Many times as he waited, Bruckman’s eyes would grow heavy and slowly close, but each time his eyes would spring open again at once, and he would find himself staring into the shadows for Wernecke. Sleep would no longer have him, it was a kingdom closed to him now; it spat him out each time he tried to enter it, just as his stomach now spat out the food he placed in it . . .
The thought of food brought Bruckman to a sharper awareness, and there in the darkness he huddled around his hunger, momentarily forgetting everything else. Never had he been so hungry . . . He thought of the food he had wasted earlier in the evening, and only the last few shreds of his self-control kept him from moaning aloud.
Bohme did moan aloud then, as though unease were contagious. As Bruckman glanced at him, Bohme said “Anya” in a clear calm voice; he mumbled a little, and then, a bit more loudly, said, “Tseitel, have you set the table yet?” and Bruckman realized that Bohme was no longer in the camp, that Bohme was back in Düsseldorf in the tiny apartment with his fat wife and his four healthy children, and Bruckman felt a pang of envy go through him, for Bohme, who had escaped.
It was at that moment that Bruckman realized that Wernecke was standing there, just beyond Bohme.
There had been no movement that Bruckman had seen. Wernecke had seemed to slowly materialize from the darkness, atom by atom, bit by incremental bit, until at some point he had been solid enough for his presence to register on Bruckman’s consciousness, so that what had been only a shadow a moment before was now suddenly and unmistakably Wernecke as well, however much a shadow it remained.
Bruckman’s mouth went dry with terror, and it almost seemed that he could hear the voice of his dead grandmother whispering in his ears. Bogey-tales, Wernecke had said. I’m no night-spirit. Remember that he had said that . . .
Wernecke was almost close enough to touch. He was staring down at Bohme; his face, lit by a dusty shaft of light from the window, was cold and remote, only the total lack of expression hinting at the passion that strained and quivered behind the mask. Slowly, lingeringly, Wernecke stooped over Bohme. “Anya,” Bohme said again, caressingly, and then Wernecke’s mouth was on his throat.
Let him feed, said a cold remorseless voice in Bruckman’s mind. It will be easier to take him when he’s nearly sated, when he’s fully preoccupied and growing lethargic and logy . . . Growing full . . .
Slowly, with infinite caution, Bruckman gathered himself to spring, watching in horror and fascination as Wernecke fed. He could hear Wernecke sucking the juice out of Bohme, as if there was not enough blood in the foolish old man to satiate him, as if there was not enough blood in the whole camp . . . Or perhaps the whole world. And now Bohme was ceasing his feeble struggling, was becoming still . . .
Bruckman flung himself upon Wernecke, stabbing him twice in the back before his weight bowled them both over. There was a moment of confusion as they rolled and struggled together, all without sound, and then Bruckman found himself sitting atop Wernecke, Wernecke’s white face turned up to him. Bruckman drove his weapon into Wernecke again, the shock of the blow jarring Bruckman’s arm to the shoulder. Wernecke made no outcry; his eyes were already glazing, but they looked at Bruckman with recognition, with cold anger, with bitter irony, and, oddly, with what might have been resignation or relief, with what might almost have been pity . . . Bruckman stabbed again and again, driving the blows home with hysterical strength, panting, rocking atop his victim, feeling Wernecke’s blood splatter against his face, wrapped in the heat and steam that rose from Wernecke’s torn-open body like a smothering black cloud, coughing and choking on it for a moment, feeling the steam seep in through his pores and sink deep into the marrow of his bones, feeling the world seem to pulse and shimmer and change around him, as though he were suddenly seeing through new eyes, as though something had been born anew inside him, and then abruptly he was smelling Wernecke’s blood, the hot organic reek of it, leaning closer to drink in that sudden overpowering smell, better than the smell of freshly baked bread, better than anything he could remember, rich and heady and strong beyond imagining. There was a moment of revulsion and horror, and he had time to wonder how long the ancient contamination had been passing from man to man to man, how far into the past the chain of lives stretched, how Wernecke himself had been trapped, and then his parched lips touched wetness, and he was drinking, drinking deeply and greedily, and his mouth was filled with the strong clean taste of copper.
AFTERWORD TO DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN
I don’t remember the exact genesis of this idea. I do know that at some time during the ‘70s, probably the later ‘70s, I jotted the following sentence down in my story-idea notebook: “vampire in death camp, during Second World War.”
And there it stayed, for years, until one night when Jack was down in Philadelphia for a visit—my calendar shows that it was March 6, 1981—and we were sitting around brainstorming in my rundown old apartment on Quince Street.
If you’ve thumbed through the book of photographs called The Faces of Science Fiction, you’ve seen that apartment. There I am, sitting on the sofa, looking bloated and glaze-eyed and stuffed, like an exhibit in some diorama in a museum case in the future, labeled SQUALID TWENTIETH-CENTURY URBAN DWELLER, and around me in all its cluttered glory spreads the living room of my Quince Street place. It was a cramped and uncomfortable apartment in many ways, but some good memories attach to it as well—it was there (or on the surrounding stoops and stairs of the neighborhood, when it got too hot inside) that I wrote all of the stories in this book (or, at least, worked on my parts of them), and we came up with the ideas for almost all of them right there in that rundown living room, too.
On this occasion, Jack and I were sitting in the living room with a bottle of wine, 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 I mentioned above. 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 manual typewriter, which lived on one side of my somewhat-unsteady kitchen table—if you pounded the keys hard, as I’d learned to do as an old-style newspaperman before the days of computer terminals, the table actually swayed slightly with the rhythm of your typing, and the keys clacked and ratatattatted in a loud and gratifying way—and started writing the story.
Jack wrote like a madman for several hours, steam practically coming out of his ears, 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 for Binghamton, and the ball was in my court. I worked extensively on the story for a week or so, 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—the final encounter between Wernecke and Bruckman—toward the story’s end. It was finished on May 9, 1981.
The question of identity, it seems to me, is at the core of the story. Wernecke is perceived by the Nazis as a Jew, in spite of being a supernatural monster, and so that’s the way they treat him, no better or worse than the other prisoners. We are what other people think we are, to some extent, whether we want to be or not. The real meat of the story for me is in the two long conversations between Wernecke and Bruckman, and those were the most difficult scenes to write in many ways.
We decided to call the story “Down Among The Dead Men,” a line from an old English folksong that I’d always wanted to use as a title; it certainly seemed to fit the story well enough. The story bounced around for quite a while, longer than any of the other collaborations. It finally sold to Oui, and was later reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, where its
appearance prompted a major horror writer—one whose own work is pretty gore-splattered—to remark that it was the most morally offensive story he’d ever read. We were quietly proud.
This was probably the most controversial of the collaborations, and has drawn the most extreme responses—people seem either to really like it, or to loathe it utterly. It has been reprinted a fair number of times since, most recently in Ellen Datlow’s vampire anthology Blood Is Not Enough.
AFTERWORD
GARDNER DOZOIS
After the beginning of 1985, there were no more collaborations.
“The world is too much with us, night and noon,” Wordsworth said, and, as 1985 progressed, we all became increasingly busy folk. I became editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and for quite some while thereafter, was too busy learning to stay afloat in the sea of paper the editor of a monthly magazine must swim through to have much time for anything else. (It’s sadly indicative of the demands on such an editor’s time that I’ve only been able to produce two short stories since taking the job, five years ago; neither of them happened to be a collaborative project.) Jack too became involved in a job that ate increasing amounts of his time; what writing time he did have left he devoted first to completing his brilliant mainstream novel, Counting Coup (shamefully as yet unsold—wake up, publishers!) and then to the writing of a 1,000-page-plus historical fantasy about Leonardo Da Vinci (which, I’m glad to say, has been sold). Michael and his wife, Marianne Porter, became the parents of a young son, Sean, and what energies Michael could thereafter spare from the demands of parenting (itself a full-time job, as any parent can attest!) went into the creation of his novel, Vacuum Flowers, and then into his new novel, Stations of the Tide. Susan too was busy writing a novel, a big horror novel called The Red Carnival, finally finished last year (and still unsold as yet, too—what’s the matter with you book publishers out there?).
What got squeezed out was the time needed to do these collaborations.
There are still some collaborative projects in the pipeline, in one stage or another of completion. Michael and I have been working on and off (more off than on, alas) for years on a collaborative novella called “Blind Forces”; we have about seventy pages of it competed now. Jack and I have a partial first draft of a story called “The Wall” sitting in our files, and for years now we have been taking notes for a collaborative novel, and talking about writing the “man growing young” story and “the Elvis story”: we still discuss these projects from time to time. (Jack and I are still regularly producing co-edited anthologies, but that’s not quite the same thing.) Every so often, Susan and I talk about doing another collaboration, and one time, Susan, Jack, and I even spent an evening talking about a novel-length expansion of “The Clowns.” A children’s book written by Jack, Michael, and me exists, and has been sporadically making the rounds for a while now, so far with no takers. I have about eighty pages of a collaborative novel with George R.R. Martin called Shadow Twin, sitting in my files; not only did we go so far as to outline the book, we even drew a fucking map of the planet it takes place on! Jeez.
But, so far, the world is still too much with us all, and there those projects sit, gathering dust in the files.
Some of these projects may eventually be finished, if the gods spare us for long enough. I suspect that others of them will never be finished, and will be being poked at and pored over by students in search of obscure material for offbeat doctoral dissertations long after all of us are dead.
Whatever happens, our first cycle of fiction collaborations is clearly at an end—the last story to appear was a collaboration with Susan, written long before, that appeared in The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1987—and this book is its record and its memorial.
Looking back at the collaborations, I don’t at all regret the time we spent on them, even leaving considerations of money and exposure aside. We managed to all remain friends and produce worthwhile collaborative work, even while doing three-way collaborations with various changes in cast. It seems to me that all of these stories are at the least competent entertainment, stories that helped to convince the reader of whatever magazine or anthology they appeared in that it had been worth spending the money to buy it in the first place; a few of them may be more than that, and last longer—but that’s not for me to say.
I do think that in almost all the collaborations we managed to combine our strengths as writers rather than our weaknesses, and produced stories that none of us would have been able to write—or would have written—on our own.
And that, surely, is the point of collaborating in the first place.
OTHER COLLABORATIONS
“The Apotheosis of Isaac Rosen,” by Jack Dann and Jeanne Van Buren Dann, Omni, June 1987.
“Blues and the Abstract Truth,” by Jack Dann and Barry N. Malzberg, Lord John 10.
“Bringing It Home” by Jack Dann and Barry N. Malzberg, Twilight Zone Magazine, February 1987.
“Dogfight,” by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson, Burning Chrome.
“The Funny Trick They Played on Old McBundy’s Son,” by George Alec Effinger and Jack C. Haldeman II, Night Cry, Summer 1986.
“High Steel,” Jack Dann and Jack C. Haldeman II, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1982.
“Limits,” Jack Dann and Jack C. Haldeman II, Fantastic, May 1976.
Nightmare Blue, by Gardner Dozois and George Alec Effinger, Berkley, 1975.
“Parables of Art,” by Jack Dann and Barry N. Malzberg, New Dimensions 12.
“Sentry,” Jack Dann and Jack C. Haldeman II, Twilight Zone Magazine, February 1987.
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