The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  He found his way to the upper deck. There was nothing he could do for Miggs. He would have to leave him here. Stumbling, he moved along the rail and reached down to draw the small boat closer, where he could provision it and make it ready for his departure.

  His fingers clutched emptiness. The ropes were gone. The dory was gone. He hung limp, staring down at a flat expanse of oily sea.

  For an hour he did not move. He fought to throw off his fear long enough to think of a way out. Then he stiffened with a sudden jerk and pushed himself away from the rail.

  The ship’s boats offered the only chance. He groped to the nearest one and labored feverishly over it.

  But the task was hopeless. The life boats were of metal, rusted through and through, wedged in their davits. The wire cables were knotted and immovable. He tore his hands on them, wringing blood from his scarred fingers. Even while he worked, he knew that the boats would not float. They were rotten, through and through.

  He had to stop, at last, from exhaustion.

  After that, knowing that there was no escape, he had to do something, anything, to keep sane. First he would clear those horrible bones from the deck, then explore the rest of the ship. . . .

  It was a repulsive task, but he drove himself to it. If he could get rid of the bones, perhaps Stragella and the other two creatures would not return. He did not know. It was merely a faint hope, something to cling to.

  With grim, tight-pressed lips he dragged the bleached skeletons over the deck and kicked them over the side, and stood watching them as they sank from sight. Then he went to the hold, smothering his terror, and descended into the gloomy belly of the vessel. He avoided the crates with a shudder of revulsion. Ripping up that evil vine-thing by the roots, he carried it to the rail and flung it away, with the mold of grave-earth still clinging to it.

  After that he went over the entire ship, end to end, but found nothing.

  He slipped the anchor chains then, in the hopes that the ship would drift away from that vindictive bank of fog. Then he paced back and forth, muttering to himself and trying to force courage for the most hideous task of all.

  The sea was growing dark, and with dusk came increasing terror. He knew the Golconda was drifting. Knew, too, that the undead inhabitants of the vessel were furious with him for allowing the boat to drift away from their source of food. Or they would be furious when they came alive again after their interim of forced sleep.

  And there was only one method of defeating them. It was a horrible method, and he was already frightened. Nevertheless he searched the deck for a marlin spike and found one; and, turning sluggishly, he went back to the hold.

  A stake, driven through the heart of each of the horrible trio. . . .

  The rickety stairs were deep in shadow. Already the dying sun, buried behind its wreath of evil fog, was a ring of bloody mist. He glanced at it and realized that he must hurry. He cursed himself for having waited so long.

  It was hard, lowering himself into the pitch-black hold when he could only feel his footing and trust to fate. His boots scraped ominously on the steps. He held his hands above him, gripping the deck timbers.

  And suddenly he slipped.

  His foot caught on the edge of a lower step, twisted abruptly, and pitched him forward. He cried out. The marlin spike dropped from his hand and clattered on one of the crates below. He tumbled in a heap, clawing for support. The impact knocked something out of his belt. And he realized, even as his head came in sharp contact with the foremost oblong box, that the Bible, which had heretofore protected him, was no longer a part of him.

  He did not lose complete control of his senses. Frantically he sought to regain his knees and grope for the black book in the gloom of the hold. A sobbing, choking sound came pitifully from his lips.

  A soft, triumphant laugh came out of the darkness close to him. He swung about heavily – so heavily that the movement sent him sprawling again in an inert heap.

  He was too late. She was already there on her knees, glaring at him hungrily. A peculiar bluish glow welled about her face. She was ghastly beautiful as she reached behind her into the oblong crate and began to trace a circle about the Bible with a chunk of soft, tarry, pitch-like substance clutched in her white fingers.

  Yancy stumbled toward her, finding strength in desperation. She straightened to meet him. Her lips, curled back, exposed white teeth. Her arms coiled out, enveloping him, stifling his struggles. God, they were strong. He could not resist them. The same languid, resigned feeling came over him. He would have fallen, but she held him erect.

  She did not touch him with her lips. Behind her he saw two other shapes take form in the darkness. The savage features of Papa Bocito glowered at him; and Seraphino’s ratty, smoldering eyes, full of hunger, bored into him. Stragella was obviously afraid of them.

  Yancy was lifted from his feet. He was carried out on deck and borne swiftly, easily, down the companionway, along the lower passage, through a swirling blanket of hellish fog and darkness, to the cabin where Miggs lay dead. And he lost consciousness while they carried him.

  He could not tell, when he opened his eyes, how long he had been asleep. It seemed a long, long interlude. Stragella was sitting beside him. He lay on the bunk in the cabin, and the lamp was burning on the table, revealing Miggs’ limp body in full detail.

  Yancy reached up fearfully to touch his throat. There were no marks there; not yet.

  He was aware of voices, then. Papa Bocito and the ferret-faced woman were arguing with the girl beside him. The savage old man in particular was being angered by her cool, possessive smile.

  “We are drifting away from the prison isles,” Papa Bocito snarled, glancing at Yancy with unmasked hate. “It is his work, lifting the anchor. Unless you share him with us until we drift ashore, we shall perish!”

  “He is mine,” Stragella shrugged, modulating her voice to a persuasive whisper. “You had the other. This one is mine. I shall have him!”

  “He belongs to us all!”

  “Why?” Stragella smiled. “Because he has looked upon the resurrection night? Ah, he is the first to learn our secret.”

  Seraphino’s eyes narrowed at that, almost to pinpoints. She jerked forward, clutching the girl’s shoulder.

  “We have quarreled enough,” she hissed. “Soon it will be daylight. He belongs to us all because he has taken us away from the isles and learned our secrets.”

  The words drilled their way into Yancy’s brain. “The resurrection night!” There was an ominous significance in it, and he thought he knew its meaning. His eyes, or his face, must have revealed his thoughts, for Papa Bocito drew near to him and pointed into his face with a long, bony forefinger, muttering triumphantly.

  “You have seen what no other eyes have seen,” the ancient man growled bitterly. “Now, for that, you shall become one of us. Stragella wants you. She shall have you for eternity – for a life without death. Do you know what that means?”

  Yancy shook his head dumbly, fearfully.

  “We are the undead,” Bocito leered. “Our victims become creatures of the blood, like us. At night we are free. During the day we must return to our graves. That is why” – he cast his arm toward the upper deck in a hideous gesture – “those other victims of ours have not yet become like us. They were never buried; they have no graves to return to. Each night we give them life for our own amusement, but they are not of the brotherhood – yet.”

  Yancy licked his lips and said nothing. He understood then. Every night it happened. A nightly pantomime, when the dead become alive again, reenacting the events of the night when the Golconda had become a ship of hell.

  “We are gipsies,” the old man gloated. “Once we were human, living in our pleasant little camp in the shadow of Pobyezdin Potok’s crusty peaks, in the Morava Valley of Serbia. That was in the time of Milutin, six hundreds of years ago. Then the vampires of the hills came for us and took us to them. We lived the undead life, until there was no more blood
in the valley. So we went to the coast, we three, transporting our grave-earth with us. And we lived there, alive by night and dead by day, in the coastal villages of the Black Sea, until the time came when we wished to go to the far places.”

  Seraphino’s guttural voice interrupted him, saying harshly:

  “Hurry. It is nearly dawn!”

  “And we obtained passage on this Golconda, arranging to have our crates of grave-earth carried secretly to the hold. And the ship fell into cholera and starvation and storm. She went aground. And – here we are. Ah, but there is blood upon the islands, my pretty one, and so we anchored the Golconda on the reef, where life was close at hand!”

  Yancy closed his eyes with a shudder. He did not understand all of the words; they were in a jargon of gipsy tongue. But he knew enough to horrify him.

  Then the old man ceased gloating. He fell back, glowering at Stragella. And the girl laughed, a mad, cackling, triumphant laugh of possession. She leaned forward, and the movement brought her out of the line of the lamplight, so that the feeble glow fell full over Yancy’s prostrate body.

  At that, with an angry snarl, she recoiled. Her eyes went wide with abhorrence. Upon his chest gleamed the Crucifix – the tattooed Cross and Savior which had been indelibly printed there. Stragella held her face away, shielding her eyes. She cursed him horribly. Backing away, she seized the arms of her companions and pointed with trembling finger to the thing which had repulsed her.

  The fog seemed to seep deeper and deeper into the cabin during the ensuing silence. Yancy struggled to a sitting posture and cringed back against the wall, waiting for them to attack him. It would be finished in a moment, he knew. Then he would join Miggs, with those awful marks on his throat and Stragella’s lips crimson with his sucked blood.

  But they held their distance. The fog enveloped them, made them almost indistinct. He could see only three pairs of glaring, staring, phosphorescent eyes that grew larger and wider and more intensely terrible.

  He buried his face in his hands, waiting. They did not come. He heard them mumbling, whispering. Vaguely he was conscious of another sound, far off and barely audible. The howl of wolves.

  Beneath him the bunk was swaying from side to side with the movement of the ship. The Golconda was drifting swiftly. A storm had risen out of nowhere, and the wind was singing its dead dirge in the rotten spars high above decks. He could hear it moaning, wheezing, like a human being in torment.

  Then the three pairs of glittering orbs moved nearer. The whispered voices ceased, and a cunning smile passed over Stragella’s features. Yancy screamed, and flattened against the wall. He watched her in fascination as she crept upon him. One arm was flung across her eyes to protect them from the sight of the Crucifix. In the other hand, outstretched, groping ever nearer, she clutched that hellish chunk of pitch-like substance with which she had encircled the Bible!

  He knew what she would do. The thought struck him like an icy blast, full of fear and madness. She would slink closer, closer, until her hand touched his flesh. Then she would place the black substance around the tattooed cross and kill its powers. His defense would be gone. Then – those cruel lips on his throat. . . .

  There was no avenue of escape. Papa Bocito and the plump old woman, grinning malignantly, had slid to one side, between him and the doorway. And Stragella writhed forward with one alabaster arm feeling . . . feeling. . . .

  He was conscious of the roar of surf, very close, very loud, outside the walls of the fog-filled enclosure. The ship was lurching, reeling heavily, pitching in the swell. Hours must have passed. Hours and hours of darkness and horror.

  Then she touched him. The sticky stuff was hot on his chest, moving in a slow circle. He hurled himself back, stumbled, went down, and she fell upon him.

  Under his tormented body the floor of the cabin split asunder. The ship buckled from top to bottom with a grinding, roaring impact. A terrific shock burst through the ancient hulk, shattering its rotted timbers.

  The lamp caromed off the table, plunging the cabin in semidarkness. Through the port-holes filtered a gray glare. Stragella’s face, thrust into Yancy’s, became a mask of beautiful fury. She whirled back. She stood rigid, screaming lividly to Papa Bocito and the old hag.

  “Go back! Go back!” she railed. “We have waited too long! It is dawn!”

  She ran across the floor, grappling with them. Her lips were distorted. Her body trembled. She hurled her companions to the door. Then, as she followed them into the gloom of the passage, she turned upon Yancy with a last unholy snarl of defeated rage. And she was gone.

  Yancy lay limp. When he struggled to his feet at last and went on deck, the sun was high in the sky, bloated and crimson, struggling to penetrate the cone of fog which swirled about the ship.

  The ship lay far over, careened on her side. A hundred yards distant over the port rail lay the heaven-sent sight of land – a bleak, vacant expanse of jungle-rimmed shore line.

  He went deliberately to work – a task that had to be finished quickly, lest he be discovered by the inhabitants of the shore and be considered stark mad. Returning to the cabin, he took the oil lamp and carried it to the open hold. There, sprinkling the liquid over the ancient wood, he set fire to it.

  Turning, he stepped to the rail. A scream of agony, unearthly and prolonged, rose up behind him. Then he was over the rail, battling in the surf.

  When he staggered up on the beach, twenty minutes later, the Golconda was a roaring furnace. On all sides of her the flames snarled skyward, spewing through that hellish cone of vapor. Grimly Yancy turned away and trudged along the beach.

  He looked back after an hour of steady plodding. The lagoon was empty. The fog had vanished. The sun gleamed down with warm brilliance on a broad, empty expanse of sea.

  Hours later he reached a settlement. Men came and talked to him, and asked curious questions. They pointed to his hair which was stark white. They told him he had reached Port Blair, on the southern island of the Andamans. After that, noticing the peculiar gleam of his blood-shot eyes, they took him to the home of the governor.

  There he told his story – told hesitantly, because he expected to be disbelieved, mocked.

  The governor looked at him cryptically.

  “You don’t expect me to understand?” the governor said. “I am not so sure, sir. This is a penal colony, a prison isle. During the past few years, more than two hundred of our convicts have died in the most curious way. Two tiny punctures in the throat. Loss of blood.”

  “You – you must destroy the graves,” Yancy muttered.

  The governor nodded silently, significantly.

  After that, Yancy returned to the world, alone. Always alone. Men peered into his face and shrank away from the haunted stare of his eyes. They saw the Crucifix upon his chest and wondered why, day and night, he wore his shirt flapping open, so that the brilliant design glared forth.

  But their curiosity was never appeased. Only Yancy knew; and Yancy was silent.

  DAVID J. SCHOW

  A Week in the Unlife

  DAVID J. SCHOW LIVES IN the Hollywood Hills and collects everything he can find connected with the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  His collection of essays from Fangoria magazine, Wild Hairs, won the 2001 International Horror Guild Award for Best Non-fiction. The author’s more recent books include the final volume of the Lost Block trilogy (subtitled Crimes and Punishments), and Elvisland, a landmark collection of John Farris’s short fiction (both of which he edited); a resurrected, polished and spiffed-up reissue of his first collection, Seeing Red; a trade paperback edition of his fourth collection, Crypt Orchids; a new collection of living-dead stories entitled Zombie Jam; a short novel, Rock Breaks Scissors Cut, and a new mainstream suspense novel, Bullets of Rain.

  “ ‘A Week in the Unlife’,” explains Schow, “is a relic of the pre-Goth, post-Rice explosion in Vamp Lit, when fiction about bloodsuckers became so prolific that it nearly merited its own bookstore shelf,
and suffered the streamlining fallout of genrefication. There were punk vampires, porn vampires, rave vampires, corporate vampires, gay vampires, and sperm vampires aplenty, overrunning book after book, each twist of little substance beyond a one-liner gimmick. They’re vampires – but they have AIDS! They’re vampires – and they hate biker werewolves! It was enough to make you puke blood, the way Udo Kier did in Blood for Dracula (a.k.a. Andy Warhol’s Dracula).

  “By and large, most of the flood damage resulting from this overflow was ultraconservative, derivative, demographic, super-dull, and already moribund. Beyond Dracula, (and, in modern times, ‘Salem’s Lot), the seminal or breakout works remained largely unread (such as Lucius Shepard’s The Golden). Vampire enthusiasts would do well to exhume and rediscover Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, and Leslie Whitten’s Progeny of the Adder. Virtually 90% of the idiom of the modern, pop vampire story sprang or spun off from one, or both, of these fundamental novels.

  “It was distaste for such an adulterated cliche as vampirism that played a big part in the creation of the above-mentioned books. It is the ultimate challenge for a writer, confronting something so worn out: Transcend me if you can.

  “It is the over-saturation of vampire lore, and the trivialist’s lust to accumulate ever more of it, that is itself a new form of vampirism. The vampire hunter of ‘Unlife’ is a creature who feeds off your need to believe in vampires.”

  Initially written as a reaction against the genre, the following story fits very nicely into this particular themed anthology . . .

  I

  WHEN YOU STAKE A bloodsucker, the heartblood pumps out thick and black, the consistency of honey. I saw it make bubbles as it glurped out. The creature thrashed and squirmed and tried to pull out the stake – they always do, if you leave on their arms for the kill – but by the third whack it was, as Stoker might say, dispatched well and duly.

  I lost count a long time ago. Doesn’t matter. I no longer think of them as being even former human beings, and feel no anthropomorphic sympathy. In their eyes I see no tragedy, no romance, no seductive pulp appeal. Merely lust, rage at being outfoxed, and debased appetite, focused and sanguine.