The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

"There's a whole lot of living in that voice," the producer said, pushing brittle hair back from his eyes. "The old version was too pure, y'know. I don't go for that ethereal shit. You want to hear ethereal go to a fucking church. But this new version, it's meatier, more honest. I like it."

Minerva leaned in and handed Mona a pair of cassettes. One was new and unlabelled and the other was black and silver, labelled with her own handwriting.

"Why choose, when you can have both?" she said.

Mona turned the old demo over in her hands, fingers tracing the little silver roses she had drawn years ago.

"Where the hell did you dig this up?" she asked.

Minerva grinned. "You can't dig up what isn't buried, honey."

Mona slipped the tapes into her pocket, thinking of the past, of letters and lost love and the indelible images they leave behind, burned into the skin of history.

"I'll remember that," she said.

Outfangthief

Gala Blau

Gala Blau was born in Berlin in 1975. She has spent all her life in Germany, although her mother is English and she visits the United Kingdom whenever she can. She is currently a freelance jewellery designer, and she has been writing seriously for about three years. "Outfangthief is her first published story.

"A number of happy coincidences brought about the idea," explains the author. "I had been checking on the word 'migrations' in the dictionary, thinking of calling this story by that name. But when I opened the dictionary, my eye fell upon 'outfangthief. Nothing to do with vampires (although it sounds as though it might!), but it suited the chase I wanted to work on for the spine of the narrative.

" Also, about a year ago, I cut out a story in The Guardian newspaper about a botched operation performed by a 'freelance' surgeon upon a then seventy-nine-year-old devotee of apotemnphilia, a sexual fetish involving the voluntary removal of limbs for sexual gratification. I kept the idea of a mercenary surgeon, but changed the fetish to acrotomophilia, which is a fetish enjoyed by those who prefer to have sex with amputees .

"All delightful stuff, isn't it?"

At the moment the car slid out of control, Sarah Running had been trying to find a radio station that might carry some news of her crime. She had been driving for hours, risking the M6 all the way from Preston. Though she had seen a number of police vehicles, the traffic had been sufficiently busy to allow her to blend in, and anyway, Manser would hardly have guessed she would take her ex-husband's car. Michael was away on business in Stockholm and would not know of the theft for at least another week.

But Manser was not stupid. It would not be long before he latched on to her deceit.

As the traffic thinned, and night closed in on the motorway, Sarah's panic grew. She was convinced that her disappearance had been reported and she would be brought to book. When a police Range Rover tailed her from Walsall to the M42 turn-off, she almost sent her own car into the crash barriers at the centre of the road.

Desperate for cover, she followed the signs for the A14. Perhaps she could make the 130 miles to Felixstowe tonight and sell the car, try to find passage on a boat, lose herself and her daughter on the Continent. In a day they could be in Dresden, where her grandmother had lived; a battered city that would recognize some of its own and allow them some anonymity.

"Are you all right back there, Laura?"

In the rear-view mirror, her daughter might well have been a mannequin. Her features were glacial; her sunglasses formed tiny screens of animation as the sodium lights fizzed off them. A slight flattening of the lips was the only indication that all was well. Sarah bore down on her frustration. Did she understand what she had been rescued from? Sarah tried to remember what things had been like for herself as a child, but reasoned that her own relationship with her mother had not been fraught with the same problems.

"It's all okay, Laura. We'll not have any more worries in this family. I promise you."

All that before she spotted the flashing blue and red lights of three police vehicles blocking her progress east. She turned left on to another A road bound for Leicester. There must have been an accident; they wouldn't go to the lengths of forming a roadblock for her, would they? The road sucked her deep into darkness; on either side wild hedgerows and vast oily swells of countryside muscled into them. Headlamps on full beam, she could pick nothing out beyond the winding road apart from the ghostly dusting of insects attracted by the light. Sarah, though, felt anything but alone. She could see, in the corner of her eye, something blurred by speed, keeping pace with the car as it fled the police cordon. She took occasional glances to her right, but could not define their fellow traveller for the dense tangle of vegetation that bordered the road.

"Can you see that, Laura?" she asked. "What is it?"