“I’ve Forgotten More Than I’ve Ever Known”: Confessions on the Verge of Suicide by a Vampire Past His Prime

 As spoken to Joey Madia

First published in the Loss Anthology from Inkermen Press (2009)

 

The Legend

There is a mansion that no one enters.

It sits on a hill, as many mansions do, in a secluded spot in the Hollywood Hills, inaccessible to the bus tours and gawking eyes that undergird the tourist trade around the West Coast’s infamous movie industry.

Byproducts of byproducts, I guess you’d say.

If one is inclined to believe the widespread rumors and vague memories of an industry that’s long since lost its grace, there resided—up until recently—within this decaying, decrepit mansion, a nearly forgotten, slowly dying writer from the Hollywood heyday named Erik von Forthright.

His 3 am costume parties were the stuff of legend… It has been said—in dark corners and society rags—that what happened behind the walls of the countless rooms of this monument to depravity would make a Satanist blush—like something out of the psychological horror films he wrote for the biggest Production Houses in the world…

Or, more likely, those parties were the inspiration for the films, and not the other way around.

Egg and chicken, chicken and egg. So it is with the ultra-artsy crowd.

Then, in 1969, as the scripts became darker and more Satanic, the parties suddenly stopped.

They began again on April 30, 2004, like Wonka coming forth from the chocolate-factory gates, and ended just as abruptly within the year.

It’s been silent ever since.

A Few Words about Me

I drink. I write. The first far more than the second.

I am separated from my wife and so far behind on alimony and child support that I’m no longer allowed to see my kids.

            Not that I ever saw them much when we were all together.

            Did I mention that I drink?

            Not so long ago—a mere decade, give or take a month­—I was the hottest Hollywood horror writer around. No Richard Matheson or John Elder by any stretch, but able to hold my own among the current generation of fang-and-slasher scribes. Barely out of college, I met Gavin Rome*—superstar horror writer and casual companion. We had enough in common (choice in booze—Bacardi—and a fascination with the screenplays of Eric von Forthright) that when his novels went big and he was shopping movie rights, I was part of the package deal.

            Those were heady times.

            Gavin had a streak of eight bestsellers in as many years—Helldoll, Morning of Death, Mirror House, and Eyeteeth were the biggest—and I had written adaptations of them all. The money was pouring in, the bartenders were pouring out, and life was a blur of premieres, interviews, fancy meetings, and expense accounts.

            Then Gavin was murdered.

            In that mansion on the hill.   

The Invitation

I wish I could say otherwise, but the late morning the day I got ‘The Invitation’ found me sleeping one off (a particularly sloppy, violent one), face down near an overflowing ashtray, with vomit on a four-day-old shirt and my silent laptop refusing to record a single word.

            Not that I had conjured even a single, lonely noun to feed it.

            The Invitation itself, slipped under the door by an unseen hand, was a piece of expensive linen paper neatly folded in perfect thirds and printed upon in a careful hand with a thick, sanguineous ink.

            If I hadn’t been so happy to see that it wasn’t (a) an eviction notice, (b) a letter from the Office of Child Support, or (c) another of a dozen possible payment-(long past)-due notices, I probably would have used it to scrape up some fermented takeout from the end table the next time I entertained.

            Or, more likely, as I haven’t had a (welcome) guest in many months, it would have been slowly pushed under the couch in the process of my entering and exiting through my rarely used front door.

            But there it was, open in my hands.

            So let me tell you what it said:

‘I am a fan of your work, as I was of Gavin Rome’s.

You’re better at what you are than you think you are.

And I need someone to tell my tale.

You will be the one.

~No notebooks, no cameras, no tapes.~

I am a remorseless, aged vampire despising blood and longing to stop the loss.

The rising of the sun, the second coming foretold in my own theology, is pressing in upon me…

My ageless life, full and fabled,

Has been spent enduring draughts and floods and Neptune’s empty Furies,

Forcing me to be an eater of sand in my dancing madness,

for I have lacked my Father’s power to convey with mystic eyes

and honeyed venom voice the Gift we so savagely bestow.

I’ve lost my hold on Time.

~You no doubt know the place.~

 

Yours in urgency and haste—

Eric von Forthright’

 

Casing the Casa del Forthright

I would have liked to tell you that I hesitated for even a second to take this iconic screenwriter up on his offer. That I hemmed and hawed (whatever the hell a hem or a haw might be) and considered just ignoring this impassioned plea and going back to the bottle and the utterly empty screen of my laptop, but that would be a lie.

            And I am many, many things, but a liar I am not.

It’s important that you know that.

            So I threw on some clean clothes and headed out.

            I knew exactly where I was going, if not exactly why.

Being a horror writer, you’d think I’d go for suspense here, describing my drive into the hills, the gnarled trees along the path to the wrought iron gate, the expressions on the faces of the angels and demons cast for eternity upon them, what I (thought I) saw as I gazed up through the arched, Gothic windows, and the minute details of the house.

            No.

            I have more important things to tell you, and there isn’t much left in the way of time.

            Instead, I direct the curious reader to the tales of Poe, Jackson, Matheson, and King, for the house was very much like those.

            At least, from the outside.

            The interior was like watching a stately whore age from the inside out.

Meeting the … (Man?)

Eric von Forthright was a spectre made flesh.

            He stood before me, some six and half feet in height, in a custom-made suit of purple velvet, lacey cuffs draping four inches below his painfully thin, thick-veined wrists.

            His fingers, a classical pianist’s dream, sported rings that looked ancient and expensive—precious stones, angels, snakes, and skulls adorned them in various combinations. The nails were half an inch long and filed to subtle points.

            His hair, a shoulder-length and perfectly set mane of angelic blond curls, distorted to a dark halo all around him, backlit as it was by a crystal chandelier.

            A carefully contrived first impression.

            ‘Come and sit with me in the music room,’ he said quietly, pivoting his expensive Italian ankle boots and glide-walking down a long, art-filled hallway.

            ‘Bosch… Pollock… Caravaggio… you’ve got good—if not eclectic—taste,’ I said, wincing at the stupidity of the statement.

            ‘Copies,’ he answered. ‘I have painted to pass the time. What little there was left. Sit.’

            He motioned to a Louis XIV chair covered in a plush emerald fabric.

            I readily complied, running my fingertips along the worn oak arms as I settled in.

            ‘You enjoy fine things, eh?’ he asked.

            ‘You seem surprised.’

            He middle-fingered middle E on the grand piano that dominated the room before straddling its bench. ‘I am. You present as little more than a dull-witted drunk.’

‘Guilty as charged,’ I said, feeling a few buttons at the bottom of my shirt to make sure they matched up. ‘But I can hope.’

‘Hope, my friend, is all we really have.’

And Now He Tells His Tale

‘I have a friend,’ he began, assessing the height of the moon through the heavy damask drapes. ‘A very old friend, but new to here—a namesake of sorts—who once said, “I’ve forgotten more than I’ve ever known.” Perhaps that is the best way to start.

            ‘My time, as I have said, is short. With the rise of the sun, the devil will die, which has been, from the very dawn of Man, forever and a day foretold.

            ‘I pondered the worth of producing a sizable tome about my time upon this Earth—other vampires have done so, as you know, spawning a lucrative cottage industry of rock bands, clothing lines, and films—but I have said almost all that I must say through my scripts, through their visions of the Dark Arts and the Great Gift. It will be up to you to go through and decipher them. To peer through the frame, listen past the score, and divulge what you are able from the multilayered subtext of which I am so proud.

            ‘Then you can share with the world all that I have been.

            ‘My age. I was re-born as a vampire in the time of the Bubonic Plague. A bygone, better time, for all its brutality and ignorance. A time when Myth was still the coin of the realm and the growing currency of the Church. A necessary cleansing to clear a swath for the heretical genius of Copernicus, da Vinci, Galileo, and Bruno—for you see, it has always been about the Sun. Always.

            ‘And I was its Antithesis. Its balance.

            ‘People fail to see how important we vampires actually are.

            ‘By whom I was made is unimportant, as is the place.

            ‘In the 1700s, I came to America, on a tall-masted, rat-filled ship, because I knew that it would be here, in this New World, that the Sun would reach its zenith in the politico-military sky.

            ‘Those were rich, compelling times, as the thirteen colonies labored on the bed of their own specific brand of Liberty to bring forth a blood-coated, screaming infant. I toured the battlefields with General Washington, securing a position as an aide-de-camp to members of his staff because of my considerable insight into the European mind.

            ‘At night, I would juice the dying man grapes of the last of their wine.

            ‘The War of 1812, the American Civil War, Westward Expansion, the Industrial Revolution… These were fruitful times for an aging vampire learning his strengths and decreasing weaknesses by testing the boundaries of both with a pointed blend of intelligence and instinct.

‘I truly loved America…How could I not? We were exactly the same. Blood was our strength. Our daily need…

            ‘Then came motion pictures.

            ‘I was in the audience in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1905, when The Nickelodeon opened.

            ‘As did my eyes, and my mind, and my emaciated heart. For I saw, in those early flickering images—the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots, the life of the Christ—the possibility to relay all that I had learned in my centuries-old vampyric state to the semi-conscious masses crowding Plato’s modern cave. To show them all that I had seen, make them feel what I had felt—to love despite death, to be lonely despite crowds, to be in darkness despite Light.

            ‘For I had known much in the way of pain. You cannot know what it is to watch a young woman, firm of breast and light of step, grow old and wither and die while you remain unfalteringly young and unblemished.

            ‘My early hopes were continually rewarded. Film was not just story, but agenda and message, constructed by the director through the multi-coded pages of the script. Griffith’s propaganda. The social commentary of Chaplin and Keaton. The German expressionism of Nosferatu, Metropolis, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Cinema was the culmination of all of the arts. Even in the days of the Silents, there was music, as you know.

            ‘And the screenwriter was her Goddess and God. Her snake’s-mind and turtle’s-back. Her great Creator.

            ‘Of course, it couldn’t last.

            ‘Musicals in Technicolor—mindless eye and ear candy that they were—were the first signs of pointless entertainment in the temple of our great Muse, but their heyday (thankfully brief) was also the time of the romantic films of Westward Expansion by Leone and Ford and films championing the American cause of war starring Errol Flynn and John Wayne.

            ‘By this time I had already made quite a fortune as both a writer and producer, and in 1941 had purchased this house.

            ‘I am sure you know the legends of what took place here—all true, and many things more occurred that no sane man would or could believe. I was a little bit Velasco, a little bit Prince Prospero, and very much Myself. You see, although I was for many centuries able to have sex, over time—well… nothing was enough. Not youth, not blood, not all manner of extreme depravity—and so I, and dozens of others who shared the Great Gift—were forced to watch. To control and collect from the borders of the room the potency and release of the human spiders caught within our web.

            ‘The sex and Satan connection was well and truly forged within these walls.

            ‘Which brings me to the sixties and seventies. The time of Hammer and American International. The time of monster movies, bared breasts, dark ritual, and the Matheson–Corman reworkings of Poe. Human psychology torn wide open—its blood gushing out in a wave of symbols and Satans. This was, of course, my time. All those centuries of living and decades of learning the screenwriter’s craft finally paying off.

‘And it truly is, young man, a craft, lest you have forgotten.

‘As almost all your “colleagues” have.

‘Because the industry is shit, and it’s all the writers’ fault. They have been bought and sold a thousand times over with all of history’s stock enticements. The Whore of Babylon feeds finely on the souls that walk these hills. You know what they’ve done to you. The mirror tells your tale. Without story, there is nothing. Just empty images—dick jokes and pointless violence. So-called special effects… Cheap gags and—dare I say—carefully contrived confrontations packaged as reality.

‘Please… Reality, my friend, is the fact that I could move across this room and tear your throat out within the span of an eyeblink.

‘My namesake—the very old one I mentioned earlier—agrees with me that cinema has become a garden overgrown, with the weeds of spoon-fed plots and palatable endings choking out the flowers that were the spirit of its birth. Controversy is manufactured in Board rooms instead of flowing from the artist’s pen, as it once did. And it is “Controversy” only in the loosest sense of the word—designed to last only as long as the film’s run and to be only as edgy and potent as the great modern Moloch—the Bottom-Line—requires.

‘When the Prophet turns Promoter, the sheep will soon be sheared.

‘And I know you know this. And I know that’s why you drink. Why you suppress your gift and write the shit you do, when you do.

‘That is why I asked you, and why you came.

On the Verge of the Rising Sun    

Eric was staring at the moon as it began to dip below the horizon.

            We had sat in silence for the better part of the night, and the dawn was coming fast.

            ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked, needing to hear the sound of my own voice.

            ‘There is a writer—a sort of freelance editor—who my namesake is using to tell his tale. You will tell him mine. He will know what to do with it.’ He handed me a crumpled business card. ‘Don’t delay, lest you forget what I have said.’

            ‘So what’s next for you?’

            ‘The fabled sun, the second coming foretold in my own theology, will soon rise, and when it does, I will burn myself to memory in the back garden. I cannot face another night.’

            I stood up and, without thinking, tugged at my collar, baring my neck.

            ‘Do you want to feed on me first?’

            How lame.

            ‘Lame does not even begin to describe it, my friend,’ Eric answered, opening the drapes in lieu of my veins. ‘Your friend Gavin would be disappointed in you.’

            ‘Did you kill him?’

            ‘Me? No. I preferred to dine on the very rich and the very poor. Your collaborative companion was neither. Gavin was chosen to be the mechanism to usher in a new Age designed to undo what had been done with the corruption of the Arts, the corruption of all that was pure and potential about what it is we do. But a power far more potent than mine could not bring this new Age to be. At least, not yet. So Gavin Rome sits frozen in Limbo and I haven’t the resolve to wait a moment longer.’

The first rays of sunlight began to dance upon the window.

He involuntarily moved several steps back.

‘You must go,’ he said, inching once more toward the window. ‘Tell my tale to the man on the card. Leave through the front door. I will go out the back. Do not turn around. And do not ponder coming back. There will be nothing left of me to find. Nothing of this to find.’ He brushed his long fingers the length of his torso. ‘Go. You are no longer welcome in my house.’

I had gotten half way down the hallway, conjuring mind-films of the sodium fate of Lot’s wife in my effort to not look back, when I heard the French doors that opened onto the back garden open and close, and I had the damnedest thought.

I couldn’t wait to get home and write.

For I, too, had tales to tell.

And the second coming of my own fabled sun was suddenly not so far away.

 

*For the Gavin Rome origin story, see:

https://joeymadiastoryteller.blogspot.com/2025/03/gavin-romes-in-ice-hunk-of-horror-for.html