The Shroud Eaters

Description

The Shroud Eaters – Alyx Jae Shaw

Vampires are a common subject of fantasy tales and mainstream media. But they’ve got it all wrong.
Follow along in the recounting of one such vampire, a lady named Deirdre, born in the year of 1640, and tragically murdered—then reborn, as a pale creature of the night—at just twenty-two years young.

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EXCERPT:

It is difficult to know where to begin this tale, as it has its origins firmly entrenched in centuries past, but I shall do my best to relate my story without making it tedious. I suspect my tale shall earn me no friends, but then, being dead does tend to make one unattractive.

My name is Deirdre, and I was born in Leeds in the year 1640, two years before the royalists took the town over, and within the sound of the church bells of Briggate. My father was very much enchanted with the area, which at the time was little more than a small town, concerned with corn and cloth.  However, one day it would become a great and lovely city. Of course, that was not until after the cloth market was moved into Briggate in the year 1684, and I had been dead twenty-one years by then.

Dead, and yet not dead.

Fortunately, I did live long enough to see that bastard Cromwell dug up and hung. ‘Twas most fitting and a day of great joy in my home after so long having to live in joylessness, paying homage to a faith not our own and seeing dear friends dragged away to not be seen again. The day his wretched body was dragged from the earth that did not wish to be poisoned by his filth, my mother and I fell deep within our cups and ran ‘bout the house and courtyard bare-breasted. My father forever referred to this as the Feminine Uprising. My brothers mentioned it not at all and forbade me from doing so as well.

I was born and raised a lady, and to that I hold true, though granted the times have changed and the meaning of the word with it. Still, there are teachings to which I adhere, even in these strange days of computers and television and cars. I behave within the parameters accorded by my station and gender. I do not swear, nor drink in excess, nor behave in an unseemly manner if I can avoid it, or unless the situation warrants such antics, as in, say, the symbolic hanging of a despotic mule’s hindquarters. I am always clean and properly dressed, though I confess the latter has become something of a trial in this day of skimpy tops and low-slung jeans. I am sorry for my lack of modern fashion sense, but after more than three hundred years in hoop skirts and bodices and corsets and petticoats and bustles I simply am not comfortable with my navel on display for every pervert and cad I may encounter. Fashionable or not, I wear my full skirts.

It is strange to me how much is forgotten over the centuries. New knowledge seems to push out old, and while I delight in this age of science and reason, I am also troubled. Lore that was once passed from mother to child is now lost or deemed “fairy tales” and dismissed as nonsense. Let us look at the tales regarding vampires, for example, they being rather near to my heart, so to speak. These days so many believe that there is but one way to kill a vampire. Certainly, a stake through the heart would give me cause for concern, but if the stake were to come loose, I would recover. To kill me one needs must stake my heart, then cut off my head and turn it face down. Sunlight, also, would do me considerable harm were I unable to escape it. However I am but one kind of vampire, and there are as many types of vampires as there are methods of creating them.