Vampires Overhead

by Alan Hyder

  Well.

  The point is: did Hyder cleverly and deliberately construct Vampires Overhead the way it has turned out? So that nothing is explained, nothing is resolved, and there are enough loose ends to knit an Arran sweater? A comet is mentioned. Though not pursued. There’s a vague possibility these vampires come from outer space. How? (Can one flap leathery wings in a vacuum?) Why? Are they simply a group deus ex machina, brought in to jump-start the narrative? Is the novel meant to be ‘like life’, in that in life, too, much is unvouchsafed to us? Is it ‘naturalistic’? There are certainly a few dollops of sex chucked in—though not of course explicit sex; this is, after all, 1935. Rape takes place—though off-stage, obviously. Did Hyder then want to write about the sexual and spiritual interaction between three people undertaking an epic journey under the most appalling conditions (‘It’s hell! We’ve woke up in hell!’) and decided to give it an SF cloak because no other seemed to fit?

  Or did he simply sit down and write a pulp SF thriller, but didn’t have the breadth of vision or creative imagination to fill in the gaps?

  Or are the explanations and tyings-up not there because Hyder simply forgot to write them?

  An imponderable mystery—and, in the end, probably not worth pondering in the first place. And none of this in any case should detract from the genuine pace and genuine grue of one of the rarest vampire tales of the twentieth century.

  Jack Adrian

  August 2002

  I

  The Coming of Bingen

  CONTEMPLATING RETROSPECTIVELY the first days of terror and the ensuing weeks which alternated erratically between black despair and a curious happiness, it is incredible how horror merges into a dull background of dimly burning smoky flame whilst insignificant details are spot-lighted into prominence. Either it is that man is interested mostly in the minor, the understandable, or it is that Nature cunningly casts aside that which is too big, too terrible, for his comprehension. So that this narrative must needs be the record of what were, however appalling they may have appeared at the moment, trivial events happening in a land crouching in fear and dying.

  So far as I know the first and only inkling of anything untoward—and it was unheeded portent to a careless world—came from Jamaica. The News had a small paragraph tucked away in the ‘News from All Quarters’ column concerning a sergeant and a sapper who, stationed at Fort Nugent upon outpost duty, reported having seen humped upon the ramparts two enormous bats. The News headed the paragraph ‘Rum?’ Not many people, I imagine, noticed it, and those who read forgot it immediately. I read it and remember joking about it with Clynes in the saloon of The White Hart. Holding glasses high we peered through the amber beer while questioning the barmaid, ‘No bats in here, miss?’ I recollect her lifted eyebrows, her majestic move to another corner of the bar. She was tightly laced, that barmaid, but above and below her corsets, curves bulged into the black lace of her dress, so that even while I wonder how she fared, I know.

  Eight days after that three-lined trivial paragraph in the News, Bingen and I were crouching in the bowels of the earth like two alien shades in a vivid hell, and above, London flared away to a heaped grey mass of ash glowing redly here, leaving twisted stanchions from steel-framed buildings protruding like picked fishbones there.

  Yes, that paragraph in the paper was the beginning. There is the new comet, but whether it had any connection with the tropical weather, the fires and the arrival of the Vampires, I do not know. The Khaenealler Comet, named after its discoverer, a Belgian professor, had been growing rapidly out of the sky, watched fearfully by people who were alarmed at rumoured reports of it approaching earth in a manner which left no doubts of it colliding with us to the oblivion of everything. Khaenealler’s Comet neared earth enough to dim the light of a full moon, and then stayed at a respectable distance in the heavens, so that people grew gradually accustomed to it, and now it is either burning out or retreating from the earth’s orbit. Its brilliance is fading. Even at the apex of its illumination, the comet, though dimming that satellite with fiery glow, never approximated the moon in size, and though it is possible its flaming gaseous nucleus may have given birth to the Vampires, it is improbable, in my opinion, and but for the coincidence of its appearance the comet can have no connection with this record of events. To me that insignificant paragraph in the paper was the commencement.

  The beginning? It is hard to begin, and once begun, the narrative must filter out into an unsatisfactory conclusion. There is no finis! The country flashed alight, was gone under the instantaneous arrival of Vampires, and they dribbled away to leave a land which came gradually to life with their going. And yet this narrative should not be difficult, for it is simply the setting down of plain facts, a record of exactly what occurred. But the trouble is the recollection, for important events are faded now, into personal details, while to attempt the description of the Vampires’ descent and the wholesale destruction of the country would be, even though I had a pen capable, beyond me, for I did not experience it.

  The story must needs be condensed into the adventures of three, and who to tell it except myself? There is Janet . . . but her tale would perhaps be of less interest to those who come after desiring knowledge of the holocaust than mine. It would not chronicle the small amount of detail anent the destruction of the country, mine will. She would not bother with episodes which brought us together. Her interest is the present . . . the future! And Bingen? Bingen is dead!

  At first, the intention of leaving some record of events for whoever comes after, grew from a sense of duty, but now, when I examine myself truthfully, I know that the setting down of this story is really an excuse to give myself something to do which will take my mind from other things until they can be met. I know also, that far from recounting events proving of interest to those seeking information concerning the Vampires, this account will develop purely into our story, ignoring the important occurrences which obliterated civilization.

  From an adjoining cottage I have salvaged a cradle. Pulled it from beneath a heap of debris and dusted it. Janet has lined it with silks from the shops at Croydon. Until I suggested it be put temporarily away for safety, it stood prominently in a corner of the room. This cottage, buried deep in the Surrey Hills, is once again to hear the introductory wail of a newcomer into the world . . . a world burned and drained dry of humanity.

  Janet is not unduly concerned! Why should she be? She relies so implicitly upon me. To her I am capable of everything or anything. If only I can hide my anxiety from her!

  Tucked away in the memory cells of my brain there are, I suppose, many higgledy-piggledy, useless little scraps of things graved subconsciously at various periods of my life, and now, having been hidden away for who knows how many years, there has leapt unexpectedly forth from some recess the word umbilical-cord. From what source it came I cannot conjecture, but now, when I lay at night with Janet snuggled in the crook of my arm, it blazes in letters of fire in the blackness.

  That there are other folk in the world I know, for until the batteries ran down I used the radio in the big house over the hills frequently. Three stations came through at very irregular intervals, so that sometimes for nights on end I listened fruitlessly. Two, I think, were German and the other, Arabic or Turkish. Three stations! And eight months ago my landlady’s son could not twiddle the controls of his home-made three-valve set for two minutes without something booming shakingly out of the speaker. After dark then, the ether was alive with the hammered syncopation of maniacal dance bands and the woeful crooning of their vocal refrains. And now . . . three stations gabbling gibberish to a dead world!

  As I understand it there must be small communities scattered about England, but the big towns, the cities, the seaports, have burned and died beneath the Vampires. Overseas . . . who knows? I dare not surmise. There is no traffic upon the river. With fear, ever recurrent, of the Vampires’ return, I have not ventured often with Janet from our cottage and the adjacent dug-out, but on
ce we rode hastily, furtively, to Bostall Woods, and from the shelter of the trees high on the hillside stared down on the silver ribbon that is London’s river, and it was unrippled by any moving thing. Here and there among the fire-razed docks, tilting drunkenly amidstream, burned red hulks of great ships towered and, even after all these months, strands of grey smoke twisted lazily, drifting down the river like summer mists, while over all shimmered and danced transparent waves of heat. We were glad to get away from the desolation; from the heaped grey ashes of the towns; past shells of suburban houses standing emptily in pathetic little plots of overgrown gardens.

  But I am progressing too rapidly. This explanatory introduction with which I intended only to set forth my limitations, so that the reader might the better read with a more discerning eye, is spurting ahead, and to bring order from chaos, I must begin at the beginning. Reader! Who will read this? A son . . . a daughter . . . someone come unexpectedly into this Garden of Eden with its Eve and its Adam . . . some high-browed scientist chipping rock in the distant future about our petrified remains with a tiny hammer . . . Macaulay’s New Zealander . . .?

  Surely a reader—if there is to be one—would read the easier, having some knowledge of the writer, and the only means at my disposal for effecting that knowledge would appear to be a brief biography.

  My mother died during my infancy, and my father absconded to Australia, where, so far as I know, he may yet be living, and I was brought up by an aunt who, just so soon as I was capable of being impressed, firmly impressed upon me the need for bringing some grist to the mill, so that from the age of twelve I earned my own living and an occasional bun or whatnot for my aunt’s large family. The European War gave me a glad exit from home, and the winter of 1914 found me, at the age of sixteen, learning the art of evading the effects of modern armaments. I grew up with the War, so that I cannot say how it affected me, but I certainly grew to manhood with extremely few beliefs in anything or anybody. Not many fighting men came through the War without some bitterness in their souls, and with the small gratuity I received after the Armistice I washed mine from my mouth with a fortnight’s hectic living, and then the bitterness returned, for I was seeking a job. The exceedingly slight knowledge of carpentry achieved during my youth when in the factory of a building firm I ran errands and fetched tea for the workmen, proved useless in a country recuperating from a great war with skilfully complacent aid from men who had been indispensable during the fighting, so that, finally, an enticing odour of stew wisping across my distended nostrils, led me hungrily through the barrack gates, and once again I became a gunner in ’Is Majesty’s Royal ’Orse. For seven years I lived, but for the amount of reading I managed to do, the usual soldier’s life in the Far and the Near Easts, and then I doffed my uniform to return to a grateful country, once again in search of a job.

  This time I was luckier, even though it meant stepping into a uniform again. A uniform that had been designed, I think, by a Hollywood film magnate for a Bolivian Prince who happened at the same time to be a super-general, a glorified aide-de-camp, and a Prime Minister. I became a cinema commissionaire! Not, as you will have gathered, a menial to a suburban picture palace, a mere colonel of militia with a uniform coat over civilian trousers, croaking at intervals ‘Standin’ One an’ therree, Seats Two an fouer’. My height, I am six feet and an inch, and the fact that I had five medals to add to the already glittering uniform, procured the job for me, and I spent four years running to seed under the portico of a magnificent west-end cinema, The Luxurides. Close to the ornate doors when rain mirrored the pavement and away from the sickly scented warm air drifting through those doors when the night was fine.

  Motionlessly staring over the heads of people who wanted me to open taxi doors and less-than-people who wanted to know were there any cheaper seats than seven-and-six, I began to run to flesh, and was seriously contemplating whether an increase in majestic mien was worthy of a corresponding increase in salary, when, I’ve an idea, that had life gone on in the same old humdrum way, the ‘sack’ would have been my portion. For one Saturday afternoon I so far forgot my dignity as to run—actually run—down to the pavement and shout ‘Hi!’ at the top of my voice!

  Bingen was the cause of my undignified emotion. Bingen! Even the manager’s beady eyes glinting over a herbaic nose around the box-office did not deter me. Bingen, who had swung the pole of my gun magically between his shiny chestnuts at Karachi, and on the Menin Road, at Poona, and on the space of Abbassia. Wheel-driver of my battery!

  Comradeships between gunners and drivers are infra-dig—to the gunner—in the Royal ’Orse, but Bingen and I, despite a difference in tastes and amusements, had been pals of a sort, and four long years standing outside the Luxurides had covered the past with glamour, and Bingen was the first of the old crowd I had met.

  And with the coming of Bingen, death, in a hideous guise, enshrouded the City.

  II

  The Tunnel Beneath the Brewery

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON CROWDS thronged Piccadilly. A May sun glinted down to have rays broken, tossed back in glittering beams from shop windows, and heat danced upwards from the sticky road. Little beads of perspiration damped my neck, the stiff collar of my nightmare uniform rubbed irritatingly. Under the heavy clothing, pores in my skin seemed stifled. I itched, and wanted badly to rub my back to and fro upon one of the voluptuous mermaids which, carved in marble on the pillars of the Luxurides’ façade, formed one of its attractions. The world was a great place for a man not doomed to swelter in a padded uniform beside the hot, scented entrance of a super-cinema.

  The palace inside was full. With what kind of people eager to spend a sunny afternoon in sultry darkness with an ‘ALL-TALKING, ALL-DANCING, ALL-SINGING’ picture, I beg its pardon, ‘SUPER-PRODUCTION’, flickering before their dilated eyes, I do not know. People who might have been treading heather on the hills of Addiscombe, or breathing deeply of cool air upon the heights of Hampstead. But they had spent their seven and sixpences to cook there in the dark to music.

  Surreptitiously I ran a finger round beneath my collar, and my neck was getting soft as well as damp. I was getting fat. Ah well! Nothing, I supposed, would ever happen. Soon, maybe in a few years, the manager would notice his commissionaire had a slightly shop-soiled appearance, and a new frame would be procured to support the magnificent uniform in an erect position upon the palatial steps of the Luxurides. An ex-Guardee, or mayhap another from the Royal ’Orse.

  Traffic halted, jerked forward, halted again; crowds swerved close to the building, stared at the photographs, and turned to find themselves ringed in, had to fight their way out to continue their stroll. Careless peoples, sauntering through Saturday afternoon with the certain knowledge of a day free from toil on the morrow!

  And then, down the street, hazily in blue vapour drifting from the over-heated intestines of motors, high on the seat of a brewer’s dray, I saw Bingen.

  A curling whip, gay with scarlet rosette and shimmering with polished brass rings, slanted from his thigh; rakishly, as ever, his cap, with a gleaming metal house-badge, tilted over one reddened, dissipated eye. The sun caught pinky skin on his head under close-cropped black hair. His team of dappled greys, from great hairy fetlocks to primped manes, were groomed, as ever, immaculately. Their harness was as a glittering display of artificial jewellery in a lighted shop-window. Bingen, even more than I, had run to seed, for the leather apron of his craft curved above his knees, and his forearms, bare in rolled shirt-sleeves, were swollen, bloated. Even as I took in these things I was down to the pavement with outstretched arm, holding up once again the long-suffering traffic of Piccadilly. The dray pulled into the curb, Bingen’s hands, supple for all their size, arched his horses’ necks. He stared down at me.

  ‘Strewth! It’s Garrington. Rose from the ranks to be some sort of general. An’ on the gilded staff by the look of him. Don’t let me ’orses see you, they’ll bolt.’ He grinned and reached down an open hand after his whip slammed i
nto its socket. ‘Put it there, Garry. I’m glad to see you. How goes it?’

  ‘And I’m glad to see you, Bingen. Been watching the horse traffic roll down Piccadilly for four years on the lookout for some of the old crush, and you’re the first,’ I cried excitedly, pump-handling his hand. ‘How are you, old timer? Quick. See if we can make a date.’

  Through the inches thick of uniform padding, I could feel the manager’s disapproving eye boring into my back.

  ‘How can we arrange a meeting? Any chance tonight? I get off earlier than usual tonight. What d’you say?’

  ‘What time d’you finish?’ Bingen bent to ask. He thought awhile and continued swiftly. ‘Know the old Red Lion Brewery, over Hungerford Bridge? Stables there. I’ll wait for you there tonight. Can you come along after you’ve done here?’