Vampire

(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 fiancé 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.)

Motion pictures have also suggested that vampires are vulnerable to weapons forged from silver, and this supposed "fact" has indelibly fixed itself into the popular conception of vampires. Again, this is seized on by those who believe in the existence of a secret cabal of the undead that rules humanity from beyond the grave; they believe that vampires are using the newly popular mass media to plant misconceptions about vampires and their vulnerabilities, making it even harder for humans to fight off the predations of the undead. While this encyclopedia certainly cannot speculate about the threat of a vampiric "shadow government" that takes what they want and scarcely even deigns to notice the grieving, damaged humans left in their wake, we do believe in a commitment to accuracy, even in folkloric matters. As such, we wish to make it clear: If you encounter a vampire, sunlight and silver are useless. Attack them during the day, when they are vulnerable, and pound a good, solid stake of oak or hawthorn through their heart. Do not weep for the woman that you once loved; she is already dead. Instead, think of yourself as freeing her soul from the lascivious blood slave she has become.

Of course, legend makes much of the short lifespan of supposed "vampire hunters", and indeed, the risks of battling the true masters of the world must be extreme. Though vampires rarely distinguish one human from another, save when they take a favorite as their latest "pet" (humans would call them "victims"), they move quickly and ruthlessly to extinguish a potential threat. They are adept at moving under the cover of shadows, both literally and metaphorically, and many of the believers in the "vampire conspiracy" suspect that they engineer natural and artificial disasters to cover the evidence of their brutal rule.

Naturally, it is impossible for vampire hunters to prove or disprove the existence of their nemeses; their mortal (or rather, immortal) foes supposedly control all media, so that the vampire hunters must spread their campaign of resistance through word of mouth. (And given the vampire's penchant for brutal murder, an entire cell of vampire hunters can be wiped out with no witnesses left to carry on the fight. Thusly, vampires remain in the realm of myth and legend, instead of being viewed as a very real threat for humans to wipe out through concerted effort.) Supposedly, no publishing house, movie studio, or radio station can exist for long without a vampire finding its owners and operators and whispering darkly seductive words into their ears, hypnotizing them with their unnatural aura and leaving them breathless with the ecstasy of following their commands. These men and women escape the vampire's decadent bloodlust, but only so that they can remain their helpless thralls for the rest of their lives. (One could surmise it to be a pleasant slavery, but one purchased at the cost of betraying the human race to the undead.)

Those few who resist openly perish in 'accidents'...according to the conspiracy theorists, of course, who can only imagine the terror of watching a vampire murder a good friend, a man of strong will and kind heart, while everyone else in the room watches with glazed and empty eyes. They can only surmise the feelings of anger and despair that must go through a man's heart as he curses himself for not warning his friend sooner, for not being able to lift a finger now lest he join his comrade in death's swift embrace. They can only suspect how difficult it is not to let even a flicker of their inner turmoil show on their face, for fear of having the vampire suspect something is amiss.

But that would be the only course for someone who wished to spread the word of the true dangers of the vampire. Owning a printing press would never do; it would simply mark you out for vampiric domination. Naturally, editors and writers are either entranced by the beautiful, pale vampiric women who seduce and enthrall them, or else must submit their work to someone who is. Only by working as a typesetter, directly on the printing press, could one insert even a circumspect indictment of the vampiric cabal that rules this world as a butcher rules a stockyard. Again, according to legend.

(Shortly after publication, the 1939 edition of the Compass Encyclopedia was pulped by the publisher, who cited numerous "factual errors" in its composition. The company went out of business shortly afterwards, and the publisher went to jail for arson after setting his own printing-house on fire--with the employees still inside--to collect the insurance money and recoup his losses on the encyclopedia. Most remaining copies in circulation were donated to paper drives during the Second World War, or were lost in fires caused by wartime bombing. As a result, this volume is in high demand today by private collectors.)

THE END