Notes from Nosferatu

Solace  - anonymous  Will you find me cold  naked burning to be touched  drinking from your lips  seeking solace with our tongues  Shall you take me then  leagues below the flesh of earth  mouths full of grave dust  tasting death at every turn  Would my heart not burst  every beat to be its last  fall in to your arms  is it all you ask of me  Should I twist away  knowing you are just behind  feel your hands clutch mine  hold them there for ever more  Will you find me cold  naked burning to the touch  Ever you then me  bound together ever we

By Chad Demosiah

As I read my older journal entries, I'm astounded how much I tried to convert him.  Our souls are already damned, who cares if he worships a heathen god?  This bothers me a bit-how much of this change is due to the new stains on my soul? Ah, fuck it.

Have some new prospects chosen for childer.  I've been explaining long-term goals as a giant art project, and explained it all to them as a plan to put us on the Toreador map.  It'll take a lot of blood and tears, and who knows what I'll have to promise the other clans, but with Silverman's power, I can concentrate on this without worrying so much about personal threats.  Maybe someday I'll be able to confide in my real reasons.  Please, God, I know you don't hear me any more, but let Claire understand that all of this is for her.

***
I sent Claire a letter.  I can't believe I did that.  She must think I'm such an idiot.  If only I could get it back-I have to hold my hand, make a name for myself using nothing but craptown, Canada, and THEN she'll accept me back again-she HAS to.  I bet she won't write back this time, either.

Questions:
i. She was known as the Bloody Countess in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.  also thought to be the first real vampire.
ii. What "Tales From the Crypt" movie had a vampire theme?
iii. He played Peter Vincent in Fright Night 2.
iv.Earl, Molly, and Boya make an odd trio in this 1995 vampire flick.
v. This Canadian author wrote the vampire novels "The Night Inside" and "Blood and Chrysanthemums.
vi.In 1727 in Meduegna near Belgrade, this man was documented to have displayed vampiric traits after his death.
vii.This fictional necromancer/vampire hunter lives in a society where the undead have equal rights as citizens.
viii.She is said to be the first wife of Adam and goddess of vampires.
ix. The mountain range where Bram Stoker's Count Dracula's castle is located.
x. Who starred in the classic 1931 film "Dracula" as our hero?
xi. Bram Stoker based his villain/our hero on this historical figure.
xii.This anime film’s hero is a vampyre with a sentient, talking hand.
xiii."Still whining, Louis," is a quote from this movie.
xiv.Not all vampire hunters use garlic to repel vampires.  What flower works as well?
xv.What type of wood is considered to be the most effective when staking a vampire?
xvi.Fill in the quote:  "There's one thing I never could stomach about living in _______ _______--all the damn vampires."  -- Grandpa from "The Lost Boys"
xvii.What was the first vampire film and who was its star?
xviii.What is the Russian word for vampire?
xix.In 1970 Sean Manchester founded this organization.
xx.This first vampire poem, “Der Vampir,” was written in what year?

    This is how it was - my buddy and me, well, we had fun. We were just a couple of good old boys.  Okay, so sometimes it wasn’t all that legal but Christ, no one really got hurt.  That changed months ago when a couple guys show up behind our place; you know the type? crooked noses, crooked smiles and straight swings.  They tell me, “get the fuck out of town or our employer will take you out personally.”  Who did we piss off this time? But it wasn’t like that, it was new; these guys beat the hell out of us.
    I was losing my sight, I was losing my life as it poured into the pool that I was laying in.  The shards of glass from our beer were spread all over me and the all over the pavement.  I was figured it was the end; now all I pray for is for the end. The sirens scared off the thugs, but trust me the pain didn’t end there.  Even as my “heros in blue” escorted me to the RUH, those gruff voices were still ringing in my ears.  That was the moment I realized that Steve wasn’t with me. We grew up in the same area for fuck's sake! Please tell me I didn’t leave him bleeding on the street.
    Steve was at the emergency ward when I got there.  The doc patched us up pretty good, it took a few days but they said I should get full motion back in my hand?  I don’t have to be told twice - Life will be safer out of town, I thought. I got a girl up in Calgary there.  But Steve has different ideas.  He says “what would one more month be?”  Don’t think he’s taking these guys seriously?  I can hear myself saying “alright one more month, we’ll make a few bucks and move on”.  Why did I say that? Why didn’t I just leave?
    For the first while everything is fine, everything goes well; Steve and I pull in a couple of bucks and we’re heading it in a week. Five days pass and nothing.  On the sixth day we cancel the cable.  On the seventh day Steve and I have the car packed.  We’re heading to the car to get the hell out of dodge?
    Five minutes too late.  They’re waiting for us. Steve takes off down the alley. I saw him crumple even before I heard the shot.  I felt myself scream but I don’t think I made any noise. Finally a dull crunch sounded and broke the quiet.  It was if I was away from myself looking at the scene. My body was sliding into a slow spinning pile as the bat crushed against my skull.
    Dead, Death, Pain? oh god I can feel the pain.  It is black when I wake. Am I awake? I could hear a strange hissing sound.  It sounds like a train mixing with snake on gravel. I think it’s a car. Then everything goes black again.
    When I wake I still can’t see, I can’t make a sound.  Blinded and gagged, not as funny when it’s me.  Something is picking me up. How can it do so with such ease? I weigh 205 pounds? It feels like it is lifting me with one arm? I am being carried down stairs or across something uneven.  Even before My gag is removed I feel chains snake about my limbs.
    Sight.  Standing before me, two gentlemen.  They look like they’re more at home in front of a drawing board, not here in this dark dank hole.  I recognize both of them.  The one on the right, he was just some guy in a suit Steve and me mugged a few months ago.  I remember that guy! He seemed like a real odd ball.  You see when we was layin’ the boots to him he kept on saying “Run now, the masquerade will not protect you for ever”... What a kook. And the other guy I know him too; he the new player on the block. Got a lot of clout at the cracker factory. Think his name is?
    The first guy clocks me.  Feels like he hit me with a brick? what the fuck? No one can hit that hard.  He says to me, “I thought you were asked to leave. Yet my associate has found you still in town.  I feel for you, my poor child.”  Then I see it; my mind is now firing on a few more cylinders? “Where am I?”  On the opposite wall, Steve is chained up but still unconscious. Jesus.  What kind of fucking monsters...?
    Blood is dripping down Steve’s chin. A line of thick ichor flows from his mouth, down his chest into a puddle on the ground. Something is in the middle of the puddle...it’s his tongue.  I scream.
    “Mother fuckers!”
    The two men stop and look at me, they look at each other? then laugh and laugh.  The player says “If you only knew the half of it” with a grin.  At this point I look around. Oh my god it’s?what the hell is it?
    Two girls are chained to the ground.  At least I think they were girls. Rotten, they are rotting like dead people but still breathing.
    I am still breathing...the pain is so?
    Here he comes again, the other one, the one who reeks of the grave.
    “Please don’t touch me!”  But no sound escapes my throat.  “Please stop”...only gurgles.  “I’ll leave town”...my voice is gone, and no one hears me.
    Trust me.  We were just good old boys.  We never really hurt anyone.

Remember the 1340's?  We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone?  Brocade sonnet
marathons were the rage.  We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790's will never come again.  Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops if hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

    It sounds trite, and perhaps it is.  Times change.  Everything changes, yet strangely, everything remains the same.  Monuments rise to greet the sky, and the Flesh of the Earth shudders, returning everything to her body.  Mother Earth is lonely, wanting to cradle us in her breast.  We, the fledgling children, ache to soar high above.  When our hubris becomes too great, she rolls her great bosom, and down we fall, reaching our post of stasis once again.
    So too people change, yet remain the same.  What once was perceived as weakness is revealed to be slender strength.  The solace we took in our independence becomes quiet loneliness.  However all in one, all is the unvaried shell.  Love, ever lost, returns.  The coarse skin of despair shed, only to develop again in a supple form.
    I am by no means ancient, by no means new.  Born or created we, sometimes both.  My skin long ago cracked,  then sloughed off.  I piece together new skin, gathered from the dead, dying, and much too young, grafting it to myself by way of blood and some small amount of magic.  I am what I was, what I shall be.  My story long ago forgotten, I recount now only that which is timely.
    Princes ask my story, requesting my lineage.  “Who is your sire?” they ask me, “and who your sire’s sire?”  Of course I find such questions redundant.  Even if memory served them as well as it has me, those names were lost long ago in derision, in war, and in sand.
    They ask my station, as if such matters bear importance.  An invention of the elders trying to recapture class distinction of the courts.  Even then it made no difference; pretentious longing and the need to feel important when one’s own character can’t carry one through life...or unlife, as the case may be.  I tell them what they want to hear, and they treat me accordingly.  Sometimes they ask me to take station, to allow my people representation.
    My people do not need me to represent them.
    I speak for no one.
    The time of the new blood is upon us; the time for the young to rise up against the old.  Jyhad they call it; the blood war.  Elders build up fortresses around themselves, maudlin paranoia overtakes them.  The younger ones build fortresses of themselves, giving shape to the fortress with their own bodies.  This too, is nothing new.  Since the first ones, since the birth of time, we rise up against that which is old and we present that which is coming to be.  It is no Armageddon; it is simply the flow.  I watch them rally, I watch them fear, and could I smile, I would.
    Whose fear is this?  As if fear needed ownership.  Fear is as fire, a being to itself.  Fear seeks, finds, breathes, moans.  Fear kills, and fear draws us together.  And as a creature, it can hunt and be preyed upon.  Predator and prey, lion and lamb, I shall drape its pelt around my shoulders.
    Thus I come to your city, your Elysia, your haven.  I find you, and you have not the means to resist.  You sought me, and I have come.  You prayed to me, and I respond.  You offer me the challenge, and it shall be mine.  What was, is, and shall be.  Gather up your wits about you, and face me.
    I am among you.