by Ellen Datlow
This story started out as a sentence I jotted down in my story-idea notebook: “vampire in death camp, during Second World War.”
It stayed in that form for a couple of years, until one night when Jack Dann was down in Philadelphia for a visit—my calendar shows that it was March 6,1981—and we were sitting in my living room in my rundown old apartment on Quince Street, kicking around potential ideas for collaborative stories. I got my notebook out and started throwing ideas from it out at Jack; one of them was the vampire sentence. Jack took fire with that idea at once. We talked about the overall plot for a half hour or so, brainstorming, kicking it back and forth, and then Jack got up, sat down behind my ancient, massive Remington office-model standup standard typewriter, which lived on one side of my somewhat-unsteady kitchen table, and started writing the story. He wrote like a madman for a few hours, and by the time he stood up again, he had finished a rough draft of about the first nine manuscript pages, carrying the story through the brilliant Passover scene, which was entirely of his own devising. Then he left, headed back to Binghamton, and the ball was in my court. I worked pretty extensively on the story for a solid week (obviously, I work much more slowly than Jack!), and then worked on it off and on for the next couple of months, with one hurried story conference with Jack at that year’s Nebula Banquet to hammer out a plot problem, and the passing back and forth by mail of several different drafts of one particularly difficult scene toward the story’s end. The story was finished on May 9,1981. It bounced around for a while, and finally sold to Oui. It was reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, where its appearance prompted a major horror writer to remark that it was the most morally offensive story he’d ever read. We were quietly proud.
At the core of the story, it seems to me, is the question of identity. In spite of being a supernatural monster, Wernecke is perceived by the Nazis as a Jew, and so that’s the way they treat him, no better or worse than the other prisoners. To some extent, we are what other people think we are, whether we want to be or not. For me, the real meat of the story is in the two conversations between Wernecke and Bruckman, and in some ways those were the most difficult scenes to write.
I’d always wanted to call a story “Down Among the Dead Men,” a line from an old English folksong, and the title certainly seemed to fit the story well enough, so that’s what we called it.
Gardner Dozois
A noted writer of genre horror once complained that this story was in bad taste, as it depicted a concentration camp internee as a vampire. It is our opinion, however, that in order to rise above genre cookie patterns, fiction must take chances and try to reflect that which really is the dark side of human nature.
It has been said that the events of the holocaust were so terrible in themselves that they are beyond any kind of fictive telling. Note some of the statistics: In five years the Nazis exterminated nine million people. Six million were Jews. The efficiency of the concentration camps was such that twenty thousand people could be gassed in a day. The Nazis at Treblinka boasted that they could “process” the Jews who arrived in the cattle cars in forty-five minutes.
In 1943 six hundred desperate Jews revolted and burned Treblinka to the ground. These men were willing to martyr themselves so that a few might live to “testify” and tell a disbelieving world of the atrocities committed in the camps, lest those who had died be forgotten … lest we forget those events which are too terrible to contemplate.
Out of the six hundred, forty survived to tell their story.
“Down Among the Dead Men,” like the companion story “Camps,” is our attempt to testify, to bring the terror and horror and discomfort to another generation of readers in the only way we know how. Perhaps through the metaphoric and symbolic medium of horror—of the fantastic—we might catch a dark reflection of that terrible event. Even if it is impossible to grasp the terrible reality of what happened in the camps, still, we must try.
In order to survive, the prisoners had to take part in the “process” of killing other prisoners; that was one of the greatest atrocities of the concentration camps. It became a maxim of the survivors—those who did not let themselves be reduced to Musselmänner, the walking, living dead—that “first you save yourself, then you save yourself, and then, and only then, can you try to save others.” Prisoners could survive only against almost impossible odds, and the guilt was impossible to escape. It was built into the Nazi extermination system … into the new technology of genocide.
To live, you had to help kill.
The vampire is… us!
Indeed, the vampire is a horrifying metaphor. It would have been much more palatable if we had made him one of the Nazis. But perhaps by testifying, by taking chances, by leaning over the edge of what might be construed as “bad taste,” we can keep the memory of what happened alive.
It is too easy to forget our history.
But as the philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” God forbid….
Jack Dann
…TO FEEL ANOTHER’S WOE
Chet Williamson
The sharklike intensity necessary to succeed in the highly competitive New York theater scene is a given. Williamson has obviously brushed against the life or he wouldn’t have written the following piece about those who will do anything to make it.
I had to admit she looked like a vampire when Kevin described her as such. Her face, at least, with those high model’s cheekbones and absolutely huge, wet-looking eyes. The jet of her hair set off her pale skin strikingly, and that skin was perfect, nearly luminous. To the best of my knowledge, however, vampires didn’t wear Danskin tops and Annie Hall flop-slacks, nor did they audition for Broadway shows.
There must have been two hundred of us jammed into the less than immaculate halls of the Ansonia Hotel that morning, with photo/résumés clutched in one hand, scripts of A Streetcar Named Desire in the other. John Weidner was directing a revival at Circle in the Square, and every New York actor with an Equity card and a halfway intelligible Brooklyn dialect under his collar was there to try out. Stanley Kowalski had already been spoken for by a new Italian-American film star with more chutzpah than talent, but the rest of the roles were open. I was hoping for Steve or Mitch, or maybe even a standby, just something to pay the rent.
I found myself in line next to Kevin McQuinn, a gay song-and-dance man I’d done Jones Beach with two years before. A nice guy, not at all flouncy. “Didn’t know this was a musical,” I smiled at him.
“Sure. You never heard of the Stella aria? And he sang softly, “I’ll never stop saying Steh-el-la …”
“Seriously. You going dramatic?”
He shrugged. “No choice. Musicals these days are all rock or opera or rock opera. No soft shoes in Sweeney Todd.”
“Sweeney Todd closed ages ago.” “That’s’cause they didn’t have no soft shoes.”
Then she walked in holding her P/R and script, and sat on the floor with her back to the wall as gracefully as if she owned the place. I was, to Kevin’s amusement, instantly smitten.
“Forget it,” he said. “She’d eat you alive.”
“I wish. Who is she?”
“Name’s Sheila Remarque.”
“Shitty stage name.”
“She was born with it, so she says. Me, I believe her. Nobody’d pick that.” “She any good?”
Kevin smiled, a bit less broadly than his usually mobile face allowed. “Let’s just say that I’ve got twenty bucks that says she’ll get whatever part she’s after.”
“Serious?”
“The girl’s phenomenal. You catch Lear in the park last summer?” I nodded. “She played Goneril.”
“Oh yeah.” I was amazed that I hadn’t recalled the name. “She was good.”
“You said good, I said phenomenal. Along with the critics.”
As I thought back, I remembered the performance vividly. Generally Cordelia stole the show from Lear’s two na
sty daughters, but all eyes had been on Goneril at the matinee I’d seen. It wasn’t that the actress had been upstaging, or doing anything to excess. It was simply (or complexly, if you’re an actor) that she was so damned believable. There’d been no trace of acting, no indication shared between actress and audience, as even the finest performers will do, no self-consciousness whatsoever, only utterly true emotion. As I remembered, the one word I had associated with it was awesome. How stupid, I thought, to have forgotten her name. “What else do you know about her?” I asked Kevin.
“Not much. A mild reputation with the boys. Love em and leave em. A Theda Bara vampire type.”
“Ever work with her?”
“Three years ago. Oklahoma at Allenberry. I did Will Parker, and she was in the chorus. Fair voice, danced a little, but lousy presence. A real poser, you know? I don’t know what the hell happened.”
I started to ask Kevin if he knew where she studied, when he suddenly tensed. I followed his gaze, and saw a man coming down the hall carrying a dance bag. He was tall and thin, with light-brown hair and a nondescript face. It’s hard to describe features on which not the slightest bit of emotion is displayed. Instead of sitting on the floor like the rest of us, he remained standing, a few yards away from Sheila Remarque, whom he looked at steadily, yet apparently without interest. She looked up, saw him, gave a brief smile, and returned to her script.
Kevin leaned closer and whispered. “You want to know about Ms. Remarque, there’s the man you should ask, not me.”
“Why? Who is he?” The man hadn’t taken his eyes from the girl, but I couldn’t tell whether he watched her in lust or anger. At any rate, I admired her self-control. Save for that first glance, she didn’t acknowledge him at all.
“Name’s Guy Taylor.”
“The one who was in Annie?”
Kevin nodded. “Three years here. One on the road. Same company I went out with. Used to drink together. He was hilarious, even when he was sober. But put the drinks in him and he’d make Eddie Murphy look like David Merrick. Bars would fall apart laughing.”
“He went with this girl?”
“Lived with her for three, maybe four months, just this past year.” “They split up, I take it.”
“Mmm-hmm. Don’t know much about it, though.” He shook his head. “I ran into Guy a week or so ago at the Circle of Three auditions. I was really happy to see him, but he acted like he barely knew me. Asked him how his lady was—I’d never met her, but the word had spread—and he told me he was living alone now, so I didn’t press it. Asked a couple people and found out she’d walked out on him. Damn near crushed him. He must’ve had it hard.”
“That’s love for you.”
“Yeah. Ain’t I glad I don’t mess with women.”
Kevin and I started talking about other things then, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off Sheila Remarque’s haunting face, nor off the vacuous features of Guy Taylor, who watched the girl with the look of a stolid, stupid guard dog. I wondered if he’d bite anybody who dared to talk to her.
At ten o’clock, as scheduled, the line started to move. When I got to the table, the assistant casting director, or whatever flunky was using that name, looked at my P/R and at me, evidently approved of what he saw, and told me to come back at two o’clock for a reading. Kevin, right beside me, received only a shake of the head and a “thank you for coming.”
“Dammit,” Kevin said as we walked out. “I shouldn’t have stood behind you in line, then I wouldn’t’ve looked so un-macho. I mean, didn’t they know about Tennessee Williams, for crissake?”
When I went back to the Ansonia at two, there were over thirty people already waiting, twice as many men as women. Among the dozen or so femmes was Sheila Remarque, her nose still stuck in her script, oblivious to those around her. Guy Taylor was also there, standing against a wall as before. He had a script open in front of him, and from time to time would look down at it, but most of the time he stared at Sheila Remarque, who, I honestly believe, was totally indifferent to, and perhaps even ignorant of, his perusal.
As I sat watching the two of them, I thought that the girl would make a stunning Blanche, visually at least. She seemed to have that elusive, fragile quality that Vivien Leigh exemplified so well in the film. I’d only seen Jessica Tandy, who’d originated the role, in still photos, but she always seemed too horsey-looking for my tastes. By no stretch of the imagination could Sheila Remarque be called horsey. She was exquisite porcelain, and I guess I must have become transfixed by her for a moment, for the next time I looked away from her toward Guy Taylor, he was staring at me with that same damned expressionless stare. I was irritated by the proprietary emotion I placed on his face, but found it so disquieting that I couldn’t glare back. So I looked at my script again.
After a few minutes, a fiftyish man I didn’t recognize came out and spoke to us. “Okay, Mr. Weidner will eliminate some of you without hearing you read. Those of you who make the final cut, be prepared to do one of two scenes. We’ll have the ladies who are reading for Blanche and you men reading for Mitch first. As you were told this morning, ladies, scene ten, guys six. Use your scripts if you want to. Not’s okay too. Let’s go—”
Seven women and fifteen men, me and Guy Taylor among them, followed the man into what used to be a ballroom. At one end of the high-ceilinged room was a series of raised platforms with a few wooden chairs on them. Ten yards back from this makeshift stage were four folding director’s chairs. Another five yards in back of these were four rows of ten each of the same rickety wooden chairs there were on the stage. We sat on these while Weidner, the director, watched us file in. “I’m sorry we can’t be in the theater,” he said, “but the set there now can’t be struck for auditions. We’ll have to make do here. Let’s start with the gentlemen for a change.”
He looked at the stage manager, who read from his clipboard, “Adams.”
That was me. I stood up, script in hand. Given a choice, I always held book in auditions. It gives you self-confidence, and if you try to go without and go up on the lines, you look like summer stock. Besides, that’s why they call them readings.
“Would someone be kind enough to read Blanche in scene six with Mr. Adams?” Weidner asked. A few girls were rash enough to raise their hands and volunteer for a scene they hadn’t prepared, but Weidner’s eyes fell instantly on Sheila Remarque. “Miss Remarque, isn’t it?” She nodded. “My congratulations on your Goneril. Would you be kind enough to read six? I promise I won’t let it color my impressions of your scene ten.”
Bullshit, I thought, but she nodded graciously, and together we ascended the squeaking platform.
Have you ever played a scene opposite an animal or a really cute little kid? If you have, you know how utterly impossible it is to get the audience to pay any attention to you whatsoever. That was exactly how I felt doing a scene with Sheila Remarque. Not that my reading wasn’t good, because it was, better by far than I would have done reading with a prompter or an ASM, because she gave me something I could react to. She made Blanche so real that I had to be real too, and I was good.
But not as good as her. No way.
She used no book, had all the moves and lines down pat. But like I said of her Goneril, there was no indication of acting at all. She spoke and moved on that cheapjack stage as if she were and had always been Blanche DuBois, formerly of Belle Rêve, presently of Elysian Fields, New Orleans in the year 1947. Weidner didn’t interrupt after a few lines, a few pages, the way directors usually do, but let the scene glide on effortlessly to its end, when, still holding my script, I kissed Blanche DuBois on “her forehead and her eyes and finally her lips,” and she sobbed out her line, “‘Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly!’” and it was over and Blanche DuBois vanished, leaving Sheila Remarque and me on that platform with them all looking up at us soundlessly. Weidner’s smile was suffused with wonder. But not for me. I’d been good, but she’d been great.
“Thank you, Mr. Adams. Thank you very
much. Nice reading. We have your resume, yes. Thank you,” and he nodded in a gesture of dismissal that took me off the platform. “Thank you too, Miss Remarque. Well done. While you’re already up there, would you care to do scene ten for us?”
She nodded, and I stopped at the exit. Ten was a hell of a scene, the one where Stanley and the drunken Blanche are alone in the flat, and I had to see her do it. I whispered a request to stay to the fiftyish man who’d brought us in, and he nodded an okay, as if speaking would break whatever spell was on the room. I remained there beside him.
“Our Stanley Kowalski was to be here today to read with the Blanches and Stellas, but a TV commitment prevented him,” Weidner said somewhat bitchily. “So if one of you gentlemen would be willing to read with Miss Remarque …”
There were no idiots among the men. Not one volunteered. “Ah, Mr. Taylor,” I heard Weidner say. My stomach tightened. I didn’t know whether he’d chosen Taylor to read with her out of sheer malevolence, or whether he was ignorant of their relationship, and it was coincidence—merely his spotting Taylor’s familiar face. Either way, I thought, the results could be unpleasant. And from the way several of the gypsies’ shoulders stiffened, I could tell they were thinking the same thing. “Would you please?”
Taylor got up slowly, and joined the girl on the platform. As far as I could see, there was no irritation in his face, nor was there any sign of dismay in Sheila Remarque’s deep, wet eyes. She smiled at him as though he were a stranger, and took a seat facing the “audience.”
“Anytime,” said Weidner. He sounded anxious. Not impatient, just anxious.
Sheila Remarque became drunk. Just like that, in the space of a heartbeat. Her whole body fell into the posture of a long-developed alcoholism. Her eyes blurred, her mouth opened, a careless slash across the ruin of her face, lined and bagged with booze. She spoke the lines as if no one had ever said them before, so any onlooker would swear that it was Blanche DuBois’s liquor-dulled brain that was creating them, and in no way were they merely words that had existed on a printed page for forty years, words filtered through the voice of a performer.
