Vampires: The Recent Undead (54 page)

I do care. I ought to leave, to come for him later, when he’s alone.

He leans over to nuzzle my ear, masking the sound of the wind and the waves with his noisy breath and blood. Canvas snaps, flapping loose from the frame of a nearby chair. The gulls come and make their cries, high and wheedling. Strollers on the deck below have brought table scraps to feed them. Little beggars. They snatch what is offered from the air: a crust of someone’s sandwich, a crisp, a bit of pink tomato. They feed flying in the light, which reveals the beautiful separateness of all things. While I must go below.

I take him to my cabin. He has his own, since his wife, even on dry land, is a semi-invalid, and they can well afford it. But the two adjoin, so I take him to mine, because there will be noise. I even say that’s why I want to go there, and he smiles. He’s so sure I’ll be the source of that noise.

We take off our clothes in the dark, stuffy room. I could have a better one, if I wanted. But this cabin, so low down, is more isolated. Insulated by emptiness on either side.

I have removed my glasses. My eyes are adjusted now and I can see how self-conscious he is without his clothes. He bumps against the bed and sits down, then fumbles for the light switch. I kneel on the floor in front of him and make him stop. It’s easy. I let my tongues relax and wrap around his penis, which is a good size, not too big. Things are going well, considering.

Then, amazingly, he resists. An unusually strong-minded monkey, this one. He pushes me away by my shoulders, slides his hands into my armpits and lifts. He’s trying to get me to sit on him, he mumbles how he’s always wanted to do it this way. The soft hairs covering his legs brush the backs of my thighs, my calves, as I obediently slide my knees up beside his hips. He rolls his penis against my pubic bone in a practiced move, which might excite me if I had a clitoris. He makes me taste his antiseptic, minty lips, the breath between them laden with the odors of coffee, sugar, flour, eggs. Breakfast. Then he pushes me away again, grappling me into position. He is strong, but I could fight him. I don’t. I want this. I need it. I have given up trying to make myself be careful and use my mouth.

He does scream. I do too, and shout Oh God, I’m coming, I’m coming, so if anyone hears us they’ll stay away. It lasts a little long for an orgasm, but after a couple of minutes he stops thrashing on the bed and lies still, deflating. I pump and pump. The rosy goodness suffuses me, warming my womb. When I’m done I fall into a dream, sliding slowly off the monkey and curling up next to him on the soiled sheets.

D. is with me and we’re on a mountain in Costa Rica, in the seven-sided house he had them build. He tries to tell me why it’s better, how the design dissipates the energy of earthquakes, which are common, but I am looking at the green, a green so very green I think my eyes will turn to emeralds before the sun has set. Behind a distant peak it goes, but the green does not go with it. Instead the valleys brim with green darkness, leaf-filled shadows expanding and thickening, clotting up the night with a truer, deeper green.

I realize my companion has been silent for some time. “D.,” I say, “it’s good to be here, really here. Do you know what I mean?” He nods and touches the back of my neck. His sensitivity to the moment must be, in large part, responsible for the lengthiness of his life. Nine hundred years without even a half-hearted attempt at suicide. That’s good, for a male. Soon he will be fully mature.

I find myself kissing him. Our tongues separate, then twine, like lashing vines.

No force is applied on either side, but slowly we grow closer, closer. I am penetrated by the breeze coming through the open window, sharp as citrus; by the fine, probing mouths of flying insects, frustrated in their search for food. By D.’s tongues, too, delicately drawn along my skin, down, down, in, and piercing the membrane over my womb’s entrance in an empty, reflexive action. Or I assume the action’s emptiness, in the moment. And as I return to the moment, dreaming.

Knowing this assumption is wrong disturbs my sleep.

I wake. The monkey’s corpse reeks of feces and the barest beginnings of decay. No blood—that’s all mine now, mine and my offspring’s.

D.’s offspring, too. Precocious D., fertile a good century before it might have been expected. When my membrane thinned and tore, I should have known. But this is my first pregnancy. Not until I noticed other signs did I fathom the truth of my condition, so rare among us. And by then I had boarded the ship, and it was too late.

I could have consumed the blood of a year’s supply of monkeys, if I’d had the cavities to store so much, and still that would be barely enough to satisfy me one month in this state.

Anxiously I examine myself once again, to be sure. Nipples dark and hard. Vaginal dentata pronounced—the normally flat triangular flaps are erect again with hunger, even so soon after my recent, reckless meal.

H. told me many visits ago that the blood volume of an average female monkey increases by fifty percent in the early stages of her pregnancy.

I’m not used to having to work these sorts of things out, but I try to come up with a plan for disposing of the monkey’s remains. Although I concentrate, my head is filled with aimless, rootless thoughts. Perfume ads. Nursery rhymes.
Three, six, nine, the goose drank wine. The monkey chewed tobacco on the street car line.
I remember watching one of them, a small one, a female, jumping rope. The glass of shattered bottles glittered in the sun and she sang fiercely, breathlessly, as she leapt and fell, leapt and fell.
The line broke, the monkey got choked
. This is really very bad.
And they
all went to heaven in a little rowboat.

The sad thing is, I have no choice. Even if I managed to escape suspicion in the matter of this monkey’s death, the next stop is an island. Madeira. Entirely as problematic as a cruise ship.

So I spend an hour being charming, a few minutes being devious in cramped, unlovely spaces, several more waiting near the lifeboat I’ve selected. Then everything’s all right again.

It’s not that I don’t care about the monkeys. I’m genuinely sorry that so many have to die, especially when it’s such a waste. I manage to salvage quite a few passengers and a handful of the crew. Not the boilermaster, nor his mate, so no one knows I have any idea about the cause of the explosion. Even in memory it’s tremendous, the most profound sound; much more ringing and metallic than any volcano. The dark, messy, crowded events preceding it fade in its majestic wake.

A stiff breeze keeps most of the smoke to our south. Rainbows of oil and bobbing detritus surround us, carried here on contrary currents. Each is unique: each random pattern, each odd, useless object brings its own ineffable message to the moment. Removed from context, these fragments of enameled metal, plastic, and wood, charred and reshaped by the forces I have unleashed, are sweetly new.

I wish I could show D. I know how deeply he understands these sorts of things. It is this that makes me sure he will live long, unlike so many other males. So many I have loved. As the coast of Africa comes into view, shorebirds soaring over whitecapped waves, I am buoyed by confidence. He will live many, many more years. Centuries. Long enough to witness the thousand births of each and every child I carry within my womb.

Castle in the Desert: Anno Dracula 1977

Kim Newman

What if Dracula defeated Van Helsing, married Queen Victoria, and established a new world order? Kim Newman invented this alternate history in 1992 with a short story that was expanded into novel
Anno Dracula
(which brilliantly added Jack the Ripper, Mycroft Holmes, and other fascinating elements to the mix). He continued the tale through the first World War in
The Bloody Red Baron
(1995),
Judgment of Tears: Anno Dracula 1959
(1998), and in several stories and novellas, including “Castle in the Desert: Anno Dracula 1977.” You’ll find the nameless narrator of the story bears more than a passing resemblance to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. The altruistic vampire is Genevi
è
ve Dieudonne, who appears (sometimes as a variant character) in other Newman/Yeovil works.

Newman’s other fiction includes
The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA
(with Eugene Byrne), and
The Man From the Diogenes Club
under his own name. As Jack Yeovil he wrote
The Vampire Genevieve
and
Orgy of the Blood Parasites.
Newman’s nonfiction books include
Nightmare Movies, Ghastly Beyond Belief
(with Neil Gaiman), and
Horror: 100 Best Books
(with Stephen Jones). He has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, and scripted for radio and television. Stories “Week Woman” and “Ubermensch” have been adapted into an episode of the TV series
The Hunger
and an Australian short film. His official website, Dr Shade’s Laboratory, can be found at www.johnnyalucard.com. His current publications are expanded reissues of the
Anno Dracula
series and
The Hound of the d’Urbervilles
and a much-expanded edition of
Nightmare Movies.

The man who had married my wife cried when he told me how she died. Junior—Smith Ohlrig, Jr., of the oil and copper Ohlrigs—hadn’t held on to Linda much longer than I had, but their marriage had gone one better than ours by producing a daughter.

Whatever relation you are to a person who was once married to one of your parents, Racquel Loring Ohlrig was to me. In Southern California, it’s such a common family tie you’d think there’d be a neat little name for it, pre-father or potential-parent. The last time I’d seen her was at the Poodle Springs bungalow her mother had given me in lieu of alimony. Thirteen or fourteen going on a hundred and eight, with a micro-halter top and frayed jean shorts, stretch of still-chubby tummy in between, honey-colored hair past the small of her back, an underlip that couldn’t stop pouting without surgery, binary star sunglasses and a leather headband with Aztec symbols. She looked like a preschooler dressed up as a squaw for a costume party, but had the vocabulary of a sailor in Tijuana and the glittery eyes of a magpie with three convictions for aggravated burglary. She’d asked for money, to gas up her boyfriend’s “sickle,” and took my television (no great loss) while I was in the atrium telephoning her mother. In parting, she scrawled “fuck you, piggy-dad” in red lipstick on a Spanish mirror. Piggy-dad, that was me. She still had prep-school penmanship, with curly-tails on her
y
s and a star over the
i.

Last I’d heard, the boyfriend was gone with the rest of the Wild Angels and Racquel was back with Linda, taking penicillin shots and going with someone in a rock band.

Now things were serious.

“My little girl,” Junior kept repeating, “my little girl . . . ”

He meant Racquel.

“They took her away from me,” he said. “The vipers.”

All our lives, we’ve known about the vampires, if only from books and movies. Los Angeles was the last place they were likely to settle. After all, California is famous for sunshine. Vipers would frazzle like burgers on a grill. Now, it was changing. And not just because of affordable prescription sunglasses.

The dam broke in 1959, about the time Linda was serving me papers, when someone in Europe finally destroyed Dracula. Apparently, all vipers remembered who they were biting when they heard the news. It was down to the Count that so many of them lived openly in the world, but his continued unlife—and acknowledged position as King of the Cats—kept them in the coffin, confined to joyless regions of the old world like Transylvania and England. With the wicked old witch dead, they didn’t have to stay on the plantation any longer. They spread.

The first vipers in California were elegant European predators, flush with centuried fortunes and keen with red thirsts. In the early ’60s, they bought up real estate, movie studios, talent agencies (cue lots of gags), orange groves, restaurant franchises, ocean-front properties, parent companies. Then their get began to appear: American vampires, new-borns with wild streaks. Just as I quit the private detective business for the second time, bled-dry bodies turned up all over town as turf wars erupted and were settled out of court. For some reason, drained corpses were often dumped on golf courses. Vipers made more vipers, but they also made viper-killers—including such noted humanitarians as Charles Manson—and created new segments of the entertainment and produce industries. Vampire dietary requirements opened up whole new possibilities for butchers and hookers.’

As the Vietnam War escalated, things went quiet on the viper front. Word was that the elders of the community began ruthless policing of their own kind. Besides, the cops were more worried about draft dodgers and peace-freak protesters. Now, vampires were just another variety of Los Angeles fruitcake. Hundred-coffin mausolea were opening up along the Strip, peddling shelter from the sun at five bucks a day. A swathe of Bay City, boundaried by dried-up canals, was starting to be called Little Carpathia, a ghetto for the poor suckers who didn’t make it up to castles and estates in Beverly Hills. I had nothing real against vipers, apart from a deep-in-the-gut crawly distrust it was impossible for anyone of my generation—the WWII guys—to quell entirely. Linda’s death, though, hit me harder than I thought I could be hit, a full-force ulcer-bursting right to the gut. Ten years into my latest retirement, I was at war.

To celebrate the bicentennial year, I’d moved from Poodle Springs back into my old Los Angeles apartment. I was nearer the bartenders and medical practitioners to whom I was sole support. These days, I knocked about, boring youngsters in the profession with the Sternwood case or the Lady in the Lake, doing light sub-contract work for Lew Archer—digging up family records at county courthouses—or Jim Rockford. All the cops I knew were retired, dead or purged by Chief Exley, and I hadn’t had any pull with the D.A.’s office since Bernie Ohls’s final stroke. I admitted I was a relic, but so long as my lungs and liver behaved at least eight hours a day I was determined not to be a shambling relic.