d
to certain localities, I am quite sure that vampires are by no means
extinct. Their modes and habits--they are no longer gregarious--have
changed with the modes and habits of their victims, but they are none
the less vampires. Have I seen them? No! but my not having been thus
fortunate, or rather unfortunate, does not make me so discourteous as to
disbelieve those who tell me that they have seen a vampire--that
peculiar, indefinably peculiar shape that, wriggling along the ground
from one tombstone to another, crawls up and over the churchyard wall,
and making for the nearest house, disappears through one of its upper
windows. Indeed, I have no doubt that had I watched that house some few
days afterwards, I should have seen a pale, anaemic looking creature,
with projecting teeth and a thoroughly imbecile expression, come out of
it. I believe a large percentage of idiots and imbecile epileptics owe
their pitiable plight to vampires which, in their infancy, they had the
misfortune to attract. I do not think that, as of old, the vampires come
to their prey installed in stolen bodies, but that they visit people
wholly in spirit form, and, with their superphysical mouths, suck the
brain cells dry of intellect. The baby, who is thus the victim of a
vampire, grows up into something on a far lower scale of intelligence
than dumb animals, more bestial than monkeys, and more dangerous (far
more dangerous, if the public only realised it) than tigers; for,
whereas the tiger is content with one square meal a day, the hunger of
vampirism is never satisfied, and the half-starved, mal-shaped brain
cells, the prey of vampirism, are in a constant state of suction, ever
trying to draw in mental sustenance from the healthy brain cells around
them. Idiots and epileptics are the cephalopoda of the land--only, if
anything, fouler, more voracious, and more insatiable than their aquatic
prototypes. They never ought to be at large. If not destroyed in their
early infancy (which one cannot help thinking would be the most merciful
plan both for the idiot and the community in general), those polyp
brains ought to be kept in some isolated place where they would have
only each other to feed upon. When I see an idiot walking in the
streets, I always take very good care to give him a wide berth, as I
have no desire that the vampire buried in his withered brain cells
should derive any nutrition at my expense. From the fact that some towns
which are clo