The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  He said, “You became what you are now.”

  Then she told him.

  The great cat in the Place du Coeur had approached her so suddenly and so swiftly, seeming to move as if on wheels, that Israbel had had no time to think, or to decide after all once more to run away. Next second its body touched hers.

  The body of the cat was warm, she said, as a hearth, or a summer stone, and its pelt was smooth, velvet-soft, yet prickling with electric life. The instant they were in contact, a vast soothing, in fact a feeling of content, flooded Israbel. “It was like the first time I ever tasted good brandy.”

  The Place du Coeur was now, she said, long felled, its yards and hovels squashed and built over. Alleys attenuated from it however, then and still, creeping towards the Isle of the City.

  Israbel remembered only this, walking very fast with the great leopard, whose neck was long and who was tall as a horse, both it and she unseen and incredibly unnoted, through shadows and night. Here and there bleary lights shone in the rain. Sometimes loud displays of inebriation, rage or merriment flowed round the edges of their progress. For everything like that seemed divided by their passage, like a river, which they swam together, she and the cat, effortlessly. They came eventually out on to the open spaces before the Cathedral.

  Notre Dame, Our Lady of Paris, was that night herself lit to gold and smoky red. In her windows dark blue fires, and rubies. Far above, her demonic gargoyles craned, peering over and down at the city, their wings locked until midnight should strike in some other dimension, and let them loose.

  But the leopard drew Israbel away down a sort of slope, and into a cavern under the street. She could not say exactly how it drew her. It was as if she had become invisibly connected to its skin, the vibrant spirit of its short dense fur, which led her along like a benevolent leash.

  “What did I think or feel? I was only happy. I felt quite safe, going down into the dark. If instead it had somehow drawn me up the very heights of the Cathedral, I couldn’t have been afraid.”

  In the cavern – no, she had sometimes, in later years, looked for this spot by Notre Dame, never found it, nor any entrance to it – was the leopard’s lair. The stone floor was dry and thick with straw and rushes and scraps of material. The air was warm yet clean, faintly tinged with the incense of Notre Dame, freshened by little cracks and other apertures. She smelled the river, too, wholesome as the rest.

  She lay down against the cat, which held her between its great, muscled forelegs, the paws resting around her, without a hint of talons. It breathed into her face. And its breath was healthy and clean, and smelled only a little salty.

  “Some of those I tell this story, ask if the cat then ravished me, as lions can be trained to do with human women. Yet no such thing happened at all. Oh it wasn’t like that. It was as if I lay again, a child, in the arms of my mother, or a father who loved me tenderly. I never felt so secure, nor have I ever, after. So I slept, my head on one of the huge arms, against the breast of dappled fur, to the rhythmic hymn of its breathing.”

  Israbel paused. This hiatus went on and on.

  Plinta said finally, “And then?”

  She sighed. “I woke up. It was twilight. I felt well and strong, as if I’d eaten a nourishing meal and drunk a little wine. And as if I’d bathed in hot scented water – that was how I now smelled. I wasn’t under the city any more. I was on a back street against a wall, out of sight, where it must have taken me when it was done. I might have dreamed everything, but for knowing I was glad it wasn’t daytime, and for the sense of well-being, of vitality – neither of which have ever left me since. Even so, I started to cry. I ran about, trying to find the way back down to my beloved friend – for yes, the great cat had become my only friend, and all the family I had. Of course, I detected no way and not a single clue. I never saw my leopard again. Presently, instead, my own – no, human kind – discovered me. And so I learned my powers over them, what I could do and gain. What I had become.”

  “A vampire.”

  “An immortal thing. Naturally limited to the night, but otherwise able to exist as she wishes. And fed – cherished – by mortal blood.”

  Plinta roused himself. He felt cold and sleepy, inert and depressed, all the opposites of what she had described her own feelings to be.

  “But how had – this cat – taken your blood. How had it refashioned you?”

  “Do you really wish to know?”

  “Yes—”

  Israbel lowered her eyes of black turquoise. “The pelt,” she said, simply, in a sad low voice, “the beautiful fur of it – every fibre leached every atom of my blood away, and filled me in return with the ichor of the vampire race.”

  “Its fur!”

  Plinta surged up. He strode up and down the studio, rubbing circulation back into numbed arms and hands, stopping only to shovel more wood into the stove. The room seemed hot – yet he was freezing.

  When he happened to glance at the clock, he was astounded: two hours had passed since Israbel had first arrived.

  The moment he looked at her now, she too got up. She had not anyway taken off any but her outer garments, the furs. It seemed she did not, tonight, mean to pose for her portrait.

  Certainly she did not, for she said then, “Monsieur, your picture of me is all I could ever hope for. You’ve given me a very special gift. Now I shall pay you.”

  “It isn’t finished!” Plinta exclaimed. He himself heard the panic in his tone. It was not only the unfinished painting that troubled him. It seemed their commerce, hers and his, was at an end.

  But Israbel only nodded gravely.

  “Not quite finished, I agree. But that’s as it should be – as it must be, don’t you think? For neither am I, monsieur, finished. Nor, perhaps, can I ever be. The picture has reached the very stage I myself am at. Like me, it must remain there, or how can I see myself in it?”

  Plinta stood still. He stared at Israbel, memorizing her, her grace, elegance and otherness.

  “And so,” she said gently, “let me settle my account with you.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “what this picture can be worth.”

  “Everything.”

  “Do I ask everything of you, then?”

  “You know that I’m rich.”

  “Don’t pay me,” he said, “in money.”

  “Then how?”

  As she questioned him like that, Plinta saw in her a total fatal innocence. It had nothing to do with naivety or foolishness. I must never lose her. Aloud he said, “Show me.”

  “Ah.”

  “Show me how – pelt – can take blood. How you feed yourself.”

  The crudeness of the words he had used, and his desire to find out, both appalled him. He was humiliated by himself, and trembling, but even so, would not deny what he had said.

  She answered, “If you wish. But – I’m hungry, Plinta, Monsieur Plinta the Painter. If it’s to be you—”

  “Me. Who else?”

  “Then, I shan’t hold back. You must become as I am. Do you want such a thing?”

  Plinta thought about it. But he had been thinking of it constantly, behind a screen of debate, arguing with himself that in fact, it was not possible. But it was.

  “Madame Israbel, I have so much to learn of my trade. That alone would need immortality. I’d like the time. I don’t subscribe to the idea that, being always myself, I must become less. I think one must be able to evolve – even in the same continuing body. Yes, I’d give up the daylight. But I too am already partly nocturnal. I sleep through a day, rise at sunset. But more than that – I want to know.”

  Israbel turned her head. This was as if she listened, obediently, to some angel at her right shoulder, who now told her what she must do. It seemed she knew the angel of old. Its advice was always sound.

  Before, he had seen a seventh veil fall from her.

  Now Israbel touched the bodice of her dress, and the yellow silk parted and dropped, like a veil, and all else w
ith it. As before, she stood in front of him naked. Her hair, loose and gleaming, framed her face, neck and upper body.

  Plinta felt a stab of sexual appetite so intense it hurt him. Then he grasped it was not sexual at all.

  She came to him as her kind did, as the great cat had come to her – sudden and swift, gliding as if over burnished ice.

  And as she came, her hair, her hair, lifted up on her head in two wide, black-flaming wings, glittering with tines and prisms of diamond, topaz and gold, and as it fastened on him, and her flesh met his own clothed body, he felt the touch of her, hair, skin, her eyes, her lips. Oh, not like mother or father. This was like the meeting of mortal man with god.

  Plinta seemed to lie that night high up on the roofs of the Cathedral, among the army of gargoyles which, as a white moon rose, flew back and forth, scratching their claws on the parapets, their eyes full of misty smoulderings.

  Here, Israbel took his blood, not biting but through her skin and her hair, the soft persuasive caresses ebbing and swelling like a symphony.

  He understood that, in the future, he too must also take sustenance in this way. But her hair, so long and thick, had become two wings, like those of some giant Egyptian hawk, and she too, he saw, as he lay quiet between the delicious bouts of her feeding, flew off the roof, into the sky and stars. Sometimes she even gripped the gargoyles, held them, while both they and she soared across the moon, her hair coiling them, their tails wrapped around her. Did she take blood also from their carved stone, replacing it with immortal vampiric essences? Of course, how else were they able to fly?

  Near dawn she closed his eyes with her lips, a kind of kiss.

  “Sleep now. Be at peace. Asleep, the sun can’t harm you. Tomorrow night you will be changed.”

  “Then tomorrow, where shall I meet you?” he said. But Plinta discovered he could not, now she had shut them, open his eyes, and she did not reply, and had drawn away. A colossal slumberousness stole over him. He sank into it, not minding.

  In the dream then, asleep, which itself held a dream. In this second trance, he saw Israbel after all, her face framed now by the velvet and silk curtains of a stage. Wings flew out from her skull. Her eyes were highly reflective – like a pair of looking-glasses. Otherwise, her face had no features at all. It was a faceless face, a perfect, blind face, of fabric stretched taut on bone.

  Colas found him the next evening. Plinta lay stiff and marble cold, and looking bloodless as marble, there on the studio rug, splashed by the dregs of a sunset.

  Colas gave a yowl. Howling and yelping like a wolf, he rolled Plinta about the floor, and when neighbours rushed up the stairs, wailed that Plinta had died, was dead, and now Colas would be slung out on the street – Colas’s only actual concern.

  “No, you dolt. Look, he’s waking up. Dead? Plinta? Only drunk—”

  Plinta woke. He stretched, and Colas, who genuinely had seen him minutes before dead as the deadest corpse, backed away gibbering.

  But Plinta himself felt wonderful, like a prince who is in love and has, besides, dined on a banquet. He threw a boot at Colas, and Colas, at last reassured his patron was the same as ever, tramped off to fetch the coffee.

  Already the marvellous dream – of the Cathedral, the gargoyles, the vampire and her attentions – was fading. Of the dream-within-the-dream did anything remain? Maybe not. But Plinta soon noticed Israbel had taken her portrait away with her. Why not, when she had bought it, and at an excellent price. Next time he saw it, the picture, he would be again with her.

  One last splinter of dream-memory did linger, however. He had asked her where he should meet her, Israbel his sister, now, in blood. But he had been stupid to ask, for Plinta had not needed to. Tonight, as much of Paris knew, Israbel was due to act and sing her glimmering five minutes at the Opèra.

  Plinta threw his mirror into the cupboard before he left the studio. Now a vampire, he could never again see himself reflected, and had duly proved as much with one or two contemptuous glares at the glass. Others though would see him in mirrors, and not suspect, just as Israbel had explained.

  Would she be glad, at last, of his company? They were brethren, and she had admitted she had discovered no kindred, just as never again had she located the supernatural cat.

  Two moods possessed Plinta, as he walked the glacial streets of Paris, moving towards the golden ornament of the theatre. One was an elation not unmixed with eager fear. The other was a deep melancholy, a sort of shadow. The first state he comprehended. The second puzzled him. Was he in mourning then for his purely human life, now ended? What did that matter? Nothing, not at all. But no, it was not that.

  He stood in the light-spiked dark, and thought. Perhaps immortality is only formed, for us, from those countless days we may never now experience. A life of nights, doubled.

  All things are paid for. Even Israbel had paid for the painting he had made of her.

  Plinta took a box at the theatre, a rare extravagance. He soon glimpsed Dumière across the auditorium in a box of his own, with other friends. Dumière saluted Plinta, pleased to see him at a distance. But how jealous Dumière would be, if only he knew. Had he offered Israbel marriage? Israbel and Plinta were married, in more than religion or legality. One flesh.

  Where shall I feed? Plinta thought, as the curtain rose on some spectacular unimportance. She will show me. She will be my teacher. Then he sat back, watching the acts of the play through half-closed eyes, and all about the theatre rustled and murmured, whistled and called, alienly alive. He imagined it was like being in the zoological gardens. He had never felt a part of them, the human race, and now was not.

  To great clapping and calls, Israbel came out in the fifth act, as the programme stipulated, to perform her part, and sing her aria, which that night was by Rameau.

  Plinta sat forward. His eyes widened. His heart, or some more profound mechanism, slammed high into his chest, then leapt away, down in to a chasm. Tears rolled, helpless to save themselves, from his eyes.

  If he had been able, in those minutes, like the Biblical Samson, he would have risen, grabbed vast pillars of the Opèra temple, and brought it crashing down.

  Samson had lost all. Plinta too, had lost.

  Now he could never know, he who must learn everything, whether or not he had loved her. Instead he would be, like the rest of his kind, bereft, and quite unique.

  On the stage Israbel sang, and the audience hung in wild suspense until the last note, then bellowed its applause and flung its flowers. And across the theatre, Dumière sprang up and raced, fever-flushed from his box, to seek her in the dressing-rooms.

  But Plinta stayed where he was, still as when Colas had found him and thought him, rightly, dead. Only the mobile tears ran on from Plinta’s eyes.

  For she had warned him, had she not? Even his mirror, in its own cruelly amusing way, had done so. Certainly his inner dream of facelessness. No vampire could see itself in reflection – only human things could see it there. But that was not only in mirrors. No vampire could see any vampire – themselves or another, either in a mirror – or anywhere in the whole crystal globe of the heartless, lonely, reflective world. On the stage, Israbel was taking her bow. Plinta alone did not applaud. To him she was now entirely inaudible and invisible, just as he was now entirely inaudible and invisible to Israbel, and to all their kind.

  MICHAEL SHEA

  The Growlimb

  AFTER DISCOVERING A BATTERED copy of Jack Vance’s The Eyes of the Overworld in a cheap hotel in Juneau, Alaska, Michael Shea wrote a sequel to the book as a homage. Shea then wrote to Vance, asking if he would help get the sequel published and split the take.

  Although Vance graciously declined the offer, or to even read another author’s addendum to his own work, he did invite Shea to get the work published on his own. The result was A Quest for Simbilis (1974).

  Since then the author has published more than two dozen stories and novellas, along with such books as the World Fantasy Award-winning Nifft
the Lean, In Yana the Touch of Undying, The Color Out of Time (a sequel to H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”), Fat Face, The Mines of Behemoth, The A’rak and the World Fantasy Award-nominated collection Polyphemus.

  “I guess I can say I knew this story at least a decade before I wrote it down,” Shea reveals. “It’s a story I’d learned not just from the haunting terrain of Northern California, but also from the harsher, equally haunting chaparral hills and mountains around my natal Los Angeles.”

  IN THE OFFICES OF HUMANITY INCORPORATED, Marjorie, Program Director of Different Path, had her own cubicle. From her desk she could look across the floor directly into the corner nook – not a cubicle really, with only a standing screen to half partition it off – where Carl Larken had his desk.

  Larken was on the phone, his chair tilted back, his outthrust feet toed under his desktop, his body poised almost horizontal to the floor. In cut-offs and worn Nikes, a brambly grey beard and rakedback grey locks tendrilled on his neck, the man’s toughness showed. A lean and sunburned man in his fifties.

  Marjorie tried to decide why Larken stood out so. It wasn’t his dress. Humanity Inc. was a sizeable human services non-profit, and didn’t insist on office drag – most of its program managers had social activist backgrounds and liberal views. What nagged at her was the man’s . . . tautness. He was a very personable, articulate guy, sociable on demand, but he had an agenda, an undistracted inwardness. He could be talking to you about your program, deep in the details of a write up with you, showing perfect grasp and sensitive awareness, and you would suddenly know he wasn’t really there, was working his tongue and his face like a puppet, flawlessly managing his half of the exchange, lightyears away in his mind. Over the months, she had formed the whimsical but persistent notion that Carl Larken was insane.