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kleenexwoman) wrote2009-05-02 05:58 am
kleenexwoman) wrote2009-05-02 05:58 am
Entry tags:
Fic: "Shadow Staking," Stephen King-inspired, age 21
I wrote this as a final assignment for Jeffery Weinstock's "Vampires in Film and Literature" class. It was an excellent class; we traced the development of the pop-culture vampire from "Varney the Vampire" on, and discussed the use of the vampire as a symbol and what it meant.
This is a Stephen King parody, and I've tried to replicate his typical protagonist and as much of his voice as I could handle.
When Lacey's face appeared at the window in the worst rainstorm of the year, Jerry barely gave it a second thought. His ex-wife hadn't been by in more than a month, but he'd been waiting for her to drop in to collect her old records, makeup she'd left lying around the place, all the personal detritus from seven good years and five bad ones. He'd gone around the house the week after she left, gathering up everything that she might possibly consider hers, tossing it in a cardboard box and dropping it by the door.
He sighed and went to the door, leaving his sparse dinner of Campbell's Condensed Cream of Crap and toast. Lacey's alimony demands had been draining him dry. She refused to believe that he didn't have an extra million salted away somewhere, even after he’d showed her the meager royalty check stubs. “A big New York Times bestseller like you isn’t going to starve,” she’d said. Two weeks on the bestseller list in the middle of the vampire craze did not a millionaire make, he’d reminded her; he’d gone back to the obscurity of a cult following that barely let him pay the bills after his ex-partner Dan Bryte’s solo books had gotten popular. Anyway, she’d pissed that money away on an outdoors pool. “So sell the house,” she’d sniffed, “the pool gives it great resale value.”
Jerry opened the door to Lacey, shivering, hunched, her long blonde hair hanging over her face. “Jesus,” he said, “come out of the rain, at least.”
Lacey raised her head. “I am most grateful for your hospitality,” she said, in the softest voice he’d ever heard her use, and slipped past him into the kitchen. Jerry closed the door and followed her, frowning. Lacey was never so quiet, so polite. She’d push him out of the way and stomp around the house, slamming the doors and shoving piles of books off of tables.
Now, she sat at the kitchen table, eyeing Jerry’s bowl of soup and dripping rainwater all over the floor. Jerry stood across from her, his hands clenched nervously behind his back. “Listen, Lacey…” Her head jerked up at the sound of her name, and her piercing blue eyes locked onto Jerry’s. But Lacey’s eyes had never been blue, they were hazel… “Hey, did you get contacts or something?”
Lacey rose, and dropped her raincoat onto the floor. Like a bat shedding its wings, he thought nonsensically. She was wearing a filmy white nightgown underneath. “Please,” she said, “call me Priscilla.” She smiled, her red mouth opening to reveal a pair of white, minutely pointed fangs.
Shit, Jerry thought. A crazy fan. I bet she’s going to tie me to a bed and break my legs. His first novel had been Priscilla the Succubus, a softcore porno written under the name “A.N. Réglisse,” which his agent had eventually convinced him to re-release under his own name. “It’ll be a great move for you. Digging up a lost masterpiece and everything.” It had brought the perverts out of the woodwork, that was for sure. He’d gotten more than a few fan letters with photos of pasty, pimpled wannabe vampiresses in all their glory, their tits flowing like lava. Lacey had thought the pictures were hilarious, compared to the willowy Priscilla he’d described in the novel. He never should have told her that he’d based the seductive protagonist off of her.
Priscilla climbed onto the table, hissing like a cat, ignoring the way the flimsy card table wobbled under her weight. Jerry backed away, his eyes frantically darting around the room, looking for something he might use to defend himself. How had he dispatched Priscilla in that book, anyway? Stake through the heart? Holy water? Garlic? Maybe if he could find a cross, it would scare her off.
She reached out to him, her long red fingernails glistening in the fluorescent light. “I just loved your book,” she purred. “I thought you might like a chance to meet me for real.” She curled her hand into a claw, batting at him in a savage parody of coquettishness.
“Thanks, but no,” Jerry muttered. He flattened his back against the wall and began to edge towards the door, trying not to stare at her breasts under the nightgown. Priscilla licked her lips and beckoned Jerry to her, one finger wagging hypnotically. He didn’t want to encourage the poor disturbed woman, but God…
He suddenly realized that he was walking back towards her, raising his hands to touch her skin, stroking her cheek. It was though his body was moving of its own accord, as though he was nothing but a puppet for her. He tried to suppress the unaccustomed rush of lust like a tapeworm inside him.
Priscilla grabbed his shirt and dragged him the last few inches across the floor, closing the distance between their mouths. He could feel her fangs pressing into his lips, a dull ache beginning to spread from the sharp points of her teeth. “Yes,” she murmured into his mouth, “come to me, baby.” Jerry nearly gagged on her tongue. He wrenched himself away from her mouth, scraping her thick saliva off his tongue with his teeth. Priscilla growled and seized his shirt again, her sharp fingernails ripping holes in the cheap material. Her eyes now glowed red.
“Get the fuck away from me!” Jerry kicked the leg of the card table, hard, and the flimsy construction collapsed. Priscilla tore a handful of material from his shirt as the plywood fell out from underneath her. She howled as she landed, breaking the table in half with a sickening crunch.
“Bastard!” she screamed, her filmy gown stained with gobbets of brown broth from Jerry’s neglected soup, stained with a spreading, sickly red that was almost black. A splinter of plywood protruded from her lovely chest.
“Aw, fuck.” The girl was crazy, but even a crazy fan didn’t deserve impalement. “Hold on, I’ll call 911.”
“Hah!” Priscilla tried to spit, ended up spraying her gown with even more blood. Steam was rising from her gown, a pale red mist. “Got me. But they’ll come,” she growled, as her head drooped back onto the mess of wood and cheap china, and her eyes closed. “All of them will come for you.”
“What? Wait, who?” Jerry knelt a few feet away, still mindful of the slim fingers and sharp nails. But Priscilla had evidently decided to shut up forever, for he got no answer. He studied her prone body, the alabaster curves lying among the shards of his dinner, even as it dissolved into red mist, leaving nothing but a stained and tattered nightgown.
Well. Shit. Jerry stood up and glanced at the phone. It was too late to call 911; there was no body, and a bloody nightgown would look awfully suspicious. And how could you call 911 for a vampire? Those books weren’t fiction. Jerry shook his head. This wasn’t pretend. The thought didn’t seem as preposterous as it should have. Maybe it was the years of talespinning, the world-building, the suspension of disbelief that kept him from shredding his penny-dreadful manuscripts and going off to earn his bread by writing humorous lists for McSweeneys instead.
He avoided looking at the place where Priscilla’s body had been, started to make coffee instead. Filter, measure, pour, flip. “All of them will come for you,” she’d said. All of who? More vampires? His vampires?
If so, it was going to be a long night.
*
Beaumont Beau Pre, the Velvet Prince, reclined languidly on Jerry’s sagging corduroy sofa. “I do appreciate this opportunity, Mr. Furcht. I’ve longed to tell my version of your amusing little novel for ages.” His blue eyes, the same shade as Priscilla’s, sparkled in the low light.
“Yeah, sure.” Jerry sifted through the papers he had stacked on the kitchen counter, searching for the spiral notebook he jotted ideas in. “Coffee?”
“You are a most gracious host, but I must decline. I do not drink…coffee.” Beaumont tittered at his own wit. Jerry snorted, wondering if he had ever really penned such a cheesy line. Beaumont Beau Pre had been one of the two protagonists of the Vampire Journals, a series of graphic novels he’d written with Dan Bryte. He’d based Beaumont on Dan, a pale-skinned, patrician young man with a penchant for red velvet chairs and expensive black cigarettes that smelled like Christmas ham. In return, Dan had claimed he’d based the other character, Edmond Du Crainte, Beaumont’s ghoul lover, on Jerry. Jerry had killed both off them off in a tragic suicide pact in the last novel, which he’d had to write solo after Dan had abandoned the series to concentrate on his new series, the Faerie Diaries. The series had become more popular than anything Jerry had written ever had. Maybe Beaumont’s narrative would sap some of Dan’s popularity, bring Jerry back onto the charts for at least a few weeks.
Jerry returned with a mug of black coffee and a legal pad. “All right. Where do you want to start?”
“At my nativity, of course. I was born in eighteen-ought-five, in a spookily dilapidated castle in the south of France…” Beaumont began to sketch out his history, his slim fingers tracing patterns in the air. “Nobody understood me, and yet I was better than any of them…I would shut myself away inside my room and dream of glory…My siblings’ endless taunts only fueled the lush darkness growing inside my innocent young soul.”
Three hours later, Jerry had stopped writing, and was glancing anxiously at the clock. Beaumont’s story had consisted entirely of a litany of petty injustices he’d endured, and the infinite grace and style in which he had borne them. No blood, no guts. He stifled a yawn.
Beaumont focused his steely gaze on Jerry. “I see my story is not sufficient to hold your interest.”
“Yeah, it’s running a little long.” Jerry clicked his ballpoint pen. “Can you, you know, cut to the chase? Get to how you became a vampire?”
“How dare you!” Beaumont’s nostrils flared, and he rose from the sofa, his suave repose replaced by the coiled stance of a predator. “My adversity is of the utmost importance.”
“It won’t hook a reader.”
“It is crucial to my character development.” Beaumont hissed. “Crucial. How can the reader possibly understand the torment that drives me to evil if they know nothing of the trauma I was forced to endure as a child?”
“Nobody cares! Jesus!” Jerry slammed down the legal pad. “You know what readers want? They want blood and guts and people getting their throats ripped out. They want lesbian vampires sucking on each others’ throats. Put some of that in your autobiography, and maybe I’ll take better notes.”
“And that philosophy of literature has worked well for your career, I see.” Beaumont sniffed.
“Oh, fuck you. You don’t know anything. You’re not even real, are you? You’re some kind of Ghost of Novels Past. A—an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese…”
“Not real?” Beaumont opened his mouth to show his fangs, straight, white, and pearly. “I would wager that I am more real than you. Who’s been surviving on the fringes of society for hundreds of years, and who’s the sad little man whose purpose in life is to be nothing but a vessel for my story?”
“I don’t need you,” Jerry muttered. “I killed you off, for God’s sake.”
Beaumont froze. “You what? How?”
Right, Jerry thought, he hasn’t offed himself yet. Obviously. He gripped the pen tighter. “Yeah. I guess you haven’t gotten there yet, but you die in the last book. Stake yourself and everything.”
“I would never do such a thing!” Beaumont howled. “Never! You traitorous scribbler, you murdered me!” Red light flashed in his blue eyes, and Jerry winced before the red was replaced by an even colder blue. “You understand that I shall have to dispose of you in order to prevent this.”
Jerry began to back away, holding the pen out before him. “Then there won’t be anybody to tell your story.”
“I am perfectly capable of writing my own story,” Beaumont snapped, and Jerry drove the ballpoint pen into his chest with all the force he could muster. Beaumont took a surprised step back. “Oh, dear.” He sneered. “Ah, you seem to have ruined my frock coat. That was a custom—urk.” Jerry had pulled out the pen, and thick, red-black blood was spreading from the tiny perforation.
Beaumont clutched his heart and sank to his knees. “Touchè, Mr. Furcht. I can only conclude that…” He lowered his head and looked up at Jerry through a fringe of fine black hair. “The pen is mightier than the stake.”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “Very clever. Very dramatic.”
“It’s quite obvious to me why…” Beaumont paused to catch his breath. “Why Daniel’s books are so much more successful than yours, Mr. Furcht. You have no sense of style at all.” And with that final critique, his body disappeared.
“Well, fuck you,” Jerry said lamely to the space where the body had been. He wondered if he should have thought up some snappy remark, a stream of verbal piss on his enemy’s body. Happened all the time in movies, but this wasn’t a movie, was it? People in real life didn’t have time to make up clever shit off the top of their heads, and Jerry had always liked realism, even in the middle of a vampire yarn.
Realistically, he thought, he was probably losing his marbles. There was no sign of Beaumont’s body, and the blood had even disappeared off the pen. If he looked into the kitchen now, the table that Priscilla’s body had broken would probably be whole and still wobbly, his dishes slowly growing mold.
He shuffled into the kitchen, resolutely not looking in the direction of the possible ruins of the table, and dug out the bottle of vodka he’d stashed in the back of the freezer. Best way to deal with madness or vampires, he thought, get drunk until you can tell the difference. Or can’t.
Beaumont had been right. He found a bottle of orange juice and poured some into the vodka—not too much, just enough to take the edge off of the alcohol’s paint-thinner taste. His characters might spout witty cracks and sly innuendoes, swan around in velvet waistcoats and silk nightgowns and sip fine wine, but here he was in a flannel shirt, guzzling vodka, totally unable to think of a single thing to say.
So what the hell’s wrong with that? he wondered angrily. Don’t people want to read about themselves? What’s wrong with an Everyman? But Everyman didn’t sell. Snotty vampires that made Goth kids feel better about their whining sold. Porn sold. Blood and guts sold so long as there was someone young, attractive, and sarcastic in the middle of them.
He’d never been able to publish the one work he’d really thought had merit. It’d hadn’t had any winsome seductresses or aristocrats, just a middle-aged man—a little paunchy, a little gruff, a little bit of a wino in the making—becoming more and more exhausted as he struggled against a horde of vampires. Monstrous Nosferatu vampires, with jagged fangs and curling claws.
But nobody wanted monsters that were monsters anymore. The vampires were the good guys, with amazing powers and fascinating life stories. Vampire killers were the Feds, the IRS, your father with a stake and a clove of garlic. Nobody wanted to read a book and see themselves with bloodstained hands and bad breath.
God damn all of them. And what was that scratching outside? Considering the turns tonight had taken, he wouldn’t be lucky enough to face anything as simple as a marauding raccoon. Hell, he’d welcome a plain human cat burglar.
Jerry took one last swig of the vodka—either there had been less in there than he thought, or he was much drunker than he thought he was—and headed to the door. Halfway there, he stopped, thought better of it, and looked out the window. A field of pasty, rotting flesh, red eyes, and yellow claws awaited him. Gaping mouths, dripping with blood and gobbets, torn clothes stained with mud and draped with organs. Ratty hair, pointed ears, and grasping, clutching fingers. They scrabbled at the walls of his house, their fingernails leaving long, deep scratches in the windows. The stench of their rotted flesh and clotted blood was seeping into the house, overwhelming the last faint traces of vodka clinging to his nostrils.
My vampires. My lovely, lovely monsters. Jerry felt a rush of pride swelling in his chest. The unpublished were smellier, louder, redder and far more numerous than his pale protagonists had ever been, more real and horrifying, rendered in Technicolor and Smell-O-Vision. Sure, they wanted to kill him, suck his blood and tear his flesh before turning him into a shambling, hissing corpse…but what was one little death, compared to the legions he’d created with nothing but a typewriter?
This was a good sign, Jerry thought. A very good sign. In you, I will be immortal. You disgusting bastards.
The author opened the door and let his fans in.
This is a Stephen King parody, and I've tried to replicate his typical protagonist and as much of his voice as I could handle.
When Lacey's face appeared at the window in the worst rainstorm of the year, Jerry barely gave it a second thought. His ex-wife hadn't been by in more than a month, but he'd been waiting for her to drop in to collect her old records, makeup she'd left lying around the place, all the personal detritus from seven good years and five bad ones. He'd gone around the house the week after she left, gathering up everything that she might possibly consider hers, tossing it in a cardboard box and dropping it by the door.
He sighed and went to the door, leaving his sparse dinner of Campbell's Condensed Cream of Crap and toast. Lacey's alimony demands had been draining him dry. She refused to believe that he didn't have an extra million salted away somewhere, even after he’d showed her the meager royalty check stubs. “A big New York Times bestseller like you isn’t going to starve,” she’d said. Two weeks on the bestseller list in the middle of the vampire craze did not a millionaire make, he’d reminded her; he’d gone back to the obscurity of a cult following that barely let him pay the bills after his ex-partner Dan Bryte’s solo books had gotten popular. Anyway, she’d pissed that money away on an outdoors pool. “So sell the house,” she’d sniffed, “the pool gives it great resale value.”
Jerry opened the door to Lacey, shivering, hunched, her long blonde hair hanging over her face. “Jesus,” he said, “come out of the rain, at least.”
Lacey raised her head. “I am most grateful for your hospitality,” she said, in the softest voice he’d ever heard her use, and slipped past him into the kitchen. Jerry closed the door and followed her, frowning. Lacey was never so quiet, so polite. She’d push him out of the way and stomp around the house, slamming the doors and shoving piles of books off of tables.
Now, she sat at the kitchen table, eyeing Jerry’s bowl of soup and dripping rainwater all over the floor. Jerry stood across from her, his hands clenched nervously behind his back. “Listen, Lacey…” Her head jerked up at the sound of her name, and her piercing blue eyes locked onto Jerry’s. But Lacey’s eyes had never been blue, they were hazel… “Hey, did you get contacts or something?”
Lacey rose, and dropped her raincoat onto the floor. Like a bat shedding its wings, he thought nonsensically. She was wearing a filmy white nightgown underneath. “Please,” she said, “call me Priscilla.” She smiled, her red mouth opening to reveal a pair of white, minutely pointed fangs.
Shit, Jerry thought. A crazy fan. I bet she’s going to tie me to a bed and break my legs. His first novel had been Priscilla the Succubus, a softcore porno written under the name “A.N. Réglisse,” which his agent had eventually convinced him to re-release under his own name. “It’ll be a great move for you. Digging up a lost masterpiece and everything.” It had brought the perverts out of the woodwork, that was for sure. He’d gotten more than a few fan letters with photos of pasty, pimpled wannabe vampiresses in all their glory, their tits flowing like lava. Lacey had thought the pictures were hilarious, compared to the willowy Priscilla he’d described in the novel. He never should have told her that he’d based the seductive protagonist off of her.
Priscilla climbed onto the table, hissing like a cat, ignoring the way the flimsy card table wobbled under her weight. Jerry backed away, his eyes frantically darting around the room, looking for something he might use to defend himself. How had he dispatched Priscilla in that book, anyway? Stake through the heart? Holy water? Garlic? Maybe if he could find a cross, it would scare her off.
She reached out to him, her long red fingernails glistening in the fluorescent light. “I just loved your book,” she purred. “I thought you might like a chance to meet me for real.” She curled her hand into a claw, batting at him in a savage parody of coquettishness.
“Thanks, but no,” Jerry muttered. He flattened his back against the wall and began to edge towards the door, trying not to stare at her breasts under the nightgown. Priscilla licked her lips and beckoned Jerry to her, one finger wagging hypnotically. He didn’t want to encourage the poor disturbed woman, but God…
He suddenly realized that he was walking back towards her, raising his hands to touch her skin, stroking her cheek. It was though his body was moving of its own accord, as though he was nothing but a puppet for her. He tried to suppress the unaccustomed rush of lust like a tapeworm inside him.
Priscilla grabbed his shirt and dragged him the last few inches across the floor, closing the distance between their mouths. He could feel her fangs pressing into his lips, a dull ache beginning to spread from the sharp points of her teeth. “Yes,” she murmured into his mouth, “come to me, baby.” Jerry nearly gagged on her tongue. He wrenched himself away from her mouth, scraping her thick saliva off his tongue with his teeth. Priscilla growled and seized his shirt again, her sharp fingernails ripping holes in the cheap material. Her eyes now glowed red.
“Get the fuck away from me!” Jerry kicked the leg of the card table, hard, and the flimsy construction collapsed. Priscilla tore a handful of material from his shirt as the plywood fell out from underneath her. She howled as she landed, breaking the table in half with a sickening crunch.
“Bastard!” she screamed, her filmy gown stained with gobbets of brown broth from Jerry’s neglected soup, stained with a spreading, sickly red that was almost black. A splinter of plywood protruded from her lovely chest.
“Aw, fuck.” The girl was crazy, but even a crazy fan didn’t deserve impalement. “Hold on, I’ll call 911.”
“Hah!” Priscilla tried to spit, ended up spraying her gown with even more blood. Steam was rising from her gown, a pale red mist. “Got me. But they’ll come,” she growled, as her head drooped back onto the mess of wood and cheap china, and her eyes closed. “All of them will come for you.”
“What? Wait, who?” Jerry knelt a few feet away, still mindful of the slim fingers and sharp nails. But Priscilla had evidently decided to shut up forever, for he got no answer. He studied her prone body, the alabaster curves lying among the shards of his dinner, even as it dissolved into red mist, leaving nothing but a stained and tattered nightgown.
Well. Shit. Jerry stood up and glanced at the phone. It was too late to call 911; there was no body, and a bloody nightgown would look awfully suspicious. And how could you call 911 for a vampire? Those books weren’t fiction. Jerry shook his head. This wasn’t pretend. The thought didn’t seem as preposterous as it should have. Maybe it was the years of talespinning, the world-building, the suspension of disbelief that kept him from shredding his penny-dreadful manuscripts and going off to earn his bread by writing humorous lists for McSweeneys instead.
He avoided looking at the place where Priscilla’s body had been, started to make coffee instead. Filter, measure, pour, flip. “All of them will come for you,” she’d said. All of who? More vampires? His vampires?
If so, it was going to be a long night.
*
Beaumont Beau Pre, the Velvet Prince, reclined languidly on Jerry’s sagging corduroy sofa. “I do appreciate this opportunity, Mr. Furcht. I’ve longed to tell my version of your amusing little novel for ages.” His blue eyes, the same shade as Priscilla’s, sparkled in the low light.
“Yeah, sure.” Jerry sifted through the papers he had stacked on the kitchen counter, searching for the spiral notebook he jotted ideas in. “Coffee?”
“You are a most gracious host, but I must decline. I do not drink…coffee.” Beaumont tittered at his own wit. Jerry snorted, wondering if he had ever really penned such a cheesy line. Beaumont Beau Pre had been one of the two protagonists of the Vampire Journals, a series of graphic novels he’d written with Dan Bryte. He’d based Beaumont on Dan, a pale-skinned, patrician young man with a penchant for red velvet chairs and expensive black cigarettes that smelled like Christmas ham. In return, Dan had claimed he’d based the other character, Edmond Du Crainte, Beaumont’s ghoul lover, on Jerry. Jerry had killed both off them off in a tragic suicide pact in the last novel, which he’d had to write solo after Dan had abandoned the series to concentrate on his new series, the Faerie Diaries. The series had become more popular than anything Jerry had written ever had. Maybe Beaumont’s narrative would sap some of Dan’s popularity, bring Jerry back onto the charts for at least a few weeks.
Jerry returned with a mug of black coffee and a legal pad. “All right. Where do you want to start?”
“At my nativity, of course. I was born in eighteen-ought-five, in a spookily dilapidated castle in the south of France…” Beaumont began to sketch out his history, his slim fingers tracing patterns in the air. “Nobody understood me, and yet I was better than any of them…I would shut myself away inside my room and dream of glory…My siblings’ endless taunts only fueled the lush darkness growing inside my innocent young soul.”
Three hours later, Jerry had stopped writing, and was glancing anxiously at the clock. Beaumont’s story had consisted entirely of a litany of petty injustices he’d endured, and the infinite grace and style in which he had borne them. No blood, no guts. He stifled a yawn.
Beaumont focused his steely gaze on Jerry. “I see my story is not sufficient to hold your interest.”
“Yeah, it’s running a little long.” Jerry clicked his ballpoint pen. “Can you, you know, cut to the chase? Get to how you became a vampire?”
“How dare you!” Beaumont’s nostrils flared, and he rose from the sofa, his suave repose replaced by the coiled stance of a predator. “My adversity is of the utmost importance.”
“It won’t hook a reader.”
“It is crucial to my character development.” Beaumont hissed. “Crucial. How can the reader possibly understand the torment that drives me to evil if they know nothing of the trauma I was forced to endure as a child?”
“Nobody cares! Jesus!” Jerry slammed down the legal pad. “You know what readers want? They want blood and guts and people getting their throats ripped out. They want lesbian vampires sucking on each others’ throats. Put some of that in your autobiography, and maybe I’ll take better notes.”
“And that philosophy of literature has worked well for your career, I see.” Beaumont sniffed.
“Oh, fuck you. You don’t know anything. You’re not even real, are you? You’re some kind of Ghost of Novels Past. A—an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese…”
“Not real?” Beaumont opened his mouth to show his fangs, straight, white, and pearly. “I would wager that I am more real than you. Who’s been surviving on the fringes of society for hundreds of years, and who’s the sad little man whose purpose in life is to be nothing but a vessel for my story?”
“I don’t need you,” Jerry muttered. “I killed you off, for God’s sake.”
Beaumont froze. “You what? How?”
Right, Jerry thought, he hasn’t offed himself yet. Obviously. He gripped the pen tighter. “Yeah. I guess you haven’t gotten there yet, but you die in the last book. Stake yourself and everything.”
“I would never do such a thing!” Beaumont howled. “Never! You traitorous scribbler, you murdered me!” Red light flashed in his blue eyes, and Jerry winced before the red was replaced by an even colder blue. “You understand that I shall have to dispose of you in order to prevent this.”
Jerry began to back away, holding the pen out before him. “Then there won’t be anybody to tell your story.”
“I am perfectly capable of writing my own story,” Beaumont snapped, and Jerry drove the ballpoint pen into his chest with all the force he could muster. Beaumont took a surprised step back. “Oh, dear.” He sneered. “Ah, you seem to have ruined my frock coat. That was a custom—urk.” Jerry had pulled out the pen, and thick, red-black blood was spreading from the tiny perforation.
Beaumont clutched his heart and sank to his knees. “Touchè, Mr. Furcht. I can only conclude that…” He lowered his head and looked up at Jerry through a fringe of fine black hair. “The pen is mightier than the stake.”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “Very clever. Very dramatic.”
“It’s quite obvious to me why…” Beaumont paused to catch his breath. “Why Daniel’s books are so much more successful than yours, Mr. Furcht. You have no sense of style at all.” And with that final critique, his body disappeared.
“Well, fuck you,” Jerry said lamely to the space where the body had been. He wondered if he should have thought up some snappy remark, a stream of verbal piss on his enemy’s body. Happened all the time in movies, but this wasn’t a movie, was it? People in real life didn’t have time to make up clever shit off the top of their heads, and Jerry had always liked realism, even in the middle of a vampire yarn.
Realistically, he thought, he was probably losing his marbles. There was no sign of Beaumont’s body, and the blood had even disappeared off the pen. If he looked into the kitchen now, the table that Priscilla’s body had broken would probably be whole and still wobbly, his dishes slowly growing mold.
He shuffled into the kitchen, resolutely not looking in the direction of the possible ruins of the table, and dug out the bottle of vodka he’d stashed in the back of the freezer. Best way to deal with madness or vampires, he thought, get drunk until you can tell the difference. Or can’t.
Beaumont had been right. He found a bottle of orange juice and poured some into the vodka—not too much, just enough to take the edge off of the alcohol’s paint-thinner taste. His characters might spout witty cracks and sly innuendoes, swan around in velvet waistcoats and silk nightgowns and sip fine wine, but here he was in a flannel shirt, guzzling vodka, totally unable to think of a single thing to say.
So what the hell’s wrong with that? he wondered angrily. Don’t people want to read about themselves? What’s wrong with an Everyman? But Everyman didn’t sell. Snotty vampires that made Goth kids feel better about their whining sold. Porn sold. Blood and guts sold so long as there was someone young, attractive, and sarcastic in the middle of them.
He’d never been able to publish the one work he’d really thought had merit. It’d hadn’t had any winsome seductresses or aristocrats, just a middle-aged man—a little paunchy, a little gruff, a little bit of a wino in the making—becoming more and more exhausted as he struggled against a horde of vampires. Monstrous Nosferatu vampires, with jagged fangs and curling claws.
But nobody wanted monsters that were monsters anymore. The vampires were the good guys, with amazing powers and fascinating life stories. Vampire killers were the Feds, the IRS, your father with a stake and a clove of garlic. Nobody wanted to read a book and see themselves with bloodstained hands and bad breath.
God damn all of them. And what was that scratching outside? Considering the turns tonight had taken, he wouldn’t be lucky enough to face anything as simple as a marauding raccoon. Hell, he’d welcome a plain human cat burglar.
Jerry took one last swig of the vodka—either there had been less in there than he thought, or he was much drunker than he thought he was—and headed to the door. Halfway there, he stopped, thought better of it, and looked out the window. A field of pasty, rotting flesh, red eyes, and yellow claws awaited him. Gaping mouths, dripping with blood and gobbets, torn clothes stained with mud and draped with organs. Ratty hair, pointed ears, and grasping, clutching fingers. They scrabbled at the walls of his house, their fingernails leaving long, deep scratches in the windows. The stench of their rotted flesh and clotted blood was seeping into the house, overwhelming the last faint traces of vodka clinging to his nostrils.
My vampires. My lovely, lovely monsters. Jerry felt a rush of pride swelling in his chest. The unpublished were smellier, louder, redder and far more numerous than his pale protagonists had ever been, more real and horrifying, rendered in Technicolor and Smell-O-Vision. Sure, they wanted to kill him, suck his blood and tear his flesh before turning him into a shambling, hissing corpse…but what was one little death, compared to the legions he’d created with nothing but a typewriter?
This was a good sign, Jerry thought. A very good sign. In you, I will be immortal. You disgusting bastards.
The author opened the door and let his fans in.