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”.