Charles Stross - The Nightmare Stacks

A vampire is haunting Whitby; its traditional.

Its an hour after dusk on a Saturday evening four weeks before the spring gothic festival. Alex the Vampire strolls along the sea front, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his tweed jacket. Theres a chill breeze blowing onshore, and he has the pavement to himself as he walks, eyes downcast and chin tucked into his chest, lost in thought.

What profound insight does the creature of the night contemplate as he paces along the North Promenade beside the beach, opposite a row of moonlit houses? What ancient wisdom, what hideous secrets haunt the conscience of the undying?

Lets take a look inside his head:

Alex is fretting about his Form P.764 Employee Travel and Subsistence Claim, which he will have to fill out once he returns to his cramped room in a local bed and breakfast. The form looms as large and sinister in his minds eye as a vision of his own lichen-stained gravestone. Nevertheless, it provides a welcome distraction from the eldritch undead horror that is his Student Loan Company statement. And that, in turn, pales into insignificance compared to the worst dread of all: how he is going to explain everything that has happened in the past few months to his parents. Or at least those bits that arent classified government secrets.

(Alex hasnt been a vampire for very long, and he isnt very good at it yet. But at least hes still aliveif thats the right word for his conditionunlike several other members of his brood.)

The tides are coming in, along with the clouds. The wind is chilly on his skin, so Alex turns and begins to retrace his path towards the steps up to the high street, striding past the Pavilion and the whalebone arch, past shuttered cafes and the museum. He walks towards the cliffside, wondering if hes made a mistake. Hes not sure, if hes honest with himself, that coming to Whitby was the right thing to do. Hes supposed to be in Leeds, where hell be working for the next few weeks. Someone in Travel had booked him a seat on a Friday afternoon train, the better to enable him to make it to the office at nine oclock sharp on Monday. They obviously hadnt got the memo about flexitime hours and Persons of Hemophagy.

Spending the weekend in Whitby was entirely his own idea. Hes never visited the small coastal village before: indeed, he only knows about it for two reasons. Whitby is famous from the novel Dracula (as the harbor where the ghost ship Demeter comes aground) and, more recently, it plays host to a number of goth festivalsthemselves attracted to the village because of its famous fang-infested foreshore. Why Whitby, if not because of the obvious clich? (For Alex is not a goth.) Well, Whitby has one other advantage. Its not close enough to his home city that theres any risk of him running into his parents or younger sister by accident.

Whitby is Alexs excuse for not being in Leeds while hes not working, and not being in Leeds is his excuse for not visiting his family, and not visiting his family makes it a whole lot easier not to tell them about the V-word, which is an awkwardness hes been grappling with in ever-increasing discomfort for months now.

The season for goths and their steampunk siblings may not have arrived, but Whitby isnt entirely devoid of the flagrantly ahistorical. Theres a group of drama students staying in one of the B&Bs on the high street, and as hes passing it the front door bursts open. Alex suddenly finds himself adrift in a sea of Mina Harkers and Abraham Van Helsings, with a trio of diaphanously clad Brides of Dracula eddying around him. They giggle and laugh at some private joke as they swish past, bringing a flush to Alexs cheeks. (He has a bad case of wandering male gaze, a side effect of his monastic upbringing. He is mature enough to find this mortifying, but not sufficiently strong-willed to suppress it in the presence of so much well-displayed cleavage.)