The Mammoth Book of Dracula (81 page)

~ * ~

She had been walking for some time, across the shingles by the mouth of the harbour, before she realized this was a dream. But how realistic! The crisp snap of air channelling down from the hill. Mist rising off the still water. Somewhere in the distance she heard the cry of a hawk. Heather turned a distant bluff into a swathe of purple suede.

She looked down, and saw a black, indistinct shape attach itself to her ankle where it fluttered. She tried shaking it off but it remained, shifting languidly against her movements, like seaweed flailing in a current. She felt hot and sweetly numb down there. The blood webbing her foot was no more arresting than the knowledge she was completely naked. Fishing boats loomed out of the mist, their sails flagging like tired ghosts. She came across the first of the bodies here, punctured and rent open, gutted, bled dry and discarded. She pressed her hand against their fish-pale flesh and, licking her lips, drifted into a darkness almost as utter as the thing that danced by her feet...

~ * ~

Niam wakened, hot-headed, a thin rope of drool spinning from her mouth. She was ravenous. Sitting up, she noticed how she must have shrugged off her clothes in the night. Her dream waxed too deep in her mind for her to be able to recall it. She padded to the window and swept the curtains aside, pausing to watch a bright red trawler as it churned towards the Firth of Lorn and the open sea beyond.

Meg was fixing eggs and bacon in the kitchen. “Hey, girl,” she said and Niam’s heart lurched. They were the words with which David used to greet her.

“Good morning.”

“Why the limp? You get a stiff leg in your sleep or something?”

Niam looked down at her foot. The skin around her instep and heel was dark purple. Strands of weed were caught between her toes. She gritted her teeth and sat down. There were two ragged holes in the meat of her foot, bloodless and white. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I bruised it yesterday without realizing.”

Despite her hunger, breakfast would not sit well in her stomach. She staggered off to be sick.

“Some way to spend the last day of the nineteen hundreds, hey, Meg?” she smiled. “Sick as a dog.”

Come lunch time, she rallied a little, so they took a walk through the town, to the place where the road rolled away from the last building and became lost to the mountains beyond Portnacroish. They talked about David, AIDS, the visits they made to see Meg in the past: all paths of discussion that were well trodden but comforting for that. When Meg asked her about London and her reasons for leaving so dramatically, she clammed up, grateful that she could not conjure an image of Salavaria’s mutilated corpse.

“What happens tonight?” she asked. “Is Oban celebrating?”

“Of course,” Meg said, gripping her hand and searching Niam’s face for a key to understanding her pain. “We’ll have a lovely time.”

Niam slept a little more when they returned to the house. When she wakened, she sensed something was wrong. Night had swamped the town. Bonfires were being lit along the coast. She could see orange points of light shimmering on the water and smell woodsmoke as it rose to shroud the moon.

Downstairs, Meg was sitting in her rocking chair, her body unzipped from her pubis to her throat. A nimbus of flies darkened the air between them, feasting on the glistening wads of offal that seemed too numerous and bulky to have fit inside Meg’s skin. Gyorsy Salavaria’s head, black and misshapen, stared from the tabletop where it rested on a plastic placemat depicting the battle of Bannockburn. He looked punch-drunk, Niam thought, as she backed out into the hall. Her shock was matched by the impact of the question:
Why me?
She barrelled into the lane and ran to the shoreline where clumps of people were congregating for the countdown to the year 2000.

She felt the wisdom and the power of an ancient evil thick in the air, like the smoke that funnelled from the raging bonfires. Down here, among the other townsfolk, she would be safe. She rubbed at her forearms, jittery with a keen belief that she had been responsible for all this spilled blood, that Gyorsy had been the fall guy for her crimes.

“That’s an absurd notion,” said a voice that seemed to come at her from all sides. The man in front of her with his back to her turned around. She cringed away from him, from the severe heat of his gaze. When he spoke again, a glut of flies streamed from his mouth. He was impossibly beautiful, yet as rank as the sight she had just escaped from. His eyes seemed so deep in his head that it was hard for her not to step closer to try and make contact with them.

“I have been so very weak,” he said. “I have slept for such a long time. But I’ve been called. The new millennium beckons me, like the call of the world to a babe in the womb.”

He raised his hands, his fingernails unfurling like a set of flick-knives. “Come with me.”

She followed, her ankle itching as though the blood there was impatient to be flowing again. “I will make it beautiful for you,” he said, as a bell sounded and a voice, so very far away, yelled:
Ten seconds to go everyone!

Away from the crowds, deep in shadow, he ducked towards her. “I once loved a girl who looked so very much like you. Her blood moves inside you. I’ve heard it, singing to me since the moment you were born. You are the last of those to be silenced. The bloodlines that conspired to halt me have been cut off. It ends here. It ends now.”

Five, four, three
-

His nails slashed across her neck, opening her veins. When she tried to breathe, blood frothed pinkly to her mouth but there was no pain, just the sight of his eyes dilating like red comets bloating in the sky.

“Mina,” he whispered. His mouth was full of teeth.

Happy New Year! Happy New Millennium!

As her life spurted from her lips and throat, she felt the suggestion of newness shivering through her bones, as if there might be another way forward from this, a way filled with the rush of wind in her hair and the hunt for some kind of hot release. She struggled to talk, to ask him why, but she could only spray blood and gurgle through her rebirth as he bore down on her, covering her mouth with what passed for his own.

<>

~ * ~

CHRIS MORGAN

Windows of the Soul

CHRIS MORGAN is the author or editor of eleven books, including the horror anthology
Dark Fantasies.
He lives in Birmingham, where he was recently the city’s Poet Laureate, and teaches writing to adults.

These days he writes horror and fantasy poems rather than stories.

With advances in artificial intelligence, even a vampire can take on a new form in order to survive
...

~ * ~

THIS IS ALL so very different from the land beyond the forest: the endless city stretching without respite in every direction, the kaleidoscopic patterns of artificial lights in rainbow hues, the absence of bats.

Under cover of December’s early dusk, I leave my rooftop hiding place, my ventilation shaft eyrie. I climb down the face of this multistorey edifice head first, as is my custom. Even if the ant-sized passers-by in the street below were to glance directly upwards—which they never do—they would not notice my presence, for there is a shadowed channel between buttresses and windows, all the way down, which I follow.

At ground level I pause, watching and listening. Today being a holiday, there is relatively little business traffic, and pedestrians are sparse.

I scuttle across the street and blend with the shadows again. It is necessary for me to break into one of these premises and feed. A random choice will be perfectly sufficient. Emerging from an alleyway, I come onto a broad, fluorescent-bright thoroughfare. Ah, Irving, or Miss Terry, how good your names would look outside one of these theatres, delineated by such lights. And how sad that the Lyceum should not have survived the century. Some cars pass, and a motor-bus. Where have all the horses gone? I can see a few people. Two men walk briskly by, talking, close enough to touch me. But they are so intent upon their discussion that they pay me no heed; in all probability I could walk along beside them without attracting their attention.

As I cross the street there is an upsurge of sound.

Shouts and bangs. Running feet approaching from the next corner. Is it possible that could have been a shot? I seek uncertain refuge in the large, recessed doorway of a shop, surrounded on three sides by displays of sale-price shoes. Quickly the uproar mounts. I can hear sirens now, which surely are coming this way.

Around the corner runs a small machine. It is six-legged, knee-high to a man. Beneath the lights it gleams metallically. It casts no shadow. Yet there is a raggedness to its movement, indicating damage. Rather laboriously, it begins to climb the front wall of a bank. This all happens very swiftly and almost directly across the street from my doorway.

The long legs of the law come chasing around the corner, first one policeman then two more. Others follow.

“There it is!”

“On the wall!”

“Catch it!”

A policeman swats at it with his baton.

The machine, scarcely at head height, loses its grip and crashes to the pavement.

“That’s got it!”

“Don’t let it get away!”

“Kill it!”

As I watch, six officers beat and kick the machine. Furiously they attack it, their eyes gleaming and mouths slack. The mechanism makes no attempt to fight back, or to escape, or even to defend itself by shielding vital parts with its legs. With a final blare of sirens and a pulsing of lights, two police cars arrive. The street is by now full of people—a crowd of onlookers shouting encouragement to their uniformed protectors. At last, the heroic assault dies away; a killing frenzy has been assuaged. One burly officer, sweating profusely despite the rawness of the evening, picks up the machine distastefully by a leg and tosses it into the open trunk of a police vehicle. This is accompanied by a cheer from those watching.

By now the whole area is thick with pedestrians—flies to a carcass. But the carcass is driven away.

I feel sad, terrified, threatened. So threatened that I have tried to secrete myself even more carefully, by climbing the glass and clinging to the ceiling of the doorway with my six feet.

Gradually the crowds move on, the police return to other duties and, I presume, the immediate danger for me lessens. Even so, I wait for an hour before moving. The streets are busier now, with people swarming into the metropolis in their tens of thousands for the impending New Year celebrations.

It is time I fed.

I negotiate the overhanging lintel and soundlessly climb the front wall of this block. Above the shops are innumerable storeys of offices which should be empty of people. With ease I open a window catch: the windows here are large and heavy, with just a single pane, such a contrast to the small leaded mullions of my boyhood.

As with most offices now, this one has computers. Powerful computers, with modems for communicating with others of their kind. I switch one on, and quickly call up a distant data source, requesting immediate transmission of information to this terminal. At one time I needed to work hard to attract humans with my handsome looks before I could feed—what a relief that those days are over. Now all I need to do is turn on, bite through and fill up. I am not supposed to possess emotions, and yet there is always a frisson, a tiny thrill, as I sink my sharpened steel teeth into the warm, rubbery flex of the phone cable, in expectation of the sharp taste of data. Just as Doyle had Sherlock Holmes write a treatise on the different kinds of cigar ash, so could I write a paper analysing the finer nuances of flavour of electronic data from diverse—

But I am frustrated. A door opens at the far end of the office.

At once I switch off and clamber under the desk.

This office is partly illuminated from without—by streetlights, advertising signs and Christmas decorations. Now a roving cone of light joins them. I can look through it and, in the infra-red, spy the uniform of a security guard. Even at the very fag end of the year, of the century, this man is conscientious, checking the building instead of toasting in the new millennium like everybody else.