Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead
EVOLVE TWO
Vampire Stories of the Future Undead
Edited by
Nancy Kilpatrick
E-Book Edition
Published by
EDGE Science Fiction and
Fantasy Publishing
An Imprint of
HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.
CALGARY
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Acknowledgments
The editor would like to acknowledge the invaluable emotional support of her friends who have, as always, gotten her through tough times, including several recent losses. She appreciates the numerical help supplied by William Greene Raley, her math major Mensa friend, who may or may not be a vampire! The brilliant artwork of John Kaiine gracing the cover perfectly reflects the contents—thank you John! To the staff at EDGE for all the hard work they put into creating and promoting beautiful books they can be proud to have had a hand in producing. And a special, grateful nod to Brian Hades, publisher of EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy, for, once again, being open to a different sort of anthology, for getting behind it in so many ways, and for giving this vampirophile yet another chance to explore one of her many dreams.
Nancy Kilpatrick
Montreal 2011
INTRODUCTION
By Nancy Kilpatrick
“Why vampires?”
I’m asked that question a lot. I’m asked because I’m a writer and an editor and vampires have managed to infiltrate a fair chunk of my work. And I’m asked because I’ve been a collector of vampireobilia for thirty years and know quite a bit about the undead. Everywhere I am, when the nosferatu takes center stage, either in book, film, visual art or music form, I’m asked, especially at Halloween!
Once that ‘Why?’ question evaporates like a mist, it’s quickly followed by further why questions, for example: why are these creatures of the night rearing their fanged heads so often these days? And: why would anyone find a vampire attractive — what in the world is there to be attracted to?
Please bear with me. I’m going to wax a tad esoteric for a moment about the first ‘why’, the proliferation of the nosferatu, then (hopefully gracefully) ease gently into the second ‘why’, their attraction.
Psychologist Carl Jung coined the term ‘archetype’. It’s one of those hundred dollar words that sounds educated and sophisticated so, once the media got hold of it, the word was bandied about quite a bit over the last couple of decades. Consequently, the original meaning has been seriously diluted, if not polluted.
Today, when many people use the word ‘archetype’, what they really mean is ‘stereotype’. Most of us know that stereotypes are boring. Not to mention unfair. Nobody wants to be seen as a stereotype. It’s ridiculous to lump together people or situations and say they’re all the same, with no variations.
A stereotype is not an archetype. In fact, a stereotype is a dead archetype, one with the life sucked out (sounds like a vampire’s victim!). An archetype is the original, a vibrant energy that is a pulsing template on which whatever comes after is formed. It’s the spirit of the original. All that follows and emulates the original incorporates that spirit and is like it but also unique.
So, what does that mean when it comes to vampires? Picture this, if you can: If we took all the vampires that have ever existed in legend, mythology, literature, film, television, music and art and piled these thousands upon thousands of undead beings atop one another — (yeah, that’s quite an image!) — what we would find is the one thing they all have in common. Each is different but there’s a common thread in all of them and that thread is the archetypal vampire. What is the vampire archetype? Simply put: Vampires are predators; we are their prey.
And yes, even the sparklies like Edward Cullen can turn into a predator at any moment; it’s in his nature, the nature of the vampire. No matter how polished and presentable the undead, our fear of their dangerous side is always percolating, as it should be, and the fear is also part of the allure.
According to Jung, archetypal energies kind of float around in our personal and collective unconscious, not doing much, just hanging out. Every archetype, including the Vampire archetype, has both a positive and a negative side and these powerful energies are eternal, shared by all humanity, although different cultures may ascribe different cultural traits to an archetype. We know that humans down through history have been aware of the vampire. The earliest writing, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates to 2500 BC, is the first record of the death-bringer.
At least since then, the vampire has been lurking. Legends and folklore from many parts of the world talk about the vampire. We read about them in early English and French literature, we viewed them in German, British and American films from the silent cinema days, joined more recently by movies from Mexico, France, the Philippines, Russia, from all over the world. In one capacity or another vampires have appeared on our television screens through the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and onward. There is no shortage of art and music, board games, breakfast cereals, dolls, jewelry, and on and on. Everywhere we look in the present and the past we see the vampire.
Jung discovered that these floating archetypal energies only surface in our awareness when something triggers them. When many people become aware of an archetype, it says that collectively we are bringing this energy out into the open for a reason. Something is up.
We all know that the vampire has become a big deal over the last few decades. We mortals are finding immortals very interesting indeed. We need something from them and, at the same time, we fear them. It’s a paradox.
The current surge in their popularity started in the mid-1970s when several important books were published that shaped the vampire for modern readers and influenced film and television, art and music: Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice); Hotel Transylvania (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro); The Dracula Tape (Fred Saberhagen); Salem’s Lot (Stephen King). With the exception of King’s novel/TV miniseries, these books presented the vampire in a new and evolving light. The vampire was more human, lived among us (although back in those works from the 1970s, that bit of info was known to only a select few fictional characters); and the vampire did not necessarily always have an evil intent.
That perception of the undead has grown and expanded. Today, nearly forty years after those ground-breaking novels, we have undead that not only live among us, but are a known entity, part of society. Some are bad asses, of course, but not all. And generally, they’ve grown more human and less feral.
What we as a species need from the vampire might be tied in with how we have allowed — even encouraged — the undead to evolve. The biggest question is: why did we want to humanize the vampire? Why take what is essentially ‘other’ and try to understand and then accept this non-human, supernatural force that is so threatening. Surely this goes against the traditional Homo sapiens distrust of ‘other’, the desire to defend ourselves and our loved ones from the unknown which is potentially threatening. And maybe that’s the key to understanding why we want this creature which has always been loathsome to integrate into our world. It’s almost as if there’s a silent revolution on the go. What had previously been intolerable is now welcomed. We see t
hat with a lot of groups; over the last decades, categories of people that were ‘out’ are now ‘in’, participating in society, winning their rights, which says that overall our species is more accepting. Despite the wars of today and the fear of those who are not like us and may even harm us, there seems to be almost a quiet but steady drive underway to accept what could not in the past be accepted. Our global village now includes vampires.
The vampire traits that we’re all familiar with give a clue to why we find the undead an attractive lot and why we need them to evolve along with us. Vampires:
1. live forever, or at least more than one lifetime, but certainly long enough to gather some smarts so they can avoid the dumb mistakes we mere mortals seem hell-bent on making;
2. are youthfully gorgeous — despite not being able to see themselves in mirrors — and stay attractive sans Botox, or I should say they have become attractive in the last several decades — first we had to get rid of those old-school smelly, resuscitated corpses;
3. have no problem finding ‘dates’, to employ a euphemism. Their sexual charisma is legendary. What high school senior wouldn’t love to take a vampire to the prom;
4. don’t have to work. In fact, they are often wealthy, having managed some savvy investments over the centuries;
5. are physically powerful and mentally mesmerizing, and they refuse to play by normal human rules and regulations — unless they want to, of course. They’re good manipulators, and this power in its myriad forms comes in handy when they fall outside the boundaries of behavior expected by mortals which, it seems, they do frequently.
Naturally, there are a few drawbacks to their existence, but the spin on those has changed too. Vampires:
6. traditionally sleep in a coffin and sometimes that casket must contain soil from their native land. More often today, though, they retire on satin sheets in darkened chambers that reek of opulence and/or edginess;
7. can be fried crispy by sunlight and are weakest in the daytime. But lots of humans are night people so a moonlit lifestyle isn’t all that strange, especially for the young and palely attractive (see 2 and 3);
8. are allergic to garlic — but many people hate garlic — and wolfs bane (a plant in the buttercup family); most of us wouldn’t know wolfs bane if we brushed against it and developed a rash;
9. will die if they are stabbed through the heart with a stake preferably widdled from hawthorn — but most of us would succumb to a stake through the heart made out of any material;
10. drink human blood to survive. Not all vampires drink blood — human or other — but it seems the majority do imbibe. For mortal vegetarians turned undead, this would be a hellish way to acquire nutrients. But, since most mortals will chomp on a medium-rare sirloin when they can get their canines into one, the liquid diet of the vampire might not be as repulsive as first envisioned.
As it turns out, most vampires don’t kill their victims. It has become common for a vampire to take just a little blood and leave the human intact with a Band-aid to the neck. This makes them a tad more appealing to us.
And, more importantly, most vampires don’t ‘turn’ those they bite. If they did turn their food source into ones such as themselves, well, check the stats on that: a vampire turns one tonight. Tomorrow night those two vampires turn two. The third night the four vampires turn four. In thirty-five days there will be 13,786,200,000 vampires (yes, that’s thirteen billion!) wandering the planet, which is about 6,800,000,000 more than the total population of earth. (Total of Earth’s population estimated as it increases daily.)
Even given contingencies like: the inability to move during daylight hours; the difficulty of long-distance travel which includes time zone changes and daylight savings time; a rebellious human population that fights back; turnings that don’t ‘take’; and vampires who, for one reason or another, murder each other — even with these variables factored in, it’s pretty clear that in short order we mortals would be history. But, vampires are not stupid; they’re not zombies (see 1). They would not intentionally kill off their food supply and starve themselves to death.
One of the biggest pluses and perhaps the one largely responsible for the popularity of vampires of late is their erotic appeal. Vampires are charismatic, rock-star sexy, oozing glamour and seductiveness, so much so that there’s a lineup of volunteers ready and willing to open a vein, just for the titillation of it all.
This has not always been the case (see 2). But even the ugly ones from the past had a certain je ne sais quoi. People did let them into their homes, and yes, in the old days, courtesy being what it once was, the vampire had to be invited in. But why would anyone invite into their home a stinky, dirt and maggot-covered, pale-as-death being with fangs that they knew had died recently and was buried at the local cemetery because in their small town or village, they’d witnessed this departure and/or interment with their own eyes! Plus they were also aware that it was their relative who had died. Traditional lore has the vampire going after family first. Then extended family. Then friends. And family and friends of friends. They were a pretty incestuous lot.
Despite the terror of the person opening the door, and against all odds, vampires were invited in. The reason was simple: the undead mesmerized their potential victims. Like a hypnotist on stage commanding: Bark like a dog! The vampires of old demanded: Let me in! And people did.
Nowadays, earth is getting crowded. Plenty of us live in cities or large towns where the vampire could be our neighbor, or a classmate, or a co-worker, or the overnight gas station clerk, for all we know, or don’t know. We’re wary and not inclined to let strangers into our homes. We’ve changed, but so have the undead. They seem to have gotten over their self-imposed ritual of having to be invited, perhaps at the same pace as humanity’s abandonment of traditional etiquette. Vampires have also overcome their aversion to crosses, holy water, bibles, and other religious paraphernalia. Could this have faded as church attendance declined sharply?
Along the path of their evolution, a good many of what we deem traditional vampire traits altered, or even vanished altogether. The vampire identified in myths and legends and the ones that first appeared in literature, these are not the same vampires we see today. In the past, they were never part of our world. They lived apart from us, cold and undead, soulless, dwelling between realms, skulking amidst the shadows, spawns of Satan, frightening us, extending their existence by ending ours.
They were departed family members coming back for kin. They were aristocrats, using the advantages of wealth and elitism to prey upon both their peers and the lower classes. They were persons born with a caul over the face, or the seventh son of a seventh son. They were religious heretics. Vampires in the past ran from the cross and drank blood until they were bloated and their victims drained. In some parts of the world they sucked souls, or energy, or the life force itself. Vampires were shapeshifters, able to become bats, wolves and rats. In some cultures they appeared more ghost-like or were invisible. They controlled the elements and the lesser creatures of nature, as well as humans. They were the ultimate supernatural force that only under a spell would a mortal perceive as intelligent, erotic and worth encountering a second time. The vampire was to be avoided at all costs if for no other reason than that you would very likely end up dead or undead yourself. That’s why graves were opened, bodies exhumed, hearts staked, mouths filled with garlic bulbs and heads lopped off corpses which were then re-buried at a crossroads face down with a crucifix atop the casket.
But, all that’s the past. Vampires have evolved. Considerably. Out with the old, in with the new. And almost everything we believed we knew about the nosferatu has undergone a shift.
Today’s vampiric predators come in all flavors, from ethereal to sexy, dominant to submissive, tormented to torturer, and they can be the killer or the victim. They are everywhere at all times of day. They buy houses, register for night courses, own RVs and take vacations. And, they’ve learned restraint. They intermingle with
us and interbreed. They drink blood substitute (although they probably prefer the organic stuff!).
Everything about the vampire has changed but one thing: they are still predators, we are still their prey.
A year ago I edited the anthology Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, composed of tales of the vampire we see today and would be seeing in the immediate future. It was a project I’d wanted to pursue for a long time. I’d hoped to extract this extraordinary creature from the past — which is how he/she has been commonly viewed — and show the new vampire, where the princes and princesses of darkness are at now and how that differs from where they were then.
Even before that innovative tome was in the hands of readers, I realized that I’d caught a glimpse into the further future and became excited by the idea of showing readers what I saw. The vampire. Beyond the year 2012.
I challenged writers to find the vampire we’d be seeing in 2025, 2075, 2175 and the year 3000. We know that the vampire now lives with us and has integrated into society — that’s been the most recent common theme in vampire fiction, film and art, so that wouldn’t reverse. But how would, how could these enthralling creatures of the night evolve further without blunting their edge? Will our world be so accepting that we allow the undead to live next door, to occupy the cubicle behind ours at work, to date our daughters without worrying about it? Would future vampires be so civilized that we trust them to rein in whatever violent instincts they possess and not have us over for dinner in the strictest sense of the words?
What about catastrophes, natural and other types, and things like pandemics — we’re seeing signs of such events now. When the going gets tough, maybe the vampire will get going in a way that doesn’t suit us.
As the future unfolds, we will change, and the undead must as well. I was eager to find out how our two species will relate to and interact with one another because in the days ahead, at least regarding vampires, we mortals will be dancing with death on a daily basis. We might come to like and even appreciate them, but that doesn’t mean we will ever feel entirely safe. And can the vampire ever fully trust us, or see us as more than potential nourishment? All is possible, but what is probable? The future will undoubtedly be challenging.