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Part 2
He sat on his bed in his apartment, looking at a map of the world. He was sick of being here anyway, and he needed to move on. If his situation didn’t drive him to suicide, someone would soon enough notice that during his six years of teaching he hadn’t aged a day. He supposed someone would have noticed earlier were it not for the fact that he deliberately made himself look older than he did. But the question was, where would he go? He was sick of the States. He’d been living here since the sixties which was more than enough for anyone to grow to hate it.
He could speak more than a dozen languages, which pretty much gave him the choice of going anywhere he wanted. Italy was out of the question. Damned scamps put garlic in everything. Obviously, he took medication to get around his garlic allergy, but the stuff was still unpleasant and he could smell a single clove from a hundred feet away. Ditto France then. He realised he was making somewhat sweeping allegations about entire cultures, but as a creature from the outside looking in, he could afford to be discriminative.
He noticed after a while of staring at the map that his eyes kept being drawn to a certain point on the map. England. He hadn’t been there since the war. A chill ran down his spine as the memories came back to him. Memories of his people, his family, his son. Of course, they were all dead now, and he couldn’t change the past. But the more he thought about it, the more he felt he should spend some time in the good old United Kingdom. The people were all cynics these days, but the weather would likely be better for his skin than what America offered and they had some good research pools hanging around that he might be able to take advantage of.
It was decided then. He had avoided England for decades, but now was the time to go home.
Of course, moving was not without its complications. But if nothing else, at least he could shed the name Tarkin, which he had to admit, had been rather foolish to assume in the first place. It had been a Star Wars reference. Grand Moff Tarkin, evil commander of the Empire’s Death Star, played by Peter Cushing, who himself had starred in any number of Hammer Horror vampire movies. He’d thought it funny at the time, but he was sick of seeing irony in everything, and would be glad to be rid of the name. He would have to make preparations to move soon. The sooner the better in fact.
But not tonight. Tonight was to be a part of what he hated most about his existence. Tonight he had to socialise. The very word was almost enough to boil the blood in his veins. He had been invited out for “a few Buds” down a local tavern. About a dozen or so of the University lecturers would be there. He already knew how the night would go. First Timothy Beldize would make some utterances about how the youth of today was x much less intelligent than the youth of yesteryear. A few of the crones would argue for a while, and before he knew it, they’d all be drunk and Anna Corlino would be rubbing his leg and asking suggestively if he could take her home.
How these morons had become the planet’s dominant species was an absolute mystery. Well, it wasn’t. He knew all too well why they were so dominant. DAMNATION, he thought. If only there were a few vampires alive today. If he could teach them what he knew. Walking in daylight, afflictions such as garlic allergy and fear of crosses all neutralised. He would be the hero that brought vampires back to the fore. But there were no others. Through his own stupidity, he had brought about the downfall of his entire species. Dreaming about a different history was nothing more than a waste of time.
He threw the map aside, and went for a shower. He would likely need another shower when he got back as well. The filthy stench of beer and cigarettes was something he could never get used to. Cigarettes just smelled so cheap these days. He longed for the days of the real pipe smoker, he longed for the days of real ale, and not the filtered down slime that modern establishments served. He longed for some real company. He survived in a world filled with billions of people who would kill him in a moment if they knew what he was. But survival sometimes wasn’t enough. He was lonely. Humans didn’t suffice because they could never truly understand him.
After a while, he was washed and dressed. He took a moment to look around his apartment. Marveling at how ordinary it seemed now. A pine bed with a firm mattress, bought in a Pine Warehouse sale. Quality sofa from Ikea. All the things in here he had bought with his own money, earned working a job alongside an enemy oblivious to his presence. He had become so much like one of them, sometimes he could hardly tell the difference himself. He lived like one of them. He slept during the nights like one of them, he ate like one of them, and he worked like one of them. He even went to pubs and sat drinking like one of them.
The rage built up inside him. He wasn’t one of them. He was the apex predator, a killer of humans who feasted on their blood and threw countless usurped and drained bodies behind his terrible and immortal path. Or was he? How long had it been since he’d given into the urge? Six months? He got by with steady supplies of pig and goat blood, which tasted foul. He supplemented himself by eating human food, but had to take a combination of pills to stop it from coming straight back up again. It was often just too complicated killing people these days. Investigations, police, knocks on the door, concerned neighbours, and, of course the occasional tracker.
He tried to control the adrenaline which was running through him freeflow. It just “wouldn’t do” for him to be worked up when he met the other tutors. They might talk about him. In the staffroom while he was in a lecture, they would talk about how he was unstable or temperamental. Always behind his back they would talk about him. Filthy gossiping inbred wretches, I’ll kill you all. Someday, someday I’ll make it happen.
With a physical effort, he shrugged the thoughts away. He was in no position to be threatening the human world with Armageddon. He took a quick look around the apartment to ensure nothing was out of place – it would be a bit messy if his apartment was burgled during his absence, and the thief stumbled across strange pills, ancient parchments and large quantities of blood hanging around the place. He decided everything was in order and left the apartment to meet the others in the pub.
Part 3
He found the pub exactly how he had expected it. Stimpson, a football coach propping up the bar, speaking with Jenson from the History department. Jenson was likely only speaking to him at all because sports coaches were automatically of a different social order, and History was deemed to be among the most socially inept subjects to be teaching. By propping up the bar with Stimpson, Jenson was automatically a better person.
The others were gathered around two tables, which had been pulled together to accommodate their number. As usual, though no-one else ever seemed to notice, almost all the women had taken to one side of the table, with the sole exception of Sam White, married but separated, who would give her left hand to have someone to screw every night. He often wondered why he was the only person who noticed the sexual segregation, and if it was actually done subconsciously, or if the other females actually actively didn’t want to be too close to the men.
He noticed straight away that he was the last one to arrive. This was usually the case, as the others always seemed to display some degree of enthusiasm for being here that he simply could not share. He also didn’t miss the fact that the only seat at the table not taken happened to be, once again, adjacent to Anna Corlino. And although at the moment she seemed sober and talkative, within the space of two hours he knew she would again be reduced to a gibbering wreck, kept awake only by the sexual appetite which had been awoken and greatly augmented by the intake of alcohol. She would tell him that she loved him, again, and start clawing at him like a crazed lemming on the brink of a mighty precipice. He accepted this because he had to. Much as he would like to break her fingers for having the effrontery to touch him and then sling her around the establishment like a ragged toy, he knew he would have to conform to the human social consensus and “take it like a man”.
Before taking his seat, he approached the bar, nodded to both Stimpson and Jenson in greeting and awaited the attention of the bartender. The pub wasn’t especially busy, and never was, despite its approximation to the University campus. Pretty much everyone knew that this was the lecturer’s hang-out, and very few of the students liked to share their drinking space with the people who marked their papers. One of the few good decisions the hapless philistines managed. Spilling your beer onto your professor rarely reflected well in your grades, and emptying the contents of one’s stomach tended to be radically frowned upon.
After a few moments he caught the attention of the bar staff, and ordered a double scotch, straight up. It didn’t matter which one it was, they all tasted foul and disgusting these days. He had gotten used to the taste of the modern fetid and loathsome drinks, just as he had gotten used to the food. He had gotten used to everything. He took his drink, nodded again to Stimpson and co and walked over to the table to sit with the others. He was customarily welcomed and greeted everyone at the table with a cheery smile. Moments later, Tim Beldize was off on a rant again. Today he was picking on some of the stranger subjects to become University material in recent decades. It wasn’t long before he got around to remembering that someone at the table taught just such a course.
“James, what course is it you teach again?” the old crone wheezed out through ancient teeth.
“Classical Mythology, for the most part.” He replied.
“This is my point” he rasped “How can you class that sort of subject alongside the likes of History and Economics?”
“Quite frankly, Tim, I don’t.” that was enough to put Tim on the back pedal, but he didn’t give the old goon a chance to recover “But if you don’t class Mythology as a worthy subject, then how can you class History as one?”
“Well… they’re completely different!” he managed through a series of exasperated huffs.
“No they’re not. Think about it. History is the study of how past experiences have been written. Mythology is the study of how past experiences have been misunderstood and blown out of proportion.
“Consider the vampire, if you will. Mythological nonsense, I’m sure you’ll call it. But the vampires were not myths. They were very real. They just weren’t what you might have read about in Bram Stoker books, that’s all”
“Preposterous!” Beldize replied
“Is it? Consider, even today, we see cases of severe photosensitivity. People who can’t go out into the daylight, because their skin will burn, and they will die. A few hundred years ago, such people would still have existed. Today they are given a wealth of care and attention, yesteryear, this was not the case. Such people would have been outcasts, like lepers. They would have been deemed to have enacted some wrong in a previous life, and their soul was paying dues in this one.
“How would people have reacted to being treated like that? I’ll tell you how. Firstly, they become lonely recluses from a very young age. They live in street corners or in caves, anywhere that is sheltered from the sunlight. They become nocturnal, as they dare not venture out in the daytime. Their skin is a palette of burns from their younger days, when they didn’t understand their affliction, and so even when they do venture out, they wear dark and unrevealing robes, so as not to be seen for what they are. They will grow their hair long, to cover their faces, and their nails will grow as claws because they have no social obligations to keep themselves in good order.
“In time, they will grow a lasting contempt for normal people. The lucky ones who can walk out and live with others during the day. The ones who can bask in the glorious, but deadly sunshine. They will hate them, utterly. How long before they stalk the streets at night preying on the weak, the infirm and the lonesome? One by one withering down the numbers of the enemy, reducing the happiness in the lives of those he leaves behind?
“He sees the signs left in the streets speaking of the monster attacking people at night. The papers, the tablets or the stone carved warnings. As press always will, the claims will be exaggerated. He will be the evil demon of the land, and possibly finding amusement in that vision, perhaps he will adapt his attacks to fit the picture. Biting his victims to death and watching them bleed to death. As he gains confidence, he begins to attack people in their homes while they sleep…
“So you see, it’s not so far fetched at all. I teach my students to see past the myths to look at the truths behind them. That is the point of my course, not to fill their heads with ridiculous notions that the dead walk the earth and Dracula lives to fight another day.”
An uncomfortable silence ensued. Talking about disfigured monsters stalking the streets and killing innocents was somethng of a faux-pas, he knew. But there was something about Beldize that always made him want to prove the increpid fool wrong.
After a few moments, Anna made an effort to laugh before getting the conversation flowing again “No more talking shop today boys, I think we have enough of lectures *and* monsters back at the University.” This produced a few laughs and everything got back to normal.
Roughly two hours later, he was calling a cab for Anna. Despite her protestations, he had no desire to sleep with her tonight. He didn’t bother sharing the taxi with her either, even though she didn’t live very far from his apartment. Instead he opted to walk home. By now he had drunk seven double scotches, and while he wasn’t as prone to drunkenness as the average human, it still effected him to a slight extent, and he decided he wouldn’t mind walking it off. After throwing Anna into the cab and saying his goodbye’s to the others, he began the walk home, alone.
Walking alone at night was, for a vampire, not a particularly worrying prospect, as they were, by their very nature quite able to take care of themselves. The night was, after all, their element. So when, after only a few minutes of walking, he found a knife at his throat, which had appeared at the end of a hand which itself had strut out from an alley to his left, he wasn’t overly concerned. He acted the part of the obedient hostage, and moved into the alley to find that there were now two people waylaying him. They shuffled him down the alley a while until it would be impossible for anyone back on the street to see what was going on, and then he acted.
He grabbed the hand holding the knife with an impossibly swift move of his left hand. He squeezed and twisted the arm away. The popping noise he heard, he knew was the sound of bones cracking in his abductor’s hand. A scream left his throat as little more than an astonished gasp as the pain of his shattered bones searing through his own muscle tissue caught up with him. Weaving his head under the outstretched arm, he used his free hand to strike a blow up at the exposed elbow. It broke with a satisfying crunch, but the victim was still too surprised to make any noise other than a sodden grunt. He swung him around by his hand to plant his face hard into the brick wall on the alleyside, he slumped to the floor, lifeless. By this time, the second man was charging at him with a knife. As he approached, he slowed, and tried to swing the knife, going for a slash rather than a stab wound. The knife never came close. He grabbed the swinging hand and pulled it towards him. Then using both hands he twisted the arm until he heard bones cracking. Now he pulled the arm behind it’s owners back and jabbed a kick at the back of his shin. The bottom broken half of his tibia hit the floor well before his knee did, but before he could manage an agonised scream, a hand held his jaw closed, and all he could do was let out a muffled gasp. Before he had time to do anything else, his head was jammed roughly to its side. The last thing he heard was the sound of his neck breaking.
James stood there for a while. Humans were never enough competition. A whole mob of them could come one at a time or in huge groups, and they could never overcome him. He then regretted that they had died so easily. He had decided the moment he saw the knife that he would sup the vitae from the offending body, but it was always so much more satisfying when the subject was still alive. The fear that flowed through their bodies was a joyous sensation as the blood was drained from them. Their eyes said more than any words could say. The terror was instinctive. You didn’t have to have heard of a vampire to know when you were helpless against a creature that has hunted you for millennia. No point worrying about that now, he though. He would just have to be more gentle next time. He walked over and picked up the first of the two he’d summarily disposed of, and with a satisfied grunt, bit deeply into his neck. Tonight he feasted on human blood.
He sat on his bed in his apartment, looking at a map of the world. He was sick of being here anyway, and he needed to move on. If his situation didn’t drive him to suicide, someone would soon enough notice that during his six years of teaching he hadn’t aged a day. He supposed someone would have noticed earlier were it not for the fact that he deliberately made himself look older than he did. But the question was, where would he go? He was sick of the States. He’d been living here since the sixties which was more than enough for anyone to grow to hate it.
He could speak more than a dozen languages, which pretty much gave him the choice of going anywhere he wanted. Italy was out of the question. Damned scamps put garlic in everything. Obviously, he took medication to get around his garlic allergy, but the stuff was still unpleasant and he could smell a single clove from a hundred feet away. Ditto France then. He realised he was making somewhat sweeping allegations about entire cultures, but as a creature from the outside looking in, he could afford to be discriminative.
He noticed after a while of staring at the map that his eyes kept being drawn to a certain point on the map. England. He hadn’t been there since the war. A chill ran down his spine as the memories came back to him. Memories of his people, his family, his son. Of course, they were all dead now, and he couldn’t change the past. But the more he thought about it, the more he felt he should spend some time in the good old United Kingdom. The people were all cynics these days, but the weather would likely be better for his skin than what America offered and they had some good research pools hanging around that he might be able to take advantage of.
It was decided then. He had avoided England for decades, but now was the time to go home.
Of course, moving was not without its complications. But if nothing else, at least he could shed the name Tarkin, which he had to admit, had been rather foolish to assume in the first place. It had been a Star Wars reference. Grand Moff Tarkin, evil commander of the Empire’s Death Star, played by Peter Cushing, who himself had starred in any number of Hammer Horror vampire movies. He’d thought it funny at the time, but he was sick of seeing irony in everything, and would be glad to be rid of the name. He would have to make preparations to move soon. The sooner the better in fact.
But not tonight. Tonight was to be a part of what he hated most about his existence. Tonight he had to socialise. The very word was almost enough to boil the blood in his veins. He had been invited out for “a few Buds” down a local tavern. About a dozen or so of the University lecturers would be there. He already knew how the night would go. First Timothy Beldize would make some utterances about how the youth of today was x much less intelligent than the youth of yesteryear. A few of the crones would argue for a while, and before he knew it, they’d all be drunk and Anna Corlino would be rubbing his leg and asking suggestively if he could take her home.
How these morons had become the planet’s dominant species was an absolute mystery. Well, it wasn’t. He knew all too well why they were so dominant. DAMNATION, he thought. If only there were a few vampires alive today. If he could teach them what he knew. Walking in daylight, afflictions such as garlic allergy and fear of crosses all neutralised. He would be the hero that brought vampires back to the fore. But there were no others. Through his own stupidity, he had brought about the downfall of his entire species. Dreaming about a different history was nothing more than a waste of time.
He threw the map aside, and went for a shower. He would likely need another shower when he got back as well. The filthy stench of beer and cigarettes was something he could never get used to. Cigarettes just smelled so cheap these days. He longed for the days of the real pipe smoker, he longed for the days of real ale, and not the filtered down slime that modern establishments served. He longed for some real company. He survived in a world filled with billions of people who would kill him in a moment if they knew what he was. But survival sometimes wasn’t enough. He was lonely. Humans didn’t suffice because they could never truly understand him.
After a while, he was washed and dressed. He took a moment to look around his apartment. Marveling at how ordinary it seemed now. A pine bed with a firm mattress, bought in a Pine Warehouse sale. Quality sofa from Ikea. All the things in here he had bought with his own money, earned working a job alongside an enemy oblivious to his presence. He had become so much like one of them, sometimes he could hardly tell the difference himself. He lived like one of them. He slept during the nights like one of them, he ate like one of them, and he worked like one of them. He even went to pubs and sat drinking like one of them.
The rage built up inside him. He wasn’t one of them. He was the apex predator, a killer of humans who feasted on their blood and threw countless usurped and drained bodies behind his terrible and immortal path. Or was he? How long had it been since he’d given into the urge? Six months? He got by with steady supplies of pig and goat blood, which tasted foul. He supplemented himself by eating human food, but had to take a combination of pills to stop it from coming straight back up again. It was often just too complicated killing people these days. Investigations, police, knocks on the door, concerned neighbours, and, of course the occasional tracker.
He tried to control the adrenaline which was running through him freeflow. It just “wouldn’t do” for him to be worked up when he met the other tutors. They might talk about him. In the staffroom while he was in a lecture, they would talk about how he was unstable or temperamental. Always behind his back they would talk about him. Filthy gossiping inbred wretches, I’ll kill you all. Someday, someday I’ll make it happen.
With a physical effort, he shrugged the thoughts away. He was in no position to be threatening the human world with Armageddon. He took a quick look around the apartment to ensure nothing was out of place – it would be a bit messy if his apartment was burgled during his absence, and the thief stumbled across strange pills, ancient parchments and large quantities of blood hanging around the place. He decided everything was in order and left the apartment to meet the others in the pub.
Part 3
He found the pub exactly how he had expected it. Stimpson, a football coach propping up the bar, speaking with Jenson from the History department. Jenson was likely only speaking to him at all because sports coaches were automatically of a different social order, and History was deemed to be among the most socially inept subjects to be teaching. By propping up the bar with Stimpson, Jenson was automatically a better person.
The others were gathered around two tables, which had been pulled together to accommodate their number. As usual, though no-one else ever seemed to notice, almost all the women had taken to one side of the table, with the sole exception of Sam White, married but separated, who would give her left hand to have someone to screw every night. He often wondered why he was the only person who noticed the sexual segregation, and if it was actually done subconsciously, or if the other females actually actively didn’t want to be too close to the men.
He noticed straight away that he was the last one to arrive. This was usually the case, as the others always seemed to display some degree of enthusiasm for being here that he simply could not share. He also didn’t miss the fact that the only seat at the table not taken happened to be, once again, adjacent to Anna Corlino. And although at the moment she seemed sober and talkative, within the space of two hours he knew she would again be reduced to a gibbering wreck, kept awake only by the sexual appetite which had been awoken and greatly augmented by the intake of alcohol. She would tell him that she loved him, again, and start clawing at him like a crazed lemming on the brink of a mighty precipice. He accepted this because he had to. Much as he would like to break her fingers for having the effrontery to touch him and then sling her around the establishment like a ragged toy, he knew he would have to conform to the human social consensus and “take it like a man”.
Before taking his seat, he approached the bar, nodded to both Stimpson and Jenson in greeting and awaited the attention of the bartender. The pub wasn’t especially busy, and never was, despite its approximation to the University campus. Pretty much everyone knew that this was the lecturer’s hang-out, and very few of the students liked to share their drinking space with the people who marked their papers. One of the few good decisions the hapless philistines managed. Spilling your beer onto your professor rarely reflected well in your grades, and emptying the contents of one’s stomach tended to be radically frowned upon.
After a few moments he caught the attention of the bar staff, and ordered a double scotch, straight up. It didn’t matter which one it was, they all tasted foul and disgusting these days. He had gotten used to the taste of the modern fetid and loathsome drinks, just as he had gotten used to the food. He had gotten used to everything. He took his drink, nodded again to Stimpson and co and walked over to the table to sit with the others. He was customarily welcomed and greeted everyone at the table with a cheery smile. Moments later, Tim Beldize was off on a rant again. Today he was picking on some of the stranger subjects to become University material in recent decades. It wasn’t long before he got around to remembering that someone at the table taught just such a course.
“James, what course is it you teach again?” the old crone wheezed out through ancient teeth.
“Classical Mythology, for the most part.” He replied.
“This is my point” he rasped “How can you class that sort of subject alongside the likes of History and Economics?”
“Quite frankly, Tim, I don’t.” that was enough to put Tim on the back pedal, but he didn’t give the old goon a chance to recover “But if you don’t class Mythology as a worthy subject, then how can you class History as one?”
“Well… they’re completely different!” he managed through a series of exasperated huffs.
“No they’re not. Think about it. History is the study of how past experiences have been written. Mythology is the study of how past experiences have been misunderstood and blown out of proportion.
“Consider the vampire, if you will. Mythological nonsense, I’m sure you’ll call it. But the vampires were not myths. They were very real. They just weren’t what you might have read about in Bram Stoker books, that’s all”
“Preposterous!” Beldize replied
“Is it? Consider, even today, we see cases of severe photosensitivity. People who can’t go out into the daylight, because their skin will burn, and they will die. A few hundred years ago, such people would still have existed. Today they are given a wealth of care and attention, yesteryear, this was not the case. Such people would have been outcasts, like lepers. They would have been deemed to have enacted some wrong in a previous life, and their soul was paying dues in this one.
“How would people have reacted to being treated like that? I’ll tell you how. Firstly, they become lonely recluses from a very young age. They live in street corners or in caves, anywhere that is sheltered from the sunlight. They become nocturnal, as they dare not venture out in the daytime. Their skin is a palette of burns from their younger days, when they didn’t understand their affliction, and so even when they do venture out, they wear dark and unrevealing robes, so as not to be seen for what they are. They will grow their hair long, to cover their faces, and their nails will grow as claws because they have no social obligations to keep themselves in good order.
“In time, they will grow a lasting contempt for normal people. The lucky ones who can walk out and live with others during the day. The ones who can bask in the glorious, but deadly sunshine. They will hate them, utterly. How long before they stalk the streets at night preying on the weak, the infirm and the lonesome? One by one withering down the numbers of the enemy, reducing the happiness in the lives of those he leaves behind?
“He sees the signs left in the streets speaking of the monster attacking people at night. The papers, the tablets or the stone carved warnings. As press always will, the claims will be exaggerated. He will be the evil demon of the land, and possibly finding amusement in that vision, perhaps he will adapt his attacks to fit the picture. Biting his victims to death and watching them bleed to death. As he gains confidence, he begins to attack people in their homes while they sleep…
“So you see, it’s not so far fetched at all. I teach my students to see past the myths to look at the truths behind them. That is the point of my course, not to fill their heads with ridiculous notions that the dead walk the earth and Dracula lives to fight another day.”
An uncomfortable silence ensued. Talking about disfigured monsters stalking the streets and killing innocents was somethng of a faux-pas, he knew. But there was something about Beldize that always made him want to prove the increpid fool wrong.
After a few moments, Anna made an effort to laugh before getting the conversation flowing again “No more talking shop today boys, I think we have enough of lectures *and* monsters back at the University.” This produced a few laughs and everything got back to normal.
Roughly two hours later, he was calling a cab for Anna. Despite her protestations, he had no desire to sleep with her tonight. He didn’t bother sharing the taxi with her either, even though she didn’t live very far from his apartment. Instead he opted to walk home. By now he had drunk seven double scotches, and while he wasn’t as prone to drunkenness as the average human, it still effected him to a slight extent, and he decided he wouldn’t mind walking it off. After throwing Anna into the cab and saying his goodbye’s to the others, he began the walk home, alone.
Walking alone at night was, for a vampire, not a particularly worrying prospect, as they were, by their very nature quite able to take care of themselves. The night was, after all, their element. So when, after only a few minutes of walking, he found a knife at his throat, which had appeared at the end of a hand which itself had strut out from an alley to his left, he wasn’t overly concerned. He acted the part of the obedient hostage, and moved into the alley to find that there were now two people waylaying him. They shuffled him down the alley a while until it would be impossible for anyone back on the street to see what was going on, and then he acted.
He grabbed the hand holding the knife with an impossibly swift move of his left hand. He squeezed and twisted the arm away. The popping noise he heard, he knew was the sound of bones cracking in his abductor’s hand. A scream left his throat as little more than an astonished gasp as the pain of his shattered bones searing through his own muscle tissue caught up with him. Weaving his head under the outstretched arm, he used his free hand to strike a blow up at the exposed elbow. It broke with a satisfying crunch, but the victim was still too surprised to make any noise other than a sodden grunt. He swung him around by his hand to plant his face hard into the brick wall on the alleyside, he slumped to the floor, lifeless. By this time, the second man was charging at him with a knife. As he approached, he slowed, and tried to swing the knife, going for a slash rather than a stab wound. The knife never came close. He grabbed the swinging hand and pulled it towards him. Then using both hands he twisted the arm until he heard bones cracking. Now he pulled the arm behind it’s owners back and jabbed a kick at the back of his shin. The bottom broken half of his tibia hit the floor well before his knee did, but before he could manage an agonised scream, a hand held his jaw closed, and all he could do was let out a muffled gasp. Before he had time to do anything else, his head was jammed roughly to its side. The last thing he heard was the sound of his neck breaking.
James stood there for a while. Humans were never enough competition. A whole mob of them could come one at a time or in huge groups, and they could never overcome him. He then regretted that they had died so easily. He had decided the moment he saw the knife that he would sup the vitae from the offending body, but it was always so much more satisfying when the subject was still alive. The fear that flowed through their bodies was a joyous sensation as the blood was drained from them. Their eyes said more than any words could say. The terror was instinctive. You didn’t have to have heard of a vampire to know when you were helpless against a creature that has hunted you for millennia. No point worrying about that now, he though. He would just have to be more gentle next time. He walked over and picked up the first of the two he’d summarily disposed of, and with a satisfied grunt, bit deeply into his neck. Tonight he feasted on human blood.
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Vampires, well, the vampire in your story, is basically a bitter human with a strong desire for blood. Deprive a human of food for so long and they'll start to go like that.
But this isn't about vampires really - in terms of language vampires are human.
But this isn't about vampires really - in terms of language vampires are human.
And what is it that makes you the expert on vampires? I'm assuming you've known a fair number in your time?
What's that? They're objects of fiction and subject to interpretation? My way or no way then =)
What's that? They're objects of fiction and subject to interpretation? My way or no way then =)
Seeing as the languages he speaks are human, and he is around humans all the time, and vampires (if they existed) would be mighty similar to humans, then yes, I am generalising from human tendencies.
But your making those assumptions based on human tendencies...
Seeing as he's around humans all the time, and his words have to come from somewhere, I just thought he might be a little more American.
It's difficult to judge how the mind of a 300 year old vampire works, don't you think? You can't really compare him to any human or the traits to which they hold. He's not human, and won't act as such. The use of words such as "pub" and "tavern" are both intentional and appropriate.
Fear not, little one, all is going to plan.
*pats Blank on the head*
Fear not, little one, all is going to plan.
*pats Blank on the head*
People start to use words that the people around them use after a very short time.
It doesn't really matter the fact that he spent quite a while more outside of the US than inside - the last 60 years have been inside (I assume). If someone lives somewhere for that amount of time they'll usually be saying the words peculiar to that area.
60 years is roughly 20 per cent of his lifetime - so that's the equivalent of 20 years to someone who lives a hundred. So twenty years spent in one area and you wouldn't be using the dialect? People use it quicker than that, whether they realise it or not. And he isn't really a recluse either.
I didn't mean to be picky over this and make a big deal of it, I was just wondering whether it was intentional or not.
It doesn't really matter the fact that he spent quite a while more outside of the US than inside - the last 60 years have been inside (I assume). If someone lives somewhere for that amount of time they'll usually be saying the words peculiar to that area.
60 years is roughly 20 per cent of his lifetime - so that's the equivalent of 20 years to someone who lives a hundred. So twenty years spent in one area and you wouldn't be using the dialect? People use it quicker than that, whether they realise it or not. And he isn't really a recluse either.
I didn't mean to be picky over this and make a big deal of it, I was just wondering whether it was intentional or not.
HalloHowArtThou wrote:
> Is Half-Life finished or something?
Nope, I'm just taking my time with it...
> Is Half-Life finished or something?
Nope, I'm just taking my time with it...
Blank wrote:
> One question, was your use of the word "pub" deliberate? In
> the US I think they'd tend to use "bar", or is it because he
> came from England? Even so, i think if he hasn't been to England for
> fifty years it's likely he wouldn't use the dialect any more.
300 years old, which is more likely to lead his mind, 60 years in the US, or 240 years outside it?
He also uses the word "tavern", which I sincerely doubt anyone in the US uses, and very few use over here any more.
Have you entirely missed how he reminisces about the good old days? This man doen't want his memories to fade to grey.
> One question, was your use of the word "pub" deliberate? In
> the US I think they'd tend to use "bar", or is it because he
> came from England? Even so, i think if he hasn't been to England for
> fifty years it's likely he wouldn't use the dialect any more.
300 years old, which is more likely to lead his mind, 60 years in the US, or 240 years outside it?
He also uses the word "tavern", which I sincerely doubt anyone in the US uses, and very few use over here any more.
Have you entirely missed how he reminisces about the good old days? This man doen't want his memories to fade to grey.
Is Half-Life finished or something?
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