The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack

by Darrell Schweitzer

  Morris yanks me away and whispers, real mortified like, “What do you think we do? Draw a Star of David on the vampire’s forehead with a magic marker?”

  Which is probably an interesting question, but just then I don’t feel much like being interested.

  * * * *

  That same night at Castle Bran we’re all gathered in the floodlit courtyard for some kind of theatrical number. “Do they really make bran flakes here?” I kid Morris, who has no sense of humor. Then I notice him noticing that other woman, the pale and slinky one with the long black dress and awful black fingernails, and he notices me noticing him noticing—here I am looking out for his best interests, as if he could see something in a creature like that—and his expression is downright defiant, like he’s been this whole trip. So I decide to give the both of them a piece of my mind, but then she notices all this noticing, and our eyes meet, and her look I can’t describe. Cold. Empty. Those huge dark eyes of hers look like two subway tunnels that stretch all the way down to nowhere and you know there’s never going to be any train coming on those tracks, because they closed the station down before Moses parted the Red Sea. Only the tunnels are somehow evil and sucking me in.

  They give me goosebumps, those eyes, so I jerk away and look at something else, and don’t say anything to Morris for a while.

  About midnight, in our crummy hotel, Morris gets up to go to the bathroom—For God’s sake there isn’t even a bathroom in the room, it’s down the hall, it looks like some 14th-century dungeon maybe!—and he’s gone so long that when he comes back, I say half-asleep, “Did you fall in?”

  Right then and there he starts making love to me. I say, “Not now, I’m tired,” but that doesn’t stop him, and Oh my God! he hasn’t been like that in years, and it’s so ridiculous, fat, balding Morris in his glow-in-the-dark bat pajamas all over me, just exploding with passion like he’s a Don Juan or something, and Oh! he’s never been like this, and I say, “Morris, what’s come over you?” and I could almost get to like it, he’s such a changed man. Except for the pajamas, I might have thought he was some other man snuck into my bed!

  But then I come fully awake, and I say, “Morris! Your hands are so cold!” but he doesn’t say anything. He just bites me on the neck and I shriek and sit up with Morris hanging onto me like some enormous tick, and switch on the light and see myself in the mirror and there I am all wild-eyed, with blood on my neck, but there’s no reflection of Morris at all. He and his pajamas have both turned invisible. And, as I watch, I seem to turn invisible too.

  * * * *

  Then I wake up in a coffin, but that’s not the worst of it, because now I’m in the real 14th-century dungeon that’s just below the bathroom and it’s muddy and my nightgown is ruined, and they’ve buried me with my curlers half falling out—which would mortify me, if I weren’t already dead. Me, such a neatnik, laid out with curlers in my hair!

  So now we’re vampires, Morris explains, and I think he has made me a vampire too because he can’t live without me, even if he is dead. So we wander around the hotel a bit we jump on one of the bellboys and drink his blood—which doesn’t taste good, but I’ve had worse to eat on this tour—and then a clerk comes and taps us on the shoulders and says we have to go down into the dungeon for the Vampire Orientation Course, because they’ve got a lot of forms to signed and fill out, and we fill them out. The Vampire Welcoming Committee finally gives us new ID’s, but you have to stare at the photo cross-eyed for a long time do you see anything, like one of those holographic pictures.

  Most of the people from the tour are there, and the bellboy, and the guides, and then that slinky woman comes up and tells us what we have to do. She thinks she’s some important vampire; her name is something weird Zora or Gavora or something. We have responsibilities she tells us. Vampires secretly run the world, undead hands hold the levers of power, she says. We are in charge. We’ve been in charge for a long time. When the Archduke Ferdinand got killed in Sarajevo, she explains, there was one story put out in the newspapers, but we actually did it. In fact, Miss Slinko, Zora or whatever the smug bitch’s name is, hints she killed him personally.

  Now she brings on this whiskery old duffer in a band costume who says he’s the Archduke, and he tells how it was, having some trouble being understood what with his whiskers and his long teeth and his accent. I want to ask him if he really is the long-lost missing link between Colonel Sanders and Santa Claus, but I do not.

  Miss Slinko continues the lecture. As for the Commies, she explains, nodding to me, they weren’t a problem, because Ceaucescu was one of us, and when they showed him dead on television he wasn’t just shot, he had a stake through his heart, just outside of the frame of the picture.

  So off we go across Europe, me and Morris and the rest of the Vampire Graduating Class of ’96, with our coffins loaded on trucks and driven by drunken Gypsies who seem to find the bumpiest roads they can exceed the speed limit over, but when I complain Slinko says they’ve been in the hauling vampires almost as long as she’s been slinking. (“But you don’t look a day over five hundred,” I assure her.)

  Every night we go out and bite people, it’s our job, and if we drain all their blood they become vampires too, otherwise they wake up in the morning with a worse hickie than my cousin Alma’s teenage daughter after a date. Then they really have something to kvetch about.

  Me, I still care about the company I keep. Some people I won’t let Morris drain entirely because I wouldn’t have them sharing the same truck with me, yak-yak-yakking in their coffins. One yenta is enough.

  Still, Morris is having the time of his life, if I may use that expression. Such an exhibitionist. He even got himself a black cape, a white vest, and a medallion, the whole nine yards, and he likes to go swirling off into the night where I can’t look after him. He prefers the showy entrances, oozing into someone’s room under the door as a mist, or flapping at their window until the victim lets him in. I’m ashamed to say he’s particularly fond of looming over ladies in their beds with those glowing eyes of his, making all sorts of funny gestures before he drops down and covers them up with his cape.

  But worst part is he still sleeps in those bat pajamas, in his coffin next to mine.

  And, just to torment me, he still wears those ties, even if they don’t go well with the rest of his outfit. He wears them with his pajamas too. The man is still ungrateful after all I’ve done for him.

  Plus, I’ve got good reason to envy Miss Slinko with her the sexy shape, because for all I’m a vampire too, this doesn’t make me svelte; I am stuck through all eternity with a zaftig figure no fat farm can save me from now. And I still have to spend hours with my make-up—you just try putting it on when you can’t see yourself in a mirror. Then it’s work, work, work, sidling up to frumpy tourists, pretending to ask directions as I get out a map and lead them aside, ignoring their saying, “Lady, what good is a map of Bucharest? This is Paris.” Or it is Rome or Vienna or London. Before they can figure it out, chomp, I get rather attached to them.

  You know, most people’s blood tastes like weak, badly-curdled borscht. The other vampires agree, but nobody knows how to improve it. When I suggest maybe we should popularize some kind of flavored food-additive for the living, Morris cocks his eyebrow, swirls his cape, and runs off with the Children of the Night to make beautiful music. Actually he can’t carry a tune in a bucket.

  Work, work. We certainly get around. It is a little-known fact that when certain prominent people die, who are already vampires, or about to be vampires, we already-vampires have to dig them up for the first time, to show them around. Morris and I get drafted onto the Exhumation Detail. We dig up Mitterand, and then Andropov, who got forgotten for a few years because of politics, and we welcome them to the club. Nixon too, and Mrs. Thatcher, even though she isn’t dead yet, she just fits in so perfectly.

  Still, we mostly make tourists into vampires, me with my very tattered map of Bucharest, all of us bumping around and around
in cheap wooden coffins with no conveniences. We have to listen to stale Gypsy jokes more than once, while the trucks break down more often than not. Once in Bulgaria we’re all off-loaded and on our way to the trash-compactor before fortunately the sun goes down and I am able to take matters in hand. Afterwards, we spend the whole night scrounging up an additional truckload of coffins for all the Bulgarian officials that needed convincing.

  In short, for all that my husband may think this is a fine way for a grown-up dead man to occupy himself, I can certainly see room for improvement.

  For one thing, Morris doesn’t call me Honey Love anymore, and I miss that.

  So, when I finally can’t stand it anymore, I grab Morris by the scruff of his cape and say, “Look, we’re going to complain to whoever’s in charge here,” and when he’s horrified and says, “But you can’t!”, I tell him I certainly can. I will speak to the boss. My mind is made up.

  “You mean to Count Dracula himself?”

  “Is that who the boss is? Then he’s getting a piece of my mind.”

  Oh, he flusters and he flutters and he gnashes those big fangs of his, but Morris was never a match for me when my mind’s made up. So, just before dawn, as all the other vampires are going beddy-bye and the sun will come shining up within minutes, Morris and I drag our coffins away from the others, and just in the nick of time hypnotize two Gypsies, who steal a nearby crumbling Volkswagon minibus left over from the ’60s—it’s got purple flowers all over it, in fading, peeling paint—and load us into it. Off we go, faster than ever, over even bumpier roads than before, all the while thanking God or maybe someone else that the bus doesn’t break down and that I don’t have to convince too many officials to let us pass.

  Deeper and deeper into the wild Carpathians our Gypsies drive us as we slide around inside our splintery coffins, and more than once I have to bang on the lid to yell, “Hey! Slow down! You trying to kill us?” Which is funny, because we are already dead, but the Gypsies can’t hear us and go on telling their own tired jokes. When they don’t know which way to turn, I have to get out of my coffin and tell them that too, because we vampires have a fine sense of direction, but it is a miracle we ever get anywhere.

  Naturally, Morris is having a wonderful time. Each night, we pull off to the side of the road, and while the Gypsies snooze in the trance I put them in, Morris and I go terrorize the countryside. Wolves howl all around us and sometimes come up to us as friendly as my brother Max’s German Shepherd, to lick my hands, but I have to stop them from ruining my nails.

  Now the Gypsies are afraid, and even I’m getting the creeps as we drive across empty landscape, wolves howling like a chorus out of Hell, blue lights flickering in the dark forests, the Carpathians rising up and up around us, all black and jagged. Morris points out this or that place from the tour, but even he doesn’t seem to care any longer.

  We’re all solemn as we pull into the courtyard of Castle Dracula. Even the wolves are silent, streaming around us like a dark tide, filling the courtyard, wriggling into the castle through countless holes and crevices—I mean this place is a ruin. Haven’t these big-time vampires any pride?

  Morris and I climb out of our coffins, and we speak to the wolves in their own language. We tell them to leave our Gypsies alone for now, and we go inside.

  The enormous doors swing open all by themselves, and more wolves run in. I’m sure they’d ruin the carpeting, if there was any. Overhead, bats swarm like a bunch of starlings. Outside, the wind howls, louder than the wolves ever did. Inside, it seems to hum in the rafters, like we’re inside some huge pipe organ, and it really does give me the shivers, even if I am dead, and Morris is the wide-eyed tourist again, and all the big dope can say is, “Gosh, Honey Love, I always knew it would be like this.”

  I take him by the hand reassuringly, and say, “It’s all right. I’m with you.” And we walk through the cobwebs without breaking them, down into the castle’s crypt.

  But in the crypt it’s very different: low ceilings, flickering electric lights, coffins wired for cable, and one of them open, with CNN going on a screen set into the lid. Newspapers everywhere, the Times of London, The Wall Street Journal, a bunch more, in Russian, Japanese, whatever, and finally, after we walk past rows and rows of filing cabinets, there, behind a desk covered with computers and phones and piles of paper, is the vampire king himself, Count Dracula, lord of the undead, once Voivode of Wallachia, called the Impaler, the perpetrator of so many horrors.

  And I give him a piece of my mind, just like I came there to do, telling him all about Morris’s ties and the smarmy tour guides and Miss Slinko’s nails and the uncomfortable, cheap coffins, and the bumpy roads and how awful the Gypsies drive and how bad their jokes are, how I’m missing all my soap operas from having too sleep in the daytime, and tired I am of accosting tourists with that stupid map of Bucharest while my husband thinks he’s in some old-time horror movie and—

  The Count rises, his face contorted with rage.

  I grab Morris by the bat-tie and yank him forward.

  “Just look at this, will you?” I say to the Count. “Look what I have to put up with!”

  “Madame,” says the Count in a low, terrible voice, like the Crack of Doom heard through double-lined thick earmuffs, “I have a great deal of evil to orchestrate in the world. What makes you think that among all the legions of the damned I have time for you?”

  Morris and I both stagger back from the awful power of his glare, but then I can’t help myself. I’ve got to laugh. I mean, where is the Count Dracula, and is he wearing his medallion or even his cape? No, he’s got on a plain white shirt like any office clerk, and his sleeves are rolled up and there’s ink-stains on the pocket and he’s got a pencil behind his ear. I am not sure, but maybe he wears bifocals. He’s just haggard and his hairline is receding to a point, and he’s no more impressive than Morris, really, only taller.

  But Count Dracula is shaking and screaming and the whole castle seems about to come down around our ears, so before he can ask what is so funny, I tell him.

  “I’m sorry…forgive me, but…you don’t look one bit like Bela Lugosi!”

  He screams some more. He is not listening.

  I have to continue giving him pieces of my mind. The place is a mess. I pick up a bunch of papers. It is requisitions for coffins, from Russia in 1917. If he hasn’t got them now, why bother, I want to know. Then there’s the meeting of the Trilateral Commission he was supposed to be at, a letter from Henry Kissinger that didn’t get answered in twenty-five years, and some famous rock star who was supposed to get bitten and didn’t get bitten. So much work is not getting done. I start to straighten up. I tell him, “Look at you. You got ink-stains all over you. You don’t brush your clothes. You can’t be so sloppy. If you’re going put your undead hands on the levers of the world, you got to wash them first. I’m telling you. I don’t know how you ever got along before I arrived. You need someone like me around here to manage things.”

  That’s it. That’s the end.

  I think the very last thing I hear is Morris burbling, “Gee, Mr. Dracula, Count, Sir, can I have your autograph?” but I can’t be sure because everything gets confusing after that.

  The Count raises his arms and I imagine he’s got on the black cape like you’d expect, and he’s a huge, snarling bat with legs. Then his minions are all around him, minions of minions, a world monopoly on drooling hunchbacks, an excess of glow-in-the-dark dwarves, slinky, barefoot vampire wives wearing just rags, (the Count should be ashamed!) not to mention all those wolves, most of which are human; and they just sweep us straight out of Dracula’s office, down, down into lower crypts, into the uttermost abysses in the Earth’s bowels (as Morris would put it) and then we’re in our coffins again, with the lids hammered down so we can’t get out.

  Of course they had to bring in the Gypsies to do the dirty work. Silver nails. Only the Gypsies could touch them.

  * * * *

  Okay, so maybe I have k
vetched once too often, but what else was I to do? When something isn’t right, it isn’t right.

  Grandma Esther would understand if she were here. Now I lie in the dark, and the only way I can go anywhere is in my dreams, and in my dreams I search for Grandma Esther, to explain everything and ask her what I should do.

  Morris lies beside me, not too happy right now, but he is trying to be brave, and he whispers, “Don’t worry, Honey Love, maybe Grandma will come and let us out, or a hundred years will pass and the coffin wood will rot, or even the Count will forgive us if we are patient enough.”

  What can a vampire do under such circumstances, but be patient?

  I know Morris is trying to help, and he even called me Honey Love, but still I can’t forgive him. I know he’s lying there, right beside me, still wearing one of his stupid ties.

  KVETCHULA’S DAUGHTER

  The day my mother became a vampire, she ruined my life. I didn’t know it at the time, and I’m sure she didn’t have time to think about it—I have to admit that being dead and coming back to life more-or-less can be distracting—but that’s God’s honest truth and if I were of a slightly different persuasion I’d add “cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Give me a break!

  It wasn’t as if I were not beside myself with worry, what with Momma and Poppa off on their trip to Romania, he being, though he is my father and I love him, such a nebbish he never stood up to her about anything, so when he booked the two of them on that Dracula Fan Club tour or whatever it was with non-refundable tickets, you could have heard Momma’s jaw drop in Brooklyn, as she observed at the time, and we don’t live anywhere near Brooklyn.

  My Poppa, he was bats about bats, and about Dracula and Children of the Night and all that stuff. He had a vampire-movie collection like you wouldn’t believe. I think it was the one thing Momma couldn’t take away from him. After I went off to college and they were alone, he got even battier, and so they went on this tour that was supposed last two weeks, and after they didn’t come back and I didn’t hear a thing from them for six months, you think I shouldn’t worry?