It’s something we vampires don’t like to talk about, even to ourselves: the possibility that there really are people out there who hunt and kill for blood or for the sheer rush of killing…and that those people might be real vampires, not just psychos with no life.
At the risk of making myself really unpopular, I’d like to talk about vampire serial killers. As you might have guessed, I think they exist. At the risk of making myself even more unpopular, I see nothing wrong with a vampire serial killer (or any other kind of serial killer) being put down like a rabid dog. I think the death penalty is quite just, so long as the death is not cruel and unusual (i.e. painful, slow, torturous) and the proper precautions have been taken to make sure that the innocent are not killed by mistake.
Gilles de Rais, a contemporary of Jeanne d’Arc, is a little known figure outside of France these days, but he was one of the most bloodthirsty serial killers in human history, possibly the prototype of Bluebeard. He lured children into his castle, sodomized them, then skinned them alive or otherwise tortured them and sacrificed them to Satan. He also drank their blood. He wanted to live forever.
Erzebet Bathory, a more well known serial killer, seduced young maidens after promising them a place in her household (usually as a servant, although later in life she began to get desperate and started looking for ladies in waiting, a mistake that got her found out and walled up in her room for the rest of her life). She performed all sorts of cruel tortures on them. One of the more common methods she used was to hoist peasant girls up in a cage that had been lined with spikes; she and her personal servants would poke their feet with hot irons, and force them to impale themselves on the spikes, so that Erzebet could dance in a shower of blood. The blood was supposed to preserve her youth and beauty.
Most of us are familiar with Jeffrey Dahmer and Rod Farrell. The former was a cannibal. The latter still sits on Death row for murdering Heather Wendorf’s parents, because he wanted their minivan and money, and possibly because he wanted the thrill. The press hinted that what he really wanted was their blood, because he was the leader of a vampire cult.
There is energy in life. It is released in death. The Celts in Wales, back in prehistory, called this life awen and had it passed on ritually from priest to priest, bard to bard, chieftain to chieftain by having the dying man breathe his last breath into the mouth of his successor. Ritual sacrifices work on the principle that the energy released by death can be put to use somehow. No, it’s not pretty. No, it’s not nice. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work. Pain also releases a great deal of energy. All talk of drinking blood and/or eating flesh aside, which can speak for itself, it is my belief that many bullies, playground sadists, animal torturiers, and serial killers are actually psychic vampires who feed from the energy that they release.
It’s people like this, I think, that made people associate vampires with monsters.
Not all vampires are like this (well, duh). Most vampires, like most “normal” human beings, are moral and kind and sensitive, although like other people, we do have our weak moments and can put our foot in our mouth or commit other gaffes that we regret later (the same sins that everybody else is sometimes guilty of).
I do believe, however, that there is a minority within our ranks that is monstrous. While i don’t support vigilantism, I do believe in justice, and in protecting society from those who wpuld prey on its members. If one of these monsters gets caught, I’m all for administering lethal injection.
Mistress