Vampires love knives, and a vampire will almost always carry a knife or two, because unlike wolves and bats and panthers, they are unnatural predators, and so nature did not equip them with the means of their predation. A vampire starts their dim shadow of life in the husk of a highly-evolved, soft-bodied, mostly hairless ape with sadly diminished fangs. And so, they find a knife and they stick with it, you see.
They have a keeper, or more accurately: a collector. They speak of it, when they feel like being sociable with one another, as the Bad Father, or the Dark Father, the Big Hook, a dozen others. The name seems to vary regionally, and as with cryptids and other things that everyone has stories about but no solid evidence, they speak of it in hushed asides.
“You ever seen it, or felt it?”
“Nah, man. But I knew a guy—he was a morning’s edger anyway, and I was already half to ground—and anyway, he got too blown out one night, didn’t realize the time it was. I saw him go into the next room, and all sudden there comes this flash from him opening the blind, and then… nothing. Just nothing. No scream. I didn’t go near, but I couldn’t stop looking at the doorway all day. Watched the light move all around that room at the end of the hall til night. He never come back out. Never saw him again after that.”
Sometimes they do feel it.
“I was cruising the beachfront too long. There was this young thing—I played too long, chased too long. Didn’t see the stars wheeling down, didn’t think anything about it until I realized I couldn’t see the moon anymore. And I knew that if I couldn’t see it, then it was behind the mountains, and if it was behind the mountains, the goddamned sun was less than an hour away. And I had just noticed I couldn’t see the moon, and I didn’t know for how long I’d been missing it. And I let that young thing get away because I was instantly—I mean fucking instantly—in roost mode. Straight up from the beach, running full-tilt for the foothills, looking for any hole I could shove myself into and trying some that I knew just by looking were for shit. But I had to try, you know? And the rocks started to get the faintest orange glow on them, I mean the sun wasn’t up but this was more than predawn. Way more. And I swear, I could feel… a presence. Like a weight, coming down from above. Like a dog the size of the moon breathing on my back. Like I was being watched, like if I turned around right then and there, I would have seen thousands—no, millions, billions!—of eyes hanging in the air, burning holes through me. Something knew I was there, and all it needed was one tiny beam of sunshine to hit me, and it would know. It would know.”
“So how come you ain’t in the Bad Hands?”
“I ran back to the beach, and by fucking luck I found a pretty good-sized hole somebody had been digging in the sand the day before, and I jumped in and buried myself, squirming and digging and burrowing like a crazy-ass mole. I didn’t care that maybe someone would come back and dig me up during the day, I didn’t care about whatever ugly critters hang out under the sand. I just hid. And I felt those eyes lose track of me, felt that big dog shuffle off somewhere else. Worst day of sleep I ever had, but at the same time—best day of sleep I ever had. Because here I am.”
They need to consume blood because a vampire is a creature of metaphors, and there is no symbol more universal to their prey species than life’s blood. To spill it is to lose life. To drink it, then, is an act of transference. The vampire has no sense of taste, no great hunger to satiate, no passion for the warm tang of humanity. Left too long, however, without enacting the ritual of robbing the living of blood, and a vampire begins to fade. Like dark dyes in a sea of existence, the souls that animate them are constantly dispersing, diluting, diffusing into the ether in a steady spread. What is lost (poor, lost creatures) cannot be gathered back, but may only be replaced with the act of theft of life. Left too long, months and years, and the vampire becomes the phantom, a ghost now truly hungering for blood, but a vessel so far corroded that anything poured into it simply flows outward again, darkening the ocean. At last they become more and less than ghosts—they become hauntings, they become possessions, they become those places in the world that send chills through the mortal flesh. From vampire, to ghost, to a place of evil where people, living people, disappear without a trace: such is the death cycle of the fallen vampire.
It almost makes one root for their successes. It almost makes one want to donate blood.
