by Del Howison
Vampires Don't Sleep Alone
Collection and editorial material copyright © 2010 Elizabeth Barrial and D. H. Altair.
All rights reserved.
Published as an ebook in 2014 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc. Published as a paperback by Ulysses Press in 2010.
Cover art © 2013 Jihane Mossalim.
ISBN: 978-1-625670-69-4
For my writing partner, whose kindness, wit, and wisdom buoys me. For my beloved brother, my beautiful husband, and Lilith, our dhampyr. My life is ashes without you. For my family, blood and non-blood, living and dead. With all my heart, I love you.
Sine amore, nihil est vita.
—Elizabeth Barrial
For Lilith (Grandpa’s sidekick)— When you look back treat me kindly; and to Lisa Majewski—It’s only make-believe.
—D.H. Altair
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I Your Introduction to Vampires: What You Need to Know
Why a Vampire?
Tortured Soul: It Comes with the Territory
Common Fallacies Concerning Vampires
Do All Children of the Night Think Alike?
Nosferatu, Lord Ruthven, or Carmilla: What Sort of Vamp Are You Looking For?
Makers & Minions: Other Relationships You Need to Understand
VILFs: He’s 700 Years Old, and So Are His Hang-ups
Where Is the Lair?
Pros & Cons of Dating the Undead
PART II How to Date a Vampire: The Etiquette & the Information
How to Dress for a Vampire
On the Prowl: Where to Find Your Future Mate
Should I Bug Renfield about an Introduction?
No Matter What, Am I Too Young for Him?
To Play It Safe, Should My First Date Be a Double?
Can We Only Meet at Night?
Dining Out: Is It a Date Option?
Should I Be Talkative or Deadly Silent?
Je Ne Sais Quoi: Adding a Little Mystery to Your Humanity
Prowling Pompeii: How Much Do You Really Need to Know about His History?
I Think He Can See Right through Me—Do I Need Make up?
Better Haunts & Gravestones: How to Make Your Home Hospitable…
The Lucy Westernra Predicament: What to Do if He’s Turning Your Friends
Vulnerable, Not Victim: Showing Your Gentler Side
The Van Helsing Issue: What to Do When Your Friends Disapprove
Does He Like the Chase? Should I Play Hard to Get?
Bewitchings: Adding a Little Oomph
PART III Romancing & Bedding a Vampire: The Art of Eternal Seduction
Vamp on Top?
How to Seduce a Vampire
Shapeshifting: A Form of Foreplay?
Perfume or No: Should I Smell Like Prey or Partner?
What Difference Does It Make if the Lights Are Out?
Is There Romance in Entering though a Window?
Is Feeding Cheating?
When Your Vamp Sucks: Breakups without Stakes
Amor aeternus (Eternal love)?
Finding Unconditional Love in Undeath
Conclusion: Danse Macabre
About the Authors
Also by Del Howison
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
—E. M. Cioran
It is a summer night, and the full moon provides plenty of light as you head to the club. The light mist in the air and the cool dampness feel good against your exposed skin. You have done your make-up to perfection and are wearing your sexiest dress, the one that fits your body like a silk glove and accentuates all of your assets. The tops of your breasts are dusted with glitter. Your lips are red, a deep, blood red, and your smoky eyes beg men to come to you, to need you, to desire you. But you are only after one man tonight. This is a man who can be as dark as the night and as stoic as the grave. This man can offer you eternal love.
You had planned on a Friday night at home so you could finish up some paperwork. Long hours sitting at a desk, staring at a computer monitor, have left you feeling tense and claustrophobic, so you decide to go for a walk to unwind before you hit the sack. Stepping out into the cool darkness, you look up at the harvest moon, hanging low, full, and darkly golden in the sky. The reflective light from the orb casts long, dark shadows across the ground, creating shapes that shift and slide as you walk past. The sounds of the night come to you—a train in the distance, a cat in the alley, and a … well, you are not quite sure what that is—and you move on.
It is dark inside the nightclub, and the gloom is punctuated by jagged slashes of multicolored laser light and staccato flashes from the strobes. The air is damp and uncomfortably warm from the heat of writhing, dancing bodies, and the air is thick with tobacco, clove, heady perfume, and spilled gin. As you make your way through the crowd, you feel your own heartbeat throb in your throat, and your pulse races in anticipation of tonight’s events. You can feel moisture slowly trickle down between your swollen breasts as your breathing quickens. You know you look enticing. Your hair ruffles a moment as you pass a fan, and you are quick to straighten it with a couple of swift moves of your fingers. You want to look your best because tonight is the night. Tonight you are planning on meeting your vampire. The Transylvanian nobleman to your fair and seductive Lucy awaits, and you are ready for the chance at eternal romance.
Being alone has its advantages: It gives you time to think. You have been working day and night, and your work is your life; it always has been, but not by choice. You have always been something of a loner, introverted, and though you have had many girlfriends, you haven’t yet found anyone who really understands you. In all of your relationships, you have felt a desolate aloneness. Despite your many liaisons, you have not been able to find a real connection. You are looking for something more than the women you have met have been able to offer you. Unlike most of your buddies, you are looking for something serious, something lasting. You are looking for a love that is transcendent, the stuff of poetry, and not the shallow banalities that your peers seem to relish. Her eyes will be pools deep into her soul, and she will know all your needs and yearnings from the moment you meet her. She is out there, and you know it. You can feel it. But where do you find this sort of passion and romance in a world of glass, steel, and diodes? Where do you find the key to eternity?
While the ultraviolet darkness of the club surrounds you in a cape of pounding musical beats, people bump you as they pass, and you check out their faces and scan the crowd for this vampire of your dreams. He is there. You know this as well as you know your own name. Your pulse quickens. You imagine his breath on your neck and the warmth of your own blood as it pounds through your heart, bringing in the oxygen. It is as red as it can get, and you are a ripe piece of vampiric fruit. You can imagine his hand wrapping itself around your neck and then flattening out as his fingers trail down toward your breasts. You know it is time, and you think you are ready.
She is your succubus, your vampire. Her heat is palpable as you imagine her floating down to you or stepping around the corner of that hedge up ahead. You would do anything to meet her. You would sell your soul.
BUT WAIT! WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU DOING?
If you are seeking romance in the arms of a vampire, you need to read this book. Information is strength. You need to arm yourself with knowledge about what you are getting into. You need help. Because of the fairly recent assimilation of vampires into human society, more and more humans are taking up these complex relationships, making access to this infor
mation vital, now more than ever. In this book, we present a brief history of the vampire and some theories of vampire sociology. We discuss common misconceptions of these long-maligned and often misunderstood creatures and how to responsibly form relationships, romantic and otherwise, with them.
When you have finished reading this book, you may still want to spend eternity with your vampire. We hope that at least we may help you to pick the right vampire for you, and we want to enable you to go into this relationship with your eyes open, armed with information, knowing exactly what you are getting yourself into. This knowledge comes from years of study and our own personal infiltration of the vampire culture. It’s secret information available only to those who are part of the inner circle. Come in. Just don’t tell anybody that we told you these things.
Part I
Your Introduction to Vampires:
What You Need to Know
Why a Vampire?
The nosferatu do not die like the bee when he stings once. He is only stronger; and being stronger, have yet more power to work evil.
—Abraham Van Helsing, Dracula
The old Greek term nosophoros means “plague carrier,” and vampires and assorted drinkers of blood have always been associated with carrying and spreading disease. This is hardly the most attractive premise on which to go out and find a date, mate, or even acquaintance. An odd place for us to begin, don’t you agree? But do not delude yourself. Your quest to conquer your vampire lover will not happen without prejudices and dissent from not only the mere mortals around you but other vampires and their lovers as well. What makes these denizens of darkness so appealing? What do they have to offer that seems so out of reach by any other means?
The vampiric condition has existed since the beginning of recorded history, and the mysteries of it have been mythologized by many cultures as a way of understanding the blood-drinkers among us. Vampires’ dietary habits, lifestyles, and appearances lend easily to creating anxiety among humanity’s general population. The Pishacha and Vetelas of India, the Greco-Roman Empusae and Lamia, the Babylonian Gallû—all these mythological figures were exaggerated, deliberately misleading accounts of the vampire, based on a self-perpetuating cycle of bad publicity rooted in humanity’s fear of the unknown. In traditional Western folklore, vampires have often been portrayed as reanimated corpses with tight skin from bloating and long dirty fingernails due to receding of the skin from the cuticles down, which caused the nails to appear as if their growth had continued unimpeded after death. These rotting, stinking, semi-decayed undead would never do as romantic partners. In truth, many of history’s great statesmen, religious leaders, scientists, and artists were vampires forced to mimic humanity in order to survive, though this information is the type of stuff you will never find in your school history books.
Now, in the twenty-first century, we are beginning to put aside superstitious, foolish fears and embrace vampires as our friends and lovers. The modern acceptance of the vampiric condition is owed in part, ironically, to the popularity of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Though the antagonist is portrayed as a monster, and the vampires that populate the story are depicted as little more than predators, the sexuality, worldliness, and mystery of Stoker’s story led many free-thinking individuals in the late Victorian era to actively seek out vampires in society, which, as a consequence, brought us to the acceptance of vampires that we are starting to enjoy today. The vampire has been gussied up, and both his attire and appearance have become more socially acceptable.
A relationship with a vampire is not without its challenges, but it can be an incomparably fulfilling experience for a human. Where we need to start and concentrate our focus is the modern vampire, the man you are destined to seek out and spend eternity with, the man who will literally sweep you off of you feet and into a mausoleum built for two. Let us bring him up to date.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the quintessential vision of the vampire changed from that earlier, folkloric image. In literary representations, the vampire was now portrayed as romantic, cultured royalty, dapper in formal attire—a rake or vixen in the gilded guise of aristocracy—thanks to the writings of Bram Stoker, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, John Polidori, and Alexandre Dumas. By the twentieth century, the image of the vampire was that of a darkly beautiful, hip, sensual, and dangerous puer aeternus, his image molded by the writings of Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Charlaine Harris, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. Though the fantasy of a vampiric liaison was a dangerous one, the promise of never-ending romance and indescribable passion remained ubiquitous. Now, the allegorical vamp was ready for general socialization, a motion picture career, and prime-time television. The media portrayal of the vampire is brimming with unbridled, feral sexuality, romantic mystery, and the promise of undying devotion. Is it any wonder that humans feel drawn to this?
But despite the erotic allure, why date a vampire? What would motivate a person to deliberately choose, with open eyes, to face the inevitable challenges in this uniquely complex, exigent type of relationship?
Thanks to their innumerable years on earth, vampires have acquired a self-confidence and worldliness that is impossible for humans to achieve. Often, vampires also tend to have more refined tastes, and their manners are generally impeccable. Occasionally, their cultural references may be somewhat dated and their choice of words archaic, but it is a small price of inconvenience compared with the pleasure of sharing the breadth of their centuries of experience in all knowledge and pleasures:
• Vampires are almost wholly immune to illness and do not age.
• The vampire, male or female, is a fountainhead of passion. It is a literal byproduct of the condition and is biologically fueled by the engorgement of the red blood cells in the vampire’s system. The result? They have unparalleled primal sexual energy and, as a consequence of their extensive time on earth, prowess and skill unmatched in humans.
All in all, there is no substitute for the very rich, and sometimes enjoyable, experience of being a vampire’s consort.
Tortured Soul: It Comes with the Territory
Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.
—Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
It has become a cliché of sorts, thanks to nineteenth and twentieth century vampire fiction, that vampires are universally possessed of tragic, tortured souls, and that they can find a sort of redemption through romance. But it is a cliché that has some foundation in truth. No, not all vampires are larger-than-life Byronic antiheroes, but many are. The life of a vampire is an inexplicably lonely one, and it would be fair to say that he is doomed to this loneliness by his very nature.
The vampire’s extended lifespan is something that many people find enviable. Death is not something that modern Western culture finds palatable. Long gone are the days when we employed wailing women, celebrated death through creating memorial jewelry of hair and jet, or practiced postmortem photography. We simply no longer truly celebrate death through elaborate memorials; death is something to be feared, and is only spoken of in hushed whispers, lest the reaper come calling. As a result, the vastly extended lifespan of the vampire is something that modern humans covet. But is eternal life something that we really want for ourselves?
My God! Can one truly imagine the agony of living forever? The initial idea is great: You will never die and, with a little luck, will always appear healthy and strong. A few limitations will come up here and there, but overall it’s just life, life, and more life. But as someone who is about to date and, hopefully, mate with a vampire for life, you have to ask, What is eternity and what problems and blessings come with it? Most humans have a hard time putting together five years of bliss, let alone forever.
Consider the sorrow that comes from watching the eons pass. It would be impossible for a vampire to confer the vampiric pathogen to all the people he or she loved in their human lifetime. (Whoa, we just got a whiff of Mormon vampirisim—talk about an extended family!) Watching all the peop
le they love wither and die while they stay eternally vibrant and strong is painful, to say the least. Vampires are also met with the challenge of watching all that is familiar to them erode, change, and be rebuilt. They must find ways to acclimate and adapt to societal change and upheaval, often watching whole systems of behavior and belief transform before their eyes. Civilizations rise and fall during a vampire’s lifetime, and the sorrows and sense of loss and isolation that accompany this are things a human mind likely cannot comprehend. It is shocking enough for some of our human friends to go back to their home towns and see that mini-malls have sprouted where their little league baseball field used to stand.
Different cultures have different views on eternity. Even in this day and age, becoming a vampire is not considered socially acceptable on the whole. Most vampires, even those turned in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, find themselves ostracized by their friends and family, and this is even truer for vampires that were turned thousands of years ago.
The only time in which vampirism was considered perfectly acceptable, even the norm, was in scattered tribes among the nomadic hunter-gatherers sometime around 8500 BC. It appears that humans and vampires coexisted in tribes and survived by forming symbiotic relationships: The vampires would feed on the blood of the felled prey, and the humans would consume the meat and foraged foodstuffs. In turn, the humans would also allow the vampires to feed off of them lightly, although not to the point of death, and in the end, both halves of the tribe would mutually sustain one another, especially in times of near famine. These mixed-vampiric tribes would simply not have to hunt or forage with as much urgency as the all-human tribes.
However, those times of vampiric tribal hunting are long past, and with the advent of agrarian and industrial civilization, the abandonment of the ways of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, and the spread of the vampiric pathogen to those who weren’t as inclined to peaceful feeding as the nomads, vampires found themselves gradually driven underground. The dawn of agriculture left little place for those who feed on blood—especially human blood—and humans began to perceive vampires as pests and predators akin to, and little better than, feral wolves or rats.