The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

"Until later," she said. On still-lingering tendrils of smoke, she left the cellar. Outside, Marie and Clarice were not to be found. She knew she would never see them again. That was all right. She did not want to burden them. She would do this alone.

She bought a red-eye flight ticket to Virginia from Illinois. She'd heard rumours that the Department of Corrections had decided to allow inmates on Death Row to choose the electric chair or the new, less violent and certainly more civil method of death by lethal injection.

She did not know which condemned man was her Alexandre. She had searched for one hundred years for clues to his new life, and had found nothing. Now, though, she was close. He was there, clothed in another man's skin. She would know him by his hands.

She pushed up the plastic window curtain and stared at the moon. The moon was the same, year after year, century after century. Was it cursed?

"I come, Alexandre," she said to the night.

And if she failed, she would only have to wait again. And she had all the time there was. All the time there would be.

Night Laughter

Ellen Kushner

Ellen Kushner's novel Thomas the Rhymer won the 1991 World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award, while her first novel , Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners,, recently won the 2000 Gaylactic Network Spectrum Hall of Fame Award for Best Fiction pre-1998 (sharing the honour with Nicola Griffith and Theodore Sturgeon) .

Her recent short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as Starlight 2 , Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, The Essential Bordertown and Peter S. Beagle's Immortal Unicorn. Her work has been translated into French, Japanese, German, Latvian and Catalan .

Since 1996, Kushner has been known to public radio audiences across America as the host and writer of the award-winning programme Sound & Spirit, a weekly hour of music and ideas exploring the myth and music, traditions and beliefs that make up the human experience around the world and through the ages. For Sound & Spirit she has created two albums , Welcoming Children Into the World (Rykodisc, 1998) and The Golden Dreydl: A Klezmer "Nutcracker" for Chanukah (S&S 2000), an original story written and narrated by the author, with music by Shirim .

About the following story, Kushner explains: "Some stories just come to you whole, and this was one of them. I was living in New York City, on the fifth floor of a building festooned with gargoyles. I walked downstairs to the mailbox to see if I'd gotten any rejection letters that day, and by the time I got back up to the apartment, I had most of this story in my head.

"I remember I was thinking, for some reason, about how vampires are always portrayed wearing evening dress, and what if that was not attributable merely to Hollywood silliness; what if it was because they really liked to ?"

The thing is, it's just that you start to hate the daytime. All the bad things happen during the day: rush hour, lines at the bank, unwanted phone calls, junk mail, overworked people being rotten to each other. Night is the time for lovers, for reading alone by lamplight, for dancing, for cool breezes. It doesn't matter if your blood is hot or cold; it's the time for you.

"Come on," I say, tugging at his wrist, "come on, let's have fun!" He holds back, reluctant. "Come on, let's dance!"

All over the city the lights are blinking off and on all the time. Night laughter. "Come on into the night!"

"Crazy," he says, "that's what you are."

Rich night-time laughter bubbles in me. I let a little of it show in the corners of my mouth to scare him. He's scared. He says, "You wanna dance?"

I turnaway, shrug nonchalantly. "Nah, not really."

"You wanna go for a ride?"

"Nah," I lick my lips, trite, unmistakable. "Let's go for a walk. In the park."

"No one's in the park at this hour."

"We'll be. Just the two of us, alone. With the long paths all to ourselves."

He rises, follows. The night is like that.

He's wearing a good suit, the best he's got. The night's the time for dressing up, dressing high, dressing fine. Your real night clothes, those are the pressed black and starched white that a gentleman wore, with maybe a touch of gold or a bright ribbon sash setting it off. And a woman was always sleek and bright, lean and clean as a new machine, streamlined as a movie queen. My dress is like that; it clings and swirls so smooth, so long. I stride along beside him in my spiky heels, like a thoroughbred horse with tiny goat's hoofs. Long ago, in Achaea, God wore goat's hoofs and played the pipes all night long. Pipes of reed, like the mouth of a saxophone, blowing long and lonely down the wind between the standing trees.

The trees of the park are sparse, hanging over us in ordered rows, dark and tall as the street lamps between them, but under the trees is shadow. The circles of light, when you come to them, are bright enough to read by. Little insects buzz and flutter against their haloes.