Vampires Unveiled

How Vampires Could Be Real

The dark theater was silent as the movie came to its spellbinding end.  When credits rolled and the music played the lights came on.  The audience began to filter out, discussing what had happened.  I stretched and headed for the door.  As I moved with the crowd slowly I overheard the man in front of me talking to his girlfriend.

      It was a pretty cool movie, he declared.

     “I just love vampires,” she replied, “There is something soo sexy about them!?

     “Sexy?” he asked skeptically.  “So if I bit your neck and drank your blood that would just make you melt in my arms?”

     “Oh, yes.”

      He shook his head, “I don’t understand why.  It’s not like they’re real.”

     “You don’t know that for sure.  They could exist.”

      I couldn’t help but put my two cents in. “They could exist.” I echoed.

      The couple turned to see who had joined their conversation.  The man’s brown eyes questioningly looked at me. “You actually believe all that crap?” he demanded to know.  “Well, it isn’t really that hard to believe.  There is a lot of evidence pointing toward their existence. The line had moved from the theater to the lobby finally.  The couple had stopped by a bench to talk to me.”

       “See, I’m not the only one who thinks that,” she told her boyfriend.

       “Yeah, there are lots of people who believe in them.”

       “Those are the ones who are delusional and think that they are vampires,” he insisted. They are just glorified psychos.”

       “Not necessarily,” I told him, “Where do you think these psychos got the idea from?  It has to be based on something.”

        “Old fairy tales, ravings of a mad men, he said waving his hand dismissively.

         The crowd pushed around us to the door.  I looked at the crowd of people and then focused on the couple before me.  They looked at me with such innocent wonder.  Had they even dared to imagine?  How could the live without the knowing the truth? “Even fairy tales come from something.  I can see how vampires might exist.”

         “I’d like to hear this,” she said sitting down.

         “This might be interesting,” he replied.

          I took a seat facing them and began my story.  I could see the rain pouring outside as I spoke.  The man looked at me with suspicion at first, but as I weaved my tale he softened.  His girlfriend was entranced from the moment I began. “Okay, hear me out.  This takes a little faith and stretch of the imagination.”

          “I bet,” he exclaimed.

          “But,” I continued, “I think that you will see it is worth considering.  Vampires are creatures of the night, are they not?  Why do you think this is?”

           The woman was quick to answer, “Because they are a part of the night, dark and evil.”

         “If you want to take the symbolic route.  What concrete and physical reasons could their be?  Perhaps a long, long time ago a few people found themselves afflicted with a horrible disease that made the sun poison to them.  Maybe they were still so primitive that this genetic mutation was thought of as some curse from the gods.”

         “I don’t know about that,” the man began.

         “Such a disease does exist, it is now called porphyia.  Why couldn’t this disease have existed before?  So anyway, these people could only safely wonder around at night.  Automatically the superstitious town’s people would deem them evil creatures.  Their fear of them would create this myth.  This group of freakish outcasts would be forced to live in hiding.  The town’s people would hunt them down and kill them if they ever saw them, so they had to be careful about hunting and building fires.  This need to remain hidden could have led them to begin eating their meat raw.  Years and years passed of eating raw meat.  Soon these found that the meat itself was not near as nutritious as the blood itself.  Drinking it became standard and then vital.”

          “Why vital?” she interrupted.

          “Blood might be like alcohol.  At first it acts like a poison to the system, but then after drinking it for so long the body can’t live without it.  These people might have legitimately needed blood to live.  Animal blood would not have enough though.  Human blood was so much better, so much more nutritious.”

         “What would make them jump from animals to human?”

         “Cannibalism has been found in many ancient cultures.  It is not as an unusual thing as humans think.  There are lots of horrible acts of violence that humans like to deny and forget about.  Why should there be a fear vampires when they aren’t really so different the humans?”

          The woman sighed. “Maybe vampires represent the human dark side that we are all afraid of.  It is so much easier to call a person who is capable of doing that an animal then to face up to the fact that we are all capable of unspeakable violence.”

         I smiled and nodded because she understood so well.  “Exactly!  But let me see, where was I?  Oh, yes.  These people who were afflicted with this disease would look pale because of the lack of sun.  That explains their pasty look.  What about their sharp teeth though?  Humans generally don’t rip into our steaks like a lion would rip into a deer, so we don’t need sharp eye-teeth.  Suppose these people needed to rip into their food like that because of eating it raw.  Species have been known to adapt to their growing needs, so why couldn’t this be an example of adaptation?”

         The man shook his head, “This is actually making sense.”

        “See, I told you that it wasn’t so incredible.  Anyway, from all of this stories began to spring up about these creatures soon called vampires.  Everyone had their own versions of it, some of them terrible distorted.  The idea that these humans were immortal and could shape shift were some of the most ridiculous stories I ever heard.”

       “Like in Dracula,” she prompted.

       “Yeah, like in Dracula.  Bram Stoker had quite an imagination.”

       “So you don’t believe in Dracula, but you do believe in vampires?” the man asked little confused. 

       “I am not arguing over the existence of Vlad Tempes, but the novel Dracula was not accurate.  Mr. Stoker drew from a number folk tales and created his own vampire.  The story was much more about what the vampire represented to him then anything.  It was the first time these folk tales had been used so skillfully as a symbol.  From then on the legends only grew.  Reality blended so completely with fiction that the two became indistinguishable.  The symbol of the vampire is now all that we know, and very few people stop to question how it all began.”

        “That is very deep,” he commented. 

          I guessed he was not the scholarly type and was not use to analyzing things in that way. “It is an endless pool of ideas.  So much has been written about it that it takes a long time to get down to the heart of the matter.”   I smiled at my pun that went unnoticed by the couple.

         “So all this stuff about crucifixes and wooden stakes is all made up?” the man wondered out loud.

         “Religion has played a major role in the symbol of vampires as devils, but a crucifix would be no more harmful to a real vampire then it would be you.  As for wooden stakes, well it would kill a vampire as well as it would kill you.  It is only a matter of common sense.”

         The woman tilted her head thoughtfully.  Her brown curls famed her pretty face. “So you don’t believe that vampires have superhuman powers?”

        “Why would they?  Their keen sense of hearing, telepathic abilities and super strength no more likely then it would be with you.  I suppose after centuries of being hunters that they could develop some skills that humans normally don’t, but there wouldn’t be anything supernatural about it.”

        “So Armand said was right when he said he knew nothing of heaven or hell? Being a vampire has nothing to do with god or the devil.”

        “Vampires and humans are more a reflection of each other then anyone would like to admit.  Instead of considering the vampire a mythical creature, consider it only the hunter in all of us.”

        The man stood up, “This has been very interesting.  You have given us a lot to think about.”

        “It was nice to meet you,” his girlfriend said standing up also.

        I followed their example stood up from the bench.  More lines were forming for the next showing of the movie.  I extended my hand to her, “It was nice to meet you too.”

        She shook my hand with a smile and turned to go out the door with her boyfriend.  I watched as they disappeared into the gray rain.  I let my tongue run across my sharp teeth realizing how hungry I had become.  I wondered if I should follow the couple.  Still debating I slipped outside into the gothic night.

      

         

 

 

Author's Note

This was published on-line on thehorrolibrary.net a couple of years ago.