It was back when I was freshly dead, back before I quit being a vampire.
***
“Hang on,” I said, interrupting the undead a mere sentence into his tale. “How can you quit being a vampire?”
The vampire turned to gaze upon me, his burning eyes shrinking down to a soft glow. “How can’t you quit being a vampire? Think about it for a moment - ‘job,’ ‘species,’ the both of them are just words, and differ only by a matter of definitions. And you can always quit definitions.”
This premise struck me as singularly and sheerly illogical, and I said as much; but the vampire waved me off, merely noting in reply that the conclusion followed from the premises, and thus possessed validity. Incapable of responding, I could only content myself with imagining the vampire impotently throwing his letter of resignation in the face of a surprised Dracula, while the vampire in question, heedless of my ruminations, continued his tale.
***
It was back when I was freshly dead, back before I quit being a vampire. This was long after the fair folk had given up on man, and retreated to their abodes at the edge of the sea of dreams; and I, I had just angered a fellow academic.
Our dispute happened quite naturally, so much so that I almost didn't know it had commenced till I was right in the thick of it. I had published a paper on a favoured subject - to wit, the inexistence of human beings - and my fellow academic, incensed by the perceived odiousness of my position-
**”
“Wait a moment, wait a moment, wait just a moment here,” I cut in, once more rudely interrupting. “Did you say you wrote a paper defending the inexistence of human beings?”
“Don't forget to check under those toppled headstones,” the vampire advised, ignoring my query. “They may look like they merely cover a depression in the soil, but that is actually a hole - cleverly concealed beneath the shadows - and used by the ghouls when they want to sneak out for roadkill; a habit which bothers the gravekeepers most dreadfully, for the monsters never clean up after themselves.”
I grumbled at this lack of reply, but checked all the same. Much to my surprise a slew of slimy, furry things sped out from under the toppled tombstones and skittered off into the night, a severed rabbit's head flopping to the ground behind them.
“Oy!” Snapped the vampire, stirred up for the first time since I'd met him. “Pick that up, and bury it properly!”
“Fah!” came the reply from what must have been the ghoul, before a bloody spleen came flying out of the dark. “Every sound metaphysician knows that physical objects exist only in the mind, so once the darn thing’s dead it don’t exist anyway nohow.”
“That’s not how that works-” the vampire started, then, “ah, they’re gone.”
“Tom will be mighty pissed about the mess - you know how particular he is about the state of his grave dirt,” the vampire offered, and then, remembering that I had not the foggiest of clues as to who Tom was, continued, “ah, Tom is our live-in literate lich - he keeps Tom's Tomb Tomes on the east side of the graveyard. You should pay him a visit later - just make sure not to disturb the dirt.”
“Right, I’ll remember that - but back to the question. Did you say you wrote a paper defending the inexistence of human beings?”
“Why yes, yes I did,” the vampire replied, with an easygoing swagger. “Do try to keep up, please.”
“But you're having a conversation with me, and I'm a human,” I pointed out (very reasonably, might I add).
“Yes, but you’re misunderstanding the problem. The obvious question is not whether humans are there; the obvious question is whether humans exist.”
“Are those not one and the same?” I asked.
“Most assuredly not. It is an indisputable fact that we - that is to say, those of us on the Other Side - encounter humans with a frequency like clockwork; the problem, so to speak, is whether there is anything beneath the surface of that encounter. Who knows what dwells behind the mask, or if there is indeed more than a shadow?”
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By this point my mind, which had been scrambling to keep up ever since it learnt that there was more to this world than just the machinations of man, finally leapt before my eyes, and reminded me that what I thought was reasonable, and why, was by no means what lay in the minds of others… Even if (as was the case here) I was right; and that, should I desire to understand, I would have to step back, listen a little, and seek to comprehend.
“Alright, so let me get the story straight,” I said, moving my hands about to accentuate my point. “So, you published a paper on the inexistence of human beings?”
“Yessir,” concurred the vampire.
“And this stirred your colleague to rage, on account of the odiousness of your claims that humans don't exist?”
“Oh, no,” the vampire laughed, “no, on that point she agreed with me. What infuriated her was my attempted justification of the claim.”
***
There I was, preparing a lecture on superstitions about humans in the thirteenth century - did you know they used to believe humans went about wearing tinsel? - when my colleague kicked in the door.
At first I mistook her entry for that of a stray wind - she’s only six inches tall, you know - and it was only after I heard the first cries of rage and thought to look over the desk that I saw her, angrily pumping her fist in the air and waving about my paper.
I had argued - to my mind, convincingly - in the Periodical of Post-Ontological Perambulations that humans were an illusion, generated by the credulity of the fairies supposedly seeing them. This my colleague had taken exception to, to such a degree that she went to make her displeasure known, personally.
***
“Well of course she did. You’re talking to me now, so if that premise was true then wouldn’t it follow that you too are credulous?”
“The fey who lived before me believed in humans, and the fey who lived before them believed in humans, and the fey who lived before them, and so on and so forth, and it takes an awful long time to root a false idea out of your soul, when once it has taken root.”
***
She told me, in no uncertain times, that it was entirely irresponsible to selectively posit the existence of illusions for specific physical phenomena; to which I responded that, said physical phenomena depicting things we knew not to exist, it was more than justifiable to posit an explanation for this and only this instance, absent other more compelling theories. She then returned that humans were entirely explainable as audiovisual hallucinations generated by the organic development of houses, thus justifying their inexistence within a salient framework for the explanation of physical phenomena.
(At this point in the conversation a ghoul could be heard to distantly call out, “Except physical phenomena don’t exist!”, but both of us ignored it.)
I reiterated my point, citing my research, to which she reiterated hers. Having thus reached an impasse we did what all scholars do when they discover their findings conflict: we settled things like men.
Having prepared for challenges to my scholarly acumen beforehand, I kept a poleaxe over top of the desk - just under my framed diploma - and grabbing it sought to keep my colleague, a pixie, at arm's reach.
The pixie, for her part a veteran wrestler, used only a pair of brass knuckles.
We clashed in the middle of the room, axe against fist, and after a swift exchange I regret to say that she proved the swifter, pushing me back and sending me staggering. Unsatisfied with this much she leapt through the air; I raised the poleaxe cross-wise to block; she slammed into it, the blow from her knuckles possessing sufficient force to cleft the haft in twain.
As I was now disarmed she did the honourable thing and threw her own weapons to the side, before grabbing me in an attempted single leg takedown (or, more accurately, a single foot takedown, as she was too tiny to grab me around the knee).
I fell to the ground, and we rolled - a brutal ball of fearless fists and flashing feet - out the door and down the hall, slamming from wall to wall, knocking the pictures off and sending the stuffed hippogriff flying. At last we fought so long and so far that we rolled, still fighting, into the lecture hall.
This turned out to be highly fortuitous, as I was supposed to be delivering my lecture then, and the faculty would have been rather annoyed with me had I missed my lecture because I was settling an academic dispute. As the department head said, “the scholar is always a warrior, and the warrior follows proper timing.”
Accordingly I multitasked, and delivered my lecture to the students while continuing my dispute with my fellow professor. Smash, smack, bang, went the pair of us as we rolled about the room, brawling, all while I argued with her about the applicability of the Principle of Extension and lectured my students on why late mediaeval fairies thought human females went about wearing really long and pointy hats.
One of the dryads fainted as I described what the humans purportedly did to them in December. Another student nearly hurled when we went over mill folklore - his family used to help human millers, according to their inherited histories - and one went into a fit of rage as I described “human” records about the leprechaun.
Still, the lecture was eventually and finally completed - to great applause, let me add (I even received a commendation from the department for my thorough summary of fairies in “human” building motifs) - and, now free, my colleague and I brawled our way out of the lecture hall and down to the dining hall for lunch.
Thereupon we took a brief break, to rest and refuel, and once that was done we resumed our fight. I am sad to say it was inconclusive: our fight continued across the school grounds until night, at which point it had to be called off. After dark the trolls and the witchlights and creatures far fouler (like zygothrups, and murklugs, and the Great Glont) come out, and then the scholarship grows far weirder and altogether more uncanny.
We were not yet clear on whose argument was superior, however, so we repaired to a restaurant specialising in our favourite cuisine - Vegetable Lamb of Tartary - where we sought to hash out the elements of our dispute over meat and mead.