The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

Jonquil turned from Johanus, and saw a group of friends she had not communicated with in three years, gliding over the lagoon in a white boat. They waved and shouted, and Jonquil knew she had been rescued, she would escape, but running towards the boat she heard a metallic crash, and jumped inadvertently up out of the dream into the room, where her candles were burning low, fluttering, and the air quivered like a disturbed pond. The silence had been agitated after all. There had been some noise, like the noise in the dream which woke her.

She sat bolt upright in the lock of fear. She had never felt fear in this way in her life. She had meant to stay awake, but the meal, the wine

And the dream of Johanus — absurd.

Outside, in the mirrored night-time salon, there came a sharp screeching scrape .

Jonquil's mind shrieked, and she clamped her hand over her mouth. Don't be a fool. Listen ! She listened. The silence. Had she imagined

The noise came again, harsher and more absolute.

It was like the abrasion of a rusty chain dragged along the marble floor.

And again

Jonquil sprang up. In her life, where she had never before known such fear, the credo had been that fear, confronted, proved to be less than it had seemed. Always the maxim held true. It was this brain-washing of accredited experience which sent her to the door of the room, and caused her to dash it wide and to stare outwards.

The guttering glim of the candles, so apposite to the house, gave a half-presence to the salon. But mostly it was black, thick and composite, black, watery and uncertain on the ruined faces of the mirrors. And out of this blackness came a low flicker of motion, catching the candlelight along its edge. And this motion made the sound she had heard and now heard again. Jonquil did not believe what she saw. She did not believe it. No. This was still the dream, and she must, she must wake up.

The picture of Johnina, painted by the astrologer on a piece of membraneous bluish alien skin, had fallen over in its frame, and now the framed skin pulled itself along the floor, and, catching the light, Jonquil saw the little formless excrescences of the face-down canvas, little bluish-yellow paws, hauling the assemblage forward, the big balanced oblong shape with its rim of gilt vaguely shining. Machine-like, primeval, a mutated tortoise. It pulled itself on, and as the frame scraped along the floor it screamed, towards Jonquil in the doorway.

Jonquil slammed shut the door. She turned and caught up things — the inflatable bed, the table — and stuffed them up against the doorway. And the mechanical tortoise screamed twice more and struck against the door, and the door shook.

Jonquil turned round and round in her trap as the thing outside thudded back and forth and her flimsy barricade trembled and tottered. There was no other exit but the window. She got it open and ran on to the balcony, which creaked and dipped. The weed was there, the blue-green Venus weed which choked the whole city. Jonquil threw herself off into it. As she did so, the door of the room gave way.

She was half climbing, half rebounding and falling down the wall of the house. Everywhere was darkness, and below the sucking of the water at the pavement.

As she struggled in the ropes of weed, tangled, clawing, a shape reared up in the window above her.

Jonquil cried out. The painting was in the window. But something comically macabre had happened. In rearing, it had caught at an angle between the uprights of the shutters. It was stuck, could not move out or in.

Jonquil hung in the weed, staring up at Johnina in her frame of gilt and wood and plaster and night. How soulless she looked, how without life.

And then a convulsion went over the picture. Like a blue amoeba touched by venom it writhed and wrinkled. It tore itself free of the golden frame. It billowed out, still held by a few filaments and threads, like a sail, a veil, the belly of something swollen with the hunger of centuries

And Jonquil fought, and dropped the last two metres from the weed, landing on the pavement hard, in the box of darkness that was the city.

She was not dreaming, but it was like a dream. It seemed to her she saw herself running. The engine of her heart drove her forward. She did not know where or through what she ran. There was no moon, there were no lights. A kind of luminescence filmed over the atmosphere, and constructions loomed suddenly at her, an arch, a flight of steps, a platform, a severed wall. She fell, and got up and ran on.

And behind her, that came. That which had ripped itself from an oblong of gilding. It had taken to the air. It flew through the city, between the pillars and under the porticos, along the ribbed arteries carrying night. It rolled and unrolled as it came, with a faint soft snapping. And then it sailed, wide open, catching some helpful draught, a huge pale bat.