The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  I’m sitting in the green leather chair, and there’s a manila folder of photocopies and computer printouts in my lap. I’ve been picking through them, pretending this is work. It isn’t. There’s nothing in the folder I haven’t read five or ten times over, nothing that hasn’t been cited by other academics chasing stories of New England vampires. On top of the stack is “The ‘Vampires’ of Rhode Island”, from Yankee magazine, October 1970. Beneath that, “They Burned Her Heart . . . Was Mercy Brown a Vampire?” from the Narragansett Times, October 25 1979, and from the Providence Sunday Journal, also October 1979, “Did They Hear the Vampire Whisper?” So many of these popular pieces have October dates, a testament to journalism’s attitude towards the subject, which it clearly views as nothing more than a convenient skeleton to pull from the closet every Halloween, something to dust off and trot out for laughs.

  Salem has its witches. Sleepy Hollow its headless Hessian mercenary. And Rhode Island has its consumptive, consuming phantoms – Mercy Brown, Sarah Tillinghast, Nellie Vaughn, Ruth Ellen Rose, and all the rest. Beneath the Providence Sunday Journal piece is a black-and-white photograph I took a couple of years ago, Nellie Vaughn’s vandalised headstone, with its infamous inscription: I AM WAITING AND WATCHING FOR YOU. I stare at the photograph for a moment or two, and set it aside. Beneath it there’s a copy of another October article, “When the Wind Howls and the Trees Moan”, also from the Providence Sunday Journal. I close the manila folder and try not to stare at the window across the room.

  It is only a window, and it only looks out on trees and houses and sunlight.

  I open the folder again, and read from a much older article, “The Animistic Vampire in New England” from American Anthropologist, published in 1896, only four years after the Mercy Brown incident. I read it silently, to myself, but catch my lips moving:

  In New England the vampire superstition is unknown by its proper name. It is believed that consumption is not a physical but spiritual disease, obsession, or visitation; that as long as the body of a dead consumptive relative has blood in its heart it is proof that an occult influence steals from it for death and is at work draining the blood of the living into the heart of the dead and causing his rapid decline.

  I close the folder again and return it to its place in my book bag. And then I stand and cross the wide reading room to the window and the alcove where I saw, or only thought I saw, Abby looking in at me. There’s a marble bust of Cicero on the window ledge, and I’ve been staring out at the leafless trees and the brown grass, the sidewalk and the street, for several minutes before I notice the smudges on the pane of glass, only inches from my face. Sometime recently, when the window was wet, a finger traced a circle there, and then traced a circle within that first circle. When the glass dried, these smudges were left behind. And I remember Monday afternoon at the coffeehouse, Abby tracing an identical symbol (if “symbol” is the appropriate word here) in the condensation on the window while we talked and watched the rain.

  I press my palm to the glass, which is much colder than I’d expected.

  In my dream, I stood at another window, at the end of a long hallway, and looked down at the North Burial Ground. With some difficulty, I opened the window, hoping the air outside would be fresher than the stale air in the hallway. It was, and I thought it smelled faintly of clover and strawberries. And there was music. I saw, then, Abby standing beneath a tree, playing a violin. The music was very beautiful, though very sad, and completely unfamiliar. She drew the bow slowly across the strings, and I realised that somehow the music was shaping the night. There were clouds sailing past above the cemetery, and the chords she drew from the violin changed the shapes of those clouds, and also seemed to dictate the speed at which they moved. The moon was bloated, and shone an unhealthy shade of ivory, and the whole sky writhed like a Van Gogh painting. I wondered why she didn’t tell me that she plays the violin.

  Behind me, something clattered to the floor, and I looked over my shoulder. But there was only the long hallway, leading off into perfect darkness, leading back the way I’d apparently come. When I turned again to the open window and the cemetery, the music had ceased, and Abby was gone. There was only the tree and row after row of tilted headstones, charcoal-coloured slate, white marble, a few cut from slabs of reddish sandstone mined from Massachusetts or Connecticut. I was reminded of a platoon of drunken soldiers, lined up for a battle they knew they were going to lose.

  I have never liked writing my dreams down.

  It is late Thursday morning, almost noon, and I pull my hand back from the cold, smudged windowpane. I have to be in Providence for an evening lecture, and I gather my things and leave the Redwood Library and Athenaeum. On the drive back to the city, I do my best to stop thinking about the nightmare, my best not to dwell on what I saw sitting beneath the tree, after the music stopped and Abby Gladding disappeared. My best isn’t good enough.

  IV

  The lecture goes well, quite a bit better than I’d expected it would, better, probably, than it had a right to, all things considered. “Mercy Brown as Inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, presented to the Rhode Island Historical Society, and, somehow, I even manage not to make a fool of myself answering questions afterwards. It helps that I’ve answered these same questions so many times in the past. For example:

  “I’m assuming you’ve also drawn connections between the Mercy Brown incident and Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’”?

  “There are similarities, certainly, but so far as I know, no one has been able to demonstrate conclusively that Le Fanu knew of the New England phenomena. And, of course, the publication of ‘Carmilla’ predates the exhumation of Mercy Brown’s body by twenty years.”

  “Still, he might have known of the earlier cases.”

  “Certainly. He may well have. However, I have no evidence that he did.”

  But, the entire time, my mind is elsewhere, back across the water in Newport, in that coffeehouse on Thames, and the Redwood Library, and standing in a dream hallway, looking down on my subconscious rendering of the Common Burying Ground. A woman playing a violin beneath a tree. A woman with whom I have only actually spoken once, but about whom I cannot stop thinking.

  It is believed that consumption is not a physical but spiritual disease, obsession, or visitation . . .

  After the lecture, and the questions, after introductions are made and notable, influential hands are shaken, when I can finally slip away without seeming either rude or unprofessional, I spend an hour or so walking alone on College Hill. It’s a cold, clear night, and I follow Benevolent Street west to Benefit and turn north. There’s comfort in the uneven, buckled bricks of the sidewalk, in the bare limbs of the trees, in all the softly glowing windows. I pause at the granite steps leading up to the front door of what historians call the Stephen Harris House, built in 1764. One hundred and sixty years later, H.P. Lovecraft called this the “Babbitt House” and used it as the setting for an odd tale of lycanthropy and vampirism. I know this huge yellow house well. And I know, too, the four hand-painted signs nailed up on the gatepost, all of them in French. From the sidewalk, by the electric glow of a nearby street lamp, I can only make out the top half of the third sign in the series; the rest are lost in the gloom – Oubliez le Chien. Forget the Dog.

  I start walking again, heading home to my tiny, cluttered apartment, only a couple of blocks east on Prospect. The side streets are notoriously steep, and I’ve been in better shape. I haven’t gone twenty-five yards before I’m winded and have a nasty stitch in my side. I lean against a stone wall, cursing the cigarettes and the exercise I can’t be bothered with, trying to catch my breath. The freezing air makes my sinuses and teeth ache. It burns my throat like whiskey.

  And this is when I glimpse a sudden blur from out the corner of my right eye, hardly more than a blur. An impression or the shadow of something large and black, moving quickly across the street. It’s no more than ten feet away from me, but downhill, back towards Ben
efit. By the time I turn to get a better look, it’s gone, and I’m already beginning to doubt I saw anything, except, possibly, a stray dog.

  I linger here a moment, squinting into the darkness and the yellow-orange sodium-vapour pool of streetlight that the blur seemed to cross before it disappeared. I want to laugh at myself, because I can actually feel the prick of goose bumps along my forearms, and the short, fine hairs at the nape of my neck standing on end. I’ve blundered into a horror-movie cliché, and I can’t help but be reminded of Val Lewton’s Cat People, the scene where Jane Rudolph walks quickly past Central Park, stalked by a vengeful Simone Simon, only to be rescued at the last possible moment by the fortuitous arrival of a city bus. But I know there’s no helpful bus coming to intervene on my behalf, and, more importantly, I understand full fucking well that this night holds nothing more menacing than what my over-stimulated imagination has put there. I turn away from the streetlight and continue up the hill towards home. And I do not have to pretend that I don’t hear footsteps following me, or the clack of claws on concrete, because I don’t. The quick shadow, the peripheral blur, it was only a moment’s misapprehension, no more than a trick of my exhausted, preoccupied mind, filled with the evening’s morbid banter.

  Oubliez le Chien.

  Fifteen minutes later, I’m locking the front door of my apartment behind me. I make a hot cup of camomile tea, which I drink standing at the kitchen counter. I’m in bed shortly after ten o’clock. By then, I’ve managed to completely dismiss whatever I only thought I saw crossing Jenckes Street.

  V

  “Open your eyes, Ms Howard,” Abby Gladding says, and I do. Her voice does not in any way command me to open my eyes, and it is perfectly clear that I have a choice in the matter. But there’s a certain je ne sais quoi in the delivery, the inflection and intonation, in the measured conveyance of these four syllables, that makes it impossible for me to keep my eyes closed. It’s not yet dawn, but sunrise cannot be very far away, and I am lying in my bed. I cannot say whether I am awake or dreaming, or if possibly I am stranded in some liminal state that is neither one nor the other. I am immediately conscious of an unseen weight bearing down painfully upon my chest, and I am having difficulty breathing.

  “I promised that I’d call on you,” she says, and, with great effort, I turn my head towards the sound of her voice, my cheek pressing deeply into my pillow. I am aware now that I am all but paralysed, perhaps by the same force pushing down on my chest, and I strain for any glimpse of her. But there’s only the bedside table, the clock radio and reading lamp and ashtray, an overcrowded bookcase with sagging shelves, and the floral calico wallpaper that came with the apartment. If I could move my arms, I would switch on the lamp. If I could move, I’d sit up, and maybe I would be able to breathe again.

  And then I think that she must surely be singing, though her song has no words. There is no need for mere lyrics, not when texture and timbre, harmony and melody, are sufficient to unmake the mundane artefacts that comprise my bedroom, wiping aside the here and now that belie what I am meant to see, in this fleeting moment. And even as the wall and the bookshelf and the table beside my bed dissolve and fall away, I understand that her music is drawing me deeper into sleep again, though I must have been very nearly awake when she told me to open my eyes. I have no time to worry over apparent contradictions, and I can’t move my head to look away from what she means for me to see.

  There’s nothing to be afraid of, I think, and No more here than in any bad dream. But I find the thought carries no conviction whatsoever. It’s even less substantial than the dissolving wallpaper and bookcase.

  And now I’m looking at the weed-choked shore of a misty pond or swamp, a bog or tidal marsh. The light is so dim it might be dusk, or it might be dawn, or merely an overcast day. There are huge trees bending low near the water, which seems almost perfectly smooth and the green of polished malachite. I hear frogs, hidden among the moss and reeds, the ferns and skunk cabbages, and now the calls of birds form a counterpoint to Abby’s voice. Except, seeing her standing ankle-deep in that stagnant green pool, I also see that she isn’t singing. The music is coming from the violin braced against her shoulder, from the bow and strings and the movement of her left hand along the fingerboard of the instrument. She has her back to me, but I don’t need to see her face to know it’s her. Her black hair hangs down almost to her hips. And only now do I realise that she’s naked.

  Abruptly, she stops playing, and her arms fall to her sides, the violin in her left hand, the bow in her right. The tip of the bow breaks the surface of the pool, and ripples in concentric rings race away from it.

  “I wear this rough garment to deceive,” she says, and, at that, all the birds and frogs fall silent. “Aren’t you the clever girl? Aren’t you canny? I would not think appearances would so easily lead you astray. Not for as long as this.”

  No words escape my rigid, sleeping jaws, but she hears me, all the same, my answer that needs no voice, and she turns to face me. Her eyes are golden, not blue. And in the low light, they briefly flash a bright, iridescent yellow. She smiles, showing me teeth as sharp as razors, and then she quotes from the Gospel of Matthew.

  “Inwardly, they were ravening wolves,” she says to me, though her tone is not unkind. “You’ve seen all that you need to see, and probably more, I’d wager.” And with this, she turns away again, turning to face the fog shrouding the wide green pool. As I watch, helpless to divert my gaze or even shut my eyes, she lets the violin and bow slip from her hands; they fall into the water with quiet splashes. The bow sinks, though the violin floats. And then she goes down on all fours. She laps at the pool, and her hair has begun to writhe like a nest of serpents.

  And now I’m awake, disoriented and my chest aching, gasping for air as if a moment before I was drowning and have only just been pulled to the safety of dry land. The wallpaper is only dingy calico again, and the bookcase is only a bookcase. The clock radio and the lamp and the ashtray sit in their appointed places upon the bedside table.

  The sheets are soaked through with sweat, and I’m shivering. I sit up, my back braced against the headboard, and my eyes go to the second-storey window on the other side of the small room. The sun is still down, but it’s a little lighter out there than it is in the bedroom. And for a fraction of a moment, clearly silhouetted against that false dawn, I see the head and shoulders of a young woman. I also see the muzzle and alert ears of a wolf, and that golden eyeshine watching me. Then it’s gone, she or it, whichever pronoun might best apply. It doesn’t seem to matter. Because now I do know exactly what I’m looking for, and I know that I’ve seen it before, years before I first caught sight of Abby Gladding standing in the rain without an umbrella.

  VI

  Friday morning I drive back to Newport, and it doesn’t take me long at all to find the grave. It’s just a little ways south of the chain-link fence dividing the North Burial Ground from the older Common Burying Ground and Island Cemetery. I turn off Warner Street onto the rutted, unpaved road winding between the indistinct rows of monuments. I find a place that’s wide enough to pull over and park. The trees have only just begun to bud, and their bare limbs are stark against a sky so blue-white it hurts my eyes to look directly into it. The grass is mostly still brown from long months of snow and frost, though there are small clumps of new green showing here and there.

  The cemetery has been in use since 1640 or so. There are three Colonial-Era governors buried here (one a delegate to the Continental Congress), along with the founder of Freemasonry in Rhode Island, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, various Civil-War generals, lighthouse keepers, and hundreds of African slaves stolen from Gambia and Sierra Leone, the Gold and Ivory coasts and brought to Newport in the heyday of whaling and the Rhode Island rum trade. The grave of Abby Gladding is marked by a weathered slate headstone, badly scabbed over with lichen. But, despite the centuries, the shallow inscription is still easy enough to read:

  HERE LYE
TH INTERED Ye BODY

  OF ABBY MARY GLADDING

  DAUGHTER OF SOLOMON GLADDING esq

  & MARY HIS WYFE WHO

  DEPARTED THIS LIFE Ye 2d DAY OF

  SEPT 1785 AGED 22 YEARS

  SHE WAS DROWN’D & DEPARTED & SLEEPS

  ZECH 4:1 NEITHER SHALL THEY WEAR

  A HAIRY GARMENT TO DECEIVE

  Above the inscription, in place of the usual death’s head, is a crude carving of a violin. I sit down in the dry, dead grass in front of the marker, and I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting there when I hear crows cawing. I look over my shoulder, and there’s a tree back towards Farewell Street filled with the big black birds. They watch me, and I take that as my cue to leave. I know now that I have to go back to the library, that whatever remains of this mystery is waiting for me there. I might find it tucked away in an old journal, a newspaper clipping, or in crumbling church records. I only know I’ll find it, because now I have the missing pieces. But there is an odd reluctance to leave the grave of Abby Gladding. There’s no fear in me, no shock or stubborn disbelief at what I’ve discovered or at its impossible ramifications. And some part of me notes the oddness of this, that I am not afraid. I leave her alone in that narrow house, watched over by the wary crows, and go back to my car. Less than fifteen minutes later I’m in the Redwood Library, asking for anything they can find on a Solomon Gladding, and his daughter, Abby.

  “Are you sick?” the librarian asks, and I wonder what she sees in my face, in my eyes, to elicit such a question. “Are you feeling well?”