The Gang Finds Out That Vhampires Are Crehatively Bhankrupt
The room was uncharacteristically quiet as the vampires all stared at their copies of J.R. Ward’s Dark Lover.
“Well.” Trenchant was the first to speak with one loaded word.
A moment of silence passed in glances from the faces of one vampire to another.
“Specifics, please?” Fenrir asked.
“Was it the h’s?” Seth asked.
“The ‘h’s!” Trenchant’s voice exploded. “What was that?! It was like a fhile on my knhuckles every thime! I khept imagining that the writer suhffered tehrrible asthma and was dictating the novel to the most literal-minded buffoon she could fhind!”
“It wasn’t intentional, surely?” Seth asked. “I just thought her dictionary was altered by some mischievous child.”
“There shall be no mentions of children here!” Trenchant whispered. The room darkened by a few degrees. Somewhere, the wind blew a window open, slamming it against the wall with a rattling reverberation.
Everyone allowed Trenchant the privacy of regaining her composure by finding interest in the rafters or the many shelves of the reading room.
“Wrath, no ‘h’. It was intentional. I have a theory as to why,” Fenrir said.
“What is it this time?” Trenchant asked, feathers still unruffling. “Linguistic drift? Critical theory? Are we to believe that spelling has no intrinsic meaning, and we should interrogate the oppressive colonial legacy of the concept of spelling words the correct way?”
Fenrir crossed his scarred and muscled arms over his bare chest and waited a moment to see if Trenchant had finished. When she sat back with her eyes closed, he continued: “Simpler than that. Something that makes sense in the story. The author probably did it quite intentionally. But before I get into that, I would like to hear Anatole’s opinion of these… Dark Lovers.”
The others shifted their bodies towards the Queen of the Black Waters, expressions eager.
It took a moment for Anatole to realise that everyone’s attention was on her. “Hmm? Oh yes, quite good. Liked it.”
On the far side of the room, the window that the wind blew open earlier was audibly closed by Meadow, Mr Cavendish’s assistant.
“And?” Trenchant asked.
“What?” Anatole asked.
“You liked it,” Trenchant said.
“Hello,” Dracula said.
Anatole jumped a little in her seat, then rolled her eyes with a hard expression.
“More next time?” Dracula asked. “More, next time. I’ll use the door.” He eyed the bead curtains with suspicion.
“So, Anatole,” Seth smoothly interjected. “There was a love triangle, brothers fighting, big burly men and swooning ladies. There was even a widow’s peak in evidence. Come on, let us know what you think.”
“Well…”
“She didn’t read it,” Trenchant said.
“You didn’t read it?” Seth said, his face falling in exasperation.
“I did!” Anatole insisted, without much conviction.
“I abhor lies,” Fenrir muttered.
“If it helps, I really enjoyed it,” Dracula added, unhelpfully.
Vampire faces turned to him, in various degrees of murderousness.
“You said you couldn’t read?” Seth asked.
“No need. Found a young man named Renfield. He read it to me every morning as I got ready to, erm, pass under.”
“Really?” Anatole asked. “You found someone in New Babylon called Renfield?”
“Well, he looked like a Renfield. And he was babbling something about someone called John. Whoever this John is, I don’t trust him.”
“So your new companion is called John Renfield?” Seth asked.
“Renfield, yes.”
With that matter dealt with, the attention of the room drifted back to Anatole, who, when she realised this turn of events, said: “So, Dracula, you said you liked it?”
“Yes,” Dracula rasped.
“And?” she prompted.
“It was very good,” he said.
“All right then.”
“I was in it, of course.”
A collective groan passed through the participants.
Fenrir’s brow furrowed. “Hold on. The old boy may have a point. Dracula, care to elaborate?”
“Yes,” Dracula rasped again. “I am Wrath. Darius is Harker. Beth is Mina. Everybody else is irrelevant.”
“Are we seriously going to discuss whether Dark Lover is simply a retelling of Stoker’s work?” Seth asked.
“I wouldn’t say a one to one facsimile, of course,” Fenrir said. “But there is a commonality in the theme we can discuss, I think? Alright, Dracula, let us hear your reasoning.”
“This should be good,” Trenchant said.
Dracula straightened up and cleared his throat of the rasp. “You see, I, Dracula, am the King. Mina is my bride. And Harker gets exploded in a car.”
A breathless moment passed.
“And then?” Seth asked.
“What?” Dracula said.
“And then what happened?”
“She’s my queen, like in the book.”
Another moment.
“I guess we should have expected nothing else,” Trenchant concluded.
Seth looked over to Anatole, who looked preoccupied. “You’ve been awfully quiet through all this.”
“Oh I just remembered,” Dracula said. “Everybody else is irrelevant.”
Trenchant chuckled. “At least he didn’t leave us with a dramatic pause this time.”
“I won’t be distracted that easily,” Seth said.
“I think it would be obvious by now,” Fenrir said.
“She didn’t read the book,” Trenchant said.
“Did too!” Anatole said with sudden heat.
“Oh?” Fenrir said. “You’ve been uncharacteristically quiet. Enough so that even the Little Prince noticed the difference in you.”
“I’m just, pensive, okay? The book gave me a lot to think about.”
“I didn’t think it was that kind of book,” Seth added under his breath.
Fenrir shrugged and sat back. “You missed a few meetings the last few weeks too. I just assumed that you decided to go all-in again, like with the Vampire Diaries.”
“It’s not that,” Anatole added. I’ve just been…busy.”
Trenchant raised an eyebrow. “Pity, this book was seemingly written specifically for you.”
“Yeah, it does sound great, but can we just skip to what the Jarl was saying?”
The others reluctantly let her off the hook and turned their attention to Fenrir.
“So what is the indecipherable pseudo-intellectualism you want to spout today?” Trenchant asked.
Fenrir smirked. “I think I figured out why the vampires in this story have such, unorthodox-”
“Silly,” Trenchant helped.
“Particularly uncreative,” Seth added.
“What?” Dracula elucidated.
“-Names…” Fenrir finished. “And for once, Seth D’Asur is correct.”
“What?” Seth said.
“Uncreative. Intentionally uncreative,” Fenrir said. He sat back with his arms crossed over his broad chest with his eyes closed.
“I’m afraid you’ve lost them,” Trenchant said.
“Hmm?” Fenrir said. “Right. Let me explain. The vampire brotherhood’s leader, Wrath, has his name spelt normally, even though it would have been easily enough rendered as Whrath.”
Trenchant wheezed the word a few times for emphasis.
“Quite. He gets to keep his spelling. The others all have altered spelling. Why is this? These beings are born mortal and ascend to vampiredom overnight. Were they born with silly names? The existence of Darius and Beth, with her insistence on keeping the name, brings that into contention. Is it an honorific title? Arguments can be made in that regard. However, my theory is that they picked those names themselves for a very specific reason.”
“To be as insipid as is inhumanly possible? Can you imagine introducing yourself to your betters, or even to your prey? ‘Hello, I’m Zsadist, no really, stop laughing, I am really a big softy at heart.’ Trenchant rolled her eyes. “Honestly. Imagine having to be introduced to an old and distinguished monster. If you’re lucky, they’ll think you feeble-minded, a joke. At worst, they would think it an insult. Like you think you’re too jumped-up to give them your real-boy name.”
“Our names are mostly titles at this point, Trenchant Liberiere, Baron De Breizh,” Fenrir, Jarl Blutenheimrung pointed out. “It’s not like we’re any better.”
“At least our names have gravitas, and some tact! And my mortal name was lost when the building under which I slumbered when I was called to the dark burned to the ground. I had to relearn everything. Plus, I think Trenchant Liberiere is a pretty name, and I rule the house of De Breizh as its Baron, so it’s descriptive.”
“Be that as it may,” Fenrir continued. “I believe these individuals picked these names intentionally.”
“For what purpose?” Seth asked.
“They proclaimed these new names as a group to suck up to the boss, rather unsuccessfully, as it turned out. They all got together to reveal their new names to symbolise their devotion. But something went wrong. Then when their failure was revealed, they, out of pride, were unable to return to their old names at the risk of losing face. I think the first one to reveal this new brown-nose name presented his devotion to Wrath. He probably chose another of the seven deadly sins as a name but was then promptly executed. Wrath was, I assume, angry at the first chooser’s presumption. The others, shocked by this sudden turn of events, decided that placing themselves so close to the naming convention of their leader was too risky and then scurried to find a different name to proclaim. Then further hedged their bets by altering the word they chose in order to remove it yet another step away from Wrath’s, aha, wrath.”
“I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist that pun,” Trenchant said. “And have you considered that you are making these assumptions on the basis that these ‘brothers’ feared Wrath, which, by all appearances, none of them seem to, as they are a brotherhood.”
“Quite,” Seth agreed. “If anything, you’re reading this book like a New Babylonian vampire, and these are…” He sighed. “Well, frankly, I don’t know what these are. But they don’t seem to be in any way afraid of their king. Or anything, really, because of their large, rippling muscles.”
“Look at their actions,” Fenrir countered. “They chose names that would fit their leader’s and that they thought would make them seem strong in the eyes of Wrath.”
Seth sighed resignedly. “You’re just bending things to fit your theories now, aren’t you? And besides, that doesn’t explain the ‘h’s’.”
“That’s where you come in, Little Spoon,” Fenrir answered.
“That’s not even close to-” Seth started and then sighed. “…Nevermind.”
“The lack of creativity,” Fenrir said, grinning.
Another silent moment passed.
“Still not following?” Fenrir asked. “I’ll spell it out. Vampires, as a genus, do not have a creative bone in their entire being.”
“Now hold on,” Trenchant protested.
“What?” Dracula said.
Fenrir held up his hands in supplication. “Now, before you all try to pull me over a rack, hear me out.”
Many grumpy faces were in evidence.
“This is how I think it played out,” he continued. “The first devotee proclaimed his name and was executed. The second, in a panic, tried to come up with a new name on the spot. A human servant suggested something creative. Let’s, for argument sake, suggest Vishous was next. Personally, due to my proclivity towards Germanic languages, I mentally pronounced that name ‘Fish-house’ for the longest time.”
“Get on with it, Fenrir Jarl,” Trenchant interjected.
“Alright, alright. The vampire was panicking, and he asked a human servant for help. The human, thinking his vampire pretty vicious, suggested that as a name. The vampire, panicking more, suggested it being too close to the boss’s naming convention. The human suggested that the spelling of vicious be altered to include an ‘H’, a silent ‘H’ perhaps.”
“And so when the newly minted Vishous was not summarily executed, all the others jumped on the idea.”
This was an evening for silences, it seemed.
“Vampires are not originally creative, but they can create astounding feats of counterfeit. We simply no longer possess the spark that enables true creation.”
“That can’t be true,” Seth said.
Trenchant sat back in shock. She produced a fan and set about fanning her face. “It is true. Mon Dieu. It is. I have searched for beauty my entire existence. That is because I fail to create it by myself. My beauty, my artful makeup, my fabulous dresses. Humans. Humans create it all.”
“Impossible! I can be creative!” Seth exclaimed.
“Try then, Nine-Pence. Create something new, and I will call you by your full name forevermore. Create for me, say, a poem, no, simpler. A limerick, a haiku, anything.”
Seth scowled in determination. “There once was a man from Madras, who had-”
Trenchant smacked the table. “Stop this instant, I’ve heard that one. It is not fit for polite company.”
Seth redoubled. “Two roads diverged-”
“That’s Robert Frost,” Trenchant interrupted.
“I wasn’t finished,” Seth growled. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood- Goddammit.”
“One more, and you’ll even lose a pence.”
He stood up. The veins started standing out on his forehead. The shadows deepened around him. “The summer grasses. All that remains. Of warriors’ dreams,” he managed.
“That,” Trenchant said, “I’ve not-”
“I didn’t know you read Matsuo Bashō,” Fenrir said.
Trenchant clapped her hands together. “Of course! There’s the haiku! I did ask you to produce a poem, a limerick and a haiku. Well done.”
Seth’s face crumpled, and he sat down staring at his hands.
“I shan’t be Crhuel, Nine-pence. You can keep your penny.”
A wail of despair tore through the room.
Several of the vampires took defensive positions out of sheer surprise.
Anatole rose like a tide with tears in her tightly shut eyes, and she tore at her clothes. “How can it be so cruel! All these weeks I’ve been working! Now you say it’s impossible! It can’t be true!”
She collapsed suddenly, slipping under the table like a shark into deeper, blacker waters.
The others were too shocked to react.
“But it is true,” she muttered. Her voice muffled by her sleeve. “It’s a cruel joke, but it’s true. I’ve done nothing but fail.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing these last weeks?” Trenchant asked, not unkindly.
“Ss.” Came the answer from down below.
“Bless you, you were trying to write fiction,” Trenchant whispered.
“Ss!” came the answer again, this time coupled with a sob.
Trenchant reached under the table and gently patted what she found there. There were more wet sounds.
“It is better to understand our limitations,” Fenrir said.
Trenchant gave him a stern look. “Creating is hard, even for mortals. There is beauty to be found, and we best damned appreciate it for what it is. Without taking risks to ridicule, no true art will be accomplished.”
“This coming from the one who at the start of all this whent on a rhant about ‘h’,” Seth put his boot in.
“There are plenty of pence yet to lose,” Trenchant said.
“Nine is fine,” Seth said. “Hey look! I rhymed! Again! Hey that was almost a haiku!”
“Art requires intentionality,” Fenrir said.
“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?” Seth said.
“Anatole wrote a story?” Dracula said. “Can we read it for next time?”
“Go choke on a Renfield,” Anatole said from under the table.
