Bearing crosses

My first inclination is to tell you that vampires are nothing at all like you see in the movies.  They aren’t, but not for any of the reasons that you think.  It’s become somewhat of a convention in vampire films to spend a good chunk of plot exposition enumerating all of the ways that vampires differ from the legends that you might be familiar with. For the most part, they’re really comparing themselves with Stoker’s Dracula.  That story, especially the Tod Browning film rendition starring Bela Lugosi, is the point of comparison for nearly all contemporary vampire tales. Different authors cherry-pick their favorite aspects of vampire lore, and then tell you why all of those OTHER legends are downright fabrications and old wives’ tales.

I make it my habit to watch as many vampire movies as I can.  You never know when some clever author will hit upon a new method of slaying that will actually work in the field.  You’d be surprised to know that quite a few horror writers have actually consulted with respectable vampire hunters in their valiant attempts at realism.  I can usually tell which cinematic offerings have some basis in fact.  Unfortunately, many of these fall victim to executive tampering before they ever see the big screen.  Tragically, the happy ending where the brave vampire hunter vanquishes his unearthly undead foe is not characteristic of my profession.  My list of colleagues grows thinner every year.

The most egregious vampire falsehood to grace the silver screen is the utter and complete lack of common sense on the part of the antagonists.  In all my years of experience hunting the undead, I have yet to see a vampire wail ineffectively before throwing itself chest-first onto the next stake it sees.  Based purely upon their depictions in film, you’d think that 99% of all vampires were suicidally insane.

A vampire is not merely intelligent, it is fearfully intelligent.  The ambulatory corpse that you see lurking in the shadows is not some guy that’s been dead for a century and is just too stubborn to stay down. It is a demonic spirit that can remember a time before there were humans.  If you think that we human beings are the most dangerous game, imagine how dangerous the average human would be if it had a few millenia of experience under its belt.  That’s what a vampire is.  It is one of the most cunning things on the planet.  They give other monsters nightmaes. I guess what I’m trying to say here, is: Don’t try this at home.

Right now, you’re probably wondering what clever tricks “work” against vampires, and which tactics do not.  Well, for the most part, crosses work.  That surprises you, doesn’t it?  I’m not sure exactly why it is.  They don’t burn from it, and some of them will actually wear a cross as a way of deflecting suspicion, or possibly as a mark of bravery.  But when you display a cross prominently, vampires get uncomfortable.  It might have something to do with the many vampires destroyed during the Crusades, or the Inquisition.  But a cross serves as a good protection if you have to be somewhere where you’re susceptible to vampire attack.  As I said, it doesn’t harm them in any way, so if they’re really thirsty they might just charge you like a temperamental  rhinoceros.  So be on your guard.

Wooden stakes will usually slow a vampire down considerably.  Stabbing a foot and a half of timber into the epicenter of their circulatory system tends to have a negative effect on their blood flow.  Vampires rely on the blood that they ingest from victims to sustain the life of their borrowed corpse.  Disruption of that blood flow makes them twitchy and disoriented.  Watching a vampire struggle with a stake through its heart is like watching an ant recover from a half-hearted stomp from a Doc Marten.  They’re not immobilized, they don’t turn to ash, but they certainly have trouble running away.  From there, decapitation, or a half-gallon of gas and a box of matches works wonders.

Finally, a word about sunlight.  In the oldest legends, sunlight was never harmful to vampires, they simply stopped moving during the day.  This was as much a product of the medieval idea of Heaven and Hell as anything else.  Evil spirits were believed to be completely powerless after the first cock’s crow.  The power of Jesus rose with the dawn, and devils and demons went back to the fires of Perdition from whence they came.  Now, I don’t believe all of the religious explanations, despite my previous mention of the vampire’s susceptibility to crosses.  I’ve seen vampires crawling around the daylight, but they’re far less active at the break of day that they are at night.  I have a hypothesis, but I honestly haven’t had the time to properly test it.  It’s still percolating in the back of my head at this point.  When exposed to direct sunlight, a vampire’s body seems to show its true age.  I’ve seen the faces of fresh young teenagers suddenly take on the appearance of an old man straight out of the nursing home.  I don’t know yet if their bodies are similarly affected beyond a cosmetic shift, but I aim to find out.  This might even explain the accounts of vampires turning to ash beneath the sun’s powerful rays.  But as I said, this isn’t even a theory yet.  You will know when I know, Dear Reader.

– Chretien

Next up: What vampires can do.

Some people are so sensitive.

Adriana is probably the most empathic person that I know. She can look at you with those crystal blue eyes of hers and know exactly what’s going through your head. If you’re a heterosexual male, it’s usually not all that difficult.

You’ll notice that I used the word “empathic”, as opposed to “psychic” or “sensitive”. Adriana’s ability to read minds is not some mystical mutant power caused by her mother standing too close to a microwave while she was in utero. Adriana doesn’t have any superpowers. What she does have is talent. Over the course of primate evolution, we silly monkeys have developed quite a few tricks for figuring out what our fellow Homo Sapiens are thinking. It’s the reason that you can usually tell the difference between someone saying: “Nice shirt”, or “Nice … shirt“. There are at least a thousand non-verbal cues that we pick up on without even realizing it. Autistics often have a disability for perceiving these social cues, and tend to draw up inside of themselves, fearing human interaction. Other people are hyper-sensitive to these idiosyncratic tendencies, and they can either use that talent to give aid and counseling to others, or to rip them off. Adriana is one of the latter.

Her level of talent is breathtaking. She could charge tickets to her so-called “psychic advisory” sessions, and people would watch just to see the mastery at which she relieves people of their hard-earned cash. No Oscar-winner ever performed as effortlessly as she does. Her costume is typical of what you’d expect from a young neo-hippie working in an advisory capacity. A lot of brightly-colored taffeta and muslin, new age charms and talismans hanging from her neck and wrists, and her curly golden blond hair pulled back in the loosest of ponytails. Her every step trails the scent of patchouli and rosewater, and she speaks with a soft gentle voice of a mystic daughter of the Earth. Talking to her always makes me nervous. I feel as though she can see right into my headspace. For drastically different reasons, I also hate visiting her when she’s with a client. For someone who freely speaks about such enlightened concepts as “karma” and “balance”, she does a lot of things that are not quite on the same side of the street as “ethical”. All “psychics” do this, but sometimes I feel that Adriana takes a sick pleasure out of it. I’ve actually watched her extract an ordinary hen’s egg from its shell (something that we learn in 3rd grade art class), and then re-fill the shell with chicken blood and gizzards for the melodramatic voodoo ritual in which she will reveal that her client is under a terrible curse and must surrender $200 in protective anti-curse charms and spells.

Walking in to the sound of sitar and shakuhachi (an international blend), I take a casual look around her office. I feel a slight unease in my gut while looking over the shelves of incense, gris-gris, and new age book titles. I guess if I thought for one moment that Adriana believed in any of this, I wouldn’t mind. A person’s religion is their own business. But this is pure larceny, and I’ve spoken to her about it. Unfortunately, whenever I do, she usually takes that opportunity to rattle off the list of crimes that I’ve personally committed in my crusade against the undead. If she’s really feeling mean, she’ll throw in those few times I smoked pot in college.

After a few minutes, I watch an obviously wealthy society dame in gold and diamonds emerge from Adriana’s counseling room. For a moment, I try to tell myself that this makes it all okay. If I’d seen somebody’s sick grandma come tottering out of the room, I might have thrown up in that brass vase shaped like a spittoon. Seeing Mary Sue Mercedes-Benz swagger from behind the curtain let me live with the illusion that maybe ALL of her clients came from that privileged demographic.

I was, in fact, here on business. As I said, Adriana has no kind of psychic powers or abilities at all. But what she CAN do, is read people. She can tell a person’s life story simply by the way they hold their car keys, and for a vampire hunter, that ability is priceless. I don’t have any sort of high-tech gizmo that beeps frantically every time a vampire is near. I down own any specially treated Ray-Bans that would enable me to see which of my fellow humans have long since shuffled off their mortal coil. What I do have, is Adriana, and she can sniff out a bloodsucker like it’s wearing a neon sign.

Without pausing to greet me, Adriana walks directly across the room, and right into my personal space. She presses an open palm firmly on my chest and covers her eyes with her other hand, as if scanning for psychic vibrartions.

“You are … troubled, … a person in need.” she tells me ominously. “You have come here to fulfill this desire, this doom … you need …”.

I could immediately think of a few burning needs that I’ve always wanted her to fulfill, but I didn’t want to itemize those dubious desires right in front of her.

She pushes my chest, hard, with her open palm, forcing me to stumble backward into the large potted philodendron. She then grabs her oversize hemp purse and starts for the door.

“You need to buy me a venti green tea latte … and you’re driving”.

What would you say if I told you … ?

My name is Chretien Smith, and I hunt vampires.

Nice work if you can get it, right?

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Vampires aren’t real. There are no such things as vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons, or zombies. Every one of them is a creation of fiction, dreamed up in the mind of their authors after a bad dream caused by too much seafood. Vampires are no more real than unicorns or fairies.

I’ve tangled with fairies before. Nasty things.

Truth be told, I don’t really give a flying fig if you believe any of this. This blog is my own clumsy attempt at chronicling my unorthodox advocation of tracking down bloodsucking demons from Hell and sending them back to the darkness from which they came. I used to keep a written journal, but that got torched two weeks ago due to my own stupidity and carelessness. I’m banking on the fact that an electronic journal is at least 20 times safer than anything on paper. No information is ever lost on the Internet, and I figure I’ve got a few decades left before vampires learn how to use a proper search engine. They’re old-fashioned that way.

I usually like to refer to myself as a vampire hunter because I have to deal with the stinking things about 85% of the time. I have fought with werewolves, and exorcised a ghost or two, but it is mostly vampires. I can’t afford to discriminate. I am an equal-opportunity slayer-of-things-supernatural. But when you call yourself a “vampire hunter”, people generally identify you as an all-around monster-buster. Blame it on Buffy, blame it on Anita Blake; the term “vampire hunter” seems to have embedded itself onto the collective unconscious. As I said, most of what I do is vampire hunting, so it fits the job description.

So before I get too caught up in my own war stories, let me jot down a few of my field notes so you all understand where I’m coming from.

Despite what esoteric romance novelists and gothic soap operas might try to tell you, vampires are not nice people. As a former English Lit major, I can appreciate the postmodern mythology that has sprung up around these creatures. Since the mid 20th century, vampires in film and literature became more appealing as misunderstood good guys than as the bloodthirsty villains that they very much are in reality. This can be seen as a type of identification by the author on a being that is attractive, intelligent, and utterly lacking in the tawdry moral and social restrictions that the rest of us breathing folk have to deal with. The vampire is seen as a kind of Byronic hero, a rakish playboy that drinks human blood as a kind of sexual fetish. Some authors use vampirism as a metaphor for homosexuality, or for adolescence, but these deconstructions miss the horror of true vampirism. Reality is never quite as pretty.

Heaven help you if any of your loved ones fall prey to the curse of vampirism. If it’s someone very close to you, such as a spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend, you can expect to get a knock at your door very early in the morning. This will be the local police, coming to inform you that the person that you loved most in this world was found in the woods this morning with the blood drained from his or her body. There will have been signs of a struggle, and an investigation into the matter. Then of course comes the funeral, the teary-eyed visitors coming to comfort you as you try to cope with this devastating loss. If this had all been a mere automobile accident, or some kind of terminal disease, you might be able to make your peace with the departed and move on. But in addition to the grief and separation that you feel, you have a major police investigation watching you at all times. Everything you do becomes suspect. When you left your house last night, where did you go? Was it just a short drive to clear your head, or were you disposing of evidence? When was the last time that you had a argument with the deceased? Do you even have an alibi for the night in question? This is enough to cause debilitating despair in most people.

Eventually, the cops will leave you alone. Most law enforcement agencies are surprisingly competent, and will be able to write you off as a suspect. There are about 6,300 unsolved murders in the United States per year, and this will just be another one. Congratulations, the single most terrible experience in your mortal life has just become an unimpressive statistic.

Weeks later, something unbelievable will happen. You’ll hear a quiet, heavy shuffling sound outside of your house, maybe you’ll hear some glass breaking or a door latch unlock. Getting up to investigate, you will see a familiar shape in the hallway. Recognizing their silhouette immediately, you instinctively rush to help them. By the time you grab their arm to help them stand, a single thought will idly breeze through your mind: “But they’re supposed to be dead“. This thought ought to be terrifying, but it is always the most comforting thing in the world. You’ll convince yourself that it was all just a mistake. The funeral, the investigation, it was all just one big misunderstanding. This beautiful, beautiful person was never dead, and suddenly, everything will be all right again.

But there’s just something not right.

They look just like your loved one, they speak with your loved one’s voice, and they know secrets that not another living person in this world knows about you, but there’s something wrong about it. There’s an uneasiness in the air whenever you look at them. There’s a disturbing eagerness in their kisses. On a base, primal level, every fiber of your being tells you to run away. But that’s just silly, isn’t it? Because this is your beloved, the light of your life. This is everything that you’ve ever wanted, and he or she is finally back in your life. What could possibly be frightening about that?

A lot of people never make it past this point. At this point, the creature will grab the back of their victim’s neck with an inhuman strength and just twist. As long as the blood is reasonably fresh, and the spirit fled, they can drink their fill and not worry about overpopulating the local feeding area with another bloodsucker. If the entity inside your beloved’s corpse wants some company, however, they can just go ahead and drain every last drop of blood from your body while you’re still alive to feel it.  After that, no one knows exactly what happens to you. But as for your mortal vessel, it will serve as a cozy residence for the next supernatural spirit that wants it. If that isn’t horrifying enough, consider that this being will know everything about you, including your friends’ names and where they live.

So it’s somewhat less romantic than you read in the novels.

I don’t mean to shatter your illusions. I’m sure that your favorite fictional vampire rogue is a perfect gentleman, and merely misunderstood. I’m sure that somewhere out there is a vampire with a human soul who is living the sweet life of immortality, fast cars, good looks, and Sarah Michelle Gellar on speed dial. But in my experience, such a romantic creature simply does not exist. If you believe absolutely nothing that you read here, at least come away with the knowledge that vampires are dangerous creatures.

– Chretien

Next up: Crosses, Garlic, and other legends.