Читать книгу Real Zombies, the Living Dead, and Creatures of the Apocalypse - Brad Steiger - Страница 31

Real vampires are still being reported by honest and sober men and women in the twenty-first century. Recently I received a very strange and eerie account from a friend who is a professional journalist whose work appears in major newspapers in the United States. According to her, a friend from eastern Pennsylvania had told her something that she considered really earth-shattering.

Her friend said that he knew of a town in one of the New England states whose residents experienced the attacks of a vampire that was still active until late in the twentieth century. This “thing” had the entire town on edge, but it was the “in” secret of the community. If someone new moved to town (such as a teacher, medical professional, etc.), they were warned about what the townspeople would describe as possible attacks from escapees from a nearby asylum and not to be out late at night.

If someone were bitten, an elaborate chain of command would get the afflicted victims out of the area and to a protected place where they wouldn’t wind up as the undead.

The person who told my friend this account was an art teacher, the son of a minister. “He is a thoroughly honest person, very kind and sympathetic,” she said. “This is one of my few encounters with someone who had experienced the dark side.”

She readily conceded that the experiences of the townspeople seemed like stories right out of a vampire movie or a novel. Horror writer Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot comes quickly to mind as far as plot,” she said. “However in this case, it was only one vampire or creature of the night. They had no idea of how to get rid of it. The creature seemed to strike spontaneously after long intervals of quiet—as if it had been out of town or something—and the entire population of the town was, at least on one level, aware of the situation.

“New people coming to the town usually never stayed long. If a teacher signed a contract, he or she was gone by the end of the year. New doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and lawyers would never buy homes or raise families there. They would commute and be there only on certain days, then usually leave before dark.”

My friend told me that the only way that they finally got rid of this creature was to find its grave and pour several tons of cement on it!

“As far as I can recall,” she said, concluding her account, “this seemed to work (but with vampires, for how long?)”

Real vampires differ from zombies in that they are the ones who enslave their victims, whereas the zombie is a victim who has been enslaved by a Voodoo Priest or Priestess (art by Ricardo Pustanio).