Vampires: The Recent Undead Part 43

Bloch's little pouchy eyes gleamed with interest.

"Amazing. The monster in his story was a wild boar. You're saying he wrote the story in nineteen-forty-one, and seven years later actual wild pigs mutilated his body?"

When Milton didn't answer, Bloch said soberly, "You seem to have lived a Gothic novel, my friend."

"I was thinking the same thing this morning," Milton said, getting up to go. "You know, you're filling your own prescription, Dr. Bloch. You're moving into the fantasy."

"Good Lord," said he, knocking the ash off his cigar as he rose. "I hope not."

By the time he reached the shop, Milton was finding his own behavior incredible. After decades of silence, he couldn't believe the things he'd been saying-to Bloch, of all people.

He was confused as well, angry and fearful yet not sure exactly what he was afraid of. Sitting slumped at his desk, he worked it out.

There was the practical danger, of course. But beyond that lay a metaphysical peril: that he might somehow lose his world. It's such a private thing, Bloch had said, it disintegrates when another person moves into it.

Rising, Milton unlocked his cabinet and took out a second copy of the January '42 Arcana. Six others reposed in the same place, awaiting buyers. He put on white cotton gloves to protect the old brittle pages, and began leafing through them. The words of Ralph O'Meagan were an echo of long ago.

For many long weeks I lived in trembling fear of the night, when I would have to go to my room and see the lamplight on that wall. For now I knew that the world called real is an illusion of lighted surfaces and the resonances of touch, while underneath surges immortal and impalpable Energy, ever ready to create or kill.

There was no possible way of explaining to my father why I should sleep anywhere else, and no way of explaining anything to my mother at all. I tried to sleep without the nightlight, only to find that I feared the demons of the dark even more than those of the light.

Yet I grew tired of waiting and watching for something that never happened, and as time went by I began to persuade myself that what I'd seen that one time was, after all, a mere nightmare, such as I often had.

I was sound asleep, some three or four weeks after my first visit to the Alternate Dimension, when something tickling my face caused me to awaken. At first I had absolutely no sense of fear or dread. Then I felt a p.r.i.c.kling on my face and hands like the "pins and needles" sensation when a foot has been asleep-and a memory stirred.

Reluctantly I opened my eyes. I was lying as before in that field of dying gra.s.s. One coa.r.s.e stem was rubbing against my nose, other stems probed my hands and bare feet.

1 raised my head and saw the great beast once again. This time I waited until it had finished its horrible meal and had turned away, like an animal well satisfied and ready for sleep.

Trembling, I stood up. I was soaked and s.h.i.+vering and felt as cold and empty as the boar was warm and full. I approached the body it had been mutilating, and it was that of a grown man, with something intolerably familiar about its face-for the face remained: remained, frozen into its last rictus of agony: and I knew that the face one day would be mine.

Milton closed the magazine. Poor Ralph O'Meagan. Poor Alpha Omega. Caught in an eddy of the time process, condemned to return again and again to the same place to undergo the same death and mutilation.

The Alternate Dimension was not the past and not the future. Ralph was encountering Forever.

How extraordinary, Milton thought, that a fourteen-year-old boy should have such ideas and write them so well and then live mute forever afterward. But fourteen, that's the age of discovery, isn't it? Of s.e.xual awakening? Of sudden insights into your fate that you spend the rest of your life trying to understand?

And that rhetoric about immortal and impalpable Energy-was it mere adolescent rubbish? An early symptom of madness? Or a revelation of truth?

That night his sleep was restless. Bloch kept intruding into his dreams, with spotty face thrust forward and eyes staring. Their dialogue resumed, and soon the dream Bloch was breaking into areas the real one hadn't yet imagined.

-That's what happened, isn't it? accused the loud metallic voice. You killed Ned, didn't you?

-Christ. Well, yes. I didn't mean to.

-No, of course not.

-I didn't!

-Oh, I think there was a lot of hatred there, plus a lot of rather unbrotherly love. And I don't think you're a forgiving type . . . How'd you do it, anyway?

-With a samurai short sword he'd sent me from the Pacific. When he came at me 1 s.n.a.t.c.hed it off the living room wall and ran it into his chest. Or he did. I mean, he was the one in motion. I was just holding the sword, trying to fend him off. Really.

-Why'd he attack you?

-He was in one of his rages. It was late at night. Mama was dead and Daddy was in the hospital. I was out of the Navy and living here alone when Ned came bursting into the house, roaring. He'd found out I'd been going to a shrink and using his name instead of my own.

-Why'd you do a thing like that?

-I was afraid. It was 1948 and people could be committed a lot more easily than they can today. I was afraid I was going crazy and you'd have me put away. It was a dumb trick, but I thought I could find out what was happening to me without running such a risk.

-Ah. Now we're getting at it. So you and Ned had your second big fight and- -Just like the first time, he won.

-How could he, if you killed him?

-He only died. I died but went on living. He became one of the dead but 1 became one of the undead.

-Oh, Lord. Not Montague Summers again.

-Yes. Montague Summers again.

Milton woke up. The clock said 4:20. He got up anyway, and made tea. Except for one light the shop was dark, the books in shadow, all their tales of horror and discovery in suspended animation, like a freeze frame in a movie.

Milton drank green tea, and slowly two images, the dream Bloch and the real one, overlapped in his mind and fused together. What he'd discover in the dream, the real fat noisy old Bloch would discover in time-the pushy devil.

So, Milton thought. I'll have to get rid of him, too.

He added too because over the last three decades there had been other people who seemed to threaten him. He no longer remembered just how many.

Bathed, breakfasted, his long strands of spa.r.s.e hair neatly combed across his skull, Milton opened his shop as usual at ten. Just before noon Bloch came in, puffing, intruding with his big belly, shaking his veinous wattles.

"Welcome to my house!" Milton quoted, smiling. "Enter freely, and of your own will!"

Bloch chuckled appreciatively. "Thank you, Count."

"That was a fine lunch yesterday," Milton went on warmly, "and the talk was even better than the food."

As usual, they chatted about books. Bloch had been reading an old text from the early days of psychoa.n.a.lysis, Schwarzwalder's Somnarrzbulisinus und Daminerzustande-somnambulism and twilight states. To doctors of the Viennese school, he explained, somnambulism didn't mean literal sleepwalking but rather dissociated consciousness, a transient doubling of the personality.

"Those old boys had something to say," Bloch boomed. "They believed in the reality of the mind. Modern psychiatrists don't. Today it's all drugs, drugs, drugs."

So thought Milton, Bloch had been a.n.a.lyzing him. He said, "As long as you're here, would you like to see Ned's room? I've kept it exactly as it was when he was alive."

Bloch was enthusiastic. "Indeed I would. I wasn't able to help him, and I seem to remember my failures more than my successes."

"Success always moves on to the next thing," Milton agreed, as Bloch trailed him up the circular stair. "But failure's timeless, isn't it? Failure is forever."

Upstairs the hall was clean and bright, with the sun reflecting through the patio window. There was no sound behind Ned's door.

Bloch stopped to catch his breath, then asked, "I'm invited in here too? Otherwise I wouldn't intrude, you know"-carrying on the Dracula bit in his heavy-handed way.

Smiling, Milton unlocked the door and bowed him in. He opened the window and the shutters, and suddenly the room was full of light. The young sailor's face grinned fixedly from the picture frame, and Bloch approached it, eager as a collector catching sight of a moth he'd missed the last time.

"Ah," he said. "Yes, I remember. He looked a lot like this thirty years ago, when I treated him. Or-"

He paused, confused. Milton had come up behind him and looked over his shoulder. Frowning, Bloch stared at the picture, then at the reflection, then at the picture again. It was the first time he'd seen the brothers together.

"You never really knew Ned, did you?" Milton asked.

"But the man I saw-the one who came for treatment-he was built like an athlete-"

"I spent more than two years in the Navy before they Section-Eighted me. It was the only time in my life I was ever in shape."

That was another bit of news for Bloch to absorb, and for the first time Milton heard him stutter a little.

"And the, ah, r-reason for your d-discharge-"

"Oh, the usual. 'Psychotic.' As far as I could see, the word meant only that they didn't know what they were dealing with. At that time, neither did I."

"The story . . . you wrote it?"

"Have you ever known an athlete who could write, or a bookworm who didn't want to?"

"And the things you told me about Ned-"

"Were true. But of course about me. Hasn't it occurred to you that Ned discharged his rage while I buried mine deep? That if there was a maniac in the family, it was far more likely to be me? What kind of a lousy doctor are you, anyway?"

Despite the harsh words his voice was eerily tranquil, and he smiled when Bloch turned his head to see how far he was from the door.

Then he turned back, staring at Milton's bent and narrow frame, and his thoughts might as well have been written on his face. This bag of bones-what do I have to fear from him?

Suddenly his voice boomed out. "Ralph O'Meagan, I'm delighted to make your acquaintance at last!"

He stretched out his fat hand and as he did the yellow wall bellied out and burst, blowing away the room and the whole illusion of the world called real.

Gaping, letting his hand drop nervelessly, Bloch stared now at the smudge of fire in the west, now at the rising moon in the east.

A raw wind blew; delighted shrieks echoed from the roller coaster; the calliope was hooting, and Milton hummed along: Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed- "Welcome to my world," he said, standing back.

Swift trotters were drumming on the earth and splas.h.i.+ng in the pools and Bloch whirled as the huge humpbacked beast came at him out of the sunset, smoke jetting from its nostrils, small red eyes glinting like sardonyx.

"What did I do?" Bloch cried, waving his fat hands. "I wanted to help! What did I do?"

The boar struck his fat belly with lethal impact and his lungs exploded like balloons. He lived for a few minutes, writhing, while it delved into his guts. Milton leaned forward, hugging himself, breathlessly watching.

The scene was elemental. Timeless. The beast rooting and grunting, the sunset light unchanging, cries of joy from the roller coaster, and the calliope hooting on: Could we but relive that sweet moment divine/We'd find that our love is unaltered by time.

"Now you're really part of the fantasy," he a.s.sured Dr. Bloch.

Not that Bloch heard him. Or anything else.

Life returned to normal in Sun & Moon Metaphysical Books where, of course, things were never totally normal.

Milton's days went by as before, opening the shop, chatting with the occasional customer, closing it again. Drowsy days spent amid the smell of old books, a smell whose color, if it had a color, would he brownish gray.

Serena House called to inquire about their lodger-Dr. Bloch had left Milton's number when he went out. Milton expressed astonishment over the disappearance, offered any help he could give. Next day a bored policewoman from Missing Persons arrived to take a statement. Milton described how Bloch had visited the shop, chatted, and left.

"He was one of my best customers," he said. "Any idea what might have happened to him?"

"Nothing yet," said the cop, closing her notebook. "It's kind of like Judge Crater."

More than you know, thought Milton. Where Bloch's bones lay it was always 1948, and whole neighborhoods had been built over the spot, a palimpsest of fill and tarmac and buildings raised, razed and raised again. Milton's voice was confident and strong and totally without a stutter as he chatted with the policewoman, and he could see she believed what he told her.

After she left, the afternoon was dull as usual. Around four Milton got up from his desk and took down his copy of Montague Summers's The Vampire in Europe.

He hefted it, did not open it, put it back on the shelf and addressed its author aloud.

"Reverend Summers, you're a fool. Thinking the undead drink blood. No, we suck such life as we have from rage and memories. It must be a nouris.h.i.+ng diet, because we live on. And on. And on. And on. I knew that when I wrote my story."

An hour later, after closing the shop, he entered Ned's room and for a time stood gazing into the mirror. The sun was going down. As the room darkened, he heard the unseen beast rubbing its nap of stiff hair against the wall and smelled the morning-breath odor of unfresh blood that always attended it.

Was it something or somebody? Was it his creature, or himself? Did he dream its world, or did it dream his? Milton brooded, asking himself unanswerable questions while his image faded slowly into the brown shadows, until the gla.s.s held nothing, nothing at all.

To the Moment.

Nisi Shawl.

Nisi Shawl packs a lot into this very short story: an intriguing and original concept of the vampire plus s.e.x, death, procreation, and a dollop of horror.

Shawl's story collection Filter House, lauded by Ursula K. Le Guin as "superb," and by Samuel R. Delany as "simply amazing," won the 2008 James Tiptree, Jr. Award and was nominated for a 2009 World Fantasy Award. Shawl is the coauthor of Writing the Other, a guide to developing characters of varying racial, religious, and s.e.xual backgrounds, and one of the founding members of the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the representation of people of color in the fantastic genres. She is the editor of Aqueduct Press's WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Ident.i.ty, and a coeditor of Strange Matings: Octavia E. Butler, Feminism, Science Fiction, and African American Voices, forthcoming from Seven Stories. Her speaking engagements include presentations at Duke University, Stanford University, and Smith College. In May 2011 she will be the Guest of Honor for the feminist science fiction convention WisCon. She blogs at nisi-la.livejournal.com.

We are not extinct. There are sixteen of us, and I'm pregnant. I only just found out.

I like to travel. Not by plane, because on long flights I get restless, and the changes in air pressure hurt. My cavities ache terribly with every ascent and landing, unless I've managed to fill them completely in the last few minutes before boarding. This is difficult to do at almost any airport.

Usually I take a train wherever I want to go. But at times there are oceans in my way.

So I am on a s.h.i.+p, a big white cruiser headed south through the Atlantic. Prior to sailing, I glutted myself with blood enough to last the entire voyage, under normal circ.u.mstances.

The circ.u.mstances are not normal.

The sun is bright, but winter-thin. I'm wearing a coat of ivory wool and large, hexagonal sungla.s.ses with honey-colored frames. They make me think of bees. The wind does what it wants with my long, dark hair; nothing pretty or symmetrical. I don't care. I've been told I resemble Jackie Ona.s.sis since 1971. Monkeys always a.s.sume I'm beautiful, no matter how I look.