Best New Vampire Tales (Vol.1)

by Laimo, Michael; Newman, James; Hults, Matt; Webb, Don; Meikle, William; Wilson, David Niall; Everson, John; Waggoner, Tim; Daley, James Roy

  A fearsome cry assaults my ears. I feel the wooden deck shake under the impact of massive booted feet. The giant African slams into me, causing me to stagger back. I almost lose my footing on the slick deck. The pirate’s huge, meaty hands encircle my neck and lift me into the air. His hands exert incredible pressure, pressure that would easily have broken the neck of a normal man. I laugh, a full-throated laugh that almost brings tears to my eyes. I relish the challenge this man offers, and respond in kind. His eyes betray disbelief as my own blaze crimson in the night. My clawed hands sweep down and pulp the African’s massive forearms. A mixed cry of agony and terror shoots from his lips. We fall to the deck. I bury my mouth into his neck. Rich, powerful, hot blood pulses down my throat, flooding me with energy, dispelling the iciness that had permeated my dead body. Its thickness flows like fire in my veins, and something in me rises up and sings in delight at its flavor. The cold ichor of the shark seems like gruel in comparison. I feed until the man’s heart is stilled, the blood run out.

  I discard the corpse, casually fingering a remaining button on a once-fine shirt. I survey the carnage. Though still damned, I am imprisoned no more. At least, not physically. I feel the strength of her blood call out to me, across land and sea, offering understanding and forgiveness. I take flight, seeking some form of resolution.

  * * *

  She waits for me on the bed, her white nightgown open in the front, her pale skin beckoning me.

  “Denn die Todten reiten schnell,” she comments. For the dead travel fast.

  “I did not die, as you predicted,” I state matter-of-factly.

  She rises on her knees and encircles my shoulders with her thin arms. She looks on me, her dark eyes filling my vision.

  “I’m glad.” She brushes her lips on mine, not kissing, just arousing.

  “I have a memento,” I say, and dig my fingers through recently healed tissue, deep into my ribcage. I retrieve a serrated shark tooth and place it in her hand. She kisses it and licks my pale blood from it, leaning back to expose her chest. She trails the tooth just below the areola of her right breast, black blood slowly seeping out from the small incision. She guides my head to the cut. I let her. My lips take hold as her head falls back, her back arched in passion. I drink, her cold blood more powerful and delicious than I remember it.

  In the end, I realize, blood is stronger. Stronger than will, stronger than hate, stronger than destiny, stronger than time itself. I embrace that knowledge which has cost me so dearly to obtain, and join with her, accepting my eternity and the comfort she offers.

  Moving Lines

  STEVE VERNON

  What can I tell you? I’m a gypsy, or at least the sign outside my shop said so.

  GYPSY FORTUNE TELLING

  BY WALK-IN OR APPOINTMENT ONLY

  ASK US ABOUT OUR RAINY DAY SPECIAL!

  That was one sign. There was another on the lamppost outside my shop window. It told anyone who cared to read that:

  JESUS CHRIST SAVES FROM ALL SINS

  PRAY TO JESUS NOW

  OBEY THE BIBLE

  Lines delivered as directly as a marine drill instructor. They didn’t call it the Salvation Army for nothing. A Cosa Nostra strong-arm paissano, with biceps the size of bowling balls and tattoos on each arm that read MUDDER and MURDER could not be half so explicit.

  There was a basketful of tracts sprouting from beneath the sign. The basket was refilled every couple of weeks. I don’t know who refilled it. I’ve never seen anyone even go near the basket. Maybe it was refilled by night. Maybe the tracts spontaneously procreated. Maybe there was a miniaturized printing press installed inside the lamppost.

  Stranger things have happened.

  I never see anyone reading any of the tracts. I think a few discerning winos use the tracts to blow their noses on when the weather was cold.

  Underneath the basket the motif continued with a few more lines––DEATH, JUDGMENT, ETERNITY, HEAVEN OR HELL, YOU DECIDE––which kind of reminded me of those guilt-riddled warnings that the government printed on cigarette packages.

  Remember, only you can prevent lung cancer.

  I’ve got another sign hung on the wall beside my table that was printed on a sheet of cardboard as neatly as my penmanship allowed, in bright red magic marker; and covered with a thin layer of plastic sandwich wrap.

  It almost looked professional.

  “The moving finger writes and having writ moves on, nor all your wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”

  Omar Khayam.

  Now there was a fellow who truly knew his lines.

  I’m a palmist. I flip the tarot. I’ve got a knack for seeing what people want to see in their dreams. I can fake a teacup if the price is right.

  Some folks call me Gypsy Jack.

  Ha!

  The truth is, I don’t know jack.

  Is it a con? Sure, what isn’t? We live in concrete tombs built out of cons and promises and lies. We fill our ears with radio waves and television signals stuffed full of larcenous fantasies. We play bingo and invest in the stock market, and figure its all the way things ought to be.

  I’m an honest to Cheiro palmist. One of those crazy guys who actually believes in what he’s doing. That was rare, these days.

  The believing.

  Not the palmistry.

  My granny taught me how, much to the undying shame of my poppa. Poppa thinks I should leave the teacups and cards for the women and take up a trade as an honest thief. What can I tell you? Fathers are never happy with their sons. I think it’s some kind of immortal law, you know?

  God forbid, if I ever have a son I promise to be happy with him.

  Unless he disappoints me.

  So here I am in my rented storefront with my cot out back. The building code tells me I’m not supposed to sleep here, but I read palms, not codes. What the slumlord doesn’t know isn’t going to hurt me.

  I’ve been here for six whole months. In six more months this block is scheduled for urban renewal––another sacrifice to the power of progress and the gluttonous juggernaut of endless gentrification. Call it what you will, it’s all means the same damn thing. Me and the tattooist upstairs and the lady in the basement who takes in homeless sailors are going to be out on the street.

  What can I tell you? Nothing lasted forever. Six months before I was somewhere else. In six months from now I’ll just move on. The cheapest buildings were always the ones about to die.

  It isn’t that vicious of a cycle.

  I like what I’m doing most of the time, except every now and then I get to feeling like a priest who’s heard one too many lousy confessions.

  Like today, for instance.

  Today came down like a rain of endless thunder.

  I should have seen it coming. The signs were everywhere. A cat moaned under my window. A dog howled under the streetlight even though the moon had its eye poked out for the next three days. I woke up this morning with a mouthful of cobweb and a dead rat at my doorway.

  Oh can I hear an omen, please?

  I should have seen it coming when she first walked in. I should have seen it in the way she looked at me like a lonely moonlit cave. I should have turned her away. It was nearly night time; I was thinking about frying a couple of sausages with some peppers and onions and garlic and that bottle of plonk I’d saved since Saturday. Then she walked in and all I saw was a customer, and a chance to feed the bills.

  “I want to know my future,” she said. “Palm or cards, I don’t care, just tell me what you see.”

  “What I tell you depends on what you want to know. The palm tells everything. Birth to death, cradle to grave. Only general, you know? The cards are specific, but short sighted. Two or three months at best. The cards don’t see far, but they do see straight.”

  “I don’t know about two or three months,” she said. “I just know I’m here, for now, so maybe it better be the palm.”

  “Sit down.”
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  I’ve got a card table from a junk shop. It’s covered with a black cotton tablecloth an old lady sewed me for a dream I read. There are a couple of chairs––a green plastic lawn chair that she sits in. I found that in an alley that growled at me when I took it. There was also a wooden chair that I’m already sitting in.

  The wooden chair came with the rent.

  “Are you right handed or left handed?”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “In the old days the palmist read your left hand. Closest to the heart tells truth, so they figured. But that’s nothing but bullshit. The heart is the biggest liar you ever met. I read the hand you think with, the one you work with. The hand you don’t use, that’s what you were born with,” I tell her. “The hand you use, that’s what you made of it.”

  “What if I’m ambidextrous?”

  It was late and my patience was never long lived.

  “Then you ought to make up your mind,” I said, trying to make my irritability into a joke.

  She just stared.

  “So, are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Are you ambidextrous?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m right handed.”

  So I get her to hold out her right hand.

  “You’re receptive,” I say. “Like a radar dish to life, you take in what it sends you. You lap it up, like a cat licks cream.”

  The shape of her palm, her splayed out fingers, they tell me this, that, and a pretty good guess. Her grin tells me I guessed right.

  I hold her hand, and test it for flexibility. A stiff hand means an inflexible person––someone who doesn’t change easily, a control freak, unreceptive to new ideas. Her hand is cold, but it’s almost night and there’s probably a chill in the air. I could tell her that she had a warm heart, but I don’t believe in that old saying: cold hands, warm heart.

  Next I always turn the hand over and look at the life line. That’s the line that fish hooks from between your thumb and index and down towards your wrist. If it’s long and strong it means a good healthy life. If it bends away from your thumb, like a linebacker heading out for a lateral pass, it shows a wild spirit, a black sheep, someone who has disappointed their father early on. If there is a second line inside it, it means a strong inner life.

  Only this line wasn’t like any of those others. This line was like some kind of crazy spiral dance. This line looked like a long skinny worm wrapped around and around her thumb. It just kept running on, wrapping around her thumb and back again, like a string that she’d tied on so as not to forget something.

  The line looked like one of those spinning hypnotic discs you used to be able to buy in the back of comic books. You know, the ones right next to the garlic chewing gum, the X - Ray glasses, and the genuine shrunken heads. Do you remember those X-Ray glasses? They were supposed to allow you to hypnotize women into letting you have your way with them.

  Believe me, they didn’t work.

  “What do you see?” she asked.

  What do I see? Christ, I don’t want to see what I’m seeing.

  I try to swallow, but my tongue has swollen to the size of an overstuffed couch.

  “What do you see?” she repeated.

  This means a lot to her. She really needs to know.

  Call me Galahad, but there’s something about a woman in need I can’t resist.

  I swallow the couch and find my voice.

  “I see a long life. A very, very long life.”

  I’m not kidding. A life line like this you would expect to see on something like a god. Something that’s going to be around for a very long time.

  “What else do you see?” she asked impatiently.

  What could I tell her? It was like her life line had swallowed everything––heart, head, fate––all gone in a single gulp.

  “I see hunger,” I say. “A life of endless hunger.”

  She clears her throat, as if she’s tasting something she doesn’t like.

  “What about happiness? What about children? What about marriage?” she asks.

  There is a fistful of unshed tears trembling in her voice, but I can sense that she isn’t the kind of woman who cries a lot.

  In fact, she isn’t any kind of woman at all.

  I remember something granny told me about a life line that ran like this; something I had brushed off as old superstition. I was putting pieces together––Verdelak. Nosferatu. Vampire, Count Yorga, Barnabas Collins, Christopher Lee in all those old Hammer movies … only worse.

  This was real.

  She was real.

  She kept asking me questions.

  “What about love?” she asked.

  “What about it? You might as well ask me which way the wind will blow, three hundred years from tomorrow. It’s late. Go home, and come see me in the morning.”

  “I don’t see anyone before sundown,” she said.

  It figures.

  “What about my future?”

  “Future is all you got. Future, past, and hunger. Lots of lonely hunger.”

  Now she’s looking at me like I might look at a good tavern steak.

  I figured it was time for a little creative self-defense. So I stood up quickly. I kicked over the wooden chair and brought my boot down on it as it hit the ground.

  The rungs shattered.

  She watched me like a patient diner, waiting for their favorite midnight snack.

  I grabbed the broken chair rung and pointed it at her like a knife.

  “Get back vampire. There’s no future for you today.”

  She looked at the chair rung. One eyebrow rose up like a black sunrise.

  “Not sharp enough. If you’re going to stick me, it’s got to be sharper than that.”

  Ha.

  Some joke.

  If she smiled I was going to scream.

  I wished I had time to unsnap my jackknife and whittle a point, but wishing, like my stake, was pointless.

  She held up her palm like an Indian in a bad cowboy movie about to say, “How.”

  Suddenly she was Mandrake, Svengali, and Mesmer rolled into one. I didn’t want to look, but I had to. I had to look at her palm only it was like staring at a whirlpool in the ocean and I was falling in to it and it was spinning about me, rising up to entangle me.

  It felt a little like falling headfirst into a canyon full of maggots.

  I felt the line, her life line, wrapping about me. I felt like Tarzan wrestling a giant snake, only this snake was colder than any mere reptile. This snake was cold and unbelievably dead and absolutely hungry. I felt it sucking at me, drawing me inwards. She was amoebic, like one of those creeping vines that strangle sunflowers.

  Forget about movies. Vampires, the real ones, they never bite. Vampires suck. Sure, that sounds like the punchline to a bad pun, but I’m not joking here. I’m talking about death by osmosis. A little visceral empathy, if you please.

  I’ve got one hope.

  I reached down below me, down through the clinging lines that wrapped about me like I was a virgin in a lounge room, undead pick up artists slinging line after unholy line, to feel the broken wreckage of my wooden chair. I rose up amidst the gut storm of this evil thing’s life line, clinging to two chair rungs like a drowning sailor clinging to a couple of match sticks.

  I crossed them, and held them outward. I tried my best to think of Van Helsing. I tried to think about the pope. I thought about Mother Theresa and Billy Graham and Evil Knievel.

  It’s been years since my mother took me to church, but I remembered some of it.

  I recited the one prayer from the rosary I remembered.

  “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was crucified, died, and was buried.”

  I’m getting some of the lines wrong, but I must be doing something right because the life line about me loosened and I began to feel a kind of hope being born. Like a ninety-year-old deathbed repe
ntant who hasn’t seen the inside of a church since his grandmother took him to be baptized, I kept on praying.

  “He descended into hell and on the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God.”

  I can’t remember the last of it, something about communion and resurrection and maybe it wasn’t so good a thing to be praying for in the face of what I was facing. Then I remembered a prayer my uncle taught me, the time the neighborhood bully kicked my ass.

  “Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in our day of battle; protect us against the deceit and wickedness of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray.”

  St. Michael did the trick. I was free, and I was back in my room, behind the refuge of my overturned card table that had somehow been kicked over in the heat of our struggle, brandishing my make shift crucifix in the face of this hungry she-devil.

  What could I do? I kept on praying, falling back on the ever-reliable Lord’s Prayer.

  “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

  She swatted the card table out of the way. It slammed against the far wall and one of its chrome legs snapped off.

  The part of my mind closest to my wallet mourned the loss of a perfectly good card table and my favorite wooden chair.

  The sensible part kept on praying.

  “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done … ”

  She laughed at this, the kind of laugh that crows laugh over the bones of dead men.

  I felt a little less than confident, but I kept on praying.

  “ … as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.”

  She swatted the Tim Allen cross from my hands, and I felt my daily bread grow cold and moldy. So I crossed my fingers and began to chant, “the power of Christ compels you, the power of Christ compels you,” but I guess she hadn’t seen that movie.

  She caught me by my throat, and held me close enough to smell the stink of the graveyard dirt she’d slept in.