The Best New Horror 5

by Ramsay Campbell

  When I did I laid her down by the side of the grave and then filled it back up again, being careful to make it look undisturbed. Then I carried her to the car in my arms and brought her home.

  The flat seemed very quiet as I sat her on the sofa, and the cushion rustled and creaked as it took her weight again. When she was settled I knelt and looked up at her face. It looked much the same as it always had, though the colour of the skin was different, didn’t have the glow she always had. That’s where life is, you know, not in the heart but in the little things, like the way hair falls around a face. Her nose looked the same and her forehead was smooth. It was the same face, exactly the same.

  I knew the dress she was wearing was hiding a lot of things I would rather not see, but I took it off anyway. It was her going away dress, bought by her family specially for the occasion, and it didn’t mean anything to me or to her. I knew what the damage would be and what it meant. As it turned out the patchers and menders had done a good job, not glossing because it wouldn’t be seen. It wasn’t so bad.

  When she was sitting up again in her white dress I walked over and turned the light down, and I cried a little then, because she looked so much the same. She could have fallen asleep, warmed by the fire and dozy with wine, as if we’d just come back from the party.

  I went and had a bath then. We both used to when we came back in from an evening, to feel clean and fresh for when we slipped between the sheets. It wouldn’t be like that this evening, of course, but I had dirt all over me, and I wanted to feel normal. For one night at least I just wanted things to be as they had.

  I sat in the bath for a while, knowing she was in the living room, and slowly washed myself clean. I really wasn’t thinking much. It felt nice to know that I wouldn’t be alone when I walked back in there. That was better than nothing, was part of what had made her alive. I dropped my Someday clothes in the bin and put on the ones from the evening of the accident. They didn’t mean as much as her dress, but at least they were from before.

  When I returned to the living room her head had lolled slightly, but it would have done if she’d been asleep. I made us both a cup of coffee. The only time she ever took sugar was in this cup, so I put one in. Then I sat down next to her on the sofa and I was glad that the cushions had her dent in them, that as always they drew me slightly towards her, didn’t leave me perched there by myself.

  The first time I saw Rachel was at a party. I saw her across the room and simply stared at her, but we didn’t speak. We didn’t meet properly for a month or two, and first kissed a few weeks after that. As I sat there on the sofa next to her body I reached out tentatively and took her hand, as I had done on that night. It was cooler than it should have been, but not too bad because of the fire, and I held it, feeling the lines on her palm, lines I knew better than my own.

  I let myself feel calm and I held her hand in the half light, not looking at her, as also on that first night, when I’d been too happy to push my luck. She’s letting you hold her hand, I’d thought, don’t expect to be able to look at her too. Holding her hand is more than enough: don’t look, you’ll break the spell. My face creased then, not knowing whether to smile or cry, but it felt alright. It really did.

  I sat there for a long time, watching the flames, still not thinking, just holding her hand and letting the minutes run. The longer I sat the more normal it felt, and finally I turned slowly to look at her. She looked tired and asleep, so deeply asleep, but still there with me and still mine.

  When her eyelid first moved I thought it was a trick of the light, a flicker cast by the fire. But then it stirred again, and for the smallest of moments I thought I was going to die. The other eyelid moved and the feeling just disappeared, and that made the difference, I think. She had a long way to come, and if I’d felt frightened, or rejected her, I think that would have finished it then. I didn’t question it. A few minutes later both her eyes were open, and it wasn’t long before she was able to slowly turn her head.

  I still go to work, and put in the occasional appearance at social events, but my tie never looks quite as it did. She can’t move her fingers precisely enough to help me with that any more. She can’t come with me, and nobody can come here, but that doesn’t matter. We always spent a lot of time by ourselves. We wanted to.

  I have to do a lot of things for her, but I can live with that. Lots of people have accidents, bad ones: if Rachel had survived she could have been disabled or brain-damaged so that her movements were as they are now, so slow and clumsy. I wish she could talk, but there’s no air in her lungs, so I’m learning to read her lips. Her mouth moves slowly, but I know she’s trying to speak, and I want to hear what she’s saying.

  But she gets round the flat, and she holds my hand, and she smiles as best she can. If she’d just been injured I would have loved her still. It’s not so very different.

  SARAH SMITH

  When the Red Storm Comes

  SARAH SMITH writes mystery, science fiction and hypertext (interactive computer-based fiction, including the dark fantasy King of Space for the Macintosh). Her novel The Vanished Child appeared from Ballantine in 1992 and was one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year, and she is co-author of the mosaic SF novel Future Boston, edited by David Alexander Smith. She has also had stories published in Aboriginal, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tomorrow and Shudder Again, and she is working on a sequel to The Vanished Child, provisionally titled The Knowledge of Water.

  Currently a full-time writer, she has designed and implemented tutorials and documentation systems for high-end computer products. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband, a varying population of neighbourhood children (“two of whom – on the average – are mine”), a 22-pound Maine Coon cat named Vicious, a very nervous parakeet, and four computers.

  “I had read Michele Slung’s Crime on Her Mind anthologies as they came out,” recalls the author, “and when Michele asked me for a ‘Victorian vampire’, I wrote this story as a tribute to her delicious, half-criminal heroines. Like many resort towns, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is more stridently Edwardian now than in 1905, but surprisingly little changed. I recommend the capuccino in Market Square where Miss Wentworth met her Carpathian count.

  “Count Zohary may or may not be a vampire, but Susan Wentworth indubitably becomes one. Relationships are so often like that . . .”

  “DO YOU BELIEVE in vampires?” he said.

  I snapped Dracula closed and pushed it under the tapestry bag containing my neglected cutwork. “Mr Stoker writes amusingly,” I said. “I believe I don’t know you, sir.”

  “What a shame,” he said, putting his hand on the café chair across from me. I looked up – and up; he was tall, blond; his uniform blazed crimson, a splash of blood against the green trees and decent New Hampshire brick of Market Square. The uniform was Austro-Hungarian; his rank I did not know, but clearly he was an officer.

  “You should be better acquainted with vampires.” He clicked heels and bowed. “Count Ferenc Zohary.” Without invitation he sat down, smiling at me.

  In this August 1905, in Portsmouth where I was spending the summer before my debutante year, negotiations were being held that might finish the long Russo-Japanese War. Aboard his yacht Mayflower at the naval yard, President Roosevelt had hosted the first meeting between the Russian and Japanese plenipotentiaries, Count Serge Witte and the Marquis Komura. Now the opponents met officially at the naval yard and schemed betweentimes at the Wentworth Hotel. My aunt Mildred did not encourage newspaper reading for unmarried women, so I was out-of-date, but knew the negotiations were supposed to be going badly. The town was crowded with foreign men; there was a storminess in the air, a feel of heavy male energy, of history and importance. Danger, blood, and cruelty, like Mr Stoker’s book: it made my heart beat more strongly than any woman’s should. Don’t talk to any of them, Aunt Mildred had said. But for once my aunt was out of sight.

  “You are part of the negotiations?
Pray tell me how they proceed.”

  “I am an observer only.”

  “Will they make peace?”

  “I hope not, for my country’s sake.” He looked amused at my surprise. “If they continue the war, Russia and Japan will bleed, Russia will lose, turn west; they will make a little war and probably lose. But if they sign their treaty, Russia will fight us five years from now, when they are stronger; and then the Germans will come in, and the French to fight the Germans, and the English with the French. Very amusing. My country cannot survive.”

  “Is it not wearying, to have such things decided and to be able to do nothing?”

  “I am never wearied.” My companion stretched out his hand, gathered together my half-finished cutwork linen, and waved it in the air for a moment like a handkerchief before dropping it unceremoniously on the ground. “Your mother makes you do this,” he said, “but you prefer diplomacy. Or vampires. Which?”

  I flushed. “My aunt controls my sewing,” I said. Cutwork had been my task for this summer, sitting hour after hour on Aunt Mildred’s verandah, sewing hundreds of tiny stitches on the edges of yards of linen, then clipping out patterns with my sharp-pointed scissors. Linen for my trousseau, said Aunt Mildred, who would not say the word “sheets.” In the fall I would go to New York, planning my strategies for marriage like a powerless general. The battle was already hopeless; without greater wealth than I commanded, I could not hope to be in the center of events. I would become what I was fit for by looks but not by soul, the showy useless wife of some businessman, whose interest in war extended only to the army’s need for boots or toothbrushes.

  But now, because Admiral Togo had won at Tsushima, I had my taste of war, however faraway and tantalizing; I was sitting with a soldier, here in the hot thick sunlight and green leaves of Market Square.

  “Do you like war,” my companion asked, “or simply blood?”

  An interesting question. “I think they both concern power.”

  “Precisely.” He leafed through the book while I watched him secretly. In the exquisitely tailored crimson uniform, he had a look of coarseness combined with power. Above the stiff gold-braided collar, his neck was thick with muscle. His hands were short and broad-nailed, his fingertips square against the yellow-and-red binding of Dracula. Perhaps feeling my eyes on him, he looked up and smiled at me. He had assurance, a way of looking at me as though I were already attracted to him, though he was not handsome: a thick-lipped mouth, a scar on his jaw, and a nick out of his ear. And he had thrown my cutwork on the ground. “My name is Susan Wentworth,” I said.

  “Wentworth, like the hotel. That is easy to remember.” No sweet words about my face being too beautiful for my name to be forgotten. “Do you stay at the hotel?” he asked.

  A gentleman never asked directly where a lady lived, to save her the embarrassment of appearing to desire his company.

  “My aunt has a cottage at Kittery Point.”

  “That is not far. Do you come to the tea dances at the hotel?”

  “Seldom, Count Zohary. My aunt thinks the diplomatic guests are not suitable company.”

  “Very true. But exciting, no? Do you find soldiers exciting, Miss Wentworth?”

  “Soldiering, yes, and diplomacy; I admit that I do.”

  “A certain amount of blood . . . that is nice with the tea dances.” With his thumbnail he marked a passage in the book and showed it to me. As she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, I read. “Do you find that exciting?”

  “I am not a vampire, Count Zohary,” I said, uneasily amused.

  “I know that.” My companion smiled at me, showing regular even teeth. “I, for instance, I am a vampire, and I can assure you that you are not one yet.”

  “You, Count Zohary?”

  “Of course, not as this man Stoker describes. I walk in the sun, I see my face in my shaving mirror; I assure you I sleep in sheets, not dirt.” He reached out and touched the thin gold cross I wore around my neck. “A pretty thing. It does not repel me.” His fingers hovered very close to my neck and bosom. “The vampire is very sensual, Miss Wentworth, especially when he is also a soldier. Very attractive. You should try.”

  I had let him go too far. “I think you dare overmuch, Count Zohary.”

  “Ah, why I dare, that is the vampire in me. But you don’t hold up your cross and say, ‘Begone, necuratul!’ ” he said. “And that is the vampire in you. Do you like what you read, Miss Susan Wentworth? You look as though you would like it very much. Are you curious? If you will come to the tea dance at the hotel, I will show you the handsome hotel sheets, and teach you that vampires are – almost – as civilized as diplomats.”

  He looked at me, gauging my response: and for a moment, horrified, I felt I would respond. I wanted the brutal crude power of the man. “Count Zohary, you have mistaken me, I am respectable.” I snatched the book away from him and stuffed it deep into my tapestry bag. “I have – certainly no desire to see your – ” I would not give him the satisfaction of finishing the sentence. “You’re making me talk nonsense.”

  He brushed his mustache with his finger, then lifted one corner of his lip. “What will convince you, dear respectable Miss Wentworth? My fangs? Shall I turn into a wolf for you? Come into your chamber like a red mist, or charge in like cavalry?” Over our heads the leaves rattled and wind soughed through the square. Count Zohary looked up. “Shall I tell you the future in your blood? Shall I control the sea for you, or call a storm? That is my best parlor trick. Let us have a thunderstorm, Miss Wentworth, you and I.”

  The tide controlled the sea, and the Piscatequa River called thunderstorms once or twice a week in August, without help from Hungarian counts. “If you can tell the future, Count Zohary, you know that everything you say is useless.”

  “It is not my most reliable gift, Miss Wentworth,” he said. “Unfortunately, or I would not be here watching Witte and Komura, but back in New York drinking better coffee at the embassy. It works best after I have had a woman, or drunk blood. Shall we find out together what Witte and Komura will do? No? You do not wish to know?” On the café table there was a ring of condensation from my glass of ice water. With mock solemnity he shook salt from the table shaker over it and stared at the water as if into a crystal ball, making passes like a fortune-teller. “Seawater is better to look into; blood best. Ice water – ach, Miss Wentworth, you make me work. But I see you will come to the tea dance. Today, Wednesday, or Thursday you will come.”

  “I will not,” I said. “Of course I will not.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Thursday, then.” From the direction of the ocean, thunder muttered above the white tower of First Church. Count Zohary made a gesture upward and smiled at me. I began to gather up my things, and he bent down, stretching out his long arm to pick up my fallen linen. “This is almost done; you must come Thursday.”

  “Why Thursday?” I asked unwillingly.

  “Because I have made a bet with myself. Before you have finished this Quatsch,” he said, “I will give you what you want. I shall have turned you into a vampire.”

  A sea-salt wave of breeze rolled over the square, hissing; the leaves were tossed pale side up like dead fish. I stared at him, the smell of the sea in my mouth, an acrid freshness. He smiled at me, slightly pursing his lips. Flushing, I pushed my chair away. Count Zohary rose, clicked his heels, raised my hand to his lips; and through the first drops of rain I saw him stride away, his uniform the color of fresh blood against the brick and white of the Athenaeum, darkening in the rain. A soldier, his aide-de-camp, came forward with a black cape for him. Unwillingly I thought of vampires.

  That night the rain shook the little-paned windows of my white bedroom. This monster has done much harm already, I read. Moisture in the air made the book’s binding sticky, so that both my palms were printed with fragments of the red name backward. The howling of wolves. There were no wolves around Portsmouth, nor vamp
ires either. I could tell my own future without help from him: this fall in New York would decide it, whatever my strategies. Women of my sort all had the same future.

  How much less alive could I be if I were a vampire’s prey?

  I pictured myself approaching young men of my acquaintance and sinking my teeth into their throat. This was fancy; I had no access even to the ordinary powers of men such as the count.

  But he had told me one quite specific thing, and it intrigued me: he was with the embassy in New York.

  The next day, though I was tired, I assiduously sewed at my cutwork and pricked at it with my scissors, and finishing this respectable task, I felt as though I were again in control of myself, triumphant over Count Zohary, and ready to face him.

  At my instigation, Mrs Lathrop, my aunt’s friend, proposed that we visit the Wentworth, and Aunt Mildred was persuaded to agree.

  On Thursday, Elizabeth Lathrop and her daughter Lucilla, Aunt Mildred and I, all fit ourselves into the Lathrop barouche, and at a gentle pace we were driven through the curving streets of Kittery and past the Federal mansions of Portsmouth. It was a perfect day, the breeze from the sea just enough to refresh us, late day lilies and heliotrope blooming behind old-fashioned wooden trellis fences; a day for a pleasant, thoughtless excursion; yet as we passed through Market Square, I looked for his glittering red figure, and as we pulled into the handsome gravel driveway of the Wentworth, I found myself excited, as if I were going to a meeting of some consequence.

  Aunt Mildred and Mrs Lathrop found us a table by the dance floor, which was not large but modern and well appointed. An orchestra was playing waltzes; a few couples practiced their steps on the floor, and many soldiers sat at tables under the potted palms, flirting with young women. Mrs Lathrop and Lucilla intended a sight of Count Witte, whose manners were reported to be so uncouth that he must eat behind a screen. I saw no sign of Count Zohary. At one table, surrounded by a retinue of men, the notorious Mme N. held court, a laughing, pretty woman who was rumored to have brought down three governments. While the orchestra played, Mrs Lathrop and my aunt Mildred gossiped about her. Lucilla Lathrop and I discovered nothing in common. From under my eyelashes I watched clever Mme N.