The Vampire of Whispering Sketches

More about The Vampire of Whispering Sketches

In an old house, hidden among the hills and trees, stood a workshop whose windows never completely darkened. Even on moonless nights, a shimmer glowed there, as if darkness itself were peering curiously through the panes. In this workshop lived a creature some might call a vampire, though it bore little resemblance to the grim tales told of its kind. His name was Veymar. He was tall, pale-skinned, and shaped not unlike a bat—with large, leathery ears that caught every whisper in the room and eyes that sparkled like black glass beads in the candlelight. Yet Veymar carried not the cold melancholy of the night within him, but a lively, curious restlessness. He often sat at his heavy oak desk, wrapped in a wine-red coat with a white ruffle at the collar, and drew. Before him lay tomes filled with sketches of plants that bloomed in the moonlight and animals one encountered only in dreams. Among skulls, phials, and strangely shaped tools, he sat, quill in hand, listening to the crackle of the fire burning in a cast-iron stove. "Today," he murmured to himself, "I will finally truly grasp the vein of the night lilac." His quill scratched across the paper as he drew the blossoms he had once seen in an enchanted valley. It was said that the night lilac grew only where shadows refused to fade. Veymar was convinced that a secret lay hidden within its leaves—perhaps a cure, perhaps a key to a long-forgotten memory. Often, the voices of the workshop interrupted him. No one would have heard them, but Veymar's ears caught every whisper: the soft clinking of glasses, the scraping of bones, the breathing of the books that never completely fell silent. Some would have been frightened, but to him they were old friends. "Be careful, Veymar," whispered a skull with a cracked crown, "you're drawing yourself down." "Nonsense," he replied with a smile, "I'm drawing myself up." Sometimes he opened the window, let in the scent of the forest, and sketched while fog crept into the room. He felt then as if the world outside flowed directly through his hand onto the paper. Thus, he was not a vampire of the hunt, not one of blood, but a collector of impressions, a researcher of fleeting things. Yet Veymar knew that a hint of danger lurked in every picture. For if you looked long enough, the drawings began to move. Lines curved, shadows crept out of the parchment, and occasionally a whisper sounded that did not come from the workshop. On such an evening, when the candles burned low and the wind rattled the shutters, he laid down his quill. A new page lay open before him. On it, he had drawn a gate—tall, sinister, overgrown with vines. It was not a gate he had ever seen, and yet, in his memory, it was strangely familiar.