The Mammoth Book of Dracula (42 page)

“No, no, Vlad, you don’t understand. I want you to drink my blood and let me drink yours. I want to remain this way for eternity with you.” She took my chin in her hand and batted her lashes at me. “It may take that long for us to resolve all our issues in therapy, yes?”

I spun away. “God, Ashley, how can you think of spending eternity with a depressed partner? It is a comfort to me to think one day you will be free of this burden in your death, if you don’t choose to leave me first.”

“Turn around you ancient bag of psychological torments, and look at me.” I did. “I love you. I’ve not stopped loving you. You will not be depressed forever. Alex said so.”

I hated to correct her. “He said that it is not uncommon for someone to be depressed a month for every year they were abused or tortured or whatever their trauma. Darling, I’ve lived far longer than most psychology texts have been around, and that means I could be depressed for decades.”

“And what if I choose to work with you in this?”

I was suddenly tired, weary of working on myself. Exhausted at searching for myself. I hadn’t yet found anyone within me worth being glad about. Her enthusiasm was born of her mortality and dogged faith in our love. My affection for her couldn’t have been more at that moment.

“I love you, Ashley, but I’m afraid I love you too much to allow you to attach yourself to an emotional cavern of gloom for eternity. I’d rather let you go, than do that to you.” I regretted saying that as soon as it left my lips. How could I not see then the manipulation? It was shouting in my face!

“Oh, Vlad, you’re so noble. But I want to be immortal. Please. I mean what I said. I’m not bullshitting you.” She set her manicured fingers on her perfect hips.

Three sessions later, I’d been convinced, even though I couldn’t summon the ecstasy I knew I should be feeling at the prospect of eternity with her. With that we went home to Ashley’s grandly theatrical production of the Big Seduction. She wanted to be reborn in splendour.

A thousand candles, twenty pots of smouldering incense, silk sheets, sultry music and a table of delicate sweets awaited us. I knew as I went through the motions, that it was wrong, that my dammed emotions weren’t going to spring a leak in time to make this glorious for me as well. Ashley, contrary to my experience, was ardently amorous.

When it was over, I found myself wishing to stand in the face of the sun at dawn. Ashley was sick as hell for a while, but rebounded as I knew she would. I also knew how being immortal would come to change her. I simply hadn’t imagined the speed at which that metamorphosis would occur.

It was less than a week later when she called me into the bedroom where she reclined in all her bored immortal beauty. “I don’t like you any more, Vlad. Whining, moaning, telling me all the time how you miss your old self. Well, I miss him, too. I’m leaving. I want to find someone who can keep up with me, who can feel joy and smile. It’s been years since I heard you laugh.”

I couldn’t say I was stunned. I suspected this was coming. I tried a hollow chuckle. It failed as miserably as our union.

What I hadn’t expected was how her leaving would be as a stake to my heart.

Alex continued to treat my ennui, and I continued to lose what desire I had left to go on. He tried to put me in a psychiatric hospital, but I had to remind him I would be a danger to the patients, and it would jeopardize my anonymity. He relented.

So you can see, can’t you? Once the most feared and most fascinating of monsters in the known world, I’ve become a pathetic mass of neuroses, pathologies, with an apparently endless road ahead of me towards an iota of peace and a cohesive self. I’ve even lost interest in eating. What is the point? I can’t even live up to my myth any more.

When I’m gone, I ask only that you not tell the truth of my downfall, the demise of the Dracula the world still clings to with trepidation. Allow my legacy to live on.

I leave this world without regrets, and I have found some measure of peace. I made my last appointment with Dr Alex Bloward, and told him of my plans. He did his duty as a psychologist and insisted on committing me for my own protection. It was while he was on the telephone ordering the ambulance, I ripped out his throat and eviscerated him.

The condemned are always given whatever they ask for for their last meal, and I couldn’t have asked for better.

<>

~ * ~

LISA MORTON

Children of the Long Night

LISA MORTON lives in North Hollywood, California. She is a screenwriter (her movies include the award-winning
Meet the Hollowheads
and the vampire thriller
Blood Angels)
and the author of four non-fiction books:
The Cinema of Tsui Hark, The Halloween Encyclopedia,
the Bram Stoker Award-winning
A Hallowe’en Anthology: Literary and Historical Writings Over the Centuries
and
Savage Detours: The Life and Work of Ann Savage.

Her short fiction has appeared in more than three dozen books and magazines, including
Dark Voices 6, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, Dark Terrors, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, White of the Moon, The Museum of Horrors, Dark Delicacies: Original Tales of Terror and the Macabre, Mondo Zombie, The Dead That Walk, Zombie Apocalypse!
and
Cemetery Dance
magazine. In 2009 she edited the anthology
Midnight Walk.

Her first novella,
The Lucid Dreaming,
won the Bram Stoker Award for that same year, and her debut novel,
The Castle of Los Angeles,
was published in 2010.

Dracula finds himself ever more disgusted with humanity and what it is becoming...

~ * ~

“C’MON, TET, YOU know you can’t spend the night here.”

The ragged man in filthy combat fatigues looked up from under his thin stringy hair. His real name was John Douglas Black, but he’d earned his street name by begging passers-by to “spare some change for a vet, man, I was in the Tet Offensive, had the skin on my back torched by napalm.” Tet didn’t appear to have any war injuries, but, on the other hand, no one had ever seen his back, either.

Tet staggered to his feet, half-leaning against the wall beside him for support. The two beat cops eyed him with a mix of disgust and pity, then the female one leaped forward to steady him when he almost fell.

“You all right, Tet? We can take you to a clinic, get you some help ...”

Tet flinched away from her hand. “Already been. They couldn’t do shit for me.”

The cop reluctantly let her partner lead her back to their car, the game finished for tonight. It was always the same—they knew Tet was one of the harmless ones, didn’t really want to roust him, but if they didn’t some Yuppie on his busy way back from the video store would complain, then they’d have to arrest Tet. It was easier this way for everyone.

Except Tet really
did
need help. Something was wrong with him. Every morning he awoke feeling weaker, more feverish. He wondered if he’d caught some disease from a rat—there were bite marks on his wrists, small gaping pink spots standing out from the grime.

Tet reached the side street and turned the corner. There was an alley down here that was little more than a walkway and trash storage between buildings. Tet could store himself there with all the rest of the garbage and no one cared.

He stumbled past the first two dumpsters, then let himself collapse. He was almost asleep when he realized he wasn’t alone. He looked up blearily and made out a figure standing over him, a silhouette. Then the blackness was dropping beside Tet, and he heard a noise, a hideous noise like a cross between a guttural laugh and an animal snarl.

He realized he’d been hearing that sound every night for nearly a week.

“Hey man, leave me alone, I got nothin’—”

They were the last words Tet said before his throat was torn out.

~ * ~

It was an evening in early November 1917 as he strode across the French plain. When the war had finally washed up against his Carpathian hillsides a year earlier, the smell of blood had begun to work on him, drawing him down from his eyrie. He had returned to his homeland ten years earlier, disenchanted and dismayed by London society, and had lived in solitude for a decade, content to feed only on the occasional gypsy or stray traveller.

But then, as the war spread and his native soil was seared and smeared with gore, he became aware of his own hungers. And so he finally followed them until they led him here, to the battlefield of Ypres, on this fall night.

He had spent last night and today in an inn a hundred miles away, and had flown here after sunset. He touched down on a small hill on the edge of the conflagration, and was mildly surprised to find himself shocked by the carnage. In his own battles he had seen wholesale slaughter, but never this devastation of the land. He remembered this area from fifty years earlier; it had been thick with vegetation, a dark green that rustled with life in the night breeze. Now he saw only brown mud, broken metal and broken men.

He descended into the foggy yellow hell of mustard gas, unaffected but not unrepulsed. Even so, he was drunk on wafting copper scent and the moans of the dying. He bypassed mounds of corpses until he came to a man still alive, missing a leg, dragging himself through the clutching filth, gas mask making him look like an insect, a carrion fly.

The Transylvanian fell on the man, tearing the gas mask loose to fix on his throat. The soldier clawed feebly as needlepointed teeth slid into his skin, and then he gave in gratefully as death finally overtook him.

And when the Transylvanian had drained the man, he swam to his feet, head reeling, and let his predator’s instincts bring him to the next one ... and the next... and the next, ten years of starvation erased in one night...

Until, in his ecstasy, he did not realize that he had fastened upon a man dying of gas poisoning. And suddenly he was on his knees, vomiting up tainted blood with good, helpless as wave after wave of spasm forced the precious fluid from him, until he lay as weak as one of his victims, as barren as the land. Sunrise found him rolling into a trench and covering himself with corpses to escape the light. And although he survived, undiscovered, to rise again at dusk and flee back to his comfortable coffin . . .

... Something else in him had begun to die.

~ * ~

Jackson didn’t want the job. A bum who’d had his throat ripped out, probably by some other bum’s rabid dog. It could’ve been easily written off, except that the coroner had found the body almost completely drained of blood and ruled it a homicide.

They’d had other cases of homeless death in the last year, and a higher-than-normal percentage had died of blood loss. Some had been found with small animal bites on the throat or wrists, but the M.E. suggested they’d been dying in the alleys for some time, and rats had hastened the process along.

But clearly no mere rat had torn out John Black’s throat, and so now they finally had to accept the possibility of a serial killer. Some nut stealing blood to sell, or experiment with, probably. Jackson didn’t really care—he had more important cases to deal with. A double homicide of a wealthy couple in Hancock Park. A drive-by in Hollywood. A rape-mutilation-murder in Silverlake, a victim who had left behind three young children. Who gave a shit about a fucked-up friendless ex-vet on the streets? He intended to file it in the back of the unsolved cases as quickly as possible.

That is, until
she
walked in.

It was after eight-thirty on a Tuesday night. She appeared unannounced, asking if he was the one in charge of the John Black case.