Dark Delicacies II: Fear; More Original Tales of Terror and the Macabre by the World's Greatest Horror Writers Read online

  This was the first time in a hundred and forty years that I’d traveled very far from London. The first time since I had become vampire in 1772 that I had crossed the ocean.

  When the UnDead travel, they are horribly vulnerable. Money has always provided some protection in the form of bribes, patent locks, servants, and social pressure (why do you think it’s always Evil Lord So-and-So in the penny dreadfuls? It’s astonishing how much interest bonds accumulate if allowed to mature for two centuries). But, as I was shortly to learn, accidents do happen. And the longer the journey, the more the chances accumulate that something will go fearfully wrong.

  “There’s a new world across the ocean, Simon,” I said, making my voice grave. “Face it, Europe cannot go on as it is. War is going to break out. The Kaiser is practically jostling statesmen in doorways in the hopes of being challenged. You’ve seen the new weapons they have. Airships, incendiary bombs, cannons that can demolish a city from miles away. It’s a wise man who knows when to make his break for safety.”

  Ninety-five hours later I was kicking myself for those words, but who knew?

  Simon smiled, something he rarely does. “Perhaps you are correct, my friend. Be that so, I trust you will act in the nature of a scout, and send me word of the promised land. Now go, if not with God, at least with the blessing of an indifferent Fate, my Evil Lord…” He checked my papers for the name. “… Lord Sandridge.” He put on his black-tinted spectacles and accompanied me to the barrier, where he added the subtle influence of his mind to mine in the task of getting my luggage through unchecked. I ascended the gangway, and from the rail saw him wave, a slim small form in dark gray, perhaps my only friend among the UnDead.

  We are not, you understand, particularly pleasant company, even for one another.

  Then I went down to the first-class luggage hold to make sure my coffin-trunk was both accessible and inconspicuous. Simon, I presume, returned home and slaughtered some unsuspecting immigrant en route for breakfast.

  We put in at Queenstown on the Irish coast in the morning, before our final embarkation over the deep. It’s always a damnable struggle to remain awake in one’s coffin for even a short time after the sun is in the sky, but I was determined to make the effort, and it’s a good thing I did. Shortly after I’d locked myself in for the day—we were still several hours from Queenstown at that point—I heard stealthy steps on the deck, and smelled the stink of a man’s nervous sweat.

  Of course someone had noticed the obsessive care I’d taken in bestowing my trunk, and had drawn the usual stupid conclusion that the living are prone to. Greedy sods. Skeleton keys rattled close to my head. I forced down both grogginess and the quick flash of panic in my breast—the hold was absolutely sheltered from any chance of penetration by sunlight—and fought to accumulate enough energy to act.

  Get away from here, you stupid bastard! The living have no idea how commanding are the rhythms of vampire flesh; I felt as I had when in mortal life I’d gotten myself sodden-drunk on opium at the Hellfire Club. This ship stinks with American millionaires and you’re trying to rob the trunk of a mere Evil Lord?

  The outer lid opened, then the inner. I gazed up into a round unshaven face and brown eyes stretched huge with shock and fright.

  I heaved myself up with what I hoped was a terrifying roar, wrenched the skeleton keys out of the young man’s hand, and dropped back into the coffin, hauling the lid down after me and slamming shut its inner bolt. I heard outside a stifled gasping whimper, then heavy shoes hammering away across the deck and up the metal stairs.

  I understand he abandoned ship at Queenstown and thus missed all subsequent events. A pity. Drowning was too good for the little swine.

  It wasn’t fear of robbery, however, that made me struggle to remain awake through the boarding-process at Queenstown, listening with a vampire’s preternatural senses to every sound, every voice, every footfall in the ship around me. I had to know who was getting on the ship.

  Because of course I had not been completely truthful with Simon as to my reasons for leaving England, or for embarking at Cherbourg for that matter. One never likes to admit when one has made a very foolish mistake.

  Which brings me to the subject of Miss Alexandra Paxton.

  I don’t know under what name she boarded the Titanic. She knew, you see, that I’d be keeping an eye on the passenger lists and that I would have changed my own travel plans had I suspected she was on board.

  It is another truism of the more puerile examples of horror fiction that the victims of Evil Lord So-and-So or the wicked Countess Blankovsky are generally of the upper, or at worst the professional, classes. This is sheer foolishness, for these people keep track of one another, particularly in a small country like England. (Another motive for choosing America.)

  Vampires for the most part live on the poor. We kill people whom no one will miss. Regrettably, these people tend to be dirty, smelly, undernourished, frequently gin-soaked, and conversationally uninteresting. And we do enjoy the chase, the cat-and-mouse game: the long slow luring, for days and weeks at a time.

  Which is how I’d happened to meet, and court, and flirt with, and take to the opera, and eventually kill Miss Cynthia Engle, only a few days before she was to have wed Lionel Paxton.

  Lionel and his sister had sounded like a remarkably boring pair when Miss Engle had told me about them at our clandestine meetings, edged with danger and champagne. I hadn’t allowed for my lovely victim’s craving for the melodramatic, which discounted her suitor’s native shrewdness. In any case, after a train of events too complicated and messy to go into, I had been obliged to kill Lionel as well.

  Alexandra had been dogging me ever since.

  She came aboard at Queenstown, at the last possible moment. This was an unnecessary inconvenience on her part, since, as I’ve said, the sun was high in the sky, and I couldn’t have come up out of the hold even if I’d been awake. But I was aware of her, as I lay in the strange, clear awareness of the vampire sleep: smelled the distinctive vanilla and sandalwood of her dusting-powder, heard the sharp click of her stride on the decks.

  And my heart sank.

  There was no way I could kill her on board the Titanic without causing a tremendous fuss and possibly being locked in a cabin which might contain a window, which really would give the good Captain Smith something to write about in his log.

  But her goal, on the other hand, was not survival. I knew from a previous encounter that she wore about her neck and wrists silver chains that would effectively sear my flesh should I come in contact with them, and carried a revolver loaded with silver bullets, which she would not have the slightest hesitation about firing.

  I also knew she was an extremely accurate shot.

  I can’t tell you exactly how the UnDead know when it’s safe to emerge from their hiding places. There are those of us who can step forth in lingering Nordic twilights with no more than frantic itching of the skin and a sense of intolerable panic, others whose flesh will autocombust while the last morning stars are still visible in the sky. Our instinct in this matter is very strong, however—and those of us who lack it generally don’t remain vampires very long.

  I quit my coffin-trunk the minute I felt I could do so safely, around seven-thirty Thursday night, and ascended the several flights of steps past the squash court and through the seamen’s and third-class quarters, down the long crew corridor known as “Scotland Road,” and through a maze of passages and emergency ladders eventually reached my own ? Deck stateroom in first class. The advertising for the Titanic had strongly implied that no first-class passenger need be even aware that such things as lesser mortals existed on the ship—another reason I’d chosen the vessel for my escape. Sharp-eyed stewards abounded to make sure those who paid for elevation above the Great Unwashed achieved it, but they, like most of the living (thank God) were prey to appearances. I was deep in conversation with the young and extremely pretty wife of an elderly American millionaire when the door of th
e stair from below opened and Miss Paxton slipped through.

  She was clothed in a gown that must have cost her at least half of what her unfortunate brother had to leave: blue velvet with a bodice of cream-colored lace. A little aigret of blue gems and cream-colored feathers adorned the springy thickness of her mouse-brown hair. She was a tall girl, of the sort referred to by Americans as a “fine, strapping lass;” her jaw was long, her nose narrow, and her blue-gray eyes cool and daunting. She carried a blue velvet handbag and a trailing mass of lace shawl draped in such a fashion as to conceal her right hand and whatever might have been in it, and I fled like a rabbit before she even got a glimpse of me.

  “That young person,” I said to the head steward as I pressed a hundred dollars American into his hand, “is an impostor, a confidence trickster who has been harassing me for a number of months. I do not know under what pretext she will attempt to get near me nor do I wish to know. Only keep her away from me, or from any room that I am in, for the duration of this voyage. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir. Certainly, Lord Sandridge.”

  As I slipped through into the dining saloon an American matron’s Pekingese lunged at me in a fury of yapping. They really should keep those nasty little vermin locked up.

  Of course that wasn’t the end of Miss Paxton. Having guessed I’d be traveling first class, she had invested God knows how much in a first-class wardrobe, so I was never sure I could avoid her merely by sticking to the A Deck promenades. Nor could I afford to keep to my stateroom during the night hours when I was up and about. She would, I guessed, be looking for me. By whispers overheard from the cabin stewards and maids—and believe me, a vampire can hear whispers through both locked doors and the conversation of American socialites—I guessed she had garnered allies among them by some tale of disinheritance, persecution, and attempted rape.

  She stalked me most of that first night, for she had a constitution of iron; I was eventually reduced to donning an inconspicuous pair of trousers and a tweed jacket and hiding out on the third-class deck among the Irish.

  At sunrise I retired to my coffin-trunk again, but I did not sleep with anything resembling peace.

  All through that day and the next I heard her footfalls, smelled her blood and dusting-powder, in the dark of my dreams as she moved through the holds.

  I dreamed about her.

  And I dreamed about the sea.

  As Mr. Stoker so obligingly pointed out in his book Dracula, we—the UnDead—cannot cross running water, except at the hour of astronomical midnight, and at the moment when the tide turns. He is quite right. It was more than dread that seized me, when I and my vampire master stood on the threshold of London Bridge and he ordered me across. It was a sickness, a weakness that paralyzed me, as if death itself were rising from the moving river below us like poisoned mist. My master laughed at me, the bastard, and we took a hackney cab across the river to hunt. In later years we’d take the Underground. He’d keep me talking, to school me to focus my mind against the panicky disorientation that flowing water produces, but like all vampires I hate the temporary loss of my powers over the minds of the living.

  That was the thing that most worried me during that April voyage. That while I could cajole, or manipulate, or charm, or bribe those luscious-smelling, warm-blooded, rosily-glowing morsels with whom I was surrounded every night, I couldn’t alter their perceptions of me, or of what was going on around them.

  I couldn’t make them fall in love with me, so they’d be eager to do my bidding.

  I couldn’t lure them in a trance into nooks and corners of the hold, nor could I stand outside their cabin doors and tamper with their dreams.

  Except for the fact that I retained some, though not all, of the superhuman strength of a vampire, I was to all intents and purposes human again, and indeed a trifle less so. The touch of silver would sear and blister my flesh; the touch of sunlight set me ablaze like a screaming torch.

  And if this wretched young woman—who was as tall as I, and strong for a mortal—managed somehow to tip me overside, once in the water I would be paralyzed. I would sink like a stone, Simon had warned me, for the vampire state changes the UnDead flesh and we become physically perfect: all muscle, no fat.

  Fat is what floats a body. (Simon knows things like that. He’s made a scientific study of our state, and is fond of parading his knowledge, solicited or not.) Even in the sunless black of the deep ocean, I would not die, though crushed by the pressure of the water and frozen by its cold. Nor would I be able to move, save for the few minutes after midnight, or when the moon passed directly overhead and turned the tidal flow. Then the magnetism of the moving water would conquer again, and the sluggish currents push me where they would.

  I would be conscious, Simon had assured me. (How the hell would he know?) I could think of no state closer to those described by Dante in his book of Hell.

  And if Miss Paxton shot me with a silver bullet, even if it did not strike my heart, the logical place for her to dump my then-unresisting body would be into the drink.

  All these things wove in and out of my dreams, with the clack of her shoe-heels on the storage-hold deck.

  It was altogether not a pleasant voyage, even before 11:39 P.M. on the night of April 14.

  I’d put in a brief appearance in the dining-room that Sunday night, enough so that no oversolicitous fellow-passenger or cabin steward would come inquiring for my health during the daytime. My story was that I was too seasick to eat. Most older vampires come to despise the stench of human food. I enjoyed it, and enjoyed too the spectacle of my tablemates shoveling away quantities of poached salmon with mousseline sauce, roast duckling, squabs and cress, asparagus vinaigrette, foie gras, and éclairs—to say nothing of gallons of cognac and wines. The flavors linger for many hours in the blood, another reason, incidentally, that we prefer to sup when we can on the rich rather than the poor.

  My custom on the Titanic was to spend most of my night moving from place to place in the first-class accommodation. I hadn’t seen Miss Paxton anywhere on the A or ? Decks since Thursday night, but twice, once in the Palm Court outside the First-Class Smoking Room and once in the corridor near my suite, I’d caught the lingering whiff of her dusting-powder. She was still finding her way up onto the First-Class Decks.

  She could be waiting for me, gun in hand, around any corner.

  For that reason I was on the bow deck of the ship—as far forward on ? Deck as I could get and a goodly distance from what might have been supposed to be a gentlemanly lurking-place in the First-Class Smoking Room—when I saw a dark mass of almost-clear ice lying straight in the path of the ship.

  Being on open water hadn’t affected my ability to see in the dark, any more than it affected my ability to detect Miss Paxton’s cologne. The iceberg, though several miles away, would be almost invisible to human eyes, for there was no moon that night and the ocean lay flat calm, eliminating even the telltale froth of waves breaking around the dark ice’s base. The previous night, in my ramblings around the ship, I’d heard the men discussing a warning of heavy pack ice received from an American steamer coming east, and around dinnertime the temperature of the air had dropped.

  I worried no more than did anybody else on board about the Titanic actually sinking, of course. Her hull was divided into watertight compartments that could be closed at the touch of a button. But I did worry about there being a period of confusion in which one passenger—that is to say myself—might easily be incapacitated (say, with a silver bullet in the back) and dropped overboard without anyone’s seeing it happen. An investigation might later focus on Miss Paxton’s purported vengefulness, but that wouldn’t do me any good.

  I descended to the C Deck well and down the stairs to the cargo holds, where the “Scotland Road” corridor would lead me, eventually, to the Grand Staircase, and so up again eventually to the Boat Deck, at the rear of which lay the bridge.

  And there she was, stepping out of the door of a servants’ stair,
blocking my path.

  She said softly, “I have you, villain.”

  I said, just as softly, “Bugger.”

  She brought up her hand and I saw the gun in it. Down here surrounded by the crew quarters the sound of a shot would have brought everyone running, but at thirty feet it wasn’t likely she’d miss. If she didn’t get me through the heart the silver would cause such extraordinary damage as to both incapacitate me wherever it hit, and to cause great curiosity in the ship’s doctor. On land I could have rushed her before she fired.

  But I didn’t trust my reflexes. I wheeled and plunged for the transverse passageway that would take me—I hoped—down the smaller crew corridor, and so to another stairway up. Her heels clattered in pursuit as I darted around the corner, fled down the brightly-lighted white tunnel. I debated for a moment simply stepping into the shadow beside the nearest stairway and taking her as she came past—this late at night it would be easy to drop her, unconscious (or dead—I hadn’t fed in four days and I was ravenous), over the side.

  But she had the gun. And I knew from the past that she was a lusty screamer. I darted to the nearest downward stairway and found myself lost in the mazes around the squash court and the quarters of lesser crew on F Deck. I could hear her behind me still, though farther off, it seemed. It was astonishing how those metal corridors reechoed and tangled sound, and down here the thumping of the engines confused even the uncanny hearing of the UnDead. The main stairway led up through the third-class dining hall, but that, I knew, would be the logical place for her to cut me off. There was another, smaller stair by the Turkish Bath, and that’s where I was, halfway up, when a shuddering impact made the whole ship tremble and knocked me, reeling, off my feet and nearly to the bottom of the steps again.