She places a hand gently on Amanda’s still breast, sees cold white fingers on cold white flesh, and she reminds herself that though she still moves, she is as dead as the woman she has just slain, the woman whose life she has sucked away.
The thought sends a thrill through her.
She is dead, yet she endures.
As Amanda endured her mother’s madness, as the boy endured his ordeal in the wreckage, as so many of her victims endured so much, she endures this sensationless imitation of life, taking what she can from those who yet live.
And perversely, she enjoys that, the thought that she’s stealing what she cannot have for herself.
She finds a peculiar sort of hope in the awareness that she can still enjoy anything. She has been dead a very long time, yet she still finds this pleasure possible in her existence.
For a moment, her own memories stir, of a time when she still breathed—a vague blur of green fields and blue skies and a dark man who visited her at night.
And then there were the early days after her death, when drawing blood carried fear and shame and terror, when the taste of blood was a new and horrifying ecstasy.
She hadn’t known, at first, that the blood would carry the victim’s memories—but the blood is the life, and what is a human’s life but memory?
At first, the blood itself was enough; she ignored the memories, tried to forget them. The blood brought warmth and a semblance of life; the memories brought only shame, and a sort of dull embarrassment that she so intruded on the lives of her victims.
But then, as the taste of blood began to pall, she came to appreciate the memories, the homely little moments—a father’s story at bedtime, a lover’s caress, a child’s wild embrace.
With time, though, the novelty faded—one lover was much like another, the children’s hands were all the same, she had heard every father’s stories before. She began to seek the rawer, fiercer emotions for memories that could still stir her—the screaming hatred of a divorce, the wrenching grief of a friend’s death, the slow agony of a parent’s decline into senility.
Even that became dulled with repetition in time, for most of the lives she stole were so very similar, and her existence had become listless, boring, a weight to be borne—until the boy with the bandaged arm.
The dog’s teeth closing on his arm, the desperate jabbing at the yellow-brown eyes, the incredible searing pain from wrist to elbow and the grim satisfaction as the animal’s blood spurted up around his thumb…
She smiles, and runs her fingers lightly down Amanda’s corpse.
The boy led her to Paul.
The boy’s parents, worried about their son, took him to Paul for therapy, to get over the horror he had lived through. He was visiting regularly, though she didn’t know that when she first tasted that young, sweet blood, blood that carried intense memory of just exactly how it felt to drive one’s thumbnail through a dog’s eye into the brain.
She heard the parents talking. She heard the mother explaining that the doctor thought the boy was suppressing memories that had been clear before, and the vampire worried that this doctor might suspect, might notice the scars on the boy’s neck.
And to be safe, she found the doctor.
She found Paul.
She looks up at the door. Far away, she hears hesitant footsteps returning, echoing in the hospital corridor.
She found her pimp, found the man who brings her all the strange, the violent, the extreme memories for her to taste, to savor: The woman who had been held captive and gang-raped, the man who had been tortured in a South American prison, the couple whose little games had gotten so far out of hand that when the wife brought her mutilated husband to the emergency room he was given only a fifty-fifty chance of survival.
A slow smile spreads across her face.
The man might have made it, if not for the “inexplicable” blood loss.
That was the first death among Paul’s patients. That was the point at which he could no longer turn back, could no longer pretend that his only motive was alleviating unbearable memories.
That was what he said at first—that it was an experiment, an attempt at treatment. The boy’s nightmares were relieved when she drank away his memories of the attack, and Paul thought this could be a breakthrough for many of his patients. Even a temporary respite—and the effect was only temporary—could help.
She doesn’t care about that. She is no psychologist. Paul’s work, his theories, his degree, mean nothing to her except that he finds the most interesting treats for her.
And in a mental hospital, where no one believes if a victim tries to accuse her.
It’s so beautifully simple—Paul asks an interesting patient to stay overnight for observation, all strictly voluntary, of course, nothing threatening, he says it all so well. The patient stays, and that night she drinks from a new well.
A symbiotic relationship, Paul calls it—blood and pain give her sustenance and pleasure, and in exchange her feasts lessen the mental suffering of her victims.
That was his excuse, until the first man died.
She doesn’t need any excuses.
And then the door is opening, hard white light spills in, and Paul is there with his little cart, with the alarm device and the cold pitcher of orange juice.
“It’s all right,” he tells her, “No one will be coming by here for at least an hour.”
She rises to her feet, eyes on Dr. Paul Burchard, on the trembling hands and the pale face, the white coat and the carefully-scrubbed neck.
He closes the door and steps closer.
“My turn,” he says softly, as he lies down on the bed beside dead Amanda and tugs his collar out of the way.
Smiling, she stoops to drink of the nervous guilt, the perverse excitement, the nagging self-hatred of being a vampire’s procurer; to drink also of the relief he feels in knowing that his torturing memories of dead patients will soon be as faded and dim as a photo left too long in the sun; to drink of the dread and anticipation that this time, this time, perhaps he’ll die; to drink of the unreasoning lust he feels for her, for the vampire.
This is how she pays for what he brings her—and it costs her nothing.
Her mouth opens, her eyes close, and her fangs glisten in the lamplight as she descends.
RUNAWAY, by Darrell Schweitzer
By the time he picked me up, I might have been standing by the side of that highway for hours. I couldn’t remember much, just then, only the darkness and the rain and the soft, soothing sound of the traffic, and how I was very tired and something hurt but I didn’t know quite what.
He was honking his horn. “Hey kid! You coming?”
I ran for the car, clutching my knapsack tightly against my chest. Then we were moving, and I felt sleepy, but he was one of the ones who want to talk.
“Where you going?”
“Just going.”
“I see. But you’ll know where it is when you get there.”
“I guess so.”
I held the knapsack in my lap, and I brought my knees up, feet on the seat, gripped my knees, and leaned my face against the window, watching the landscape roll by, black and gray and flashes of light that seemed to streak and bob and slowly drift down the wet glass.
“Jesus, it’s no night for you to be out,” he said. “Skinny kid like you, in just that light jacket and jeans and sneakers. You haven’t even got any socks. You must be soaked to the skin. You’ll catch your death—”
“I’m not cold. I don’t feel it.”
He reached over and touched me on the leg. “You’re frozen like ice! Christ!”
“I’m okay.”
“What you need is a good hot meal; a hot shower; and new, warm clothes and maybe a friend who can provide all those things.”
I just turned away, let my feet drop to the floor, and stared out the side window. I was crying softly. I didn’t know why. The sound of the wheels on the pavement was like a soft voice far away, singing, and the rai
n had turned into sleet and it clattered on the roof. I watched the farmhouses pass, one by one, vanishing into the darkness, and the people inside them were like warm points of light, like candle flames, far away, but definitely there, alive. Then gone. I listened to the night, while the man in the car with me chattered on and on, about how this sure was big, beautiful country we had here in the Midwest—but was I from around here? I didn’t sound like it. He was from California, which was beautiful too; but, hey, see America first, even if the only vacation he could get was in October; autumn in the mountains of Tennessee and Virginia, the leaves turning color, quite a sight—
I started to remember things, and I was afraid, and the tears came more freely.
He was silent for a while.
Finally he said, “My name is Howard.”
The traffic went by, the sleet and rain beat down, and the night was dark.
“You must have a name,” he said.
“Lawrence.”
“Larry, then. Do your friends call you Larry?”
“I suppose so.”
More silence.
He kept looking at me, sideways as he drove, sizing me up, as if he were, it seemed to me, not just a friend, not just someone who felt sorry for me and wanted to help, but someone who was—I couldn’t put it any other way—hungry.
“Are you running away from home, Larry?”
“Leaving.”
“How old are you, Larry?”
“Uh…fifteen.”
“At your age, do you think it’s such a good idea to be out on your own? Not that I want to sound like a parent. I mean, I respect a young man who is independent and can decide things for himself—”
The memories came flooding back now, all the pain.
“It’s because of my mom.”
“She’s a real bitch then? Women are like that. Real bitches sometimes. You have to get away.” He launched into another long monologue about mothers and wives and such. I wasn’t listening. Up ahead, lights flashed. Traffic slowed down. We sat still for several minutes, then crept forward, then sat again, until a policeman in a yellow raincoat waved us onto the shoulder and around two smashed cars and a jack-knifed truck; cops and people everywhere, ambulance lights whirling.
“Looks bad,” Howard said.
The warmth. The burning lights, like candles flickering, going out. There was death here.
“Looks real bad,” Howard said. “Somebody could have been killed.”
“Two. Two dead. Another will die soon.”
He looked at me funny and shook his head. “Oh.”
Then we drove in silence for a while, and I reached into my knapsack and touched. I tried to hold back tears a third time, but couldn’t. I was so ashamed.
“You said it was your mom,” Howard said. “Maybe it will help if you tell me. Get it all out. She was a domineering bitch. Beat you, did she? I bet she drove your dad right out of the house.”
“Actually, she killed him. Then she sold her soul to the Devil.”
The car lurched. “What?”
I smiled inwardly, bitterly. I could have been making all this up, and he would still have to listen, because of the hurt he might do me if it were all true and he said he didn’t believe me…like those Jews the Nazis tortured and stuff, you can’t say they’re lying, not to their faces, because if they really were there and it really did happen…
“Mom used to put black candles in my room at night,” I said, “and make drawings on the floor and walls, stars and circles and things like that she called sigils. My dad said it was all bullshit, but Mom said that if you really want to get something, there are things you just have to do. They fought a lot, yeah. He beat her up till her face was all bloody. I remember the time he smashed her head into the TV screen and the glass cracked. Fortunately the TV was off at the time. So she killed him.”
“Right then?”
“No, later.”
“Can you blame her?”
“No. Not really.”
He was following along now. I might have been remembering; but, for all he knew, I might have been making up a story. Either way, I had him caught. It felt good. He was getting real nervous, pounding his hands on the steering wheel, looking at me, then back at the road, then at me again, breathing hard.
“Don’t you think…? I mean, the police…”
“No.”
“Why…?”
“My mom was a witch. Maybe that’s why Dad hated her. Maybe she became a witch because he hated her first. I don’t know.”
“That’s a very perceptive thing for someone…who’s been through what you have…to say.”
“Oh,” I shrugged and stared out the window for a while, remembering or dreaming.
“Oh Christ,” he said to himself in a low, whiny voice over and over. “Oh Christ, why did I have to get this one? Oh Christ…”
“Mom’s friends were witches too,” I said, “or at least they were after a while. She got rid of the ones who weren’t. They used to hold ceremonies in the basement, all of them naked, with cats and dogs for sacrifice…and maybe more. Once I was upstairs in my room, locked in, listening, and I’m sure I heard a baby crying downstairs. Then Dad came home suddenly, and there was a lot of screaming and bad words and things crashing. Then silence. I wanted to run away then, but my room was on the third floor and there was no place to go. I really did crawl out on the roof for a while…then Mom came to get me, still naked and covered with blood, and she said I knew too much and might as well know everything now. She and her friends took me down into the basement, and there was my dad, lying on the floor with black candles all around him. They’d cut out his heart.”
Howard didn’t say much for a while after that. He looked sick. Now he was the one who was scared. I was enjoying myself, shocked and ashamed that I was, like when you jerk off for the first time, but I enjoyed it anyway.
“They smeared his blood on my forehead, making signs, and then we all prayed, and we had to cut up his body and bury it under the basement floor, and some of it in the back yard, and it all had to be done before sunrise. And, you know…I was late for school that day.”
I flashed a quick smile at Howard. He turned away as if I’d hit him.
I reached into the knapsack and touched.
We really were in the middle of nowhere now, alone in the darkness, in the pouring sleet and rain, with just the occasional car going by in the opposite lane. Outside, when I pressed my face to the glass, I couldn’t find any warmth, any people, just miles and miles of muddy fields. Howard kept looking at me from the side, then looking away, and I knew what he was thinking. He was sure he’d got himself a cute little psycho, another Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Dahlmer in the making if not in actual fact already. Maybe what I was telling him was true, kind of, only it wasn’t my mom and I’d done all those things myself.
After what must have been hours we came to a little town where there was a diner open. Howard pulled into the parking lot, then got out. He leaned back into the car.
“You got to do anything?”
“No.”
“You hungry? You want anything?”
“Uh, no.”
He was shaking, and not just from the cold. “Well, I gotta…I have a lot of things I have to do.”
I rested my head on my knapsack and smiled at him. “I’ll be here. I want to be your friend.”
He turned from me and ran into the diner. I sat there in the car, rocking back and forth gently, remembering, or making up my story, dreaming dreams of blood. I reached into the knapsack once more, and touched.
When Howard came back, maybe a hour later, he was the one who was quiet. He put a paper bag on the seat beside me. A burger and fries, for me. I didn’t touch them. But I did reach out and take Howard’s hand in mine.
“You’re cold!” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“Just going. Maybe we’ll find a motel.”
He’d done what he had to do and decided what he had
to decide, and we weren’t going to the police, and he wasn’t going to drop me off at the nearest mental hospital. At least not right away. Fine. It would be long enough.
“I forgot to tell you the rest of my story,” I said.
“Yeah. You did.”
“It got a lot worse when Mr. Andrescu arrived. He came in the night, for one of the ceremonies, and as soon as I saw him I was afraid of him, because he was…massive and hard, like a white marble statue that’s come alive, and his eyes, there was something about his eyes like no eyes I’d ever seen before. Mom was afraid of him too, and the other ladies, but they went down into the basement with him anyway. I think the Devil sent him. I really do. I think they prayed to the Devil and that’s why Mr. Andrescu came, but maybe they didn’t really believe he would. Mom was crying. She told me to go up to my room and lock myself in, and barricade the door. She said she loved me, and gave me a hug and kissed me, and I tasted her tears, and there were so many things I wanted to say to her, hurt and angry things, but then she broke away and ran down into the basement with Mr. Andrescu and the rest. All that night I heard the screaming, not Mr. Andrescu, but the ladies, and when it was getting almost light Mom came to my room again. She had on her bathrobe and nothing else, and her face was like it had been when Dad beat her up. There was blood all over, but she didn’t seem to be hurt, other than on her face, I mean. She said I had to help her because she was tired out and her arthritis wouldn’t let her do everything that needed to be done. So down we went, and I had to help her bury Mrs. Walker, the lady from down the street who worked at the grocery store. Mrs. Walker’s throat was all ripped out, and her heart was gone too. And we had to bury Mr. Andrescu in a box below the cellar floor. That was a lot of digging. Mom and the other ladies helped, but I did most of it. I didn’t go to school at all that day, and when the job was done we all just slept and when it got dark again Mr. Andrescu was there and so was Mrs. Walker, and both of them were saying how darkness was so much better than light, and how we would all be in darkness one day and rule the darkened world—crazy stuff like that.”
The Vampire Megapack Page 24