Did you:

* Smoke on a holiday 

* Have sexual intercourse
   with your grandmother

* Allow unclean birds or
   animals to settle on the
   grave, leap under the
   dead body, or creep
   under the coffin

* Become a wizard during
   your lifetime

* Become a heretic

* Have illigitimate parents
   who weren't married

* Become a werewolf

* Commit suicide

* Commit perjury

* Get buried without the 
   proper sacraments

* Die unbaptized

* Die by violence or
   drowning

* Have a caul at birth

* Have six older brothers
   or sisters

* Have chlorea

* Have teeth at birth

* Have a werewolf or
   vampire walk over your
   grave

* Die during the birth of 
   your child

* Die right after the birth
   of your child

* Have sexual intercourse
   with the seventh son of 
   a chloric heritic who was 
   born with teeth and a caul 

These are the night's gaunt riders;
And all their names are Fear:
Fear of life, Fear of death, Fear of hate, Fear of love.
They ride the black night circuit;
Girding round and ever round;
Breaking for nothing except to pound
At long intervals the stone drums of Eternity.
- Constance Golden Sontag

Dictionary definitions of the word 'vampire', in all its varied spellings and incarnations, remain fairly constant in their description. Random House: "1. a reanimated corpse said to suck the blood of sleeping persons at night. 2. a person who preys ruthlessly upon others." This folklore, passed down from pre-recorded history, explains much of life and the fears of the people that created the myth. However, every belief, every superstition, has a root of Truth. No one definition could begin to encompass all that the Vampire is and has become. We continuously reinvent ourselves as the world reinvents the myth.

There is the realm of fantasy in fiction and the gamer's paradise. The hopefuls, children who play the game so well they scare the world. Blood fetishists and erotic connoisseurs. The powers of sexual magik are the stuff of legend, much like the vampire. Illnesses like anemia and porphyria, among others, whose symptoms parallel those of the vampire. There are also the psychotics, the murders, whose crimes include the drinking of their victim's blood, but none of these contain any real hint of the supernatural creatures of myth. They are not beautiful, although they might be. They do not possess heightened senses, although they could. While they may not be considered 'human', they are all definitely mortal.

Where, then, are Louis and Nick? The regret-filled immortals we all long to comfort? They are within us. They emerge in the battle we fight against eternity and our own personal daemons. Where are the True Vampires? Do we exist? Turn your view inward and ask yourself: Do you WANT us to be 'real'? Find your own answers and take that comfort to your warm beds at night. We will wander the streets, the beaches, the world safe under the moonlight and your closed eyelids.