The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

Ariadne. It fitted her. A beautiful name for a beautiful woman. He glanced once more at her, and like that one other time she seemed to have crawled atop the other man. He blinked; surely he could not be seeing what he saw, and yet even though the light in the tent was dim he could make out the outline of the woman straddling the prone DeLance, the skirts of her gown spread out. She rocked back and forth, and murmured all the while, and he could hear DeLance groan.

Embarrassed, Foster still watched; he couldn't look away. DeLance cried out in release, and the woman whispered, and bent down over DeLance's lips and kissed him long.

Foster felt a warmth suffusing through his body and he closed his eyes tightly and thought of Sarah, good-hearted Sarah. Sarah who was just a little too thin because of their hard times; not with a voluptuous body like this woman this Ariadne here in the tent.

A woman in the hospital. Impossible, he told himself, and he looked once more, and Ariadne was rising from DeLance, straightening her skirts. Foster watched as she ran a hand down DeLance's chest to his groin, and DeLance shuddered.

He glanced across at Long, but the man was asleep. Foster looked up and down the double rows and saw that of the other men he was the only one awake, the only one to see what he had seen. But what was that?

The woman — Ariadne — had done something to DeLance. She had climbed atop — no, Foster decided, climbed wasn't quite the proper word. Slithered? No.

She had seduced no, that wasn't the right word. Nothing was right, he decided, nothing tonight.

He closed his eyes and willed sleep to come, but stubbornly it refused.

The following day it rained, and the dampness seeped through the canvas walls and into the bones of the men, chilling them to their very souls. Foster felt the worst he had since coming to the hospital. The flap to the tent had been left open, and he could see the greyness outside, the dripping leaves, the subdued colours, and remembered what autumn was like at home.

He and the other farmers in the area would be done with their harvesting, and the wives and mothers and sisters would have been cooking all day long, and then towards sundown would come the dances in someone's barn. Some man would bring out a fiddle and maybe a mouth harp, then maybe a bucket or two or even some old jugs — they didn't much care what they used as musical instruments as long as it made noise — and William, Foster's oldest slave, a man who'd worked for his father, would bring out his banjo. They'd all dance, too, the slaves and their owners in their own separate circles. The barn would smell of drying apples and old manure, of new hay and dust which rose under the stamping of their feet on the dirt floor. A cow, somewhere down the line in a crib, would low in response, a bird in the eaves might flutter briefly, and in the flickering yellow light of the lanterns they would sing and laugh and drink home-made brew and celebrate the good harvest.

Only the past two years there'd been no good harvest; times had got rougher, and there'd been no dances. There'd been setbacks in the planting, he'd lost a crop or two, and several times army companies had marched through the farmland and taken what food they wanted. They'd also hurt Nell, William's granddaughter, and William had grabbed a pitchfork before Foster could stop him and had run after the retreating soldiers. He'd been shot in the head and he'd simply sunk to his knees, lifeless already, and when Foster had finally reached the old man, his skin was already cooling.

Sarah had cried when Foster and Tom and George, William's sons, buried the old man out on the hill behind the house.

And for a long time after that Foster had sat upon the porch thinking. It had been confederate troops who had come through his farm, who had hurt Nell, killed poor old William.

His own kind, Foster kept saying. His own kind did this. But it was war, one part of him said. That doesn't excuse it, another argued. And he knew then that if the Southern troops would do such awful things, what could he — and Sarah and the others — expect if the Yankees were to come down here, to come through these bountiful farms? What sort of horrors could they expect at these Northerners' hands? What would these Yankees who hated them so much do?

And so the next day he'd kissed his wife goodbye, taken his best hat and best rifle and a pouch full of shot, and had left the farm to volunteer. He would fight, and he would keep the Yankees and the others away from his family. It was the only thing he could do.