The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women

by Stephen Jones

  Brand swung about on them abruptly. “Now!” he said, moving on as if to an assault, his head bowed forward on his bull neck.

  “Now—now? Not in there?” gasped the Deacon. “What’s the use? It was tomorrow he said—” He shook like a leaf.

  “It’s now,” said Brand. He went up to the door of the crazy house, pushed it inward, and meeting with an unexpected resistance, thrust his heavy shoulder against the panel. The door collapsed like a playing card, and Brand stumbled after it into the darkness of the hut. The others, after a moment’s hesitation, followed.

  Bosworth was never quite sure in what order the events that succeeded took place. Coming in out of the snow-dazzle, he seemed to be plunging into total blackness. He groped his way across the threshold, caught a sharp splinter of the fallen door in his palm, seemed to see something white and wraithlike surge up out of the darkest corner of the hut, and then heard a revolver shot at his elbow, and a cry …

  Brand had turned back, and was staggering past him out into the lingering daylight. The sunset, suddenly flushing through the trees, crimsoned his face like blood. He held a revolver in his hand and looked about him in his stupid way.

  “They do walk, then,” he said and began to laugh. He bent his head to examine his weapon. “Better here than in the churchyard. They shan’t dig her up now,” he shouted out. The two men caught him by the arms, and Bosworth got the revolver away from him.

  IV

  The next day Bosworth’s sister Loretta, who kept house for him, asked him, when he came in for his midday dinner, if he had heard the news.

  Bosworth had been sawing wood all the morning, and in spite of the cold and the driving snow, which had begun again in the night, he was covered with an icy sweat, like a man getting over a fever.

  “What news?”

  “Venny Brand’s down sick with pneumonia. The Deacon’s been there. I guess she’s dying.”

  Bosworth looked at her with listless eyes. She seemed far off from him, miles away. “Venny Brand?” he echoed.

  “You never liked her, Orrin.”

  “She’s a child. I never knew much about her.”

  “Well,” repeated his sister, with the guileless relish of the unimaginative for bad news, “I guess she’s dying.” After a pause she added: “It’ll kill Sylvester Brand, all alone up there.”

  Bosworth got up and said: “I’ve got to see to poulticing the gray’s fetlock.” He walked out into the steadily falling snow.

  Venny Brand was buried three days later. The Deacon read the service; Bosworth was one of the pallbearers. The whole countryside turned out, for the snow had stopped falling, and at any season a funeral offered an opportunity for an outing that was not to be missed. Besides, Venny Brand was young and handsome—at least some people thought her handsome, though she was so swarthy—and her dying like that, so suddenly, had the fascination of tragedy.

  “They say her lungs filled right up … Seems she’d had bronchial troubles before … I always said both them girls was frail … Look at Ora, how she took and wasted away. And it’s colder’n all outdoors up there to Brand’s … Their mother, too, she pined away just the same. They don’t ever make old bones on the mother’s side of the family … There’s that young Bedlow over there; they say Venny was engaged to him … Oh, Mrs. Rutledge, excuse me … Step right into the pew; there’s a seat for you alongside of grandma …”

  Mrs. Rutledge was advancing with deliberate step down the narrow aisle of the bleak wooden church. She had on her best bonnet, a monumental structure which no one had seen out of her trunk since old Mrs. Silsee’s funeral, three years before. All the women remembered it. Under its perpendicular pile her narrow face, swaying on the long thin neck, seemed whiter than ever; but her air of fretfulness had been composed into a suitable expression of mournful immobility.

  “Looks as if the stone-mason had carved her to put atop of Venny’s grave,” Bosworth thought as she glided past him; and then shivered at his own sepulchral fancy. When she bent over her hymn book her lowered lids reminded him again of marble eye-balls; the bony hands clasping the book were bloodless. Bosworth had never seen such hands since he had seen old Aunt Cressidora Cheney strangle the canary-bird because it fluttered.

  The service was over, the coffin of Venny Brand had been lowered into her sister’s grave, and the neighbors were slowly dispersing. Bosworth, as pallbearer, felt obliged to linger and say a word to the stricken father. He waited till Brand had turned from the grave with the Deacon at his side. The three men stood together for a moment; but not one of them spoke. Brand’s face was the closed door of a vault, barred with wrinkles like bands of iron.

  Finally the Deacon took his hand and said: “The Lord gave—”

  Brand nodded and turned away toward the shed where the horses were hitched. Bosworth followed him. “Let me drive along home with you,” he suggested.

  Brand did not so much as turn his head. “Home? What home?” he said; and the other fell back.

  Loretta Bosworth was talking with the other women while the men unblanketed their horses and backed the cutters out into the heavy snow. As Bosworth waited for her, a few feet off, he saw Mrs. Rutledge’s tall bonnet lording it above the group. Andy Pond, the Rutledge farmhand, was backing out the sleigh.

  “Saul ain’t here today, Mrs. Rutledge, is he?” one of the village elders piped, turning a benevolent old tortoise-head about on a loose neck, and blinking up into Mrs. Rutledge’s marble face.

  Bosworth heard her measure out her answer in slow incisive words. “No. Mr. Rutledge he ain’t here. He would ’a’ come for certain, but his aunt Minorca Cummins is being buried down to Stotesbury this very day and he had to go down there. Don’t it sometimes seem zif we was all walking right in the Shadow of Death?”

  As she walked toward the cutter, in which Andy Pond was already seated, the Deacon went up to her with visible hesitation. Involuntarily Bosworth also moved nearer. He heard the Deacon say: “I’m glad to hear that Saul is able to be up and around.”

  She turned her small head on her rigid neck, and lifted the lids of marble.

  “Yes, I guess he’ll sleep quieter now—and her too, maybe, now she don’t lay there alone any longer,” she added in a low voice, with a sudden twist of her chin toward the fresh black stain in the graveyard snow. She got into the cutter, and said in a clear tone to Andy Pond: “’S long as we’re down here I don’t know but what I’ll just call round and get a box of soap at Hiram Pringle’s.”

  MY BROTHER’S KEEPER

  Pat Cadigan

  Pat Cadigan is an American science fiction author who has lived in London since the mid-1990s. Often identified with the cyberpunk movement, she has won a number of awards, including the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice, the latter for her novels Synners and Fools.

  Her other novels include Mindplayers, Tea from an Empty Cup, and Dervish is Digital, and her short fiction has been collected in Patterns: Stories, Home by the Sea, and Dirty Work: Stories.

  “Addiction really scares me,” she reveals. “There are many different drugs, but addiction is addiction is addiction. It’s harder to kill than a vampire and a whole lot hungrier, and it doesn’t have limitations like sunlight or garlic or religious symbols.

  “‘My Brother’s Keeper’ was a story I had been writing on and off for several years before I finally finished it. It grew out of a rather unsavory experience I had back in my extreme and misspent youth, in a time before AIDS. Heroin chic, my ass.”

  ALL THIS HAPPENED a long time ago. Exactly when doesn’t matter, not in a time when you can smoke your coke and Mommy and Daddy lock their grass in the liquor cabinet so Junior can’t toke up at their expense. I used to think of it as a relevant episode, from a time when lots of things were relevant. It wasn’t long before everyone got burned out on relevance. Hey, don’t feel too guilty, bad, smug, perplexed. There’ll be something else, you know there will. It’s coming in, right along wi
th your ship.

  In those days, I was still in the midst of my triumphant rise out of the ghetto (not all white chicks are found under a suburb). I was still energized and reveling at the sight of upturned faces beaming at me, saying, “Good luck, China, you’re gonna be something someday!” as I floated heavenward attached to a college scholarship. My family’s pride wore out sometime after my second visit home. Higher education was one thing, high-mindedness was another. I was puffed up with delusions of better and my parents kept sticking pins in me, trying to make the swelling go down so they could see me better. I stopped going home for a while. I stopped writing, too. But my mother’s letters came as frequently as ever: Your sister Rose is pregnant again, pray God she doesn’t lose this one, it could kill her; your sister Aurelia is skipping school, running around, I wish you’d come home and talk to her; and Your brother Joe … your brother Joe … your brother Joe.

  My brother Joe. As though she had to identify him. I had one brother and that was Joe. My brother Joe, the original lost boy. Second oldest in the family, two years older than me, first to put a spike in his arm. Sometimes we could be close, Joe and me, squeezed between the brackets of Rose and Aurelia. He was a boner, the lone male among the daughters. Chip off the old block. Nature’s middle finger to my father.

  My brother Joe, the disposable man. He had no innate talents, not many learned skills other than finding a vein. He wasn’t good-looking and junkies aren’t known for their scintillating personalities or their sexual prowess or their kind and generous hearts. The family wasn’t crazy about him; Rose wouldn’t let him near her kids, Aurelia avoided him. Sometimes I wasn’t sure how deep my love for him went. Junkies need love but they need a fix more. Between fixes, he could find the odd moment to wave me goodbye from the old life.

  Hey, Joe, I’d say. What the hell, huh?

  If you have to ask, babe, you don’t really want to know. Already looking for another vein. Grinning with the end of a belt between his teeth.

  My brother Joe was why I finally broke down and went home between semesters instead of going to suburban Connecticut with my roommate. Marlene had painted me a bright picture of scenic walks through pristine snow, leisurely shopping trips to boutiques that sold Mucha prints and glass beads, and then, hot chocolate by the hearth, each of us wrapped in an afghan crocheted by a grandmother with prematurely red hair and an awful lot of money. Marlene admitted her family was far less relevant than mine, but what were vacations for? I agreed and was packing my bag when Joe’s postcard arrived.

  Dear China, They threw me out for the last time. That was all, on the back of a map of Cape Cod. Words were something else not at his command. But he’d gone to the trouble of buying a stamp and sending it to the right address.

  The parents had taken to throwing him out the last year I’d lived at home. There hadn’t been anything I could do about it then and I didn’t know what Joe thought I could do about it now but I called it off with Marlene anyway. She said she’d leave it open in case I could get away before classes started again. Just phone so Mummy could break out the extra linens. Marlene was a good sort. She survived relevance admirably. In the end, it was hedonism that got her.

  I took a bus home, parked my bag in a locker in the bus station and went for a look around. I never went straight to my parents’ apartment when I came back. I had to decompress before I went home to be their daughter the stuck-up college snotnose.

  It was already dark and the temperature well south of freezing. Old snow lined the empty streets. You had to know where to look for the action in winter. Junkies wore coats for only as long as it took to sell them. What the hell, junkies were always cold anyway. I toured; no luck. It was late enough that anyone wanting to score already had and was nodding off somewhere. Streep’s Lunch was one place to go after getting loaded, so I went there.

  Streep’s wasn’t even half full, segregated in the usual way—straights by the windows, hopheads near the jukebox and toilets, cops and strangers at the U-shaped counter in the middle. Jake Streep didn’t like the junkies but he didn’t bother them unless they nodded out in the booths. The junkies tried to keep the jukebox going so they’d stay awake but apparently no one had any quarters right now. The black and purple machine (Muzik Master) stood silent, its lights flashing on and off inanely.

  Joe wasn’t there but some of his friends were crammed into a booth, all on the nod. They didn’t notice me come in any more than they noticed Jake Streep was just about ready to throw them out. Only one of them seemed to be dressed warmly enough; I couldn’t place him. I just vaguely recognized the guy he was half leaning on. I slid into the booth next to the two people sitting across from them, a lanky guy named Farmer and Stacey, who functioned more like his shadow than his girlfriend. I gave Farmer a sharp poke in the ribs and kicked one of the guys across from me. Farmer came to life with a grunt, jerking away from me and rousing Stacey.

  “I’m awake, chrissakes.” Farmer’s head bobbed while he tried to get me in focus. A smile of realization spread across his dead face. “Oh. China. Hey, wow.” He nudged Stacey. “It’s China.”

  “Where?” Stacey leaned forward heavily. She blinked at me several times, started to nod out again and revived. “Oh. Wow. You’re back. What happened?” She smeared her dark hair out of her face with one hand.

  “Someone kicked me,” said the guy I vaguely knew. I recognized him now. George Something-Or-Other. I’d gone to high school with him.

  “Classes are out,” I told Stacey.

  Perplexed, she started to fade away.

  “Vacation,” I clarified.

  “Oh. Okay.” She hung on Farmer’s shoulder as though they were in deep water and she couldn’t swim. “You didn’t quit?”

  “I didn’t quit.”

  She giggled. “That’s great. Vacation. We never get vacation. We have to be us all the time.”

  “Shut up.” Farmer made a half-hearted attempt to push her away.

  “Hey. You kick me?” asked George Whoever, scratching his face.

  “Sorry. It was an accident. Anyone seen Joe lately?”

  Farmer scrubbed his cheek with his palm. “Ain’t he in here?” He tried to look around. “I thought—” His bloodshot gaze came back to me blank. In the act of turning his head, he’d forgotten what we were talking about.

  “Joe isn’t here. I checked.”

  “You sure?” Farmer’s head drooped. “Light’s so bad in here, you can’t see nothing, hardly.”

  I pulled him up against the back of the seat. “I’m sure, Farmer. Do you remember seeing him at all lately?”

  His mouth opened a little. A thought was struggling through the warm ooze of his mind. “Oh. Yeah, yeah. Joe’s been gone a couple days.” He rolled his head around to Stacey. “Today Thursday?”

  Stacey made a face. “Hey, do I look like a fuckin’ calendar to you?”

  The guy next to George woke up and smiled at nothing. “Everybody get off?” he asked. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen and still looked pretty good, relatively clean and healthy. The only one with a coat. Babe in Joyland.

  “When did you see Joe last, Farmer?” I asked.

  “Who?” Farmer frowned with woozy suspicion.

  “Joe. My brother Joe.”

  “Joe’s your brother?” said the kid, grinning like a drowsy angel. “I know Joe. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “No, he’s not,” I told him. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Nope.” He slumped against the back of the seat and closed his eyes.

  “Hey,” said Stacey, “you wanna go smoke some grass? That’s a college drug, ain’t it? Tommy Barrow’s got some. Let’s all go to Tommy Barrow’s and smoke grass like college kids.”

  “Shut up,” said Farmer irritably. He seemed a little more alert now. “Tommy’s outa town, I’m tryin’ to think here.” He put a heavy hand on my shoulder. “The other day, Joe was around. With this older woman. Older, you know?”

  “Where?”


  “You know, around. Just around. No place special. In here. Driving around. Just around.”

  I yawned. Their lethargy was contagious but I hadn’t started scratching my face with sympathetic quinine itch yet. “Who is she? Anyone know her?”

  “His connection. His new connection,” Stacey said in a sudden burst of lucidity. “I remember. He said she was going to set him up nice. He said she had some good sources.”

  “Yeah. Yeah,” Farmer said. “That’s it. She’s with some distributor or something.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Farmer and Stacey looked at me. Names, sure. “Blonde,” said Farmer. “Lotta money.”

  “And a car,” George put in, sitting up and wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Like a Caddy or something.”

  “Caddy, shit. You think anything ain’t a Volkswagen’s a Caddy,” Farmer said.

  “It’s a big white Caddy,” George insisted. “I saw it.”

  “I saw it, too, and it ain’t no Caddy.”

  “Where’d you see it?” I asked George.

  “Seventeenth Street.” He smiled dreamily. “It’s gotta tape deck.”

  “Where on Seventeenth?”

  “Like near Foster Circle, down there. Joe said she’s got two speakers in the back. That’s so cool.”

  “Okay, thanks. I guess I’ll have a look around.”

  “Whoa.” Farmer grabbed my arm. “It ain’t there now. You kidding? I don’t know where they are. Nobody knows.”

  “Farmer, I’ve got to find Joe. He wrote me at school. The parents threw him out and I’ve got to find him.”

  “Hey, he’s okay. I told you, he’s with this woman. Staying with her, probably.”

  I started to get up.

  “Okay, okay,” Farmer said. “Look, we’re gonna see Priscilla tomorrow. She knows how to find him. Tomorrow.”

  I sighed. With junkies, everything was going to happen tomorrow. “When will you be seeing her?”