Temporary Monsters

Chapter 4

  I stopped off at the Toronto Public Library on my way home.

  All I knew about the Black Lands was what they taught in school. A military rescue team came upon it by accident in 1945. They were looking for Flight 19, a fighter squadron that had disappeared off the coast of Florida in an area now known as the Bermuda Triangle. The world treated the Black Lands in much the same way the U.S. treated Cuba. It was a shunned place, illegal to travel to. But can you imagine trying to impose an embargo on an entire dimension? Especially when other portals were constantly being found; some of them floated in mid-air – like the one that had swallowed Flight 19 – while there were others on the ground, even some underwater. Scientists had even managed to create man-made portals.

  I went to one of the reference computers and performed a catalogue search on “Black Lands.” I got over 50,000 results. I skipped past everything on the physics of inter-dimensional travel, the various laws and amendments that came after the discovery of the Black Lands, and focused instead on the inhabitants of that dark dimension. That brought me down to 12,000 results. I filtered it further by limiting my search to vampires – 752 results. Still too many. I asked the computer to give me the volumes related specifically to vampire biology and behaviour  – 207 results. I figured that was as close as I was going to get, so I wrote down the five most recent publications and went looking for them in the stacks.

  I ended up spending the rest of the day and most of the evening in the library learning about vampires. There was a lot of conflicting evidence and wild theories, even after 60 years of study. The only thing that the scientists agreed on was that vampires were very dangerous, and I didn’t need a book to tell me that.

  One volume suggested that vampires might not be indigenous to the Black Lands. The author put forth the theory that people from our world had travelled over to the Black Lands hundreds of years ago and became vampires as a result of some unknown catalyst – a virus, a mutation or a natural stage of human evolution.

  I came upon a scientific paper entitled “The Black Lands and the Vampire Myth” that further enforced this idea. It said that if you subtracted the parts of the vampire legend added by Hollywood – the creature’s power to hypnotize its victims, the ability to transform itself into a bat or a wolf or smoke – vampires were not much different from any other earthly carnivore. But there were inconsistencies.

  While vampires weren’t afraid of crosses, field experiments had shown that they were agitated by the presence of priests and other holy figures. Some scientists believed this reaction was due to a racial memory, hearkening back to the time of their creation, presumably in the Dark Ages – a time when people were routinely being hung and burned at the stake for the crime of witchcraft. It probably taught the vampires the necessity of discretion, and it made me wonder just how many real vamps had been destroyed back then. Not too many, I was willing to bet.

  This in turn made me think about Jimmy Logan. He was neither a scapegoat accused of being a vampire, nor was he a true supernatural entity. At least I didn’t think he was. He had tossed me across the restaurant like a lawn dart, but sunlight didn’t affect him. It didn’t make sense. There was a piece missing.

  My research confirmed that the only way to kill a vampire was by destroying the heart with a wooden object or by exposure to sunlight. It was no wonder they flourished in the Black Lands, where no sun ever shone.

  I never understood why government agencies like the PIA bothered to keep people out of there. It’s like punishing the guy who sneaks into the polar bear habitat at the zoo. If he’s stupid enough to go in there, then he deserves what he gets.

  Did Jimmy Logan go the Black Lands, and if so, why? To prepare for his next role? I didn’t know. And by the time I had finished reading, I was too tired to care.