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

by Stephen Jones

  He won the 1988 British Fantasy Award for his story ‘Leaks’, and his collection entitled Ombres sur la Route appeared in France several years ago. More recent collections have included the career-spanning City Fishing from Silver Salamander Press, which won The International Horror Guild Award, and The Far Side of the Lake from Ash-Tree Press. A chapbook entitled The Man on the Ceiling, written with Melanie and published by American Fantasy won both the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy awards, and his novella In These Final Days of Sales from Wormhole Books picked up another Bram Stoker Award.

  The author’s latest collaboration with his wife is the high-fantasy novel Daughters, and an experimental fantasy novel entitled The Book of Days recently appeared as a limited edition from Subterranean Press.

  “‘Vintage Domestic’ came out of my desire to put a familial face on the vampire legend,” Tem reveals. “As an icon, the vampire is a glamorous figure. Those of us who are members of large families understand all too well how the nitty-gritty of everyday family relationships puts a spike to glamour.”

  The powerful story that follows is another that was originally written for this anthology . . .

  SHE USED TO TELL him that they’d have the house forever. One day their children would live there. When Jack grew too old to walk, or to feed himself, she would take care of him in this house. She would feed him right from her own mouth, with a kiss. He’d always counted on her keeping this promise.

  But as her condition worsened, as the changes accelerated, he realized that this was a promise she could not keep. The roles were to be reversed, and it was to be he who fed his lifetime lover with a kiss full of raw meat and blood. Sweet, domestic vintage.

  Early in their marriage his wife had told him that there was this history of depression in her family. That’s the way members of the family always talked about it: the sadness, the melancholy, the long slow condition. Before he understood what this meant he hadn’t taken it that seriously, because at the time she never seemed depressed. Once their two oldest reached the teen years, however, she became sad, and slow to move, her eyes dark stones in the clay mask of her face, and she stopped telling him about her family’s history of depression. When he asked her about the old story, she acted as if she didn’t know what he was talking about.

  At some point during her rapid deterioration someone had labeled his family “possibly dysfunctional.” Follow-up visits from teachers and social workers had removed “possibly” from his family’s thickening file. Studies and follow-up studies had been completed, detailed reports and addenda analyzing his children’s behavior and the family dynamics. He had fought them all the way, and perhaps they had tired of the issue, because they finally gave up on their investigations. His family had weathered their accusations. He had protected his wife and children, fulfilled his obligations. Finally people left them alone, but they could not see that something sacred was occurring in this house.

  The house grew old quickly. But not as quickly as his wife and children.

  “You’re so damned cheerful all the time,” she said to him. “It makes me sick.”

  At one time that might have been a joke. Looking into her gray eyes at this moment, he knew it was not. “I’m maintaining,” he said. “That’s all.” He thought maybe her vision was failing her. He was sure it had been months since he’d last smiled. He bent over her with the tea, then passed her a cracker. She stretched her neck and tried to catch his lips in her teeth. He expected a laugh but it didn’t come.

  “You love me?” she asked, her voice flat and dusty. He put the cracker in his mouth and let her take it from his lips. He could hear his teenage daughters in the next room moaning from the bed. They’d been there two months already, maybe more.

  She reached up with a brittle touch across his cheek. “They take after me, you know?” And then she did smile, then opened her mouth around a dry cough of a laugh.

  Downstairs their seven-year-old son made loud motorcycle noises with moist lips and tongue. Thank God he takes after his father, he thought, and would have laughed if he could. Beneath him his sweet wife moaned, her lips cracked and peeling. A white tongue flickered like the corner of a starched handkerchief.

  He bit down hard into the tender scar on the inside of his mouth. He ground one tooth, two, through the tentative pain. When he tasted salt he began to suck, mixing the salt and iron taste with a saliva that had become remarkable in its quantity, until the frothy red cocktail was formed.

  He bent over her lips with this beverage kiss and allowed her tongue to meet his, her razor teeth still held back in supplication. In this way he fed her when she could no longer feed herself, when she could not move, when she could not hunt, when in their house tall curtains of dust floated gently around them.

  “The girls,” she said, once her handkerchief tongue was soaked and her pale lips glistened pinkly.

  But still he could not go into his daughters’ bedroom, and had to listen to them moan their hunger like pale and hairless, motherless rats.

  “Tell me again, Jack,” his wife whispered wetly from the bed. “Tell me again how wonderful life is.” These were among the last words she would ever use with him.

  The young man at the front door wore the blue uniform of the delivery service. Overripe brown sacks filled each of his arms, blending into his fat cheeks as if part of them. He smiled all the time. Jack smiled a hungry smile back.

  “Your groceries, sir.” Behind him were the stirrings of dry skin against cloth, insect legs, pleadings too starved and faint to be heard clearly.

  As the young man handed the sacks over to him, Jack’s fingertips brushed the pale backs of the man’s hands. He imagined he could feel the heat there, the youthful coursing through veins, feeding pale tissues, warming otherwise cold meat.

  Sometimes he took his daughters hunting, if they were strong enough, but so far he had been able to limit them to slugs, worms, insects, small animals. He wondered how long he could hold them to that when the stores kept sending them tender young delivery boys. He wondered how long it would be before his daughters were as immobile as his wife, and begged him to bring them something more. Somewhere behind him there was a tiny gasp, the rising pressure of tears which could not fall.

  Some evenings he would sit up talking to his family long into the night. They did not always respond precisely to his confessions of loneliness, of dreams which did not include them, and he wondered if it was because of the doors that separated them from him.

  Sometimes he would go to the closet doors and open them. Where his wife stood, folded back against the wall with the coats and robes. Where his daughters leaned one against the other like ancient, lesbian mops. Kiss us, the dry whisper came from somewhere within the pale flaps of their faces. Jack still loved them desperately, but he could not do what they asked.

  His youngest, his only son, had taken to his bed.

  Jack brought his daughters mice and roaches he had killed himself. They sucked on them like sugar candy until most of the color was gone, and then they spat them out.

  Months ago they had stopped having their periods. The last few times had been pale pink and runny. and Jack had cried for them, then cleaned them up with old burlap sacks.

  His son disappeared from his bed one evening. Jack found him standing in the closet, his eyes full of moths, his hands stiffened into hooks.

  Later his son would disappear from time to time, sometimes showing up in one of the other closets, clutching at mother or sisters, sometimes curled up inside the empty toy box (the boy had no more use for toys, having his own body to play with – sometimes he’d chew a finger into odd shapes).

  Jack continued to feed his wife from his own mouth. Sometimes his mouth was so raw he could not tear any more skin off the insides. Then he’d bite through a rat or a bird himself, holding its rank warmth in his cheeks until he could deliver the meal. She returned his kisses greedily, always wanting more than he could provide. But he had spoiled her. She would not feed any
other way.

  His son became a good hunter, and sometimes Jack would hear him feeding on the other side of the closet door. Pets began disappearing from the neighborhood, and Jack stopped answering the door even for delivery boys.

  His daughters became despondent and refused to eat. When he opened their closet door they tried to disguise themselves as abandoned brooms. Finally Jack had to hold them one at a time, forcing his blood smeared tongue past their splintered lips into the dry cisterns of their mouths so that they might leech nourishment. Once he’d overcome their initial resistance they scraped his tongue clean, then threatened to carve it down to the root, but Jack always knew the exact moment to pull out.

  Sometimes he wondered if they still considered him a good father, an adequate husband. He tried singing his children lullabies, reciting poetry to his wife. They nodded their full heads of dust in the gale of his breath, but said nothing.

  When the food delivery boys no longer came he saved a portion of his kills for himself. And whenever possible he swallowed his own bloody wet kisses, and tried to remember the feel of his wife’s hands on his face, back when her skin was soft and her breath was sweet.

  In the houses around him, he knew a hundred hearts beat, desperately chasing life’s apprehensions through a racecourse of veins. He tried to ignore the hunger brought on by such thinking. He tried to picture his neighbors’ faces, but could not.

  His family became so light he could carry them about the house without effort. If he hadn’t heard their close whispers, he might have thought them a few old towels thrown across his shoulder. Sometimes he would set them down and forget them, later rushing around in panic to find where they’d been mislaid.

  The lighter, the thinner they became, the more blood they seemed to require. When his mouth became too sore to chew he would apply razor blades to the scar tissue, slicing through new white skin into the thicker layers beneath, finally into muscle so that the blood would fill his mouth to spilling before he could get his mouth completely over theirs. Blood stained their thin chests with a rough crimson bib.

  And still they grew thinner, their bones growing fibrous, pulpy before beginning to dissolve altogether. He made long rips in his forearms, his thighs, his calves, and held his wife and children up to drink there. The blood soaked through the tissues of their flesh, through the translucent fibres of their hair, washing through their skin until in the dusty shadows of the house they looked vaguely tanned.

  But almost as quickly they were pale again, and thin as a distant memory.

  He took to slicing off hunks of thigh muscle, severing fingertips, toes. His family ate for months off the bloody bits, their small rat teeth nibbling listlessly. They had ceased using words of any kind long ago, so they could not express their thanks. But Jack didn’t mind. This was the family he’d always dreamed of. The look of appreciation in their colorless eyes was thanks enough.

  At first he tore his clothes to rags to staunch the blood, but even the rags eventually fell apart. One day seeing his son sucking up the last bit of red from a torn twist of cloth he decided to forego the last vestiges of his modesty and throw the ragged clothes away. After that time he would walk about the dreary old house naked, wearing only the paperthin bodies of his family wrapped around him, their mouths fixed tightly to his oozing wounds.

  This went on for months, wearing his family constantly, their feeding so regular and persistent it seemed to alter the very rhythm of his heart. He would wake up in the middle of the night to the soft sucking noise their lips and teeth made against his flesh. He would awaken a few hours later and the first thing he would see was the stupored look in their eyes as they gazed up at him in adoration. He was pleased to see that such constant nourishment fattened them and brought color to their skin so that eventually they fell off his body from the sheer weight of them.

  Wriggling about his feet at first, they eventually decided to explore the house on their own. Obviously, they felt far healthier than before.

  Again they did not thank him, but what did a good husband and father need of thanks?

  They soon grew thin again, soft, transparent.

  After a year he had not seen them again. Although occasionally he might swear to a face hidden within the upholstery, an eye rolling past a furniture leg, a dry mouth praying silently among the house plants filmed in a dark, furry dust.

  After five years even the garbled whispering had stopped. He continued to watch over the house, intent on his obligation. And after preparing a blood kiss in the pale vacancy of his mouth, he was content to drink it himself.

  HARLAN ELLISON

  Try a Dull Knife

  IN A CAREER THAT HAS spanned nearly fifty years, Harlan Ellison has won more awards for imaginative literature than any other living writer, including the Hugo, Nebula, Edgar, Writers Guild of America, Silver Pen, British Fantasy, Bram Stoker and World Fantasy. He has also received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the World Fantasy Convention and the Horror Writers Association.

  He is the author or editor of more than seventy-five books and has written around 2,000 short stories, comic books, essays, articles and newspaper columns, plus two dozen teleplays and a dozen screen-plays. The Washington Post has described him as “one of the great living American short-story writers.”

  He made his professional debut in a 1956 edition of Infinity Science Fiction, since when he has published numerous acclaimed novels and such short-story collections as Deathbird Stories, Strange Wine, Shatter-day, Stalking the Nightmare, Angry Candy, Slippage and the Edgeworks series. He also edited the landmark science fiction anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions.

  Ellison is currently completing the editing of a collection of The Thinking Machine, detective stories by the late Jacques Futrelle, for The Modern Library. His own collection Strange Wine will be reissued (including a brand-new story, “The Final Experiment of the Son of Dr Moreau”) under the author’s own imprint, Edgeworks Abbey, in collaboration with i-books. From the same publishers, Vic and Blood: The Continuing Adventures of A Boy and His Dog recently appeared as a graphic novel, containing Ellison’s post-apocalyptic short stories with illustrations by Richard Corben.

  “Horror, as an identifiable sub-genre of literature, has been around at least since 1764 and The Castle of Otranto,” the author explains, “notwithstanding that I like to think the first manifestation of it was in the earliest written record, the recounting of Gilgamesh cutting trail with Grendel, which has been the high-water mark for mind-numbing horror until Britney Spears came along.

  “Neither here nor there. The point being: almost every single one of the common tropes in the horror canon has been written and rewritten, chewed and remasticated until they come festooned with familiarity and literary exhaustion. For me, the idea of the hoary cobwebbed vampire – sexually explicit or neutered – and the standard neck-suck, hold about as much scintillance as a plate of lima beans. (Speaking of horror. You show me someone who’ll eat a lima bean without a cocked gun to his head, and I’ll show you a child-molester, serial killer, or politician.)

  “So I cannot bring myself to waste any fragment of what’s left of my life, nor any smallest spark of my enormous talent, leavened only by my charming humility, writing a horror story that farts-again the tune told brilliantly by Stoker, Charnas, Matheson and the author of the screenplay for Love at First Bite.

  “One day thirty or so years ago, I got an idea, though. It was during that brief, six-month interregnum when the madness of working in the film industry took me, and I ‘went Hollywood’. I was surrounded by mooks, leaners, losers, schnorrers, leeches, time-wasters, blue-sky merchants, and scam artists of four or five sexual predilections. Having been a kid who was on the road at age thirteen, I was able to dog-paddle through them polluted waters, and came to landfall none the worse for having been assailed by human limpet mines. Left only with the idea for this story, which is – I hope – a new way of dealing with the neck-suck.

  �
�Here is vampirism, though now thirty years’ published, which nonetheless codifies the dossier of this rampant creature in all our lives. I had ’em; you got ’em; here’s what they look like.”

  As you would expect from Harlan Ellison, the story that follows is about a very different kind of vampire . . .

  IT WAS pachanga night at The Cave. Three spick bands all going at once, each with a fat momma shaking her meat and screaming Vaya! The sound was something visible, an assault in silver lame and screamhorn. Sound hung dense as smog-cloud, redolent as skunk-scent from a thousand roaches of the best shit, no stems or seeds. Darkness shot through with the quicksilver flashes of mouths open to show gold bridgework and dirty words. Eddie Burma staggered in, leaned against a wall and felt the sickness as thick as cotton wool in his throat.

  The deep scar-burn of pain was bleeding slowly down his right side. The blood had started coagulating, his shirt stuck to his flesh, but he dug it: it wasn’t pumping any more. But he was in trouble, that was the righteous truth. Nobody can get cut the way Eddie Burma’d been cut and not be in deep trouble.

  And somewhere back out there, in the night, they were moving toward him, coming for him. He had to get through to – who? Somebody. Somebody who could help him; because only now, after fifteen years of what had been happening to him, did Eddie Burma finally know what it was he had been through, what had been done to him . . . what was being done to him . . . what they would certainly do to him.

  He stumbled down the short flight of steps into The Cave and was instantly lost in the smoke and smell and twisting shadows. Ethnic smoke, Puerto Rican smells, lush shadows from another land. He dug it; even with his strength ebbing, he dug it.

  That was Eddie Burma’s problem. He was an empath. He felt. Deep inside himself, on a level most people never even know exists, he felt for the world. Involvement was what motivated him. Even here, in this slum nightclub where intensity of enjoyment substituted for the shallow glamour and gaucherie of the uptown boîtes, here where no one knew him and therefore could not harm him, he felt the pulse of the world’s life surging through him. And the blood started pumping again.