Vampires: The Recent Undead (62 page)

I can still recall the sharp, sweet aroma and the tangy-sweet taste as the vitae engulfed my flesh, the hot blood burning through my skin, altering it with its magical properties, transforming what had become old and tired and revitalizing my body. I reveled in the blood. It filled my mouth, my nose, and I gulped it down greedily, allowing it to burn away from the inside the dross of age and reveal the hidden, nearly lost beauty of my youth. Call it early Botox!

I am certain that each girl VICTIM understands my pursuit, my desire to stay attractive at any price. And if you do not now understand it, you will!

These noble girls performed a service for me. I took possession of their youth gratefully and they gave up their lives in the same way, gratefully, at least in their hearts. A symbiosis. A sacrifice. For the greater good. Isn’t that obvious?

In any event, I continued in this way for many years, retaining my beauty to the amazement of those in my social circle. During this time, at age forty-four, I became a widow, barely noticing. Ferenc had been absent for some years. He died at the hand of a general, or having been killed in battle, or murdered by a prostitute in Bucharest whom he refused to pay—take your pick. I had little interest in his fate. And upon his demise I inherited his wealth and consequently had no shortage of suitors lured as much by my youthful beauty as by the hope of marrying my money and power. But I barely tolerated these leeches. Especially now that I was in direct line for the throne. I was, you see, on the verge of becoming the Queen of Poland! And now, sweet VICTIMS, you understand the greater good, do you not?

Alas, nothing continues forever. Mine was a political era and rumors abounded about illicit practices involving witchcraft at my estate and at my house in Bucharest. While the deaths of peasant girls were tolerated or ignored, the offspring of nobles was duly noted. Eventually, in 1610, I was brought to trial, found guilty of twenty-five years of abuses. Three of my most trusted servants were burned alive as witches, including Dorka. From my window I watch her body blacken, her dark hair catch fire and all the while I listened as her screams filled my ears.

I was charged with bringing about the deaths through sadistic torture of 650 girls, an absurd number. Although I kept no written records, I did compile a tally in my head and the numbers had been triple that, at least!

During this sham trial I refused to respond with the regret or remorse expected. After all, I was a Countess and did not deign to address their ridiculous accusations. Consequently, without being found guilty because of my station, I received the harshest punishment—I were walled up alive in the tower of my own castle where I remained for the next three years, being fed through a slot like an animal. Were the powers-that-be concerned with the deaths? Of course not! The entire charade of a trial was a strategic move on the part of the then heads of state to usurp my land and my wealth, which they did, and to keep me from ascending to the throne. A woman then had few legal recourses.

Ah, but did I not have the last laugh? You see, the blood not only changed my skin but it altered every aspect of my being, body and soul. Not only did I return to youth, but that youth became eternal, and my taste for blood infinite.

When I stopped eating, they finally opened the tower door. But I was not there! My body, you see, has never been found. The pathetic
paraszt
who resided near Nádasdy Castle have insisted for centuries, to this day in fact, that they can hear the wail of girls being tortured to death, and my sparkling laugh as I delight in the voluptuous richness of their young blood. Me, whom these cretins call
vámpír
!

So many young and pretty girls here! And of course you understand. There are far more important concerns that those of a petty nature, what might be deemed “personal’ problems. The greater good must prevail! You are not VICTIMS but lovers of history, of tradition, of fate. Surely, my pretties, you would like to meet me? Ah, to surrender to a larger fate, what better destiny . . . ?

VICTIMS:

Awesome!
Harry Lewis

That story chills my bones, man.
Nosferatu

Where’s all the chicks? How come they aren’t posting anymore?
NoElm

Maybe they got tired of your stupidity!
Harry Lewis

Hey, how’s it going? Thought I’d check this out.
Vampire of Dusseldorf

Hey V of D. Good to meet you!
Harry Lewis

Yeah, man, it’s getting lonely here without chicks.
NoElm

Doesn’t matter to me. I’m gay. And German.
Vampire of Dusseldorf

That’s a problem.
NoElm

Being gay?
Vampire of Dusseldorf

Being German!
NoElm

Groan!
Nosferatu

Don’t you think it’s weird that every time this guy tells a story, VICTIMS disappear? I mean, the missing people are like the people in the stories!
Nosferatu

It’s coincidental, man. Do I have to remind you we’re on the Net. There aren’t any vampires here!
NoElm

Testament #4

Landsmann! A Deutsch amongst the VICTIMS! Vampire of Düsseldorf. Düsseldorf. Northwest of Köln,
ja
? I am familiar with your small city.
Und
your reputation!

Have you not heard of me? My name is Fritz. Fritz Haarmann. Like you, I have been identified for eternity. They call me The Hanover Vampire, The Butcher of Hanover, oh, so many names! We are alike, you and I, but different. But you have a taste for girls while my predilection is for boys. Not for you but for me, there are many now here amongst the VICTIMS . . .

THE WIDE, CARNIVOROUS SKY

John Langan

Our final story, “The Wide, Canivorous Sky,” was re-published (as was our first) in
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2010.
I’m pleased to present this novella again because—like Holly Black’s tale—it is not only an outstanding vampire story, it’s simply an outstanding story. And, pragmatically, I suspect there will be many readers to whom the story will be new. It’s another answer to those who think the vampire is no longer seen as a monster, that the icon appears so often these days as the desirable anti-hero, or the outright hero, or a sexy butt-kicking babe, or a kid’s chum, or a pin-up for tweens to swoon over . . . and so on . . . that there’s nothing left to fear. It’s also more proof that although the “dreaded fiend” trope may suffer from the “same old story too often retold” syndrome, that there’s still such a thing as a highly effective, thoroughly relevant, completely twenty-first century scary vampire story.

John Langan is the author of novel
House of Windows
(2009) and
collection Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters
(2008).
Creatures
, an anthology he is editing with Paul Tremblay will be published this fall. He lives in Upstate New York with his wife, son, dog, and two cats.

I

9:13
PM

From the other side of the campfire, Lee said, “So it’s a vampire.”

“I did not say vampire,” Davis said. “Did you hear me say vampire?”

It was exactly the kind of thing Lee would say, the gross generalization that obscured more than it clarified. Not for the first time since they’d set out up the mountain, Davis wondered at their decision to include Lee in their plans.

Lee held up his right hand, index finger extended. “It has the fangs.”

“A mouthful of them.”

Lee raised his middle finger. “It turns into a bat.”

“No—its wings are like a bat’s.”

“Does it walk around with them?”

“They—it extrudes them from its arms and sides.”

“ ’Extrudes’?” Lee said.

Han chimed in: “College.”

Not this shit again
, Davis thought. He rolled his eyes to the sky, dark blue studded by early stars. Although the sun’s last light had drained from the air, his stomach clenched. He dropped his gaze to the fire.

The Lieutenant spoke. “He means the thing extends them out of its body.”

“Oh,” Lee said. “Sounds like it turns into a bat to me.”

“Uh-huh,” Han said.

“Whatever,” Davis said. “It doesn’t—”

Lee extended his ring finger and spoke over him. “It sleeps in a coffin.”

“Not a coffin—”

“I know, a flying coffin.”

“It isn’t—it’s in low-Earth orbit, like a satellite.”

“What was it you said it looked like?” the Lieutenant asked. “A cocoon?”

“A chrysalis,” Davis said.

“Same thing,” the Lieutenant said.

“More or less,” Davis said, unwilling to insist on the distinction because, even a year and three-quarters removed from Iraq, the Lieutenant was still the Lieutenant and you did not argue the small shit with him.

“Coffin, cocoon, chrysalis,” Lee said, “it has to be in it before sunset or it’s in trouble.”

“Wait,” Han said. “Sunset.”

“Yes,” Davis began.

“The principle’s the same,” the Lieutenant said. “There’s a place it has to be and a time it has to be there by.”

“Thank you, sir,” Lee said. He raised his pinky. “And, it drinks blood.”

“Yeah,” Davis said, “it does.”

“Lots,” Han said.

“Yeah,” the Lieutenant said.

For a moment, the only sounds were the fire popping and, somewhere out in the woods, an owl prolonging its question. Davis thought of Fallujah.

“Okay,” Lee said, “how do we kill it?”

II

2004

There had been rumors, stories, legends of the things you might see in combat. Talk to any of the older guys, the ones who’d done tours in Vietnam, and you heard about a jungle in which you might meet the ghosts of Chinese invaders from five centuries before; or serve beside a grunt whose heart had been shot out a week earlier but who wouldn’t die; or find yourself stalked by what you thought was a tiger but had a tail like a snake and a woman’s voice. The guys who’d been part of the first war in Iraq—“The good one,” a sailor Davis knew called it—told their own tales about the desert, about coming across a raised tomb, its black stone worn free of markings, and listening to someone laughing inside it all the time it took you to walk around it; about the dark shapes you might see stalking through a sandstorm, their arms and legs a child’s stick-figures; about the sergeant who swore his reflection had been killed so that, when he looked in a mirror now, a corpse stared back at him. Even the soldiers who’d returned from Afghanistan talked about vast forms they’d seen hunched at the crests of mountains; the street in Kabul that usually ended in a blank wall, except when it didn’t; the pale shapes you might glimpse darting into the mouth of the cave you were about to search. A lot of what you heard was bullshit, of course, the plot of a familiar movie or TV show adapted to new location and cast of characters, and a lot of it started off sounding as if it were headed somewhere interesting then ran out of gas halfway through. But there were some stories about which, even if he couldn’t quite credit their having happened, some quality in the teller’s voice, or phrasing, caused him to suspend judgment.

During the course of his Associate’s Degree, Davis had taken a number of courses in psychology—preparation for a possible career as a psychologist—and in one of these, he had learned that, after several hours of uninterrupted combat (he couldn’t remember how many, had never been any good with numbers), you would hallucinate. You couldn’t help it; it was your brain’s response to continuous unbearable stress. He supposed that at least some of the stories he’d listened to in barracks and bars might owe themselves to such cause, although he was unwilling to categorize them all as symptoms. This was not due to any overriding belief in either organized religion or disorganized superstition; it derived more from principle, specifically, a conclusion that an open mind was the best way to meet what continually impressed him as an enormous world packed full of many things.

By Fallujah, Davis had had no experiences of the strange, the bizarre, no stories to compare with those he’d accumulated over the course of basic and his deployment. He hadn’t been thinking about that much as they took up their positions south of the city; all of his available attention had been directed at the coming engagement. Davis had walked patrol, had felt the crawl of the skin at the back of your neck as you made your way down streets crowded with men and women who’d been happy enough to see Saddam pulled down from his pedestal but had long since lost their patience with those who’d operated the crane. He’d ridden in convoys, his head light, his heart throbbing at the base of his throat as they passed potential danger after potential danger, a metal can on the right shoulder, what might be a shell on the left, and while they’d done their best to reinforce their Hummers with whatever junk they could scavenge, Davis was acutely aware that it wasn’t enough, a consequence of galloping across the Kuwaiti desert with The Army You Had. Davis had stood checkpoint, his mouth dry as he sighted his M-16 on an approaching car that appeared full of women in black burkas who weren’t responding to the signs to slow down, and he’d wondered if they were suicide bombers, or just afraid, and how much closer he could allow them before squeezing the trigger. However much danger he’d imagined himself in, inevitably, he’d arrived after the sniper had opened fire and fled, or passed the exact spot an IED would erupt two hours later, or been on the verge of aiming for the car’s engine when it screeched to a halt. It wasn’t that Davis hadn’t discharged his weapon; he’d served support for several nighttime raids on suspected insurgent strongholds, and he’d sent his own bullets in pursuit of the tracers that scored the darkness. But support wasn’t the same thing as kicking in doors, trying to kill the guy down the hall who was trying to kill you. It was not the same as being part of the Anvil.