Like A Rolling Stone?

March 2044

I cast my thoughts back in time and wonder to myself about the figure we called ‘The Victoria Vampire’ when we were youngsters in the early ‘80s,  he hasn’t appeared again to my knowledge, but if he is a vampire, he should still be around (you will notice that I hesitate to use the word ‘alive’ here) in this the year of Our Lord 2044, do people still say that? Anyway, as we all know vampires go on forever, ad infinitum. If I am honest, I would say that the rambling anecdote shared with me in the pub in 2009, is actually the vampire himself being interviewed by Mark P , (later recorded on an vintage Olympus digital voice recorder and transcribed by Mark on ‘Word for Windows’, the first software I ever encountered and later by Jenny on the latest one ‘Windows 2044’) in a sort of Aberdeen’s poor relation of ‘Interview With The Vampire’, which some of you may recall was a celebrated novel by Anne Rice in the ‘80s, at least in horror fan circles, as well as being a hit movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and as far as my musical memories go, it was referenced in a song by someone called ‘Sting’ at the time, not a personal favourite, I may say, but my old  school mate Andy Delaney was a big fan and always nipped my head about the song ‘Moon Over Bourbon Street’, being about the Vampire Lestat, and wasn’t Anne Rice’s character how we would assume the Victoria Vampire to be , were we to interview him. Anyway, I think Mark P nailed the definitive interview so to speak, but never got any photographs or ‘pics’, as we say these days. Imagine if we had, we could have posted them on ‘Facebook’ or ‘Instagram’ or some of those ‘apps’, as they call them.      

All this collating the ‘Vampire Archive ’with Jenny has got me thinking about this whole vampire thing, probably far too much for a man of my advancing years. I remember the story my uncle wrote, ‘They Wait’, the setting of which was a hospice not far from where I currently reside, and it described how these mysteriously cloaked figures wandered the grounds of the place after dark, the story of course, was based on fact, you know. I remember the nurses talking about this, in fact I have a typewritten interview with one of them, which I must rake out from my folders of my extensive archive I have gathered over the years. I recall one of the nurses at my uncle’s hospice, Mary Morton, saying that her father often spoke of the ‘Victoria Vampire’ in the ‘70s, when her family had lived in the Westburn area, near the ‘Vicky’ Park. Apparently, these stories go back at far as the 1930’s, Mary had told of her father’s tales which his father had told him, all sorts of rumours of weird happenings at the park over the years. Of course, there were lots of sightings, but no real concrete evidence, nothing that would stand up in a court of law, or the modern equivalent thereof.

 Lately, there has been talk among the people in our complex that ‘prowlers’ have been seen in the lanes adjacent to the building at night, we have reported this to the local Police, but there haven’t been any reports of break-ins, or anything unusual, so nothing has been taken forward as they say.  Jenny reckons its maybe homeless people looking for somewhere to bed down for the night. Evidently homelessness is on the rise again, for the first time in twenty years, even after the Government brought in new measures to curb homelessness after the Covid-19 Pandemic was declared over in 2022.

I can’t help thinking that ‘The Victoria Vampire’ is the real prowler, the park is after all, just around the corner from this place.

Anyway, we have a new person in the building this week, and he looks weird, I haven’t met him yet, but I have seen him coming in at night, I suspect from one of the few pubs which are still open in the area. I reckon he is a few years younger than me, maybe 75 or so, and he reminds me of how the Rolling Stones looked in their later days, a damn good rock’n’roll band, albeit with wrinkled, gnarled faces, and hair dyed crow black, their youth long departed. This guy looks like a potential Stone who failed the audition, cadaverous and gaunt, he habitually wears black jeans and boots, and a long black coat like someone from Victorian times. Jenny sniggered when she found his profile pic on Facebook, saying that he looked like someone famous. ‘Famous for what?’ was my reply. I laughed inwardly when she said that he looked like a Rolling Stone, like a Rolling Stone, no direction home, a song from back in my youth, which was old even then.

Rumours abound about him in our complex and I’m told that he's not the most talkative individual, who apparently stays in his apartment all day and only goes out at night. I assume he gets his shopping delivered, as I have never seen him in the local area when I am out. I suppose he has his car, the Lamborghini that stays parked in the lane most of the time, a real 70’s flash car from a ‘70s movie, maybe ‘Salem’s Lot’. I have heard the screech of brakes and the sound of the turbo exhaust as he drives into the darkness most evenings, as I am drifting off to sleep.

The guy might be the Victoria Vampire, but helps me recall  another occurrence , perhaps a sighting which I remember from way back in 2001, you may recall that the winter of that year was a bad one for snow, ice, and the usual winter trappings, almost as bad as a decade later, but I digress as always.

I was walking home from my parents’ house in the west end of the city, the snow was falling thick and fast, and drifting so that there were not many cars on the road as I trudged,more worried about how cold my flat was going to be by the time I returned, than how thick the snow fall was getting.

At the time, I was a single man, I hadn’t yet met Christine, and was attempting to write my horror stories in between the drudgery of my day job, and a few drinks at the weekend, and sometimes during the week. In my mind, I was a writer in what I called my ‘garret’, which was in reality was  a relatively comfortable top floor flat in a respectable tenement building. At the time I was drafting out my first story about the Victoria Vampire, a piece which started out as a reminiscence of my last school days, and something  I thought to be a ‘doff of the cap’ to the work of Stephen King rather than that of Bram Stoker. Maybe I was a bit off the mark, it did work as a story, which I think improved with several drafts, written on the old Ambassador typewriter which my Dad had bought for me from a church jumble sale back in the ‘70s. I was really into the vampire stories, and was reading a lot in that vein, if you'll pardon the pun. I had enjoyed reading an anthology edited by Alan Ryan , which featured stories from Lord Byron , the former pupil of my school, and John Polidori, along with the more modern ones from Ramsey Campbell and Charles L. Grant , two authors I had picked up on in the ‘80s. Vampires and ghosts were an all consuming  interest for me at the time. As I walked through the snowstorm, which was degenerating into a whiteout, as the weathermen said, I was beginning to see things , maybe I was having visions brought on by the icy temperatures, but  was that a figure in black behind me, a ghost, a vampire?

I looked back in the snowscape, maybe the snowfall was playing tricks upon my mind, like in those stories of mountaineers on Ben Macdhui, seeing the ‘Grey Man of Ben Macdhui’, but I was walking back from a meal with my folks, and had no alcohol to speak of that would perhaps cloud my judgement, so I was sure what I saw.

There was someone (or thing) following me, at a fair distance behind, I admit, but I could discern its  shape and black garb, it was the flowing cloak that got me. It was reminiscent of the spectral figure that pursues Professor Parkin in ‘Whistle and I’ll Come’, a favourite film of mine, except it was real and  actually happening to me, I had not summoned this apparition, by means of any whistleblowing .  Was this the Victoria Vampire wandering out of his usual territory? He was dressed in the manner of any Hammer Horror vampire, anyway, I ran home in the snow, and returned  shivering to my ‘garret’, convincing myself that this figure hadn’t been there at all, a trick of the light, a dance of shadows reflected in the falling snow, who knew?

I was no expert…yet.

Once in the flat, I was relieved that the heat was on and working, it had been somewhat erratic of late. I poured myself a large dram of the finest Highland malt whisky, and looked out the front window, to see a large bat flapping past. We usually got seagulls, pigeons, and magpies here, but bats were not something people often saw in this area. 

Of course, I forgot to say, my flat was just along the road from Vicky Park, so you never know.

I put on a record to accompany my whisky, which was something I was very fond of doing at the time. ‘Oh Mercy’ by Bob Dylan was my choice, and I played ‘The Man with the Long Black Coat’, which was entirely appropriate, given the events of my journey home.

So , back in the present, time will tell if this character in my complex is the Victoria Vampire, time will tell as ever.