Twicelight

Chapter - 6

Sana hated using the Internet here. She sat in her hard folding chair and began and then typed in one word. Vampire.

When the results came up, there was a lot to sift through - everything from movies and TV shows to role-playing games, underground metal, and gothic cosmetic companies. Then she found a promising site - Vampires A-Z. Simple white background with black text, academic-looking. Two quotes greeted her on the home page: Throughout the vast shadowy world of ghosts and demons there is no figure so terrible, no figure so dreaded and abhorred, yet dight with such fearful fascination, as the vampire, who is himself neither ghost nor demon, but yet who partakes the dark natures and possesses the mysterious and terrible qualities of both.

- Rev. Montague Summers

If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of the vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?

- Rousseau

The rest of the site was an alphabetized listing of all the different myths of vampires held throughout the world. The first I clicked on, the Danag, was a Filipino vampire supposedly responsible for planting taro on the islands long ago. The myth continued that the Danag worked with humans for many years, but the partnership ended one day when a woman cut her finger and a Danag sucked her wound, enjoying the taste so much that it drained her body completely of blood.

Sana read carefully through the descriptions, looking for anything that sounded familiar, let alone plausible. It seemed that most vampire myths centered around beautiful women as demons and children as victims; they also seemed like constructs created to explain away the high mortality rates for young children, and to give men an excuse for infidelity. Many of the stories involved bodiless spirits and warnings against improper burials. There wasn't much that sounded like the movies I'd seen, and only a very few, like the Hebrew Estrie and the Polish Upier, who were even preoccupied with drinking blood.

Only three entries really caught Sana's attention: the Romanian Varacolaci, a powerful undead being who could appear as a beautiful, pale-skinned human, the Slovak Nelapsi, a creature so strong and fast it could massacre an entire village in the single hour after midnight, and one other, the Stregoni benefici.

About this last there was only one brief sentence.

Stregoni benefici: An Italian vampire, said to be on the side of goodness, and a mortal enemy of all evil vampires.

It was a relief, that one small entry, the one myth among hundreds that claimed the existence of good vampires.

Overall, though, there was little that coincided with Eunha's stories or Sana's own observations. She'd made a little catalogue in her mind as she'd read and carefully compared it with each myth. Speed, strength, beauty, pale skin, eyes that shift color; and then Eunha's criteria: blood drinkers, enemies of the werewolf, cold- skinned, and immortal. There were very few myths that matched even one factor.

And then another problem, one that she'd remembered from the small number of scary movies that she'd seen and was backed up by today's reading- vampires couldn't come out in the daytime, the sun would burn them to a cinder. They slept in coffins all day and came out only at night.

Aggravated, Sana snapped off the computer's main power switch, not waiting to shut things down properly. Through her irritation, she felt overwhelming embarrassment. It was all so stupid. 'I was sitting in my room, researching vampires. What was wrong with me?' Sana thought. She decided that
most of the blame belonged on the doorstep of the town of Dobong-gu - and the entire sodden Olympic Peninsula, for that matter.