“Vegan,” he corrected me gently.

“How does that work?”

He smiled showing the points of his upper canine teeth.

“Better than you would think,” he said. “My dietary needs are obviously different than they were when I was a baseline human, which just leaves me with the moral and ecological components of veganism… although in my mind it’s all a matter of morality, as it is immoral to render the earth uninhabitable for everyone in order to feed one’s appetite.”

He spoke smoothly and evenly, and slowly enough that I could get much of his answer down on my tablet before he’d stopped speaking. Normally I used a digital recorder when I did interviews, but vampires didn’t show up on recordings any more than they did in mirrors. It was one of the peskier details for those who still clung to the idea that the undead condition was nothing more than some kind of virus we didn’t understand yet.

“But plants don’t have blood,” I said. “I’m not trying be smart-alecky, but you can’t survive on tomato juice, or by biting a maple tree…. can you?”

“No,” he said with a laugh. “Although it’s funny that you should raise such possibilities. It was a book about a vegetable-draining rabbit that first got me interested in a vegetarian diet as a child… and that same silly story stirred my interest in darker subjects, as well. I couldn’t live on vegetables, but the whole course of my existence is the confluence of two paths that book started me down.”

“So how do you feed?”

“Well, again, we come to the moral component of veganism,” he said. “It is wrong to kill an animal for food and it is wrong to take the product of another being’s labor without consent. To feed my blood thirst, I need do neither. I take my sustenance from willing and sentient volunteers. To spend precious resources feeding a cow and then eat that cow is wasteful and destructive compared to using the same resources to simply feed ourselves—-excuse me, I mean living humans—-but those who I feed through need only increase their iron and glucose intake slightly. Collectively, our footprint is actually slightly smaller than it would be if I were consuming the same sort of food they do.”

“And it doesn’t bother you to drink blood, after so many years without meat?”

“The thought of meat still makes me ill, but… my biology, if it can be called that, is different,” he said. “I felt a bit of what you might call apprehension before my earliest feedings, but it was more the fear that I would be repulsed than actual revulsion. I credit these vestigial misgivings with helping me maintain control at an age where I might have easily lost it.”

“So there are control issues?”

“Oh, of course there are,” he said. “This wouldn’t be something I’d want to put out there as part of the face of modern vampirism, but: blood is delicious and we are predators by nature. The heat and flush of life excites us, as does the hunt and the struggle at the end of it. But as beings with a human mind at our core, we are gifted with the ability to moderate our instincts and operate according to the callings of our higher nature rather than our baser urges.”

“So then… forgive me, but I have to ask this… you’ve never killed anyone?”

“No one I did not intend to,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well… being fed by vegan friends slakes the bloodthirst, but not what we might term the ‘bloodlust’,” he said. “My morals do offer me an out there, though. Feeding a cow and then killing it food is wasteful, but killing someone who feeds on cows helps end the cycle of waste. Taking sustenance from a creature that has not consented is immoral, but a person who subscribes to the notion that occupying a higher place on the food chain is a license to kill has clearly consented to being hunted by their biological superiors.”

He laughed. It was a deep, rich, and somehow chilling sound.

“Not that I subscribe to such a hierarchical view of things myself,” he said. “But why argue with people who are so certain of their place in the world that they’re willing to kill because of it?”

“Listen,” I said, putting my tablet aside. “When you agreed to this interview…”

“I like to get to know my meals,” he said. “One should always know where one’s food comes from.”

“You said you enjoy the hunt…” I said, hoping for at least a head start.

His red eyes bored into me. He showed his teeth again, though this time it looked less like a smile.

“Sometimes,” he said. “But while I try to keep an active afterlifestyle, sometimes I don’t feel like running.”

But one night it began to seem to him that even as most of the darkness faded somewhat, some of the shadows not only remained resolutely dark but became darker still… more solid, more real… as the night wore on. More, they seemed to move and grow. Never when he was looking, of course, and never in too obvious a way, at least at first.

After night after night of this, he eventually managed to convince himself that he was seeing nothing out of the ordinary… that it was just his imagination, or that this was just how darkness worked, and he’d never noticed it before.

Then the night came when it didn’t happen, and that tender illusion was stripped away, though all he felt was relief that whatever had been transpiring in his bedroom every night was over.

That relief lasted until the next night, when it all began again. The darkness crept out from under his dresser, from beneath his closet door, and from behind the chair in the corner. It pooled together and slunk slowly across the floor towards his bed… never quite reaching it, though coming quite close. There was no kidding himself about it now. He’d seen what his room was supposed to look like in the dark, and it had seemed too right and natural for him to pretend that what he was seeing now was anything like normal.

That first interruption wasn’t the only time he was given a respite. Sometimes they happened quite frequently, and other times weeks would go by without the unnatural darkness taking over his room. At first he prayed each night that the darkness would pass him over, but eventually he came to dread those nights just as much, if not more.

The beshadowed nights had become normal to him, and on those nights he could at least see the darkness reaching for him. He knew better than to let his foot hit the floor on those nights, or relinquish the protection of the covers. He could see his doom coming. He knew where the shadows were.

The other nights… who knew where the shadows got to on those nights? Who knew where they lurked? Who knew where they waited for him? He certainly didn’t, and that terrified him in a way that all the tendrils of darkness creeping across his floor never could.

He dutifully bade his mother goodnight as she turned off the lights. He closed his eyes involuntarily and ducked under the covers, not willing to see at once what sort of a night he was in for.

Beyond the covers, the shadows in his room were just shadows… but outside his window, a pool of darkness deepened, and then seemed to straighten and stand up. A figure strode out towards the sidewalk, carefully skirting far around the circle of amber light cast by a lamp pole. Another dark figure flitted across the street towards it. The two came together in what could only be seen as an embrace, had any human eyes been watching.

“So, where do you want to go tonight?”

“I don’t care, I’m just happy to get out of the house for a while.”

“I know what you mean… it’s a good job, and an important one, but it’s like, we can’t spend every night scaring kids.”

“Yeah. Honestly, I think their little minds can use a break. We’re supposed to be teaching them how to cope with fear, not driving them up the wall with it.”

“True that.”

Nobody’s even sure exactly where the trend started, where the idea came from. Memos floating it went around the halls of the big multinational banks. It worked its way into the middle of mass e-mail chains. At one high tech firm, a voice on a conference call quietly made the suggestion. It seemed like a radical notion at first, but it gained traction at first based on sheer buzz alone.

The purpose of a corporation is to make money. This is considered to be obvious almost to the point of tautology. The right decision is always the one that produces the most profit, the biggest return on investment, the most reward for the least risk. Everything else? Just a distraction.

In recent years, this came to be understood as gospel truth and the officers of the corporations became little more than executors of a program. The ones who wouldn’t make the “hard decisions” for the good of the company got booted out. The ones who would were rewarded.

But if it’s possible to determine what the right choice is, why did there have to be a single person who was tasked with making them? It doesn’t take a warm body in a seat to cut services and reduce payroll to the minimum needed to operate, after all. Eliminating the decision-makers not only saves a company the not-inconsiderable cost of their future compensation, it reduces the chance of a costly error made in a moment of sentimental weakness or compassion.

Maybe the human touch is needed to deal with the fallout when things were pushed too far, but people are getting more and more used to hearing “that’s business” and “we have a right to make a profit” when they complained, anyway. The longer this goes on, the more it seems like it’s always been that way.

There were laws and regulations that needed changing to accommodate a headless corporation, of course, but by this point that was little more than a formality. The government expectes there to be a person to hold accountable, but corporations are people and they’re firmly in charge.

The evidence increasingly suggests that they know it.

“Nothing happened with Y2K because people made a big deal out of it,” I said. “Because it was a big deal. It took a lot of trained professionals doing a ton of hard work that no one would ever see the results of because ‘nothing happening’ was the proof that they’d done it right.”

“And yet I remember you being all ‘blah blah blah blah misinformation’ at the time.”

“Because people were talking about things like toasters and coffee makers not working because a chip in them that was keeping track of the date for some reason and they imagined their non-computerized kitchen appliances would care if it was suddenly 1900,” I said. “And easily disproved misinformation like that only makes it easier for people to ignore the actual consequences of ignoring something like the Y2K glitch… like how the crap stories about Obama vetoing SOPA or the senate voting it down are making people complacent about this.”

“Okay, yeah, but even if those news stories weren’t actually about SOPA… the senate wouldn’t throw out one bill and then pass this one,” she said. “And why wouldn’t Obama veto this one after saying he’d protect net neutrality?”

“Because this bill doesn’t have anything to do with net neutrality, according to its sponsors,” I said.

“You said it did.”

“I said it’s an end run around net neutrality and could be used to demolish it,” I said. “But to the people who are pushing this bill, it’s only about stopping pirates and boosting business, and we can’t count on a bunch of career politicians to know or care better.”

“Whatever,” she said. “What are you going to say if this whole thing blows over?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever I feel like saying, I guess. That’s the nice thing about free speech, when it works.”

“I’ll admit it’s unusual,” my guide said. “But nothing we need to worry about right now. These are all varieties of the American vulture, or condor… none of these species are birds of prey. They’re all scavengers, you see. They don’t hunt or attack healthy, living prey.”

“So what are they all doing, then?”

“Waiting.”

“Waiting for what?” I asked.

“Nothing we need to worry about right now.”

This sight might have been as impossible to explain as it was fearful to behold, but the skeleton was covered with a grisly network of muscular fibers that pushed and pulled its bones along in a crude sort of lumbering locomotion.

The muscles and all the blood vessels and various organs that fed them might have only served to make the specter of the skeleton all the more harrowing, but they were bound up together in a protective covering made of actual human skin.

This certainly made the skeleton less viscerally terrifying, though it left it with an altogether indecent appearance that forced the grim creature to go to its wardrobe and select a series of cloth garments with which to cover itself.

Thus clad, it went out of the house, boarded a bus, and went to an office building where all day long, none of its coworkers had any idea that they were sitting next to a skeleton.

A little light comes through the cloth, too, I suppose. It’s not completely opaque. If I look at it long enough I can sometimes see a shadow passing across it. Not what you’d call a figure. Something distant, less distinct. If I go near it, I start to hear something like a voice, or voices… an odd drone, just outside the edge of my understanding.

It isn’t a pleasant sound.

I don’t look at it very often, or for very long. I never go near it any more. I’ve never moved the curtain aside to look out it, or even to look at the window itself. It seems to be the same kind of double-hung sash window that is found throughout the upper two floors of the house.

It’s almost no wonder that I thought nothing of it the first time that I came down into the basement, or the second… almost. Sometimes I do wonder if it had really been there the whole time. If it had been, why hadn’t I noticed how out of place it was? But of course there was nothing remarkable about it, except for its location… and possibly what it would show me, where it would lead to, if I ever pulled back the curtain.

Back when I bought the house, I’d had plans for finishing the lower floor and using it as a rec room and den. Now I only use it for storage, and that reluctantly. I plan on moving again as soon as I can. The house is still in excellent shape. I just have to hope that any potential buyers are as inattentive or incurious as I was about the window that should have been overlooking nothing more than the underside of the backyard.

“That is it?” the pilgrim asked his guide, the priest. “This is what I came for?”

It was said to be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. So, too, would it have been difficult for a rich man to come to this point. Impossible, really. The same was true for most poor men. But an extremely rich man had options, and this man had spent freely, passing from very rich to very poor in the process.

“That depends on what you came for,” the priest told him, the last of the man’s money tucked away inside his robes.

It was a large sum, by his reckoning, but a small one compared to what had been expended in the search that led the seeker to him in the first place. He had not been seeking the priest, the temple, or the book originally… he had not known of them. Half his fortune had been used up seeking answers that no one could seem to give him. He’d chased after hints and rumors of wise men, fortune tellers, and oracles, and though some had produced what surely qualified as signs and wonders none had been able to help him.

He’d met a woman who knew what the next day would bring as surely as he knew it would start with a sunrise, but she hadn’t known what he needed to know. He’d met a man who could communicate with angels and said he knew all the secret names of God, but he had not been able to help. He’d seen a child who had been counting aloud backwards from four hundred million something from the moment of birth, every waking moment, taking exactly six seconds per number. The child had been no help at all.

And then, just when he’d been almost ready to give up all hope, word had reached his ears. There was a book, the word said, and this book… this book…

“Tell me,” the formerly-wealthy man said. “Tell me again.”

“Before you is the book of the never-known,” the priest said. “It holds the things that no man knows, things no man will ever know. I have told you this before.”

“And it has the answer I need?”

“I do not know that,” the priest said. “No man does. No man will.”

“It must,” the man said, staggering towards the book. “The answer must be somewhere, and it isn’t anywhere else. I’ve been looking so long. It must… it must… I know it!”

As the man’s outstretched hands drew near the book, a single shot rang out in the tiny cave. He took one more staggering step, lurching to the side, and then collapsed.

“I told you,” the priest said, putting away his gun. “No man will ever know what the book says.”

Visitors and newcomers to the area… and this latter group can include people whose family settled in the region three generations ago or fewer… often mistakenly believe that this is simply the local colloquial term for a bitingly cold winter wind blowing in from the north. Folklorists assert with the smug confidence of a man who knows nothing about which he speaks that the wolf-wind is named for the way it seems to howl at night.

The wolf-wind does come most often during the winter. That much is right. It does not always come from the north, though. It can spring up from any direction. It does not blow cold. Even in the dead of a winter’s night, even when it billows down from the arctic north, the wolf-wind is hot and wet. It does not announce itself with a poor imitation of a wolf’s call. It comes in silently. The wolf-wind is a wolf on the hunt. It prowls rather than howls.

And the wolf-wind does bite. That is the other part they get right.

It’s easy to miss the wolf-wind when it comes. A few people will report having felt it blowing hot and wet on their necks. A few more will say they felt some portent of unease. Somewhere in the valley, some chickens will go missing, or a sheep, or a goat, or a cow. Flecks of blood will be spread out across the snow… or a long smear of it will be, in the case of something larger.

Sometimes, maybe once or twice in a generation, it won’t be livestock.

The wolf-wind is a hungry wind.

What it is in fact is the world’s largest known carnivorous plant. Like the sundew or the Venus fly trap, it lures in its prey and then closes its appendages around them in order to supplement the poor nutrition in the soil with what it can plunder from the corpse.

Unlike its smaller cousins, the whispering willow does not subsist on insects. It requires larger prey. Its scent is said to be inviting, but as scent markers do not have as strong or direct a hold over humans as they do over insects, the willow offers other inducements and this is where the other part of its name comes from.

In ages past, travelers walking alone through boggy parts of the world might have heard a soft voice on the breeze bidding them to come and rest their heads in the shade of an inviting tree, or one promising love and riches and all the secrets of the universe. The trees are fewer in number these days, but they are still out there, still whispering, still tempting travelers to stray from the path, to stumble in closer.

“All natural male enhancement,” whispers the hangman’s tree. “Fuck her like a pro today. Work from home. I made fifty-seven thousand dollars from Google. You can, too. Your insurance company doesn’t want you to know. Housewife’s secret: whiter teeth today. Learn the one method to a flat stomach. Cialis tabs…”