Feral Vampire

Here is a vampire, that is, a living person laid under a curse, who has passed beyond all control: long of arm and nail, crooked of fang, crazed, killing well past any hunger. Ordinary vampires the realm reports as a rate; this kind it reports as a scene.

One sentence, the hunters say, holds it, and that sentence parts it from all else told about vampires: the ordinary sort the realm reports as a rate, this sort as a scene. An ordinary vampire keeps a room, goes by a name and pays rent, and the most anyone notices is a ward whose people go faster than its neighbours’. This one announces itself at a stroke. In a lane, a drover’s dog ripped open and abandoned. In a stall, a dead horse, the door dangling off. Then from the darkness of a ruin comes something on all fours, long of arm and longer of nail, eyes red, a mouthful of crooked teeth, and it falls on whatever is closest. What it cannot possibly eat it kills. Feeding does not stop it. Fire does not turn it, nor do numbers.

Those with real experience of vampires hold that this is the same creature and no other. A vampire it is, and a vampire is a living person under a curse, or, as some hunters allow, under a sickness that does a curse’s work: not dead, whatever undead may imply; not growing old; and compelled to feed. Some run wholly wild, beyond any control. Feral is the hunters’ name for those, taken from the drovers’ word for ground a district has abandoned, and spoken with the same weight. Most feral ones also bear what the country calls the marks of blight, skin gone raw and wrong, teeth crooked in the jaw. Which of these came first, no hunter will say, and any man professing to know, they hold, has something to sell. Whether any ever recovered they dispute as well, and none of them claims to have seen it.

Standing is the law’s trouble with vampires, and the feral sort leaves that trouble where it was. Upon a person no suppressing house will attend. A man who meets one in the act, in the hunters’ opinion, defends himself as any man is free to and afterwards answers as any man is bound to; nobody has put the question to the canon lawyers. Where a household has a vampire, it has a relative, and here most of all, since by the hunters’ account a feral one stays near ground it knew. Usually the ruin where it is found is less than a night’s walk from a house that has recently lost somebody and buried no one. People raise Molling Marsh, and the hunters reject it: whatever was in the fog there did not give chase, and this does. On the morning after, a district does not ask what it was. It asks whose.

As witnesses describe it

From a ruined gothic church a gaunt, misshapen, humanlike figure crawls out on long lean arms whose fingers end in long hooked nails. Its skin is blotched, raw and pale; its ears are pointed and its hair long and matted; its red eyes are crazed, and its open mouth shows fangs crooked and overlong. The broken arches behind it are lit by the moon and by a few lighted windows. Those who have seen one say the worst of it is that the face remains a face.