The Dark Issue 98: The Dark, #98

By Sam J. Miller, Steve Rasnic Tem, Kristi DeMeester and Françoise Harvey

Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Selected by award-winning editor Sean Wallace and published by Prime Books, this issue includes two all-new stories and two reprints:

 

"If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak" by Sam J. Miller
"Gavin's Field" by Steve Rasnic Tem (reprint)
"A Ritual for Pleasure and Atonement" by Kristi DeMeester (reprint)
"Red Red Rose, Bare Bare Bones" by Françoise Harvey

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Jun 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223026594

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 98 • July 2023

If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak by Sam J. Miller

Gavin’s Field by Steve Rasnic Tem

A Ritual for Pleasure and Atonement by Kristi DeMeester

Red Red Rose, Bare Bare Bones by Françoise Harvey

Cover Art: Female Zombie Standing on Stairs in Abandoned House by Tithi Luadthong

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2023 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak

by Sam J. Miller

My brother on my front porch wailing my name, soaking wet and without a jacket in the cold spring rain, with nowhere else in the world to go, wondering why I won’t let him in.

My brother crashing at our mom’s house, preying on her weakness the way he always did; me calling her every day and waiting for when she’ll let it slip that the TV is missing or a credit card is gone.

My brother phoning at four AM, begging for fifty bucks but forgetting the username of his latest account on Paypal or Zelle or Venmo or CashApp, the previous one having been shut down like all the others for fraudulent activity.

I think of Planck now and it’s shit like this that comes to mind. Which is so profoundly fucking sad it makes me even madder at him.

We’re twins. Our first fifteen years were a bubble of shared bliss and ill-advised adventures, secret language and all, us against the world, but now his name pops up on my phone or an old friend asks how he’s doing and I don’t think about jumping fences to steal apples from a neighbor’s orchard, or dressing identically to engage in uncanny performance pranks in public. I think of my brother’s hollow sunken eyes across the Thanksgiving dinner table—six Thanksgivings ago, the last one he was invited to. I think of my brother debasing himself in a sleazy non-studio porno film clip a so-called friend sent me.

Planck and Faraday, named by our mom after two scientific constants, meant to be universal and unchanging for each other . . . but the only constant in Planck’s adult life has been addiction.

It’s a common misperception, that vurdalaks are a sub-subspecies of vampire. True, both creatures are dead and drain the life force of the living, but ethno-archaeological studies have traced distinct lines of descent.

Vampires, as everyone knows, originated in Egypt, and while scientific consensus on the origin of the vurdalak is lacking, most researchers believe it was Eastern Europe. The first known use of the word is in Russian, in a poem by Pushkin, and scholars still argue whether he made it up or was merely citing a folkloric tradition that had not been previously recorded.

For nearly a century, vurdulaks were said to subsist on blood, but this is now believed to be a relic of an earlier scholarly period when parahuman subspecies were less well understood, and intermediary strains outside the primary taxa of vampire, werewolf, and zombie tended to be grouped in with one of those. There are documented cases of vurdulaks consuming blood, but this is typically ascribed to confusion about their own mechanism of feeding, or a desire to be erroneously believed to be vampires.

The simple, unique, horrifying defining characteristic of the vurdulak is this: postmortem animation can only be sustained by feeding on people who love them.

Strangers and mere acquaintances are toxic to them. Vurdalaks can only derive nourishment in the presence of actual love.

Vampires can make ethical choices about who they feed on, and how. Vurdalaks have no such freedom.

Death was just another step on the long rocky staircase down to rock bottom for Planck. I don’t know how or when it happened, just that one day he showed up a lot paler than he’d been before. Shunning sunlight more than normal. Prone to showing me shitty party tricks like cutting himself and no blood coming out.

I’ve asked around. Nowadays every gay guy knows a vurdulak or two, just as we all have friends who’ve fallen victim to tina—aka christina—aka crystal meth.

I’d already heard about the addict cuddle puddles. A group of crystal-heads will get a hotel room and spend days fucking and slamming and sleeping. Splitting costs and steadily lowering standards. Losing touch with reality.

Turns out, vurdulaks love that scene. Since they swiftly consume or alienate everyone who loves them, they have to form new attachments. Get new folks to fall in love with them. So they find a drug-addled orgy on Grindr, show up, fixate on someone drugged out and desperate and in the grip of extreme feelings, show them a little kindness and a lot of sexual availability, and, bam. Give it a couple of days and that person has fallen in love with them. Which means they can feed on them. And maybe turn them.

So I figure that’s how it happened. He ended up at an orgy on a Tuesday and was food by Friday. A monster by Monday.

Planck was always one to fall in love fast. That’s something that’s true of me too.

But the silver lining of finding out at fifteen that you have an astonishing genetic propensity for addiction is, you learn what danger signs to steer clear of. I lost my brother, but I gained boundaries. Walls I could build, around my heart. So I never experimented with any substances, and I learned not to trust or indulge my own needs.

Sex was fine. Sex was easy. But love was work, was stress, was risk.

I steered clear.

Vurdalaks are believed to be the smallest in population size the of the confirmed supernatural subspecies, and certainly the least-studied. Most scholarship on the subject originated in either the USSR or the USA, and throughout their existence both nations were notorious for the unethical standards of scientific treatment of sentient creatures, the dubiousness of consent in their historic research traditions.

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