by Marvin Kaye
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THE VAMPIRE
SEXTETTE
Edited By
Marvin Kaye
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Erotic Myth of Blood
MARVIN KAYE
The Other Side of Midnight
KIM NEWMAN
Some Velvet Morning
NANCY A. COLLINS
Sheena
BRIAN STABLEFORD
Vanilla Blood
S. P. SOMTOW
In the Face of Death
CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO
The Isle Is Full of Noises
TANITH LEE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or
locales is entirely coincidental.
THE VAMPIRE SEXTETTE
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with Bookspan
PRINTING HISTORY
GuildAmerica Books hardcover edition / 2000
Ace mass-market edition / October 2002
Compilation copyright © 2000 by Marvin Kaye.
The Other Side of Midnight copyright © 2000 by Kim Newman.
Some Velvet Morning copyright © 2000 by Nancy Collins.
Sheena copyright © 2000 by Brian Stableford.
Vanilla Wood copyright © 2000 by S. P. Somtow.
In the Face of Death copyright © 2000 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
The Isle Is Full of Noises copyright © 2000 by Tanith Lee.
Cover art by Luis Royo.
Cover design by Rita Frangie.
Text design by Julie Rogers.
All rights reserved.
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INTRODUCTION
The Erotic Myth of Blood
WHEN BRAM STOKER'S memorable nosferatu Dracula opens one of his
own veins and forces Mina Harker to drink, it is a moment both unholy and
sexual. The count's shocking oralism is concupiscent and, in the manner of the
Black Mass, also a dark travesty of transubstantiation.
Vampirism in its literary guise is often linked with Eros. The two first
significant vampire tales in western literature—Dr. John Polidori's lampoon of
Lord Byron, The Vampire, and Sheridan LeFanu's novella, Camilla, are infused
with implicit homosexuality; compared with them, Dracula's sexual implications
seem oblique.
One might argue that Bram Stoker was reined in by Victorianism, but in fact his
plot is rife with implicit carnality. The count, in his own idiosyncratic fashion,
cuckolds both Mina's and Lucy's human lovers, and back at his old castle in
Transylvania, he also maintains an undead ménage à quatre. (Research reveals
that one of his wives is Carmilla, which suggests she must be bisexual.)
In his quintessential novel, Stoker introduced a third significant element to the
myth: compassion. As her poor suffering lover pounds a wooden stake through
Lucy's heart, he sees upon her countenance an expression of spiritual peace that
bespeaks her soul's delivery from the curse of the damned. This sympathy, so
vital to the author's theme of holiness and the profane, is again memorably invoked
when Dracula himself is at last destroyed, and though most of the movie versions
ignore this part of the tale, it does briefly surface in the 1931 film, when Bela
Lugosi says, "To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious," and then observes,
"There are far worse things awaiting man than death."
In 1976, this linkage between lust, bloodlust, and compassion reached a literary
pinnacle of sorts in Anne Rice's popular Interview With the Vampire. In its wake
came a flood of novels and short stories about vampires charismatic, eloquent,
genteel, melancholy, misunderstood, noble. Some were heroic, many were
equipped with paradoxically healthy libidos. Sexy vampires became such a cliché
that the market for them shriveled like a cinematic vampire in the light of day*
(*Only in the movies does daylight destroy vampires, but if you've read Dracula,
you already know that.) and, at several fantasy conventions, horror writer and
editor of Weird Tales Darrell Schweitzer reminded authors that vampires, alluring
though they might be, originally were supposed to be bad guys, remember?
The Vampire Sextette is my twenty-second anthology. Vampires have made
relatively few appearances in my collections, partly because they don't tend to
frighten me. Like demons, they are rooted in dualistic cosmology, and that has
little impact on someone whose philosophy is a tad to the left of atheism. Thus,
three popular horror novels, Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, William Peter Blatty's
The Exorcist, and Stephen King's Salem's Lot failed to raise a goose bump upon
my jaded flesh; though, to be fair, King's novel was sufficiently well written to
keep me reading to the end.
Another reason I have seldom included vampire stories is that so few have
anything to offer that Stoker hasn't already done better, and some of the
exceptions, notably E. F. Benson's "The Room in the Tower," Carl Jacobi's
"Revelations in Black," Clark Ashton Smith's "A Rendezvous in Averoigne," and
Richard Matheson's "Blood Son" have already been anthologized several times. I
did reprint Matheson's gruesome "Dress of White Silk," but his most remarkable
contribution to vampire literature was too long for my gatherings: I Am Legend,
that oft-filmed honor/science-fiction novel about a normal man trapped in a world
full of vampires.
In the past twenty-plus years, however, a new spate of excellent, highly original
vampire tales began to flow from the pens of such diverse stylists and storytellers
as Robert Aickman, Nancy Collins, Morgan Llywelyn, George R. R. Martin, Ray
Russell, Dan Simmons, S. P. Somtow, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and numerous
others. Still, it was not until Tanith Lee and I became international pen pals that the
idea for The Vampire Sextette was born.
I have long admired Tanith's poetically crafted fiction, and have purchased
rights to several of her short stories. A few years ago, we struck up a friendly
America-to-England correspondence and, at one point, exchanged works of
romantic fantasy that each other had written. About this time, Tanith suggested
that if I edited an anthology of a half dozen erotic vampire novellas, she would
agree to write one of them. She meant to work musk into her plot, and proposed
th
e collection be called The Vampire Sextette, to invoke the subthemes of
sensuality and musk.
The idea sparked the interest of Ellen Asher, editorial director of Doubleday
Direct's Science Fiction Book Club, so Ellen and I drew up a List of authors we
hoped might participate with Tanith. We agreed that the eroticism might vary from
X-rated down to R, that music might or might not be part of the plots, but the
vampirism must not be metaphorical, like Strindberg's Vampire Cook in The
Ghost Sonata or Harry Kressing's Conrad in The Cook: it must be the traditional
bloodsucking variety.
The six novellas that comprise The Vampire Sextette, all original variations on
the vampire theme, are refreshingly unlike one another. Sex and violence are
equally important in "Some Velvet Morning" by Nancy Collins, "The Isle Is Full
of Noises" by Tanith Lee, and S. P. Somtow's "Vanilla Blood"; gore runs
stronger than carnality in Kim Newman's "The Other Side of Midnight," while the
opposite is true in Brian Stableford's "Sheena" (in which music is also an
important plot element). Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's "In the Face of Death" is the
least sanguine, but its poignant love affair between an elegant vampire and the
redoubtable Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman is meticulously original.
Now settle back with a Bloody Mary and meet some truly remarkable
vampires… but before you do, don't forget to smear your windowpanes with
garlic.
—Marvin Kaye Manhattan, 2000
THE
VAMPIRE
SEXTETTE
KIM NEWMAN
The Other Side of Midnight
Kim Newman is an actor, broadcaster, film critic, and author of
some of the most remarkable fantasy tales being sent our way from his
hometown, London. His vampire novels include Anno Dracula, The
Bloody Red Baron,
and Judgment of Tears, and the theme also
surfaces in his novella, "Andy Warhol's Dracula." Other fiction
includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, The Quorum, as well as
nonfiction books such as Millennium Movies: End of the World
Cinema. His affection for the great filmmaker Orson Welles surfaces
in "The Other Side of Midnight," at once a startlingly different take
(pun intended) on vampire films, yet deep down a delightfully old-
fashioned homage to the same.
AT MIDNIGHT, 1980 flew away across the Pacific, and 1981 crept in from
the east. A muted cheer rose from the pretty folk around the barbecue pit, barely
an echo of the raucous welcome to a new decade that erupted at the height of the
last Paradise Cove New Year's party.
Of this company, only Geneviève clung to the old—the proper—manner of
reckoning decades, centuries, and (when they came) millennia. The passing of time
was important to her, born in 1416, she'd let more time pass than most. Even
among vampires, she was an elder. Five minutes ago—last year, last decade—
she'd started to explain her position to a greying California boy, an ex-activist they
called "the Dude." His eyes glazed over with more than the weed he'd been toking
throughout the party, indeed since Jefferson Airplane went Starship. She quite
liked the Dude's eyes, in any condition.
"It's as simple as this," she reiterated, hearing the French in her accent ("eet's,"
"seemple," "ziss") that came out only when she was tipsy ("teep-see") or trying
for effect. "Since there was no year nothing, the first decade ended with the end of
year ten A.D.; the first century with the end of 100 A.D.; the first millennium with
the end of 1000 A.D. Now, at this moment, a new decade is to begin. Nineteeneighty-one is the first year of the 1980s, as 1990 will be the last."
Momentarily, the Dude looked as if he understood, but he was just
concentrating to make out her accented words. She saw insight spark in his mind,
a vertiginous leap that made him want to back away from her. He held out his
twisted, tufted joint. It might have been the one he'd rolled and started in 1968,
replenished on and off ever since.
"Man, if you start questioning time," he said, "what have you got left? Physical
matter? Maybe you question that next, and the mojo won't work any more. You'll
think holes between molecules and sink through the surface of the Earth. Drawn
by gravity. Heavy things should be left alone. Fundamental things, like the ground
you walk on, the air you breathe. You do breathe, don't you, man? Suddenly it hits
me, I don't know if you do."
"Yes, I breathe," she said. "When I turned, I didn't die. That's not common."
She proved her ability to inhale by taking a toke from the joint. She didn't get a
high like his; for that, she'd have to sample his blood as it channelled the
intoxicants from his alveoli to his brain. She had the mellow buzz of him, from
saliva on the roach as much as from the dope smoke. It made her thirsty.
Because it was just after midnight on New Year's Eve, she kissed him. He
enjoyed it, noncommittally. Tasting straggles of tobacco in his beard and the film
of a cocktail—White Russian—on his teeth and tongue, she sampled the ease of
him, the defiant crusade of his back-burnered life. She understood now precisely
what the expression "ex-activist" meant. If she let herself drink, his blood would
be relaxing.
Breaking the kiss, she saw more sparks in his eyes, where her face was not
reflected. Her lips were sometimes like razors, even more than her fang -teeth.
She'd cut him slightly, just for a taste, not even thinking, and left some of herself
on his tongue. She swallowed: mostly spit, but with tiny ribbons of blood from his
gums.
French-kissing was the kindest form of vampirism. From the minute exchange
of fluid, she could draw a surprising sustenance. For her, just now, it was enough.
It took the edge off her red thirst.
"Keep on breathing, man," said the Dude, reclaiming his joint, smiling broadly,
drifting back towards the rest of the party, enjoying the unreeling connection
between them. "And don't question time. Let it pass."
Licking her lips daintily, she watched him amble. He wasn't convinced 1980
had been the last year of the old decade and not the first of the new. Rather, he
wasn't convinced that it mattered. Like a lot of Southern Californians, he'd settled
on a time that suited him and stayed in it. Many vampires did the same thing,
though Geneviève thought it a waste of longevity. In her more pompous moments,
she felt the whole point was to embrace change while carrying on what was of
value from the past.
When she was born and when she was turned, time was reckoned by the Julian
calendar, with its annual error of eleven minutes and fourteen seconds. Thinking of
it, she still regretted the ten days—the fifth to the fourteenth of October 1582—
Pope Gregory XIII had stolen from her, from the world, to make his sums add up.
England and Scotland, ten days behind Rome, held out against the Gregorian
calendar until 1752. Other countries stubbornly stuck with Julian dating until well
into the twentieth century; Russia had not chimed in until 1918, Greece not until
1923. Before the modern era, those ten-day shifts made diary-keeping a complex
b
usiness for a necessarily much-travelled creature. The leap-frogged weeks were
far much more jarring than the time-zone hopping she sometimes went through as
an air passenger.
The Paradise Cove Trailer Park Colony had been her home for all of seven
years, an eye blink which made her a senior resident among the constitutionally
impermanent peoples of Malibu. Here, ancient history was Sonny and Cher and
Leave It to Beaver, anything on the "golden oldies" station or an off-prime-time
rerun.
Geneviève—fully, Geneviève Sandrine de l'Isle Dieudonne, though she went by
Gené Dee for convenience—remembered with a hazy vividity that she had once
looked at the Atlantic and not known what lay between France and China. She was
older than the name "America"; had she not turned, she'd probably have been
dead before Columbus brought back the news. In all those years, ten days
shouldn't matter, but supposedly significant dates made her aware of that fold in
time, that wrench which pulled the future hungrily closer, which had swallowed
one of her birthdays. By her internal calendar, the decade would not fully turn for
nearly two weeks. This was a limbo between unarguable decades. She should have
been used to limbos by now. For her, Paradise Cove was the latest of a long
string of pockets out of time and space, cosy coffins shallowly buried away from
the rush of the world.
She was the only one of her kind at the party; if she took "her kind" to mean
vampires—there were others in her current profession, private investigation, even
other incomers from far enough out of state to be considered foreign parts. Born
in northern France under the rule of an English king, she'd seen enough history to
recognise the irrelevance of nationality. To be Breton in 1416 was to be neither
French nor English, or both at the same time. Much later, during the revolution,
France had scrapped the calendar again, ducking out of the 1790s, even renaming
the months. In the long term, the experiment was not a success. That was the last
