“You’ll love the house in Mayfair,” I said.
“Yes …” he said.
“And when Richard finally tires of Rampling Gate, we shall go home.”
HOMEWRECKER
Poppy Z. Brite
Before announcing his “retirement,” for almost twenty years Billy Martin wrote a string of acclaimed and successful horror novels and short stories under the name “Poppy Z. Brite.”
As Brite he published the novels Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, Exquisite Corpse, and The Crow: The Lazarus Heart, along with the story collections Swamp Foetus (aka Wormwood), Are You Loathesome Tonight? (aka Self-Made Man), Wrong Things (with Caitlín R. Kiernan), The Devil You Know, and Antediluvian Tales. He also edited the vampire anthologies Love in Vein and Twice Bitten (Love in Vein II).
In 1999 he published Courtney Love: The Real Story, a semi-official biography of the singer, and he subsequently wrote a series of novels set in the restaurant world of New Orleans.
His short story “The Sixth Sentinel” was filmed in 1999 (under the title “The Dream Sentinel”) for the Showtime TV series The Hunger.
“The vampire is the easiest horror trope to turn into a cliché,” says the author, “and yet a great many writers try their hands at a vampire tale sooner or later, maybe because the familiar canvas shows off one’s individual flourishes … To write about a creature that lives off the human life-force requires the ability to plumb one’s own darkness.”
MY UNCLE EDNA killed hogs. He came home from the slaughterhouse every day smelling of shit and pig blood, and if I didn’t have his bath drawn with plenty of perfume and bubble stuff, he’d whup my ass until I felt his hard-on poking me in the leg.
Like I said, he killed hogs. At night, though, you’d never have known it to see him in his satin gown. He swished around the old farmhouse like some kind of fairy godmother, swigging from a bottle of JD and cussing the bitch who stole his man.“Homewrecker!” he’d shriek, pounding his fist on the table and rattling the stack of rhinestone bracelets he wore on his skinny arm. “How could he want her when he had me? How could he do it, boy?”
And you had to wonder, because even with his lipstick smeared and his chest hair poking out of his gown, there was a certain tired glamour to Uncle Edna. Thing was, the bitch hadn’t even wanted his man. Uncle Jude, who’d been with Uncle Edna since he was just plain old Ed Slopes, had all of a sudden turned hetero and gone slobbering off after a henna-headed barfly who called herself Verna. What Verna considered a night’s amusement, Uncle Jude decided was the grand passion of his life. And that was the last we saw of him. We never could understand it.
Uncle Edna was thirty-six when Uncle Jude left. The years and the whiskey rode him hard after that, but the man knew how to do his makeup, and I thought Uncle Jude would fall back in love with him if they could just see each other again.
I couldn’t do anything about it though, and back then I was more interested in catching frogs and snakes than in the affairs of grown-ups’ hearts. But a few years later, I heard Verna was back in town.
I knew I couldn’t let Uncle Edna find out. He’d want to get out his shotgun and go after her, and then he’d get cornholed to death in jail and who’d take care of me? So I talked to a certain kid at school. He made me suck his dick out behind the cafeteria, but I came home with four Xanax. I ground them up and put them in Uncle Edna’s bottle of JD that same night. Pretty soon he was snoring like a chainsaw and drooling on his party dress. I went out to look for Verna. I didn’t especially want to see her, but I thought maybe I could find out where she’d last seen Uncle Jude.
I parked my bike across the street from the only bar in town, the Silky Q. Inside, the men stood or danced in pairs. A few wore drag, but most were in jeans and flannels; this was a working man’s town.
Then I saw her. She’d slid her meaty ass into a booth and was cuddled up to one of the men in it. The other man sat glaring at her, nearly in tears. I recognized them as Bob and Jim Frenchette, a couple who’d been married as long as I could remember. Verna’s red-nailed hand was on Bob’s thigh, stroking the worn denim.
I walked up to the table.
Jim and Bob were too far gone to pay me any mind. Verna didn’t seem to recognize me. I’d been a little kid when she saw me last, and she’d hardly noticed me then, bent as she was on sucking Uncle Jude’s neck. I stared into her eyes. Her lashes were clumped with black mascara, her lids frosted with turquoise shadow. Her mouth was a lipstick wound. Her lips twitched in a scornful smile, then parted.
“What you want, little boy?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t know what I had meant to do. I stumbled away from the table. My hands were trembling and my cheeks flaming. I was outside, unchaining my bike from the lamppost, when Verna came out of the bar.
She crossed the deserted street, pinning me where I stood with those wolf-pale eyes. I wanted to jump on my bike and speed away, or just run, but I couldn’t. I wanted to look away from those slippery red lips that glistened like hog grease. But I couldn’t.
“Your uncle …” she whispered. “Jules, wasn’t it?”
I shook my head, but Verna kept smiling and bending closer until her lips were right against my ear.
“He was a lousy fuck,” she said.
Her sharp red nails bit into my shoulder. She pushed me back against the lamppost and sank to her knees in front of me. I felt hot bile rising in my throat, but I couldn’t move, even when her other hand undid my pants.
I tried to keep my dick from getting hard, I truly did. But it was like her mouth sucked the blood into it, right to the surface of the skin. I thought she might tear it out by the roots. Her tongue slithered over my balls, into my pee-hole. There came a sharp stinging at the base of my dick, unlike anything I’d felt when other boys sucked it. Then I was shooting my jizz into her mouth, much as I didn’t want to, and she was swallowing it like she’d been starved.
Verna wiped her mouth and laughed. Then she stood, turned, and walked back to the bar like I wasn’t even there. The door closed behind her, and I fell to my knees and puked until my throat was raw. But even as the rancid taste of half-digested food filled my mouth and nose, I could feel my dick getting hard again.
I had to whack off before I could get on my bike. As I came on the sidewalk, I imagined those fat shiny lips closing around me again, and I started to cry. I couldn’t get the nasty thoughts out of my head, things I’d never thought about before: the smell of dank sea coves and fish markets, the soft squish of a body encased in a layer of fat, with big floppy globes of it stuck on the chest and rear like cancers. And the thoughts were like a cancer in me.
As fast as my feet could pedal, I rode home to Uncle Edna. But I had a feeling I could never really go home again.
WHEN GRETCHEN WAS HUMAN
Mary A. Turzillo
Mary A. Turzillo won the Nebula Award in 2000 for Best Science Fiction Novelette for her story “Mars is No Place for Children.” A former professor at Kent State University, her critical books include Reader’s Guides to the work of Anne McCaffrey and Philip José Farmer under the byline “Mary T. Brizzi.”
She has published short stories in Interzone, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Age, and her work has been included in such anthologies as Nebula Awards Showcase 2001, edited by Robert Silverberg, and Tales of Wonder and Imagination, edited by Ellen Datlow. Her collection Bonsai Babies appeared from Omnium Gatherum in 2016, and she has published four collections of poetry (two in collaboration with Marge Simon) and a novel, Mars Girls, from Apex in 2017.
“Not everyone has a victim or a vampire inside them,” explains Turzillo, “but even those whose vampire-self is weak understand that the inner monster is lonely and craves love, while also fearing it. The passion that the vampire seeks and that the victim wants to give is an appalling and consecrated gift. Is it a metaphor for the love between the tyrant and willingly oppressed, or between the child and the parent who bleeds for t
he child’s anguish?
“It is more. It is the deep core of ardor. We are afraid, and we desire.”
“YOU’RE ONLY HUMAN,” said Nick Scuroforno, fanning the pages of a tattered first edition of Image of the Beast. The conversation had degenerated from half-hearted sales pitch, Gretchen trying to sell Nick Scuroforno an early Pangborn imprint. Now they sat cross-legged on the scarred wooden floor of Miss Trilby’s Tomes, watching dust motes dance in the August four o’clock sun. Gretchen was wallowing in self-disclosure and voluptuous self-pity.
“Sometimes I don’t even feel human.” Gretchen settled her back against the soft, dusty-smelling spines of a leather-bound 1910 imprint Book of Knowledge.
“I can identify.”
“And given the choice, who’d really want to be?” asked Gretchen, tracing the grain of the wooden floor with chapped fingers.
“You have a choice?” asked Scuroforno.
“See, after Ashley was diagnosed, my ex got custody of her. Just as well.” She rummaged her smock for a tissue. “I didn’t have hospitalization after we split. And his would cover her, but only if she goes to a hospital way off in Seattle.” Unbidden, a memory rose: Ashley’s warm little body, wriggly as a puppy’s, settling in her lap, opening Where the Wild Things Are, striking the page with her tiny pink index finger. Mommy, read!
Scuroforno nodded. “But can’t they cure leukemia now?”
“Sometimes. She’s in remission at the moment. But how long will that last?” Gretchen kept sneaking looks at Scuroforno. Amazingly, she found him attractive. She thought depression had killed the sexual impulse in her. He was a big man, chunky but not actually fat, with evasive amber eyes and shaggy hair. Not bad looking, but not handsome either, in gray sweatpants, a brown T-shirt, and beach sandals. He had a habit of twisting the band of his watch, revealing a strip of pale skin from which the fine hairs of his wrist had been worn.
“And yet cancer itself is immortal,” he mused. “Why can’t it make its host immortal too?”
“Cancer is immortal?” But of course cancer would be immortal. It was the ultimate predator. Why shouldn’t it hold all the high cards?
“The cells are. There’s some pancreatic cancer cells that have been growing in a lab fifty years since the man with the cancer died. And yet, cancer cells are not even as intelligent as a virus. A virus knows not to kill its host.”
“But viruses do kill!”
He smiled. “That’s true, lots do kill. Bacteria, too. But there are bacteria that millennia ago decided to infect every cell in our bodies. Turned into—let me think of the word. Organelles? Like the mitochondrion.”
“What’s a mitochondrion?”
He shrugged, slyly basking in his superior knowledge. “It’s an energy-converting organ in animal cells. Different DNA from the host. You’d think you could design a mitochondrion that would make the host live forever.”
She stared at him. “No. I certainly wouldn’t think that. “
“Why not?”
“It would be horrible. A zombie. A vampire.”
He was silent, a smile playing around his eyes.
She shuddered. “You get these ideas from Miss Trilby’s Tomes?”
“The wisdom of the ages.” He gestured at the high shelves, then stood. “And of course the Internet. Here comes Madame Trilby herself. Does she like you lounging on the floor with customers?”
Gretchen flushed. “Oh, she never minds anything. My grandpa was friends with her father, and I’ve worked here off and on since I was little.” She took Scuroforno’s proffered hand and pulled herself to her feet.
Miss Trilby, frail and spry, wafting a fragrance of face powder and moldy paper, lugged in a milk crate of pamphlets. She frowned at Gretchen. Strange, thought Gretchen. Yesterday she said I should find a new man, but now she’s glaring at me. For sitting on the floor? I sit on the floor to do paperwork all the time. There’s no room for chairs. It has to be for schmoozing with a male customer.
Miss Trilby dumped the mail on the counter and swept into the back room.
“Cheerful today, hmm?” said Scuroforno.
“Really, she’s so good to me. She lends me money to go to Seattle and see my daughter. She’s just nervous today.”
“Ah. By the way, before I leave, do you have a cold, or were you crying?”
Gretchen reddened. “I have a chronic sinus infection.” She suddenly saw herself objectively: stringy hair, bad posture, skinny. How could she be flirting with this man?
He touched her wrist. “Take care.” And he strode through the door into the street.
“Him you don’t need,” said Miss Trilby, bustling back in and firing up the shop’s ancient Kaypro computer.
“Did I say I did?”
“Your face says you think you do. Did he buy anything?”
“I’m sorry. I can never predict what he’ll be interested in.”
“I’ll die in the poorhouse. Sell him antique medical texts. Or detective novels. He stands reading historical novels right off the shelf and laughs. Pretends to be an expert, finds all the mistakes.”
“What have you got against him, besides reading and not buying?”
“Oh, he buys. But Gretchen, lambkin, a man like that you don’t need. Loner. Crazy.”
“But he listens. He’s so understanding.”
“Like the butcher with the calf. What’s this immortal cancer stuff he’s feeding you?”
“Nothing. We were talking about Ashley.”
“Sorry, lambkin. Life hasn’t been kind to you. But be a little wise. This man has delusions he’s a vampire.”
Gretchen smoothed the dust jacket of Euryanthe and Oberon at Covent Garden. “Maybe he is.”
Miss Trilby rounded her lips in mock horror. “Perhaps! Doesn’t look much like Frank Langella, though, does he?”
No, he didn’t, thought Gretchen, as she sorted orders for reprints of Kadensho’s Book of the Flowery Tradition and de Honnecourt’s Fervor of Buenos Aires.
But there was something appealing about Nick Scuroforno, something besides his empathy for a homely divorcée with a terminally ill child. His spare, dark humor; maybe that was it. Miss Trilby did not understand everything.
Why not make a play for him?
Even to herself, her efforts seemed pathetic. She got Keesha, the single mother across the hall in her apartment, to help her frost her hair. She bought a cheap cardigan trimmed with Angora and dug out an old padded bra.
“Lambkin,” said Miss Trilby dryly one afternoon when Gretchen came in dolled up in her desperate finery, “the man is not exactly a fashion plate himself.”
But Scuroforno seemed flattered, if not impressed, by Gretchen’s efforts, and took her out for coffee, then a late dinner. Mostly, however, he came into the bookstore an hour before closing and let her pretend to sell him some white elephant like the Reverend Wood’s Trespassers: How Inhabitants of Earth, Air, and Water Are Enabled to Trespass on Domains Not Their Own. She would fiddle with the silver chain on her neck, and they would slide to the floor where she would pour out her troubles to him. Other customers seldom came in so late.
“You trust him with private details of your life,” said Miss Trilby, “but what do you know of his?”
He did talk. He did. Philosophy, history, details of Gretchen’s daughter’s illness. One day, she asked, “What do you do?”
“I steal souls. Photographer.”
Oh.
“Can’t make much money on that artsy stuff,” Miss Trilby commented when she heard this. “Rumor says he’s got a private source of income.”
“Illegal, you mean?”
“What a romantic you are, Gretchen. Ask him.”
Gambling luck and investments, he told her.
One day, leaving for the shop, Gretchen opened her mail and found a letter—not even a phone call—that Ashley’s remission was over. Her little girl was in the hospital again.
The grief was surreal, physical. She was afraid to go back into h
er apartment. She had bought a copy of Jan Pieńkowski’s Haunted House, full of diabolically funny pop-ups, for Ashley’s birthday. She couldn’t bear to look at it now, waiting like a poisoned bait on the counter.
She went straight to the shop, began alphabetizing the new stock. Nothing made sense, she couldn’t remember if O came after N. Miss Trilby had to drag her away, make her stop.
“What’s wrong? Is it Ashley?”
Gretchen handed her the letter.
Miss Trilby read it through her thick lorgnette. Then, “Look at yourself. Your cheeks are flushed. Eyes bright. Disaster becomes you. Or is it the nearness of death bids us breed, like romance in a concentration camp?”
Gretchen shuddered. “Maybe my body is tricking me into reproducing again.”
“To replace Ashley. Not funny, lambkin. But possibly true. I ask again, why this man? Doesn’t madness frighten you?”
Next day, Gretchen followed him to his car. It seemed natural to get in, uninvited, ride home with him, follow him up two flights of stairs covered with cracked treads.
He let her perch on a stool in his kitchen darkroom while he printed peculiar old architectural photographs. The room smelled of chemicals, vinegary. An old Commodore 64 propped the pantry door open. She had seen a new computer in his living room, running a screensaver of Giger babies holding grenades, and wraiths dancing an agony-dance.
“I never eat here,” he said. “As a kitchen, it’s useless.”
He emptied trays, washed solutions down the drain, rinsed. Her heart beat hard under the sleazy Angora. His body, sleek as a lion’s, gave off a male scent, faintly predatory.
While his back was turned, she undid her cardigan. The buttons too easily slipped out of the cheap fuzzy fabric, conspiring with lust.
She slipped it off as he turned around. And felt the draft of the cold kitchen and the surprise of his gaze on her inadequate chest.
He turned away, dried his hands on the kitchen towel. “Don’t fall in love with me.”
“Not at all arrogant, are you?” She wouldn’t, wouldn’t fall in love. No. That wasn’t quite it.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 4
