Microsoft Word - The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance.doc (6 page)

Cherry  Hill, that his name was Jacob Wrey Mould, and he came to New York in 1853 or 1854 or 1855 to design and build All  Soul’s Church. He was a pious man, she tells me, and he illustrated Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country ChurchYard” and
 
The book of Common Prayer
. She says he died in  1886, and that he too was in love with a daughter of Lilith, that he died with no other thought but her. I want to ask where she learned all these things, if, perhaps, she spends her days in libraries, and I also want to ask if she means that she believes that I’m in love with her. But then the narrow corridor we’ve been following turns left and opens abruptly on a vast torch-lit chamber.

“Listen,” she whispers. “This is one of my secrets. I’ve

guarded this place for all my  life.”

The walls  are built from great blocks of reddish limestone carved and set firmly in place without the aid of mortar, locking somehow perfectly together by a forgotten Masonic art. The air reeks of frankincense, and there is thick cinnamon-coloured  dust covering everything; I follow her down a short flight of steps to the floor. It occurs to me that we’ve gone so deep underground that the roar of the wind should not still be so loud, but it is, and  I wonder if maybe the wind has found its way
 
inside
 
me, if it’s entered through one of the wounds she leaves on my throat.

“This was the hall of my mother,” she says. And now I see

the corpses, heaped high between the smoky braziers. They are

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nude, or they are half-dressed, or they’ve been torn apart so

completely or are now so badly decomposed that it is difficult to  tell whether they’re clothed or not. Some are men and others are  women and not a few children. I can smell them even through  the incense, and I might cover my nose and mouth. I might  begin to  gag. I might take a step back towards the stairs leading  up to the long corridor and the bloodless desert night beyond.  And she blinks at me like a hungry, watchful owl.

“I cannot expect you to understand,” she says.

And there are other rooms, other chambers, endless atrocities that I can now only half recall. There are other secrets that she keeps for her mother in the deep places beneath shifting sands. There are the ghosts of innumerable butcheries. There are demons held in prisons of crystal and iron, chained until some eventual apocalypse; their voices are almost indistinguishable from the voice of the wind. And then we have descended into some still greater abyss, a cavern of sparkling stalactite and stalagmite formations, travertine and calcite glinting in the soft glow of phosphorescent vegetation that has never seen and will never have need of sunlight. We’re standing together at the muddy edge of a subterranean pool, water so still and perfectly smooth, an ebony mirror, and she’s already undressed and is waiting impatiently for me to do the same.

“I can’t swim,” I tell her and earn another owl blink.

If I
 
could
 
swim, I cannot imagine setting foot in that water,

that lake at the bottom of the world.

“No one has asked you to swim,” she replies and smiles,  showing me those long incisors. “At this well men only have to  drown. You can do that well enough I suspect.”

And then I’m falling, as the depths of that terrible lake rise up around me like the hood of some black desert cobra and rush

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over me,  bearing me down and down and down into the chasm,  driving the air from my lungs. Stones placed one by one upon  my chest until my lungs collapse, constricting coils drawing  tighter and tighter about me, and I try to scream. I open my  mouth, and her sandpaper tongue slips past my lips and teeth.  She tastes of silt and dying and loss. She tastes of cherry  blossoms and summer nights in Central Park. She wraps herself  about me, and the grey-white wings sprouting from her  shoulders open wider than the wings of an  earthly bird. Those  wings have become the sky, and her feathers brush aside the fire  of a hundred trillion stars. Her teeth tear at my lower lip, and I  taste my own blood. The wind howling in my ears is the serpent  flood risen from out of that black pool,  and is also icy solar  winds, and the futile cries of bottled demons.

“Don’t be afraid,” she whispers  in my ear, and her hand  closes around my penis. “One must only take very small drinks.  One must not be greedy in these dry times.”

I gasp and open my eyes, unable to remember having shut them, and now we’re lying together on the floor of the abattoir at the end of the long corridor below the temple ruins. This is the only one of her secrets she’s shown me, and anything else must have been my imagination,  my shock at the sight of so much death. There is rain, rain as red and sticky as blood, but still something to cool my fever, and I wrap my legs around her brown thighs and slide inside her. She’s not made like other women, my raggedy girl from Cherry Hill, and she begins to devour me so slowly that I will still be dying in 1,000 years.

She tells me she loves me.

There are no revelations here. My eyes look for the night sky somewhere beyond the gore and limestone and sand, but there are only her wings, like heaven and hell and whatever might lie in between, and I listen to the raw and bitter laughter of the wind . . .

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Some nights, I tell myself that I will walk around the park and never mind the distance and inconvenience. Some nights, I pretend I hope she
 
won’t
 
be there, waiting by the fountain. But  I’m not even as good a liar as I am a pianist, and it hardly matters, because she’s always there. Last night, for instance.

I brought her an old sweater I never wear, a birthday present from an ex-girlfriend,  and she thanked me for it. I told her that I can bring her other things, whatever she might need, that she only has to ask, and she smiled and told me I’m very kind. My needs are few, she said and pulled the old sweater on over whatever tatters she was already wearing.

“I worry about you,” I said. “I worry about you all the time

these days.”

“That’s sweet of you,” she replied. “But I’m strong,

stronger than I might seem.”

And I wonder if she knows about my dreams, and if our conversation were merely a private joke. I wonder if she only accepted the sweater because she feels sorry for me,

We talked, and she told me a very funny story about her first night in the park, almost a decade before I was born. And then, when there were no more words, when there  was no longer the
 
need
 
for words. I leaned forwards and offered her my throat.  Thank you, she said, and I shut my eyes and waited for the scratch of her tongue against my skin, for the prick of those sharp teeth. She was gentle, because she is always gentle, lapping at the hole she’s made and pausing from time to time to murmur reassurances I can understand without grasping the coarser, literal meaning of what she’s said. I get the gist of it and  I know that’s all that matters. When she was done, when she’dwiped her mouth clean and thanked me again for the sweater, when we’d said our usual goodbyes for the evening, I sat alone

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on the bench and watched as she slipped away into the maze of

cherry trees and azaleas and forsythia bushes.

I don’t know what will  become of these pages. I may never print them. Or I may print them out and hide them from myself.  I could slip them between the pages of a book in the stacks at  NYU and leave them there for anyone to find. I could do that. I could place them in an empty wine bottle and drop them from the Queensboro Bridge so that the river would carry them down to the sea. The sea must be filled with bottles . . .

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F angs F or H ire

Jenna Black

I
 
met  my client at a seedy, unpleasant bar. Not because I liked such places, but because it’s what clients usually expect when they hire a hit man  –  or, in my case, a hit woman.

My nostrils flared as I opened the door and stepped inside.  The place stank of stale beer, stale sweat, stale cigarettes and stale  lives. Even though it was late on a Saturday night, prime bar hour, the place was practically empty. As advertised by the hogs packed outside, there were a handful of biker dudes and their slutty chicks hanging out at the pool table. At the bar itself, there were a couple of men who might as well have had “loser” tattooed on their foreheads. They both looked unhappily drunk.

Remind me why I chose this place for a rendezvous? Oh,

yeah. The atmosphere.

I could smell my client from clear across the room. Not because he stank, but because he smelled like he’d had a shower within the last week, which was more than I could say of the other patrons of this fine establishment. Being a vampire has its advantages, but the enhanced sense of smell is something I would happily do without.

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My client occupied one of the bar’s rather unsanitary booths. He was much younger and much softer looking than I’s expected. I guessed his age at about 22 or 23 and, though he’d dressed down to meet me here, his jeans looked like they’d been artificially aged and the plain white T-shirt still had creases from being in its package. I’d bet he usually wore suits, or at least designer grunge wear.

His scent changed when he saw me coming: a delicious bouquet of fear and musk blending with his expensive after-shave. No doubt if he’d known I was a vampire, rather than your

run-of-the-mill hitter, He’d have run screaming from the room. I  had, of course, dressed the part. No reason to pick an  atmospheric dive and then go in looking like Jane  Normal. If I  hadn’t been broadcasting that special vampire don’t-notice-me  vibe to everyone but my client, all the guys in the bar, would  have been after me, in the vain hope  of getting lucky.

Leather pants, stiletto heels and some nice cleavage. Gets  ‘em  every time. My client  –  or really, I should say my potential client, because he hadn’t officially hired me yet  –  swallowed hard when I slid into the booth across from him. I wasn’t sure if that was from lust or fear.

I smiled pleasantly and reached my hand out across the table. “Gemma Johanson at your service,” I said, and like a good little boy he shook my hand. I could have gone for the stereotypical cold, psychotic stare, but I thought the kid was already shaken up enough. Wouldn’t do to scare away a

customer.

He cleared his throat. “Hi. I’m Jeffrey Reeves.”

I arched an eyebrow. “I rather figured you were.”

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Even in the darkness of the bar, I could see the blush that crept up his neck and flushed his cheeks. “Sorry I’ve never, uh, done this before.”

No kidding. “Why don’t you tell me about the job?” I prompted, because if I waited for him to get around to it, I’d have been there all night.

Jeffrey’s eyes darted nervously around the bar, but no one was paying any attention to us. He leaned over the table and whispered. “I want to hire you to kill someone.”

Apparently, my would-be client had a special talent for

stating the obvious. I made a “keep talking” gesture.

He licked his lips, then took a deep breath. That seemed to settle him down some. “It’s  my stepfather,” he said, his lips curling  –  unconsciously, I think  –  with distaste. “His name is  Ross Blackburn, and he’s a murdering son of a bitch who deserves to die.”

Jeffrey’s body language changed completely, his fear and uncertainty buried beneath  the rage that now filled him. His hands clenched into fists, his shoulders stiffened and I could hear the angry thump of his heart. I have to admit, it was rather disconcerting. He’d looked so soft and harmless when I’d first caught sight of him. Now he looked like someone who’d seriously considered doing the job himself,

“OK,” I said, not really caring if Ross Blackburn deserved  to die or not. I had yet to be hired to kill someone who didn’t  have it coming, one way or another. I’d made it very clear to  Miles, my handler  –  or my pimp, as he laughingly called himself

–  that I wasn’t hitting any innocent bystanders who just  happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m sure  he farmed out jobs like that to someone else, but as long as I  didn’t know  about it, I could justify letting him live.

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Jeffrey seemed surprised by my easy agreement.

“You, uh, don’t need to know any more?” The anger had  drained away as quickly as it had come. He now had that lost  and vaguely pathetic look he’d worn when I’d first caught sight  of him.