(From the 1939 edition of the Compass Encyclopedia, Volume Thirty-Seven, Umbrella-Vermin.)
The vampire is a creature of folklore. It features primarily in Eastern European folklore, but virtually every culture on earth has some sort of local variant on vampire myth. This has led some foolish people to speculate that there is a factual basis to the vampire legend. Such a speculation is certainly beyond the realm of this publication, but the advances in modern science, geographic exploration, and archaeological researches seem to imply that if vampires genuinely existed, the human race at large would be aware of their presence. Saving a vast conspiracy to suppress such information, which is, of course, utterly absurd, we can safely assume that vampires are not real and that they do not lurk in the night waiting to drain us of our blood.
Those who insist that such a conspiracy does exist point to the vampire's supposed "mesmeric gaze", which can hypnotize a person into doing the vampire's bidding. According to myth, the vampire can so thoroughly enthrall a victim that they willingly present themselves to be fed upon, even enjoying the sensations of being bitten and having their blood slowly, sensuously drained out by undead lips. Certainly, if such a power were real, vampires could use it to gain control of key figures in the publishing industry, ensuring that only harmless myths and legends about the vampire circulated, instead of the true facts on how to destroy the blood-sucking fiends. Only those of great cunning and immensely strong will would be able to withstand the vampire's unnatural charisma, and those few who did not fall victim to the seductive gaze and mental domination of the vampire would no doubt be easy prey for their inhuman strength and speed. No doubt most would rather submit to the warm, mindless thralldom within the endless fathoms of the vampire's eyes than be left a broken corpse for defying them.
For according to virtually all of the legends that are in strange, almost eerie levels of concordance on the existence of the vampire, they are indeed terrifyingly formidable foes. They are stronger than ten men, no matter how physically frail they appear to be (even a dainty female vampire, who looks soft and enticing, can lift a man and hurl him into the rollers of a printing press should he defy her) and can move almost faster than the human eye can follow. They can regenerate damaged tissue with inhuman speed, dissolve into mist, and transform into a bat or a wolf at will.
Even in these alternative states, they retain their mesmeric abilities; folklore (which is, of course, a somewhat unreliable third-hand recounting of eyewitness testimony) records instances of a woman compelled to wander out into the fog, lured onwards by the swirling, hypnotic patterns within the mist until she is far away from any who could hope to rescue her. Only then would the vampire resume human form (naked, of course; some legends claim that the vampire could transform her clothing into mist as well, but this is an utterly absurd supposition) and caress the woman's warm flesh with her cold fingers. The helpless, trembling victim would then willingly bare not just her neck, but any part of her that the vampire wished to bite. Before her fiancΓ© even noticed her absence, she would become a slave of the fiendish creature as she shuddered in the ecstasy of the monster's hellish "kisses".
Such victims generally undergo one of two fates...again, according to lore. Either the vampire drains them of their blood over the course of a few days or a week, their hideous appetites testing the poor unfortunate beyond endurance...or (and this is considered to be a literal fate worse than death) they find the victim in some way "worthy" of becoming a vampire as well. These victims seemingly die of blood loss, but they have been marked by the vampire as one of their chosen. After three days and three nights of lying in their grave, they return to a parody of life as one of the undead. This newly-born vampire then preys on their own victims, but they remain a devoted slave of the vampire who turned them. (Most accounts of the vampire agree that they are depraved sexual predators as well as bloodthirsty monsters; female vampires, in particular, are said to take women and seduce them into sapphic trysts under the cover of darkness, where they think their daytime lovers cannot see them writhing in passion as their undead lover drinks blood from between their thighs.)
Once a victim becomes a vampire, legend suggests only a few ways to end their cursed existence. Hammering a wooden stake through their hearts while they sleep the day away on a bed of their native soil, then decapitating them and burying the head separately from the body is a reliable way of putting a vampire to rest...or so the legend goes; in addition, vampires are said to fear religious symbols, and consecrating their resting place with them forces them to find another, lest they perish when the sun rises and they cannot sleep. (This has led to claims that the vampire fears sunlight, but that variant on folklore comes from the motion pictures, and is a relatively recent addition to vampire lore. In fact, although they are possessed with a great lethargy during the daytime hours, they can move about freely during the day once they have renewed their contact with native soil at dawn. If the legends are to be believed, that is.)