Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror

Reclaiming the Shadows: An Introduction

Christopher Golden

Epigraph

Up in Old Vermont

Scott Smith

Something Lost, Something Gained

Seanan McGuire

On the Dark Side of Sunlight Basin

Michael Koryta

The Neighbors

Sherrilyn Kenyon

Paper Cuts

Gary A. Braunbeck

Miss Fondevant

Charlaine Harris

In a Cavern, in a Canyon

Laird Barron

Whiskey and Light

Dana Cameron

We Are All Monsters Here

Kelley Armstrong

May the End Be Good

Tim Lebbon

Mrs. Popkin

Dan Chaon and Lynda Barry

Direct Report

Leigh Perry

Shadow and Thirst

John Langan

Mother

Joe McKinney

Blood

Robert Shearman

The Yellow Death

Lucy A. Snyder

The Last Supper

Brian Keene

Separator

Rio Youers

What Kept You So Long?

John Ajvide Lindqvist

Blue Hell

David Wellington

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

About the Editor

O
nce upon a time, vampires were figures of terror . . .

If you’re reading these words, chances are you don’t require a lesson on the history of the vampire in legend, fiction, and pop culture. I don’t have to discuss my love of
Dracula
in its many iterations, of
’Salem’s Lot
and
I Am Legend
, of divergent tales like Tim Lucas’s
Throat Sprockets
and Tim Powers’s
The Stress of Her Regard
. Instead, let me begin by saying that
Seize the Night
is not an indictment of variations on the vampire story. Urban fantasy and paranormal romance and supernatural thrillers have not watered down the legend of the vampire so much as expanded it. I’ve written a fair number of variations on the theme myself, but my favorite vampire stories are the ones full of darkness and evil, and those seem to have been few and far between in recent years. While I’m happy that all of those variations exist, we run the risk of forgetting just how terrifying vampires can be.

I’m not just talking about Dracula’s heirs. Vampire legends can be found throughout history in nearly every corner of the world. Hebrew myth presented Lilith and her offspring drinking the blood of babies. Lamashtu had the head of a lion and the body of a donkey.
The ancient Greek goddess Empusa had feet made of bronze. This is to say nothing of the lamia or strigoi, or the fantastic and terrifying vampiric creatures of African and Asian legend, dangling from trees or turning into fireflies. There have been infinite variations in folklore and fiction—and even more await us in the shadows of human imagination.

Yes, once upon a time, vampires were figures of terror . . .

And they can be again.

Say the word
vampire
to a reader, or someone who loves movies or television, and each person is likely to have a different image in her or his mind. Most of us will have a variety of such images, indelible marks made by the creations of Bram Stoker, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris, and more. The beauty of the vampire story as a vehicle for fiction is that although beauty and sexuality and mortality/immortality frequently come into play, these tales can be used to explore infinite themes.

In
Seize the Night
, however . . . what matters is the
terror
.

When I began to make overtures to the exceptional writers whose works fill the following pages, I invited them to strike back against the notion that the vampire has lost its ability to inspire fear. I can’t begin to tell you how thrilled I am with the responses I received and the twisted tales that resulted. Up ahead, you’ll find new takes on ancient folklore and variations on tradition, stories full of sorrow and desperation and childhood fear, and true invention.

Some say that vampire fiction has run its course, that nothing new can be done with these monsters.

On behalf of the twenty-one writers in this volume . . .

Challenge accepted.

—Christopher Golden

Bradford, Massachusetts

September 2014

None of the old fears had been staked—only tucked away in their tiny, child-sized coffins with a wild rose on top.

—’SALEM’S LOT,
STEPHEN KING

T
he first time he asked, Ally had been there only a few months, and the idea seemed sweet but absurd—so much the latter, in fact, that she wondered if the old man might not be just as befuddled as his wife; it was easy for Ally to say no. She was happy for a change, still newly arrived in Huntington (new town, new job, new boyfriend), and feeling cocky with all the high hopes attendant to such beginnings. It was early autumn in the Berkshires—the first slaps of color appearing in the trees alongside the road, the morning light so clear it hit her eyes like cold water from a pump. Ally had dyed her long hair blond the previous summer; she’d taken up running and had grown ropy with the exercise, the veins standing out on her arms, dark blue beneath the skin. She felt good about herself after a long period where quite the opposite had been true; she was even beginning to think that maybe, if she could just keep her head straight here, her years of wandering—all those false starts and wrong turns—might at last be behind her. She wanted to believe this: that she’d finally found herself a home.

Even after she learned their names, Ally thought of the couple as “the Hobbits.” They were short and stout and friendly, essential
qualities that their advanced age seemed only to have heightened. The woman’s name was Eleanor. She had Alzheimer’s, and her condition had deteriorated to the point where she could no longer remember her husband’s name. Eleanor called him Edward, or Ed, or even Big Ed—someone from her distant past, Stan explained to Ally, though he didn’t know who. It didn’t seem to bother him. “If she liked the man, that’s good enough for me,” he said, and he happily responded to the name. They both had thick white hair and oddly large hands, and their skin was noticeably ruddy, as if they spent a great deal of their time outdoors. When they dressed in matching sweaters—which they often did—they could look so much alike that Ally would find herself thinking of them as brother and sister rather than husband and wife.

The second time Stan asked, it was deep winter. If Ally had said no the first time out of an excess of optimism, she did so on this subsequent occasion from an utter deficit. She was fairly certain that her boyfriend was sleeping with her roommate, though she hadn’t caught them yet—this wouldn’t happen for another month or so. She was cold all the time; business was slack at the diner; she had a yeast infection that kept reasserting itself each time she imagined it finally cured. She felt bored and poor and unhappy enough that she would’ve liked to crawl out of her own skin, if such a thing were possible. She couldn’t see how anyone would want anything to do with her—even this sad, lonely couple. So when Stan repeated his invitation, she just smiled and said no again. It was more difficult to decline this time around, however: after the Hobbits departed, Ally went into the diner’s restroom and wept, sobbing as vigorously as she had since childhood, running both faucets and the electric hand dryer in an attempt to mask the sound of her distress. It was the sight of Stan helping Eleanor to their car that had prompted this outburst, his hand under her elbow as he guided her across the icy lot—it was the years of love implicit in the gesture, along with Ally’s
sudden, self-pitying certainty that she herself would never feel a touch so tender.

The Hobbits ate a late lunch in the diner toward the end of every month, stopping on their way down from Vermont before they turned east for Boston, where Eleanor had appointments with various specialists—“Hopes raised and hopes dashed,” was how Stan described the expeditions. He’d order a grilled cheese sandwich for Eleanor—American cheese, white bread, the purest sort of comfort food—and New England clam chowder for himself. He’d drink a cup of coffee; Eleanor would quickly drain a vanilla shake through its long straw, rocking back and forth with childlike pleasure. If it was quiet, as it often was in those late afternoon hours, Ally would pull up a chair beside their booth and chat with them while they ate. Eleanor called Ally Reba, which Stan assured her was the highest sort of compliment: Reba had been Eleanor’s college roommate. A beautiful girl, Stan said, smart and funny and more than a little impish, dead now for forty years, one of the first friends they’d lost, so sad, breast cancer, with three young children left behind, but what a pleasure now to find her resurrected so unexpectedly in Ally. Eleanor continued to suck contentedly at her milkshake, swaying to her internal music, while Stan spoke in this manner. She rarely ate more than a bite or two of her sandwich, and sometimes, after they departed, Ally would stand in the kitchen and quickly devour the rest. All that winter, with each successive day seeming darker and colder than the last, she felt an incessant hunger. By March, she’d gained twenty pounds. Her waitressing uniform had grown snug around her midsection and rear, making her feel like an overstuffed sausage.

It was late April when Stan asked the third time, and as soon as Ally heard the words, she realized she’d been waiting for them, hoping he might try again. By this point, Ally’s boyfriend had moved to Springfield with her roommate. Ally was behind on her rent and lonely enough that she’d begun to drift into the diner on her
evenings off—a new low. She knew she couldn’t stay in Huntington much longer, but she had no idea where to go instead. She’d just turned thirty-three, and she sensed this was far too old to be living in such a rootless, aimless manner. She wasn’t so desperate that she imagined the Hobbits might save her, but why shouldn’t they be able to offer a brief reprieve, a little space in which she might lick her wounds?

She and Stan quickly agreed upon an arrangement: room and board, plus what Stan called “a small weekly stipend,” which was nonetheless nearly equal to what Ally had been taking home from the diner. And in exchange? Some cooking and cleaning, a little light weeding in the garden, the occasional trip into town to pick up groceries or Eleanor’s medications, but mostly just the pleasure of Ally’s company—“Eleanor likes you,” Stan said. “You calm her. Merely having you in the house will make her days so much easier.”

T
he Hobbits picked her up outside the diner three days later, on their way back from Boston. Ally had two suitcases and a large cardboard box, which they loaded into the Volvo’s deep trunk.