Vampires: The Recent Undead (51 page)

Twilight States

Albert Cowdrey

Albert E. Cowdrey was born and grew up in New Orleans, and became a historian after going through the academic mill at Tulane and Johns Hopkins. He served in the army, wrote a historical novel which did not feed him, and found work that did in the Department of Defense as a writer of official history. Most of his professional life was spent in the Northeast; he lived in Baltimore, in Annapolis, and for the last fifteen years of his employed life in Washington, D.C., writing for the army’s Center of Military History. After retirement he returned to New Orleans, only to be uprooted again by Hurricane Katrina, and today lives in Natchez, Mississippi, a town of conspicuous oddity and charm that has served him as the background of several stories. “Twilight States,” a story in which he offers a completely different idea of what a vampire might be, is set, however in New Orleans.

As a writer of imaginative fiction, he has produced one recent novel,
Crux, and
fifty or so stories that have appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
His varied output has been reprinted in English—British English, that is—and in German, Russian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Hebrew, and Chinese. He has received awards from both the American Historical Association and the World Fantasy Convention. A loner by choice or by DNA (sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference) he lives with a border collie named Lagniappe, a Creole word meaning something you get for nothing. Of the two, she is much the cleverer—that’s in the nature of the breed.

A dusty shop window, a darkening street outside. Streetlights winking on at three o’clock. A summer storm brewing. Milton’s reflection—dim, bent, somehow older than his fifty-two years-stared at him through backward lettering that said
Sun & Moon Metaphysical Books
.

He sighed and flipped the pages of his desk calendar. June 1979 was drawing to an end. Could he afford to close for the day? A customer might yet be driven in by the threat of rain. . . .

As if summoned, the doorbell jangled and a fat old man carrying a furled umbrella erupted into the shop. He strode to a bookcase, browsed for a moment, then snatched down a faded red volume.

“Why d’you stock a fool like Montague Summers?” he boomed.

“Because he s-sells,” Milton answered.

Why the stutter? He hadn’t stuttered for years. Decades, maybe. Then he knew why: he’d heard that voice before.

“A superstitious Jesuit who thought vampires were real,” the intruder was grumbling. “I’m a scientist myself . . . Somebody told me you stock old science fiction.”

Milton took a deep breath. “Like
Weird Tales
,
Astounding
,
Arcana
?”

“That’s it.
Arcana
.”

He drew out a ring of keys and unlocked a cabinet. “You’re a collector?”

“No. I read for pleasure. And professional interest.”

Milton explained that
Arcana
lasted only twenty issues, from mid-1941 until wartime scarcities of paper and ink shut it down. Yet in its brief lifespan it published everybody—big names, promising unknowns.

“Do you have the January ’42 issue?”

Milton took another deep breath and offered a flawless copy in its plastic jacket.

“Of course it’s pricey. But very rare.”

“I’ll take it,” said the fat man, paying two hundred dollars for a pulp magazine thirty-seven years old. The check he wrote identified him as Erasmus Bloch, M.D., and gave his address and phone number.

The name too rang a bell. An alarm bell, maybe? Yet this was a customer Milton wanted to keep.

“This issue’s got a bit of history attached to it,” he said, wrapping the package. “My brother Ned was a World War Two hero—Navy Cross—and he got this
Arcana
just about the time of Pearl Harbor. He volunteered so quickly that he never had a chance to read it.”

Actually, Milton had bought the copy (and a dozen others) at a newsstand on Royal Street. But people liked pricey purchases to come with a legend.

“Your brother,” came that loud, abrupt voice. “Is he still alive?”

Instantly Milton’s stutter resurfaced. “No. He was m-murdered. After the war. T-terribly.”

Even Bloch seemed to realize he’d put a heavy thumb on an old wound. He touched Milton’s bony shoulder with a hand like a flipper.

“This copy will be treasured,” he said.

An instant later, the bell jangled, his umbrella deployed with a snap, and the door clicked shut behind him.

Milton folded his arms tight against his concave chest. How could you? He silently berated himself How could you say so much to a stranger? Worse yet, to somebody who may not be a stranger at all?

By now the French Quarter was adrift in rain. Gutters spouted like whales and ankle-deep water washed the streets clean of tourists. No more customers today.

Milton locked the shop and climbed a circular staircase to his living quarters on the second floor. At the top he paused, wheezing. The hall was deep in shadow and rain streamed down the only window. Four closed doors stood in a row: his parents’ bedroom, Ned’s, his own, and the bath. Something scratched at Ned’s door with a sound like a wire brush.

“It’s all right;’ said Milton. “Don’t you be worried. I’m not.”

In his room he took off his shoes, stretched out on the bed, and flicked on an old brass lamp. Erasmus, Erasmus. Odd name. Now where—?

In search of an elusive memory, his eyes traveled over the yellow walls, the scarred plaster, the heavy purple furniture, the wall clock missing its pendulum. But no memory came.

Rain drummed on the balcony and rattled the wooden shutters. Gradually Milton’s breathing became regular, and sleep fell on him like a coverlet.

He began to dream. Ralph O’Meagan, aged ten, lay in bed listening to his mother curse his father. She was out of the hospital again, and as usual the drying-out treatment hadn’t worked for long. She was drinking, and the drunker she got the more she tried to fight with her silent husband, and the more he ignored her the sorrier she felt for herself and the more she drank.

Ralph suffered from nightmares and his parents allowed him to keep a nightlight burning. He lay on his side staring at the wall, at the scars and bumps in the old yellow plaster.
“Why don’t you SAY something?”
He concentrated, doing magic, knowing that when his eyes grew tired the wall would seem to move.
“You miserable BASTARD!”

It was stirring now. Wavering, rippling like a broad flag stirred by a light wind. Then it bellied out like a sail.

Startled, he closed his eyes. Looked again through his lashes. The wall was swollen and straining. When he tried to will it back, it burst in a soundless explosion, flinging sparks in every direction.

The dazzle faded. Ralph was lying on a wet field of grass and reeds. He felt the damp and the cold through his PJs. His breath came quickly and he could hear the beating of his heart.

Bewildered, he sat up, shivering in a raw wind. The sky was blue dusk except for one smear of red in the west and a dim moon rising in the east. Far away, he saw a roller coaster’s snaky form outlined in lights. A calliope hooted a popular tune of 1948, “The Anniversary Waltz.”

Something scratched and snorted and he turned his head. No more than ten yards away, a giant wild boar was digging at the grass. Its flat bristly nostrils blew puffs of smoke, it braced its thick legs, pulled with orange tusks, and a human arm lifted into view. The fingers moved feebly—

Milton sat up, sweating.

He was safe in his own bed, in his own room where he’d slept all his life. Rain pattered against the shutters. And Ralph O’Meagan was back where and when he belonged, in the January ’42 issue of
Arcana
, his name forever attached to an intense and disturbing transdimensional story called “Borderland.”

The wire-brush sound came again from Ned’s room next door, and Milton muttered, “I told you it’s all right.”

He got up stiffly, put his shoes on and shuffled downstairs. In a small kitchen behind the bookshop he made green tea on a hot plate and inserted a frozen dinner into a dirty microwave oven.

He sat down at a metal-topped table, sipping the tea, and listened to the fan droning in the microwave. He had no way to avoid thinking about Ned, and about himself.

They’d shared Mama’s fair coloring, sharp nose, and prominent chin, but not much else.

The product of an earlier marriage, Ned was a bully and a braggart, a fanatic athlete with an appetite for contact sports. Feared in grade school, worshipped in high school. Milton lived in terror of him, never knowing from day to day whether Ned would use him as a playmate or a punching bag.

Early on, Ned demanded and got a separate room so he wouldn’t have to live with The Drip. He warned Milton not to talk to him at school, because he didn’t want anybody to know they were related. Ned’s door sported a poster of a soldier in a tin helmet and a gas mask. A hand-lettered sign said
POISON! KEEP OUT!

“I ever catch you in my stuff,” Ned warned him, “I’ll fix you a knuckle sandwich. You hear that, Drip?”

What was Ned hiding? On December 1, 1941—Milton was an obscure freshman in Jesuit High School, Ned a prominent senior—thinking Ned was out, he filled a skeleton key into the old-fashioned lock and went exploring.

The yellow walls were exactly like those in his own room, only stuck all over with movie posters of Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson looking tough. On Ned’s desk, athletic trophies towered over a litter of papers and schoolbooks. Magazines—fantasy, sport, muscle, mystery—lay scattered over the rumpled bed.

Not knowing what he wanted to find, Milton began pawing through papers, opening desk drawers. He was still at work when the door crashed against the wall and Ned erupted into the room.

The memory lingered after almost forty years. Milton stopped sipping his tea and ran his fingertips over his ribs, touching the little lumps where cracked bones had healed. He shivered, reliving his terror as Ned’s big hands pounded him.

“God damn you, you fucking punk,” he bawled, “keep outta here! Keep outta here!”

The boy Milton had hunkered down, trying to shield his face—that was when his ribs took the pounding—and waited for death. But Ned was fighting himself, too. His face and whole body twisted as he tried to regain control.

Milton slipped under his arm and ran away and locked himself in his room, sobbing with rage and shame. Little by little the sparks of acute pain died out and a slow dull throbbing began in his chest, shoulders, arms, face. Blood soaked his undershirt and he tore it off and threw it away.

Later, when Daddy asked him what had happened to him—most of his injuries were hidden by his clothes, but Milton was walking stiffly and sporting a plum-sized black eye and a swollen jaw—he said he’d fallen downstairs at school.

“Clumsy goddamn kid;’ said Daddy.

By then Pearl Harbor had happened and Daddy was signing papers so that Ned could volunteer for the Navy. “One less mouth to feed,” remarked Mr. Warmth.

Ned vanished into the alternate dimension that people called The Service, and Mama locked up his room, saying it must be kept just as he left it or he’d never return alive.

“Crazy bitch,” said Daddy, whose comments were usually terse and always predictable.

Night after night for weeks afterward, Milton opened his window, slipped out onto the cold balcony that connected the three bedrooms, lifted the latch on Ned’s shutters with a kitchen knife, and silently raised the sash.

One at a time he took Ned’s trophies, wrapped them in old newspapers, and put them out with the trash. He threw away Ned’s magazines, books, and posters.

He was hoping that Mama was right and Ned would never return. He hoped the Japs would capture him and torture him. He hoped Ned would fall into the ocean and be eaten by sharks. The depth of his loathing surprised even him, and he treasured it as a lover savors his love.

Then he received Ned’s first letter. “Hi, Bro!” it started breezily.

Ned told about the weird people he was meeting in the Navy, about the icy wind blowing off the Great Lakes, about learning to operate a burp gun. Milton read the letter dozens, maybe hundreds of times.

More letters came on tissue-paper V-Mail, the APOs migrating westward to San Diego, then to Hawaii. Ned told about the great fleets gathering in Pearl Harbor for the counterpunch against Japan, about the deafening bombardment of Tarawa before the Marines went in. Gifts began arriving for Milton, handfuls of Japanese paper money, a rising-sun flag, a Samurai short sword.

Why had Ned turned from a domestic monster to a brother? Milton never knew. Maybe the war, maybe the presence of death. As the fighting darkened and lengthened, he could see something of the same spirit touching them all.

Mama went to work for the Red Cross and stayed sober until evening. Daddy took the Samurai short sword and hung it over the fireplace in the living room, where everybody could see it. When Ned sent Mama the Navy Cross he’d won, Daddy sat beside her on the sofa, staring at the medal in its little leather box as if a star had fallen from heaven. That was when he stopped calling Ned “my wife’s kid” and started calling him “my son.”

In the summer of 1945 Ned himself arrived at the naval air station on Lake Pontchartrain. Broad-shouldered and burned mahogany, he burst upon their lives like a bomb blowing down a wall and letting sunlight pour in.

He ordered Mama to stop drinking, and she put her bottles out with the trash. He ordered Daddy to stop insulting her, and he obeyed. At the first sign of backsliding, Ned would fly into one of his patented rages and his parents would hurry back into line. He was still a bully—only now he controlled his chronic abiding fury and used it for good.

Did hatred really lie so close to love? Could God and the devil swap places so easily? Apparently so.

Now Milton loved him and wanted desperately to be like him. An impossible job, of course. But he tried. Out of sheer hero-worship he decided to volunteer for the peacetime Navy and began going to the Y, trying to get in shape for boot camp. The new Ned didn’t laugh at his belated efforts to be athletic. Instead, he went running with him at six in the morning, down the Public Belt railroad tracks along the wharves, among the wild daisies, while a great incandescent sun rose and a rank, fresh wind blew off the Father of Waters.