Dear ‘Vlad’,
It’s all your fault.
Your ‘Eternity Without Cruelty’ lark is sending me mad.
Mad, I tell you.
In the old life, the Bride and I could spend our evenings hunting and stalking and bleeding our prey. All good, clean, vampiric fun. Now that we have joined the IV League and mealtimes are rapid and joyless occasions, and therefore the remainder of the nighttime needs to be filled with some activity or other. Our wealth is copious and diversely invested, and using the internet has made attending to them an easy and quick thing, and so it is no longer a diverting challenge.
Well, we’re both keen readers, and my Marjorie has been so ever since Mister Caxton made books cheap enough for commoners such as we. There are some splendid books available, and many of them to my taste, as I see they are to yours.
There are many splendid vampire films available, as you know, but can Marjorie and I choose films which we both enjoy equally?
Can we hell! I like light, romantic comedies with happy endings, such as Daughters of Darkness and The Hunger, or musicals wherein all the would-be vampire killers end up variously anxious, heartbroken, or ashamed. My Marjorie, however, prefers dreary weepies where the vampires suffer pain - both emotional and physical - and even defeat, such as Van Helsing or Blade.
Why, oh why, is it that women always seem to enjoy cruel and violent tales, while we menfolk prefer cheerful and edifying stories after which we can sleep soundly all day long, unafraid that the mortals will destroy us?
Could we but hunt and kill once more, Mister Blackburn, Marjorie and I need never squabble over the choice of DVDs again.
Dining non-lethally was your Mistress Bountilaire’s quirkish gift to my marriage, and I insist that she, or you, provide a solution.
Regards,
7 comments:
Dear Bernard,
I sympathise with you; I really do.
The female of the species, while being potentially deadlier than the male, certainly do follow their enthusiasms with more firmness and determination than we do. This is nowhere more obvious than when they take up good causes, such as the Peace Movement. Consequently, when we might want a little cheerful viewing to warm the heart, involving lots of dead humans and mortal blood all over the place, they have to go for the worthier, ‘idealised’ kind of picture, where at least some of the human beings survive to the last reel and even beyond.
It’s a girl thing; they have been spawned with tenderer hearts than we have (think how easier Brides tend to be dispatched than male Masters are, though that may derive from their resurrection rather than being part of their inherent unnatures) and they believe that if mortals see lots of films and so on in which the warm-blooded survive, then they will fear us less and peace between us is more likely.
For what it’s worth, I understand that human couples have an identical argument.
Good luck, dead Bernard.
AB-
Oh no, you won’t get away with it so easily! When I let you and those other Peace Movement fruitbats into my home; to cross my threshold and help Marjorie persuade me to take the pledge; I was not threatened with an eternity of films and television in which my own kind were reduced to ashes every single night.
What kind of a message is this sending to the mortals? That we exist and merit killing once again? That we are wide open to slaughter? That all it requires is enough adolescent angst and a good underarm motion to rid the earth of us?
It’s not even as entertaining as most zombie films are; at least some of them are allowed to stagger off into the sunset.
Sir, I am not having a good time, thanks to your soft words of peace between the species, and I demand help of you to achieve a little of it between my dear Bride and me.
Angrily,
Bernard Hatton, (deceased.)
Dead Bernard,
I really do think that you’re a little long in the tooth for me to be explaining the bats and the moths to you, but here goes.
Vamps are different from us. They don’t take the feelings of mortals as casually as we do. When they are traditionalists they enjoy the pain and death that they cause, and like to toy with their victims. Not for them the quick kill and then back to sleep, as we males would prefer. When, however, they take the pledge and decide that long pigs are friends and not soup bowls, then they identify with them and even listen to them. They try to understand humans and to sympathise with their feelings.
I’m sorry, old chap, but we’re supposed to try to do the same. It’s not just because of some wishy-washy feeling of fellow-existence here; it’s basic survival. There are six billion of them, using ever-more intelligent machines and surveillance and record-keeping equipment. If they ever decide to do so and get organised, then they can pretty much wipe us out in a single decade, as they did to the European and Japanese Fascists. We’ve been preying on them mercilessly (with a few notable exceptions) for millennia. Unless the IV League gets it right, then the humans are finally going to get the message that we exist and are mostly raptors, and once industrial civilization sets itself against us, then we’ll go the way of smallpox or malaria-spreading mosquitoes in countries with DDT.
Films and books wherein vampires are defeatable and especially where we suffer from fits of conscience are being commissioned all the time to make mortals believe deep down that the two species can be friends. Not equals, of course, but certainly friends.
Whether you’re obliged to share Marjorie of Pocklington’s taste in films is a matter for your own domestic deliberations, but the PR will have to go on, I’m afraid. We’re just too scarce and they too numerous for the hunting to last.
Good luck,
AB
Listen, suckhead assholes, I don’t care if a bunch of you’ve lost the will to fight now that us slayers are getting organised and recruiting worldwide, but I know that all the other vampires, the 99.99% who don’t give a shit are running the show. Okay? Vampires getting killed in droves, or in groups, even at the last minute, is just not in their plan. Their plan is to make it look easy so humans don’t bother to join the fight. The last time I came up against vampire PR the last of my family got killed along with most with most of my friends, so just don’t expect me and mine to do anything other than come looking for you all. I warn you now Mister bleeding-heart Blackburn, I don’t figure you or your damned wife mean any of it, so you might as well run for the hills over there in England, because once I’m done in the States, it’ll be time for a European vacation – if the Brit slayers aren’t finished by then, that is.
Catch you later.
W
See, Blackburn? That’s exactly what I’m talking about! The American knows about you fruitbats and doesn’t care. We’re all the same to her, IV League or otherwise; monsters to hunt down and destroy. She thinks that all the vampire fiction is the traditionalists’ plot to soothe the mortals into thinking we’re all easy targets for their stakes. And after this reaction, am I expected merely to sit still and await the arrival of my natural food which will be bearing weapons? And I must tolerate all this whilst my home’s peace and quiet is disturbed by the fictionalized performance of ‘good vampires’ riddled with shame and drinking from rats?
Well, sir, I demand an explanation, or redress.
Bernard Hatton, (deceased.)
Dear Ms W.
This reply is late, I’m afraid. It was a rough night here in our County Palatinate.
I was truly sorry to hear of your late father’s second and final death. His killing was done by none of mine as you must know, if you will only admit it to yourself. I will accept the responsibility of failure though, since by 2004 I was an EWC activist and the senior British delegate to the IV League conference in Louisiana that year. We might well have prevented your father’s murder had we been in the right state, but we were not. We are simply not influential enough, yet. Your father was a great man in the slaying profession and he will be missed. Alas, we never met and I was never able to explain to him, as I had hoped to, that full-blood vampires could and would fight against their predatory cousins to protect the humans. He was singularly tolerant of the vampirish kind as his sponsorship of his young dhampir protégé demonstrated.
I hope that one day that you will learn to trust more of us. You already trust the dhampir and your reanimated friend the amusing ex-detective.
If you simply MUST visit the UK looking for me, please at least do yourself the favour and me the courtesy of contacting the British slayer network. We in EWC have tentative diplomatic relations with individuals in a couple of the affiliated organisations. You can find their websites easily enough. The passwords ‘Jilted bride’ or ‘Dewey decimal’ should get you to the right people. We might not be obliged to meet over the sights of automatic weapons that way.
Once more my condolences,
Adonais Blackburn.
Dead Bernard,
Yes, it’s true; much vampire fiction is concocted to be the raptors’ propaganda and camouflage to make their armies seem like pushovers.
But what do you want to do with the rest of your life, Bernard? Go back to predation? Do you really want to caper around in the snow with snaggle-toothed barbarians, or hunt along dusty Oklahoma roads stalking farm boys and truck-drivers in the company of reheated trailer trash and Confederate has-beens? I mean, really? Do you truly want to be governed by the kind of improvident idiots who engineered a successor species so powerful it could have destroyed us all, as in the Prague debacle, or some thug so ill-disciplined that he allowed his offspring to overbreed and replace the entire human population in days; so emptying the town he had only just settled in?
Raptors just don’t understand basis economics or morality, Bernard, which is why they will lose against any well-organised and determined enemy. Hell, a fair few of them are defeated by angry amateurs.
Some vampire fiction is also our stuff; the good guys’ work, intended to show the common human herd – and especially slayers and potential slayers – that our two species can live peacefully alongside one another. It’s hard to kill decent people if you’re a decent person yourself. This is why so much of our ‘fiction’ is aimed at young women, especially in America and Britain where much organised slaying is headquartered. It’s intended to show that we can be decent - even churchgoing - types, and unwilling to harm their human neighbours. If we can succeed in preparing the next generation of slayers to discriminate between us and the predators, then we will be on the winning side, as well as the right side.
The Ice Age is coming, Bernard; the Great Darkness and the Last Dawn. That’s what the raptors are planning.
So watch those horror films with the sad endings and let Marjorie enjoy them, is my advice. Because when the NATO nations get their heads unstuck and into the sunlight once again and organize against us, and the Eastern impasse is sorted out, then industrial civilization will be coming after us. And it won’t just be the Ice it’s melting. It’ll be liquefying us.
Enjoy the show
AB-
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