A Whisper of Blood Read online

  A Whisper of Blood

  Stories of Vampirism

  Edited by Ellen Datlow

  In memory of Blue

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Ellen Datlow

  Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

  Suzy McKee Charnas

  The Slug

  Karl Edward Wagner

  Warm Man

  Robert Silverberg

  Teratisms

  Kathe Koja

  M Is for the Many Things

  Elizabeth Massie

  Folly for Three

  Barry N. Malzberg

  The Impaler in Love

  Rick Wilber

  The Moose Church

  Jonathan Carroll

  Mrs. Rinaldi’s Angel

  Thomas Ligotti

  The Pool People

  Melissa Mia Hall

  A Week in the Unlife

  David J. Schow

  Lifeblood

  Jack Womack

  Requiem

  Melinda M. Snodgrass

  Infidel

  Thomas Tessier

  Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?

  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  True Love

  K. W. Jeter

  Home by the Sea

  Pat Cadigan

  The Ragthorn

  Robert Holdstock and Garry Kilworth

  Contributors’ Notes

  Acknowledgments

  A Biography of Ellen Datlow

  INTRODUCTION

  In Blood Is Not Enough, I wanted to extend the boundaries of what a vampire is—expand the bloodsucker image into the concept of vampirism. I believe I succeeded. With A Whisper of Blood, I had intended to see just how far I could take the concept without any actual bloodsucking. But my editor, and certain avid fans of the vampire-as-entity who had read and enjoyed the first volume, expressed dismay that I planned to include no actual vampires. So … here and there among these metaphorical bloodsuckers lurks a vampire or two. You’ll know them when you see them.

  Admittedly, some of the stories are a stretch—at least three posit situations as vampiric in nature. In “The Pool People,” the act of rape has drained the victim of her essential selfhood, she no longer trusts herself or others; in “Teratisms,” a family’s human monster, and a promise, have robbed the siblings of their own lives, their hopes, even their selves; and in “Folly for Three,” the bizarre means of keeping a relationship alive not only drains the participants of any love they may feel for each other but ultimately destroys them as well. “Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?” is about the “State” stealing a man’s soul, and in both “The Moose Church” and “Mrs. Rinaldi’s Angel,” dreams have an enervating effect on the dreamer.

  The concept of vampirism can be seen as a metaphor for negative relationships. In these stories, our ideas of love and devotion and loyalty—parental, spousal, friendly, student/teacher, employer/employee—are all perverted in some way, and betrayals abound. The factor of betrayal seems inherent in the idea of the vampire: After all, by showing one hospitality (inviting one into your house) you get bitten. By looking for love (seduction), you get bitten and infected (how appropriate in today’s sexual climate). And not only is just one person infected, but the contagion spreads—physically, in the case of the vampire; metaphorically, in other sorts of vampirism—one person’s perversion, as in “Teratisms, "can corrupt the whole family structure; the ripples of faithlessness in “Infidel” can, it is hinted, spread heresy throughout Christendom; the ruling class’s desire to maintain the status quo in “Requiem” forces stagnation upon the entire world.

  Anyone picking up this book will have encountered the vampire in fiction before—at least, will have seen Dracula or The Lost Boys—and so will have already developed some ideas or feelings relating to vampirism. For some, the vampire inspires fear, horror, or terror; for others, the vampire is a seductive creature and promises sex, freedom from ordinary restraint, and immortality. Tapping into the preexisting emotional context that the reader brings to the concept of vampirism, the stories gain an extra dimension, an added edge.

  The focus is on the negative relationships themselves, and, in most of the stories here, on the victim. Because of this emphasis on the victim’s reaction to the rape, the reader doesn’t care about the psychology of the rapist—whether he was abused as a child; or if the dependent aged parent is a ravening monster, the plight of the child in devoting herself to his care is highlighted, rather than the misery of the parent—at least for the duration of the storytelling.

  On a panel at the World Fantasy Convention one year, Doug Winter claimed that most horror published today supports the status quo and makes us feel safe. He wasn’t wrong. He was talking about bad horror fiction. Complacency is, to me, the antithesis of good horror. Effective horror should disturb, perhaps disgust, and, hopefully, linger in the mind of the reader, and like all the best fiction should provoke the reader’s self-examination. It can do this by using supernatural elements or psychological ones. The supernatural used to be a comforting way of looking at evil. It came from outside of us and so we weren’t responsible for it. I think that the real world has become a much more frightening place, and to many people today it seems easier to believe in the monstrosity of man (after Hitler and Hiroshima) than it is to believe in outside devils who made them/us do it. The prominence of the serial killer in real life and in fiction (particularly the ground-breaking novels by Thomas Harris, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs) has produced a rash of “psycho-killer” novels and stories. Man has become the monster/demon.

  I’m a nonbeliever in the supernatural, which doesn’t mean I can’t be temporarily frightened by good supernatural fiction. Whether horror can accomplish its purpose is of course dependent on the effectiveness of the storytelling. When I was younger, I was more easily influenced and impressed by the fiction I read: I read and reread Fowles’s The Magus and Hesse’s Steppenwolf. They told me things about myself that I might have been better off not knowing but I loved them anyway for making me think. I find there is very little so-called mainstream fiction that can still do that for me. But great weird fiction or horror can occasionally accomplish that. For me, the best horror fiction (or any fiction) works on more than one level—the melody first, to get my attention, the middle and lower ranges to hold it, and to force me to reevaluate the story and, far more rarely, the way I live my life. Horror fiction is meant to disturb complacency and challenge assumptions and I hope the stories in A Whisper of Blood will do that for all of you.

  Ellen Datlow,

  New York

  NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP

  Suzy McKee Charnas

  Charnas’s reluctant vampire, Rose, is a far cry from her famous Professor Weyland. She is not aggressive and means no harm. Despite this, her motivation for becoming a vampire is the same as most other vampires—the desire to cheat death and claim immortality for oneself. Although Rose is one of the few actual vampires in this anthology, she is not by nature a predator and this story is a somewhat gentle piece to soothe the reader into the horror to come.

  After Rose died, she floated around in a nerve-wracking fog for a time looking for the tunnel, the lights, and other aspects of the near-death experience as detailed in mass-media reports of such events.

  She was very anxious to encounter these manifestations since apparently something loomed in the offing, in place of the happy surcease of consciousness her father had insisted on as the sequel to death. The older she had grown, the more inclined Rose had been to opt for Papa Sol’s opinion. Maybe he would show up now trying to explain how he was right even though he was wrong, a bewildered figure of light along with Mom and Nana and everybody?

  It would be nice to see a famili
ar face. Rose felt twinges of panic laced with a vague resentment. Here she was with the gratifyingly easy first step taken, and nothing was going on. Since she was still conscious, shouldn’t there be something to exercise that consciousness on?

  A siren wailed distantly. Suddenly she found herself walking on—or almost on, for her feet made only the memory of contact—the roof of her apartment building with its expensive view eastward across Central Park. She hadn’t been to the park in years, nor even outside her own apartment. Her minute terrace had provided quite enough contact with the streets below. As far as Rose was concerned, these streets were not the streets she had grown up in. She preferred the comfortable security of her own apartment.

  Being on the roof felt very odd, particularly since it seemed to be broad daylight and cold out. Far below in the street she could see one of the doormen waving down a cab; he wore his overcoat with the golden epaulets on the shoulders. Rose could have sworn she had taken her carefully hoarded pills late at night, in the comfortable warmth of 14C. Why else would she be wearing her blue flannel nightgown?

  Turning to go back to the refuge of her own place, she found an Angel standing close behind her. She knew him—it?—at once by its beautifully modeled, long-toed feet, the feet of a Bernini Angel she had seen in an Italian church on a tour with Fred. Indeed, the entire form was exactly that of the stone Angel she remembered, except that the exposed skin was, well, skin-toned, which she found unsettling. Like colorizing poor old Humphrey Bogart.

  “Leave me alone,” she said. “I don’t want to go.”

  “You’ll go,” the Angel said in a drifting, chiming voice that made her ears itch. “Eventually. Everyone does. Are you sure you want to stand out there like that? I wouldn’t say anything, but you’re not really used to it yet.”

  Rose looked down and discovered that she had unwittingly backed off or through or over the parapet and now hovered nineteen stories above the street. She gasped and flailed about, for though she had no body to fall—nor for that matter arms to flail or breath to gasp with—sensory flashes still shot along her shadowy, habitual nerve pathways.

  Thus the Angel’s fingers closed, cool and palpable, on hers and lifted her lightly back onto the roof. She snatched her hand back at once. No one had touched her in years except her doctor, and that didn’t count.

  But it was not really the Angel’s touch she feared.

  “I don’t want to go anywhere,” she said, unable to bring herself to mention by name the anywhere she did not wish to go. “I’m a suicide. I killed myself.”

  “Yes,” the Angel said, clasping its hands in front of its chest the way Dr. Simkin always used to do when he was about to say something truly outrageous. But it said nothing more.

  “Well, how does—how do you, um, all feel about that, about people who kill themselves?” She knew the traditional answer, but dared to hope for a different one.

  The Angel pursed its perfect lips. “Grouchy,” it replied judiciously.

  Unwillingly Rose recalled instances from the Old Testament of God’s grouchiness. Actually there had been no Bible in her parents’house. She had read instead a book of Bible stories slipped to her one birthday by Nana and kept hidden from Papa Sol. Even watered down for kids, the stories had been frightening. Rose trembled.

  “I was brought up an atheist,” she said faintly.

  The Angel answered, “What about the time you and Mary Hogan were going to run away and enter a convent together?”

  “We were kids, we didn’t know anything,” Rose objected. “Let me stay here. I’m not ready.”

  “You can’t stay,” the Angel said. Its blank eyes contrasted oddly with its earnest tone of voice. “Your soul without its body is light, and as memories of the body’s life fade, the spirit grows lighter, until you’ll just naturally rise and drift.

  “Drift? Drift where?” Rose asked.

  “Up,” the Angel said. Rose followed the languid gesture of one slender hand and saw what might to living eyes seem just a cloud bank. She knew it was nothing of the kind. It was a vast, angry, looming presence of unmistakable portent.

  She scuttled around trying to put the Angel between herself and the towering form. At least the face of cloud was not looking at her. For the moment. Luckily there was lots else to look down disapprovingly at in New York City, most of it a good deal more entertaining than Rose Blum.

  She whispered urgently to the Angel, “I changed my mind, I want to go back. I can see now, there are worse things than having your cats die and your kids plan to put you away someplace for your own good. Let them, I’ll go, they can have my money, I don’t care.”

  “I’m sorry,” the Angel said, and Rose suddenly saw herself from above, not her spirit self but her body, lying down there in the big white tub. The leaky old faucets still dribbled in a desultory way, she noted with an exasperated sigh. Her “luxury” building had high ceilings and the rooms were sizable, but the plumbing was ancient.

  Her pale form lay half submerged in what looked like rust-stained water. Funny, she had forgotten entirely that after the pills she had taken the further step of cutting her wrists in the bath. The blue nightgown was an illusion of habit.

  Not a bad body for her age, she reflected, though it was essentially an Old World model, chunky flesh on a short-boned frame. The next generation grew tall and sleek, a different species made for playing tennis and wearing the clothes the models in the magazines wore. Though her granddaughter Stephanie, now that she thought of it, was little, like Rose herself; petite, but not so wide-hipped, an improved version of the original import with a flavor of central Europe and probably an inclination to run to fat if allowed.

  Good heavens, somebody was in there, also looking at her—two men, Bill the super and Mr. Lum the day concierge! Rose recoiled, burning with shame. Her vacated body couldn’t even make the gestures of modesty.

  They were talking, the two of them. She had given them generous holiday tips for years to repay them for helping her organize a life that had never required her to leave her apartment after Fred’s death and the consequent money squabbles in the family.

  Bill said, “Two mil at least, maybe more on account of the terrace.”

  Mr. Lum nodded. “Forgot the terrace,” he said.

  She wished she hadn’t tipped them at all. She wished her body didn’t look so—well—dead. Definitively dead.

  “Okay, I can’t go back,” she admitted to the Angel, relieved to find herself alone with it on the roof again. “But there must be something I can do besides go—you know.” She shuddered, thinking of the monstrous shape lowering above her—a wrathful, a terrible, a vengeful God. She needed time to get used to the idea, after Papa Sol and a lifetime of living in the world had convinced her otherwise. Why hadn’t somebody told her?

  Well, somebody besides Mary Hogan, who had been a Catholic, for crying out loud.

  “Well,” the Angel said, “you can postpone.”

  “Postpone,” Rose repeated eagerly. “That’s right, that’s exactly what I had in mind. How do I postpone?”

  The Angel said, “You make yourself a body out of astral material: this.” Its slim hand waved and a blur of pale filaments gathered at the tapered fingertips.

  “Where did that stuff come from?” Rose said nervously. Was the Angel going to change form or disintegrate or do something nasty like something in a horror movie?

  “It’s all around everybody all the time,” the Angel said, “because the physical world and the nonphysical world and everything in between interpenetrate and occupy the same space and time interminably.”

  “I don’t understand physics,” Rose said.

  “You don’t need to,” the Angel said. “Astral sculpting is easy, you’ll get the hang of it. With a body made of this, you can approach living people and ask them to help you stay. At night, anyway—that’s when they’ll be able to see you.”

  Rose thought of Bill and Mr. Lum standing there talking about the value of her ap
artment. Then she thought of her kids whom she hadn’t liked for quite a while and who didn’t seem to like her either. Not much use asking them for anything. Maybe Frank, the elevator man? He had always struck her as decent.

  “Help, how?” she asked.

  “By letting you drink their blood,” said the Angel.

  Appalled, Rose said nothing for a moment. Down below, a taxi pulled in at the awning and disgorged a comically foreshortened figure. Rose watched this person waddle into the building. “Drink their blood,” she said finally. “I’m supposed to go around drinking blood, like Dracula?”

  The Angel said, “You need the blood to keep you connected with the physical world. But you can’t take it against a person’s will, you have to ask. That’s the meaning of the business about having to be invited into the donor’s house. The house is a metaphor for the physical shell—”

  “I’m a vampire?” Rose cried, visions of Christopher Lee and Vampirella and the rest from late-night TV flashing through her stunned mind.

  “You are if you want to put off going up,” the Angel said with a significant glance skyward. “Most suicides do.”

  Rose didn’t dare look up and see if the mighty cheek of cloud had turned her way.

  “That’s why suicides were buried at crossroads,” the Angel went on, “to prevent their return as vampires.”

  “Nobody gets buried at a crossroad!”

  “Not now,” the Angel agreed, “and cremation is so common; but ashes don’t count. It’s no wonder there’s a vampire craze in books and movies. People sense their presence in large numbers in the modern world.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Rose burst out. “I want to see somebody senior to you, I want to talk to the person in—”