Ellen Datlow - Teeth - Vampire Tales

There was an older vampire in her clan who taught her how to find them, those on the brink. He taught her how to smell them from miles away. Showed her the special way to run so that it was almost flying on the wind. He had always been like that, ever since he’d turned. He called it a mercy to the dying. He said he felt like an angel.

He informed her that there was a property in vampire’s mucus that acted like a sedative. Amy had never known how to use it. Her victims had always been horrified and in pain. But he taught her how to hawk up a loogie in such a way that she could swish it around in her mouth with her saliva and spit it into the victim’s mouth so that they felt a pleasant warmth as they were being drained.

This kindness that she offered made her feel better about having to kill. It made her able to look Gina and the other girls they hung out with at night school in the eyes with no guilt.

It was Gina’s birthday. Gina knew that her time was coming to an end. And one thing that she had always wanted to do was go to the beach. But of course she never would be able to, because of the sun.

“Why don’t you go to Abe’s Tropical Paradise Tanning Spa?” one of the girls said during one of their five-minute breaks.

“You’ll come, too, Amy,” Gina said. “We’re both so pale, we could probably use two treatments of spray-on tan.”

Everyone laughed. Including Amy. But it made her miss the sun.

Abe’s promised a total paradise experience in the very comfort of your own hometown . No travel needed! Bring a beach towel! Swim in our marine-animal-free lagoon! Real imported Jamaican sand! Hawaiian-style tiki bar! Private parties available! Spray tan included!

“It might be a fun idea,” Gina said.

Everyone promised they would come. Especially Amy. She wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Gina’s parents knew that there wasn’t likely to be much longer, so when Gina asked for such an extravagant sixteenth birthday party, they gladly paid the $1,500 for Gina and her friends to have a private tropical experience.

All the girls packed beach bags and flip-flops and went downtown at night.

The lagoon area with tiki bar that served virgin margaritas had sand everywhere and a soundtrack of water lapping and bird calls. There were heat lamps that had no harmful UV lights in them. They just flooded the room with warmth. The only way you could tan up at Abe’s was to get spray-on tan. He still had some tanning beds, but they were in a storage room and he didn’t have a license for that anymore. People didn’t want the skin cancer. They just wanted the tropical experience.

Amy was the first to arrive. Abe let her wander around by herself, and she opened up doors and closets as she explored.

In one room, she found the old tanning beds. They looked like futuristic coffins.

Amy could not resist. She had never slept in a coffin. She had vampire friends who swore that it was the best sleep you could ever get. You were so sealed in, with such darkness, that they were sad that it wasn’t in fashion, or that having a coffin delivered to your home would call too much attention. It wasn’t like the old days, when death was a part of day-to-day life and coffins were common.

Amy wanted to try it out. She opened one of the beds. Lay down. And pulled the cover over herself. It was dark. She’d checked that the machine was unplugged, to make sure that it wouldn’t be accidentally turned on. Deprived of her sight, she found her hearing heightened. She could hear the heartbeat of everyone as they entered the spa. Two people. Now five. Now eleven. She could smell their sweat. She could pinpoint the person with the sweetest blood. She drooled for a second at the thought of the taste of the girl. But she would have to feed later, on a stranger. Rules were rules.

She relaxed. She breathed easy for the first time in years.

She drifted off, content.

She woke when she could hear the girls moving into the room. She didn’t want them to think she was weird, so she lay there, waiting for them to leave the room so that she could arrive like a normal girl, from the front door, and not emerge from the tanning bed.

“We can put all the bags and stuff in here, so they’re out of the way. We don’t want to see winter coats and boots in our tropical paradise,” Gina said.

And that was when it happened.

The tightness in her chest. The unbearable feeling of being strapped down.

“Oh, Mom! You bought me roses!” Gina said.

“Yes, but they won’t go with the tropics. Just leave them in the bag and we’ll put them in a vase at home.”

The bouquet of red roses with thorns that her mother had picked up on impulse just to give to her girl on her birthday lay inside the bag. Gina innocently put the shopping bag on top of the tanning bed, trapping Amy inside.

Amy had never believed that the warning the other vampires had given her about roses was true. It seemed more like a fairy tale. Roses were too pretty a thing to net a vampire.

But here she was, stuck. Trapped in the bed.

Amy listened from her jail as Gina and the other girls pretended to swim and bask in the fake sunlight. They splashed and wiggled around in their bikinis.

The whole time that the party raged on, Amy lay ensnared in the coffinlike bed in the next room. Unable to scream. Unable to move. Unable to call for help. Hearing all the fun that she was missing.

It was death. But she was conscious.

For herself, Gina tried to have as much fun as she could. But truthfully, she was mad at Amy for not showing up to her birthday party. She swore that she would never talk to her again.

It wasn’t until hours after the room had been cleaned up and the bag holding the bouquet of roses had been removed that Amy had the strength to lift off the cover and free herself from her temporary hell.

It had never really struck her that she was a vampire before. That although she was immortal and undead, she could be vulnerable. That she really was a monstrous thing who fed on humans, who needed to be trapped. That she was an actual danger to the world. Maybe it was a kind of awakening, because that was when she knew for sure that really being dead and not just undead would be a better end than a living hell.

Amy skipped school for a week after the tanning bed incident. She was afraid that mixing with humans was dangerous to her survival. The hours in the tanning bed had traumatized her. But one night she saw Gina sitting inside a coffee shop. Gina was eating some soup.

Amy missed Gina. She hadn’t called Gina to apologize, and Gina hadn’t called Amy to find out where she had been. Not that she could have told her the truth. But Amy was hurt. She wasn’t used to feeling hurt anymore.

Amy knocked on the window to wave Gina out to her. Instead Gina looked up and waved her in. Amy entered the coffee shop for the first time ever; after all, she’d been invited. It was a hip place, with Christmas lights strung up everywhere and overstuffed chairs and couches and impossibly hip-looking kids with colored hair, tattoos, and piercings, who sipped espressos and chai green teas with attitude.

Amy slid into a comfy chair across from Gina.

Gina didn’t speak. She fiddled with her oversized soup spoon. She looked very tiny in her black dress, dwarfed by the large mustard colored cushions of the chair.

“I really wanted to be there,” Amy said.

“I thought we were friends,” Gina said.

Amy froze. She remembered her old life. The one with the parties and the days spent with friends at Rye Playland and the Coney Island boardwalk. She remembered the slumber parties and the doing of each other’s hair and makeup. The endless flipping through fashion magazines and listening to LP records. The movie outings and the cheering on of boys at pickup basketball games in the park. She remembered her friend Stephanie, and how they couldn’t wait to see each other every day, shared every intimate personal detail, wrote to each other every day over summer vacations apart, and held hands at each other’s sweet sixteens.