The Night Inside Read online

  The Night

  Inside

  Nancy Baker

  A ChiZine Publications eBook

  Dedication

  For Richard and Kim

  Epigraph

  Aching with a passion inside

  Deep as the river of desire,

  The ashes and the fire

  Turning this night inside . . .

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Midnight Maps

  From the Diary of Ambrose Delaney Dale

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  The Only Thing That Shines

  From the Diary of Ambrose Delaney Dale

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Shark Walk

  From the Diary of Ambrose Delaney Dale

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Everything That Rises

  From the Diary of Ambrose Delaney Dale

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Other CZP eBook titles by Nancy Baker

  Copyright

  Introduction

  It’s my pleasure to introduce the republication of two novels by Nancy Baker, The Night Inside and its sequel, Blood and Chrysanthemums. Both were printed originally in the early nineties. As I recall, that was when editors and other knowledgeable people in publishing were saying, “The vampire vein is played out, it’s been saturated, it’s done.”

  Just as they’re always saying, about horror fiction in general and vampire stories in particular. So far, they have always been wrong. Vampires going extinct? They’re not even slowing down! As of this writing, we’ve got pop culture sports vampires in high school all over TV and YA fiction, a Dracula TV series about the count’s efforts to become a steampunk entrepreneur in 19th century London, a boy band called “Vampire Weekend,” vampire “romance” novels coming out of our ears, and many other fangish manifestations.

  For those with a streak of dark romanticism—with or without the other side of that coin, a streak of savagery that never sees the light of day except on the printed page or the movie screen—there is nothing as delicious as a dip in the warm and apparently boundless sea of fictional blood and those who take it for their sustenance.

  However, that doesn’t mean that readers are such bloody wantons that all it takes to get our pulses pounding is a flash of fang.

  For this reader, the particular sub-vein of vampire tales that I don’t read any more is the fictional power struggle within large, complicated vampire societies, secret or open. These societies are modelled on modern notions of feudal authoritarianism, or Freud’s primal horde (both of which tend to produce the brutish structures of the criminal gang), or the nasty-minded hierarchies of Gothicky pop celebs and their worlds of sex, drugs, and drearily unoriginal music (yes, there is good Gothic music, but it’s hard to find; personally, I’m partial to any group with the guts to include a skilled theremin player—at least they make an effort).

  None of this sort of world-building takes any imagination. The author can just parcel out titles and territories and oaths of loyalty and hierarchical ambitions among more or less interchangeable vampire characters, and off you go.

  Why, they’re just like us at our most childish, but older, more suave, and numbingly dull. Vampire Lineages, Houses, chapters, lodges, battalions, parties, clans, etc. find their plots in a constant jostling for advantage, which to me wears pretty thin pretty fast. I’ve had enough of vampire politics (mostly ruthless infighting with no thought for the population at large) just by living through the past three decades of American history.

  So for me, at any rate, the pleasure of vampire stories isn’t politics but evocations of intimacy—the close-in, deeply imagined, mindfully emotional relationships that a writer must stretch herself to create for her semi-supernatural protagonists. I enjoy good stories about individual monsters caught up in and absorbed by their own murkily undead state. What’s the point of being a vampire in a world full of the creatures that you used to be like but upon whom you now prey, if you never give serious thought to what that means—to the staggering psychological displacement from the short, warm, busy life of a human being to a vampiric existence of sharply narrowed concerns but infinitely extended time horizons.

  In these two books of Nancy Baker’s you will find just such a story, in the form of a very close study of individual vampires fighting for balance in a chaotic existence that cycles erratically between bestial appetite, coupled with augmented strength, and the tenuous connection to what remains of their original humanity. There is no “vampire society” here. The author places her characters in a situation where vampires are extremely few and far between; the only social structures that matter are human ones, within which they must somehow lead their outsider lives.

  The tight focus on character is complemented by a firm grounding of the narratives in Canadian geography—Toronto and Banff, grittily realized to ground the fantastic doings of vampire protagonists in a fresh, realistically evoked setting of Canadian town and city life.

  The Night Inside presents us with a young teacher ripped from her ordinary life and thrown into the ongoing battle between a captured vampire and a gang that uses him for exploitative purposes, with even more nefarious ends in mind. The complex relationship that grows between Ardeth and the vampire Rozokov, their dangerous escape and counterattack, is set against Ardeth’s continued entanglement with humans—like her sister, whose closeness with Ardeth is troubled by the normal frictions of sibling-hood.

  It’s worth noting that one of the pleasures of these books is the inclusion of significant female characters who are not the dimensionless evil brides of Dracula but persons in their own right: the Nisei medical tech Lisa Takara, Eleanor the librarian, Sara who sings with a band, and others.

  There are active supporting male characters as well, with goals and anxieties of their own, so that the central couple doesn’t breathe up all the oxygen in the book. The sense of ordinary life going on around them, life that must be engaged with on more levels than simply securing a meal, is solid and satisfying.

  Ardeth, killed and risen as a vampire herself, is a changed person. A rush of power comes with her newfound state, and a joy in shedding her human identity’s constrictions, assumptions, and hesitations. She savours the excitement of the hunt, of a stealthy outlaw existence, and of the erotic enigma of Rozokov, who made her a vampire.

  But she’s also still a person. She doesn’t just walk away from the human network that has both bound and nourished her all her life: it’s not that simple, not for most real, functional people, no matter how peculiar they’ve become. Ardeth joins Rozokov in the quest for freedom from their persecutors, but she pursues another, more complex q
uest too, for intimacy beyond transitory closeness to a person whose blood you want to drink.

  In Blood and Chrysanthemums the story is built out from a loose end from the first book—Lisa Takara and what she knows or imagines she knows about these two strange and dangerous beings.

  The sequel begins with a reconnection of the undead lovers to the natural world: Ardeth rock-climbs, Rozokov studies the stars. The couple are living in Banff, a destination for admirers of the majestic outdoors, where self-absorption is challenged by the beauty of vibrant, living nature.

  On a more intimate scale, domestic discord inevitably intrudes: jealousy, possessiveness, and disagreement over where and how to live in the human world, together as a couple or alone, as solitary predators. Rozokov has long since been separated from the familiarities of the environment he was born into. Ardeth’s freshly minted shock and confusion is a vivid complement to his more world-weary familiarity with their dilemma: Can you maintain the ruthless pragmatism that ensures the survival of a predator, and also maintain the passionate and vulnerable emotional life that is the essence of the human self? How do you avoid becoming all-monster, all the time, devoted to the stratagems of the hunt and satisfied with them as your central, eternal theme-and-variations—that and nothing more, forever?

  Rozokov broods. Well, he is Russian, and he’s had centuries to ruminate over the problem. Ardeth isn’t ready for brooding. She’s young, she’s full of new energy and perceptions, and she wants to find not just answers but solutions. She even tries to return to her old lives—human and vampire—in Toronto, where it all began for her. But nothing is a comfortable fit any more.

  So, for company—for the intimacy that any social animal craves—they have each other, in closeness and understanding, but also in anger and mistrust: What can “faithfulness” mean to lovers who live for centuries?

  This is a meditative take on vampirism, more exploratory than the first novel. The big questions aren’t scanted while the action of escape, flight, and retribution are foreground.

  Big questions like: What am I supposed to do with my long, long life? What gives significance to my isolated existence, running in lonely, secretive parallel to the myriad of brief human lives around me? Do I still have a soul (and so what if I do)? Can I ever find lasting love, peace, and freedom as a bloodsucker chained by necessity to its prey; and is that what I really want?

  Becoming a vampire clearly doesn’t let them off the existential hook—far from it.

  The plot structure is unusual; a dreamlike quality develops as a new vampire character closes in on the central pair, with their fitful quarrels, joys, and bafflements. Fujiwara, once a Japanese lordling and now a yakuza boss, is much older than even Rozokov, and formed by a very different culture. Does he have some answers?

  In Baker’s vampire tale, the melancholy found in so many supernatural protagonists isn’t, really, all that different from the underlying melancholy felt by ordinary humans who think and feel beyond the standard, socially acceptable mores of their day. That’s why it’s so rewarding for a reader to spend time with these characters while they search, through doubt and confusion, for better answers—just like the rest of us.

  Finally, the biggest question must be faced: How do I deal with an endless lifetime? What Baker’s vampires come up with in answer is both moving and satisfying.

  Suzy McKee Charnas

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  January 6, 2014

  Prologue

  It took him two days to wake.

  His heart, which had beat only once every day, gradually began to expand and contract more rapidly. The blood that had crawled along the interior miles of his body as sluggishly as a glacier now began to melt and flow. Nerves sparked into life and set muscles twitching in reaction as contact was re-established with the long-forgotten territories of hands and feet.

  As his body woke, so did his mind, drifting up from midnight oblivion to a twilight plain where dreams bloomed like Rousseau flowers, bright crimson, with teeth.

  Finally, after two nights of the moon’s rise and fall had dragged his blood like tides through his body, he opened his eyes and stared into utter darkness.

  His hands jerked then flopped back, twitching like pale fronded sea creatures. As his control over them returned, they moved again, lifting up to touch the wood that surrounded him. Nails now long and sharp as razors clawed desperately at his prison walls before he overcame the suffocating panic. He was not trapped, he told himself, the thoughts coming sluggish and heavy. This was his hiding place, his sanctuary.

  The hands sank to his sides, as reason subdued his rebellious body. He took a deep breath (there was next to no oxygen, true, but that hardly mattered). Wait, the slow pulse in his body told him, wait.

  Several timeless hours later, when the moon had reached its zenith over the silent city, he moved again. This time, his hands raised to brace themselves against the wood above him. He pushed, and waited for the creak of the lid rising, the tearing sound of nails dragged from their beds. There was only silence and darkness.

  Irrational panic suddenly raced through his mind, snapping at his barely re-established reason with teeth of terror. Be calm, be calm, he told himself, fighting the fear. He had never experienced this before, this failure of his body to obey his commands. But then, he had never waited so long before. Could he have misjudged his strength so? Had it been too many years, and now he was too sapped of strength to escape from his hiding place? If he were trapped here, then what? Could he starve here, hunger accomplishing what bullets, swords and more than four hundred years could not? If so, how long would it take? Would his mind crack before his body could rot away? For a horrifying moment, he contemplated an eternity of gibbering, ravenous madness, trapped in the twin tombs of wood and bone.

  A sound escaped his lips, a hoarse guttural groan of denial, and he thrust upwards again. He held the pressure until he heard, over the roar in his temples, the crack of the wood as it split above his hands.

  He opened his eyes again. There was no light, but he needed none, not to see the three-foot crack in the wood above him. He thought he could scent the wild sweetness of the night air and the illusion gave him strength.

  Ten minutes of thrust and claw and there was a rent in the wood large enough for both his arms. The fraying cloth of his jacket ripped on the wooden splinters as he snaked one arm out through the hole to grip the edge of the lid. Hard, ragged talons slid beneath the edge and tugged until, with a faint shriek of protest, the metal nails yielded their grip on the wood. One more thrust and he was free.

  He rested for an hour that for the first time seemed that long, and then clambered slowly to his feet, leaning on the wood box for support. The space was not much wider than the box. He looked about slowly, feeling the weight of the building over him. He reached for the wall at one end, felt a sudden dizziness sweep over him and clung to the box again.

  He bent there for a long moment, letting his muscles readapt themselves, and then became aware of the ache deep inside him. The exertion of the last hours had awakened his slumbering hunger. His belly cramped and nausea shook him again. He would have to feed, and soon, to maintain even the shadow of strength he still possessed.

  He shook himself slightly and reached for the hidden mechanism that had sealed him into the wall years ago. For a moment he thought it too would not open, but then the internal machinery crawled into creaking life and the hidden door opened out into the darkened warehouse.

  He stepped out into the deserted upper floor and felt a rush of strength as the clean air touched his face. This part of the warehouse had been empty when he had locked himself away and was empty still, except for the heavy iron pulleys and winches hanging like skeletal ribs over the barren floor. The great windows that lined one wall were dirt-caked and blackened, but the faint moonlight crept through the narrow cracks to lie like a shining web on the dirty floor. He stepped into one
shaft of pale glow and breathed in the quicksilver light.

  Closing his eyes, he lifted his face to the faint gleam of sky above him, then stretched out his mind slowly, feeling for some scrap of life, some tiny heartbeat in the upper emptiness of the warehouse. There, oh there . . . he felt a faint pulse, and the dim awareness of a rodent brain. “Come,” he breathed, a dry dusty sound. “Come.”

  The rat chattered nervously, its squeak echoing in his ears, but it crept from the wall and began to scurry through the sea of dust towards him. He watched it come, then bent down to let it crawl onto his hand. For one moment, the tiny black eyes stared up into his and he had a dizzying vision of himself through the rat’s eyes—a grey, grimacing monster whose glowing eyes were almost obscured by the tangled, ashen hair.

  He felt fastidious disgust then, but the hunger was so much stronger and the warm life pulsing in his hands too tempting. He drowned his ancient revulsion in an act even more ancient.

  After a moment he dropped the lifeless body and crouched there, panting. The creature’s blood ran like fire down his throat and through his veins. It was sweet, oh so sweet . . . but not nearly enough to assuage the maddening hunger he felt. If anything, the brief satiation had only heightened his need.

  He wiped his face, licked his stained fingers absently and stared back up at the moonlight, its mercury-silver glow brighter now. How long had it been, he wondered. More than fifty years, he guessed, but perhaps less than one hundred. Rising, he went slowly to the stairs that led down to the main floor of the warehouse. The cracking of his leather boots creaked with each step, the floor echoing the sound to a reverberation that throbbed in his head. He started down the stairs, clutching the railing whenever his head spun again.

  Halfway down, he realized he was not alone.

  Heartbeats sounding like thunder in his head, breathing like a hurricane in his ears . . . the sensations flooded through his mind with a power that shook him. More than one, more than two . . . that was all his confused senses could make of the input for a moment. Then he lighted his head and saw them, flaring bright and hot in his nightsight. They were clustered at the other end of the empty warehouse, three of them standing over a machine that hummed a maddening frequency in his hypersensitive ears.