The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

A rat sat on a coffin overseeing her departure, digesting in its belly blueness and alien dreams. The walls went on crumbling particle by particle. Silence flowed over the city like the approaching sea.

Year Zero

Gemma Files

Born in London, England, Gemma Files has been a Canadian citizen since the age of two. She has a BAA in Magazine Journalism and has spent the past eight years writing freelance film criticism for a popular local news and culture review in Toronto.

Her first professional sale was "Mouthful of Pins" to Don Hutchison's anthology Northern Frights 2. Since then her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies such as Grue, Transversions, Palace Corbie, Selective Spectres, Demon Sex, Northern Frights 5 and Queer Fear. Her story "The Emperor's Old Bones" won the 1999 Best Short Story from the International Horror Writers' Guild and was reprinted in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Eleven and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Thirteenth Annual Collection. Four of her stories have been adapted for the anthology TV series The Hunger.

"Vampires, as all my non-horror-friendly pals so often sneer, are a dead-end concept," explains Files: "the same tropes repeated without variation, over and over dirty little sex fantasies masquerading as good, clean fear. But it only requires a few nights' cursory research to realize that even the oldest stories posit as many different types of vampires as there are different types of people for them to feed on (and not all of them drink blood, either).

" I think of vampires, therefore, as the dark literature world's equivalent of the Rhorsach blot. If you're limited, your idea of what vampires are or could be will be similarly limited. And if you're not "

About the following story, the author reveals: "When I was a kid, I remember being wonderfully impressed by the TV adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel starring Anthony Andrews, Ian McKellen and Jane Seymour; of course, given my perverse nature and interests, I found myself identifying far more heavily with the embattled Agent Chauvelin and his fellow Revolutionaries than with that rather vicious fop Sir Percy. At any rate, it started me off on a life-long French Revolution kick that cross-bred perfectly with my equally life-long vampire fetish: blood, decapitation, a general violent upheaval of the natural order ooh, yeah, baby. And since 'walking corpses who suck blood' has always seemed like a pretty good description of any given aristocracy to me, I guess this particular story could be read as nothing deeper than my chance to elaborate on that metaphor a tad — not to mention have quite a bit of good (albeit messy) fun doing so ."

And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood. I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live. Ezekiel 6:16

At the very height of the French Revolution, after they killed the king and drank his blood, they started everything over: new calendar, new months, new history. Wind back the national clock and smash its guts to powder; wipe the slate clean, and crack it across your knee. A failed actor named Fabre d'Eglantine drew up the plans. He stretched each seven-day week to a ten-day decade, and recarved the months into a verdant litany of rural images: fruit and flowers, wind and rain. The guillotine's red flash, masked in a mist of blistering, lobster-baked heat.

The first year of this process was to be known as Year Zero. Everything that happened next would be counted from then on. And all that had happened before would be, very simply

gone.

Then: Paris, 1793. Thermidor, Year Three, just before the end of the Terror

"Oh, la, Citizen. How you do blush."

I must wake up. Jean-Guy Sansterre thinks, slow and lax — the words losing shape even as he forms them, like water dripping through an open mental hand, fingers splayed and helpless. Rouse myself. Act. Fight

But feeling, instead, how his whole body settles inexorably into some arcane variety of sleep limbs loose and heavy, head lolling back on dark red satin upholstery. Falling spine-first into the close, dim interior of the Chevalier du Prendegrace's coach, a languorous haze of drawn velvet curtains against which Jean-Guy lies helpless as some micro-organism trapped beneath the fringed, softly sloping convex lens of a partially lidded eye.