huge pale bat.
Weed rushed over Jonquil and she thought the thing which had been called Johnina had settled on her lightly, coaxingly, and she screamed. The city filled with her scream like an empty gourd with water.
There were no lights, no figures huddled at smouldering fires, no guards or watchmen, no villains, no one here to save her, no one even to be the witness of what must come, when her young heart finally failed, her legs buckled, when the sailing softness came down and covered her, stroking and devouring, caressing and eating — its tongues and fingers and the whole porous mouth that it was to drink her away and away.
Jonquil ran. She ran over streets that were cratered as if by meteorites, through vaulted passages, beside the still waters of night and death. It occurred to her (her stunned and now almost witless brain) to plunge into the lagoon, to swim towards the unseen towers. But on the face of the mirror, gentleness would drift down on her, and in the morning mist, not even a ripple
The paving tipped. Jonquil stumbled, ran, downwards now, hopeless and mindless, her heart burning a hole in her side. Down and down, cracked tiles spinning off from her feet, down into some underground place that must be a prison for her, perhaps a catacomb, to stagger among filigree coffins, where the water puddled like glass on the floor, no way out, down into despair, and yet, mockingly, there was more light. More light to see what she did not want to see. It was the phosphorus of the death already there, the mummies in their narrow homes. Yes, she saw the water pools now, as she splashed through them, she saw the peculiar shelves and cubbies, the stone statue of a saint barnacled by the sea-rot the water brought into a creature from another world. And she saw the wall also that rose peremptory before her, the dead-end that would end in death, and for which she had been waiting, to which she had run, and where now she collapsed, her body useless, run out.
She dropped against the wall, and, in the coffin-light, turned and looked back. And through the descending vault, a pale blue shadow floated, innocent and faithful, coming down to her like a kiss.
I don't believe this, Jonquil would have said, but now she did. And anyway she had no breath, no breath even to scream again or cry. She could only watch, could not take her eyes off the coming of the feaster. It had singled her out, allowed her to bring it from the chest. With others it had been more reticent, hiding itself. Perhaps it had eaten of Johanus, too, before he had been forced to secure it against the witch-hunting servants. Or maybe Johanus had not been to its taste. How ravenous it was, and how controlled was its need.
It alighted five metres from her, from Jonquil, as she lay against the death-end wall. She saw it down an aisle of coffins. Touching the water on the floor, it rolled together, and furled open, and skimmed over the surface on to the stone.
She was fascinated now. She wanted it to reach her. She wanted it to be over. She dug her hands into the dirt and a yellow bone crumbled under her fingers.
The painting of Johnina was crawling ably along the aisle. There was no impediment, no heavy frame to drag with it.
Sweat slipped into Jonquil's eyes and for a moment she saw a blue woman with ivory hair walking slowly between the coffins, but there was something catching at her robe, and she hesitated, to try to pluck the material away.
Jonquil blinked. She saw a second movement, behind the limpid roll of the Venus skin. A flicker, like a white handkerchief. And then another.
Something darted, and it was on the painting, on top of it, and then it flashed and was gone. And then two other white darts sewed through the blueness of the shadow, bundling it up into an ungainly lump, and two more, gathering and kneading.
The painting had vanished. It was buried under a pure white jostling. And there began to be a thin high note on the air, like a whistling in the ear, without any emotion or language. Ten white rats of the catacombs had settled on the painting, and with their teeth and busy paws they held it still and rent it in pieces, and they ate it. They ate the painted image of the Venus Johnina, and her background of mountains and sea, they ate the living shrieking membrane of the flesh. Their hunger too had been long unappeased.
Jonquil lay by the wall, watching, until the last crumb and shred had disappeared into dainty needled mouths. It did not take more than two or three minutes. Then there was only a space, nothing on it, no rats, no other thing.
'Get up,' Jonquil said. There was a low singing in her head, but no other noise. She stood in stages, and went back along the aisle of dead. She was very cold, feeble and sluggish. She thought she felt old. She walked through the water pools. She had a dreadful intimation that everything had changed, that she would never be the same, that nothing ever would, that survival had sent her into an unknown and fearful world.
A rat sat on a coffin overseeing her departure, digesting in its belly blueness and alien dreams. The walls went on crumbling particle by particle. Silence flowed over the city like the approaching sea.
Year Zero
Gemma Files
Born in London, England, Gemma Files has been a Canadian citizen since the age of two. She has a BAA in Magazine Journalism and has spent the past eight years writing freelance film criticism for a popular local news and culture review in Toronto.
Her first professional sale was 'Mouthful of Pins' to Don Hutchison's anthology Northern Frights 2. Since then her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies such as Grue, Transversions, Palace Corbie, Selective Spectres, Demon Sex, Northern Frights 5 and Queer Fear. Her story 'The Emperor's Old Bones' won the 1999 Best Short Story from the International Horror Writers' Guild and was reprinted in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Eleven and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Thirteenth Annual Collection. Four of her stories have been adapted for the anthology TV series The Hunger.
'Vampires, as all my non-horror-friendly pals so often sneer, are a dead-end concept,' explains Files: 'the same tropes repeated without variation, over and over dirty little sex fantasies masquerading as good, clean fear. But it only requires a few nights' cursory research to realize that even the oldest stories posit as many different types of vampires as there are different types of people for them to feed on (and not all of them drink blood, either).
' I think of vampires, therefore, as the dark literature world's equivalent of the Rhorsach blot. If you're limited, your idea of what vampires are or could be will be similarly limited. And if you're not '
About the following story, the author reveals: 'When I was a kid, I remember being wonderfully impressed by the TV adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel starring Anthony Andrews, Ian McKellen and Jane Seymour; of course,
