The Vampire Bat Man

The Vampire Bat Man - Part 7

For the next few months, Thomas and Dracula would repeat this process. Thomas would come home and complain to Dracula about some person who was making the city a worse place in which to raise a family.

And Dracula would, within the week, make sure that person disappeared.

Thomas never outright asked anything of Dracula.

But his intention was understood.

And Dracula, who felt he owed this new lease on life to Thomas and his family, was happy to oblige his new hosts.

During his late night crusades, Dracula managed to extinguish the lives of:

"Jack Frost". An Austrian butcher who shook his frail wife to death in a fit of anger, and then kept her corpse hidden in the freezer at his butcher shop, "to preserve her for a future age, when mankind had developed a cure for Death, and could undo his mistake."

"The Green-Thumbed Killer". A strange spinster who preferred the company of plants to human men so much that she murdered her suitors and used their remains to fertilize her flower garden.

"The Maddest Hatter". A quiet, polite library clerk who stalked one of the college-aged girls who frequented his branch, slit her throats with a playing card, and dabbed up her blood with the pages a first-edition copy of Alice In Wonderland.

To date, there has been one survivor of Dracula's attacks: Ozzy Cobblepott, "The Penguin Kingpin". An ugly little gangster with a limp from an old knee injury that causes him to waddle like a penguin when he runs.

 Despite Ozzy's limp, he managed to evade Dracula's capture by ducking into the Our Lady Of Sorrows cathedral, just as the sun began to rise.

Ozzy described Dracula to Vicki Valere of the Chicago Gazette as "A snarling demon who commands the shadows and drinks blood like a vampire bat."

The story of "The Vampire Bat Man" captured the imagination of the city. Not just the typical folks who read the paper, but working men, housewives, and even schoolchildren. The Vampire Bat Man became the inspiration for a comic strip, a pulp novel whose chapters were serialized in the Sunday edition, and even a popular radio program.

To say that young Bruce Vein was a fan of these stories would be a dramatic understatement. In fact, he developed a hobby of recreating the items mentioned in the fiction about The Vampire Bat Man, and leaving them in "The Justice Crypt" (Bruce's name for the wine cellar, where Dracula slept during the day) for the genuine article to take out on his missions. Most of them were impractical in the real world (such as the little bat-shaped, "oriental throwing stars" that Bruce folded out of tinfoil). But the matching cape and domino mask that Bruce crafted Dracula (by destroying one of his father's old leather trench coats) became his nightly uniform.

Even Dracula, himself, got caught up in The Vampire Bat Man's hype. After listening to an episode of the radio show in which The Vampire Bat Man marked his territory by smearing the blood of his enemies on the wall in a sytlized "vampire bat symbol", Dracula adopted the practice in real life. And he even began carving the same symbol into the bullets he loaded into the pair of Colt..45's that he iberated from the corpse of a contract assassin whose head he ripped off before the man was able to put a bullet in the district attorney.

That last act earned Dracula a fan on the police force. Specifically: James Grosu, the commissioner of police. So much so, that he issued an invitation to meet, via one of Dracula's "Familiars" (the legion of vagrants, newsboys, and cabbies who Dracula paid to act as informers and accomplices).

The letter the commissioner handed the familiar to pass on reads thusly:

"To the vigilante referred to as The Vampire Bat Man,

As the commissioner of police, I can't officially endorse your actions.

But, as a father who is trying his damnedest to raise a daughter in this city...I can't say I object with your results.

It's time we spoke face-to-face. Meet me the old, abandoned Ace Chemicals building at sunset. Come alone. I'll do the same."