The rain wakes me up. Not because it is strong or dense - it wakes me because, without knowing, I’ve been waiting for it.

It’s a late rain. The cold has begun and winter is in the air.

I look at the clock at my side - 3 a.m. - but I twist it away because the glow of the LED doesn’t go well with the primordial murmur of the water. I get up and stretch my hand towards my clothes, but don’t complete the gesture.

I go to the patio; to the darkness.

There’s no more noise than the sound of water, and in that moment it is just my skin and the rain. I close my eyes, lift my face and wait.

The intimate warmth of the bed disappears in an instant.

I feel over me a slow caress. The water travels as if it wants to discover every centimeter of me.

The caress of a dead hand. A hungry embrace, fierce in its impatience to encompass me.

My body reacts to the contact, shivering, but at the same time, absolutely conscious of each part of me.

Here I am, practically nude.

Here I am, in the storm.

I shiver and I do not know if it is from pleasure or fright.

Perfect, I tell myself, returning to my bed.

I have a thread for my novel.

The story I wish to tell is a ghost walking the hallways of my mind. I can’t see it completely, but I know it’s there and I search for a way to make it discernible, concrete.

I read, without yet knowing why, stories of cursed voyages, the sad destiny of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the last lines of Moby Dick, where fury ends in disaster.

I take out the old VHS tapes and sit down late at night to watch the symphony in black, white and gray that is Nosferatu. One scene in particular: While the captain ties himself quickly to the rudder, Count Orlock approaches, full of power, hands like claws, the appearance of a human rat, surrounded by an air of disease and plague.

On the wall of my office, I stick a map torn from an atlas. I have marked with ink the trip that leads from Varna to Whitby; I look at it obsessively.

A trip from yesterday to today.

A past rabidly alive.

I mark all the countries to which the unfortunate schooner sails and I wonder what hungry yesterdays inhabit each one of them. What creatures, beings and spectres have been imagined, which come from death to feed on the living?

I sleep well, thinking of nightmares.

I sail towards them, in the midst of the storm and the furious waters.

A boat. A schooner. The Demeter.

I picture that name in the wood, gnawed by the salt.

And aren’t the sailors surrounded by it? What flavor do the sailors possess for the vampire? Salt, of course, of the sea, of the sweat and the skin, of the blood and every secret liquid, intimate, sheltered by the body.

And if someone else desires it?

What if someone faces the vampire in order to save, to taste, to love that salt?

And who else is most appropriate to fight for those men than the captain of the boat?

A homosexual captain.

I think about what it means to be one on a Russian schooner of the 19th century. In those days, it was easy to be lynched for the mere crime of being. While I walk through the streets of my city, I think and observe, and discover that 1996 is not that far from the 19th century.

Many stories of the sea are stories of increasing growth, of the young person who acquires, through penuries and adventures, the security that allows them to leave their adolescence behind.

But what I am writing is a voyage of the damned.

And if I make it a story about decreasing? What if I snatch away the security and tranquility of the captain?

How cruel is the phantom of my interior.

Why write horror stories, stories of fear and darkness?

Most of the time, when people have asked me this question, it’s a complaint. There are more important things than monsters, they tell me implicitly. I wish I could believe them ….

I was born in 1966 and I ignored everything. At bedtime, nobody tells children dark stories of power and repression, nor that a murderous tyranny governs us. I was busy learning how to walk, busy with my first words, happily protected and unaware.

The judicial police had the power of impunity. They could do whatever they wanted without repercussion. They could claim that each one of their victims was guilty of political crimes.

This combination of hitmen and cops were called “madrinas” and they circulated freely through the streets. That you were innocent of everything couldn’t protect you.

Children know even if they don’t know. They may not understand the context, but the evidence is there.

I could not understand the conversation of the adults, but I understood the tone of their voices; the pauses filled with meaning and the heavy silence they forced upon themselves.

I remember, yes, the nocturnal glow of a television (black-and-white, with only two channels), and a movie where a silhouette of something shows against the window that protects the people from the night. A second before the glass breaks and the inconceivable darkness devours them, there is a pause, a silence.

The space of horror just before the bestial maw and blood.

The silence heard again and again from the adults.

Why do you write horror and not reality?

Why write a vampire story?

Back then, it seems, everyone loved vampires. Not old Lugosi, but David Bowie, modern and Gothic. The publicity for the film The Lost Boys proclaimed, “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.” The game of Masquerade showed us the sons of Cain, sophisticated and filled with a security born of knowing themselves masters of the night. The last rebels, the urban pirates, whose fury, appetite and desire responded only to their will.

I couldn’t love them. I was upset by so much power, so much carefree impunity ….

Oh, come on, they said. Imagine yourself being a predator, carnivorous, the lion amongst the sheep.

But I looked at my fluffy wool and told myself it was dangerous to love assassins.

And despite this, I was fascinated by that world. I don’t know why.

I read about vampires, of the style found in the documents gathered in 1746 by Agustin Calmet, and found a fragment that fascinated me: the way of burying the impure.

You filled their mouths with rocks. They were decapitated. They were buried under crossroads so they remained lost forever and, as an added precaution, they were pierced with a stake. Not the cinematographical one, absurdly portable. The traditional stake was a clumsy lance, heavy and huge, which basically nailed the corpse to the ground, like a butterfly that should never fly again.

What kind of monsters deserved such treatment, such rage and contempt?

Vampires, yes, but also the bastard sons, the unbaptized ones, the inhabitants of other regions, the sodomites and those careless souls who allowed a black cat to jump over their dead bodies.

In short: anyone.

Anyone could be considered a monster. And monsters were assassinated with impunity.

Didn’t you know? Didn’t we all know? The grownups who hushed themselves to protect the children; the children who, without knowing how, discovered they were not safe from the darkness and death?

Perhaps that’s what fascinated me about the topic. But not from the perspective of the assassin.

How would his shadow be perceived? What do the gazelles think of tigers? What sensations exist when one falls into a winter that one knows will never leave?

What does it feel like to walk down streets that can devour you any second, where impunity and prejudice can decide to finish you off without any cares?

What does it feel like when you sail towards a shipwreck?

– José Luis Zárate, 2020

Mexico