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The Unfanged Ones

A letter from the damned

By A. N. Merchant Published 4 years ago 7 min read
2

To whoever finds this,

I am going to tell you a story about people like me. You probably don’t want to hear it right now but maybe one day you will be able to look back and know that how my people and I were treated was unjust and barbaric. I don’t know who you are and how far into the future you are reading this. I don’t know if your opinion of my kind differs much from the opinion held by society at the time of writing this. I don’t even know if you will know much about the history of mankind and my kind. To ensure that you have an understanding about why I am writing this and why I am going to do what I am about to do I need to start from the beginning.

Your kind and mine lived alongside each other in secret throughout history. Yours lived freely and mine in the shadows. We were largely a myth to you but our way of life was unethical. Yes, we did murder your kind but it was a means of survival. Like any predator in nature, we needed to feed and we didn’t have a supermarket that we could go to and grab something off of the shelf. Unlike the way we have been portrayed in human movies and television, animal blood or synthetic substitutes does nothing to quench the burn we experience when we are due a feed. We need the real deal. We wanted to remedy our immoral hunting methods and so we revealed ourselves to you. This prompted years of war between our kinds but eventually, it was decided by both sides that it would be beneficial for us to find a way to live in harmony with each other.

Laws and legislations were passed regarding how we were able to feed. Legislations were also passed forbidding us to recruit any newbies to the species. However, in some extreme life-or-death circumstances, this could be allowed in a court of law. For a while you saw the use in us and we lived harmoniously. We got to live freely and your kind got to benefit from us. We performed executions and euthanasia, we helped at hospitals and worked through the night. It seemed like the days of my kind being persecuted and having to hide were long behind us. I was wrong.

You see, many humans break laws and hurt people and murder for fun. It is a select few of the population and the rest of you are not punished for the wrongdoings of some. Well, when my kind had a select few that were found to be breaking the laws and murdering outside of the legal means, your kind didn’t like that. After a few cases and imprisonments, there was unrest within society. People blamed us for all of the violence and disruption within the world and people demanded something to be done about it. There were violent protests and the government listened to its people and started a witch hunt for my kind. We had to go into hiding but we were hunted down and taken to prisons and then your people would lock us together in shackles made of silver and drag us out into the sunlight. My peers were reduced to piles of ashes and scorch marks on the ground. Your people showed absolutely no remorse and there was no stopping you until we were all dead.

People started injecting liquid silver solutions into their blood as a safety measure against us. Of course, this did them more harm than good and then we got blamed for the adverse effects of that as well.

We disintegrated in mass but a small few of us retreated to the shadows and survived for a while. A lot of us were on our own but some of us found each other. We had to remain unseen and so we filed and chiselled the fangs of one another until they looked like standard teeth. I have never experienced such excruciating pain in all of my years. Since I first became the way that I am I didn’t think that I would be capable of feeling pain so severe from a source other than hunger. This modification to our bodies meant that the only way we could impart our venom and recruit someone into the blood would be by using a syringe to extract our blood and injecting it into theirs. Not that this was an issue, we were hardly in a position where recruits were a viable option. Another, more important issue caused by the change is the inability to pierce the skin as easily. Unable to feed in the traditional way, we now had to use a scalpel or knife to pierce the skin.

Feeding became increasingly more difficult. Not just because of the loss of our most important tool but we could not expose ourselves and people were going to extreme measures to protect their selves and their blood from us. We knew about the silver solution but hell only knows what other measures were being taken. In desperation, we would raid sanitary and clinical bins to try and dull the burn through our bodies. We couldn’t die from lack of feeding but the sensations it caused were unbearable. Aside from the teeth filing, it was the only pain I had ever felt since becoming the way that I am.

Slowly but surely, a few of us found each other. We were aided by an underground group of supporters that wanted to help us survive. They brought us to each other. They hid us in a facility and they let us feed upon them. We talked about changing them one day as a form of thanks. We didn’t see that it was a good idea but they didn’t see the horror in a life of pain in the shadows if it meant immortality.

It came to our attention though, that all was not what it seemed. They were not trying to help us after all. They were trying to get all of the remaining vampires together to kill us like they had the rest of us. One member of the group had a change of heart and told us the plan. In response, we all had the biggest feed we had in months and left her empty sack of skin and dehydrated tissue in a pile on the floor.

We can hear you all outside now. We have nowhere to go but outside and it is the middle of the day. We can either let you kill us like our peers or we can leave this world with self-respect and take matters into our own hands. This is why I am writing this letter and I hope that one day, someone finds it and it awakens some regret for the treatment of our species. We have acted barbaric but so have humans. I don’t know an exact figure but I would guess that the body count under the belt of humans far surpasses that of the body count of vampires.

If we truly are the last ones then this account won’t make a difference to us, but maybe another minority might benefit from humans understanding that the persecution of something different to themselves is unjust, or the persecution of an entire group for the behaviours of a select few is also unjust. Maybe there are a few of our kind still out there, in which case I hope they survive and I hope one day they can live freely again and without fear and pain.

Either way, I will not be around to see it. In this moment I am not wondering about the larger impact of this on the future of the world and I am only considering what it will feel like. I am wondering whether I will feel the burn before I disintegrate into ash or whether it will happen too quickly for me to feel a thing. I hope it is the latter.

I have no idea how to sign off such a letter so I will leave you with this: People are capable of good and evil and fear seems to awaken the evil within you all. Once you learn to control the fear of the misunderstood then you might be able to ignite the good within yourselves.

So much for immortality.

Farewell.

-

This story was the product of a challenge set by a friend of mine to push me out of my comfort zone and it certainly did do that. I'd love to know what you thought @creepyandcurious on Instagram and @curiouslycreepy on Twitter.

Stay creepy and curious, ghouls.

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About the Creator

A. N. Merchant

Sharing factual and fictional stories of the horrific, disgusting, macabre and frightfully peculiar. Appealing to the morbid curiosity within us all.

@creepyandcurious - Instagram

@curiouslycreepy - Twitter

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