The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Read online

  Praise for

  The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women

  Nominated for the 2002 World Fantasy Award

  Nominated for the 2002 British Fantasy Award

  Nominated for the 2001 International Horror Guild Award

  “British horror maven Jones has assembled an impressive volume packed with period classics and fresh takes before and after the 21st century … this is a robust anthology sure to satisfy even the most jaded blood thirst.”

  —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

  “Broad in scope and very lively … Fun, ghoulish stuff.”

  —Booklist

  “Jones, King of the Horror Editors, opens the lid on the first-ever collection of vampire stories by women.”

  —Kirkus

  “If there could be like, a King of Anthology Editors, it would be Stephen Jones … no one knows how to put together a great combination of short literature like Jones. He’s like a really good DJ, except of stories, not music.”

  —Vampires.com

  “Jones performs his usual exemplary job in this massive volume.”

  —Starlog (UK)

  “This is a superb collection of vampire stories.”

  —Bite Me

  Collection and introductions copyright © Stephen Jones 2001, 2017

  To find out more about Ingrid Pitt, please visit The Ingrid Pitt Archive at www.pittofhorror.net and the Ingrid Pitt Fan Club at www.ingridpittfanclub.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover photo credit: iStockphoto

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2383-2

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2384-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION:

  MY LIFE AMONG THE UNDEAD

  Ingrid Pitt

  THE MASTER OF RAMPLING GATE

  Anne Rice

  HOMEWRECKER

  Poppy Z. Brite

  WHEN GRETCHEN WAS HUMAN

  Mary A. Turzillo

  THE VENGEFUL SPIRIT OF LAKE NEPEAKEA

  Tanya Huff

  LA DIENTE

  Nancy Kilpatrick

  MISS MASSINGBERD AND THE VAMPIRE

  Tina Rath

  THE RAVEN BOUND

  Freda Warrington

  VAMPIRE KING OF THE GOTH CHICKS

  Nancy A. Collins

  JUST HIS TYPE

  Storm Constantine

  PRINCE OF FLOWERS

  Elizabeth Hand

  SERVICES RENDERED

  Louise Cooper

  AFTERMATH

  Janet Berliner

  ONE AMONG MILLIONS

  Yvonne Navarro

  LUELLA MILLER

  Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman

  SANGRE

  Lisa Tuttle

  A QUESTION OF PATRONAGE

  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  HISAKO SAN

  Ingrid Pitt

  BUTTERNUT AND BLOOD

  Kathryn Ptacek

  SLEEPING CITIES

  Wendy Webb

  THE HAUNTED HOUSE

  E. Nesbit

  TURKISH DELIGHT

  Roberta Lannes

  VENUS RISING ON WATER

  Tanith Lee

  YEAR ZERO

  Gemma Files

  GOOD LADY DUCAYNE

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  LUNCH AT CHARON’S

  Melanie Tem

  FOREVER, AMEN

  Elizabeth Massie

  NIGHT LAUGHTER

  Ellen Kushner

  BOOTLEG

  Christa Faust

  BEWITCHED

  Edith Wharton

  MY BROTHER’S KEEPER

  Pat Cadigan

  SO RUNS THE WORLD AWAY

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  THE NIGHT STAIR

  Angela Slatter

  A NORTH LIGHT

  Gwyneth Jones

  JACK

  Connie Willis

  VAMPYR

  Jane Yolen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Editor

  In memory of all the wonderful women

  who contributed to this anthology

  who are no longer among us.

  INTRODUCTION:

  MY LIFE AMONG THE UNDEAD

  Ingrid Pitt

  THE SNOW WAS streaming horizontally along London’s Wardour Street as I quit the taxi and cautiously picked my way across the deep slush on the pavement. I had spent quite a lot of time deciding to make the trip and, even now, standing in the shelter of the doorway of Hammer House, I was not sure that the choice had been right.

  After all, I had just made a major epic with MGM and it seemed like a step backward to be considering a cheapo film in the horror genre. I was sure that neither Richard Burton nor Clint Eastwood, with whom I had appeared in Where Eagles Dare, would have considered it for a moment.

  I shrugged off the snow and pushed open the door. Who was I trying to kid? Okay, so Where Eagles Dare was great; but since wrapping on that—zilch. It was time to move on. Capitalize on the great publicity I was getting and do something positive.

  I ran up the short flight of stairs to the inner door and went through.

  The previous evening I had been at an after-premiere party for Alfred the Great and had sat beside Sir James Carreras, the head of Hammer Productions. He told me he was looking for an actress to play the lead in a new vampire film he was making, and asked me if I was interested. I decided to drop the cool pose and looked interested.

  And that was why I had braved the snowstorm and was now standing outside his office, dressed to kill and still wondering if I was doing the right thing.

  Jimmy was great. He made it sound as if I would be doing him a favor if I took the job. I dimpled prettily and said I would speak to my agent, but we both knew that I was well and truly hooked.

  The film was called The Vampire Lovers, and it was scripted by Tudor Gates from J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s century-old story “Carmilla.”

  It was one of the happiest productions I have ever worked on. Hammer Films were well known for the sense of camaraderie they fostered, and The Vampire Lovers was no exception.

  However, at times it did get a little out of hand.

  The two producers, Harry Fine and Michael Style, always made sure that they were around when an “interesting” scene was about to be shot. Madeleine Smith and I shared a bedroom scene that could be uncomfortable if it was not approached in the right frame of mind. Neither of us had ever been photographed in the nude before, so we asked Jimmy to call Harry and Michael up to London on some pretext.

  I was walking along a corridor at Elstree Studios, wearing only a dressing gown for the scene, when I saw the producers approaching. They
looked so unhappy that I could not resist the urge to cheer them up. As we drew level, I threw open the robe! Their step was definitely lighter as they walked on.

  One of the best scenes I have ever seen in a vampire film occurs toward the end of The Vampire Lovers. Carmilla, now exposed for what she is and hunted by the avenging vampire hunter General von Spielsdorf (Peter Cushing), hurries back to her graveyard tomb. The gravestones stand out as black monoliths in a moonlit miasma. Carmilla, dressed in a diaphanous white shift, floats through the cemetery no more substantial than the mist that surrounds her.

  The atmosphere, at times, was very spooky. But with six young women on the set, it got a little frenetic. It was easy to get a fit of the giggles and hold up shooting. Roy Ward Baker, the director, was marvelous. He would wait patiently until everyone had control of themselves, then carry on as if nobody had been rolling around on the floor hooting with laughter.

  One particular scene took a lot of work to get “in the can.” I was supposed to bite Kate O’Mara. Kate is usually in control, but once she goes—she goes. Although my fangs had been specially fitted by a dentist, they did not fit as well as they might have. I had this big struggle with Kate, and my incisors decided to desert my mouth for the more enticing depths of Kate’s cleavage. Of course, all the men on set gallantly jumped forward to retrieve them! Kate started to go. I was too concerned with my wayward teeth to be affected at first.

  We tried the scene again. My teeth headed for Kate’s cleavage like a rabbit down a hole. Kate “corpsed.” Everybody tried to keep their cool. Kate managed to simmer down. And, would you believe it, those rotten teeth headed for their new home yet again. This time Kate freaked out with everybody else on the set.

  All I got was mad. I noticed one of the grips chewing gum. I called him over, took his gum, and jammed the fangs back into my mouth using the gum as a suction-pad. Success. But Kate and the rest of the crew were hooting away even more frenetically by then. That finished work for the day. By that time, even I was rolling around in fits of hysteria.

  The next day I made sure that my teeth were secure. And everybody made sure that they did not make eye contact with anyone else. That way led to disaster.

  Overall, though, it was a wonderful introduction to the world of the vampire and Gothic overkill.

  As we were finishing The Vampire Lovers, I heard that Hammer was setting up another film, called Countess Dracula. It was going to be a big, lavish production and the lead character seemed to be right up my street: a 16th-century serial killer called Countess Erzsebet Bathory.

  I had also heard that Diana Rigg was up for the part. I could not have that, so I cornered Jimmy Carreras and made him promise to give me a chance.

  There were also a couple of other vampire films in the early stages of development at Hammer: Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil. I read the first-draft scripts. The Carmilla character had another outing, but the part was a tag-on rather than the central role, and that made me even more determined to get the part of Erzsebet Bathory.

  I do not know what happened, but one day Jimmy called me into his office and told me that I was to play Bathory.

  Unfortunately, Countess Dracula was not quite the happiness factory that The Vampire Lovers had been. For one thing, the management had come to the conclusion that Hammer was in a battle for survival that it would be hard to win. To try and counter this, they had bought up the sets and many of the costumes from the historical film Anne of the Thousand Days. This was to give the production an unaccustomed gloss.

  The director, Peter Sasdy, was not at all happy with the title. It was exploitative, and he was not making a vampire film. He wanted a title with more resonance. This caused big arguments on set with the producer, Alexander Paal.

  However, there were still the odd moments of light relief. When Sandor Elès, my co-star, was building up to have his wicked way with me in the hay, I looked at his face and shouted, “Cut!” This did not go down well with the frazzle-nerved Sasdy, and he shouted at me that he was the one who said when to say “cut.” I did not care, because I was having a fit of the giggles. I pointed to Sandor’s face. Half of his false mustache was missing.

  A thorough search was made, but it seems that it is as hard to find half a mustache in a haystack as a needle. I went off to my dressing room and levered myself out of the heavy skirt I was wearing. Then in the mirror I noticed something obscene crawling out of my navel. I gave a high-pitched scream, whacked at it with my corset, and leapt onto the bunk.

  My dresser came running. I explained that I had been invested with something Satanic and pointed hysterically to where I had seen the alien item disappear. She bent down and held the hairy object up to the light. It was the missing half of Sandor’s mustache!

  The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula have since become classics of the genre, and I am glad that I braved that cold December morning to meet with Jimmy Carreras.

  I did one more outing as a vampire. This was in the Amicus film The House That Dripped Blood with Jon Pertwee. Originally it was going to be a straight horror film, but Jon just worked on director Peter Duffell until he rejigged the script (by horror writer Robert Bloch) and made it into a comedy. I think the film benefited from it.

  Although ‘The Cloak’ episode in which I appeared was a comedy, it was played out against a background that was surprisingly real. The coffin in the cellar, where my character Carla was supposed to pass the daylight hours, was the real McCoy. We were shooting a scene when a break for lunch was called. I was lying in the coffin, waiting for the scene where I reared up, fangs exposed, and frightened the life and juice out of a nasty police inspector. The crew thought it would be a splendid wheeze to leave me there.

  After a while I cottoned on to the fact that I had been in the coffin a long time and there was no sound of movement getting through to me. I tried pushing the lid up. No go. I tried banging on the sides. Still no reaction.

  It is amazing the thoughts that go through your mind at a time like that. The scenario I was looking at was some sort of catastrophe had overtaken the crew and they were all lying around the set in various dramatic attitudes of death. For a moment I panicked, scrabbled at the lid. Then reason cut in and I guessed what had happened. A typical film set prank.

  But I was not having that. I settled down to wait. A couple of times the death scenario tried to kick in, but I still was not having any of it. When I at last heard some movement beyond the confining walls of my coffin, I pretended to be asleep. As the lid was lifted, I opened my eyes, gave an exaggerated yawn, and innocently asked what was happening! I think I pulled it off.

  On a recent visit to the homeland of that old rogue Dracula, I had a disturbing experience. I thought that the inhabitants of Transylvania would be thrilled that their top export had been acknowledged as one of the most familiar icons of the cinema.

  Not only was I wrong, but some of the denizens of darkest Sighişoara (the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler, also known as Dracula—son of Dracul) were positively hostile to the notion that their heroic Vlad had anything to do with the incarnation of the fictional Dracula. Why they are so opposed to the idea that Bram Stoker’s version of the vampire is something to be ashamed of is hard to nail down. In many ways, the nattily-dressed and be-cloaked film star has much to offer a country still tethered by their communist past to a lifestyle not so different from that described by Stoker.

  The vampire, of course, was not a creature conjured up in the 19th century. Before it was spruced up and introduced into the British drawing room it had ranged through history in a number of gruesome disguises, but always with its trademark calling card—the drinking of the victim’s blood or essence. The vampires of Anne Rice hark back to the days of the Pharaohs, and maybe beyond. They are sophisticated beings who have found themselves a steady food source and live out their tainted existence accordingly.

  Until recently, I thought that vampires had been thought up to suit the predilections of the top-hatted, child-
molesting, wife-beating, power-crazed males of the 1800s. I was surprised to discover that nearly every country and culture had a variation on the theme of the vampire.

  As the vampire became a literary property, its creator was acknowledged as the mad-bad Lord Byron. He only wrote a fragment of a story, but his physician-come-drug pusher, John Polidori, after an acrimonious bust-up with the fractious peer, left his employ, taking the document with him. Polidori himself took up the Gothic theme and substantially rewrote his former employer’s story into what was to become the first classic vampire tale. The Vampyre: A Tale was issued in 1819 by London publisher Sherwood, Neely, and Jones who originally—and incorrectly—attributed the story to Byron. But Byron’s involvement with the genesis of Polidori’s story ensured that the vampire stepped straight out of the tomb and into society.

  Now I am delighted to find myself introducing this new collection of superior vampire stories, written by talented women from diverse cultures and backgrounds. However, fashions change, and the urbane vampire created by Byron and cemented in place by Stoker has had to move on.

  There are now New Age vampires aplenty, waiting in the shadows, just out of sight, ready to slither forth and seek new victims.

  Are you, like me, ready for the new dusk … ?

  —Ingrid Pitt

  London, England

  THE MASTER OF RAMPLING GATE

  Anne Rice

  For many years, Anne O’Brien Rice was the horror genre’s female equivalent to Stephen King. A publishing phenomenon in her own right, having sold around one hundred million copies, she began her acclaimed Vampire Chronicles series in 1976 with the novel Interview with the Vampire. Responsible for creating a huge resurgence in the popularity of the undead, the book introduced readers to her sexually powerful bloodsucker, Lestat de Lioncourt.

  Described as “the undisputed queen of vampire literature,” she followed it with a string of best-selling sequels and spin-offs, including The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, The Tale of the Body Thief, Memnoch the Devil, Pandora, The Vampire Armand, Vittorio the Vampire, Merrick, Blood and Gold, Blackwood Farm, Blood Caticle, and Prince Lestat.

  Her other genre novels include the Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy (The Witching Hour, Lasher and Taltos), The Wolf Gift Chronicles (The Wolf Gift and The Wolves of Midwinter), The Mummy or Ramses the Damned, Servant of the Bones, and Violin. More recently, her Songs of the Seraphim series has so far included Angel Time and Of Love and Evil. She has also published a number of erotic novels under the pseudonyms “Anne Rampling” and “A.N. Roquelaure.”