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  CONTENTS

  Reclaiming the Shadows: An Introduction

  Christopher Golden

  Epigraph

  Up in Old Vermont

  Scott Smith

  Something Lost, Something Gained

  Seanan McGuire

  On the Dark Side of Sunlight Basin

  Michael Koryta

  The Neighbors

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Paper Cuts

  Gary A. Braunbeck

  Miss Fondevant

  Charlaine Harris

  In a Cavern, in a Canyon

  Laird Barron

  Whiskey and Light

  Dana Cameron

  We Are All Monsters Here

  Kelley Armstrong

  May the End Be Good

  Tim Lebbon

  Mrs. Popkin

  Dan Chaon and Lynda Barry

  Direct Report

  Leigh Perry

  Shadow and Thirst

  John Langan

  Mother

  Joe McKinney

  Blood

  Robert Shearman

  The Yellow Death

  Lucy A. Snyder

  The Last Supper

  Brian Keene

  Separator

  Rio Youers

  What Kept You So Long?

  John Ajvide Lindqvist

  Blue Hell

  David Wellington

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  About the Editor

  RECLAIMING THE SHADOWS

  AN INTRODUCTION

  Once upon a time, vampires were figures of terror . . .

  If you’re reading these words, chances are you don’t require a lesson on the history of the vampire in legend, fiction, and pop culture. I don’t have to discuss my love of Dracula in its many iterations, of ’Salem’s Lot and I Am Legend, of divergent tales like Tim Lucas’s Throat Sprockets and Tim Powers’s The Stress of Her Regard. Instead, let me begin by saying that Seize the Night is not an indictment of variations on the vampire story. Urban fantasy and paranormal romance and supernatural thrillers have not watered down the legend of the vampire so much as expanded it. I’ve written a fair number of variations on the theme myself, but my favorite vampire stories are the ones full of darkness and evil, and those seem to have been few and far between in recent years. While I’m happy that all of those variations exist, we run the risk of forgetting just how terrifying vampires can be.

  I’m not just talking about Dracula’s heirs. Vampire legends can be found throughout history in nearly every corner of the world. Hebrew myth presented Lilith and her offspring drinking the blood of babies. Lamashtu had the head of a lion and the body of a donkey. The ancient Greek goddess Empusa had feet made of bronze. This is to say nothing of the lamia or strigoi, or the fantastic and terrifying vampiric creatures of African and Asian legend, dangling from trees or turning into fireflies. There have been infinite variations in folklore and fiction—and even more await us in the shadows of human imagination.

  Yes, once upon a time, vampires were figures of terror . . .

  And they can be again.

  Say the word vampire to a reader, or someone who loves movies or television, and each person is likely to have a different image in her or his mind. Most of us will have a variety of such images, indelible marks made by the creations of Bram Stoker, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris, and more. The beauty of the vampire story as a vehicle for fiction is that although beauty and sexuality and mortality/immortality frequently come into play, these tales can be used to explore infinite themes.

  In Seize the Night, however . . . what matters is the terror.

  When I began to make overtures to the exceptional writers whose works fill the following pages, I invited them to strike back against the notion that the vampire has lost its ability to inspire fear. I can’t begin to tell you how thrilled I am with the responses I received and the twisted tales that resulted. Up ahead, you’ll find new takes on ancient folklore and variations on tradition, stories full of sorrow and desperation and childhood fear, and true invention.

  Some say that vampire fiction has run its course, that nothing new can be done with these monsters.

  On behalf of the twenty-one writers in this volume . . .

  Challenge accepted.

  —Christopher Golden

  Bradford, Massachusetts

  September 2014

  None of the old fears had been staked—only tucked away in their tiny, child-sized coffins with a wild rose on top.

  —’SALEM’S LOT, STEPHEN KING

  UP IN OLD VERMONT

  SCOTT SMITH

  The first time he asked, Ally had been there only a few months, and the idea seemed sweet but absurd—so much the latter, in fact, that she wondered if the old man might not be just as befuddled as his wife; it was easy for Ally to say no. She was happy for a change, still newly arrived in Huntington (new town, new job, new boyfriend), and feeling cocky with all the high hopes attendant to such beginnings. It was early autumn in the Berkshires—the first slaps of color appearing in the trees alongside the road, the morning light so clear it hit her eyes like cold water from a pump. Ally had dyed her long hair blond the previous summer; she’d taken up running and had grown ropy with the exercise, the veins standing out on her arms, dark blue beneath the skin. She felt good about herself after a long period where quite the opposite had been true; she was even beginning to think that maybe, if she could just keep her head straight here, her years of wandering—all those false starts and wrong turns—might at last be behind her. She wanted to believe this: that she’d finally found herself a home.

  Even after she learned their names, Ally thought of the couple as “the Hobbits.” They were short and stout and friendly, essential qualities that their advanced age seemed only to have heightened. The woman’s name was Eleanor. She had Alzheimer’s, and her condition had deteriorated to the point where she could no longer remember her husband’s name. Eleanor called him Edward, or Ed, or even Big Ed—someone from her distant past, Stan explained to Ally, though he didn’t know who. It didn’t seem to bother him. “If she liked the man, that’s good enough for me,” he said, and he happily responded to the name. They both had thick white hair and oddly large hands, and their skin was noticeably ruddy, as if they spent a great deal of their time outdoors. When they dressed in matching sweaters—which they often did—they could look so much alike that Ally would find herself thinking of them as brother and sister rather than husband and wife.

  The second time Stan asked, it was deep winter. If Ally had said no the first time out of an excess of optimism, she did so on this subsequent occasion from an utter deficit. She was fairly certain that her boyfriend was sleeping with her roommate, though she hadn’t caught them yet—this wouldn’t happen for another month or so. She was cold all the time; business was slack at the diner; she had a yeast infection that kept reasserting itself each time she imagined it finally cured. She felt bored and poor and unhappy enough that she would’ve liked to crawl out of her own skin, if such a thing were possible. She couldn’t see how an
yone would want anything to do with her—even this sad, lonely couple. So when Stan repeated his invitation, she just smiled and said no again. It was more difficult to decline this time around, however: after the Hobbits departed, Ally went into the diner’s restroom and wept, sobbing as vigorously as she had since childhood, running both faucets and the electric hand dryer in an attempt to mask the sound of her distress. It was the sight of Stan helping Eleanor to their car that had prompted this outburst, his hand under her elbow as he guided her across the icy lot—it was the years of love implicit in the gesture, along with Ally’s sudden, self-pitying certainty that she herself would never feel a touch so tender.

  The Hobbits ate a late lunch in the diner toward the end of every month, stopping on their way down from Vermont before they turned east for Boston, where Eleanor had appointments with various specialists—“Hopes raised and hopes dashed,” was how Stan described the expeditions. He’d order a grilled cheese sandwich for Eleanor—American cheese, white bread, the purest sort of comfort food—and New England clam chowder for himself. He’d drink a cup of coffee; Eleanor would quickly drain a vanilla shake through its long straw, rocking back and forth with childlike pleasure. If it was quiet, as it often was in those late afternoon hours, Ally would pull up a chair beside their booth and chat with them while they ate. Eleanor called Ally Reba, which Stan assured her was the highest sort of compliment: Reba had been Eleanor’s college roommate. A beautiful girl, Stan said, smart and funny and more than a little impish, dead now for forty years, one of the first friends they’d lost, so sad, breast cancer, with three young children left behind, but what a pleasure now to find her resurrected so unexpectedly in Ally. Eleanor continued to suck contentedly at her milkshake, swaying to her internal music, while Stan spoke in this manner. She rarely ate more than a bite or two of her sandwich, and sometimes, after they departed, Ally would stand in the kitchen and quickly devour the rest. All that winter, with each successive day seeming darker and colder than the last, she felt an incessant hunger. By March, she’d gained twenty pounds. Her waitressing uniform had grown snug around her midsection and rear, making her feel like an overstuffed sausage.

  It was late April when Stan asked the third time, and as soon as Ally heard the words, she realized she’d been waiting for them, hoping he might try again. By this point, Ally’s boyfriend had moved to Springfield with her roommate. Ally was behind on her rent and lonely enough that she’d begun to drift into the diner on her evenings off—a new low. She knew she couldn’t stay in Huntington much longer, but she had no idea where to go instead. She’d just turned thirty-three, and she sensed this was far too old to be living in such a rootless, aimless manner. She wasn’t so desperate that she imagined the Hobbits might save her, but why shouldn’t they be able to offer a brief reprieve, a little space in which she might lick her wounds?

  She and Stan quickly agreed upon an arrangement: room and board, plus what Stan called “a small weekly stipend,” which was nonetheless nearly equal to what Ally had been taking home from the diner. And in exchange? Some cooking and cleaning, a little light weeding in the garden, the occasional trip into town to pick up groceries or Eleanor’s medications, but mostly just the pleasure of Ally’s company—“Eleanor likes you,” Stan said. “You calm her. Merely having you in the house will make her days so much easier.”

  The Hobbits picked her up outside the diner three days later, on their way back from Boston. Ally had two suitcases and a large cardboard box, which they loaded into the Volvo’s deep trunk.

  Then they started north.

  It was the sort of early April afternoon that can throw a line into summer, with pockets of dirty snow still melting in the hollows but the day suddenly hot and thick, the world seeming to hold its breath as dark gray clouds mass in the west, an errant July thunderstorm, arriving three months too early. The air inside the Volvo was stuffy; it smelled of cherry cough drops. Before they’d even made it out of town, Ally began to feel carsick. Her stomach gave a queasy swing with every turn. She started to count upward by sevens, a calming exercise a stranger had taught her once, during a cross-country bus trip, when Ally was heading back east from Reno. She’d been working as a barmaid in a second-tier casino: another lost job, another failed relationship, another aborted attempt to make a life. This had been almost a decade ago, and Ally remembered how ancient the stranger on the bus had seemed, so ill used and depleted, though the woman couldn’t have been much older than Ally was now. Seven, fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight . . . Ally was at eighty-four when Stan glanced back from the front seat, asking if she minded music. Ally shook her head, shut her eyes, feeling abruptly tired, almost drugged. A moment later, a Beatles song began to play: “Hey Jude.” She was asleep before the first chorus, dropping into a tropical dream, to match the oddly tropical weather. Ally was on a sailboat in the Caribbean, where she’d never been, and Mrs. Henderson, her high school gym teacher, was trying to teach her how to tie nautical knots, with mounting impatience—mounting urgency, too—because a storm was rising, seemingly out of nowhere; one moment the sky was clear, the sea calm and sun-splashed, and the next, rain was sweeping across the deck, the boat pitching, the wind seeming to rage through the rigging, sounding tormented, howling, shrieking, a pure cry of animal pain, so loud that Mrs. Henderson had to shout to be heard, and Ally couldn’t follow her instructions, which meant they were doomed—Ally somehow understood this, that if she couldn’t learn the necessary knots, the boat would surely founder. She awakened as the first wave broke over the deck, opening her eyes to a changed world, her dream panic still gripping her. Rain was running down the car’s windows, blurring the view beyond the glass, the trees seeming too close to the road (murky, animate, swaying in the storm’s onslaught), the car swaying, too, rocking and thumping over the deep ruts of a narrow lane—no, not a lane, a driveway—and now the trees were parting before them and the Volvo was splashing through one final pothole, deeper and wider than the others, moatlike, the car almost bottoming out before emerging into a clearing, a large irregularly shaped circle of muddy grass, on the far side of which stood a tall, narrow house. The house looked gray in the rain and fading light, though somehow Ally could tell it was really white. The movement of the surrounding trees lent the house a sense of motion, too; the structure seemed to rock in counterpoint to the plunging branches. Beyond the house, Ally could just make out a small barn. Beyond the barn, a steep—almost sheer—pine-covered hill rose abruptly skyward. Stan put the car in park and turned off the engine, and for a long moment the three of them just sat there, waiting for the rain to slacken enough so that they might dash across the lawn and enter the house. Ally could hear “Hey Jude” still playing, though there was something odd about it now—the speed was off, the pitch, too. It took her a handful of seconds to realize that it wasn’t the CD; it was Eleanor softly singing in the front seat, her voice as high as a child’s and so out of tune that it sounded intentional, as if the old woman might have been mocking the Beatles’ lyrics.

  Remember to let her under your skin . . .

  This was Ally’s nadir, what would be the lowest dip of her spirits for a long time to come. She realized she didn’t know these people, not really—not at all—and that no one she actually did know had any idea where she was; even she didn’t know where she was, just Vermont, northern Vermont, somewhere east of Burlington, in the rain, at the base of a hill that looked too steep to climb . . . yes, she’d made a terrible mistake. She thought briefly of fleeing, pushing open the Volvo’s door and darting off into the storm, beneath the swaying trees, through the mud and wind. She could make her way back down the drive to whatever road might lay at its end; she could put her hope in the prospect of a passing car, a stranger’s kindness. She’d hitch a ride to the nearest town, where she’d make a collect call to . . . whom, exactly? Ally was picturing her ex-roommate and her ex-boyfriend, the two lovers just sitting down to an early dinner in Springfield, the phone starting to ring, one of them risi
ng, reaching to pick up the receiver—Ally felt her face flush at the thought, the shame she’d feel as she announced herself, as she extended her hand for their assistance, their pity—and at that precise moment the rain stopped. It didn’t slacken or abate; it just ceased—the wind did, too. The world seemed so silent in the storm’s wake that Ally experienced the sudden quiet as its own sort of noise, loud and unsettling. Stan shifted in his seat, turned to look at Eleanor. “Well, love,” he said. “Shall we?”

  “Is Reba staying for supper?”

  Stan glanced at Ally in the rearview mirror, gave her a smile of playful complicity; it was growing familiar now, this smile—a cherub peeking out from behind a rose-tinted cloud. “What do you think, Reba? Would you like to stay for supper?”

  And as easily as that, everything was okay again. The idea of fleeing through the trees seemed suddenly absurd; it was already being forgotten. Ally smiled back at the old man, smiled and nodded: “Yes, Stan,” she said. “That would be lovely.”

  When Eleanor’s condition first began to reveal itself, Stan had moved their bedroom to the house’s first floor. They rarely ventured upstairs anymore. This meant that Ally would have free run of the entire second story. The evening of her arrival, after a dinner of hot dogs and potato salad, Ally climbed a steep flight of stairs to discover three bedrooms and a large bathroom awaiting her. She hesitated at the first doorway she came to . . . This one? Beyond the threshold was a canopied bed, a mahogany bureau and matching night table, a red-and-white rag rug to complement the red-and-white-striped curtains. Ally heard a creaking sound behind her, and when she turned, she saw her footprints in the dust on the floor—not just her footprints, but paw prints, too, a complicated skein of them trailing up and down the hallway. And then, in the shadows at the far end of the corridor, peering toward her—so big that Ally initially mistook it for a bear—she glimpsed an immense black dog. Ally felt a surge of heat pass through her body: an adrenaline dump. For an instant, she was so frightened that it was difficult to breathe. She could hear the dog audibly sniffing, taking in her scent. Without making a conscious decision to do so, Ally began to retreat, first one slow step, then another. When she reached the head of the stairs, she turned and scampered quickly back down to the first floor.