TOMORROW SUCKS.
T. K. F. Weisskopf & Greg c.o.x.
A Scientific History of Vampirism.
GREG c.o.x.
Dracula nearly killed the vampire story.
Creatively, that is. Coming at the end of a wave of Victorian vampire tales that began in 1819 with John Polidori"s "The Vampyre," Bram Stoker"s cla.s.sic horror novel, first published in 1897, quickly established itself as the definitive vampire story, encompa.s.sing and supplanting all that had been written before-and most of the vampire fiction to come. Dracula movies and plays popularized Stoker"s vampireeven more, and the Count cast an oppressive black shadow over more than fifty years of copycats and parodies. No vampire novels worth remembering were published for at least five decades after Dracula, and only a handful of short stories-such as Ray Bradbury"s lyrical "Homecoming" (1946)-turned over fresh soil in an increasingly overcrowded literary graveyard.
Life-and unlife-was simpler then. Vampires were heartless creatures of h.e.l.l, or, at best, tormented lost souls condemned forever by some unholy curse. Their motives and abilities were clearly defined, as were their weaknesses: sunlight, holy water, wooden stakes, and so on. They were the (mostly illegitimate) children of Dracula, and numbingly predictable for that reason.
Science proved the vampire"s salvation. A few early stories pointed the way, like Mary Braddon"s "Good Lady Ducayne" (1896), an otherwise forgettable story about a vicious old woman who preserves her life via frequent blood transfusions. C. L.
Moore"s "Shambleau" (1933) was possibly the first vampire of extraterrestrial origin, unless one counts the blood-sucking Martians in H. G. Wells" The War of the Worlds (1898)-and that"s a bit of a stretch. Wells also supplied "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid" (1894), a ground-breaking tale of botanical vampirism whose blood-sucking plant antic.i.p.ated The Little Shop of Horrors and other bizarre horrors.
It wasn"t until the 1950s, though, that scientific vampires really came into their own. In the wake of Hiroshima and Sputnik, science fiction spread like fall-out over the haunted castles and crypts of the Gothic tradition. On the silver screen, radioactive mutants and Things from Outer s.p.a.ce suddenly outnumbered ghosts, werewolves, and undead. But what might have seemed like a bad time for bloodsuckers proved instead a rebirth.
Forget curses, spells, and pacts with the Devil. Suddenly vampirism could be the result of bacteria, genetics, mental illness, parallel evolution, atomic mutation, robotics, or even an invasion from another planet. Anything was possible, and all the old rules were suddenly subject to change. Even traditional, supernatural vampires suddenly found themselves confronted with such unusual situations as time travel, s.p.a.ce travel, and planets with two or more suns. Somehow, Dorothy, they weren"t in Transylvania anymore...
After years of stodgy cliches, vampire fiction received a rejuvenating jolt of fresh blood. The new wave of scientific nosferatu included such instant cla.s.sics as Richard Matheson"s I am Legend (1954), Theodore Sturgeon"s Some of Your Blood (1961), and, in a lighter vein, "Blood" (1955) by Fredric Brown, about an old-fashioned vamp"s ill-fated attempt to drain blood from a sentient turnip.
Perhaps most significantly, vampires didn"t have to be evil anymore. No longer a creature of h.e.l.l by definition, vampires could be villains, victims, or even heroes.
Science draws no moral distinctions, and what used to be an unnatural plague of darkness could now be treated as merely a handicap, an alternative lifestyle, or possibly the next stage in human evolution. Vampire stories became a lot more complicated... and interesting.Which doesn"t mean, of course, that a scientific vampire couldn"t be twice as scary as its supernatural brethren. If the old rules no longer applied, neither did the traditional defenses. And an entire species of non-human bloodsuckers, be they earthly or alien, might have less sympathy for mere h.o.m.o sapiens than even the resurrected corpse of Vlad the Impaler.
In time, after the scientific vampire boom of the "50s, the children of Dracula eventually staged a comeback of sorts. Hammer Films beget a new generation of Gothic thrillers, while writers like Anne Rice and Stephen King found new ways to open the old graves. But vampirism would never be the same; the virus had escaped from the test tube, and a new, vital and sometimes virulent strain has entered the collective bloodstream of the genre, sp.a.w.ning memorable works like Suzy McKee Charnas"s The Vampire Tapestry (1980), Whitley Strieber"s The Hunger (1981), George R. R. Martin"s Fevre Dream (1982), and continuing to mutate with each new novel, movie, short story, and comic book.
So throw away that crucifix. Pour your holy water down the drain. There"s a new breed of vampire stalking your future, starting only a few pages away, and neither science nor sorcery can protect you from their unquenchable thirst.
Ray Bradbury is, of course, one of the best known sf authors in the world.
"Pillar of Fire," originally published in 1948, is a chilling elegy for yesterday"s monsters-and a case study in what can happen when science confronts the undead. Bradbury has written at least two other stories, "Usher II" and "The Exiles," set in the same (or similar) future.
Pillar of Fire.
RAY BRADBURY.
He came out of the earth, hating. Hate was his father; hate was his mother.
It was good to walk again. It was good to leap up out of the earth, off of your back, and stretch your cramped arms violently and try to take a deep breath!
He tried. He cried out.
He couldn"t breathe. He flung his arms over his face and tried to breathe. It was impossible. He walked on the earth, he came out of the earth. But he was dead. He couldn"t breathe. He could take air into his mouth and force it half down his throat, with withered moves of long-dormant muscles, wildly, wildly! And with this little air he could shout and cry! He wanted to have tears, but he couldn"t make them come, either. All he knew was that he was standing upright, he was dead, he shouldn"t be walking! He couldn"t breathe and yet he stood.
The smells of the world were all about him. Frustratedly, he tried to smell thesmells of autumn. Autumn was burning the land down into ruin. All across the country the ruins of summer lay; vast forests bloomed with flame, tumbled down timber on empty, unleafed timber. The smoke of the burning was rich, blue, and invisible.
He stood in the graveyard, hating. He walked through the world and yet could not taste nor smell of it. He heard, yes. The wind roared on his newly opened ears. But he was dead. Even though he walked he knew he was dead and should expect not too much of himself or this hateful living world.
He touched the tombstone over his own empty grave. He knew his own name again. It was a good job of carving.
WILLIAM LANTRY.
That"s what the gravestone said.
His fingers trembled on the cool stone surface.
BORN 1898-DIED 1933.
Born again ... ?
What year? He glared at the sky and the midnight autumnal stars moving in slow illuminations across the windy black. He read the tiltings of centuries in those stars.
Orion thus and so, Aurega here! and where Taurus? There!
His eyes narrowed. His lips spelled out the year.
"2349.".
An odd number. Like a school sum. They used to say a man couldn"t encompa.s.s any number over a hundred. After that it was all so d.a.m.ned abstract there was no use counting. This was the year 2349! A numeral, a sum. And here he was, a man who had lain in his hateful dark coffin, hating to be buried, hating the living people above who lived and lived and lived, hating them for all the centuries, until today, now, born out of hatred, he stood by his own freshly excavated grave, the smell of raw earth in the air, perhaps, but he could not smell it!
"I," he said, addressing a poplar tree that was shaken by the wind, "am an anachronism." He smiled faintly.
He looked at the graveyard. It was cold and empty. All of the stones had been ripped up and piled like so many flat bricks, one atop another, in the far corner of the wrought iron fence. This had been going on for two endless weeks. In his deep secret coffin he had heard the heartless, wild stirrings as the men jabbed the earth with cold spades and tore out the coffins and carried away the withered ancientbodies to be burned. Twisting with fear in his coffin, he had waited for them to come to him.
Today they had arrived at his coffin. But-late. They had dug down to within an inch of the lid. Five o"clock bell, time for quitting. Home to supper. The workers had gone off. Tomorrow they would finish the job, they said, shrugging into their coats.
Silence had come to the emptied tomb-yard.
Carefully, quietly, with a soft rattling of sod, the coffin lid had lifted.
William Lantry stood trembling now, in the last cemetery on Earth.
"Remember?" he asked himself, looking at the raw earth. "Remember those stories of the last man on earth? Those stories of men wandering in ruins, alone?
Well you, William Lantry, are a switch on the old story. Do you know that? You are the last dead man in the whole d.a.m.ned world!"
There were no more dead people. Nowhere in any land was there a dead person.
Impossible? Lantry did not smile at this. No, not impossible at all in this foolish, sterile, unimaginative, antiseptic age of cleansings and scientific methods! People died, oh my G.o.d, yes. But*dead people? Corpses? They didn"t exist!
What happened to dead people?
The graveyard was on a hilt. William Lantry walked through the dark burning night until he reached the edge of the graveyard and looked down upon the new town of Salem. It was all illumination, all colour. Rocket ships cut fire above it, crossing the sky to all far ports of earth.
In his grave the new violence of this future world had driven down and seeped into William Lantry. He had been bathed in it for years. He knew all about it, with a hating dead man"s knowledge of such things.
Most important of all, he knew what these fools did with dead men.
He lifted his eyes. In the centre of the town a ma.s.sive stone finger pointed at the stars. It was three hundred feet high and fifty feet across. There was a wide entrance and a drive in front of it.
In the town, theoretically, thought William Lantry, say you have a dying man. In a moment he will be dead. What happens? No sooner is his pulse cold than a certificate is flourished, made out, his relatives pack him into a car-beetle and drive him swiftly to- The Incinerator!
That functional finger, that Pillar of Fire pointing at the stars. Incinerator. A functional, terrible name. But truth is truth in this future world.
Like a stick of kindling your Mr. Dead Man is shot into the furnace.
Flume!
William Lantry looked at the top of the gigantic pistol shoving at the stars. A small pennant of smoke issued from the top.There"s where your dead people go.
"Take care of yourself, William Lantry," he murmured. "You"re the last one, the rare item, the last dead man. All the other graveyards of earth have been blasted up.
This is the last graveyard and you"re the last dead man from the centuries. These people don"t believe in having dead people about, much less walking dead people.
Everything that can"t be used goes up like a matchstick. Superst.i.tions right along with it!"
He looked at the town. All right, he thought, quietly.
I hate you. You hate me, or you would if you knew I existed. You don"t believe in such things as vampires or ghosts. Labels without referents, you cry! You snort. All right, snort! Frankly, I don"t believe in you, either! I don"t like you! You and your Incinerators.
He trembled. How very close it had been. Day after day they had hauled out the other dead ones, burned them like so much kindling. An edict had been broadcast around the world. He had heard the digging men talk as they worked!
"I guess it"s a good idea, this cleaning up the graveyards," said one of the men.
"Guess so," said another. "Grisly custom. Can you imagine? Being buried, I mean! Unhealthy! All them germs!"
"Sort of a shame. Romantic, kind of. I mean, leaving just this one graveyard untouched all these centuries. The other graveyards were cleaned out, what year was it, Jim?"
"About 2260, I think. Yeah, that was it, 2260, almost a hundred years ago. But some Salem Committee they got on their high horse and they said, "Look here, let"s have just one graveyard left, to remind us of the customs of the barbarians." And the gover"ment scratched its head, thunk it over, and said, "Okay. Salem it is. But all other graveyards go, you understand, all!" "
"And away they went," said Bill.
"Sure, they sucked "em out with fire and steam shovels and rocket-cleaners. If they knew a man was buried in a cow-pasture, they fixed him! Evacuated them, they did. Sort of cruel, I say."
"I hate to sound old-fashioned, but still there were a lot of tourists came here every year, just to see what a real graveyard was like."
"Right. We had nearly a million people in the last three years visiting. A good revenue. But-a government order is an order. The government says no more morbidity, so flush her out we do! Here we go. Hand me that spade, Bill."
William Lantry stood in the autumn wind, on the hill. It was good to walk again, to feel the wind and to hear the leaves scuttling like mice on the road ahead of him. It was good to see the bitter cold stars almost blown away by the wind.
It was even good to know fear again.For fear rose in him now, and he could not put it away. The very fact that he was walking made him an enemy. And there was not another friend, another dead man, in all of the world, to whom one could turn for help or consolation. It was the whole melodramatic living world against one William Lantry. It was the whole vampire-disbelieving, body-burning, graveyard-annihilating world against a man in a dark suit on a dark autumn hill. He put out his pale cold hands into the city illumination. You have pulled the tombstones, like teeth, from the yard, he thought.
Now I will find some way to push your d.a.m.nable Incinerators down into rubble. I will make dead people again, and I will make friends in so doing. I cannot be alone and lonely. I must start manufacturing friends very soon. Tonight.
"War is declared," he said, and laughed. It was pretty silly, one man declaring war on an entire world.
The world did not answer back. A rocket crossed the sky on a rush of flame, like an Incinerator taking wing.
Footsteps. Lantry hastened to the edge of the cemetery. The diggers, coming back to finish up their work? No. Just someone, a man, walking by.
As the man came abreast the cemetery gate, Lantry stepped swiftly out. "Good evening," said the man, smiling.
Lantry struck the man in the face. The man fell. Lantry bent quietly down and hit the man a killing blow across the neck with the side of his hand.
Dragging the body back into shadow, he stripped it, changed clothes with it. It wouldn"t do for a fellow to go wandering about this future world with ancient clothing on. He found a small pocket knife in the man"s coat; not much of a knife, but enough if you knew how to handle it properly. He knew how.
He rolled the body down into one of the already opened and exhumed graves. In a minute he had shovelled dirt down upon it, just enough to hide it. There was little chance of it being found. They wouldn"t dig the same grave twice.
He adjusted himself in his new loose-fitting metallic suit. Fine, fine.
Hating, William Lantry walked down into town, to do battle with the Earth.
II.
The Incinerator was open. It never closed. There was a wide entrance, all lighted up with hidden illumination, there was a helicopter landing table and a beetle drive.
The town itself was dying down after another day of the dynamo. The lights were going dim, and the only quiet, lighted spot in the town now was the Incinerator.