Stamps, Vamps & Tramps (A Three Little Words Anthology)

by Rachel Caine

  “Whose memory is it then?” he finally asks of Samuel.

  “A lawyer passing through Hawthorne on some boring bit of business or another. I’m sure he is safely ensconced back in Richmond by now, once again resting against that tree and doubting his entire life.” Samuel takes a long drink from his mug. When he at last sets it down, his expression is rueful and distant, fixed on the table yet seeming to see past it. But as soon as he returns his attention to Frederick, his easy smile returns. “He would have been better off staying here. Once I found Hawthorne, I couldn’t imagine ever leaving.”

  Frederick has been wondering if Samuel hailed from some other part of the colonies. He stood out as different the moment Frederick first laid eyes upon him, bounding down the street with his head high while others shuffled past with ducked heads.

  “Where do you come from originally?” Frederick asks.

  “A small village in Virginia. No place anyone has ever heard of.”

  “And how long have you been in Hawthorne?”

  “Two months? Maybe close to three now.” Samuel laughs. “It’s easy to lose track of the days here.”

  “This place is a curiosity to be certain,” Frederick says, casting a look around him. The Painted People would be a more apt name for the inn than The Wayward Tramp, he thinks. “Why the markings? What is it about them—about Hawthorne—that made you choose to stay? To abandon whatever life you had before this?”

  “The life I had before this abandoned me. My father…” Samuel takes a swig of ale, then follows it with a bitter laugh. “The golden-tongued preacher, they called him. Only his tongue was not so golden when it came to me. His last words to me were that I was no son of his, but of the Devil, and that he would see me driven from his home. So I left. I traveled about for a good many years, and then I found Hawthorne.” Samuel’s smile returns, though the unmistakable weight of sadness leaves it not so broad as before. “A wayward tramp found himself welcomed at The Wayward Tramp.”

  “I’m sorry,” Frederick says. He almost asks what made Samuel’s father disown him, but stops himself. He wants too much for the answer to be the very secret he himself hides. To know that Samuel harbors those same kinds of feelings would be too great a temptation; to know that he doesn’t, too great a disappointment.

  “If you want to know what is so remarkable about Hawthorne,” Samuel says, “it’s this: This is a town of good people, the kindest people I have ever known. Yet anywhere else, each and every one of them would be an outcast for some foolish reason or another. We all have stories the world isn’t ready to hear. But here… here we can live more honestly as ourselves, without shame. Here we can share our stories on our very skin.”

  Samuel speaks with a passion that suggests he has inherited his father’s golden tongue, despite whatever differences drove them apart. Frederick glances around the room and, for a moment, permits himself to entertain the fantasy of living among painted people who tattoo themselves with stories and memories. What would it be like to dwell in a place where he could finally share all the longings he has kept secret, where he would not have to beseech a dubious God to make him other than he is?

  “Such a place sounds too good to be true,” he says at last.

  A solemn look passes across Samuel’s face. “Living in Hawthorne is not without its price.”

  “The markings,” Frederick says. “Are they the price? They must involve a great deal of pain, I imagine.”

  “Only for a moment.”

  Frederick has his doubts about that claim, for he has heard how some of the native tribes tattoo themselves. They mix the ashes of burnt straw with water, and with that inky mixture, the desired image is drawn upon the skin and then pricked with needles. The blood and the ash combine, leaving an imprint on the skin that can never be removed. Using such a process to achieve the detail in Samuel’s tattoo—to portray the minutiae of individual leaves and the crevices in the tree bark—would have to require far more than a moment’s discomfort.

  “You seem curious,” Samuel says playfully. There is suddenly something ominous about his dimpled smile, something calculating in the glint of his eyes. “Perhaps you’d like one of your own?”

  “No,” Frederick says. He shivers, overcome by a fear disproportionate to Samuel’s question, a fear he can find no rational reason to feel.

  A serving girl appears with Frederick’s meal—a tureen of peanut soup and a plate overflowing with boiled pork and chunks of bread and cheese. The food is barely upon the table before Frederick is downing a mouthful of pork, hot enough to burn his tongue. His chill quickly passes, and with it his fear. There is nothing in Samuel’s gaze now but nonchalance and charm. The ill effects of travel, Frederick tells himself as explanation for his burst of anxiety. Merely hunger and fatigue masquerading as dread.

  As he eats, the conversation turns to matters far less strange than memories inked on skin. Frederick tells Samuel of his work for the wealthy and insufferable Benjamin Hutchins, whose business interests frequently have Frederick traveling throughout the colonies. After another tankard of ale, Frederick speaks of losing his parents—his mother during the birth of a stillborn child, his father to a shipwreck off the coast of New Jersey. Another then another, and he is admitting how lost he has come to feel in Philadelphia with no family left, how those who call themselves friends cannot truly be so; they know too little of what is in his mind and heart.

  “And what is it you’re keeping from them?” Samuel asks.

  Frederick lets out an incredulous laugh. “Why would I tell a man I’ve only just met when I cannot even tell those whom I’ve known since childhood?”

  “Because I have no expectations of you. Because Hawthorne is a place of no judgments.”

  Frederick stares at Samuel for a long while, unable to speak for fear of what might escape his lips. He wants nothing more than to reveal his every secret to Samuel, yet the desire to talk so freely feels as shameful as the longings to which he would confess.

  “I should turn in for the evening,” Frederick says, standing. “I have a long day’s journey ahead of me tomorrow.”

  The impact of how much he has drunk reveals itself in his unsteady steps. Samuel is standing as quickly as Frederick is staggering, grabbing him by the arm to steady him.

  “In your condition, you’ll have a long journey to your room as well without some help.”

  Frederick can feel the eyes of the inn’s other occupants on him. Not wanting to leave Hawthorne with a fine for public drunkenness—if the town’s unorthodox residents even impose such things—he nods and allows Samuel to help him toward the narrow staircase that leads up to the guest rooms. The stairs creak with every step, and Frederick finds himself lulled by the sound. He sags against Samuel as they reach the upper landing and start down a dark hall. Frederick hates that Samuel doesn’t pull away, that he was so foolish as to have drunk so much, that he ever stopped in this accursed town to begin with. He can’t help but wonder if, deep down, he has put himself in this position on purpose.

  “Here we are,” Samuel says, stopping in front of a door.

  Frederick mutters a quick word of thanks and opens the door, ready to shut it quickly behind him. Before he can, Samuel is cupping his face in his hands, kissing him deeply. What little resolve Frederick has left departs him in a rush of desire. He and Samuel stumble into the room, mouths still locked even as Samuel pulls the door closed. Their arms entangle in a hurry to undo clasps and slip off garments.

  “Would you leave me something to remember you by?” Samuel whispers as they sink down onto the bed. His skin feels surprisingly cool, the earthy scent of him intoxicating enough to overpower the sour odor of every traveler who has slept there before them.

  “Yes,” Frederick answers, so breathless that the word barely makes it past his lips.

  Samuel’s mouth trails down his neck, but the gentle brush of his lips soon stops. Two sharp pricks, and then Frederick is crying out as pain sears its way across his
neck. For a moment he is paralyzed, aware of only heat and the pounding of blood through his veins. Then the pain fades, leaving only the feel of Samuel driving into him, teeth still buried in his neck. Frederick cries out again, this time in pleasure, and the already darkened room goes black around him.

  In his first moment of wakefulness, Frederick is certain he has dreamed—at least the bite, if not the entire encounter. But as his eyes adjust to the morning light, he sees small splatters of blood on the mattress, then Samuel asleep beside him, his mouth smeared red. Frederick touches a hand to his neck and flinches; the skin there is sore to the touch. He shudders, not sure which frightens him more—Samuel, or the fact that he recalls more pleasure than pain when he stares at his own spilled blood.

  Frederick tries to slip away quietly from the bed, but stops when he notices the half-formed image on Samuel’s bare chest. Impossibly, blood-red lines appear on Samuel’s skin, twisting and turning themselves, each adding to the image’s completion. But there is already enough there for Frederick to know with dreadful certainty what this marking portrays: a top he played with as a child, exact in its representation, down to the chip near its point and the jagged scratch down its side.

  Frederick leaps from the bed. This is impossible, he tells himself, yet he cannot deny what he sees before him: his own memory, one he never shared with Samuel, forming on the man’s chest.

  “Frederick?” Samuel, now roused, quickly gets out of the bed. “Don’t be—”

  “What are you?” Frederick demands, his voice quavering as he backs away. His heart pounds so fast that he feels sick.

  “I know you’re afraid,” Samuel says, taking slow steps toward him, hands held out like one trying to convince a snarling dog that he means no harm. “I was too, at first.”

  Frederick looks to the door. He could run, but what then? He is naked, his clothes strewn about the room. And the other people in the town—they’re all like Samuel. Would they attack him, try to stop him from fleeing?

  “What are you?” Frederick demands again.

  “Yet one more thing in this world that is wrongly feared. Like everything and everyone that comes to Hawthorne. Like you.”

  “You are nothing like me,” Frederick says, though he can hear the tinge of doubt in his words. For all his fear now, he never struggled against Samuel the night before, and part of him yearns to endure it all again. Frederick grabs a candlestick from the mantel of the room’s fireplace and brandishes it like a weapon; if only he could fight off his own desire with it as well as Samuel. “Stay away from me.”

  Samuel stops. His face falls, a look of such genuine-seeming hurt that Frederick half-lowers the candlestick.

  “You’re free to leave, Frederick. But if you stay…” Samuel starts toward him again. “Imagine no secrets. Imagine not having to deny what you feel.”

  What Frederick imagines is the night before. The pain was so brief, so fleeting. And the rest of it—more than any carnal pleasures, he longs for the simple act of sitting across from Samuel and talking, knowing he can reveal what’s in his heart without fear.

  “But at what cost?” Frederick asks, knowing such freedom cannot possibly come so easily. “You said last night that living in Hawthorne is not without its price.”

  “The choice to stay is one you can never take back. And the memories—you will always hunger for more. But…” Samuel closes the space between them, strokes a hand across Frederick’s cheek. “Imagine you and I knowing everything there is to know about each other.”

  Frederick’s gaze strays to Samuel’s chest. The image has fully formed now—his childhood top, as scarred on the outside as he has always felt inside.

  “I want to stay,” he whispers, letting the candlestick fall from his hand.

  Samuel kisses him softly, then looks around the room, clearly searching for something. He rummages through their discarded garments until he at last finds a knife he must have had somewhere on his person. Frederick feels a flare of panic. Before he can question what the knife is for, Samuel pulls the blade across the spot where Frederick’s memory has formed on his chest.

  “What are you—”

  Samuel hushes him with another kiss, then gently pulls Frederick’s face toward his bleeding chest. The blood moistens Frederick’s lips and trickles into his mouth, sweet on his tongue. For reasons his rational mind fails to explain, he is overcome by the desire to taste more of it. He sucks at the wound, swallowing blood while Samuel’s fingers run through his hair. Frederick’s body suddenly goes rigid, his mind a canvas of blackness. A spasm of pain follows, as if fire is shooting through his innards. When the pain subsides, Samuel is kissing him again. Frederick’s lips stray to Samuel’s neck. He feels a tingle in his mouth, the strange sensation of his teeth elongating. A hunger deeper than any he has ever known rises from within him. Overwhelmed, Frederick sinks his teeth into Samuel’s neck and swallows blood as sweet as any wine. Then Samuel feeds from him in turn, each of them again and again, drinking until the whole of each other’s history is spelled out on the other’s skin.

  MUNGO THE VAMPIRE

  By Sandra Kasturi

  Once there was a tiny little vampire whose name was Mungo Cheswick. He was no bigger than a pickle. Mungo was terribly in love with film star Annabel Cartwright, former “Scream Queen” of many beloved horror films, and now a Serious Actress, who lived in San Francisco and sometimes Hollywood. This was not helpful, as Mungo lived in London and was not a film star. Also, Mungo was a thousand times smaller than Annabel, which made the pursuit of love somewhat troublesome.

  Mungo thought carefully about how he could make Annabel Cartwright into his vampire bride. First, he had to get to “the Colonies,” which is how he still thought of the Americas. Mungo’s archaic nature was somewhat charming; he had certainly charmed his way into the graces of other ladies, mostly fairies and small elves, even a less-homely-than-usual gnome or two. They had all succumbed to his whispers and mosquito-like buzzing, which, as one of the fairies had said, tickled a bit, but was otherwise quite pleasant. Of course this didn’t last, as eventually Mungo would drain them dry and leave their desiccated corpses (now even smaller) in various gardens, under the shrubbery or in beds of perennials.

  But what Mungo Cheswick, miniscule vampire, really wanted was a red-blooded American girl, an enormous (to him) actress. His mother had always warned him against taking human blood—it caused drunkenness, freewheeling and general bad behavior amongst tiny vampires. Mungo had been a good son and followed Mother’s edicts. Until he’d spotted Annabel Cartwright on a film poster in Piccadilly Circus and was instantly smitten. Happily, Mother came afoul of a fly zapper by the kitchen door of a vicarage and Mungo was finally free to pursue his dream.

  Getting to America did seem problematic. Mungo thought about stowing away on a boat, but he didn’t really take to the sea. His one excursion to Brighton for an evening cruise in a Barbie Party Cruise Ship™ had resulted in terrible seasickness that was only alleviated by Mungo eating most of his guests, and then he couldn’t show his face in polite vampire society for fully six months.

  Mungo then considered an aeroplane, but was worried that, being so tiny, he might get sucked into some sort of unpleasant intake valve and be irreparably smoodged. He could always burrow into a human’s pocket, but he was nervous that he might be tempted by the heady scent of blood from non-celebrity Homo sapiens and cave in to its lure, when he really wanted to save himself for Annabel.

  Finally he hit upon the perfect plan. He would post himself to America. Straight to Annabel herself! He’d still travel by air, but would be safe inside his little coffin, itself stuffed into a fat, padded envelope. Mungo would also take several ticks bloated with fairy blood to sustain him on his journey. He felt quite bursting with cleverness at this plan. None of the other little vampires in England had ventured as far as he was about to go. Now, he just needed to find a way to get his parcelled-self deposited into a post box, with “fragile” and “handle wit
h care” written on the outside of the parcel.

  After much thought and the bullying of a few brownies and dwarfs with nimble fingers, Mungo managed to have his wee coffin (with himself inside it) bundled into the bubble-lined envelope that was guaranteed to be light-proof by the photo supply shop he ordered it from. He even had a small witch he knew hex the postman into bringing the appropriate stickers and postage. Appropriately enough, the somewhat befuddled postman showed up with commemorative Christopher Lee stamps, which Mungo felt boded well for his upcoming venture into world travel and romance. Excitedly, Mungo settled himself and his blood-filled ticks in for the long journey to the New World.

  Things didn’t go exactly as planned. Who could have known that Mungo didn’t travel well? His lurching journey to the post box in a dwarf-sack left him terribly seasick—worse even than on his ill-fated cruise—and he wasn’t able to have a single sip of supper that night. Even more unfortunately, the dwarfs, early risers all of them, had dumped him in the Royal Mail first thing in the morning… which meant that the entire weight of the day’s post rested right on top of Mungo’s coffin. As the letters piled up, the coffin creaked alarmingly, warped out of true at the joints, and then squished into a tiny trapezoid, Mungo and his ticks similarly flattened inside. It was most upsetting.

  Mungo’s parcel finally arrived in California, croggled, mashed, and much the worse for wear. Mungo himself was not the jaunty little vampire he had once been. The only upside was that the envelope was indeed light-proof, as guaranteed, so poor Mungo did not suffer the indignity of bursting suddenly into flames after being touched by sunlight. Unfortunately, he still hadn’t reached his beloved, but had been redirected to the office of Annabel Cartwright’s agent, where all the star’s post was automatically sent.