CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

My name is Angus Windham IV. I was also
Angus Windham I, II and III. You can call me Gus. I
am a Broadway producer. I am also a vampire. These
are my private notes.

On nights such as this I am happy to be in
Manhattan. My heartbeat matches the pulse of the
city. That doesn’t happen often anymore. In 1850,
when I first arrived here, or a hundred years ago, or
ninety years ago – I enjoyed the sensation of being one
with the city with a much greater degree of frequency.
Of course now everything is different from the
way that it was when I was here as Gus I, II and III.
Change is inevitable. Marcus Aurelius had that right.
Living some seven thousand years or so on this
continent, as I have, one learns to accept even the most
abominable changes, which most often are brought
about by humans. They certainly are not the result
of the activities of vampires. If nothing else, we are
stealthy and leave little trace.
Perhaps this is a moment to jump right into
an explanation. I am writing this to clear up some
critical misconceptions about vampires that have been
promulgated by the popular culture. Whether the
populace at large will ever see these notes of mine is
another matter entirely.
Here is what society has right about vampires:We feed on the blood of living creatures, preferably humans. We are nocturnal beings, which is to say we prefer the night due to our powers being available only after the sun goes down. We resemble human beings, though vampires never age. We can hypnotize humans by means of a deep penetrating gaze. Our hearing is keen beyond human ken. We can fly – more on flying later. We can move at an incredible rate of speed compared to any human making a similar effort. We are immortal, so far, as a race. Vampires are monsters by human definition. I certainly am anyway.
Vampires can confer immortality, for as long as it lasts, which in most cases is not long. Let me explain. Humans become dolts when they receive the blood hunger. The word zombie describes a human made vampire, not someone raised from the grave. It is pathetic to watch a human who has been transformed into a vampire. It is rather like mules as the offspring of horses and donkeys. A human who receives the blood hunger becomes very strong, very stubborn, and rather stupid. Likewise, the ability of these transformed humans to procreate is absent in the vampiric realm– as I said, like a mule.
At some point or another, every vampire has made the mistake of trying to convert a human or two into eternal companions. It never works. Loneliness is a far preferable option. So, your standard-issue vampire will destroy his or her human transformations for aesthetic reasons at the very least. Nobody, not even a vampire, likes a zombie.
Despite the unpleasant features as a result of these transformations, I think sometimes about making large wild creatures immortal. Imagine a zombie bear stumbling about the countryside in Pennsylvania, or an entire herd of blood-hungry whitetail deer, killing on a more or less unstoppable rampage in the New Jersey suburbs. That would give hunters pause.
Over the centuries since the European invasion, I have become something of an animal rights activist, with a vampire twist, if you will. That, however, is a personal quirk. I know for certain it is not a native trait among my kind.
Obviously, we are not humans made immortal. My theory is that vampires came into being thousands of years ago as a separate race parallel to human existence. We cannot transform ourselves into shadows or mist, or shape shift into other creatures like wolves. That is all drivel from pop culture.
We cannot smell blood. We cannot smell anything, for that matter. We have no olfactory nerves. This is a blessing, I’m sure.
Sunlight does not destroy us. So far, nothing can destroy us except nuclear weapons, as was discovered at the end of World War Two at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where three of our kind were vaporized. Getting back to the effects of daylight, we can move among humanity during the day time but it is exhausting. We are lead-footed and sluggish during the day, which is to say quite like humans, and may even age to some tiny degree as a result of exposure to the sun.
There is also a misconception that we can read the minds of humans. This is not quite accurate. We can, if we wish, receive thoughts and memories as we feed on a dying human being. As to the living, we cannot read minds so much as we experience interpretive sensations when we focus on an individual’s mind. In any case, I would rather read a script, which is saying something for a producer in this day and age.
We are able to scan crowds of humans and discover types of minds and anomalies in thought patterns. This sometimes comes in handy when I hunt.
There are not a lot of vampires on the planet, nor will there ever be. There are about a dozen of us in the Western Hemisphere. Proportionate numbers exist in Europe, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, China and the Indian subcontinent. If we were any more numerous, humanity would have a serious corpse disposal problem.
Before creating the first of these Windham personas in the 1890s, I was a theater civilian, an avid audience member, for four decades. Since becoming part of the theater, living on the other side of the rainbow, as it were, it is as though my destiny was fulfilled.
These days I am only five years into my new iteration, if you will. I look like a young man in my twenties. I have always looked that way, though ethnic permutations have varied. Only now it all seems to be slowing, ebbing away.
Enough of these revelations, for the moment. It is now time for me to get dressed for the evening.