Diversion Books
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Copyright © 2002 by Michele Jaffe
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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First Diversion Books edition January 2012
ISBN: 978-1-62681-191-1
The Stargazer
The Water Nymph
Secret Admirer
For this volume there can be no better godmother than Susie Phillips, with whom I first learned to appreciate all the secrets a text can contain—and conceal. I can only hope that among its pages she will find some small measure of the pleasure that I have long been blessed with in her friendship.
The Vampire, also known as a Bloode-Sucker or fiend, comes originally from the Northern Countries. Contrary-wise to what others have said, he is often faire of complexion, and mayhap shows none of the fiend without. A man once had a vampire for a Friende a good many years before he discovered the truth of the matter, and then only when it was too late and he saw his wife dying of two pricks in her neck, and his friend with blood upon his lips.
Concerning the Vampire, t’are those who say he is e’en such a one as rises from the dead, but this is wrong, for the Vampire is a living being, and takes to his blood sucking so that he may prosper, and grow stronger, from others. For him, the blood is as food for us, and he must have it, lest he weaken and die. This is the cause that he shall be known to strike in a regular way, just as we must eat our victuals and drink ale at our regular times or we will perish. So that he will suck blood every day or every week, as he list, but regular like always or else he will bee sick unto death.
This noorishment he taketh only by night, being a creeture who loves the darkness, and thrives upon it. So that as the Moon, no longer young, waneth in her course and grow slimmer, even so the Vampire grows fatter, which is to say, more powerful. And on every such night as there is no Moon, when between her monthly courses she doth hide her face, on that night will the Vampire be at his most powerful. Woe awaits he who thinks he can strike the Vampire down on such a night, for he has the power of the Devil in him most strongly then, and will be invincible.
And I say ‘he’ but really there is also the other kind, the female or ‘she-vampire’ who is the same in every respect, save this one: that she is far more dangerous.
—From A Compendium of Vampires and Other Fiends, London: 1545