Smoke And Mirrors

Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot

One day, perhaps, I'll finish the major arcana: seven cards, and seven little stories, still to go. And then there's the minor arcana. You can draw your own pictures.

If the stories in this book were arranged in chronological order, rather than in the strange and haphazard well-it-feels-right sort of order I have put them in, this story would be the first in the book. I dozed off one night in 1983, listening to the radio. When I fell asleep, I was listening to a piece on buying in bulk; when I woke up, they were talking about hired killers. That was where this story came from.

I'd been reading a lot of John Collier short stories before I wrote this. Rereading it several years ago, I realised that it was a John Collier story. Not as good as any good John Collier story, nor written as well as Collier wrote; but it's still a Collier story for all that, and I hadn't noticed that when I was writing it.