In retrospect, we might skip the details of my journey - they are all of them boring, uninteresting ventures, like my difficulties in acquiring a road map from a sasquatch, or how I had to arm wrestle an ogre for the sake of my much-needed train ticket. The case of the dragon, in particular, and what it had against lawn mowers, might be skipped without any injury to the narrative.

The destination of my journey was clear, and came from the strictest of philosophical principles: to wit, that if you want to know if someone doesn’t exist, the best solution is to ask him yourself. I had therefore decided to head south, not merely to a so-called human settlement but to the greatest of so-called human settlements, that I might find the best selection of respondents.

I’ll resume my tale properly with the journey’s outcome, when I stepped off the train at its last stop, the sprawling, spiderous city of Galton, capital of the Northern Wastes.

I must confess that before my arrival I had heard only stories of your far-famed capital (the vampire said to me, for I lived in the Northern Wastes, some seventy miles south of Galton in Cosy-on-the-Hill); exaggerated stories, evidently, stories which boasted of its might and grandeur, and which left me utterly unprepared for the real thing.

I had taken the train south, glued to the edge of my seat in excitement, heedless of the strange stares and horrified glances I received as I watched the passing blur of grey and white. Mountains faded into leafless trees, and slowly I saw the capital come into being - the capital, where I might speak to any mass of men I chose, or visit one of the sundry research facilities.

You can imagine my disappointment, then, when I got off the train and saw the same blur of grey and white, only instead of rocks and snowdrifts passing by my window it was now the overburdened and crumbling infrastructure of a dying civilisation.

***

I nodded in agreement. Few things were as disappointing as one’s first sight of Galton.

“It’s the mouldering concrete that does it, though it has its own beauty after dark, when the streetlamps reflect off the grey walls - in winter, with the fresh snow, it can be especially lovely, the ground so many sparkling diamonds under the lamp glow.”

“Oh? I arrived first thing in the morning, shortly after dawn, although now that you mention it the city did look better later on, after dark. Incidentally, were we planning to finish burying the body? Not that I’m in a huge rush, but the gravekeepers will be disappointed if they find another body come morning.”

I started. I had once more forgotten the stiffening corpse. “Blast, you’re right. Where’s John?”

“John? Check the columbarium, third resting place to the left. As I was saying, however…”

***

I should have expected it. Spirit research into the organic and spontaneous generation of houses has long ago revealed that they, like the forests they so incompetently imitate, go through life cycles, both as individual houses and as members of a community. The life cycles of individual houses are still poorly understood - to all intents and purposes they look as if they are repaired regularly by human beings, although this obviously can’t be the case - but we know much more about housing communities.

My favourite work on this subject was written by the flower fairy Doctor Daylily, who argued that housing communities - cities - go through a cycle wherein they grow ever so slowly until they reach a ‘critical mass.’ At this point the city is sufficiently robust to sustain the growth of specialist species such as hospitals and judiciaries, and the overall population explodes until, having overshot its carrying capacity, the city begins to decay. Such, it seems, had happened to Galton.

The strange stares didn’t let up as I left the station, travelling through the town proper, nor did I see any creatures of the Other Side - be they fey, or undead, or even demons. This wasn’t so surprising, perhaps, for we had been in retreat to the Lands Beyond and the Lands Below and even the Lands Above for the better part of an age, but to see no one was perturbing, as was the evident confusion I received when I made inquiries as to the locals’ attitude towards the supernatural - most couldn’t understand my query, the very question failing to penetrate some fog in their eyes.

Those few who seemed to have some inkling of my questions merely brushed them off, casually observing that there was no such thing as the undead. Can you imagine the absurdity? Not believing in vampires!

Nor did I penetrate much farther when I inquired from them their views on more immediate philosophical topics, such as their view on who they were as people, who others were to them, and what they thought it meant to be human. They merely stared at me, bleary eyed, stammered in stupefaction, and hurried off.

Eventually, however, I was able to find a clue in my quest to prove that humans don’t exist - namely, the address of the city’s university. And so I slung my pack about my shoulders and tightened my scarf against the chill and descended deep down into the centre of town, past the factories and their pipes and smoke and the crumbling apartments, refuse and detritus littering their steps, till at last I trod the grime-ridden, blackened tiles of the university halls.

The clocks had stopped in the university, the typewriters ran dead; and not a counting nor an accounting could be found. All was silent, mostly, for the silence was punctuated by occasional spurts of a horrible, crackling noise, cacodemonic howls bursting out of the rooms and cantering about the quiet halls.

One cannot stop students the way one might stop restaurateurs or greengrocers. It is not enough to wave them down, and ask if they have time to chat. One has to lay in wait for them, like a tiger stalking a lame gazelle, pouncing upon them at their luncheons in a furious ambuscade.

In the cafes, in the halls, atop the smoke-choked rooftop gardens I questioned them… And here as elsewhere I found no answers, and oftentimes not even an inkling of an understanding of my questions. The students stared at me like mooncalves caught in the cabbages, eyes blank, faces white. If anything, they knew less than the grocers.

Their professors were nominally more helpful. Upon my approaching them and enquiring into their thoughts on their own existence (or lack thereof), they stared at me in surprise, then smiled and simpered a little, and said that of course humans didn’t exist, only this ought not to surprise me, for nothing else did either.

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This, as you can imagine, was a source of supreme dissatisfaction to me - to receive so categorical, so absolute, so unconditional a declaration, and yet with so little argument behind it. As a scholar (if I may so style myself), this would not satisfy me, could not satisfy me - for I needed not the conclusion they’d derived, but the process by which at it they’d arrived.

And then, in the immortal words of the Poet of Maldon, “I did as I should not have done” - I asked for their proof. Immediately the placid faces of the academics clouded, becoming stormy with rage and thunderous fury… Before they cleared, assuming the peace at the eye of the storm, at which point I knew I was really in trouble - for I had entered a hurricane.

The academics surrounded me, eyes glinting, bodies clacking and clattering in chitinous tones, and escorted me unceremoniously to the office of the university dean. Now there was an odious man - not fat, not thin; neither bony nor rounded; his skin devoid of dry or oily elements; his face unremarkable; and his hair indescribable. Truthfully, it was hard to say what he was at all, save that the sight of him left one with a bitter, vaguely revolting taste in the back of the mouth, and a flitting urge to upchuck one’s dinner.

He motioned for me to sit and, once I had done so, stood, pacing about the richly-appointed office with a frown twisting his lips. At last, after a pause too sterile to be described as pregnant, he spoke. “The expert academics of my university tell me that you’ve been making inquiries… Inquiries, apparently, of a philosophical sort.”

“That’s right, sir,” I said politely, keeping a respectful attitude in the face of a distant land’s academic authority.

The man blew air out his nose, the only sign of his boiling rage. “We don’t do that here.”

“Make inquiries?” I asked, turning about to keep him in my line of sight.

“Make philosophical inquiries,” he clarified. “You are of course welcome to make any inquiries you so choose; only please keep wisdom out of it, for wisdom does not exist.”

By this time I had grown weary of turning about and around and straining my head to keep track of the man, and ignoring his command I rose to my feet.

He eyed me and tsked. “How tiresome. My clerks tell me, Mr. Joseph, that you have come here to prove whether or not humans exist - and, to that end, to inquire from humans their thoughts on the subject itself. Do I have this correct?”

“Yes, that is correct,” I replied.

He sighed, a deep sound, full of exhaustion at the absurdities of the world. “Then you must have known how absurd your quest was at the outset. Prove whether people exist? I laugh at the very notion. My dear sir, all you have before your eyes is a cluttered field of nothings-at-all, and it’s only in the caverns of your mind that you assign any meaning to that cacophonous concatenated cavalcade. Whether ‘humans’ exist - or, indeed, anything else - is something that can never be known, even if the very idea weren’t a product of mad fancies, disturbed humours of a mind hungry for something outside itself. Even you, sir-”

It was only now, as our conversation reached its crucial point - twitching out into the Realm of Know-How, the realm through which all facts pass - that the academic took a proper look at me. Whatever he saw, it gave him pause, and his words died in throat.

“Actually… What are you?”

“A vampire, sir,” I said, ever so respectfully, for this was still before I had quit being a bloodsucking leech.

“No no, you can’t be a vampire. Vampires don’t exist.”

“Because nothing exists?” I hazarded tentatively, trying to follow the threads of his argument. Frankly, I thought it was a rather terrible position - so far as I am concerned, ideas are impressed into the mind, and aren’t the mind’s own products - but a scholar must see from within to understand.

“No,” the dean snapped, or perhaps he stuttered - there was a weird, jolting lilt to his voice, almost a fuzzy sound. “Because vampires are an impossibility. Humans, at least, might be; but vampires? Why, next you’ll be telling me you believe in fairies.”

“But I do believe in fairies,” I offered helpfully, still unsure where he was going.

“Unaccepta- hack,” the man said, and then he viscerally fizzed. His body leaned over, his left hand resting against the back of his chair, the other ramming into his chest.

Concerned, I went to help him, only to freeze in surprise as the man’s incessant pounding solicited an audible CLICK. All of a sudden his head leapt up and his gaze narrowed in on me, his fishlike eyes gleaming dully.

“Supernatural creatures do not exist, sir. The very notion is illegal,” he said, or perhaps it wasn’t him, for the voice when it came was firm and monotonous and altogether unlike the nasally, supercilious tone of the academic.

And then the man began to change. Steam hissed, gears clanked, and the man visibly came apart, his skin cracking and emerging in unlevel blocks, revealing a web of machinery beneath. These began to swiftly shift shape and reassemble themselves, the hideous form of the academic giving way to the more stolid shape of a city policeman.

His right hand shot up, a mechanical pistol emerging from the web of gears under his skin, and he fired. Fortunately, my education in the Humanities had prepared me well for this, and I expertly weaved out of the way. The bookshelf behind me exploded, fragments of wood and burning paper flying across the room.

The dean raised his hand cannon for another shot; I ducked down, prompting him to adjust his aim. Once more he fired, once more I just barely avoided the shot, my training in Hermeneutics helping me determine precisely where he was planning to shoot.

The floorboards were ripped asunder, the strength of the shot sufficient to puncture the next floor’s ceiling. I, however, had stepped around the circumference of the blast. Having successfully closed the distance I grabbed a pen knife from off the desk and, while he was reloading, slammed it into his hand.

The force of my blow was sufficient to bring it down and even pin it to the desk, shattering his pistol and jamming his gears; with a judder and a shudder the transformation stopped, the machine man frozen halfway between a university bureaucrat and an agent of the law.

“Bzzt,” he hissed, tugging at the pen knife. “Intruder - illegal undead! Illegal undead!”

And his other arm whipped up. I caught his wrist as the knife flashed for my head. There was a brief moment in which the supernatural strength of a vampire competed against mechanical muscle, before I twisted his wrist and the knife fell to the floor.

This didn’t perturb the dean in the slightest.

“Illegal undead! Illegal undead!” He continued to cry in that firm, monotonous voice, his fingers withdrawing into their shell and five needles taking their place.

I was about to go in for a throw when I heard “Illegal undead! Illegal undead!” from down the hall, a dozen voices speaking with the same dull uniformity, and realised that the academics were onto me.

There was only one thing for a scholar to do in that situation - leap out the ninth story window. And that, in point of fact, is precisely what I did.