by Holly Black
“I won’t do it,” Charles says, again.
“That is very rude. And you know I do not tolerate rudeness.”
“What’s going on?” you say, tremulously, from behind me.
“He’s going to kill Charles,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound all that different from yours.
“What are you?” you ask. You must be sobering up. “What’s he?” You point at Mr. DuChamp.
I bare my teeth at you. It’s the easiest way, really, to show you what I am. I’ve never done it before in front of someone I wasn’t intending to kill right away.
Your eyes go wide when you see the fangs, but you don’t step back. “And he’s one, too? And he’s going to hurt Charles?”
You’re so stupid. I already told you. “He’s going to kill him.”
“But … why?”
“For not following the rules,” I tell you. “That’s why rules are so important.”
“But you’re just kids,” you say. You’re used to second chances and next-time-there’ll-be-consequences-young-lady. You’ve never had your mother killed in front of you. You’ve never drunk your brother’s blood.
“I’m old,” I say. “Older than you. Older than your mother.”
I know why Charles didn’t tell me about the tribute, though. It’s because some part of him still thinks of me as little too. He’s been protecting me from that, just like he’s been protecting me by staying in the old house, even though he no longer wants to. It’s not fair. He was right before when he said he was a good brother. He shouldn’t get killed for that.
“Well, do you have a stake?” you ask.
I don’t point out that this is like asking a French aristocrat if they have a guillotine around. Instead I point toward the fireplace.
You are surprisingly quick on the uptake. Not sophisticated, of course, but with a sort of rough intelligence. Street-smarts, Mr. DuChamp would say. You grab the fireplace poker and without a second glance head out the door into the dining room.
I lean around the door. Mr. DuChamp has Charles up against the wall. His big hand is around Charles’ neck and he is squeezing. He can squeeze hard enough to crush Charles’ neck if he wants to, but that wouldn’t be fatal. Right now he’s just having fun.
When we were just starting to learn how to feed, the hardest part for me was moving out of the stalk and into the strike. There’s an awkward moment when you get close to your victim, but haven’t actually lunged. It can seem an impossibly gulf between planning and actually doing, but if you hesitate, you’ll get noticed.
You obviously don’t have that problem. You swing the poker against the side of Mr. DuChamp’s head hard enough to make him stagger back. Blood runs down his cheek and he opens his mouth in a fanged hiss.
Before he can get his bearings, I clamp my mouth on his throat like a lamprey. I’ve never drunk the blood of one of my kind before. It’s like drinking lightning. It goes zinging down my throat, and all the time Mr. DuChamp’s fists are beating on my shoulders, but I don’t let go. He’s roaring like a tiger in a trap, but I don’t let go. Even when he crashes to the ground, I don’t let go, until Charles leans over and detaches me, pulling me off the corpse like an engorged tick so full and fat it doesn’t even care.
“Enough, Jenny,” he says. “He’s dead.”
6. Never start cleaning up while your guests are still present.
A lot of people think that when vampires die they blow up or catch on fire. That’s not true. As death sets in, our kind subside slowly into ash, like a bowl of fruit ripening into mold and rot on speeded-up film. We all stand in a sort of triangle, watching as Mr. DuChamp starts turning slowly black, the tips of his fingers beginning to crumble.
You start crying, which seems ridiculous, but Charles takes you into the other room and talks to you softly like he used to talk to me when I was little.
So then it’s just me, witness to Mr. DuChamp’s final end. I take the little broom from the fireplace and sweep what’s left of him among the scorched wood and bones.
When you and Charles come back out, I’m standing there with the broom like Cinderella. Charles has his arm around you. You look blotchy and red-nosed and very human.
“We’re going to have to run away, Jenny,” he says. “Mr. DuChamp’s master knew where he was. He’ll come looking for him soon enough. I don’t know what he’ll do when he finds out what happened.”
“Run away?” I echo. “Run away to where?” I’ve never been anywhere but here, never lived anywhere but in this house.
You explain that you have an uncle who has a farmhouse upstate. You and Charles plan to hide out there. I am welcome to come along, of course. Charles’ creepy little sister.
This is what Charles always wanted—a real girlfriend, someone who will love him and listen to music with him and pretend that he’s a regular boy. I hope that you do. I hope that you will. You might be stuck with each other for a long time.
“No,” I say. “I’m okay. I’ve got somewhere else to go.”
Charles furrows his brow. “No you don’t.”
“I do,” I say and give him the evilest look I can manage.
I guess he doesn’t really want me to come to the farmhouse, because he actually drops it. He goes upstairs to pack up his stuff, and you go with him.
The remains of dinner are still on the table. The glasses full of wine. The four plates, only one of them with food on it. The remains of our last dinner party.
When I’m done cleaning up and I’ve said goodbye to you and Charles, when you’ve given me the address in case I change my mind, when you’ve hugged me, even, my neck so close to yours that I can smell your blood through the pores of your skin, then I’m going to get ready too.
Six girls is nothing to me. I can ask them to help me find my mother in parking lots, to look for lost kittens, to pick me up after I fall from my bike and skin my knee. I don’t care if they scream or cry. It might be a little annoying, but that’s it.
The hardest part is going to be driving while sitting on a phone book. But I’ll figure out a way. If I want the job, I’m going to have to show the Master I’m just as good as DuChamp. I know every detail of the story of his rise to power. I’ve heard it a hundred times. Everything he did, I can do.
As I leave town, I’ll drop this letter in the mail, just so you know what my plans are.
Thank you very much for coming to my party. I had a lovely time.
Make Believe
Michael Reaves
I am a very lucky man.
The reason for my saying this is obvious: I’m standing before you, accepting this award for Outstanding Alumnus. But the reason behind the reason is that I became what I wanted to be.
I’m lucky because, for as far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. Ever since I was a kid, five years old, sitting down in front of our new black-and-white TV to watch The Adventures Of Superman. I was hooked the first time I saw George Reeves leap into the air and fly. Actually, he was lying on a board in front of a cyclorama screen with a wind machine blowing his hair and cape, but I didn’t know that at the time, of course. I do remember wondering even back then, however, why he always leveled off at a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet even when he was just going a couple of city blocks away.
I’m not what you would call a mainstream writer. I have an unabashed preference for genre fiction—specifically, horror. And, like most horror writers, I’ve drawn most of my stories from childhood fears and experiences. I grew up in this town—you wouldn’t think a place on the edge of the desert would be particularly spooky or atmospheric, but you’d be wrong. The desert can be a terrifying place.
If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to tell you about one of those childhood experiences. Oddly enough, I’ve never written about it, or even spoken of it, before now. I’m not sure why. Perhaps my reasons will become clear—to me as well as you—during the telling. After all, good fiction is supposed to illuminate as well as entertain, isn’t it?
I was seven years old, and this took place in 1955. It is probably impossible to convey to you all how totally different a time it was. It was, first and foremost, a much simpler time. You all have console games that tremble on the edge of virtual reality; we had Winky Dink. You have cell phones that can video and text and Twitter; we had party lines. And, of course, you have computers capable of processing gigabytes that you can hold in one hand, and we had UNIVAC.
But it wasn’t just the technology that was simpler. It was a more trusting time. Back then, parents thought nothing of letting their kids roam all over the neighborhood, as long as they were home in time for dinner. Somehow or other, adults back then were much better at protecting the young from fearful realities. It’s true that we were aware of those realities—ever hear of “duck and cover”? But kids were allowed to be kids back then. They weren’t exposed to the rampant cynicism and smut that you all imbibed along with your baby food. Don’t get me started.
It was spring, I remember, around the end of April or the beginning of May—you’d think that, considering what happened, the date would be burned into my memory. It had to have been a Saturday, because school wasn’t out yet. I was playing with a couple of friends—Tom Harper and Malcolm James. We’d gone up into the hills a few blocks from my house to play cowboys and Indians. We were armed and ready for trouble.
When I say “armed,” I mean something different than what the word might connote today. I was carrying my trusty McRepeater Rifle, which made a very satisfactory bang when the wheel atop the stock was turned. Tom had a deadly Daisy 1101 Thunderbird, and in addition was packing twin cap pistols. And Malcolm … well, Malcolm was carrying his Johnny Eagle Magumba Big Game Rifle, which he’d insisted on bringing even though he had a perfectly good Fanner 50 cap gun back in his bedroom. Some people just won’t get with the program.
We were hunting Indians, or, as we called them, “Injuns.” The term “political correctness,” let alone the concept, wasn’t exactly widespread back then. It was the middle of the afternoon and, though it was early in the year, it was already hot enough to raise shimmers of heat waves from the dirt road. The hills were still green, but you could see that slowly the vegetation was dying. Another month, and brown would be the dominating color, announcing the beginning of the fire season.
For now, however, it was still pleasant, or as pleasant as those hills ever became. We were walking cautiously through the Badlands of our fantasy, alert for the slightest sound that might betray an Apache ambush. This was more difficult than it might seem, because every few minutes Malcolm would drop into a crouch and spin around, spraying the mesquite with imaginary bullets and going “Kachow!! Kachow!!” Tom Harper finally grew tired of this, and demanded to know how we were going to get the drop on the bad guys with Malcolm constantly announcing our presence to everyone in the county. To which Malcolm replied that it was only make believe, and that the most we might hope to flush from the underbrush was a rabbit or coyote.
We knew that, of course. We all knew that. It’s important to keep this in mind.
“Knock it off,” Tom finally said, exasperated, “or I’ll drop-kick your ass into next week.”
That got the desired result. Tom Harper’s right leg ended in a stump just above the knee—legacy of a car accident. He wore a prosthetic; a hinged contraption made of wood, metal and plastic, and when he ran, he used a sort of half-skip in his locomotion which the rest of us found very amusing. We were careful not to show it, however, because Tom could turn that half-skip into a devastating kick that could easily deliver the recipient as far up the calendar as Tom wanted. Malcolm said nothing more that in any way damaged the fantasy gemütlichkeit that we had constructed. And again, it’s important to remember that we knew what we were doing.
Malcolm was going on eight, with a seborrheic head of densely black hair and horn-rimmed glasses the exact same shade. He was built like a concentration camp inmate, all sharp, acute angles, with an Adam’s apple that leapt about like the bouncing ball in a Fleischer sing-along cartoon. Not surprisingly, he had few friends. Tom had just turned eight; he was handsome, if somewhat bland in appearance, and looked like a future gridiron star—until he began to walk or run with that characteristic hitching limp. I remember once, when we were both younger and I was at his sixth birthday party, seeing his father’s eyes fill with tears as he watched his son skip-run across the back yard.
We knew what we were doing. It was play, make-believe. Nothing more.
We were wandering along a dirt road, not far from the ranger station. The shadows were starting to grow longer, and the light more sanguine, as the sun neared the smoggy horizon. “We should maybe turn around,” Malcolm said. “We’re gettin’ too near the cave.”
There was no need to stipulate which cave. There was only one in the area—Arrowhead Cave, so named because of the dozens of chipped flint relics found there over the years. It was a tectonic cave, not one formed by gradual erosion. It had come into being thousands of years ago, when an earthquake had shattered a sandstone outcrop and deposited the fragments at the bottom of a ravine. Over the centuries talus and dirt had covered it, and eventually solidified into a roof. It hadn’t been a particularly impressive cave, according to rumor, but it had served the local Indians well as shelter for centuries before the valley was settled. It was even less impressive now, after the tragedy of 1938, when four young boys—out, like us, for play—had become lost in the cave.
I never did learn the specifics of the story—when I was a child, the adults had been very tight-lipped about it, even almost two decades later. All I knew—all any kid knew—was that the four boys had died in Arrowhead Cave. A few days later the City Council, acting with an alacrity hard to believe for anyone familiar with local government, had authorized several construction workers to blow up the cave’s entrance with dynamite, closing it for good.
Tom and I looked at each other after Malcolm’s statement. Neither of us wanted to be thought cowardly. On the other hand, neither of us particularly wanted to get any closer to Arrowhead Cave, as it was supposedly haunted. There had been another minor temblor last week as well, and none of us relished the thought of being near the cave, or—worse—in it, should another quake hit.
As the three of us stood there, momentarily paralyzed by indecision, we—or I, at least—became aware of just how quiet it was. I know it’s a cliché—I knew it even back then—to speak of an ominous, brooding silence holding dominion over the scene. How many times had I lain on the threadbare rug in our living room, chin cupped in my hands, staring at a black-and-white image of somebody wearing a pith helmet, standing in front of a sarcophagus and saying grimly, “It’s quiet—too quiet”? Usually this particular trope was immediately followed by the hero being seized around the throat and throttled by an ancient hand wrapped in dry, dusty cerements.
Still, cliché or no, I could suddenly feel my heart pounding. The light had taken on a shimmering, glassine quality, and the air seemed dead. It was impossible to get a lungful, no matter how deeply I breathed. There was no nourishment to it.
It would be easy, I suppose, to speculate that we all passed through some sort of transition then—a portal to another reality, I guess you could call it. It’s tempting to use such a device as an explanation of a sort for what we did next. But the truth, as it usually is, was much more banal. We did what we did because that’s what kids did back then.
I started to say something, even though I was somehow convinced that the leaden air would not convey my words. Before I could try, however, a voice shouted, “Hands up!”
Now, this is the point. It was fantasy. Make-believe. And we knew that. But unless you can remember, really remember, those Bradbury days of childhood, the unspoken social norms that we all lived by then, the secret lives and inviolate rules that bound us as fully and completely as office politics and the laws of church and state circumscribed our parents’ lives—well, then I have no real hope of making you understand why we
did what we did. It wasn’t even something we thought about—we just did it. They had the drop on us, after all. They’d caught us, fair and square.
So, all three of us dropped our toy guns and reached for the sky.
“They” were four boys our age, armed with toy guns like ours. They’d come up on us from behind and nailed us good. The tallest one, a kid my age, was wearing bib overalls over a flannel shirt. There seemed to be something odd about his weapon—a carbine, with no manufacturer’s stamp apparent—but it was obviously a toy. He gestured with the barrel, a peremptory jerk obviously intended to move us along, while the other three picked up our weapons.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Shag it.”
Arms still upraised, we stumbled along down the road, our captors herding us toward an unknown destination.
Even though these lads represented “the Enemy” (Apaches, space aliens, Nazis, gangsters, the heathen Chinee or a hundred and one other incarnations of Bad Guys), there was nothing in our childhood rules of engagement that prohibited discourse. Consequently, Malcolm attempted conversation. “Where d’you guys go to school?” he asked. “I haven’t seen you around—”
“Quiet,” one of them, a tall fellow with hair as red as Malcolm’s was black, and a face mottled with more freckles than the moon has craters, hissed. And yes, I know it’s bad writing to use anything other than “said”—but you weren’t there. Trust me; there was less humanity in that one word as spoken by him than there was in a snake’s sibilance.
We marched on in silence. And I started to wonder just how they’d managed to catch us so thoroughly off-guard. We’d been standing on the crest of a small hill; if they’d come along the road from either direction we’d have seen them, and there was no way they could’ve climbed up the side, through the dry creosote, without making enough noise to wake the dead.
… to wake the dead … There are certain phrases that we use a thousand times without thinking, until one day you realize just how hideously appropriate they are.