Vampire the Requiem - Night Horrors - Wicked Dead.pdf - Vampire the Requiem - FatumTech

a sourcebook for

The question you have to ask yourself is, if you’re a

walking dead man, why are you so blinkered?

Do you think you’re the only impossible thing out there?

— Frances Black

This book includes:

• Secrets of the other vampires

of the World of Darkness,

from the vile Formosae, who

feed on beauty, through to

the bizarre and appalling

Cymothoa Sanguinaria,

nature’s greatest horror.

• Beings that exist as direct

consequences of the Kindred’s

parasitic existence, including

the Draugr, vampires without

Humanity and Dampyrs,

children who should not be.

• The return of the Strix,

vengeful spirits that plagued

the Kindred back in the

days of ancient Rome.

• New options, allowing players

to take on the role of strange,

exotic vampiric creatures.

53299

9 781588 463746

PRINTED IN CANADA

www.worldofdarkness.com

978-1-58846-374-6 WW25313 $32.99 US

I could eat you all up

“Darling! You look so beautiful, I could eat you all up!”

This is who I am after here: A middle-aged woman, her razor lips painted Barbie pink is escorting another woman,

a blonde wearing huge black shades that make her look even more like a stick insect, through a mass of soul-eaters

with cameras.

I imagine the blonde, she’s just a girl, she’s like not even legal, I imagine her catching little glimpses of her bug eyes

double-relected in those long rigid eye stalks, enlarged to massive proportions.

She pouts and poses, expertly, for the cameramen—a relex action—and turns on her three-inch stiletto heels and

instantly forgets them, like something wiped it from her memory.

Maybe something did.

I will so insist on dressing up

I am walking two steps behind her. No one sees me, and that’s OK, that’s the idea. Except one chap looks over the

camera for a second, and sees me—sometimes they do—and then looks back at the little screen on his digital SLR, and

then looks over, and back at the screen. He has a funny look on his face. I mouth “sorry” at him and blow him a little

pap-carpet kiss anyway. No hard feelings, old chap.

Oops. They’re getting away.

I must dash. Or at least the best I can in these shoes.

I will so insist on dressing up.

Shiny

Inside, the gallery is all sterile glass and artiicial light and shiny shiny steel pillars. I used to hate places like this when I

was alive, but I’ve recently gained an appreciation for the aesthetic of surgery. So I stand there and go, ooh, shiny.

She stops at one of the paintings, pretending to admire it but actually trying to catch a glimpse of herself in the

relected glass. The painted PR woman tuts impatiently, eager to move on. The girl with the almond eyes and the cut-

glass cheekbones eyes herself disapprovingly, seeing only blemishes. I can hear the grumblegurgleploppopplopple of

her vise-lat stomach, watch the moisture in her eye as she catches sight of the vol-au-vents. And around her, I can see

a lack of color, a deiciency, blotchy hungry patches, such hungry patches.

And she’s whispering to herself:

“This little piggy went to market,

This little piggy stayed at home,

This little piggy had roast beef,

This little piggy had none,

And this little piggy went wee wee wee all the way home.”

The rain seeps in

It is raining outside. The hard, cold kind that seeps into your soul and gets stuck there.

The artwork is called Phagos.

I have seen the photographers, lovely ishy eyes behind lovely ishy lenses and this is my job, really, and so I think, I

want to see someone here, and I want to eat. I catch the scent, faint but nevertheless perceptible, of freshly-baked vol-

au-vents mingled with hairspray and—is that Chanel Number 5? How depressing—and I think, “I’m feeling peckish.”

And I have seen her.

By Wood Ingham and Becky Lowe

Phagos —Predator an d Prey

Ph ilip Veare

The predator lurks wit hin all of

u s. We are each of us c onsumer

a nd consumed. We are c onsumed

b y the desire to attain, of ten at the

ex pense of others, and the refore our

v ery want consumes us. W e quickly

b ecome the thing we des pise—the

ea ter becomes the eaten.

Th eophany is a practi ce as

old a s time itself. Pre-Chr istian

religi ons often participated in the

cons umption of God’s bloo d and

body through the ritual h uman

sacri fice of a deity substitu te: a

vesta l virgin or otherwise. I t was

belie ved that the sacrifice w ould

appe ase God. Consuming the

sacrii ce entailed identity wit h the

godh ead. The Christian sacra ment

of Eu charist is merely a continu ation

of thi s practice.

Eating another person is a w ay

to expre ss a relationship of nak ed

power o ver him...

Others sp eak not of consuming,

but of being consumed. In the late

Mi ddle Ages, Eucharistic m ysticism furnished a fr amework in which med ieval holy women like

Ha dewijch and Catherine o f Siena could report ex periences of eating and being eaten by Christ,

lite ral incorporation into t he sufering lesh of the Savior.

Whe ther we are the eater o r the eaten is a matter of personal choice. Per haps it is a case of

Surviv al of the Fittest, or som ething altogether darke r, more primeval.

“Studi es of poultry

s how that cannib alism

can a lso be

the result of

the Urban C ondition:

often spurred on fro m

overcrowding , poor

lightin g conditions,

racial hatre d

and plain meanness.”

157

Nobody notices me, any more than they notice the artwork.

Nods and grins and really-how-interestings, eyes darting frantically trying to catch the editor of Vogue or Cosmo or

Tatler or if you’re really desperate Glamour.

Everybody here is on a mission.

I don’t care to speak to any of them. I make my way straight to the vol-au-vents on the table—to where

she is—and I am standing beside her. The girl is perched on a pirouetted heel, her back against a pillar. A

woman with too much makeup and twenty years on her is talking to her, and she is nodding and the colors

around her are—so patchy! So hungry!—bored colors, magnolia and beige and taupe. She keeps looking at

the plate of petit-fours the other woman is holding, and with a flash of orange she looks away. What are you

scared of? A little roundel of pastry filled with salmon and crème fraîche or a fairy cake and you shudder

and suddenly there’s turquoise ambition and nervous red in specks between the gaps and little spikes of

yellow. The woman with the plate sees someone important, and the girl pulls from her clutch-bag a half-

health-warning packet of Marlboros and a little gold lighter. She takes forever to pull the cigarette out and

tap it like an old man would and place it between her lips and breathe through it and take it out and put it

back in and light up.

One of the gallery attendants, a woman in a tailored uniform by some haute designer who wanted to “do something

different,” all black and plastic with round sunglasses like an ant, is at her side, asking her politely to refrain from

smoking. It is against the law to smoke in here.

The girl lares with purple satisfaction. She scowls, though, as if she’s going to stamp her foot like a toddler and

smirks and says, “Don’t you know who I am?”

The attendant stands.

She answers herself, in her most mocking, patronizing voice, “No, I don’t suppose you do, you silly

little woman.”

She blows smoke in the attendant’s face and turns on her heel, hips swinging, arm cocked with the cigarette, letting

the ash fall where it will.

With a nod to some other women, she struts through the gallery, laughing and tossing her hair back. The

crowd surges forward, shufling without conscious thought in the direction in which the model is headed.

And I think, Tonight, I am coming home with you.

Losers

Lilli gets in, throws her bag into the lat, lets it fall where it may, lings herself wearily onto the sofa.

She had expected the gallery showing to be dull. Losers. Losers, boring empty losers who all wanted to have

their picture taken, who didn’t have any interest in anything she wanted to say. She didn’t have anything to say.

She will be pictured standing next to one of the 3am Girls in the gossip pages tomorrow.

She has eaten, over the course of today, three vol-au-vents (salmon, organic cress, salmon again), one organic

goat cheese and spring onion sandwich and—shudder—two fairy cakes. 230 calories. She feels sick.

She pours herself a cup of raspberry and cranberry tea, making certain to check the side of the box for

forbidden contents before she does so, like she does every time she drinks it, like she hasn’t memorized the

ingredients list.

She feels a little uneasy, like she is being watched. Like something is in the shadows.

She gets up, retrieves her handbag—Vuitton tonight—from the kitchenette loor, returns to the sofa, stretches out,

pulls out the exhibition catalog. Photographs of a series of plastic igures, customized dolls, in sadistic poses.

A doll dressed in a dog-collar is eating the brain from another doll’s head—smiling vapidly—that it holds in

its hands.

Identical twin dolls devour one another, piece by piece.

Three dolls are in the act of mutilating a plastic pony and eating the pieces.

A female doll lies tied to a gurney while another, hanging by its feet from the ceiling, has its head buried in

the irst doll’s crotch, its arms around the doll’s thighs. The lying doll’s head is turned to the side, smiles blankly

at the camera.

Lilli is bored now. Her stomach gurgles. She stretches out on the sofa, and tries to sleep.

Frances, sitting on the end of the sofa at the girl’s feet, strokes her ankle for a moment. Then she reaches across and

picks up the catalog. She lips through it, licking her lips, making little sighs of approval.

Vampire the Requiem - Night Horrors - Wicked Dead.pdf

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