Eternal Night: A Vampire Anthology
Blood, fangs, darkness and terror…these are the calling cards of the vampire mythos. Inside this tome are stories that embrace vampire history but seek to introduce a new literary spin on this longstanding fictional monster. Follow a dark journey through cigarette-smoking creatures hunted by rogue angels, vampires that feed off of thoughts instead of blood, immortals presenting the fantastic in a local rock band, to a legendary monster on the far reaches of town. Forget what you know about vampires; this anthology will destroy historical mythos and embrace incredible new twists on this celebrated, fictional character. Welcome to a world of the undead, welcome to the world of Eternal Night.
Featuring stories from Nefarious Muse authors:
Chris Deal
Christopher Dwyer
Nik Korpon
Caleb Ross
Richard Thomas
Buy at Amazon.com
I have killed Krepler with a too, too heavy application of the hatchet edge. Raim intones greedily into my ear – juicy, juicy like a split pomegranate – hinting at Krepler’s fate, Krepler who I once loved with the power of pearls and other obscenities, Krepler who – alas! – acted in the opposite of my intentions. Skin separates in such a way as whales, as ribs. Fingernails encrusted black and hands stained yellow, the whole corpus numbing into haze. The melting silts the earth. Krepler’s face gains immensity – imagine: he once took the most hush, meek actions – becoming mistier as we wait, our hunger rising like steam. Raim licks his chapped lips, grunts. You need to forestall that habit, I whisper to Raim, placing my hands over his eyes and near his ragged and well-chewed lips, that habit of staring. That habit of speaking. What’s done is done. At this admonishment Raim backs down, frothing about alleged unfairness. Don’t deny that you see what you did, how you make it unwhole, pry it asunder? Now is no time for quibbling. I do not hesitate. The hatchet pauses over Raim, then descends. Have I acted right? Raim tries to be still, but his feet twitch. He is just pretending, no doubt. But Krepler – he will not deceive me now. His mouth hangs open – the way fish scream – a sight exceeding all others in vain omnipotence. A voice calls – Krepler’s – pick me, eat me, a poison berry looks best. I could use something warm in my belly. I bite my tongue, bite it so hard I taste blood, thinking of Krepler and of Raim, of the three of us falling open and apart, parting wider and wider.
Louise Norlie’s publications have appeared in Gloom Cupboard, decomP, otoliths and elsewhere. Her writing will also be included in the Quantum Genre on the Planet of the Arts anthology from Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink. Meanwhile, she has been putting in her time in a bureaucratic cubicle where she shuffles papers and pushes buttons deep within the belly of a large building. Visit her at louise-norlie.blogspot.com.
Somehow I knew it was going to end this way. One way or another all paths led to this very spot of my life. My mother used to say it was the journey, not the destination that mattered. Well, in my case, it was both. The destination just wasn’t what I expected.
A stomach full of alcohol, snorting cocaine and Xanax, in the swampy backwaters of Florida, I found myself all alone. Back where I started. I had blood on my hands, literally and otherwise. I’d bought a gun from my now ex-buddy, Jacky, about two months ago, before I left the club for good. I left so I could maybe go home to Illinois and reconnect with my family and friends, only to find that they really didn’t need me anymore. I had turned my back on them and they were returning the favor. Life is a bitch sometimes.
Jacky was the real problem, though. When I decided to leave my hometown of River Grove Illinois, I found myself down in New Orleans. I always thought it was the perfect place that you travel to when you want to die. You can die. You can be reborn. But mostly I went there to die. Instead I met Jacky while playing poker and burning the last of my cash on coke and hookers. Jacky was more than happy to join in on my little game of self-destruction and loathing. He was quite good at it actually; he must’ve had a lot of practice back where he was from. He claimed he was born in New Orleans but I knew better. I just never told him so. The mystery surrounding the guy intrigued me, to be honest. I felt like I was sort of looking in a mirror most times we hung out. Fact is: we hit it off almost immediately and that was that. Friendship forged in decay. I should have known it might end up like this.
He introduced me to a world that I’d secretly wished I could be a part of. He always wore designer shirts and slacks, almost always with a suit coat. He had a seemingly endless supply of cash that he kept in some military-grade money clip at all times. Not to mention the women that swirled around this guy, always robust and beautiful, always willing to please.
Normally I’m good to bums. I don’t have a lot to give and I’m barely staying off the streets myself, but some people aren’t as lucky as me. So what if they spend my spare change on booze or crack, who am I to judge? If it’s what gets them through the day, fine. We’ve all got our vices.
The real scourge of this city are these hipster fucks. They slum it for the vacation between semesters at NYU or Pratt or Columbia, like it’s all a joke to them. I’m on my way to an appointment on St. Marks and I pass a crusty lounging on the steps of Sing-Sing Karaoke. He’s got a guitar and a dog and a whiteboard that reads in purple marker, “2 cool 4 werk, spare a buck for pizza?” He’s got on shiny red patent-leather Doc Martens. If he’s so fucking hungry, maybe he shouldn’t have spent his last $150 on shoes.
The little fuck looks at me and grins. He’s got a cigarette in his hand, but his teeth are still pimp-sneaker white. I roll my eyes and keep walking.
If you’re pretty enough and know when to open and shut your mouth, you can make a decent living as an escort—not a junked-out streetwalker, but the kind of girl listed in the Manhattan yellow pages. It was sell myself or bag groceries. One of the women I work with offered me a spot in her weekend burlesque troupe, but burlesque is for girls who want to piss off their daddies. You have to know where your dad is in order to piss him off.
I was afraid I’d end up blowing a bunch of rich cockwads, but the majority of my clients were anonymous middle-managers who all claimed their wives didn’t understand them. That’s what it’s like today, I get on all fours and he does me doggie style so he can keep watching MSNBC. Nothing turns me on like Keith Oberman. I collect my fee and book my john for the same time next week and once outside I wipe jizz off the first payphone I see and call Dean. He says he’ll take the next train out of New Haven.
Millions passed through his hands. Not dirty bills, like a drug dealer; it was all electrons, electrons as good as money. With a few strokes on the keyboard, a check for a three hundred dollar auto repair was out the door, a ten thousand dollar bodily injury settlement was on its way to an eager claimant, a fifty dollar payment to the guy who inspected shingles on a house, five dollars for a police report, thousands to defense attorneys. All those payments and many more, flying from Jack’s fingertips every day.
Jack had, along with all the other adjusters in the claims department, his evaluation the first week of January. His supervisor explained that his performance had been average, that he’d “achieved his objectives, but not exceeded them” and therefore, “Mr. Smith, you will not qualify for the performance bonus this year.”
What a surprise, he thought as he looked at his supervisor’s slight smile, like she was holding back a whooping “gotcha again this year, sucker” that she’d let loose as soon as no one could hear. In five years at Universal Amalgamated Insurance Company, he’d never qualified for a performance bonus. He’d given up expecting it. Once putting in fifty hours a week, when he believed there really was a carrot dangling from the end of that stick, now he carefully watched the clock. He never arrived more than two minutes early at his desk, never stayed later than two minutes past five. Lunches were as long as he could draw them out, and he’d recently started smoking, to spend the maximum time possible away from his desk. Sometimes he drank as many as ten cups of coffee so he could trek to the kitchenette and back; the coffee had the bonus of extra restroom time. There were days Jack knew he’d spent less than three hours out of eight at his desk in front of his computer.
Back from his smoke break, Jack revisited last week’s conversation with his supervisor. Performance pay was meant to encourage and reward extraordinary work. From what he could tell, it encouraged the opposite; he noticed that more and more people from the office seemed to have taken up smoking recently. He was willing to bet not a single person at Universal Amalgamated, except maybe management, qualified for that elusive yearly bonus.
Hands hovering over the keyboard, he looked at the claim file in front of him. Small rear-end accident, one person in the car, a lady named Mary Albright, and no police report had been made. Universal Amalgamated’s policyholder was clearly at fault and admitted to reading a magazine while driving.
“What if. . .” murmured Jack, and with a few strokes of the computer keys he wrote detailed file notes, adding a passenger to the car. A passenger named John Smith, Mrs. Albright’s brother. Who happened to have the exact address as Jack himself. Who happened to settle his claim today with Universal Amalgamated for a reasonable twelve hundred dollars. The check would be mailed out from the home office in Chicago. Jack would have it in hand in three days.
Dear Helena,
I’m obsessed with you, I admit it. You’re so beautiful, so creative and intriguing. I love you.
The week before Moss Lake, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Your black bikini. Your body shimmering by the reflection of light and water. Skin tinted to the color of honey, as it gets every summer. Your glass-green eyes, shattered into a thousand shining pieces. And you turning your back to me in your coy way, pretending you don’t see me watching you. Fuck, I love that.
I couldn’t stop the fantasies. At night the bad ones played incessantly, like silent films on the walls in my mind.
Your beautiful ass. The backs of your thighs. My curious tongue.
I am breathlessly in love with you.
Since that first day when I saw you at the park, your bare legs dangling as you twirled in a lone swing, I fell for you in one breath. There was something in the way your hair fell across your back as you looked over your shoulder, the way you seemed to look for me. You pinched the sand between your toes, and I had never felt more connected to anyone.
And our weekend here together was amazing. Watching you sleep settles something inside me. But it was over too quickly. Sunday morning was a crash in my brain. No one could love you as much as I do.
Do you ever feel like carving your name in my skin? I’d let you. I want you to draw the blood that belongs to you, bleed the heart that has been consecrated for you. Are you in love with me, Helena? I want to hear you say it.
Being that the Panthers were on track for another losing season, the desire to drown my sorry sorrows in some stout was strong. Frayer’s Pub a block away. Their special for the night was $2.00 pints, so the decision was made. An angel and a demon were talking in a conspiratorial tone down at the end of the bar when I walked in. It was heated. Ecumenical this, preordained that. Wasn’t paying attention, I’ll admit. I was mighty thirsty when the chairs on either side of me suddenly had bodies in them, an angel to my right, a demon to my left, close enough to put a head on each shoulder.
“How goes it, Louie?” from the demon, his name Irving. His greasy fedora sat back enough on his head to keep his horns in full view, the way he always wore it. Same with the wrinkled dime store assimilation, the mismatched jacket and slacks smeared and stained. His cauliflower face hadn’t seen a razor in weeks, his hair gray with a few streaks of copper.
“Good night?” the angel Earl asked, his wings held back by an expensively tailored pinstripe three piece, gold watch and all. Pale hair the color pure cloud slicked back. Earl was ethereal, like a model, so damn perfect. The hair on his pointed face was exact, eyebrows and sideburns groomed and plucked impeccably.
Each of them, otherworldly beings they were, were diametrically opposed, and yet there they were, like always, sitting and drinking and bullshiting every damn time I came here for a pint. Now, I’m no statistician, and though I got a couple paychecks working for the Census Bureau a few years back, I spent most of those shifts here, spilling drinks on the forms as I filled them out. Still, I’m thinking these hosts, holy and unholy though they may be, are widespread, more so I’d wager around urban centers like Charlotte. Most of them do their jobs, but I’d say there are more than a few like Earl and Irving here that go through the motions of influence, having been influenced by the lecherous schmucks they encounter on a daily basis on this mortal coil.
“Fair to middling, I suppose. Tender, a stout?” I called, trying to ignore the stench of sulfur from one side and patchouli the other. Long night, it seemed to be turning into.
Gordon Highland, whose short In the Bag appeared on the site last year, has his debut novel Major Inversions available from CreateSpace and Amazon (Kindle edition also available).
Caleb J Ross, whose short A Trench is No Place for God was an entrant in the 2008 Short Fiction Competition, has his chapbook Charactered Pieces available for pre-order from the Outsider Writers Collective.
Greyson’d seen the old man ‘round before, standing on the corners, talking and lecturing on to anyone who would listen and, lot of times, to those who wouldn’t. The old man liked to say he was a prophet. Spreading God’s word and saving people from their sins, talking ‘em ‘way from temptations and damnation. Greyson’d only talked to him once his own self, explained to the preacher how he’d killed God, stabbed him with a knife, and how he felt real bad about it. Told the old man it was by mistake, though, Greyson wasn’t to blame. And the preacher man said not to worry, said God’s a tough old bastard, harder to kill than that, and just about filled to busting with forgiveness. Greyson, well, he sure felt better hearing that, he did. So when Greyson seen the prophet man comin’ round again, he knew good things were in store for him.
The old man was on a bus bench, sittin’ and eatin’, biting into a White Castle hamburger with a whole bag more on his lap. Greyson could tell there was more food in there than the old man could handle, more’n enough to share with Greyson. So Greyson asked the old man for a burger and the old man said no and Greyson said he’d pay the man and the old man said yes. But Greyson, Greyson didn’t have no cash. Didn’t have anything worth anything, neither. The preacher man shrugged and kept on eatin’, right there in front of Greyson.
Greyson watched him, saw him shovel another hamburger into his big ol’ beard. Greyson was staring at the cracked lips and cracked teeth hidden behind all that fur when Greyson started remembering some of the old man’s speechifying. Great, loud sermons about fire and brimstone and eternal souls. And Greyson realized maybe he had something worth something after all.
Greyson asked the old man if he’d trade, a barter to help Greyson fill his belly proper. He’d been walking since yesterday, hadn’t had the time to eat and he was damn near starving now. The prophet man, he was leery, but Greyson, Greyson could talk, too, and he convinced the preacher he was sincere.
Way Greyson figured it, he wasn’t getting into Heaven, not after all he’s done. Greyson sure wouldn’t be comfortable with living with God anyways. No one would, not if they’d killed ‘im once, even by accident. So Greyson didn’t need his soul for Heaven. And Hell, Hell didn’t seem like too great a place neither. Not somewhere you’d look forward to spending forever. So Greyson didn’t need his soul for Hell. And, fuck it all, if the preacher was willing to part with a bagful of greasy meat in exchange for one lousy soul, who was Greyson to argue. He was hungry. So he sold his soul and took his hamburgers.
City lights dance above us like dying fireflies. The night air is as sweet as a country morning, waves of a new summer throwing a warm coverlet of dew across our faces. She walks with soft steps, as if she doesn’t want to wake the dead souls hidden beneath the concrete of the sidewalk. Every few seconds our arms brush each other and the touch anesthetizes the blood swimming beneath the surface.
We’re the only bodies on the street this late at night. Jenna looks over and her eyes glimmer with a gray glow. Her fingers find mine and she pulls my hand to the air. Dimples collude in her porcelain face, and I’m afraid that a kiss will crack her skin into a thousand dusty pieces. We reach a set of red brick stairs and she’s the first one to take flight, jet black flats scampering with loud scratches across every step. I follow and take slow steps until I’m standing next to her. The front door of the building is as brown as week-old vomit. She turns the doorknob with a smile and motions for me to follow her.
“Are you tired?” She bites her lower lip.
I raise my eyebrows and wonder what she’ll look like with my cock in her mouth. “Not at all.”
She swishes the blonde locks out of her face, golden strands of hair as curled as the wings of a dead baby swan. She starts up the inner flight of stairs and I follow behind. Her ass sways in tight black jeans, a hypnotic swing that almost makes me trip over my own feet. She reaches the second floor before me and fumbles for keys in her tiny red leather purse. It takes her a few minutes to find the right one.
“I had a great time,” she says, swinging open the apartment door. She tosses her purse on a small wooden stool and flips on the living room lamp.
I nod. “Me too.” Her apartment smells like a funeral home.
She unzips her jacket, slides her thin pale arms out of the sleeves. Three koi fish are tattooed on her left arm. The ink looks fresh, as if the slimy creatures are going to jump off her skin and into the kitchen sink. Jenna lights a cigarette and offers me one. I slip it between dry lips and let her light its tip.
