Lessons in the Occult

Lesson 4: The truth about vampires (By Anthony Shy)

 On the way to his house the dark haired boy and I got acquainted. The boy's name is Anthony Shy. And, against my better judgment, I have agreed to let him write this lesson. He is, after all, the expert on vampires.

Mr. James Harrison

* * *

Ok, before I start talking about vampires I wanted to correct some mistakes in the previous lesson. I did not scream when I saw the Mr. Harrison ghost. I let out a very manly yell because I was surprised. That's right, surprised, not scared. Now that you know the truth we can get on with the lesson.

When we got home from the park I told my mom that I was really tired. Then I went straight up to my room so I could talk to Mr. Harrison. First off, I had a ton of questions about ghosts. I learned what you just learned in the previous lessons. Ghosts are real, they are rare, and they can't hurt you. That made me feel much better about talking to a ghost. I also thought it was pretty cool when he explained why he was see-through. I guess I was "seeing with my spirit" when I looked for supernatural stuff. That's cool. He didn't tell me about the haunted house until much later, though. Maybe he thought I would laugh at him. Pretty good guess, since when I finally did find out I did laugh at him.

You just learned that ghosts are spirits who don't have bodies. Well, vampires are the opposite. They are bodies that don't have spirits. You see, when someone dies from a vampire bite, their spirits move on just like when anyone else dies. The difference is that the body grows fangs and keeps feeling the things that bodies feel. The body feels hungry at night and has to feed on the blood of some living person. During the day the body feels sleepy, and so it sleeps in a cave or sewer or some other dark place. You can't really blame the vampire. It just feels and reacts without having a conscience to guide its actions. Still, they do need to be stopped. If they keep feeding on the same person for a long time it can kill that person.

Vampires feel other things besides hunger and sleepiness. They can feel pain, for example, which they avoid when possible. Fire hurts them the most and it is one of the few things that can drive them off when they are trying to feed. But without a spirit they are never happy or sad or remorseful or spiteful. They simply exist. So it is no good trying to talk to a vampire and make it see the error of its ways. It can't be sorry without a soul. That, and vampires can't talk anyway.

I learned all this stuff about vampires because of what happened to my friend, Jamie. She had been sick for a while, but the doctors didn't know what was wrong with her. She just started feeling tired all the time and had to stop coming to school so that she could rest more. I was really worried about her, so I volunteered to bring her homework to her while she was sick. That way I would have a reason to see her every weekday and try to cheer her up. I started having my suspicions on the first day I brought her homework to her.

"How are you doing?" I asked. Then I felt all stupid because I knew she wasn't doing well. But she was nice enough not to say what a stupid question it was. Maybe she didn't even think it was a stupid question. I had come to see her, and I guess that's what counts.

"I am doing good, Anthony. Just tired all the time and... and I don't know why..." and then her voice broke and she started to sob.

I didn't really know what to do, so I leaned toward her and gave her a hug so that she would have a shoulder to cry on. Jamie leaned into me and just cried against my shoulder for a while. I brushed her hair back so it wouldn't get wet from her tears, and that is when I felt a bump on her neck. I looked down and saw the fang marks; two small puncture wounds that had been hidden by her hair before. I knew it wasn't a snake bite or anything, because the doctors would have figured out what was wrong with her if it was as simple as snake venom. That is when I started wondering if she could have been bitten by a vampire. Before I had never believed in vampires, but Jamie's unexplained illness and the fang marks made me reconsider. I needed to find out what was happening.

Jamie and I talked a little bit about school and stuff, and then I said good-bye and promised to talk to her a little whenever I brought her homework from school. When I left her house I went straight to the library and checked-out every book they had about vampires. I figured that some of these books had to have some real information about real vampires. I mean, if vampires really existed.

So my life for the next several weeks consisted of going to school, visiting Jamie (when she wasn't too tired for company), and reading books about vampires. At first I just glanced through the books to see if any described the sort of thing that was happening to Jamie. Most of the books weren't even close, but there were some books that pretty much hit the mark. These were some of the older traditional vampire stories. They said that vampires fed on a victim's blood every few days while the victim slept. That person would get weaker and more and more tired over a long period of time. This is exactly what was happening to Jamie!

I used these stories to learn as much truth about vampires as I could. And that is how I figured out that they are soulless (that is, they don't have a spirit) and all of the other stuff I mentioned at the beginning of the lesson.

But I had to have time to figure out how to find and defeat a vampire, and time for Jamie was running out. I decided to suggest to Jamie that blood transfusions might help. She asked the doctors if that might help, and (since they didn't know what else to do at this point) the doctors agreed to give it a try. When they started giving her blood her condition stabilized, meaning that it didn't get any worse. Unfortunately she didn't get better, either. But at least it gave me some extra time to help her.

And it was at this point that I met Mr. Harrison. I was walking around in the evening looking for vampires, because that is when they would come out. And instead of finding a vampire, I find a ghost. It was actually nice to have someone to talk to about this vampire stuff. Mr. Harrison believed in ghost, of course, so believing in vampires wasn't as hard for him as it might be for other people.

I am sure that you learned tons from me during this lesson, but Mr. Harrison wants to write the next one. I think he misses being a teacher or something, so I guess I won't argue. Besides, I get a little irritated with him looking over my shoulder the whole time I write.