Ellen Datlow - Teeth - Vampire Tales

“I’ll be a vampire,” agreed Amos. He smiled at the thought. “And then I reckon I’ll go home and. despite crosses and silver and everything, I’ll — ”

“No,” said Jane. “No! You don’t want to be a vampire. Grandma. Grandma hated it, she could never see the sun, she could only see daylight through fog. and she was always cold, so cold — ”

“Cold,” agreed Amos. He was cold, too, chilled to his heart. Who needed the sun anyway?

“I’ll help you,” said Jane. “You’ll get better. You can watch television!”

Amos looked at her with dead, unfeeling eyes. He couldn’t even cry for everything he’d lost.

“Help me to the lake,” he muttered as he stumbled into another tree. He couldn’t see properly or work his legs. “That’s not too much to ask, is it, after what you’ve done?”

“No,” whispered Jane. “No. Here, take my arm.”

Amos held on to her arm, though it was hot, so hot he thought it might sizzle his skin. But she held him up as he staggered on, mumbling about drinking the blood of girls with names Jane had never heard of, like Hepzibah and Penninah, and killing someone called Young Franz.

He was so intent on this litany that he barely noticed when they reached the mailbox and Jane sat him down against it.

“What?” he groaned as she lowered him to the ground. “What?”

“Rest a little,” said Jane. “Just for a while.”

She tried to stroke his head, but he flinched away, and she bit back a sob as she saw that her fingers had branded red streaks on the pallid flesh of his forehead.

The ambulance came a few minutes later, accompanied by two police cars. The police spoke to her briefly before driving on up the road to the village. The paramedics gave Amos a sedative and the antivampire shot, then began the transfusion of blood plasma. After a brief conversation with Jane, they gave her a sedative as well and put her on a stretcher next to Amos. She lay there, looking at the unconscious boy, wreathed in the fog that had extended its twining fingers into the back of the ambulance.

One of the paramedics, the older one, looked out the back and took a deep breath before he pulled the door shut.

“Ah, I like a lungful of mountain fog,” he said. “Sometimes you just can’t beat a touch of vampire weather.”

The vampires showed up the summer that Josh worked at Ivan’s Antiques Mall.

The job wasn’t Josh’s idea. He hadn’t asked to be there.

Ivan’s side of the family were all fixated on material stuff, and what is an antiques mall about if not stuff ? Josh’s side were the talented ones. His mother, Maya Cherny Burnham, was a well-known landscape painter. His father taught higher math at the technical college. Upward strivers both, they had never been shy about letting him know that they expected great things from him.

That was okay; everybody pushed their kids. Josh wasn’t the only one taking extra science, math, and creative writing electives. In fact, he was doing pretty well. He even liked the writing work. The teacher was giving him A minuses and B pluses, and he was really getting into it.

Then he broke his leg. And then Steve Bowlin’s crazy dog bit him, two surgeries’ worth. Then he got mono (better than getting rabies, ha ha). A whole parade of pain. No wonder he messed up on his SATs.

His father said, “Josh, you should hear this from me first: If you had major sciences talent, we’d have seen it by now.”

His mom said, “Okay, you’re not the next Richard Feynman or Tom Wolfe — so what? You’ve got more creativity in your little finger than that whole high school put together!”

So, on to after-school classes at the Community Arts Center: oils, clay, watercolor, printmaking, even a “fiber arts” class that (despite strong encouragement from the instructor) he bailed on early. The retards at school were already spreading a rumor that he was gay. He eased out of team sports around that time, too. You do not want to be the weediest guy on the field with a bunch of Transformers who think (or pretend to think, just for the fun of it) that a guy who does any kind of art must be queer.

The worst, though, was when the portfolio of his best drawings didn’t get him into the Art Institute Advanced Placement program. Probably he shouldn’t have included those comic book pages he’d been so proud of. So he wasn’t good enough; but that was what art school was for, wasn’t it? To help you do it better .

His parents said, “Some creative people are late bloomers.” They smiled encouragingly, but disappointment hung over them like those little black rain clouds that float above sad cartoon characters. Josh got depressed, too. He quit drawing, writing, even hanging out in the local museum (a small collection, but they had two awesome Basquiats and a set of spectacular watercolors by a local guy — he could see these things in his mind anyway, they were that good).

He shut himself off as much as he could, using his iPod to enclose himself in a shield of sound: Coldplay, a couple of rappers, some older groups like the Clash. And the Decemberists, at the top of his list since he had heard them in a live concert and had been blown away.

Then at the farmer’s market one Saturday he heard a band performing and stopped to listen.

They were heading for a music festival in Colorado, according to the cardboard sign propped up in an open guitar case: a sturdy guy on a camp stool with one drum and a light, easy beat; a skinny, capering guitarist who wore a T-shirt on his head like a jester’s cap and bells; a low-slung blonde who padded around with her eyes half closed, fiddling the sweetest riffs Josh had ever heard; and a square-shouldered girl with a voice like a trumpet, belting out offbeat love songs and political ballads without ever needing to pause for breath.

They were too cool to talk to — in their twenties, playing barefoot on the grass for gas money — but he stayed until they started to repeat themselves. Their songs were good — quirky, catchy, wry, sad, the works. Okay, they were not Danger Mouse or the Decemberists. But they were surely what those groups had been when they started out: talented friends who went out to play whatever they could to whoever would listen, learning how to make great songs.

That was what he needed to do. That was the life he wanted.

So when the class play, an original musical, needed more songs, he volunteered to help. His reward was to be assigned to write two songs with Annie Frye. Writing verses (what was he thinking ? Now he was really going to be killed in the boys’ bathroom) — with Freaky Frye!

But Annie was fun to work with, and lyrics for her tunes came surprisingly easily. Didn’t that mean something?

Annie introduced him to some seniors she knew who played gigs around town for beer money. They called themselves the Mister Wrongs, and they needed a writer (obviously). He began spending time with them, rehearsing in Brandon White’s garage. Annie had a fight with the drummer and walked out. Josh stayed, not just writing songs but singing them. His voice was getting better. They said if he could grow some decent stubble, he might make himself into an acceptable front man.

He had two big problems. One, his mother thought pop music was stupid and destroyed your hearing, so for the first time she was carping about what he was doing instead of cheering him on.

Two, he was so far behind! He couldn’t seem to get the hang of reading music. The only instrument he could play was a Casio keyboard (secondhand from Ivan’s). He existed, musically speaking, in a whole other galaxy from the Decemberists and their peers.