The Real Vampires

THE STORY OF MARCUS THE VAMPIRE

Paul Beach

The Story of Marcus the Vampire,

Table of Contents

1 – The Origin of a Vampire

2 – Lucio and Maria

3 – Finding Fredricko

4 – The Passing of Maria

5 – The Execution

6 – Giovanni and Marcus

7 – The Teachings

8 – The Parting

9 – Insanity

10 – Vengeance

11 – Venus

12 – The Wooing of Shalimar

13 – Marcus and Shalimar

14 – The Return to Insanity

15 – The Promise

16 – The Reunion

17 – The Slaying

18 – Marcus and Ava

19 – Marcus and Cyllia

20 – The Fight

21 – The Crystal Orb

22 – Gerald and Maria

PART II

This is the story of Marcus the Vampire, as told by him personally to Janet, Mimi, and Chad during their four week stay with him at Scott’s cabin.

NIGHT I

I do not know exactly when I was born. Since 1498 I have lived as a vampire. I think I had lived before then for about eighteen years.

My father was Vincenzo Lancetta, and his wife, my mother, was named Galora. But I only learned of them later in life, after I had become a vampire. They never had any knowledge of me or my fate, because I was not raised by my biological parents. Actually, I was not really raised at all. At some young age, earlier than I can remember, I had apparently come to be ‘owned’ by a band of gypsies. The gypsies had always maintained to me that I had come to be without parents.

In those days there were many bands of nomadic gypsies that traveled through Italy and surrounding areas. Some of these bands of gypsies, called comprachicos, indulged in a fairly horrific art-form, using children. They would begin by taking a child, extremely young, and groom the child by working them as a slave. The spirit and emerging will of the child had to completely broken. My earliest memories are of collecting firewood, picking fruit, weaving, and other chores around the camp, with very little rest. The comprachicos also had me stealing for them at every opportunity. I was a perfectly mindless slave. I performed without question. That was my life at my earliest recollection.

You must understand right now at the beginning that something about vampirism has given me nearly perfect recall of all of my life’s experiences. Every memory can be re-played in perfect reality in my mind’s eye. There is much that I would choose to forget if I could, however the best that I can do is to not think about it; to not focus on the pain. I would like to think that I have learned what I need to learn from all of my painful experiences. Still, re-living them is vastly unpleasant. That is one of the reasons why I rarely share memories of my life with anyone.

I think that I was about eight years of age when the comprachicos placed me inside a large, grotesque vase. It was bent with twisted appendages meant for my arms and legs. There was a slat on the bottom to accommodate my bodily elimination functions, and of course, a hole for my head. I couldn’t move inside of the vase, and for the next ten years I just sat there in that vase while other young slaves of the comprachicos fed me incessantly. There were also many other vase children in various stages of development.

And that was the art of the comprachicos; one of their forms of art anyway. The idea was for the vase children to grow into the shape of their vase. We were fed extremely fattening foods, and in that way our most physically formative years were spent. At nineteen or twenty years of age, a vase child would be broken out of his or her vase, now a wonderful freak. The comprachicos would put their works of art on display at ghastly circuses, and they could fetch large prices from the eccentric elite who desired to own one of their abominable ‘works of art.’

To say that growing into a vase was uncomfortable would be a gross understatement. I was forced to sleep in that upright position. The growing pains would have been unbearable, but I was given opium. My spine bent and folded to fit. My hips and legs followed the twisted contours that had been fashioned into the vase. I was frequently beaten by the gypsies and I eventually lost most of my teeth. They wished to mar my face; that was part of the ‘art.’ But they would never risk injuring me to the point that my value was compromised. They were very careful and shrewd and they knew precisely how to create the ghastliest freaks that fetched top dollar.

Quite often we would be loaded into a wagon as the band of gypsies would travel to some new place to make camp. I saw a lot of northern Italy while trapped in the vase. I saw it, but I was unable to experience it, so I learned very little of life outside the camp.

I viewed myself as sub-human, believing without question what I had been told by the gypsies about my existing without the benefit of parents; and, for that matter, everything else that they ever said to hurt me and damage my self-image. So pathetic I was that I felt special if they took the time to talk to me at all, despite the fact that they were never anything but abusive. They called me Spignuglini. It was not until many years later that I learned my true name and adopted it.

As it happened, I was often placed next to another vase child – a most beautiful girl named Maria. For eight years we sat near to each other enduring all the conditions of life as vase children. From the beginning we were together, so to speak. She became my life companion, and I loved her deeply! During terrible times she was my strength, and I hers. We knew nothing of physical love; in our vases we weren’t able to experiment even a little bit with such things. So our love grew, not being complicated by the confusion of physical affection. I lived through those ten hard years only because of her love.

We talked, and we got to know each other in ways that few people ever get the chance to. Keep in mind that neither one of us was very experienced or even knowledgeable. In many ways we were both retarded, if I can use such a word literally. We were but babes, even in our teens! But together we explored both our natures, unfettered by the biases that experience and knowledge can sometimes create to cover and corrupt a personality. Maria never called me Spignuglini; she said the name did not fit me. Her name for me was Lucio, which means Bringer of Light.

At some point, we became aware of a startling fact. Our captors, the core leaders of this band of gypsies were all vampires. I think there were maybe nine of them all together, but in that ten year time span their number both increased and decreased. The leader was an especially sadistic and destructive vampire that they called Tarino.

Years later I realized that they were all relatively young vampires. I believe Tarino was the only one of the group that was older than one hundred years. I was in the habit of watching and listening to everything that went on around me, and Tarino and his vampires did not attempt to hide from us the fact that they were vampires.

I watched and learned how vampires lived. I saw the way they behaved and discerned the way they thought. I had never been subjected to the scary bed-time stories of monsters and demons and any of that what-not that children are so often exposed to. From my earliest recollection I was living a scary bed-time story. For me to see that there were ‘people’ that came out only at night, and sucked the blood of others was nightmare-ish certainly, but I soon accepted it as a normal part of life. Of course, they never fed on the vase children. Oh, they often threatened us with it, but their beatings held far more menace. Furthermore, we did not have any way to act up or misbehave; we were all quite contained in our vases.

At first I had no idea or conception of the life-span of vampires. I did not understand that they could not simply die – at least, not of old age. It only seemed to me that they were very mean people that hated the day, loved the night, and killed a lot! So I could not understand why there would be other, non-vampire people willing to endanger their life by traveling with vampires. It seemed that the vampires killed without discrimination. Their ‘slaves’ would help in ‘harvesting’ victims, abducting both children and young adults alike, the latter usually used as victims for the vampires, and the former often groomed to become vase art.

All this I watched from inside my own vase, as my body grew abnormally, defectively, in order to fit into the cramped confines of my hideous vase. I was too young, and too uneducated so to speak, to know how to feel about what I witnessed. Any empathy that I felt for any of it, I felt through Maria.

Where I did feel sympathetic, great emotion and passion in the form of anger and rage to be precise, was whenever they hurt Maria. I was careful to hide my emotion as best I could, for I felt certain that they would separate us if they learned of our strong feelings for each other.

Maria saw no ugliness. Well, I mean she saw it; of course, she saw it. And she was not in denial about it. But she preferred to focus on the beautiful. She had no more education or experience in the world than I had, but it was just in her to see the lovely.

I’m not really prone to sentimentality, except, perhaps, when it comes to the sun, and, to my Maria. My only real memories of enjoying the light of day are with Maria. Perhaps it is good that I can’t view another sunrise, for I think I should prefer to keep pure that cherished memory of us together, watching the dawn sky lighten, and the glorious brilliance of the virgin day intensifying from the horizon. “Someday,” I had whispered just loud enough for her to hear, “I will be strong enough to break out of this vase on my own, and I will break you out of yours, and we shall escape together from these people.”

“Ah, Mia Luce Bella” as she called me, which means My Lovely Light. “You are my hero, whatever.”

But we had seen other vase children broken out of their vases when their time had come. It was not a pretty sight. Usually, the newly created, deformed, dwarfen ‘freak’ had not the strength to walk. And the smell – God!! And even as they learned to stand upright and walk again, they were never fast, as their legs had often been twisted quite effectively by the grotesque mold that had been made to form them. And they would be carrying on those twisted legs a squat, hunched form that was grossly obese!

So I was not sure how I would ever be able to do as I had promised. Though I wanted to so badly. The years in that vase dragged on slower than all of my centuries as a vampire.

After nearly ten years, I knew that my time to be broken out of the vase was coming soon. My arms had grown into the bent protuberances through which they were stuck and my elbows just emerged allowing me limited use. My legs also protruded from their twisted adjutages just above the knees. Inside my vase I stood maybe four feet tall, and though I couldn’t see my body I knew that I was undoubtedly fat, filling in all of the warped contours. The vase felt like my shell, and I could feel the slight pressure of my body against the inside of that shell. Curious… that it never occurred to me to feel self-conscious.

I spent at least a season trying to strengthen my legs and stand on them whenever no one was looking, and eventually I was able to just move under my own power. The first thing I did was close the distance between Maria and myself, and touch her face. It was the first time we had ever touched.

My first idea was to try to smash my vase into Maria’s, hoping to break both of them with the impact. But we were both scared to try. It was sure to make a loud noise, and everyone in the camp would come running. There would be trouble then, no matter if I was successful in breaking out of the vase or not.

We both stewed on it for weeks, and eventually an idea that had been in the back of my mind crept like a criminal into my conscious. The vampires had strength – a lot of strength! Even the female vampires seemed to be stronger than a regular man. I knew nothing of the blood-lust; Maria and I both thought simply that they liked the taste of it. I had seen enough vampires created that I had an idea of how it was done. It seemed that if you drank the blood of a vampire, then you would become a vampire.

And so my idea was to drink the poisoned blood of a vampire. It would hopefully make me strong enough to break free of my vase and safely escape with Maria. I would never drink the blood of anyone else though. And I would never kill anyone.

It did not occur to me that such an act might forever ban me from the light of day. Obviously, I had no idea of the true consequences of drinking the blood of a vampire. Understand that we had never been exposed to any traditional vampire folk-lore, religion, or virtually anything of the ‘real’ world.

Of course, we did know that the light of the dawn would destroy a vampire. We had witnessed several executions from our vases. Watching a vampire die in the sun was an extremely horrible event to behold. I do not know what ‘crime’ a vampire would have to commit to warrant such a decree of death from Tarino, but I know that it was an easy thing to incur his wrath. The condemned vampire would be stripped and shackled by his wrists and ankles. Thick, heavy chains would connect each of the shackles tightly to four evenly spaced steel rods that had been driven deep into the ground in an open clearing in the forest. Bare in mind that it would require at least eight other vampires or strong men to restrain the struggling vampire. This would all be done shortly before dawn, and the other vampires would, of course, take their cover for the day. The doomed vampire would then wait, splayed, for the first rays of the sun. There would be the most violent struggling you could possibly imagine. Once I saw a vampire free his wrists by ripping his own hands off. He was in the process of chewing through his ankles when the first light of day streamed over the hill. The sun burned the writhing and screaming vampire layer by layer into nothing!