COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1983, 2011 by Brian Stableford
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Barry Bayley
PROLOGUE
As you move along the corridor the hands sprout from the walls, their slow, slimy fingers groping for your arms and your ankles. The cobwebs catch your face, caressing you, and you feel the eyes of the great fat spiders watching you. They don’t move, but somehow that’s no mercy.
There are ghosts nearby, but you’ll never see them. They’re inside the walls, where ghosts prefer to live, coexistent with cold stone. That’s your destiny: to wait out eternity entombed in solid rock, moving through the barriers that set apart the spaces where the others live.
The others?
You’re one of the others right now. An ephemeral creature; a meaningless dream of the nucleic acids, a sport in the grand game of life. Flesh and blood—flesh that is made to feel pain; blood that fills you up so that every least pin prick will burst you and spill you and shrink you and feed the vampire until you shrivel and fade away and run for cover to the bosom of the cold, cold walls.
The vampire is behind you, and you mustn’t forget that. He never drinks wine; how beautiful they sound...but he’s not like that, not really. His eyes aren’t rimmed with red lightning; he has no fangs. He’s a creature of the shadows, his face is too frightful even to be imagined. You never hear him coming; but you always know you’re caught. it’s the feeling of suffocation; the deathly, sickly warmth; the moment when no matter how hard you try, you can’t move; you try to lift your limbs but the heaviness is in them; and the blood...the blood is squeezing inside its sac...squeezing until you burst....
Try to scream!
It’s a dream!
Things are not what they seem.
(You know it’s a dream. You always know...but what’s the difference if you can’t escape? Waking is dreaming too, but you can’t wake from being awake, and if you can’t wake from being asleep, why, then...being asleep is being awake and the dream has you and won’t let you go, and you can be caught and squeezed until you pop like a blister and bleed
and bleed
and...)
It’s a shame.
But you’re to blame.
What’s in a name?
Now it’s the staircase, that goes on and on and round and round. The stairs are wooden, the wood is warped, in the middle they sag. They’re slick (with polish? with grease? with the wax of candles or dead men’s flesh?) and they curve, and with every step you take you nearly slip, but you don’t have to come down hard and you can almost float if you will it well...float and fly, with your arms spreading and one leg out behind you trailing, like a skater on the ice.
But to float is to yield and to yield is to feel the grip of the hands and the heaviness and the cloud of suffocation flowing up from the depths. The staircase grows steeper and the walls draw in, and you know that when you reach the top of the tower there’ll be no place to go, and the night sky won’t help you because the stars are so cold and so damnably far away.
The insects that fly by night are as bad as the spiders and the bats which land on your face and suffocate you with their fur while they suck your blood and give you hydrophobia which Pasteur’s treatment doesn’t cure because there was no double blind...but the staircase just goes on and on and on and there’s no way out.
No way at all.
There isn’t time.
Your number’s prime.
Regret your crime.
You hear him coming now, like the id behind the brazen door, the noise like air caught deep in your throat, rasping and groaning, and you know there’s no escape.
Even here! You howl (silently) as if it were a surprise, though you always knew, or should have known....
Escape in space
won’t win the race
you have to face
it.
You reach out your arms and you try to fly, throwing your head back as if to seek the sun, longing to soar, but all that happens is that waiting hands grip yours, and squeeze until the bones crack, and your shoes sink into the soft wood, which sucks them in, and your feet too, so you’re pulled out tight like a man on a cross, and the shadows flow around you with their sickly warmth and their loving touch, all ready to laugh.
It’s all a dream, you tell yourself, over and over, because you think if you say it often enough you might spring the doors of sleep.
I want to leave!
I need to grieve.
I need you....
But it’s hopeless and you know it. The vampire has you now, and he controls it all. You’re at his mercy, and he has no mercy. He can chew you up and spit you out, and you’re helpless because, in your heart of hearts, you want him to. You’re just a bag of blood, and you need to be squeezed.
For a moment, as he flows around you, you’re not quite so scared. But then you catch a glimpse of the face that’s too frightful to be seen, and the glimpse is enough to let the terror free.
There’s no stemming that tide, once it’s burst its banks.
You can’t scream anymore, because you have nothing left; all you can do is whisper inside yourself.
It’s a dream, a dream, a stupid, filthy dream....
And the vampire opens his red-lipped mouth to show you the darkness inside,
and he says,
of course it’s a dream,
but it’s not your dream,
it’s MINE
End of Nightmare
So I wake up sweating. I always do. The sheet is sticky with it, and so crumpled and twisted it’s almost knotted around my ankles.
I try to smooth it out.
The first feeling is always profound relief. I’ve awakened. I’m out of it, back in the real world. Nothing in these shadows can hurt me.
I switch on the reading light, just to be sure. I check the pale blue walls, the chromatograms, the hand-colored images of Martian landscapes and Cookham on the Thames. Clean and neat. My heart is slowing down; the panic’s over.
Or is it?
I try to remember, and then I know. It isn’t just the nightmare. A necessary but not sufficient condition.
It’s been so long, but I haven’t forgotten, and there’s no shadow of a doubt. When it’s real, it’s real. It’s not just worry, it’s certainty.
My hand is starting to shake, and I take a firm grip on myself. I have to take control. I have to take myself firmly in hand. I can get through it—I know I can—if I only go carefully and do everything right. No one must know, but no one has to know, if only I’m careful.
The last thing I remember is the stupid party. New Year’s Eve. Happy Birthday, 2444...you couldn’t possibly tell me what happened to the last few hours of 2443?
I thought not.
It wasn’t the drink. I only had one glass. I only remember one glass...but whatever else is wrong with me I’ve no hangover. Blackouts don’t drive me to drink. Whatever Mr. Hyde gets up to, it isn’t swilling alcohol or popping pills. Zeno was there...hell, everyone was there, from Schumann down. It can’t have been more than an hour. What can you do in an hour, especially at a party? Even if I did something really crazy, who’d care? A party is protective