The Vampire Sextette Read online

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  THE VAMPIRE SEXTETTE

  Edited By

  Marvin Kaye

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction: The Erotic Myth of Blood

  MARVIN KAYE

  The Other Side of Midnight

  KIM NEWMAN

  Some Velvet Morning

  NANCY A. COLLINS

  Sheena

  BRIAN STABLEFORD

  Vanilla Blood

  S. P. SOMTOW

  In the Face of Death

  CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO

  The Isle Is Full of Noises

  TANITH LEE

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE VAMPIRE SEXTETTE

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with Bookspan

  PRINTING HISTORY

  GuildAmerica Books hardcover edition / 2000

  Ace mass-market edition / October 2002

  Compilation copyright © 2000 by Marvin Kaye.

  The Other Side of Midnight copyright © 2000 by Kim Newman.

  Some Velvet Morning copyright © 2000 by Nancy Collins.

  Sheena copyright © 2000 by Brian Stableford.

  Vanilla Wood copyright © 2000 by S. P. Somtow.

  In the Face of Death copyright © 2000 by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

  The Isle Is Full of Noises copyright © 2000 by Tanith Lee.

  Cover art by Luis Royo.

  Cover design by Rita Frangie.

  Text design by Julie Rogers.

  All rights reserved.

  For information address: GuildAmerica Books, an imprint and registered trademark of BOOKSPAN, Department GB,

  401 Franklin Avenue, Garden City, New York 11530.

  Visit our website at www.penguinputnam.com

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  ISBN: 0-441-00986-7

  ACE®

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  ACE and the "A" design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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  INTRODUCTION

  The Erotic Myth of Blood

  WHEN BRAM STOKER'S memorable nosferatu Dracula opens one of his own veins and forces Mina Harker to drink, it is a moment both unholy and sexual. The count's shocking oralism is concupiscent and, in the manner of the Black Mass, also a dark travesty of transubstantiation.

  Vampirism in its literary guise is often linked with Eros. The two first significant vampire tales in western literature—Dr. John Polidori's lampoon of Lord Byron, The Vampire, and Sheridan LeFanu's novella, Camilla, are infused with implicit homosexuality; compared with them, Dracula's sexual implications seem oblique.

  One might argue that Bram Stoker was reined in by Victorianism, but in fact his plot is rife with implicit carnality. The count, in his own idiosyncratic fashion, cuckolds both Mina's and Lucy's human lovers, and back at his old castle in Transylvania, he also maintains an undead ménage à quatre. (Research reveals that one of his wives is Carmilla, which suggests she must be bisexual.)

  In his quintessential novel, Stoker introduced a third significant element to the myth: compassion. As her poor suffering lover pounds a wooden stake through Lucy's heart, he sees upon her countenance an expression of spiritual peace that bespeaks her soul's delivery from the curse of the damned. This sympathy, so vital to the author's theme of holiness and the profane, is again memorably invoked when Dracula himself is at last destroyed, and though most of the movie versions ignore this part of the tale, it does briefly surface in the 1931 film, when Bela Lugosi says, "To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious," and then observes, "There are far worse things awaiting man than death."

  In 1976, this linkage between lust, bloodlust, and compassion reached a literary pinnacle of sorts in Anne Rice's popular Interview With the Vampire. In its wake came a flood of novels and short stories about vampires charismatic, eloquent, genteel, melancholy, misunderstood, noble. Some were heroic, many were equipped with paradoxically healthy libidos. Sexy vampires became such a cliché that the market for them shriveled like a cinematic vampire in the light of day* (*Only in the movies does daylight destroy vampires, but if you've read Dracula, you already know that.) and, at several fantasy conventions, horror writer and editor of Weird Tales Darrell Schweitzer reminded authors that vampires, alluring though they might be, originally were supposed to be bad guys, remember?

  The Vampire Sextette is my twenty-second anthology. Vampires have made relatively few appearances in my collections, partly because they don't tend to frighten me. Like demons, they are rooted in dualistic cosmology, and that has little impact on someone whose philosophy is a tad to the left of atheism. Thus, three popular horror novels, Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, and Stephen King's Salem's Lot failed to raise a goose bump upon my jaded flesh; though, to be fair, King's novel was sufficiently well written to keep me reading to the end.

  Another reason I have seldom included vampire stories is that so few have anything to offer that Stoker hasn't already done better, and some of the exceptions, notably E. F. Benson's "The Room in the Tower," Carl Jacobi's "Revelations in Black," Clark Ashton Smith's "A Rendezvous in Averoigne," and Richard Matheson's "Blood Son" have already been anthologized several times. I did reprint Matheson's gruesome "Dress of White Silk," but his most remarkable contribution to vampire literature was too long for my gatherings: I Am Legend, that oft-filmed honor/science-fiction novel about a normal man trapped in a world full of vampires.

  In the past twenty-plus years, however, a new spate of excellent, highly original vampire tales began to flow from the pens of such diverse stylists and storytellers as Robert Aickman, Nancy Collins, Morgan Llywelyn, George R. R. Martin, Ray Russell, Dan Simmons, S. P. Somtow, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and numerous others. Still, it was not until Tanith Lee and I became international pen pals that the idea for The Vampire Sextette was born.

  I have long admired Tanith's poetically crafted fiction, and have purchased rights to several of her short stories. A few years ago, we struck up a friendly America-to-England correspondence and, at one point, exchanged works of romantic fantasy that each other had written. About this time, Tanith suggested that if I edited an anthology of a half dozen erotic vampire novellas, she would agree to write one of them. She meant to work musk into her plot, and proposed the collection be called The Vampire Sextette, to invoke the subthemes of sensuality and musk.

  The idea sparked the interest of Ellen Asher, editorial director of Doubleday Direct's Science Fiction Book Club, so Ellen and I drew up a List of authors we hoped might participate with Tanith. We agreed that the eroticism might vary from X-rated down to R, that music might or might not be part of the plots, but the vampirism must not be metaphorical, like Strindberg's Vampire Cook in The Ghost Sonata or Harry Kressing's Conrad in The Cook: it must be the traditional bloodsucking variety.

  The six novellas that comprise The Vampire Sextette, all original variations on the vampire theme, are refreshingly unlike one another. Sex and violence are equally important in "Some Velvet Morning" by Nancy Collins, "The Isle Is Full of Noises" by Tanith Lee, and S. P. Somtow's "Vanilla Blood"; gore runs stronger than carnality in Kim Newman's "The Other Side of Midnight," while the opposite is true in Brian Stableford's "Sheena" (in which music is also an important plot element). Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's "
In the Face of Death" is the least sanguine, but its poignant love affair between an elegant vampire and the redoubtable Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman is meticulously original.

  Now settle back with a Bloody Mary and meet some truly remarkable vampires… but before you do, don't forget to smear your windowpanes with garlic.

  —Marvin Kaye Manhattan, 2000

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  THE

  VAMPIRE

  SEXTETTE

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  KIM NEWMAN

  The Other Side of Midnight

  Kim Newman is an actor, broadcaster, film critic, and author of some of the most remarkable fantasy tales being sent our way from his hometown, London. His vampire novels include Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron, and Judgment of Tears, and the theme also surfaces in his novella, "Andy Warhol's Dracula." Other fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, The Quorum, as well as nonfiction books such as Millennium Movies: End of the World Cinema. His affection for the great filmmaker Orson Welles surfaces in "The Other Side of Midnight," at once a startlingly different take (pun intended) on vampire films, yet deep down a delightfully old-fashioned homage to the same.

  AT MIDNIGHT, 1980 flew away across the Pacific, and 1981 crept in from the east. A muted cheer rose from the pretty folk around the barbecue pit, barely an echo of the raucous welcome to a new decade that erupted at the height of the last Paradise Cove New Year's party.

  Of this company, only Geneviève clung to the old—the proper—manner of reckoning decades, centuries, and (when they came) millennia. The passing of time was important to her, born in 1416, she'd let more time pass than most. Even among vampires, she was an elder. Five minutes ago—last year, last decade—she'd started to explain her position to a greying California boy, an ex-activist they called "the Dude." His eyes glazed over with more than the weed he'd been toking throughout the party, indeed since Jefferson Airplane went Starship. She quite liked the Dude's eyes, in any condition.

  "It's as simple as this," she reiterated, hearing the French in her accent ("eet's," "seemple," "ziss") that came out only when she was tipsy ("teep-see") or trying for effect. "Since there was no year nothing, the first decade ended with the end of year ten a.d.; the first century with the end of 100 a.d.; the first millennium with the end of 1000 a.d. Now, at this moment, a new decade is to begin. Nineteen-eighty-one is the first year of the 1980s, as 1990 will be the last."

  Momentarily, the Dude looked as if he understood, but he was just concentrating to make out her accented words. She saw insight spark in his mind, a vertiginous leap that made him want to back away from her. He held out his twisted, tufted joint. It might have been the one he'd rolled and started in 1968, replenished on and off ever since.

  "Man, if you start questioning time," he said, "what have you got left? Physical matter? Maybe you question that next, and the mojo won't work any more. You'll think holes between molecules and sink through the surface of the Earth. Drawn by gravity. Heavy things should be left alone. Fundamental things, like the ground you walk on, the air you breathe. You do breathe, don't you, man? Suddenly it hits me, I don't know if you do."

  "Yes, I breathe," she said. "When I turned, I didn't die. That's not common."

  She proved her ability to inhale by taking a toke from the joint. She didn't get a high like his; for that, she'd have to sample his blood as it channelled the intoxicants from his alveoli to his brain. She had the mellow buzz of him, from saliva on the roach as much as from the dope smoke. It made her thirsty.

  Because it was just after midnight on New Year's Eve, she kissed him. He enjoyed it, noncommittally. Tasting straggles of tobacco in his beard and the film of a cocktail—White Russian—on his teeth and tongue, she sampled the ease of him, the defiant crusade of his back-burnered life. She understood now precisely what the expression "ex-activist" meant. If she let herself drink, his blood would be relaxing.

  Breaking the kiss, she saw more sparks in his eyes, where her face was not reflected. Her lips were sometimes like razors, even more than her fang-teeth. She'd cut him slightly, just for a taste, not even thinking, and left some of herself on his tongue. She swallowed: mostly spit, but with tiny ribbons of blood from his gums.

  French-kissing was the kindest form of vampirism. From the minute exchange of fluid, she could draw a surprising sustenance. For her, just now, it was enough. It took the edge off her red thirst.

  "Keep on breathing, man," said the Dude, reclaiming his joint, smiling broadly, drifting back towards the rest of the party, enjoying the unreeling connection between them. "And don't question time. Let it pass."

  Licking her lips daintily, she watched him amble. He wasn't convinced 1980 had been the last year of the old decade and not the first of the new. Rather, he wasn't convinced that it mattered. Like a lot of Southern Californians, he'd settled on a time that suited him and stayed in it. Many vampires did the same thing, though Geneviève thought it a waste of longevity. In her more pompous moments, she felt the whole point was to embrace change while carrying on what was of value from the past.

  When she was born and when she was turned, time was reckoned by the Julian calendar, with its annual error of eleven minutes and fourteen seconds. Thinking of it, she still regretted the ten days—the fifth to the fourteenth of October 1582—Pope Gregory XIII had stolen from her, from the world, to make his sums add up. England and Scotland, ten days behind Rome, held out against the Gregorian calendar until 1752. Other countries stubbornly stuck with Julian dating until well into the twentieth century; Russia had not chimed in until 1918, Greece not until 1923. Before the modern era, those ten-day shifts made diary-keeping a complex business for a necessarily much-travelled creature. The leap-frogged weeks were far much more jarring than the time-zone hopping she sometimes went through as an air passenger.

  The Paradise Cove Trailer Park Colony had been her home for all of seven years, an eye blink which made her a senior resident among the constitutionally impermanent peoples of Malibu. Here, ancient history was Sonny and Cher and Leave It to Beaver, anything on the "golden oldies" station or an off-prime-time rerun.

  Geneviève—fully, Geneviève Sandrine de l'Isle Dieudonne, though she went by Gené Dee for convenience—remembered with a hazy vividity that she had once looked at the Atlantic and not known what lay between France and China. She was older than the name "America"; had she not turned, she'd probably have been dead before Columbus brought back the news. In all those years, ten days shouldn't matter, but supposedly significant dates made her aware of that fold in time, that wrench which pulled the future hungrily closer, which had swallowed one of her birthdays. By her internal calendar, the decade would not fully turn for nearly two weeks. This was a limbo between unarguable decades. She should have been used to limbos by now. For her, Paradise Cove was the latest of a long string of pockets out of time and space, cosy coffins shallowly buried away from the rush of the world.

  She was the only one of her kind at the party; if she took "her kind" to mean vampires—there were others in her current profession, private investigation, even other incomers from far enough out of state to be considered foreign parts. Born in northern France under the rule of an English king, she'd seen enough history to recognise the irrelevance of nationality. To be Breton in 1416 was to be neither French nor English, or both at the same time. Much later, during the revolution, France had scrapped the calendar again, ducking out of the 1790s, even renaming the months. In the long term, the experiment was not a success. That was the last time she—Citizen Dieudonné—had really lived in her native land; the gory business soured her not only on her own nationality but humanity in general. Too many eras earned names like "the Tenor." Vampires were supposed to be obscenely bloodthirsty, and she wasn't blind to the excesses of her kind, but the warm drank just as deeply from open wounds and usually made more of a mess of it.

  From the sandy patio beside her chrome-finished Airstream trailer, she looked beyond the gaggle of folks about the pit, joking
over franks impaled on skewers. The Dude was mixing a pitcher of White Russians with his bowling buddies, resuming a months-long argument over the precise wording of the opening narration/song of Branded. An eight-track in an open-top car played "Hotel California," The Eagles's upbeat but ominous song about a vampire and her victims. Some were dancing on the sand, shoes in a pile that would be hard to sort out later. White rolls of surf crashed on the breakers, waves edged delicately up to the beach.

  Out there was the Pacific Ocean and the curve of the Earth, and beyond the blue horizon, as another shivery song went, was a rising sun. Dawn didn't worry her; at her age, as long as she dressed carefully—sunglasses, a floppy hat, long sleeves—she wouldn't even catch a severe tan, let alone frazzle up into dust and essential salts like some nosferatu of the Dracula bloodline. She had grown out of the dark. To her owl eyes, it was no place to hide, which meant she had to be careful where she looked on party nights like this. She liked living by the sea: its depths were still impenetrable to her, still a mystery.

  "Hey, Gidget," came a rough voice, "need a nip?"

  It was one of the surfers, a shaggy bear of a man she had never heard called anything but Moondoggie. He wore frayed shorts, flip-flops, and an old blue shirt, and probably had done since the 1950s. He was a legendary veteran of tubes and pipes and waves long gone. He seemed young to her, though his friends called him an old man.

  His offer was generous. She had fed off him before when the need was strong. With his blood came a salt rush, the sense of being enclosed by a curl of wave as his board torpedoed across the surface of the water.