The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

Then there was poor Aunt Molly; stealing from the people she cleaned house for, taking a ring here, a watch there. Nothing they could prove Molly had taken, things they could have easily misplaced. In the dream, Andrew saw her standing at her wardrobe, a box of booty in her arms, thinking of the life she'd have when she hocked it all and bought herself a flat of her own. Her antipathies for her bitter sister were evident in her wish that all that was Bernadette's turn to dross. That Andrew was more her child than Bernadette's and one day she would tell Andrew the truth. That his mother was a whore, not a secretary at Babington Hospital. She laughed then, deeply, loudly, without remorse.

The nightmare ended. The woman swooned, sated, as he awoke. He looked up to her. She had an aura of light around her that twinkled and pulsed. She sat down on the chair beside the bed and wept. Andrew sat up. In his mind, he thought to go to her, comfort her. She sobbed on. But he could not seem to muster the concern to move. He watched her until she went quiet.

"What happened to you? Why do I feel like this?"

She seemed to wake from a reverie, and then fixed him with her bright eyes. "He did not tell you?"

"The granddad? No, he just talked about essence and treasures. Was it me made you cry?"

The old woman rose up, took a few steps away. She thought a moment about what she might say, then said nothing. She opened the door.

"Please," Andrew said flatly.

"Oh, what's the harm." She returned to the bed. "You will know as soon as you talk with the other children." She sat down, leaned against the bedpost. "My son, do you see some of the uglier truths of your life now? Do you feel the sorrow in that truth?" She waited but Andrew remained impassive, silent. "I have lifted the veil of ignorance you have relied on all of your ten years. Do you not feel different for the weight of your innocence now gone into me?"

Andrew looked within. It was as dark and wet as the night the granddad had taken him, but there was no glistening.

"You are unlucky in that you are mine. I will always weep at your loss and the sweetness of my fullness. It confuses. In time, you will no longer be confused. You will just be ." She laughed dryly, as the granddad had. "And to think that some of the silly human race rather reveres that state being . They call it 'enlightenment' and spend a lifetime seeking to attain it." She rose again, chuckling, went to the door and smiled a smile like dice without dots. "Until tomorrow."

When the door shut behind her, Andrew looked at his hands, felt his face. They were the same as always. He had not changed, really. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, he would look and see if they had a library with any books on Turkey. He hadn't finished the one he'd left behind. Somewhere.

Venus Rising on Water

Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee was born in London and lives on Britain's Sussex Weald with her husband, writer John Kaiine, and two cats. She began writing at the age of nine and worked variously as a library assistant, shop assistant, filing clerk and waitress before having three children's books published in the early 1970s.

When DAW Books released her novel The Birthgrave in 1975, and thereafter twenty-six other titles, she became a full-time writer. To date she has published more than seventy books and nearly 200 short stories. Her novels include Sabella, or The Blood Stone, The Blood of Roses, and the "Blood Opera" sequence (Dark Dance, Personal Darkness and Darkness, I ), while her short fiction is available in collections such as Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer and the 1986 Arkham House retrospective , Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee. Her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages, and she has won two World Fantasy Awards for short fiction and the 1980 British Fantasy Award for her novel Death's Master.

Four of her plays have been broadcast by BBC Radio, and she has scripted two episodes of the cult BBC TV series Blakes 7, including the 1980 space vampire story, "Sarcophagus" .

"So far I've written seven novels about vampires," reveals the author, "or types of vampire, and quite a lot of short stories of various lengths. Vampirism, to me, is one of those themes where somehow another idea or twist is always making itself known to me. The subject seems limitless, perhaps because the vampire seems somehow to have woven itself among the human psyche.