She bought a red-eye flight ticket to Virginia from Illinois. She’d heard rumors that the Department of Corrections had decided to allow inmates on Death Row to choose the electric chair or the new, less violent, and certainly more civil method of death by lethal injection.
She did not know which condemned man was her Alexandre. She had searched for one hundred years for clues to his new life, and had found nothing. Now, though, she was close. He was there, clothed in another man’s skin. She would know him by his hands.
She pushed up the plastic window curtain and stared at the moon. The moon was the same, year after year, century after century. Was it cursed?
“I come, Alexandre,” she said to the night.
And if she failed, she would only have to wait again. And she had all the time there was. All the time there would be.
NIGHT LAUGHTER
Ellen Kushner
Ellen Kushner weaves together multiple careers as a writer, radio host, teacher, performer, and public speaker. She began her career in publishing as a fiction editor in New York City, but left to write her first novel Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners. It was followed by the World Fantasy Award– and the Mythopoeic Award–winning Thomas the Rhymer, The Fall of Kings (with Delia Sherman), and The Privilege of the Sword. She edited the anthology Basilisk and coedited The Horns of Elfland (with Delia Sherman and Donald G. Keller) and Welcome to Bordertown (with Holly Black). Her latest project is the collaborative serial Tremontaine (SerialBox.com and Saga Press).
Upon moving to Boston, she became a radio host for WGBH-FM. In 1996, she created Sound & Spirit, PRI’s award-winning national public radio series. Her recent audio work includes narrating three of her own novels for Neil Gaiman Presents/Audible.com.
She now lives once again in New York City. In the twenty-first century, she no longer has to check the mailbox in her building lobby for rejection slips, but old habits die hard.
“Some stories just come to you whole, and this was one of them,” explains the author. “I was living in New York, on the fifth floor of a building festooned with gargoyles. I walked downstairs to the mailbox to see if I’d gotten any rejection letters that day, and by the time I got back up to the apartment, I had most of this story in my head.
“I remember I was thinking, for some reason, about how vampires are always portrayed wearing evening dress, and what if that was not attributable merely to Hollywood; what if it was because they really liked to … ?”
THE THING IS, it’s just that you start to hate the daytime. All the bad things happen during the day: rush hour, lines at the bank, unwanted phone calls, junk mail, overworked people being rotten to each other. Night is the time for lovers, for reading alone by lamplight, for dancing, for cool breezes. It doesn’t matter if your blood is hot or cold; it’s the time for you.
“Come on,” I say, tugging at his wrist, “come on, let’s have fun!” He holds back, reluctant. “Come on, let’s dance!”
All over the city the lights are blinking off and on all the time. Night laughter. “Come on into the night!”
“Crazy,” he says, “that’s what you are.” Rich nighttime laughter bubbles in me. I let a little of it show in the corners of my mouth to scare him. He’s scared. He says, “You wanna dance?”
I turn away, shrug nonchalantly. “Nah, not really.”
“You wanna … go for a ride?”
“Nah,” I lick my lips, trite, unmistakable. “Let’s go for a walk. In the park.”
“No one’s in the park at this hour.”
“We’ll be. Just the two of us, alone. With the long paths all to ourselves.”
He rises, follows. The night is like that.
He’s wearing a good suit, the best he’s got. The night’s the time for dressing up, dressing high, dressing fine. Your real night clothes, those are the pressed black and starched white that a gentleman wore, with maybe a touch of gold or a bright ribbon sash setting it off. And a woman was always sleek and bright, lean and clean as a new machine, streamlined as a movie queen. My dress is like that; it clings and swirls so smooth, so long. I stride along beside him in my spiky heels, like a thoroughbred horse with tiny goat’s hoofs. Long ago, in Achaea, God wore goat’s hoofs and played the pipes all night long. Pipes of reed, like the mouth of a saxophone, blowing long and lonely down the wind between the standing trees.
The trees of the park are sparse, hanging over us in ordered rows, dark and tall as the street lamps between them, but under the trees is shadow. The circles of light, when you come to them, are bright enough to read by. Little insects buzz and flutter against their haloes.
Bums are asleep on the benches; poor guys, don’t even know if it’s night or day. I always avoid them. The only thing they want is money; they never knew how to have a good time, or they’ve forgotten how. I knew someone once who couldn’t bear the light of day, quite right. He’d get out of his white jacket and into a velvet dressing-gown, put on dark glasses and retire from the sunrise like poison, while we watched the lights going out in strings across the park, and he’d be making his jokes about what to do with the waking birds and their noise. Owl, I called him, and he called me Mouse. But finally he couldn’t take it anymore, he took to sucking red life out of a wine bottle with thick glass, green as sunshades, and he lost the taste for real life altogether; now for all I know he’s one of the bums on the benches. They know they’re safe: we won’t touch them if we don’t have to.
This man I’m with, he keeps darting his eyes left and right, as if he’s looking for a cop or a junkie or a mugger. I take his arm, press up against him. “You’re cold,” he says.
I flip my silver scarf twice around my throat. “No, I’m not.”
Lights from the passing cars streak our path. I tilt my head back, eyes veiled against the glare of sky, the light bouncing off the clouds.
He says, “I think I see my office. There, over the trees.”
I lead him deeper into the darkness, toward the boat pond.
He says, “Y’know it’s really dangerous in here,” coming all the time along with me.
I kick off my shoes, they go shooting up like silver rockets out over the old lake. My feet press the damp earth, soft and cool, perfect night feeling. Not just earth under them; there’s old cigarette stubs moldering into clay and hard edges of glass and a little bird’s bone.
Considerately I lean my back against a tree, unwrap my scarf, and smile one of my dream smiles.
“Cigarette?” I ask huskily. He fumbles in his pocket, holds the white stick out to me; I just lean there, holding the pose, and finally he places the end between my polished lips. I look up sultry through my eyelashes, and he produces a light.
Oh, the gorgeousness of that tiny flame, orange and strong in the darkness! You don’t get orange like that by daylight. I suck it to a perfect scarlet circle on the end of my cigarette, and then I give it back to him, trailing its ghostly wisp of smoke. Automatically he smokes it.
Automatic, still too nervous. He doesn’t know how to have a good time! He was a mistake, a good-looking mistake. But then, not every night is perfect. I sigh so quietly only the wind hears me. Frogs are croaking in the pond, competing with crickets for airspace over the distant traffic roar. Another good night, opening itself to me. All you have to do is want it.
“C’mere,” I say in my husky dusky cigarette voice. His tie so neatly tied, his shoes so clean they catch the little light on their rounded surface … He walks towards me. The expression on his face is steadier, more hopeful: here at last is something he thinks he’ll understand. He buries his face in my neck. My white arms glow around his shoulders.
He’s all pressed into me now, I’m like sandwich filling between him and the tree. There’s bubble of laughter in my throat; I’m thinking, What would happen if I swiftly stepped aside and all his hard softness were pressing against bark? But I just shift my weight, enjoying the way he picks up on it, shifting his body to conform to me. Now he likes the night. Now
his hands have some life in them, running the maze between my dress and my skin. With my fingertips I touch his ears, his jaw, the rim of his collar, while he presses, presses, his breath playing like a brassy syncopated band, his life pulsing hard, trying to burst through his clothes. Owl always said, Let them do that.
He’s working my dress up around my waist. His hands are hot. Ah, he’s happy. He’s fumbling with his buckle. I breathe on him and make him laugh.
“Fun?” I ask.
“Mm-hmm.”
“You’re having a good time now.”
I tickle the base of his throat and he throws back his head, face joyous in the mercury-colored cloudlight. Night laughter rises in me, too strong anymore to be contained. It wells through my mouth and fixes on his throat, laughter hard and sharp as the edge of a champagne glass, wet and bright as a puddle in neon.
It’s fun, it’s wild, it’s night-blooming orchid and splashing fountains and the fastest car you’ve ever been in, speeding along the coast … It’s life.
He hardly weighs anything now. I leave him under the tree; the bums can have what he’s got left. I take a pair of slippers out of my bag; it’s after midnight, but I won’t be running home barefoot, not like some unfortunate fairy-tale girl. Midnight’s just the beginning for me.
In the distance a siren goes wailing by. Unsprung trucks speed across town, their trailers pounding as though they’re beating the pavement to death. Moonlight and street light blend on the surface of the water.
I pass under the big statue of the hero on the horse, and walk jaunty and silent-footed among his many lamplit shadows. Around the bend I see a white gleam, too white and sharp to be anything but a pressed evening jacket. For a moment I think that it is Owl again. But his face, when he turns to look at me, is different.
His jacket is a little rumpled but not dirty, and his black bow tie is perfectly in place. He is smiling. I catch up to him.
“Cigarette?” he says.
“No thanks, I just had one.”
He takes one from a gold-plated case, lights it and inhales slowly and contentedly. Where his lips touched it I see a dark stain.
“Hungry?”
“Not a bit.”
“Wonderful night,” I say.
He nods, still smiling. “Let’s go dancing,” he says.
We’ll have a good time.
BOOTLEG
Christa Faust
Christa Faust grew up in New York City, in the Bronx and Hell’s Kitchen. She’s been making stuff up her whole life, and spent most of her teen years on endless subway rides, cutting school, and scribbling stories.
After high school finally had enough of her, she worked in the Times Square peep booths and later as a fetish model and professional dominatrix.
An avid reader and collector of vintage paperbacks, a film noir enthusiast, and a tattooed lady, she sold her first short story when she moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s. Since then, her books have included two novels from Hard Case Crime, Money Shot and Choke Hold, along with Control Freak, Hoodtown, Triads, and Butch Fatale: Dyke Dick: Double D Double Cross.
Among Faust’s movie and TV tie-ins are Twilight Zone #5: Burned/One Night at Mercy, A Nightmare on Elm Street #2: Dreamspawn, Friday the 13th: The Jason Strain, Final Destination III: The Movie, Snakes on a Plane, Supernatural: Coyote’s Kiss, Fringe: The Zodiac Paradox, Fringe: The Burning Man, and Fringe: Sins of the Fathers.
“It’s funny,” reveals the author, “even though ‘Bootleg’ deals with blood-fetish and the cosmetic accessories of vampirism, I always thought of it as more of a ghost story or maybe even a zombie story (if you could make dead love get up and walk again), rather than a traditional vampire story.
“While I do enjoy bloodplay as a sexual indulgence, as a writer I find very little blood left to suck from that old archetype. As with my other ‘vampire’ story, ‘Cherry’ in Love in Vein, in this story I tried to take the idea in a slightly different direction. I wanted to get away from the whole doomed immortal thing, the romantic wish-fulfillment fantasy of being pale and thin and pretty forever and ever, and try to do something that was a little more human.”
MONA CUT OFF his right hand first. It was more important to him than his penis, the source of all his brilliance, his ART (she could always hear the capital letters in his slow, jaded voice) and she took great pleasure in removing it. Then the left hand, severed just below the twisted copper bracelet she gave him last Christmas. Tattooed arms were next, lower then upper. Their swirling patterns seemed much more beautiful without him attached. She cut off his booted feet, left then right and added them to the growing pile. She sliced off his legs in thin denim sections until she reached his narrow hips. Before she detached his pelvis from the rest of his torso, she cut out his treacherous penis. (You’ll never stick it in another anorexic art-school slut behind my back again, bucko.) She sliced up his belly and his stray-dog ribcage until there was nothing left but his head.
His face was serene, unaware of his own dismemberment as he was unaware of everything that did not fulfil his immediate needs. His eyes were as blue as the day Mona fell for him, a hard, pure shade of turquoise that she would forever associate with lies. She cut them out separately, left then right. She cut out his sweet, lying mouth and his angular, aristocratic nose, then tossed what remained of his head on to the pile.
“Bastard,” she said softly to herself and dumped all his severed parts into the fire.
She watched him burn for a long minute, coiling flames as blue as his eyes as they devoured him. Then she set to work on the other photographs.
There weren’t that many. Mostly just snapshots taken by friends. Mona and Daniel at various stuffy parties, she uncomfortable in a strappy black, thrift-store dress and he in his eternal art uniform: paint-flecked T-shirt and torn jeans and hand-rolled cigarette, too cool to dress up. Mona and Daniel in Jackson Square, posed against wrought iron and surrounded by the bright chaos of Daniel’s paintings. Mona and Daniel in love, arms wound around each other, smiling and not knowing any better. She shuddered and added these to the fire.
Then the rest of Daniel by himself, photos she had taken when the angles of his face and the smooth muscles of his arms meant something to her. Daniel with streaks of cerulean and viridian across his chest and cheeks, a thick paintbrush clenched between his teeth. Daniel sleeping like a child with his fists curled up under his chin. She slashed at them with her scissors and tossed the fragments into the fire. The letters were all gone except for one, his most recent:
8/11/01
Mona,
I’m so sorry things went the way they did. I know I was an asshole and I would do anything to make it up to you if you’d let me. I know you’re hurt, but you can’t just shut me out after all we’ve been through together. Give me a chance to explain. If I could see you, talk to you, I’m sure we could work it out. This last week has been hell without you. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I can’t paint. You’re all I think about. I hate sleeping in this lonely studio, waking up every morning and reaching for you, only to find there’s no one there. Look, I know what I did was wrong, but don’t you think I’ve been punished enough? I miss you so much. Things will be different from now on I swear. Please call me, Mona. I need to hear your voice.
I still love you.
Daniel
Mona shook her head and added the single sheet of expensive sketch paper to the fire. It was really a pathetic little fire, nothing but dark, glowing coals and pale tongues of reluctant flame in the center of the wide brick fireplace. It perked up a little with this latest addition, flaring bright and then dying down again. There was not much nourishment to be had from the leftovers of Mona’s dead relationship.
All that was left was a handful of postcards from his trip to Paris. She fed them one by one to the fire, glancing only briefly at their charming little messages full of I love you and I miss you and sprawling doodles of hearts and spirals. She later found out he was fucking at least three diffe
rent women during that trip. Burning these last shreds of their relationship was particularly satisfying.
As the postcards curled and blackened, their sweet lies devoured by the hungry flames, Mona felt giddy and light, buoyed up by her new freedom. Of course there had been tears and anger and broken dishes, but that seemed like a thousand years ago. Now, she felt cleansed and streamlined, stripped down to fighting weight. There was nothing left in the Magazine Street apartment that wasn’t hers alone. She wandered slowly through the long rooms, touching things with strange reverence. Her curmudgeonly old word-processor, her spaceship-console stereo, bought with the unwieldy lump of money that accompanied the sale of her first novel. A glass bowl of chalky gray bone fragments gleaned from badly maintained graves in the city’s many cemeteries. Tacky, colorful beads from her first Mardi Gras. Her things, her history. The uneven but sturdy shelves she constructed out of cannibalized scraps of wood and glass. A pair of spidery chairs she rescued from the trash and painted silver. Models of classic monsters, Frankenstein’s creation and his bride, the tortured Wolf Man and the tragic Mummy, the Phantom of the Opera and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, all built and painted when Mona couldn’t bear to look at the flashing cursor for another second. They were a habit that had horrified Daniel. He called them the most trashy, paint-by-numbers kind of non-art. But they were still here and Daniel and his ART were gone and this made Mona smile. It was as if there had never been a Mona-and-Daniel. There was only Mona, now and forever. A little wiser and a lot stronger, ready to get out there and kick the world’s ass.
She stripped and showered, luxuriating under the cool spray for nearly an hour. She sang “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” while she shaved the long, silky hair from her armpits. She only stopped shaving because Daniel thought it was sexy, so now she laughed as yet another fragment of the past went swirling down the drain.
Clean and fragrant, her skin still rosy from the shower, she sprawled across her new, post-Daniel sheets, on sale at Woolworth’s for nineteen dollars and ninety-nine cents. They were dark, inky purple and smelled of innocence and fabric softener. Smiling to herself, she masturbated. She did not fantasize about anyone. Instead she dreamed of silk and water and the smell of her own skin. With each new orgasm, she felt empowered, propelled into the future.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 53