kissing him. Our tongues separate, then twine, like lashing vines.
No force is applied on either side, but slowly we grow closer, closer. I am penetrated by the breeze coming through the open window, sharp as citrus; by the fine, probing mouths of flying insects, frustrated in their search for food. By D.’s tongues, too, delicately drawn along my skin, down, down, in, and piercing the membrane over my womb’s entrance in an empty, reflexive action. Or I assume the action’s emptiness, in the moment. And as I return to the moment, dreaming.
Knowing this assumption is wrong disturbs my sleep.
I wake. The monkey’s corpse reeks of feces and the barest beginnings of decay. No blood—that’s all mine now, mine and my offspring’s.
D.’s offspring, too. Precocious D., fertile a good century before it might have been expected. When my membrane thinned and tore, I should have known. But this is my first pregnancy. Not until I noticed other signs did I fathom the truth of my condition, so rare among us. And by then I had boarded the ship, and it was too late.
I could have consumed the blood of a year’s supply of monkeys, if I’d had the cavities to store so much, and still that would be barely enough to satisfy me one month in this state.
Anxiously I examine myself once again, to be sure. Nipples dark and hard. Vaginal dentata pronounced—the normally flat triangular flaps are erect again with hunger, even so soon after my recent, reckless meal.
H. told me many visits ago that the blood volume of an average female monkey increases by fifty percent in the early stages of her pregnancy.
I’m not used to having to work these sorts of things out, but I try to come up with a plan for disposing of the monkey’s remains. Although I concentrate, my head is filled with aimless, rootless thoughts. Perfume ads. Nursery rhymes. Three, six, nine, the goose drank wine. The monkey chewed tobacco on the street car line. I remember watching one of them, a small one, a female, jumping rope. The glass of shattered bottles glittered in the sun and she sang fiercely, breathlessly, as she leapt and fell, leapt and fell. The line broke, the monkey got choked. This is really very bad. And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat.
The sad thing is, I have no choice. Even if I managed to escape suspicion in the matter of this monkey’s death, the next stop is an island. Madeira. Entirely as problematic as a cruise ship.
So I spend an hour being charming, a few minutes being devious in cramped, unlovely spaces, several more waiting near the lifeboat I’ve selected. Then everything’s all right again.
It’s not that I don’t care about the monkeys. I’m genuinely sorry that so many have to die, especially when it’s such a waste. I manage to salvage quite a few passengers and a handful of the crew. Not the boilermaster, nor his mate, so no one knows I have any idea about the cause of the explosion. Even in memory it’s tremendous, the most profound sound; much more ringing and metallic than any volcano. The dark, messy, crowded events preceding it fade in its majestic wake.
A stiff breeze keeps most of the smoke to our south. Rainbows of oil and bobbing detritus surround us, carried here on contrary currents. Each is unique: each random pattern, each odd, useless object brings its own ineffable message to the moment. Removed from context, these fragments of enameled metal, plastic, and wood, charred and reshaped by the forces I have unleashed, are sweetly new.
I wish I could show D. I know how deeply he understands these sorts of things. It is this that makes me sure he will live long, unlike so many other males. So many I have loved. As the coast of Africa comes into view, shorebirds soaring over whitecapped waves, I am buoyed by confidence. He will live many, many more years. Centuries. Long enough to witness the thousand births of each and every child I carry within my womb.
Castle in the Desert: Anno Dracula 1977
Kim Newman
What if Dracula defeated Van Helsing, married Queen Victoria, and established a new world order? Kim Newman invented this alternate history in 1992 with a short story that was expanded into novel Anno Dracula (which brilliantly added Jack the Ripper, Mycroft Holmes, and other fascinating elements to the mix). He continued the tale through the first World War in The Bloody Red Baron (1995), Judgment of Tears: Anno Dracula 1959 (1998), and in several stories and novellas, including “Castle in the Desert: Anno Dracula 1977.” You’ll find the nameless narrator of the story bears more than a passing resemblance to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. The altruistic vampire is Geneviève Dieudonne, who appears (sometimes as a variant character) in other Newman/Yeovil works.
Newman’s other fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne), and The Man From the Diogenes Club under his own name. As Jack Yeovil he wrote The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites. Newman’s nonfiction books include Nightmare Movies, Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), and Horror: 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones). He has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, and scripted for radio and television. Stories “Week Woman” and “Ubermensch” have been adapted into an episode of the TV series The Hunger and an Australian short film. His official website, Dr Shade’s Laboratory, can be found at www.johnnyalucard.com. His current publications are expanded reissues of the A
nno Dracula series and The Hound of the d’Urbervilles and a much-expanded edition of Nightmare Movies.
The man who had married my wife cried when he told me how she died. Junior—Smith Ohlrig, Jr., of the oil and copper Ohlrigs—hadn’t held on to Linda much longer than I had, but their marriage had gone one better than ours by producing a daughter.
Whatever relation you are to a person who was once married to one of your parents, Racquel Loring Ohlrig was to me. In Southern California, it’s such a common family tie you’d think there’d be a neat little name for it, pre-father or potential-parent. The last time I’d seen her was at the Poodle Springs bungalow her mother had given me in lieu of alimony. Thirteen or fourteen going on a hundred and eight, with a micro-halter top and frayed jean shorts, stretch of still-chubby tummy in between, honey-colored hair past the small of her back, an underlip that couldn’t stop pouting without surgery, binary star sunglasses and a leather headband with Aztec symbols. She looked like a preschooler dressed up as a squaw for a costume party, but had the vocabulary of a sailor in Tijuana and the glittery eyes of a magpie with three convictions for aggravated burglary. She’d asked for money, to gas up her boyfriend’s “sickle,” and took my television (no great loss) while I was in the atrium telephoning her mother. In parting, she scrawled “fuck you, piggy-dad” in red lipstick on a Spanish mirror. Piggy-dad, that was me. She still had prep-school penmanship, with curly-tails on her ys and a star over the i.
Last I’d heard, the boyfriend was gone with the rest of the Wild Angels and Racquel was back with Linda, taking penicillin shots and going with someone in a rock band.
Now things were serious.
“My little girl,” Junior kept repeating, “my little girl . . . ”
He meant Racquel.
“They took her away from me,” he said. “The vipers.”
All our lives, we’ve known about the vampires, if only from books and movies. Los Angeles was the last place they were likely to settle. After all, California is famous for sunshine. Vipers would frazzle like burgers on a grill. Now, it was changing. And not just because of affordable prescription sunglasses.