The Vampire Megapack: 27 Modern and Classic Vampire Stories

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “It will take a few days, for several steps are required. I’ll help you get through them as quickly as possible. I don’t doubt the things that you have told me. I must add that, while science is reluctant to get involved with phenomena of such a nature, it has for a while now been less contemptuous than in the past: it is trying to restore these things to the realm of natural phenomena. For the past three years I have been studying the folk remedies of old women, peasants, to explain to myself what their value is. Quite often they heal what science doesn’t know how to heal. Do you know my opinion? These folk remedies are the remains, the fragments, of an ancient, secret science. These old women have retained some tips from natural medicine; and I think science should be paying attention to this fact, because in every superstition hides something that is not just a deceptive observation of ignorance… Please excuse my long digression. Some scientists now admit, that is, that with the apparent death of the individual, the functioning of individual existence doesn’t really cease until all of the elements have completely disintegrated. Popular superstition—for this is the word we use—has already divined it, in part, with its belief in Vampires, and it had divined the remedy. Vampires have a more persistent individuality than others… Don’t look at me like that! It’s a fact, and not so uncommon, that so-called popular superstition—or, better said—primitive divination could find itself in agreement with science. And do you know what the defense against the evil actions of Vampires is, these persistent individualities who believe they can prolong their existence by sucking the blood or vital essence from healthy people? To accelerate the destruction of their bodies. In the places where this happens, the old women run to the cemetery, dig up the corpse, and burn it. It’s proven then that the Vampire has really died; and in fact the phenomenon ceases. You say that your child…”

  “Come and see him; he not recognizable anymore. Luisa is mad with pain and fear. I’m sick of defending myself from a living repugnance, from this heartbreakingly violent distancing, another one of his evil acts!…”

  “Then you must burn the corpse. It’s an experiment that interests me, not just as a friend but as a scientist. Your wife, although no longer a widow, will be easily granted permission; I will help you in matters regarding the authorities. And I’m not ashamed for science, of which I am a poor lover. Science doesn’t lose any dignity when it runs to folk wisdom, turning superstition into its prize, if you can then prove that it is only superstition in appearance; then science will be inspired to try new research, to discover unexpected truths. Science must be modest, good, while continuing its heritage of facts and truths. You must burn the corpse. I’m telling you quite seriously,” added Mongeri, reading the doubt in his friend’s eyes of being treated by old women or ignorant people.

  “And the baby, meanwhile?” exclaimed Lelio Giorgi, wringing his hands. “One night I felt a surge of anger; I hurled myself against him, following the direction in which Luisa was looking, as if he were a person that I could grab and choke; I hurled myself against him, crying: “Go away! Go away, you devil!…” But after a few steps I was stopped, paralyzed, nailed in place, at a distance, with the words dying in my throat, unable even to translate themselves into an indistinct moan… You can’t believe, you can’t imagine…”

  “If you would allow me to keep you company tonight…”

  “Maybe we’ll make it worse: I fear that your presence might irritate him more, like having the house blessed. No, not tonight. I’ll come to see you tomorrow…”

  * * * *

  And, the next day, he returned so frightened, so defeated, than Mongeri entertained certain doubts about the integrity of his friend’s mental faculties.

  “He knows!” stammered Lelio Giorgi as soon as he entered the study. “Ah, what a hellish night! Luisa heard him cursing, shouting, threatening terrible punishments if we dare.”

  “All the more reason that we must dare,” replied Mongeri.

  “If you had seen that cradle shaking, so hard that I don’t even know how the baby didn’t fall to the ground! Luisa was forced to get down on her knees, invoking his pity, crying to him: ‘Yes, I’ll be yours, all yours! But spare this innocent baby…’ And at that moment it seemed that my every tie with her was broken, that she was no longer really mine, but his, his!”

  “Calm down! We will win. Calm down… I’d like to be with you tonight.”

  Mongeri went with the conviction that his presence would prevent the phenomenon from taking place. He thought: It nearly always works this way. These unknown forces are neutralized by indifferent, foreign forces. It nearly always works this way. How? Why? One day, certainly, we’ll know. We need to observe it, to study it.

  * * * *

  And, in the early hours of the night, it happened just like he had thought it would. Luisa turned her frightened eyes around the room, pricked up her ears anxiously…Nothing. The cradle remained motionless: the baby, quite pale, and thin, slept calmly. Lelio Giorgi, holding back his agitation with difficulty, looked now at his wife, now at Mongeri, who was smiling, satisfied.

  Meanwhile they discussed things that, despite their preoccupation, managed now and then to distract them. Mongeri had begun to tell the story of a very entertaining trip he had taken.

  A good speaker, free of any affectation of scientific gravity, he intended to divert their attention, and in the meantime to keep an eye on them, in order to take note of all of the phases of the phenomenon in case it should ever repeat itself, and he had already begun to persuade himself that his intervention had been beneficial when, just as he had turned his gaze towards the cradle, he noticed it move lightly, in a way that could not have been caused by any of them, since Luisa and Lelio were seated far from the cradle. He couldn’t help but pause, and be noticed, and so Luisa and Lelio leapt to their feet.

  The movement grew stronger by degrees, and when Luisa turned to look where Mongeri’s eyes were involuntarily fixed, the cradle was rocking and jerking.

  “There he is!” she cried. “Oh, God! My poor little son!”

  She went to run, but she couldn’t. And she fell upside down on the couch where she had been sitting. Pale, her entire body shaking, with her eyes open wide and her pupils motionless, she stammered something that gurgled in her throat but didn’t take the form of words, and seemed as if it would suffocate her.

  “It’s nothing!” said Mongeri, having stood up, squeezing Lelio’s hand, which had come towards him in vivid terror, almost in defense.

  Luisa at first stiffened, shook even more violently, and then suddenly seemed to return to her ordinary state, except that her attention was fully directed towards watching something that the other two didn’t see, towards listening to words that they didn’t hear, the meaning of which they deduced through her responses.

  “Why do you say that I want to keep hurting you?… I’ve prayed for you! I’ve had Masses said for you!… But you can’t annul! You’re dead… You’re not dead?… Then why did you accuse me of poisoning you?… Agreement with him? Oh!… He promised you, yes; and he kept it…Pretend? We planned it all along? He sent me the poison?… It’s absurd! You must not believe that if it’s true that the dead can see the truth… All right. I won’t consider you dead… I won’t repeat it again.”

  “She’s gone into a spontaneous trance!” said Mongeri into Lelio’s ear. “Allow me.” Taking hold of her thumbs, after a few minutes he called out in a loud voice: “Madam!”

  On hearing the deep, annoyed, robust, and masculine voice with which she responded, Mongeri jumped back. Luisa had risen from the grave, with such a darkened face, with such hardness in her features, that she seemed another person. The special beauty of her physiognomy, so gentle, good, almost virginal, that came from the sweet gaze of her beautiful blue eyes and the light smile that roamed her lips, like a delicate pulse, had completely disappeared.

  “What do you want? Why are you meddling?”

  Mongeri regained his self-control almost immediately. His habitua
l scientist’s mistrust made him suspect that he, too, must have felt, by induction, by consent of his nervous system, the influence of the strong hallucinatory state of those two, if he had seemed to see the cradle rocking and jerking, which he could see quite well was now still, with the baby inside quietly sleeping, now that his attention was drawn from the extraordinary phenomenon of the ghost’s personification. He approached, with a sense of spite against himself for that backwards jump at the sound of the rough voice that had nearly run him over, and imperiously responded:

  “Stop it! I order you!”

  He had put such force of will into his expression that the command should have asserted its authority over the woman’s nervous excitement, should have overcome it—he thought. The long and sardonic laugh that immediately replied to “I order you,” shook him, made him hesitate for an instant.

  “Stop it! I order you!,” he responded with greater force.

  “Ah! Ah! You want to be the third…enjoying… Poison him too? You lie! Wickedly!”

  Mongeri didn’t have to restrain himself from responding like with a living person. And the already slightly disturbed lucidity of his mind, notwithstanding the efforts he made to remain an attentive and impartial observer, all of a sudden became very upset when he felt two blows to his back by an invisible hand, and in the same instant he saw a gray, semi-transparent hand appear in front of the light, almost made of smoke, that contracted and relaxed its fingers rapidly, growing thinner as though the heat of the candle’s flame were making it evaporate.

  “Do you see? Do you see?” Giorgi asked him. There were tears in his voice.

  Suddenly the phenomenon stopped. Luisa woke up from her trance, almost as if she were waking from a natural dream, and looked around the room, questioning her husband and Mongeri with a brief nod of her head.

  Lelio and Mongeri questioned themselves, in turn, bewildered by the sense of serenity, or better liberation that eased their breathing and returned their heartbeats to normal. No one dared to speak. Only a faint cry from the baby made them run anxiously towards the cradle. The baby wailed and wailed, struggling under the oppression of something that appeared to aggravate his mouth and impede his cries. Suddenly, this phenomenon stopped too, and nothing more happened.

  * * * *

  In the morning, as they burned the remains of the corpse, Mongeri was thinking not only that scientists were wrong not to want to study up close those cases that coincided with popular superstition.

  That night, the phenomena completely ceased, to the great relief of Lelio Giorgi and his good wife Luisa. Mongori, as a scientist, had acted admirably, leading the experiment until the end without minding at all if (in case burning the corpse of Luisa’s first husband hadn’t worked) his reputation with his colleagues and with the public had to suffer. Still, he repeated to himself, in his mind, what he had told his friend two days ago: I wouldn’t marry a widow for all the gold in the world.

  Mongeri did publish the results of his experiment. He could not say: “These are the facts, and this the result of the remedy: the claims of popular superstition were right in their negation of science: the Vampire died completely as soon as his corpse was burned.” No. He placed many “ifs,” many “buts” in the smallest circumstances, had shown off the words “hallucination,” “suggestion,” “nervous influence” many times in his scientific reasoning, in order to confirm what he had confessed previously, that is: that even intelligence is a matter of habit and that having to change his opinion had annoyed him. Most curidydyous is that he did not prove to be more coherent as a man. He who had proclaimed: “I wouldn’t marry a widow for all the gold in the world” later married one for much less, a 60,000 lira dowry!

  And to Lelio Giorgi, who had naively said: “But how? You!”, he replied: “Right now not two atoms of the first husband’s corpse exist. He’s been dead six years!,” without realizing that, in saying this, he was contradicting the author of the scientific memoir An Alleged Case of Vampirism, that is, he himself.

  OMEGA, by Jason Andrew

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  It has been three months since my last confession. I’m sure you remember it. It was the night I died. You were the one that gave me Last Rites as I lay dying naked on the street shivering in a pool of my own blood.

  Your voice was the last thing I heard before my heart stopped. And it was your voice that stirred me from the ground at my funeral. You were my death and rebirth.

  Lying in the ground I listened to my mother and sisters crying. I wondered if they knew the things you did to me.

  The sweat on your trembling body is rancid. Funny, I used to shake just like that before our special lessons. I wanted to be pure in God’s love. You taught me all about love, didn’t you?

  Don’t cry, Father. We won’t kill you. Not yet.

  I have to confess my sins. Confession frees the soul, you used to say. Of course, some might think I don’t have a soul now. That’s the funny thing. You need a soul to burn in hell or ascend to heaven. I’m immortal in this body. My soul shattered. I have nothing left to loose. There’s freedom in that. The only Hell I’ll ever know is on this earth.

  Don’t look at me like that!

  It was your fault that I was chosen after all. You taught me Latin after school, made me believe in the Sacraments, and you administered my first Eucharist. You taught me other things in our special sessions. You showed me that I was full of sin. You were careful enough to keep me a virgin, but that left two other places for you to feed your carnal urges, didn’t it? The urges that you preached being against God’s will.

  You wouldn’t walk me home that night despite my whimpering pleas. Why would you? I was Greasy Grace. Who in the world would want me, except for you?

  It turns out that someone else was watching me during my lonely night; someone that had a use for a sinful and wicked girl. He waited for me in the shadows after our last session and he brought friends. They waited until just the right moment when no one was watching. They fell upon me like wolves. They tore at my clothing and bit into my flesh. My body shivered.

  I was terrified and I cried out for you, thinking that you could have protected me if only you would have deigned to bring me home like I had asked. Suddenly, they stopped as if commanded by some invisible force and then their eader Joshua stepped out of the shadows.

  You can see him over there by the candles. He’s the one with the long hair and the devilish smile. Joshua has lived more than two thousand years. That’s more than you or I could ever imagine. And he picked me.

  At the moment of death, he unbuttoned his shirt and cut a swath across his chest. I could barely see him then; I clung to life. Despite the pain, I wanted him to love me. “You have a choice. This night I can leave you and you will turn into legend. A tale others will tell for many years. Or, you may drink of me and live forever.”

  What can I say? You trained me to swallow what older men put in my mouth. As I lay dying, he kissed me gently upon my lips, my first real kiss.

  As I mentioned, I didn’t awaken until the funeral a few days later. If I hadn’t been disoriented from being enclosed in a casket, I would have killed all of you right then, but I had to wait. Your eulogy was very inspiring. One by one, I heard all of the people that ignored me while I was alive wish they had more time with me.

  One of my oldest friends Alice cried. We had been friends in junior high. We both loved school and wanted to be doctors. Eventually, she discovered boys while I remained interested in studying. She became too good to be seen with a loser like me.

  What do a high school clique and a vampire gang have in common? Both are organized by the pack principle. There are alphas, betas, and omegas. Every one knows their place. I have always been the omega; the ugly girl with no breasts, pimples, glasses, and a fat ass. The one other girls instantly shun for not wearing the right clothing or having a picture perfect haircut. The omega is at the bottom despite her best efforts.

  It didn’
t seem to matter to me though, I had a life. I escaped into books. I paid attention during class. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to afford the best college, but I knew I could get a scholarship somewhere and escape.

  It turns out that there isn’t a Narnia or Middle Earth. Neverland is just an endless stream of nights stretching into eternity. But there is magic in the world. I’m living proof, so to speak. My skin has cleared and I see better than any human. My nose is a bit smaller, perkier. My ass is firm and shapely. Suddenly, I have breasts. I bet the boys at school would love me now.

  I did a bit of reading and research. Heh! Living or dead, I can’t escape the library. Once vampires were hideous creatures. In nature, many predators lure their prey from surprise. What’s surprising about a monster who’s ugly? But we adapted, taking a clue from the movies we became enchanting fantasies.

  I’m not the omega anymore. All of us are beautiful and deadly, so that’s nothing special. Unfortunately, you don’t get smarter after the change. It’s a pity for most, but for me I’ve discovered that I have a talent for mischief and mayhem.

  Alice was my first kill. It was easy enough to get her alone. Her parents are always out of town. All I had to do was ask for help with the boosters club and she invited me into her home. She didn’t even recognize me. I toyed with her for a while until she realized who I was and then she start begging for forgiveness. It was pathetic.

  I left her face intact. I wanted to leave her mother something to remember her by. I dragged her up the stairs and washed away the blood and dressed her in white, which was funny because Alice hadn’t been a virgin since our freshman year. I wish I could have seen that Old Bat’s face. When we dug her up three days later, Alice’s mind was gone. She survived the transformation, but her mind disintegrated. She’s not all that useful, but she follows orders. And if we remind her to wash herself, she can be very pretty. I was a little disappointed; I had so much I wanted to do to her.

  And now it comes to this moment. Did you know that vampires have Sacraments too? Some rituals have been lost over the centuries, but Joshua knows some of them. We pieced together what we needed. We found a ritual to unmake the world.