Some of them weren’t just blue from the water. Some were painted that way. Some of them had bands of black painted across their eyes and their toothy mouths.
Just as she had.
Blue. Blue paint, paint so good, so durable, it was saved for the gods.
Blue for sacrifice.
Blue for eternity.
The tour guide mopped sweat from his forehead with a red handkerchief. “As late as five hundred years ago,” he said, and some of the tourists listened, and some just took pictures, the way it always was, “this was a holy place for my ancestors. A place of sacrifice. We’ll never know how many young people were thrown down here.” He leaned a hand on the wooden guardrail. “You’ve got to imagine what it was like, before we put these stairs in. A lot harder getting back up without them, hey?”
Some of them laughed. He didn’t care anymore if they liked his patter or not, except when they did he got bigger tips. He’d told the same joke every day for nearly six years.
“It was drought that ended the Mayan empire, you know? Not the Spaniards. Not aliens from space. They lived in these cities, all crowded like Mexico City is today, and they relied on the cornfields for food. When the rain didn’t come, they starved. They didn’t know why, of course. They thought their rain god was angry with them. So they threw their children down here. Divers have gone down in that water and they found at least forty-seven sets of bones. What’s that?”
One of the tourists had asked a question. “Did it work?”
They all laughed, this time.
“Well, if it had, we’d still be doing it, yeah?” Another laugh. The tour guide turned and started up again. Way too many steps. “Come on, let’s let them sleep in peace, okay? No, I can’t let anybody go swimming down here. You see that blue? It would stain your clothes, that’s why. Our next stop is the famous pyramid. Yes, yes, you can take all the pictures you like.”
One by one they filed out, up the long wooden stairway to the surface. It was the last tour group of the day. Already shadows were stretching down the cenote’s wall, moving toward the blue water.
And when that darkness filled the cenote, the little sparks showed. The little sparks at the bottom of eye sockets long since eaten clean by fish. Little sparks of blue.
Please, she croaked.
Please.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Enormous thanks to each of the contributors to this volume for bringing me their sharpest edges and darkest corners. Thanks to the entire Gallery Books team, especially to our maestro, Ed Schlesinger, and to my excellent agent, Howard Morhaim. Finally, nothing good is possible without the support of my wife, Connie, who doesn’t love the monsters herself, but who loves me . . . and that’s enough.
—Christopher Golden
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST is the author of Let the Right One In, Handling the Undead, and Little Star. Let the Right One In has been made into two critically acclaimed films. The Swedish film won top honors at sixteen film festivals around the globe. The American remake of the Swedish movie, titled Let Me In, received rave reviews. Stephen King called the film “a genre-busting triumph. Not just a horror film, but the best American horror film in the last twenty years.”
KELLEY ARMSTRONG is the author of the Cainsville modern gothic series and the Age of Legends YA fantasy trilogy. Past works include the Otherworld urban fantasy series, the Darkest Powers & Darkness Rising teen paranormal trilogies, and the Nadia Stafford crime trilogy. She also co-writes the Blackwell Pages middle-grade fantasy trilogy as K. L. Armstrong with M. A. Marr. Armstrong lives in southwestern Ontario with her family.
LAIRD BARRON is the author of several books, including The Croning, Occultation, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in upstate New York.
LYNDA BARRY has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher. She is the creator behind Ernie Pook’s Comeek, the seminal comic strip that was syndicated across North America in alternative weeklies for two decades. She is the author of more than twenty books, including The Freddie Stories, One! Hundred! Demons!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, and The Good Times Are Killing Me, which was adapted as an off-Broadway play. Her graphic novel What It Is won the comics industry’s 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. She lives in Wisconsin, where she teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
GARY A. BRAUNBECK is a seven-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author who writes mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mainstream literature. He is the author of twenty-four books, and his fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, and German. Nearly 250 of his short stories have appeared in various professional publications. His fiction has received numerous awards, including multiple Bram Stoker Awards, a Black Quill Award, three Shocklines “Shocker” Awards, and the International Horror Guild Award, and has also been nominated for the World Fantasy Award.
DANA CAMERON can’t help mixing in a little history into her fiction. Drawing from her expertise in archaeology, Dana’s work (including traditional mystery, noir, urban fantasy, historical fiction, and thrillers) has won multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards and earned an Edgar Award nomination. Her third Fangborn novel, Hellbender, will be published in March 2015 by 47North. Her most recent Fangborn short story is a Sherlockian pastiche, “The Curious Case of Miss Amelia Vernet.” Her story “The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars,” featuring Pam Ravenscroft from Charlaine Harris’s acclaimed Sookie Stackhouse mysteries, appears in Dead But Not Forgotten: Stories from the World of Sookie Stackhouse. Visit her at www.danacameron.com.
DAN CHAON’s most recent book is the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize. Other works include the national bestseller Await Your Reply and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, as well as the Shirley Jackson Award, and he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.
CHARLAINE HARRIS, a native of the Mississippi Delta, has lived her whole life in various Southern states. Her first book, a mystery, was published in 1981. After that promising debut, her career meandered along until the success of the Sookie Stackhouse novels. Now all her books are in print, and she is a very happy camper. She is married and has three children.
BRIAN KEENE is the author of more than forty books, mostly in the horror, crime, and dark fantasy genres. His 2003 novel, The Rising, is often credited (along with Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later film) with inspiring pop culture’s current interest in zombies. Keene’s novels have been translated into German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, French, Taiwanese, and many more languages. Several of Keene’s novels have been developed for film, including Ghoul, The Ties That Bind, and Fast Zombies Suck.
SHERRILYN KENYON is a New York Times and international bestselling author, and a regular at the #1 spot. Since 2004, she had placed more than seventy novels on the New York Times bestseller list in all formats, including manga and graphic novels. Her current series are Dark-Hunter, Chronicles of Nick, and The League, and her books are available in over one hundred countries. Her Chronicles of Nick and Dark-Hunter series are soon to be major motion pictures, while Dark-Hunter is also being developed as a television series.
MICHAEL KORYTA is the New York Times bestselling author of ten suspense novels. His work has been praised by such writers as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Dennis Lehane, among many others, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. His books have won or been nominated for prizes such as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Edgar Award, Shamus Award, Barry Award, Q
uill Award, International Thriller Writers Award, and the Golden Dagger.
JOHN LANGAN is the author of two collections, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus; 2013) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime; 2008), and a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade; 2009). With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime; 2011). His next collection, Sefira and Other Betrayals, is forthcoming in 2015. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and younger son.
TIM LEBBON is a New York Times bestselling writer with more than thirty novels published to date, as well as dozens of novellas and hundreds of short stories. Recent releases include The Silence, Coldbrook, Into the Void: Dawn of the Jedi (Star Wars), Reaper’s Legacy, and Alien: Out of the Shadows. Forthcoming novels include the thriller The Hunt from Avon, and Titan will be publishing The Rage War trilogy and also the Relics trilogy over the next few years. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and been shortlisted for World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards. A movie of his story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, will be released soon, and other projects in development include My Haunted House, Playtime (with Stephen Volk), and Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark). Find out more at www.timlebbon.net.
SEANAN McGUIRE is the author of more than a dozen novels, under both her own name and the pseudonym Mira Grant. She won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and can generally be found either skulking around cornfields or heading for the nearest Disney Park. Seanan lives in California with her collection of Maine Coon cats and creepy dolls; keep up with her at www.seananmcguire.com.
JOE McKINNEY has been a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a homicide detective, a disaster mitigation specialist, a patrol commander, and a successful novelist. His books include the four-part Dead World series, Quarantined, Inheritance, The Savage Dead, St. Rage, Crooked House, and Dodging Bullets. His short fiction has been collected in The Red Empire and Other Stories, Speculations, and Dead World Resurrection: The Complete Zombie Short Stories of Joe McKinney. His latest works include the YA werewolf thriller Dog Days, set in the summer of 1983, and Plague of the Undead: Book One in the Deadlands Saga. McKinney’s novels have twice been honored with the Bram Stoker Award. For more information, go to joemckinney.wordpress.com.
LEIGH PERRY is Toni L.P. in disguise, or perhaps vice versa. As Leigh, she writes the Family Skeleton mysteries. The Skeleton Haunts a House, the third, is due out in Fall 2015. As Toni, she is the author of three Where Are They Now? mysteries and eight novels in the Laura Fleming series; an Agatha Award winner and multiple award nominee for short fiction; and the co-editor of urban fantasy anthologies with Charlaine Harris. Leigh and/or Toni lives just north of Boston with her husband, fellow author Stephen P. Kelner, their two daughters, two guinea pigs, and many, many books.
ROBERT SHEARMAN has written five short story collections, and collectively they have won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers’ Prize, and three British Fantasy Awards. He began his career in theater, both as a playwright and director, and his work has won the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the Sophie Winter Memorial Trust Award, and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. His interactive series for BBC Radio Four, The Chain Gang, ran for three seasons and won two Sony Awards. However, he may be best known as a writer for Doctor Who, reintroducing the Daleks for its BAFTA-winning first series in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award.
SCOTT SMITH is the author of two novels, A Simple Plan and The Ruins.
LUCY A. SNYDER is the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess, and the collections Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her latest books are Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide and Soft Apocalypses. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Jamais Vu, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Steampunk World, In the Court of the Yellow King, Qualia Nous, Chiral Mad 2, and Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 5. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband and occasional co-author, Gary A. Braunbeck, and is a mentor in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter: @LucyASnyder.
DAVID WELLINGTON is the author of seventeen novels, which have appeared around the world in eight languages. His horror series include Monster Island, 13 Bullets, and Frostbite. His thriller series starring Afghanistan war veteran Jim Chapel includes Chimera and The Hydra Protocol. In 2015, he will publish Positive, a zombie epic about rebuilding the world after an apocalypse. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
RIO YOUERS is the British Fantasy Award–nominated author of End Times and Old Man Scratch. His short fiction has appeared in many notable anthologies, and his previous novel, Westlake Soul, was nominated for Canada’s prestigious Sunburst Award. Rio lives in southwestern Ontario with his wife, Emily, and their children, Lily and Charlie.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN is the #1 New York Times bestselling and Bram Stoker Award–winning author of such novels as Snowblind, Tin Men, Of Saints and Shadows, and The Boys Are Back in Town. His novel with Mike Mignola, Baltimore; or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, was the launching pad for the Eisner Award–nominated comic book series Baltimore. As an editor, he has compiled the short story anthologies The New Dead, The Monster’s Corner, and Dark Duets, among others, and has also written and co-written numerous comic books, video games, and screenplays. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in more than fourteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com.
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Gallery Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors’ imaginations, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Compilation copyright © 2015 by Daring Greatly Corporation, Inc.
“Reclaiming the Shadows: An Introduction” copyright © 2015 by Christopher Golden
“Up in Old Vermont” copyright © 2015 by Scott B. Smith, Inc.
“Something Lost, Something Gained” copyright © 2015 by Seanan McGuire
“On the Dark Side of Sunlight Basin” copyright © 2015 by Michael Koryta
“The Neighbors” copyright © 2015 by Sherrilyn Kenyon
“Paper Cuts” copyright © 2015 by Gary A. Braunbeck
“Miss Fondevant” copyright © 2015 by Charlaine Harris
“In a Cavern, in a Canyon” copyright © 2015 by Laird Barron
“Whiskey and Light” copyright © 2015 by Dana Cameron
“We Are All Monsters Here” copyright © 2015 by Kelley Armstrong
“May the End Be Good” copyright © 2015 by Tim Lebbon
“Mrs. Popkin” copyright © 2015 by Dan Chaon and Lynda Barry
“Direct Report” copyright © 2015 by Leigh Perry
“Shadow and Thirst” copyright © 2015 by John Langan
“Mother” copyright © 2015 by Joe McKinney
“Blood” copyright © 2015 by Robert Shearman
“The Yellow Death” copyright © 2015 by Lucy A. Snyder
“The Last Supper” copyright © 2015 by Brian Keene
“Separator” copyright © 2015 by Rio Youers
“What Kept You So Long?” copyright © 2015 by John Ajvide Lindqvist
“Blue Hell” copyright © 2015 by David Wellington
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Gallery Books trade paperback edition October 2015
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Interior design by Jaime Putorti
Cover design by Richard Yoo
Cover image © Cevdet Gökhan Palas
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Seize the night : new tales of vampiric terror / edited by Christopher Golden.—First Gallery Books trade paperback edition.
pages ; cm
1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. Horror tales, American. I. Golden, Christopher, editor.
PS648.V35S45 2015
813'.0873808375—dc23
Seize the Night Page 51
