will preserve my husband’s memory and protect his works to the end of my life—it is the very least I can do.
My husband was more than an insightful man, he was intuitive. If you have not as yet, perhaps you will eventually hear of him and the dark novel which depicts, in metaphor, the agony of the hollow existence of the woman whom he held dear, whose very soul had been absorbed for the refreshment of a psychic vampire.
A Personal Reminiscence,
by Florence Balcombe Stoker
Widow of Irish Writer Bram Stoker
1925
Author’s note: Many of the “facts” in this story are true, howbeit spun by the author into a work of fiction. Oscar Wilde did court the beautiful Florence Balcombe. He presented her with a gold cross necklace, which he asked her to return—she refused. He was known for his dalliances, including with the women mentioned in this story. Florence Balcombe went on to marry Irish writer Bram Stoker, by most accounts neither the happiest nor the saddest of marriages, and gave birth to one child, a son. She enjoyed a very brief career as an actress on the London stage. Stoker, of course, penned Dracula for which, after his death, she fought and won a lawsuit against Germany filmmaker Murnau for copyright infringement. Part of her compensation was that all copies of the silent film Nosferatu were turned over to her for destruction although, somehow, a few reels managed to survive the fires. It is this lawsuit and its consequences for which Florence Balcombe is best known.
WHERE THE VAMPIRES LIVE
Storm Constantine
Storm Constantine has written over twenty books, both fiction and nonfiction and more than fifty short stories. Her novels span several genres, from literary fantasy, to science fiction, to dark fantasy. She is most well known for her Wraeththu Chronicles—The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit (1987), The Bewitchments of Love and Hate (1988), The Fulfillments of Fate and Desire (1989)—and the Wraeththu Histories, The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure (2003), The Shades of Time and Memory (2004), The Ghosts of Blood and Innocence (2005). Although not vampires, the post-human Wraeththu are magical and sensual hermaphroditic beings who, when their story first began almost thirty years ago, broke new ground in speculative fiction. In her single vampire novel, Burying the Shadow (1992), humankind meets its collective end and a highly eroticized universe of vampires takes its place.
In “Where the Vampires Live,” Constantine asks: How can you love someone who is so beyond all that is real it is impossible even to give them a name?
Zenna knew where the vampires gathered after sundown. She could climb out of the attic window, jump onto a limb of the ironwood tree outside and be free of the house, unheard and unseen, in minutes. She would run like a white hind between the dappled shadows of night, perhaps shape-shifting as she ran; hind to girl to hind. Her feet would seem barely to touch the ground. Her hair would be full of moths, drawn to it as if to a white flame.
Ariel would watch secretly from her own window, further down the house, full of envy, wistfulness and other aches she could not identify.
Ariel was Zenna’s cousin, and she had come to live in the Green House in the spring, right at the edge of the forest, far from town. Ariel’s father had died many years before and recently her mother had suffered some kind of disgrace that had affected her ability to be a mother—apparently. Ariel did not know what had happened; all she knew was that her mother had seemed to become someone else, a stranger in familiar skin. This troubled her so much she couldn’t bear to think about it, so it came as rather a relief when her uncle and aunt had offered to take her in for a while.
It quickly became clear to Ariel, who was well-mannered and prudent, that she was the kind of daughter that Maeve and Darn would have liked to have had. They tried very hard not to show it, but Ariel was aware of the irrepressible leaps in their spirit when she asked for things politely, or did chores without being asked. Zenna was a wild creature; wilful, often bad-tempered, but seductively fascinating. When she turned on her light, none could fail to be blinded by it, hypnotized into adoration. Getting her own way was a trait inbuilt into her being. She had magic in her that made it happen. No one could dislike her, because it