A Whisper of Blood

by Ellen Datlow

  For a number of nights my dreams remained somewhat anemic and continued to present only the palest characters and scenes. Thus, they had been rendered too weak to use me as they had before, seizing, as they did, the contents of my life—my memories and emotions, all the paraphernalia of a private history—and working them in their way, giving form to things that had none of their own, and thereby exhausting my body and soul. Mrs. Rinaldi’s theory of these parasites that have been called dreams was therefore accurate … as far as it went. But she had failed to consider, or perhaps refused to acknowledge, that the dreamer on his part draws something from the dream, gaining a store of experience otherwise impossible to obtain, hoarding the grotesque or banal enigmas of the night to try to fill out the great empty spaces of the day. And my dreams had ceased to perform this function, or at least were no longer adequate to my needs—that appetite I had discovered in myself for banqueting on the absurd and horrible, even the perfectly evil. It was this deprivation, I believe, that brought about the change in the nature of my dreaming.

  Having such paltry sustenance on which to nourish my tastes—frail demons and insipid decors—I must have been thrown back upon my own consciousness … until finally I came into full awareness of my dreaming state, intensely lucid. Over the course of several nights, then, I noticed a new or formerly obscure phenomenon, something that existed in the distance of those bankrupt landscapes that I had started to explore. It was a kind of sickly mist that lingered about the horizon of each dream, exerting a definite magnetism, a tugging upon the austere scenes that it enveloped from all sides, even hovering high above like an animate sky, a celestial vault that glistened softly. Yet the dreams themselves were cast in the dullest tones and contained the most spare and dilapidated furnishings.

  In the very last dream I had of this type, I was wandering amid a few widely scattered ruins that seemed to have risen from some undersea abyss, all soft and pallid from their dark confinement. Like the settings of the other dreams, this one seemed familiar, though incomplete, as if I were seeing the decayed remnants of something I might have known in waking life. For those were not time-eaten towers rising around me, and at my feet there were not sunken strongboxes crumbling like rotten flesh. Instead, these objects were the cabinets and cases I remembered from that room in Mrs. Rinaldi’s house, except now this memory was degenerating, being dragged away little by little, digested by that mist, which surrounded everything and nibbled at it. And the more closely I approached this mist, the more decomposed the scenery of the dream became, until it was consumed altogether and I could see nothing but that sparkling, swirling vapor.

  It was only when I had entered this foggy void that the true sense of dreams, the inherent dread of my visions, was restored to me. Here was a sort of reservoir into which the depths of my dreams were being directed, leaving only a shallow spillover that barely trickled through my nights. Here, I say, without knowing really what place or plane of being it was: some spectral venue, a vacant plot situated along the back street of sleep, an outpost of the universe itself… or perhaps merely the inside of a box hidden away in the house of an old woman, a box in which something exists in all its insensible purity, a cloudy ether free of tainted forms and knowledge, freely cleansing others with its sterile grace.

  In any event, I sensed that the usual boundaries of my world of sleep had extended into another realm. And it was here, I found, that the lost dreams were fully alive in their essence. Consumed within that barren vapor, which I had seen imbibe a mixture of my own saliva and the reddest wine, they lived in exile from that multitude of unwitting hosts whose experiences they used like a wardrobe for those eerie performances behind the curtain of sleep, forcing the sleeper into the role of both player and witness in the alien manipulations of his memories and emotions, the ungranted abduction of his private history for the wreckless revels of these parasites called dreams. But here, in that prison of glittering purity, they had been reduced to their primordial state—dreams in abstraction, faceless and formless things from the old time that a very old woman revealed to me. And although they had neither face nor form, none of the multitudinous disguises in which I had always known them, their presence was still quite palpable all around me, bearing down upon the richly laden lucidity I had brought with me into a place I did not belong.

  A struggle evolved as that angelic mist—agent of my salvation—held at bay the things that craved my mind and soul, my very consciousness. But rather than join in that struggle, I gave myself up to this ravenous siege, offering my awareness to what had none of its own, bestowing all the treasures of my life on this wasteland of abstract dreams.

  Then the infinite whiteness itself was flooded with the colors of countless faces and forms, a blank sky suddenly dense with rainbows, until everything was so saturated with revels and thick with frenzy that it took on the utter blackness of the old time. And in the blackness I awoke, screaming for all the world.

  The next day I was standing on Mrs. Rinaldi’s porch, watching as my mother repeatedly slammed the door knocker without being able to summon the old woman. But something told us she was nevertheless at home, a shadow that we saw pass nervously behind the front window. At last the door opened for us, but whoever opened it stayed on the other side, saying: “Missus, take your child home. There is nothing more that can be done. I made a mistake with him.”

  My mother protested the recurrence of my “sickness,” taking a step inside the house and pulling me along with her. But Mrs. Rinaldi only said: “Do not come in here. It is not a fit place to visit, and I am not fit to be looked upon.” From what I could observe of the parlor, it did seem that an essential change had occurred, as if the room’s fragile balance had failed and the ever-threatening derangement of its order had finally been consummated. Everything in this interior seemed askew, distorted by some process of decay and twisted out of natural proportion. It was a room seen through a warped and strangely colored window.

  And how much stranger this color appeared when Mrs. Rinaldi suddenly showed herself, and I saw that her once-pale eyes and sallow face had taken on the same tint, a greenish glaze as of something both rotten and reptilian. My mother was immediately silenced by this sight. “Now will you leave me?” she said. “Even for myself there is nothing I can do any longer. You know what I am saying, child. All those years the dreams had been kept away. But you have consorted with them, I know you did. I have made a mistake with you. You let my angel be poisoned by the dreams that you could not deny. It was an angel, did you know that? It was pure of all thinking and pure of all dreaming. And you are the one who made it think and dream and now it is dying. And it is dying not as an angel, but as a demon. Do you want to see what it is like now?” she said, gesturing toward a door that led into the cellar of her house. “Yes, it is down there because it is not the way it was and could not remain where it was. It crawled away with its own body, the body of a demon. And it has its own dreams, the dreams of a demon. It is dreaming and dying of its dreams. And I am dying too, because all the dreams have come back.”

  Mrs. Rinaldi then began to approach me, and the color of her eyes and her face seemed to deepen. That was when my mother grasped my arm to pull me quickly from the house. As we ran off I looked over my shoulder and saw the old woman raving in the open doorway, cursing me for a demon.

  It was not long afterward that we learned of Mrs. Rinaldi’s death. True to her own diagnosis, the parasites were upon her, although local gossip told that she had been suffering for years from a cancer of some kind. There was also evidence that another inhabitant of the house survived the old woman for a short time. As it happened, several of my schoolmates reported to me their investigations after dark at the house of the “old witch,” a place that I myself was forbidden by my parents to go. So I cannot claim that I observed with my own eyes what crept along the floor of that moonlit house, “like a pile of filthy rags,” said one boy.

  But I did dream about this prodigy; I even dreamed about
its dreams as they dragged every shining angelic particle of this being into the blackness of the old time. Then all my bad dreams abated after a while, just as they always had and always would, using my world only at intervals and gradually dissolving my life into theirs.

  A few words on the death of the personal vampire. One of the noblest and most tragic figures of the imagination, the vampire has long been reduced to serving some allegorical function in various mundane contexts—psychology, sociology, politics, and so on. The vampire attained his stature through the emotion of fear of a fantastic evil, yet how utterly he has lost it all at the heavy hands of writers and critics whose ceaseless prying has exposed him too often to daylight, murdering his mystery with tabloid revelations as well as talky sessions of analysis.

  But if the vampire no longer inspires the emotion he once did, perhaps it is partly his own fault. He lost his mystery entirely because he had so little of it to start. His nature and habits were always documented in detail, his ways and means a matter of public record. Too many laws lorded over him, and all laws belong to the natural world. Like his colleague the werewolf, he was too much a known quantity. His was a familiar, most of the time human body, and it was used like a whore by writers whose concerns were predominantly for the body and the everyday path in which it walks. Consequently, the vampire was stripped of all that made him alien to our ordinary selves, until finally he was transformed into merely the bad boy next door. He remained a menace, to be sure. But his focus shifted from the soul to the senses. This is how it is when a mysterious force is embodied in a human body, or in any form that is too well fixed. And a mystery explained is one robbed of its power.

  Rest in peace, Nosferatu. None will ever take your place.

  Thomas Ligotti

  THE POOL PEOPLE

  Melissa Mia Hall

  Hall’s story deals with an experience seldom written about from the victim’s point of view—particularly in horror fiction. The protagonist has been so maimed emotionally that she has lost her sense of self.

  1. THE POOL

  The water’s so blue it hurts my eyes. On a day like this you have to wear sunglasses or go blind. I’m wearing dark ones, old-fashioned Audrey Hepburn Breakfast at Tiffany’s sunglasses. The glamorous, heavy-duty I-want-to-be-alone kind. And I’m alone. My cousin has gone to work and left me here by her pool. Her swimming pool. I’ll be safe here. I can relax and take it easy. Get a tan on a body that hasn’t known a tan since high school. Of course I know sunburns are dangerous. I’ve slathered my body with sunscreen. I smell like a dream of Hawaii.

  This is my summer vacation.

  And I’m sitting by the pool.

  2. THE PEOPLE

  I saw them for the first time in a dream. I’d fallen asleep in the sun. My eyelids bled pink light, then I opened my eyes and my eyeballs fell forward into my lap. I picked them up and put them back in and leaned forward, staring into the water. My hands gripped the side of the pool. The pebble-coarse side slid into smoothness. I touched the surface of the water with the palm of my hand. I felt the ripples. I thought, Molly, you’re dreaming, and then I saw them, clear as day, the people. They sat at a table under the water, on the bottom. Fully clothed, they were, their hair streaming out from their heads like seaweed.

  Like a show I saw or wanted to see at the Aquarena Watercade Extravaganza a long, long time ago, when I was little. How I loved the idea of people pretending they weren’t really underwater, sucking secret oxygen.

  And now, here they are again. Waving.

  3. THE POOL MAN

  It’s too much sun, seeing people in a pool, waving. I was just remembering a TV commercial. And staring into the water. I should swim. The exercise would be good for me. I’d impress Cara Ann, too. She’s so proud of this pool, this house, the lovely landscaping, the life she’s made here, without Al.

  She wants me to be happy. I open a book instead. The pages are too white. I move over to a circle of shade. I take a sip of tepid Coke. I need ice. I stand up and stretch, lady of supreme leisure.

  “The gate was open—”

  I drop my book. The intruder looks embarrassed. “Ms. Clovis was expecting me—”

  My hand closes over the back of a wrought-iron chair. I can barely breathe. Every time I see them, I feel emptier, looser, gone. But now here is this man. I tighten inside, clench. All men are dangerous. I know that, I know.

  He flashes an open billfold like he’s from the FBI and stuffs it back into the back pocket of his baggy shorts. “I’m the pool man—at least for today. I’m helping out my big brother, Ben. He owns Sunside Pools—and he’s in a bind and I told him, hey, bubba, I’ll help you out. I owe him, see? So, just get back to whatever it was you were doing. I won’t be long. Well, not too long. It’s been a while. You’re working on a tan—I see—I know, what tan? Well, never mind, I’ll get to work and you won’t even know I’m here.” “Cara Ann forgot to tell me—”

  She had left a note on the refrigerator I had forgotten to read. I thought it probably said something about what to fix for dinner or when she was coming home. I should’ve read it.

  “I hope you’re not planning on swimming. That’ll have to wait, I’m afraid, while I do all this. But you can stay out here and keep me company.”

  He won’t stop talking. I stare at him, still uneasy. He’s not dressed in a uniform and he’s too attractive to be trusted. He has a tan almost as dark as George Hamilton’s, which cannot be too healthy, dark eyes, carelessly sexy. He tosses his longish hair back like Miss Piggy and keeps talking, about the weather, music, his favorite kind of food, baseball. He plays with his pool tools like a child.

  “What’s wrong?”

  A fish does this, out of water, gasping. Slowly, I must breathe in and out, slowly. Suddenly there’s a wet towel on my face. I push it off and meet the pool man’s searching, too observant eyes.

  “Lady, you fainted. I’ve seen that in old movies, but never in real life. Are you okay? Are you sick or something? Should I call Ms. Clovis? She works on that TV show—what is it? I could call her—”

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No,” I say, managing a smile. His white shirt is unbuttoned. He has dark hair on his chest. My head hurts. The white shirt has tiny black dots woven into the cloth. They appear to be moving.

  “I think I’d better help you into the house where it’s cool.”

  “Thanks—”

  “Bergman, Pete, and you are—” “Molly Woods.”

  “Nice to meet you, Molly.” He says this with an expectant grin. He acts as if I am sharing some sort of secret joke, but then he sees I don’t get it. He leads me into the house. I flop on the nearest chair and motion for him to go back outside. He overwhelms me with the scent of an aftershave mingled with sweat. He keeps looking at me with an expression that frightens me.

  “I know, I may or may not be a killer.” His hand rests on the sliding glass door. “Trust me, I’m not.” He smiles again and his perfect white teeth amaze me. Everyone here has such perfect teeth. Self-consciously, I cover my mouth. My teeth need cleaning desperately.

  The door slides shut. I watch him go about his business. He moves in slow motion, carefully. He pauses and considers each action he takes. Something’s not right.

  I go to the kitchen and get a knife. I sit in the den and watch him out the window. He better not come back in here. The steak knife stays in my lap. I call Cara Ann and ask when she’ll be home. “Seven o’clock, like I told you, silly,” she says, laughing. “Didn’t you read my note?”

  I go get the note after I hang up. I read it, keeping the knife always close at hand. It says nothing about a pool man coming.

  I look outside and he’s bending over the water. Around his neck is a thin gold necklace with a small disc. A tiny round flashlight. He sees something under the water. He stoops down but doesn’t use the net. He just stares, shakes his head, and straightens up. He suddenly looks at the house. I know th
at he cannot see me, but it’s as if he does. He smiles.

  “I’m leaving!” he yells. “Till next time, Molly—!”

  There won’t be a next time. He’s crazy. But I have the knife.

  He comes to the sliding glass door. He knocks on it, still smiling. “Listen, Molly, if you swim, tomorrow, whenever, make sure and take the Polaris out.” He points at that white machine thing with the long umbilical cord.

  “I know—” I shout.

  “And, hey, Molly—I hope you feel better.” He seems sincere. “You want to come lock the gate after I leave?”

  He doesn’t see the knife. I stroke the handle. I’ll put it in the pocket of my pink cover-up. I’ll carry it with me. He has done nothing wrong.

  I follow him out to the gate.

  “You living here now?”

  “Just visiting.”

  I glimpse the faint wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. I realize he’s probably in his late thirties. Too old to be a pool man? “You’re not local. I could tell that.”

  I stroke the handle of the knife. I’m perfectly safe. He will not harm me. “No, I’m not. I’m from Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

  He suddenly leans forward and kisses my cheek. “Welcome to California,” he says and the gate clangs shut.

  I run back to the house. From the pool I hear strange voices and a bubbling sound. It’s a fantasy, just a fantasy. It comes of vacationing. I am used to working and a normal life. Idle time and idle hands create insanity. You think too much. And when you think, you remember.