Best New Horror: Volume 25 (Mammoth Book of Best New Horror)

by Неизвестный

  A large, rumpled man hogged one of the phones. He was in the habit of eating too much garlic. She took the kiosk furthest from him.

  She fished a quarter out of her purse and dialled the number.

  It rang for a long time. Then was picked up.

  Silence. Except for breathing. Not Lorie’s.

  “Doctor Dee,” she identified herself.

  “Listen to me, Doctor Dee,” responded a voice she didn’t know – male, loud. “I got your gal pal here. A clean snatch. She ain’t been puncturated, so far. But things can change, baby. In a flash. You come see me, sister, and we can rap. You don’t come, consequences there be, you dig?”

  A frightened squeal, curtailed.

  “Picture in focus, doll?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a diner on Reistertown and Rogers. It’s open late … we be waitin’. I strongly recommend you make good time …”

  V

  She had walked to the restaurant from her apartment and her car was parked at the morgue anyway. So Geneviève took a cab to Northwest Baltimore.

  The intersection of Reistertown Road and Rogers Avenue was in Woodmere. Once predominantly Jewish, now middle-class black. Few bodies dropped suspiciously in this neighbourhood, so she hadn’t been here often.

  The diner was easy to find. It was an Americana postcard, an aluminium-sided ’50s relic. The boxcar-shaped building supported a huge orange neon sign which just said DINER.

  The windows were steamed up, but she could see people-like shapes inside.

  She had the cab cruise by and drop her three blocks up. For her date, she was wearing her good black dress, heels and one of Lorie’s puffy-shouldered jackets.

  She took off her shoes and put them in her bag, then put her purse and ID in an inside jacket pocket.

  She owned a gun, a habit from her private detective nights. It was locked safely in her desk at the morgue.

  Walking the three blocks, cold sidewalk under her soles, she felt her hackles rise. She salivated as her fangs slid from gumsheaths. Her nails elongated and curved.

  No one could mistake what she was.

  People – not that there were many around – got out of her way.

  She hid her bag behind a potted shrub in the diner’s parking lot. The only vehicles here were a Cadillac pimpmobile, a beat-up Ford truck and a rusty black van with MONDO TRASHO written on it in lipstick pink. A late-in-the-day punk band? Some freak subculture she’d not come across yet?

  She half-expected to be shot with silver as soon as she barged through the Diner door. Instead, she got a slow handclap.

  Sat at a table waiting for her was a smiling African-American vampire with a helmet of conked hair like James Brown’s, and fur on his cheeks and the backs of his hands. He wore tartan flares over yellow stack-heeled boots, a wide-lapelled jacket with a zigzag pattern in mauve and electric green and matching coat-hanger-shaped tie, plus wraparound mirror shades. His clock had stopped in 1973, which – at a guess – was when he turned. If they didn’t go the murgatroyd route with black capes or gauze shrouds, twentieth-century vampires tended to dress the way they had when they died.

  She remembered the toast rack of soul records and knew who this was. He seemed to be enjoying his freedom.

  The other people in the diner were dhamps, not vamps. A gaggle of flaming creatures: a 400-pound man with a cockatoo mohawk, squeezed into a frilly scarlet ball gown; a madeyed old woman, toothless but for temporary fangs, in a ragged nightie; a cadaverous, long-haired white dude with purple moustaches and bullet-holes in his sports jacket; a beehive-do blonde sweater girl with a Sardonicus smile; an emaciated punker, trussed up in bondage trousers and a ripped Ramones T-shirt. This must be the Mondo Trasho gang.

  They were mostly crammed into a booth, surrounding a terrified Emma Zoole.

  Geneviève was tempted to say “wrong roommate” and leave … But she couldn’t let Emma take the heat for her and, worse, she had this nagging itch to find out what the hell this was all about.

  She could blame Charles for inculcating in her a need to know.

  Emma wasn’t dhamped. She kept her head down.

  “Doctor Dee, Doctor Dee,” said the soul vampire.

  “You have a name too?”

  “Willis, baby. Willis Daniels.”

  He left a pause for it to sink in.

  She had never heard of him, so she couldn’t give him the “we meet at last” response he clearly craved.

  “Mamuwalde’s get,” he elucidated.

  Prince Mamuwalde was an African vampire. Not a cat to be invoked carelessly. Geneviève had met him and been impressed.

  She suspected this son-in-darkness was not a credit to the Prince.

  “Salaam Alaikum,” she said.

  Willis tittered, showing a long right fang and a short left one.

  “Peace on you too, sister,” he said. “Now set your bootie down and let’s get to talkin’ business …”

  She slid onto the red-upholstered chair opposite him.

  Everything in the diner was cherry-red or silver-chrome, and bolted to the floor. A giant jukebox bore the smiling, faded face of Corny Collins, whose 1960s music show still played late at night or early in the morning on local television. Corny promised “All the teen beat hits to set your toes tappin’ and your fingers snappin’!”

  The juke played Gene Pitney’s “Town Without Pity”. A tragic wail of a song.

  A blood splatter arced on the wall behind the counter. This krewe had taken out the staff. One of the Mondo Trasho dhampires – a disco punk with roller-skates and an orange crinkly headband – had an unconscious waitress in his lap and was nuzzling her neck with teeth not sharp enough to puncture a vein.

  She had no reflection in Willis’ shades, but saw the purple-moustache guy moving to block the door she’d come through. He put up the closed sign. A tall, warm, black woman with angry eyes and a leopard-print outfit sat on a stool at the far end of the diner. She was straight, not flying on drac-wings, and had a Glock 9mm on the counter. Geneviève took the Leopard Lady for the most dangerous person in the room …

  No, she told herself, second most dangerous person in the room. She hadn’t lasted since 1416 by being a pussycat.

  Emma, the connoisseur of terror, was not enjoying this. She was morbid, but no masochist.

  Geneviève tried not to show her fangs.

  Willis dipped a long forefinger in a spill of sugar from the table dispenser and drew a smiley face. He licked sugar off his finger.

  “I have your missing tooth,” she said. “At the morgue.”

  He shrugged. “It’s growin’ out, sweet cheeks.”

  “Don’t you want the diamond?”

  “Easy to come by.”

  “For some.”

  “You an’ me, girl. We don’t have to try so hard, do we? What do they call it – power of fascination? The oogadaboogada? The Charm.”

  He made hypnotic gestures.

  “Slap the Charm on a person, make ’em do what you want. A trip and a half, Doc. Open up the cash register … open up a wrist. Hah, bein’ unborn is the best thing ever happened to Mrs Daniels’ boy, and that’s the truth.”

  “What are you talking about, Willis?” she asked.

  He was flustered for a moment, suspicious, prickly. He liked to be taken seriously. He was fundamentally insecure.

  In street terms, he was just Blacula’s bitch.

  Which did not make him any less dangerous.

  If it came down to Die Hard in a Diner, she could take Willis. She could even deal with the dhamps. But Emma would be killed. The waitress, too. If the Leopard Lady was packing silver bullets, and she had no reason to think she wasn’t, Geneviève wouldn’t make it either. At her age, she’d go to dust – some dhamps snorted that! – which would spare Blake and Grimes the embarrassment of hauling their boss to the morgue.

  Emma whimpered. The big Mondo Trasho transvestite stuck a long tongue in her ear. The hag cackled.

 
; “Emma,” Geneviève said, “don’t worry. They can’t hurt you.”

  “Oh I think they most surely purely can,” said Willis.

  “Not if you want to keep talking with me.”

  He held up his beringed, hairy hands and made a Stepin Fetchit I’s-so-scared face, then chuckled.

  “The Charm, you know,” he continued. “It come natural to me. Not from bein’ a vampire and shit, but from birth. Mrs Daniels was mama-loi from the islands. She never turned, but she had the Charm. S’what voodoo’s all about. Makin’ puppets of people …”

  “Puppets of people,” Geneviève echoed.

  Willis let his grin widen. She intuited he’d practised that so his diamond would glisten. It was wasted now.

  “In that basement, someone put you on strings, Willis.”

  “Mr Wilkie Collins,” he said. “Look at him now.”

  He made a puff gesture at the back of his head. A fraction of an expression crossed the Leopard Lady’s face. So Geneviève knew who’d raided the Barksdale house. Looking at her, it seemed possible she’d gone in alone.

  “Are you really off the string? Or on another one?”

  She indicated the woman with the Glock.

  Willis laughed but his cheek-fur bristled. An unusual tell.

  “You are misunderstandin’ the situation, Doctor Dee. Me an’ Georgia Rae’s tight.”

  Georgia Rae Drumgo. Not a name you were likely to forget. Dan Hanson had mentioned her while running through the players in Baltimore’s crime organizations. Luther Mahoney’s sister. Married to an ex-Tonton Macoute Haitian who was currently missing presumed dismembered. Reputed avatar of the avenging, red-eyed spirit Erzulie Ge-Rouge. Executioner and enforcer.

  Willis’ favourite song came to mind, “Supernatural Voodoo Woman”.

  “Me an’ you could be tight too,” said Willis. “What you might call a business opportunity is openin’ up …”

  She knew what was coming but let him continue.

  “This drac thing, man, it’s huge already. Gonna get bigger. You and me – vampires – we have to be on top of it, or else it be on top of us, you dig?”

  He slid his shades down his nose and flashed his eyes at her.

  Did he really think his Charm would work on an elder?

  “The krewe I was with thought small. Too small.”

  “Grab a cow, pen a cow, milk a cow?”

  He didn’t like to be reminded. He would have slice marks on his arms. Drac was the only drug where the dealers got the tracks.

  “No longer a feasible business model, Doc.”

  Eventually, your abducted vampire got used up and went to dust. No more cash flow.

  She thought about all those teeth in Wilkie Collins’ box. If he only pulled one keepsake from each of his drac-cows that meant Barksdale had been through thirty-eight vampires.

  “You don’t need a cow, you need a flock …”

  “Cows come in herds, Willis.”

  “Whatever … do I look like Pa Kettle to you? We’re speakin’ metaphorically and you started the cow talk.”

  “Am I to understand that your plan is to turn selected people vampire? The homeless, the lost, stolen children? Then reap the blood harvest … ?”

  “See, you do dig, mama.”

  That was why there’d been no epidemic of vampire disappearances anyone could notice. Barksdale had Willis make vampires out of people who’d already fallen off the map. It was also why they got used up so fast. The stock would be poor in the first place. Then, there was Mamuwalde bloodline. The story went that the Prince was personally turned by Dracula, and so inherited the Dracula rot … his get were feeble, and the bloodline thinned with each turning …

  “You’d be the mama.”

  She felt Georgia Rae Drumgo’s eyes on her.

  Willis was moving his lips and making a noise, but Georgia Rae was doing the talking. He was still the puppet. She assumed Georgia Rae had a Willis doll somewhere.

  If the Mamuwalde bloodline failed to take, Mahoney needed something stronger. Like hers.

  So far, Geneviève had refrained from bestowing the Dark Kiss. She’d begged Charles to accept it, but he had refused ’til the end. That was as close as she had come to having get. She wasn’t about to break the habit of centuries to keep Luther Mahoney’s drac corners hopping with dhamps.

  She said nothing.

  She could still see Willis’ eyes … a spark died in them. He had made promises she would not keep.

  “Won’t come willing; can’t be broke,” said Georgia Rae, raising her Glock. “Drain her for drac and kill the other bitch.”

  Geneviève ducked under the table as Georgia Rae fired.

  Shots ploughed into the Formica and chrome. Willis yelped as a silver slug punched through his sleeve and the meat of his arm.

  “Hey, man, mind my threads!”

  The dhamps were on Emma or up and about, bumping into one another, too blitzed to pay attention.

  Geneviève lizard-slithered across the tile floor as fast as she could manage.

  So much for her good black dress. Lorie’s jacket ripped under the arms.

  Georgia Rae fired again. Purple-moustache guy got in the way of a bullet and fell.

  “Willis, she’ll kill you too,” Geneviève shouted.

  No use. Blacula’s bitch wasn’t growing any balls tonight.

  “You gotta be reasonable, girl!” he whined. He was up from the table, hopping in frustration and excitement, like a kid who needs the bathroom.

  He must see another basement in his immediate future. Mahoney would keep him going longer than Barksdale, but he’d still be used up …

  Geneviève back-slid into a booth, using the table as a shield, but there was nowhere else to go.

  On the whole, she wished she’d stayed with her date.

  No … she didn’t. She wasn’t like that. Georgia Rae, of all people, had seen it straight away. Won’t come willing; can’t be broke …

  She saw Georgia Rae’s legs – she had leopard-pattern high heels, too – as she marched across the diner. She rapped on the table with the gun.

  “Come out,” she said.

  Geneviève eased herself up from the floor and sat in the booth, fixed table between her and the Leopard Lady. Erzulie Ge-Rouge ascendant. Just now, eyes ablaze, gun smoking, Georgia Rae Drumgo was gunpowder, gelatine, dynamite with a laser beam …

  There was no use trying to talk with her.

  “Blast the bitch, why don’t you?” shrieked Willis.

  “She ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  Geneviève sensed a moment. Georgia Rae didn’t want to draw this out. She’d used her full clip and needed to reload.

  The diner door opened and someone wide and whiffy walked in.

  “Hey, honkie, can’t you see we’re closed?” said Willis. “What kind of a jive-ass, mutha-gropin’, toad-lickin’ …”

  A very loud noise sounded.

  The front of Willis’ zigzag eyesore exploded red. His eyes were frozen in surprise.

  As Geneviève’s ears rang, Willis slowly buckled – threads of scarlet and gristle seeming to float in the smoke around him – and he fell on the floor.

  The dracheads pushed Emma – who was going to need serious therapy if she lived much longer – away and pounced, crawled and leaped across the room, shoving their faces into Willis’ wound, snorting and licking, feet turning clawed inside confining shoes, teeth so big they cracked jaws and split cheeks.

  The newcomer was a gross warm man with a Stetson and a sawn-off double-barrel shotgun.

  Geneviève recognized him. He’d been at the restaurant. And around before then. Outside the Barksdale house this morning. She even remembered him showing up in Canada, sitting in court as she gave evidence against Lucien Lacroix.

  Georgia Rae had her gun on the fat cowboy. Stand-off. Except … he had one more shell under the hammer and she was empty.

  Geneviève slipped out of the booth, quickened by the golden she’d had earlie
r, and took away Georgia Rae’s gun. She put her teeth against the Leopard Lady’s jugular and pressed enough to leave dimples, then stepped back.

  Georgia Rae looked angry enough to kill with her bare hands.

  “Uh uh, honey,” said the gunman, finger tight on the other trigger. “Message from on high. Don’t mess with the mademoiselle. Nod your head to show you understand.”

  After a long moment, the Leopard Lady deliberately nodded.

  Geneviève spat at Georgia Rae’s shoes. A display of French contempt.

  “Best take your posse and ride off into the sunrise, I reckon,” said the gunman. He had a grating Texan accent.

  With a sweet smile, Geneviève gave Georgia Rae back her empty Glock. The Leopard Lady put the gun in a shoulder black and snapped her fingers. The Mondo Trasho dhampires left Willis alone, and came to heel.

  Glaring, Georgia Rae moved towards the door.

  “On high means West Coast, Miz Drumgo,” said the man. “Tell Luther … tell everyone you know. Change is coming. Get it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good.”

  Georgia Rae and the dhampires left. Some of the pack were howling and laughing. They didn’t know this was real.

  Geneviève checked the waitress. Unconscious, but alive. Behind the counter was a cook with his throat cut. Dead.

  Emma Zoole was in shock.

  “Where’s Lorie?” Geneviève asked.

  “At the Sun. She left a note to call.”

  So the roommate she liked was safe. Sweet.

  “I’m thinking of moving out,” Emma said.

  “We can talk about that later.”

  Geneviève turned to the man with the gun, the man from the West Coast. He was gone. The jukebox whirred, though. He must have dropped a coin in one of the tabletop selection machines.

  Roy Rogers sang “Happy Trails”.

  “How about that?” she said, to no one in particular.

  She heard sirens from outside. Someone had called the cops.

  Uniforms came through the door. And a familiar detective.

  “Sacre bleu, mon brave. C’est un tableau de splatter avec jolies filles.”

  STEPHEN VOLK

  Whitstable

  STEPHEN VOLK IS best known as the writer of the infamous BBC-TV “Hallowe’en hoax” Ghostwatch and as creator of the paranormal ITV drama series Afterlife, starring Lesley Sharp and Andrew Lincoln. His other screenplays include The Awakening, starring Rebecca Hall, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton; Ken Russell’s trippy extravaganza Gothic, and The Guardian (co-written and directed by William [The Exorcist] Friedkin). In 1998 he won a BAFTA for The Deadness of Dad starring Rhys Ifans, and has contributed to the Channel Four horror series Shockers.