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

by Stephen Jones

  He is poised above me, his face looking satanic in the dim light of the crypt beneath the house. He whirls a mallet while shriek after shriek disturbs the silence of this place. Dear Christ, the stake is against my breast!

  PAUL McAULEY

  Straight to Hell

  BEFORE HE BECAME a full-time writer, Paul McAuley worked as a research biologist in various universities, and for six years was a lecturer in botany at St Andrews University.

  His books include Whole Wide World, Four Hundred Billion Stars, Pasquale’s Angel, Fairyland, The Secret of Life and The Eye of the Tyger, the latter a Doctor Who novella from Telos. His acclaimed “The Book of Confluence” trilogy comprises Child of the River, Ancients of Days and Shrine of Stars, while his latest novel, White Devils, is a thriller set in a near-future Africa greatly changed by out-of-control biotechnology. A new short-story collection, Little Machines, is available from PS Publishing.

  The author has won the Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, John W. Campbell, Sidewise and British Fantasy awards for his novels and short stories.

  “Whenever I was ill and laid up in bed in my childhood, my grandmother (who lived next door) would bring me Lucozade and samples from her stacks of Reader’s Digest,” remembers McAuley. “In one of those I read an article about Rasputin. The trouble his murderers had in finishing him off (he proved to be almost as hard to kill as any cartoon character) stuck with me, and some time later turned into this story.”

  Twenty years after he last saw them, the writer still thinks that The Clash, from whom he borrowed the title for this symbiotic story, was one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands ever.

  THE BOTTLES CAME SAILING out of the roaring dark. One and then another and then too many to count. Beautiful for a moment as they tumbled lazily in the black air like so many spent rocket stages, catching glints and sparks of light from the spots as they fell towards us.

  Then the first shattered on the stage, a yard from where Vor slumped under the black puddle of his cloak, breathing loudly into his antique microphone, the one that looked like a miniature robot head. Glass splinters flying everywhere, and Vor too far gone to notice as more bottles fell, hitting Toad’s drum riser with percussive thumps, hitting everywhere amongst the cables that snaked across the stage, smashing against the speaker cabinets. One knocked a baby spot around, the light scything across upturned faces; another slammed into Davy’s keyboards and spun away into the wings. Davy’s ornamental arpeggios cut off as he stepped back, although the taped effects were still playing. I sidestepped a bottle, still strumming the lazy, circular riff we’d settled into when Vor had collapsed into his fugue a long five minutes ago, and felt a sharp bite in my calf where a shard cut through my leather jeans.

  The crowd’s blood was up, its roar like the ocean turning under a storm, and now more than bottles were flying through the air: plastic cups, programmes fluttering like wounded birds, shoes, a crutch. As if the crowd was tearing itself to bits in its fury. A cup heavy with greasy yellow liquid splashed at my feet: the sharp stink of piss.

  Someone darted past me – it was Koshchei, dodging as I swung the body of my guitar at him, smiling right at me for a moment, ropes of hair swinging around the pale blade of his face. He plucked a bottle from the air and hurled it back, then knelt over Vor and tenderly cradled him.

  I had stopped playing now; Toad had abandoned his riser.

  For a moment all you could hear was the sound of Vor’s wet, hoarse breathing, the birdsong on the tape loop, and the clatter and smash of breaking glass.

  Then the crowd’s roar rose up again as two bouncers came forward, big men bulging out of their T-shirts and jeans, hunched shyly under the barrage of noise and flying stuff, passes swinging from their necks as they got their hands under Vor’s shoulders and dragged him backwards, the heels of his boots bumping over cables. Koshchei scampered beside him, for all the world like a dog by its master.

  Davy stepped up to his mike, his black duster dripping beer, welder’s goggles gleaming blankly, and said, “Fuck you and goodnight.”

  I pulled the plug from my guitar and ran.

  Stockholm, 15 September 2001. The first and last gig of Liquid Television’s second European tour.

  It wasn’t the first time Vor had pulled shit like that. Even before he’d fallen under Koshchei’s spell, he’d played head games – with himself, with the crowd, with us. Turning away from the mike mid-song to watch us drive it home without him, arms folded and a little smile tucked into his face. Striding out at the opening of a concert and reading page after page of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, ignoring the crowd’s impatient heckling. Launching into a song only to suddenly bring it to a halt, starting another and stopping that too, as if searching for the perfect groove. Singing a chorus over and over until his voice gave out, then holding the mike out to the crowd and letting them take over. Davy and me, we put up with it, because although we’d brought the band together, this skinny little twenty-year-old kid, young enough to be my son, was the star.

  I never wanted to be anything other than a musician. I spent the seventies in a squat in Camden, the caretaker’s house of a disused school. I lived in one room with my guitar and a couple of reel-to-reel tape recorders, LPs in cardboard boxes, a bed made out of a couple of pallets. I was a sort of post-hippie hippie, doing a tab of acid every day, living on Mars bars and leftover fruit that I scrounged from the market. Drawing the dole, sometimes going down to Kent to make some easy cash apple– or hop-picking. And always playing, sometimes hooking up with one of the bands on the local pub circuit but mostly doing my own thing, using the two tape recorders to experiment with layering and splicing of sounds. In the mid-1980s I hooked up with Davy, a public-school drop-out and electronics genius whose best mate had started a record label, XYZ. Davy was tall, blond, and intensely serious, a perfect foil to my nervous unfocused energy. We made trance music before anyone knew what it was (we didn’t know either – we thought we were a kind of Fripp and Eno deal). We sold enough twelve-inch mixes to DJs to make a living, even had a minor chart hit, its riff lifted from the opening of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2. XYZ grew too fast, developed cash-flow problems and folded; Davy and I started our own label and set up a studio where we recorded our own stuff and mixed and re-mixed tracks for other people. We were famous in our own circle, but never hit it big until one day this scroungey kid who’d been hanging around the studio dumped a sheaf of papers on the mixing desk and said he’d just written twenty songs and we should quit fucking around and make him a star.

  That was Vor. That was two years ago.

  He got what he wanted in six months. Then he met Koshchei, and now he was tearing everything down.

  I don’t even remember when Koshchei appeared on the scene. Somewhere during our first European tour, between Berlin and Kiev. Vor always had people hanging around him, a gang within the gang that was our band. Davy and I tolerated it, but the heavy partying and the heavy-duty drugs were beginning to affect Vor’s performance. We were scheduled to record the crucial second album as soon as the tour ended, and as yet Vor had no new songs.

  “They’ll come,” Vor would say, whenever Davy pressed him. “They’ll come when I’m ready for them.” Once, he said, with the shy smile that girls fell for, “They’re all around us. You can just pluck them out of the air, once you know how.”

  My first memory of Koshchei is of seeing him talk with the army captain in charge of a border crossing. Our two coaches and three pantechnicons head-to-tail on a steep mountain road with pines crowding the slope above them, concrete blockhouses beside the toll gates, everyone standing in the road, shivering in the fresh cold wind and thinking about all the illegal shit stashed in their belongings, watching the very young and very nervous soldiers armed with machine guns walk up and down. And this tall man in a fur coat, greasy ropes of hair tumbling down his back, drawing the army captain aside, talking to him in a low soothing voice. Koshchei and the captain talking for about two mi
nutes, then Koshchei coming over to the tour manager, who was standing with Davy and me, and saying that all was fine, we could go through, nothing to pay, no inspection.

  “I know that man’s family of old,” Koshchei said. His smile was as quick and sharp as an assassin’s knife.

  He looked about forty then. At other times he looked twice that; at others, he could have been Vor’s younger brother. He was even taller than Davy, wire-thin but immensely strong, his skin like paper, very white and coarsely textured, his eyes blue, with veins like little red ropes, his nose hooked. Although he doused himself in perfume, his personal odour was strong: spoiled butter, foul mud, fresh meat. I smelt it then, tainting the clean mountain air.

  After the border incident, I started to notice that Koshchei was always close to Vor. He was in Vor’s dressing room before gigs, stood in the shadows at the side of the stage and hustled away with him while the last chords of the last encore hung in the air; stood beside him at parties, stooping down to whisper something in our singer’s ear, or performing some conjuring trick for the amusement of Vor and his entourage. Card tricks, mind-reading stunts – Koshchei was good at them, and ate pebbles and light bulbs too, crunching the glass and letting people see the fragments on his red tongue before he swallowed them.

  Vor looked like hell. He was mixing coke and ‘hides and, I think, experimenting with heroin. And he was drinking heavily too, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s a day plus swigs from whatever the people around him were drinking. We bought a case of foul plum brandy in Albania; Vor got through it in a week. On stage he was still on fire, burning with messianic fervour.

  Off stage he looked drawn and weary, and he often fell asleep in some corner, Koshchei covering him with a fur wrap and tenderly rubbing his wrists.

  Towards the end of the tour, I learned from Normal Norman, one of Vor’s entourage, that Vor had given up snorting coke and heroin, was into this stuff Koshchei made. “Really thick and evil-smelling, like bad yogurt. Vor says it takes him to very strange places,” Normal Norman said, adjusting his thick glasses with a forefinger, “but I wouldn’t know where, because Koshchei doesn’t give it up for anyone but Vor.”

  Whatever it was, it didn’t stop Vor drinking, and he still looked terrible. He had a flare-up of acne, and permanent circles inked under his eyes, which he disguised with make-up before going on stage. He was throwing up a lot, too, blaming bad food and refusing all offers of medical attention, saying stubbornly that Koshchei was taking care of him.

  One time, in Bucharest, a roadie went into the backstage bathroom and saw Vor kneeling in front of Koshchei, who was pissing in his mouth.

  “It really creeps me out,” Davy said, after he had told me about it.

  “Different strokes,” I said, although I didn’t like it either.

  “If it was a sex thing I wouldn’t mind so much,” Davy said.

  “Maybe that’s all it is. An S&M deal.”

  “It’s more than that,” Davy said.

  I shrugged. Although Davy was terrific with any kind of electronic gear and drove his mixing desk with a subtle yet alert touch, he didn’t know shit about people. But just this once he was right.

  Koshchei was still with us when we finished the tour and went straight into the studios with no idea of what we were going to do. That didn’t worry us too much – Davy and I had been working together a long time, and we had a deep box of tricks to draw on. But while we developed a couple of basic tracks by noodling about, adding this, taking away that, Vor either nodded out on one of the couches of the control booth, with Koshchei beside him, or didn’t turn up at all. We racked up a couple of weeks of studio time and spent about a hundred thousand pounds, and still didn’t have a single lyric or hook from Vor, and that was when we went around to his house and told him to get his shit together, taking turns to talk while Vor looked at us with a kind of dazed bafflement.

  We were in the cavernous master bedroom, and Vor was stretched out under the canopy of his eighteenth-century four-poster, which he’d bought because Mozart was supposed have slept in it. He was bare-chested, and his thin white frame was marked with livid scratches and the knots of old cigarette burns. Someone was asleep under the heavy red velvet throw, curled up so that only a cap of dirty blond hair showed. Candles burned in front of mirrors, a glass half-full of thick white liquid stood on the bedside table, and there was a stack of dirty plates on the Turkestan carpet.

  “He is able to do what you want,” Koshchei said, when we had run out of breath. “More than that, you will be amazed by what he does.”

  “This is business,” Davy said sharply. He was exasperated by Vor’s dumb stoner act. “You keep out of it.”

  “This boy is my business,” Koshchei said. “I cannot keep out of it.”

  “Fuck you,” Davy said, and made to grab Koshchei’s wrist.

  It was three in the morning. The air was grainy and stale, and I had a headache from too much dope and nicotine and coffee, so maybe I only thought that I saw Davy’s hand pass right through the sleeve of Koshchei’s fur coat. Maybe he misjudged his reach, or maybe the man leaned back. That’s what I thought then.

  Davy swore, and shook his hand as if it had been burned. Vor giggled, and said, “He’s with me. I need him. You leave him alone.”

  “You need to get to work,” Davy said.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready to go down that road.”

  “You are ready,” Koshchei said.

  Davy ignored this, and said to Vor, “What happened to just plucking them out of the air?”

  Vor said quietly, “The stuff I did before isn’t even bad. It’s trivial. It’s nothing. I want to go deeper than that. I know I can go deeper, but it’s scary. Worse than scary.”

  Koshchei said, “You have it in you to do great things, Clint.”

  Clint was Vor’s real name: Clint Kelly. A half-Irish kid who’d grown up ragged and strange amongst the tower blocks of Hackney, a naive genius who’d taken his stage name from some old sci-fi novel.

  The boy looked at me, looked at Davy. He said, “You don’t know what you’re asking. Give me time.”

  “We have to get the album out before September,” Davy said. “That’s when the next tour starts, and we don’t even have a single track yet.”

  I said, “Maybe you should go away for a week. Rest up somewhere warm, away from all the pressure. Then come back and get started.”

  Vor laughed. “You don’t get it. It isn’t the contract. It isn’t the fucking rock-star thing. It’s in here,” he said, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “It’s in here. I want to go deeper than anyone ever has. I’m on the brink. I can feel it. But I can’t let go.”

  Koshchei said, “But you want to. I know that you do.”

  Vor looked at Koshchei, and something passed between them. He said, “Yes. Yes, I want it so much. But I’m so afraid.”

  “I will be with you,” Koshchei said, with such tenderness and such hunger that I shivered.

  Davy took off his glasses and knuckled his eyes and said, “Does this mean that we’re going to get to work?”

  Koshchei stood, very tall and very thin inside his black floor-length fur coat. His eyes seemed full of blood. “Leave now. He does not need you. I will help him. We will give you what you want.”

  Vor took his hands away from his eyes and looked up at Koshchei, and for the first time he seemed truly frightened of his strange friend.

  Vor was away for five days. He did not come to the studio; he was not at his house. He vanished. Davy was ready to cancel everything, convinced that Vor had run away, when the boy came into the studio and dumped a DAT cassette and a folder full of paper on the mixing desk. He was wide awake for the first time in months, very engaged and very serious, hovering at our shoulders while Davy and I read through the lyrics and listened to the voice guides that he’d laid down over a basic keyboard accompaniment. “Test Meat.” “Throw Me in the Fire.” “Nest of Salt.” “Spook Speak.” You kno
w them all.

  “I want a heavy beat,” Vor said. “Something very fundamental, like the heartbeat of the world.”

  We got to work. Vor was on fire, roaring and wailing those extraordinary lyrics into his favourite antique microphone as if the studio was a stage in front of an audience of millions. He hardly ate, drank only a kind of tea that Koshchei made from aromatic bark, yet he exhausted us as he listened to the mixes over and over, making intense and detailed criticisms and suggestions as we layered drums and keyboards, guitar and orchestral and ambient effects. We did forty takes of the basic rhythm track for “King of Illiterature”, so many versions of “Close as Cancer” that even Davy lost count.

  And Koshchei was always there, watching Vor with an avid tenderness as the boy went deeper than did ever plummet sound.

  I ran straight through the backstage maze into a limo. I still had my guitar; its head bumped the roof every time the limo hit a pothole. I got to the hotel inside ten minutes and went up to the floor where we had our suites. Davy was already there, sucking on a Beck’s as he paced up and down outside Vor’s suite, stopping every third or fourth pass to slam the flat of his palm against the door. Dressed like me in a long black duster coat, leather jeans, leather vest, silver boots, his hair dyed white. It was our patent space-cowboy look.

  He saw me and thumped the door and yelled, “Come out, you fucker!”

  “Is he in there?”

  “He’s in there.”

  “And—”

  “He’s in there too, the piece of shit. Christ, he must have slipped Vor something bad this time.”

  “Vor didn’t ever need anyone to find bad shit.”

  Davy looked at me. He was still pumped up from the gig, his hair soaked in sweat, his eyes wide and staring. He said, “He was on another planet, man. He couldn’t even speak.”

  Roy Menthorn, our manager, came out of the adjoining suite – mine, as it happened. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie at half-mast. He saw us and said, “The promoter is going to sue us,” and might have said more, but then his cellphone rang and he disappeared back into the suite.