Jack and the Stalker

The world is a hideous place wherein creatures we could not even imagine stalk us hungrily, as if we were simply tasty and delectable vittles lower down the food chain. They are hungry for flesh, bone, and blood—most especially blood, the hot, sanguinary repast that calls to them from the singing blue corpuscles wherein flows the hot, brutal life of our very veins.

Or some such.

Cowboys are a breed apart; they are American and pure, honest, upright, and chaste. Unless they're outlaws, gunslingers, bushwhackers, bandits, polecats, and bad ombres. Then phooey on the sumbitches! Cast those tobacco-chomping, cigarette-rolling, whiskey-drinking, bean-guzzling, chapped-ass banditos to the prairie wind like so much tumbleweed.

Long and lean is the image of the American cowboy, his shadow a tall black streak across the Arizona hardscrabble, desert earth. (Or maybe West Texas?) Longer still, though, is the "shadow of the vampire," to borrow a phrase from Henrik Galeen.

Have Mercy (Or She Will Perhaps Have You!)

Vampires of course have always existed, since ancient times when the sanguisuga stalked the small villages of Eastern Europe and the Carpathians, draining their victims, in the manner of Arnold Paole and Peter Plogojowitz. A Serbian butcher who died in 1725 but refused to believe himself dead. The former, Arnold, was a soldier who was bitten by a vampire when returning home from the war and who died falling off of a haycart, only to return, to walk the streets of his little village, in search of warm and living BLOOD.

Plogojowitz also finally succumbed to the bite of a vampire, and, being a heretic, walked the earth after death, resulting in the deaths of nine people who all died mysteriously (most likely of consumption).

All nine of Plogojowitz's victims, though, testified that he was the "terror that comes in the night" (to borrow a little from Peter Hufford), in the form of a long, lean, dark entity that accosted them in the dream realm of astral terrors—a place that is neither rightside-up nor upside down; a psychic "liminal space."

Opening the casket, the vampire hunters found a bloated corpse, with rosy, full-on colorful cheeks that looked as if, like a giant leech, they retained the blood just lapped up from unsuspecting and cursed victims. Cutting off the head revealed a freshet of blood. A stake was driven through the body, the heart cut out, burnt to ashes, the ground sealed with garlic and salt, and the deaths were halted. Or perhaps not. Who can tell fact from fancy three hundred years on?

Coming up to more contemporary times, the New England legend of Mercy Brown—who, in point of fact, did live and die and was buried, and whose body remained as incorruptible as that of a saint—introduces us to the enchanting little homespun tale of how this young girl, who died (again, most likely of consumption), was thought to be haunting her family members. A sister and her mother also succumbed strangely, and then her brother Edwin likewise fell ill.

Mercy's body had spent the winter in a special tomb until such time as the frozen soil could be upturned and she be placed within her sepulchral shell for all time. Ascertaining her incorruptible, undecayed little form as evidence enough of her vampirism, Mercy's heart was cut from her chest, burned to ashes, which were then drank by her brother Edwin.

As disgusting as this was, it was to no avail: he ended up dying anyway. It is suggested that this incident helped inspire Stoker to write Dracula, since reportedly a clipping of the newspaper article was found in his possession. And that was not, by the way, the only vampire exhumation in New England during the era.

Jack and the Cattle-Sucker

In modern times, we have a huge glut of cases, going down through the decades, of UFO entities perhaps mutilating cattle for unknown reasons. Some have likewise put it down to "Satanic cults," but, whatever the case, it has happened all over the Southwest and South America (the local variant there is the alien-like predator called "Chupacabra"). Cattle are mysteriously found exsanguinated, their eyes, hearts, and other delicate organs mysteriously removed with surgical precision by—who? Or what? And, pray tell: for what purpose?

No one knows, and no one ever has. In the 1974 film UFOs: It Has Begun, a documentary of the era narrated by Rod Serling, a medical expert interviewed is asked about the cattle mutilations being the work of "predators." He answers (though this is not an exact quote), "If it was a predator, he was six foot tall, had two arms, two legs, and was carrying a knife."

"Jack Lewis" (supposing him a real person) is said to have been encamped with fellow cowpokes on the plains of Nebraska, near the Black Hills, sometime in 1896. Eating his pannikin of beans, possibly smoking a hand-rolled cigarette while the long orange and beige streaks of amber painted stripes across the barren earth, he left his compadres to go off into the lonely places, the stands of trees, wherein shadows pooled and darkness and hungry, wild eyes reigned. Locally, there had been talk around campfires of a strange, man-like predator, a beast of the black who ripped animals apart and drained cattle of their blood. Was it true? Jack didn't know, but as he walked into the shadow, leaving the encampment behind, he could suddenly feel intense, dark, savage things—eyes watching him from the shade and creeping closer, closer.

The Vampire Strikes

Wait. What was that?

It was on him suddenly, a bolt from the black, darker than the shadow around him. The tall, thin, unseen thing—the Beast-Man—one that might rip him apart with iron talons and thrust its fangs into his jugular, to lap the warm life-blood that was now ice water in his veins.

Its eyes blazed as Jack struggled in its iron grip, its strength seeming the equal to ten men. Its breath was a noxious exhale of rotten blood and death, and he fought to reach for his pistol.

With trembling fingers, as he fought for his dying breath, he pulled the pistol from its holster and fired. The cowboy's aim was true.

The black figure howled in pain. It darted away from him as if stung, retreating into the darkness, into the moonlight and the night.

He never even got a steady look at it.

But he remembered till the day he died.

And on his deathbed he must have trembled wondering if, when expiration claimed him: Would he meet it one last time?

Vampires exist. Or some form of them, knew Jack Lewis.

And now you know it too.

And furthermore, perhaps he knows you know it.

And, somewhere, he waits.

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Book: Folklore of Fear: Urban Legends, HAuntings, and Supernatural Terrors