“A Place to Stay” (1998)

[spoilers] I was impressed by this longish vampire story by Michael Marshall Smith. It deliberately applies a patina of confusion to a story of a man’s semi-lost evening with a woman he meets and wants to find again. It’s set in New Orleans, the French Quarter in all its touristy glory. The man works in the software development industry and is there for a convention and the excuse to party and blow off steam. These elements are perfect, in 1998, for a night of hard drinking and carousing. Eventually our first-person narrator blacks out. He wakes in the 4 a.m. hour in a bar that is cleaning up after closing. He remembers parts of the night, and parts come back to him as he retraces his steps trying to put it together. He thinks he remembers where the woman told him she works, a retailer of high-end kitchen goods. He finds the place, the next day, and enters, but instead of a store he finds himself in the bar from the night before, and it’s no longer day but night. Smith’s transitions as he switches back and forth between these realities can be jarring, and confusing, but they use my favorite of all the vampire powers, otherwise way too underutilized for my taste, which is the ability to cloud minds. Whatever your theory, by this point of the story the mystery is engaged. It’s hard to guess what might be coming next, specifically, but we’re starting to get the drift. There’s a decidedly modern tinge to it in the affluent, hedonistic, youthful software development world. The woman our guy searches for asked him at one point whether he believes in vampires. Decidedly, contemptuously, he does not. That’s really our only clue, beyond that I was reading the story in a fantasy/horror anthology. Nothing seems vampirish at all about her. Things reach a crescendo of confusion as our guy goes switching in and out of the night before and recovers more information about his missing time. It’s all nicely done with enough misdirection to fool me until the reveal only in the very last sentence. One thing I find interesting about vampire stories is that the lore is so wide-ranging—about mirrors and daylight and counting and all of it—that even if you know it’s a vampire story it’s hard to know how it’s going to play out. This story is obviously dependent on their ability to becloud minds, which I had forgotten as a possibility while reading the story. Smith springs it on us as an unfurling, horrific, endless nightmare, with romance and pleasure ultimately stripped away.

The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.