The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  “It is the dull and naked truth,” he assured me, “that I have come here tonight to ascertain.”

  “Very well,” I said. “I will tell you the dull and naked truth. I debauched Vambery’s youngest daughter. I used her as I had used many others. It was heartless, perhaps cruel – but I have always been a villain, by instinct and by inclination. I seduced the girl, in a spirit which had naught to do with love. Later, I regretted it very bitterly, but I claim no credit for that; I know that it cannot excuse me. Vambery swore revenge, and would have called me out had he any competence with sword or pistol – but he had naught but the mind and sinews of a professor of languages, and the capacity for obsession which academic study requires and rewards. The seduction of his daughter drove him half-mad; her suicide completed the process. He could not fight me, so he found other ways to strike out at me. Alas, I would far rather he had aimed a bullet at my heart than do to me what he has done these last ten years.

  “The dull and naked truth is that my name really is Lugard; the notion that I obtained it by reversing the name Dragul is Vambery’s fantasy, as is the absurd proposition that I am the reincarnation of Vlad Dragul, called Tepes or the Impaler, whose name is usually Latinised as Dracul and sometimes rendered Dracula – “son of Dracul” – in order to distinguish him from his like-named father. It is also Vambery’s fantasy that I am one of the undead, who subsists by drinking human blood, and that what I did to his daughter was unnatural and accomplished by magic. The dull and naked truth is that what I did to his daughter was entirely natural, even if a little of the mesmerist’s art was employed in its accomplishment. No one, it is said, can be persuaded even by mesmerism to do anything which flatly contradicts her own will – but the professor was quite unable to accept that, and felt compelled to invent an alternative account which absolved his beloved child from all hint of blame.

  “As the late Professor Copplestone scrupulously pointed out to us, a man’s vision is ever apt to be polluted, perverted and confused by his hopes, fears and fancies. Vambery made himself vulnerable to fears and fancies of the worst kind, and he has pursued me throughout Europe with dark rumours and direct slanders. He has done his best to ruin my reputation, and to make a demon of me in the eyes of my fellow men. No one believes him, of course – but the lie is so very gaudy, so very entertaining, that it is repeated anyway. No one really believes that I am Dragul reincarnate, nor that I am a vampire which feeds on the blood of my fellow men . . . but that does not prevent the whispers and the sly glances, and the universal acceptance of the notion that however I accomplished the feat, I did worse than murder Laura Vambery. Vambery has succeeded, after a fashion, in making a vampire of me in the eyes of my fellow men. His caustic lies have stripped me by degrees of every vestige of the respect that is my due by virtue of birth, wealth and station.

  “If Wilde’s friend Stoker really is writing a book based in the supposed occult wisdom of Arminius Vambery, I shudder to think what further shadows might be cast upon my life. You ought to sympathize with that, Mr H*****, as one who has some experience of the way in which a real life may be confused by myth. If it is difficult to live up to a heroic reputation, think how much more difficult it might be to live down a monstrous one!”

  He was sitting less rigidly now. As his curiosity was fed, he was possessed by a soothing tranquillity. What a strange being he was!

  “In a way,” I told him, lowering my voice almost to a whisper, “I wish I were a vampire. Then, I could not be hurt by Vambery’s lies, and Laura Vambery could have risen from the grave to become my consort. And in my inmost heart, I wish that every word which Copplestone spoke might be true, that all humanity might be doomed and damned, and that vampires might inherit the earth, worrying no more about the stupid hatreds of blind, mad men. Alas, I fear that Copplestone may have been no less a victim of his fears and fancies than Arminius Vambery. The dull truth and the dull tragedy, my dear H*****, is that you are quite right: there is no such thing as a vampire.”

  “Then why,” he said, with what was clearly intended to be devastating simplicity, “did you steal the professor’s formula, and the remainder of his drug? Do you hope to make money selling it?”

  “You know better than that, Mr H*****,” I purred. “Do you think my life of leisure is sustained by dealing in opium and absinthe? My wealth needs no such supplementation. It was my villain’s instinct which made me steal the vial and the paper; once having concluded that I wanted them, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to take them. For a while, I considered the possibility that the impulse was not entirely my own – that it might have been planted in my soul by one of Copplestone’s overmen, reaching back through time to make sure that the secret would not die with him – but you and I know better than to entertain such nonsense.”

  I knew that I was on safe ground. This was a man whose watchword was When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth. That, at least, was the watchword of the the doctor’s literary invention, and I knew by the haunted expression in his eyes that this H***** was trying desperately to live up to his legend. I, on the other hand, knew perfectly well that if, when one has eliminated the apparently impossible, one is left with something unworthy of consideration, one must re-examine one’s assumptions regarding the limits of possibility.

  “So you took the vial, although you already had the formula, out of simple dog-in-the-manger selfishness?” he said.

  “Of course,” I said, gently. The man had little understanding of the true wellsprings of human action; he could not have begun to comprehend my motives, because they could not have met his crude standards of rationality. He could not have begun to comprehend what Arminius Vambery’s malicious madness and the love for Laura which I had belatedly discovered in my desolate heart had made of me. He did not have imagination enough to see where obsession might lead a man with a soul as dark as mine. Oscar Wilde might have understood, but Wilde was about to set sail for the desert sun with his handsome Judas, leaving me alone and friendless.

  “I must ask you to return the formula,” said H*****, formally. “You may keep the vial, but the formula was consigned to the care of Dr W*****, and is his by right.”

  “The written formula no longer exists,” I said, regretfully. “I have destroyed the paper I took from W*****’s jacket.”

  “I can’t believe that,” he said – but he said it mechanically, like an automaton. He was mine, now, and I could play him as I wished.

  I leaned forward. “You might yet be surprised, Mr H*****,” I said, “by your own capacity for belief.”

  He was staring at me now, wide-eyed. I did not have to meet his gaze; no true mesmerist requires an awesome stare or a bright and spinning object to captivate the imagination of his victim. As to whether a mesmerized man can be instructed to do something contradictory to his own will . . . who can know what a man’s will might permit, and what it might forbid? I was in a mood to be bold. “Listen to me, H*****,” I said, in a velvet-smooth tone. “Listen to me, and I will tell you the real truth . . .”

  I told him, very painstakingly, that everything Arminius Vambery had said about me was true: that I was a vampire, and must be destroyed. I told him to return, between one and three hours after dawn, armed with a wooden stake, which he must drive through my beating heart. I told him not to be afraid, because he would find me unconscious and unresisting. I assured him that I would not crumble to dust, but that he would find my body lighter by a least three stones than it was at present, and that this would be an unmistakable proof of all that I had said.

  By the time I finished, he was nearly asleep. It was apparent to me that his rest cure had been terminated too early. I was able to take the gun from his uncannily steady hand. I checked the chambers; it was fully loaded. I put it back in his hand, and gently roused him from his trance.

  “Go now,” I told him, gently. “Come back after dawn. You know what you must do.”

&nb
sp; He looked at me in bewilderment. For a few moments he did not know where he was or why. He put the gun away, but I had to help him with his coat and hat. When I opened the door for him, he departed meekly – but he recovered himself sufficiently as he descended the steps to turn and face me, and say: “This matter is not finished, Count Lugard. Depend on it.”

  “I do,” I assured him, as I raised my hand in a salute of farewell. I watched him from the doorway while he disappeared into the shadows of the night. There were still three hours and more until dawn.

  I collected my case, took a candle from the sitting-room, and went down into the cellars of the house.

  Laura lay in her coffin, perfectly at peace. Her wan face was lustrously clear and her dark eyes seemed almost luminous. The small star like mark on the cheek beneath her left eye stood out very clearly. Her lovely hair was neatly gathered about her finely chiselled features.

  “Soon,” I whispered. “Soon, my love!”

  She did not wake while I did my work; she might as well have been truly dead. Nor did she wake when I pricked her arm with the needle, injecting the drug into her arm.

  “Never fear, my love,” I said. “There is a better world for such as you and I, and a path which might lead us there, hand in hand. I have laid my last nightmare, played my last trick, and the time is come for expiation and redemption. I have found my destiny, and it is within my grasp.”

  I found that I was weeping, and wiped the tears from my eyes with my sleeve. How could any man ever have thought that I was heartless? How could any man ever have condemned me as a monster, forever doomed to remain outside the human community?

  I filled the syringe again. I knew that no one else would ever be able to use Copplestone’s elixir, unless the world of men were to produce another man with his peculiar fascinations – and refrained, meanwhile, from obliterating the ancient but precarious wisdom of the tribesmen he had visited. No one else could ever follow us into that glorious world where violent and vapid mankind was naught but a myth and a memory.

  Before taking my appointed station and injecting the drug into my own arm I reached out to touch the cold forehead of the lovely victim of my lust. I wanted to feel the faint warmth of her forgiveness before I escorted her into the misty reaches of the worlds beyond the world.

  “We leave nothing behind but a sunless world of dismal madmen,” I told her, softly. “We are bound for the vivid and effulgent future, when we shall revel and rejoice in the hunger and ecstasy of vampires.”

  NICHOLAS ROYLE

  Lacuna

  NICHOLAS ROYLE’S SECOND novel, Saxophone Dreams, appeared in the UK as a Penguin Original in 1996, following the publication of Counterparts in both Britain and America. A collection, The Crucian Pit & Other Stories, is also due from White Wolf. He is currently working on a new novel, Omphalos, which stems from ideas he has been developing in such recent short stories as “Lacuna”, “The Lagoon” (from Dark Terrors) and “The Matter of the Heart” (from The Third Alternative).

  Royle is the award-winning author of more than seventy horror tales, several of which have been selected for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Year’s Best Horror Stories and previous volumes of The Best New Horror, and recent appearances include Dark Terrors 2, Twist in the Tail and Razor Kiss. Also recently published are two Royle-edited anthologies: A Book of Two Halves, containing original stories about football and featuring a number of genre writers, and The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams.

  “ ‘Lacuna’ was based on one night in Denham, the westernmost town in Western Australia,” recalls the author. “It’s a small, one-street town and not especially beautiful, but I am determined to revisit it, if only to render untrue the line in the ‘story’ I find most disturbing – ‘You’ve never been here before, you’ll never be here again.’ I don’t like the dark shadow of mortality cast by that particular line – which wrote itself without any input from me. ‘Lacuna’ has now been developed into a scene in my new novel.”

  YOU WAKE UP in the middle of the night. Your mind is made of rubber.

  It’s hot. The trees are rushing under hair-dryer winds. The windows are open. You should have closed them. Put up with the motor racket of the air-con.

  You make one more move out of sleep and you know there is someone else in the room with you. Someone apart from her. You know it was their noise that woke you. You know they’re there. You can go back to sleep or make another move. You have to choose. You’re a figure in a game. You can’t hear her breathing. You should be able to. She’s lying next to you.

  You keep taking another step out of sleep until at last you’re awake. You realize the rubber was just the taste in your mouth. You reach for your glasses – look at the time. The red figures on the clock snap into focus: 1.25. You get out of bed. The room is in darkness. The curtains are only thin but there’s no moon. She stirs slightly. You kiss her to reassure her because you know that’s all she needs and she’ll stay asleep.

  You prowl the rented villa in the dark, pass through the main room. Go into the bathroom. The little window high in the wall above the toilet is open. The wind fails to drown out the cicadas. Less than an hour south of the Tropic of Capricorn. You’ve never been here before, you’ll never be here again. There are sharks and dugong in the bay.

  You sit on the toilet. There’s a mirror on the wall opposite. You raise your head but cannot see your reflection.

  It’s hot.

  You see your own reflection crawling in through the little window above your head.

  You rub the back of your neck, splash cold water. Try to wake up.

  You hear a noise in the main room. You creep back in from the bathroom. You imagine an intruder, fantasize scrabbling for a knife in the unfamiliar kitchen. You look back into the bedroom. The wind’s blowing outside. It’s 3.15.

  STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN

  Necrology: 1995

  HALF-WAY INTO THE DECADE, and as usual we pay tribute to those many writers, artists, performers and technicians who made significant contributions to the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres during their lifetimes and who died in 1995 . . .

  AUTHORS/ARTISTS

  Russian poet, literary critic and science fiction author Abram Ruvimovich Palely died on January 11th, less than a month before his 102nd birthday. His SF books were published in the late 1920s and early 30s, and he was imprisoned during Stalin’s “struggle against cosmopolitanism”.

  Fan and author Dr Kenneth J. Sterling, who sold his first story, “The Brain Eaters of Pluto”, to Wonder Stories at the age of thirteen, died from an aneurysm on January 12th, aged 74. As a teenager, he knew H.P. Lovecraft and supplied the plot of Lovecraft’s story “In the Walls of Eryx”, published in Weird Tales in 1939. He also contributed an essay, “Lovecraft and Science” to the Arkham House HPL volume Marginalia (1944). A clinical professor, he was recognized in medical circles as an authority on thyroid hormones.

  Gay author, editor and critic Stan Leventhal died of AIDS on January 15th, aged 43. His SF and fantasy stories were collected in A Herd of Tiny Elephants and Candy Holidays and Other Short Fiction.

  Radio scriptwriter Sidney Slon, who wrote episodes of The Shadow, died from Alzheimer’s Disease on January 21st, aged 84.

  Texas-born mystery writer Patricia Highsmith died in Switzerland on January 28th, aged 74. Her career began in 1950 with Strangers on a Train (memorably filmed the following year by Alfred Hitchcock), and her collection Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes featured mostly fantasy stories. Her fiction was also reprinted in such horror anthologies as The 17th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories and Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural.

  Paul Monette, who wrote novelizations of Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979), Scarface (1983) and Predator, as well as Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, succumbed to the disease on February 10th, aged 49.

  Ian Ballantine, founder of Penguin Books in America, plus the Bantam, New American Library and Ballantine impri
nts, died from a heart attack on March 9th. He was 79. In partnership with his wife Betty, he was a major figure in paperback publishing and the history of science fiction and fantasy books for six decades. Bantam Books closed its offices for a day in his honour.

  Radio writer Mildred Henry Gross, who scripted The Green Hornet at Detroit’s WXYZ radio during the 1940s, died on March 28th, aged 93.

  San Francisco poet Stanley D. McNail, whose books of wonderfully macabre verse include Tea in the Mortuary, Footsteps in the Attic, The Black Hawk Country and the Arkham House volume Something Breathing, died of heart failure in Berkeley, California on April 4th, aged 77. Editor and publisher of the magazines Nightshade and The Galley Sail Review, he served as poetry editor for Renaissance and was the first to publish Charles Bukowski.

  Hollywood screenwriter Allan Scott, best known as the co-writer of many Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals, died on April 13th, aged 88. He also made uncredited contributions to such films as Portrait of Jennie and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.

  Screenwriter Edwin Blum died on May 2nd, aged 89. His fifteen produced screenplays include The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), The Canterville Ghost (1944) and Down to Earth. He also wrote many episodes of the TV sci-spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

  Publisher Charles (Montgomery) Monteith died on May 9th, aged 74. He joined Faber & Faber in 1954 and quickly discovered and published William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. He went on the publish many SF writers, including Brian Aldiss, Edmund Cooper, James Blish, Harry Harrison and Clifford Simak, as well as Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, P.D. James and Philip Larkin. He retired in 1980 due to ill health.

  Author Christopher Hodder-Williams, whose near-future SF novels include Chain Reaction (1959), The Main Experiment and Fistful of Digits, died of a heart attack on May 15th, aged 69.