Out of cold black space came light and earth and water, and out of these came the garden behind my house.

The garden is mine-- or it is me, I'm not sure anymore.

I can walk in my lilac bushes and lilies and the yellow roses and my scalp will be sunburned.
I will wince when I brush my miles of brown hair that night.

I go out on my balcony to look at my garden in the black.
Soon the trellis shudders violently, and he lumbers over the wrought iron rail.

I am an urban vampire. My real name is unimportant as I have had so many over the years, besides names are merely the crude labels humans use and that is something I have not been for many years.

It happened that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon London winter, there appeared at the various parties of the leaders of the ton a nobleman more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank. He gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein. Apparently, the light laughter of the fair only attracted his attention, that he might by a look quell it and throw fear into those breasts where thoughtlessness reigned. Those who felt this sensation of awe, could not explain whence it arose: some attributed it to the dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object's face, did not seem to penetrate, and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass.

March 6, 1998 (DALLAS / AP) - Four teen-agers claiming to be vampires went on a drug-crazed rampage, vandalizing dozens of cars and homes, spray-painting racial slurs and burning a church, police say.

The following text is a translation of one of the oldest surviving versions of the story of Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia -- known to his friends as Vlad the Impaler, or Prince Dracole. It was printed in Nuremburg in 1488.