By Blood We Live.
John Joseph Adams.
Neil Gaiman.
Introduction.
by John Joseph Adams.
How do we define the vampire? Are they barely animated corpses, of a horrific visage, killing indiscriminately? Or are they suave, charismatic symbols of s.e.xual repression in the Victorian era? Do they die in sunlight, or does it only make them itch a little, or, G.o.d forbid, sparkle? Do crosses and holy symbols work at repelling them, or is that just a superst.i.tion from the old times? Are they born, or made by other vampires? And anyway, are these vampires created through scientific means, such as genetic research or a virus, or are they the magical kind? Can they transform into bats? Or are they stuck in the appearance they had when they were turned? Are we talking the traditional Eastern European vampire, or something more exotic, like the Tagalog mandurugo, a pretty girl during the day, and a winged, mosquito-like monstrosity by night? Do they even drink blood, or are they some kind of psychic vampire, more directly attacking the life-force of their victims?
Vampire stories come from our myths, but their origins are quite diverse. Stories of the dead thirsting for human life have existed for thousands of years, although the most common version we speak of in popular culture originated in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. Why is the notion of the dead risen to prey on the living such an omnipresent myth across so many cultures?
Perhaps the myth of the vampire comes from a little bit of projection on the part of the living. We have a hard time imagining our existence after death, and it may be easier to imagine a life that goes on somehow. But what kind of life would a corpse live? Our ancestors were intimately familiar with decomposition, even if they didn"t precisely understand it. If I were dead, I know I would have a certain fixation for living things. And perhaps I might, finding death an unagreeable state, attempt to steal from the living some essence that defines the barrier between the living and death. Blood stands in for the notion of life easily enough. Now I just have to get that essence inside of me somehow, hmm... slurp.
Or perhaps there"s a darker, more insidious reason for the pervasiveness of the vampire story. Is there some kernel of universal truth behind all these stories? Many of the tales included here will offer their own explanations for the stories and myths. Because if there"s one thing we love almost as much as vampires themselves, it"s exploring their true natures. With the wealth of material acc.u.mulated on the nasty bloodsuckers, no two authors approach the vampire myth in quite the same way. The commonality of the vampire"s story means their tales can take place in any time and in any place. The backdrop changes, and the details too, but always, underneath it all, there is blood. All draw from those dark, fearful histories, but provide their own fresh take, each like a rare blood type, to be sought by connoisseurs such as yourself.
Hear again one of our oldest and most well-known fairy tales from a new, darker perspective in Neil Gaiman"s "Snow, Gla.s.s, Apples." And just who is the mysterious Tribute in Elizabeth Bear"s "House of the Rising Sun"? He seems so familiar... Visit the Philippines in Gabriela Lee"s "Hunger," and see the world from the eyes of a creature of decidedly non-European origin. If that is not exotic enough for your tastes, then travel into the future and beyond with Ken Macleod"s "Undead Again."
Is your thirst still not satisfied? Hunt through these pages for stories by authors such as Stephen King, Joe Hill, Kelley Armstrong, Lilith Saintcrow, Carrie Vaughn, Harry Turtledove, and many more. There is a feast here to be had. Drink deeply.
Snow, Gla.s.s, Apples.
by Neil Gaiman.
Neil Gaiman is the bestselling author of American G.o.ds, Coraline, and Anansi Boys, among many other novels. His most recent novel, The Graveyard Book, won the prestigious Newbery Medal, given to great works of children"s literature. In addition to his novel-writing, Gaiman is also the writer of the popular Sandman comic book series, and has done work in television and film.
The story of Snow White is best known from the 1937 Disney animated feature, which is about seven lovable dwarfs with names like Happy and Bashful. Gaiman"s take on that tale is new, but in a way it"s also old. For long ago, before Disney Disneyfied it, the story of Snow White was told to children-children who would almost certainly die before reaching adulthood, and whose parents couldn"t afford to be so delicate about the cruelties of the world. It was a tale in which a woman"s feet are shoved into burning hot iron shoes so that she is forced to dance until she falls down dead.
This story harkens back to that earlier, darker tradition... and then takes it a few steps farther. Mutilation, pedophilia, necrophilia. This definitely isn"t Disney.
I do not know what manner of thing she is. None of us do. She killed her mother in the birthing, but that"s never enough to account for it.
They call me wise, but I am far from wise, for all that I foresaw fragments of it, frozen moments caught in pools of water or in the cold gla.s.s of my mirror. If I were wise I would not have tried to change what I saw. If I were wise I would have killed myself before ever I encountered her, before ever I caught him.
Wise, and a witch, or so they said, and I"d seen his face in my dreams and in reflections for all my life: sixteen years of dreaming of him before he reined his horse by the bridge that morning, and asked my name. He helped me onto his high horse and we rode together to my little cottage, my face buried in the gold of his hair. He asked for the best of what I had; a king"s right, it was.
His beard was red-bronze in the morning light, and I knew him, not as a king, for I knew nothing of kings then, but as my love. He took all he wanted from me, the right of kings, but he returned to me on the following day, and on the night after that: his beard so red, his hair so gold, his eyes the blue of a summer sky, his skin tanned the gentle brown of ripe wheat.
His daughter was only a child: no more than five years of age when I came to the palace. A portrait of her dead mother hung in the princess"s tower room; a tall woman, hair the colour of dark wood, eyes nut-brown. She was of a different blood to her pale daughter.
The girl would not eat with us.
I do not know where in the palace she ate.
I had my own chambers. My husband the king, he had his own rooms also. When he wanted me he would send for me, and I would go to him, and pleasure him, and take my pleasure with him.
One night, several months after I was brought to the palace, she came to my rooms. She was six. I was embroidering by lamplight, squinting my eyes against the lamp"s smoke and fitful illumination. When I looked up, she was there.
"Princess?"
She said nothing. Her eyes were black as coal, black as her hair; her lips were redder than blood. She looked up at me and smiled. Her teeth seemed sharp, even then, in the lamplight.
"What are you doing away from your room?"
"I"m hungry," she said, like any child.
It was winter, when fresh food is a dream of warmth and sunlight; but I had strings of whole apples, cored and dried, hanging from the beams of my chamber, and I pulled an apple down for her.
"Here."
Autumn is the time of drying, of preserving, a time of picking apples, of rendering the goose fat. Winter is the time of hunger, of snow, and of death; and it is the time of the midwinter feast, when we rub the goose-fat into the skin of a whole pig, stuffed with that autumn"s apples, then we roast it or spit it, and we prepare to feast upon the crackling.
She took the dried apple from me and began to chew it with her sharp yellow teeth.
"Is it good?"
She nodded. I had always been scared of the little princess, but at that moment I warmed to her and, with my fingers, gently, I stroked her cheek. She looked at me and smiled-she smiled but rarely-then she sank her teeth into the base of my thumb, the Mound of Venus, and she drew blood.
I began to shriek, from pain and from surprise; but she looked at me and I fell silent.
The little princess fastened her mouth to my hand and licked and sucked and drank. When she was finished, she left my chamber. Beneath my gaze the cut that she had made began to close, to scab, and to heal. The next day it was an old scar: I might have cut my hand with a pocket-knife in my childhood.
I had been frozen by her, owned and dominated. That scared me, more than the blood she had fed on. After that night I locked my chamber door at dusk, barring it with an oaken pole, and I had the smith forge iron bars, which he placed across my windows.
My husband, my love, my king, sent for me less and less, and when I came to him he was dizzy, listless, confused. He could no longer make love as a man makes love; and he would not permit me to pleasure him with my mouth: the one time I tried, he started, violently, and began to weep. I pulled my mouth away and held him tightly, until the sobbing had stopped, and he slept, like a child.
I ran my fingers across his skin as he slept. It was covered in a mult.i.tude of ancient scars. But I could recall no scars from the days of our courtship, save one, on his side, where a boar had gored him when he was a youth.
Soon he was a shadow of the man I had met and loved by the bridge. His bones showed, blue and white, beneath his skin. I was with him at the last: his hands were cold as stone, his eyes milky-blue, his hair and beard faded and l.u.s.treless and limp. He died unshriven, his skin nipped and pocked from head to toe with tiny, old scars.
He weighed near to nothing. The ground was frozen hard, and we could dig no grave for him, so we made a cairn of rocks and stones above his body, as a memorial only, for there was little enough of him left to protect from the hunger of the beasts and the birds.
So I was queen.
And I was foolish, and young-eighteen summers had come and gone since first I saw daylight-and I did not do what I would do, now.
If it were today, I would have her heart cut out, true. But then I would have her head and arms and legs cut off. I would have them disembowel her. And then I would watch, in the town square, as the hangman heated the fire to white-heat with bellows, watch unblinking as he consigned each part of her to the fire. I would have archers around the square, who would shoot any bird or animal who came close to the flames, any raven or dog or hawk or rat. And I would not close my eyes until the princess was ash, and a gentle wind could scatter her like snow.
I did not do this thing, and we pay for our mistakes.
They say I was fooled; that it was not her heart. That it was the heart of an animal-a stag, perhaps, or a boar. They say that, and they are wrong.
And some say (but it is her lie, not mine) that I was given the heart, and that I ate it. Lies and half-truths fall like snow, covering the things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape, unrecognisable after a snowfall; that is what she has made of my life.
There were scars on my love, her father"s thighs, and on his ballock-pouch, and on his male member, when he died.
I did not go with them. They took her in the day, while she slept, and was at her weakest. They took her to the heart of the forest, and there they opened her blouse, and they cut out her heart, and they left her dead, in a gully, for the forest to swallow.
The forest is a dark place, the border to many kingdoms; no one would be foolish enough to claim jurisdiction over it. Outlaws live in the forest. Robbers live in the forest, and so do wolves. You can ride through the forest for a dozen days and never see a soul; but there are eyes upon you the entire time.
They brought me her heart. I know it was hers-no sow"s heart or doe"s would have continued to beat and pulse after it had been cut out, as that one did.
I took it to my chamber.
I did not eat it: I hung it from the beams above my bed, placed it on a length of twine that I strung with rowan-berries, orange-red as a robin"s breast; and with bulbs of garlic.
Outside, the snow fell, covering the footprints of my huntsmen, covering her tiny body in the forest where it lay.
I had the smith remove the iron bars from my windows, and I would spend some time in my room each afternoon through the short winter days, gazing out over the forest, until darkness fell.
There were, as I have already stated, people in the forest. They would come out, some of them, for the Spring Fair: a greedy, feral, dangerous people; some were stunted-dwarfs and midgets and hunchbacks; others had the huge teeth and vacant gazes of idiots; some had fingers like flippers or crab-claws. They would creep out of the forest each year for the Spring Fair, held when the snows had melted.
As a young la.s.s I had worked at the fair, and they had scared me then, the forest folk. I told fortunes for the fairgoers, scrying in a pool of still water; and, later, when I was older, in a disc of polished gla.s.s, its back all silvered-a gift from a merchant whose straying horse I had seen in a pool of ink.
The stallholders at the fair were afraid of the forest folk; they would nail their wares to the bare boards of their stalls-slabs of gingerbread or leather belts were nailed with great iron nails to the wood. If their wares were not nailed, they said, the forest folk would take them, and run away, chewing on the stolen gingerbread, flailing about them with the belts.
The forest folk had money, though: a coin here, another there, sometimes stained green by time or the earth, the face on the coin unknown to even the oldest of us. Also they had things to trade, and thus the fair continued, serving the outcasts and the dwarfs, serving the robbers (if they were circ.u.mspect) who preyed on the rare travellers from lands beyond the forest, or on gypsies, or on the deer. (This was robbery in the eyes of the law. The deer were the queen"s.) The years pa.s.sed by slowly, and my people claimed that I ruled them with wisdom. The heart still hung above by bed, pulsing gently in the night. If there were any who mourned the child, I saw no evidence: she was a thing of terror, back then, and they believed themselves well rid of her.
Spring Fair followed Spring Fair: five of them, each sadder, poorer, shoddier than the one before. Fewer of the forest folk came out of the forest to buy. Those who did seemed subdued and listless. The stallholders stopped nailing their wares to the boards of their stalls. And by the fifth year but a handful of folk came from the forest-a fearful huddle of little hairy men, and no one else.
The Lord of the Fair, and his page, came to me when the fair was done. I had known him slightly, before I was queen.
"I do not come to you as my queen," he said.
I said nothing. I listened.
"I come to you because you are wise," he continued. "When you were a child you found a strayed foal by staring into a pool of ink; when you were a maiden you found a lost infant who had wandered far from her mother, by staring into that mirror of yours. You know secrets and you can seek out things hidden. My queen," he asked, "what is taking the forest folk? Next year there will be no Spring Fair. The travellers from other kingdoms have grown scarce and few, the folk of the forest are almost gone. Another year like the last, and we shall all starve."
I commanded my maidservant to bring me my looking-gla.s.s. It was a simple thing, a silver-backed gla.s.s disc, which I kept wrapped in a doe-skin, in a chest, in my chamber.
They brought it to me, then, and I gazed into it: She was twelve and she was no longer a little child. Her skin was still pale, her eyes and hair coal-black, her lips as red as blood. She wore the clothes she had worn when she left the castle for the last time-the blouse, the skirt-although they were much let-out, much mended. Over them she wore a leather cloak, and instead of boots she had leather bags, tied with thongs, over her tiny feet.
She was standing in the forest, beside a tree.
As I watched, in the eye of my mind, I saw her edge and step and flitter and pad from tree to tree, like an animal: a bat or a wolf. She was following someone.
He was a monk. He wore sackcloth, and his feet were bare, and scabbed and hard. His beard and tonsure were of a length, overgrown, unshaven.
She watched him from behind the trees. Eventually he paused for the night, and began to make a fire, laying twigs down, breaking up a robin"s nest as kindling. He had a tinder-box in his robe, and he knocked the flint against the steel until the sparks caught the tinder and the fire flamed. There had been two eggs in the nest he had found, and these he ate, raw. They cannot have been much of a meal for so big a man.
He sat there in the firelight, and she came out from her hiding place. She crouched down on the other side of the fire, and stared at him. He grinned, as if it were a long time since he had seen another human, and beckoned her over to him.
She stood up and walked around the fire, and waited, an arm"s-length away. He pulled in his robe until he found a coin-a tiny, copper penny-and tossed it to her. She caught it, and nodded, and went to him. He pulled at the rope around his waist, and his robe swung open. His body was as hairy as a bear"s. She pushed him back onto the moss. One hand crept, spider-like, through the tangle of hair, until it closed on his manhood; the other hand traced a circle on his left nipple. He closed his eyes, and fumbled one huge hand under her skirt. She lowered her mouth to the nipple she had been teasing, her smooth skin white on the furry brown body of him.
She sank her teeth deep into his breast. His eyes opened, then they closed again, and she drank.
She straddled him, and she fed. As she did so a thin blackish liquid began to dribble from between her legs...
"Do you know what is keeping the travellers from our town? What is happening to the forest people?" asked the Head of the Fair.
I covered the mirror in doe-skin, and told him that I would personally take it upon myself to make the forest safe once more.
I had to, although she terrified me. I was the queen.
A foolish woman would have gone then into the forest and tried to capture the creature; but I had been foolish once and had no wish to be so a second time.
I spent time with old books, for I could read a little. I spent time with the gypsy women (who pa.s.sed through our country across the mountains to the south, rather than cross the forest to the north and the west).
I prepared myself, and obtained those things I would need, and when the first snows began to fall, then I was ready.
Naked, I was, and alone in the highest tower of the palace, a place open to the sky. The winds chilled my body; goose-pimples crept across my arms and thighs and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I carried a silver basin, and a basket in which I had placed a silver knife, a silver pin, some tongs, a grey robe and three green apples.
I put them down and stood there, unclothed, on the tower, humble before the night sky and the wind. Had any man seen me standing there, I would have had his eyes; but there was no-one to spy. Clouds scudded across the sky, hiding and uncovering the waning moon.
I took the silver knife, and slashed my left arm-once, twice, three times. The blood dripped into the basin, scarlet seeming black in the moonlight.
I added the powder from the vial that hung around my neck. It was a brown dust, made of dried herbs and the skin of a particular toad, and from certain other things. It thickened the blood, while preventing it from clotting.
I took the three apples, one by one, and p.r.i.c.ked their skins gently with my silver pin. Then I placed the apples in the silver bowl, and let them sit there while the first tiny flakes of snow of the year fell slowly onto my skin, and onto the apples, and onto the blood.
When dawn began to brighten the sky I covered myself with the grey cloak, and took the red apples from the silver bowl, one by one, lifting each into my basket with silver tongs, taking care not to touch it. There was nothing left of my blood or of the brown powder in the silver bowl, save nothing save a black residue, like a verdigris, on the inside.
I buried the bowl in the earth. Then I cast a glamour on the apples (as once, years before, by a bridge, I had cast a glamour on myself), that they were, beyond any doubt, the most wonderful apples in the world; and the crimson blush of their skins was the warm colour of fresh blood.
I pulled the hood of my cloak low over my face, and I took ribbons and pretty hair ornaments with me, placed them above the apples in the reed basket, and I walked alone into the forest, until I came to her dwelling: a high, sandstone cliff, laced with deep caves going back a way into the rock wall.
There were trees and boulders around the cliff-face, and I walked quietly and gently from tree to tree, without disturbing a twig or a fallen leaf. Eventually I found my place to hide, and I waited, and I watched.
After some hours a clutch of dwarfs crawled out of the cave-front-ugly, misshapen, hairy little men, the old inhabitants of this country. You saw them seldom now.
They vanished into the wood, and none of them spied me, though one of them stopped to p.i.s.s against the rock I hid behind.
I waited. No more came out.
I went to the cave entrance and hallooed into it, in a cracked old voice.