The stain on the carpet was spreading. Her hands and arms still dripped, probably from when she had punched her clenched fists into his chest afterwards, to make absolutely sure. Funny; she was so squeamish about red meat, but tonight she hadn't felt sick. Still didn't, despite the fact that the whole thing had been much more spectacular than she had anticipated. Penny giggled. Movie-makers didn't know the half of it. The marks might come out of the stairs and hall carpet, but there wasn't a chance of eradicating the mess upstairs. Bathroom, bedroom — she hadn't quite struck cleanly {Ha! Joke!) the first time, so David had managed to get to the bedroom before shock and pain keeled him over and she had been able to finish it all properly. The heart really is an efficient pump, isn't it? I hadn't realized it would go on for so long .
The revving outside stopped at last. Footsteps now, click of elegant heels approaching the front gate. Penny giggled again, and this time had a degree of trouble making it stop. Silly woman. Control yourself. It's no laughing matter .
At that thought she covered her mouth with a stained hand and snorted like a horse. Her face was smeared when she finally sobered and took the hand away, but she wasn't aware of it and wouldn't have minded in the least anyway. Come on, footsteps. I can hear you. Up the path. Hello, Carmine. Come in. I've been expecting you and I'm all ready .
A shape loomed dimly through the frosted glass panel in the door, and the bell rang, just once, demurely.
Bitch. Two-timer, Cheat. Betrayer. Made my husband immortal, did you? Well, he isn't immortal any more. Maybe I'll let you see him. But I think it's better if I don't. Safer. I don't want to lose the element of surprise, after all.
Penny stood up and started to smile. The hall mirror, as she passed it, reflected a demonic vision of gory red and deathly white, with eyes that burned and laughed and burned. Her hands felt as if they were burning, too, but it didn't matter, any more than Carmine's lateness mattered. The smile on her face was fixed now, as if nothing could ever erase it, and her right hand closed more firmly on the hilt of the scarlet knife behind her back, as with her left she reached out to open the front door.
Aftermath
Janet Berliner
Janet Berliner received a Bram Stoker Award for the novel Children of the Dark, the third volume of 'The Madagascar Manifesto' series, co-authored with George Guthridge. As an editor, her anthologies have included Snapshots: 20th-century Mother-Daughter Fiction, which she co-edited with Joyce Carol Oates, two volumes of Peter S. Beagle's Immortal Unicorn, David Copperfield's Tales of the Impossible, David Copperfield's Beyond Imagination and Desire Burn: Women's Stories from the Dark Side of Passion. She also created The Unicorn Sonata, an illustrated novella by Peter Beagle which is now in development as a film. She is currently coauthor of the high adventure novel Flirting with Death along with Kevin J. Anderson, Matthew J. Costello and F. Paul Wilson .
'At the risk of being branded a traitor, I admit to the fact that, excepting the original, I was never much into vampires of the traditional blood-sucking variety,' admits the author. 'Or so I believed, until I had an epiphany at a party in Las Vegas.
'Living in such an environment, running into Elvis or Marilyn at a party or the crap tables is commonplace, so it didn't seem all that peculiar to me when I met a tall, handsome man who called himself Vlad, spoke with a strong Balkan accent, and claimed to be from Transylvania.
'Immediately Vlad found out that I was a writer, he asked me if I had ever written any vampire stories. I hadn't. Then, as fate would have it, the very next day I was asked to write a vampire story, set in Jerusalem in or around the year 1197.
' There it was. The challenge I needed. I could continue to write about the human condition, and the next time I met Vlad I could tell him honestly that I had now written a true vampire tale '
In Canaan, which was also known as the land of Israel, in the spring of the year Christians called 1197, Muslems prayed openly but with a sense of unease. Jews, for whom the spring coincided with the celebration of Passover, called the year 4957. They prayed, too, in secret and with no less nervousness. Muslems and Jews alike were people whose families had endured and survived the injustices and cruelties of three Crusades. They knew, to a man and to a woman, that this brief respite from war would not last; a fourth Crusade would follow the third as surely as camels carried their own water across the desert.
The first three Crusades had been devastating. Entire Muslem families had been decimated; Jews, falsely accused of engaging in blood rites too horrific to contemplate, refused to convert to Christianity, to deny ha- rachamim , their Merciful Father, and laid down their lives for the sanctification of His name.
The Crusades denied fathers the pleasure of seeing their sons grow up; they denuded both communities of single men who could marry their daughters, so that they could no longer obey the Lord's or Allah's instruction to go forth and multiply.
And so it was that Meyer ben Joseph and Hamid el Faisir, who were the leaders of their communities and knew that they all needed protection against the evil to come, befriended each other. 'If we are destroyed, it will not matter to the few survivors which God we worshipped,' Meyer said.
Hamid assented.
On the first night of Passover, in the same spirit of co-operation, Hamid agreed to be present at the religious meal which his new friend Meyer called the Seder . 'In this way,' Hamid told his people, 'I shall be an eye-witness to their rituals. If they do not drink of the blood of Christian children, as has been reported, then we shall defend our city together against the soldiers when they come.'
And so it came to be that Hamid and his family joined Meyer, his wife, Rose, and their only surviving child Devora on the first night of Passover. They reclined and listened with respect as Meyer told the story of his people's journey across the desert in search of the Promised Land, they enjoyed the melodic songs, and they bowed their heads respectfully during the prayers.
'Pour the last of the wine, Meyer,' Rose said, finally. 'I sense that our guests are growing hungry.'
Meyer poured a small amount of prayer wine for each person, though he knew that his Muslem guests did not drink. He was emptying the last of the carafe into a large goblet set aside for the Prophet Elijah, when there came a knock at the door. Meyer's hand jerked in surprise and a few drops missed the large goblet and landed on his wife's handwoven tablecloth. He grimaced; there was little more where that had come from. The extra glass of wine they poured each year — the extra place setting at the table was a tradition he would never have ignored. But for a stranger to know the exact moment in the Seder bordered on miraculous.
'Timing is everything,' he said, thinking, the Prophet has a good nose.
