Mags Campbell

Listen to Mags read her story

For a time in the beginning, we held the vampire in the strongest cage ever built, one that could contain a minor angel, if ever the need arose. How that creature fought and raged, even bending the iron and tearing at the enchantment in those bars.

After a while, no more than a handful of years, it stopped throwing itself against the cage and merely screamed in protest at its confinement. It cursed and it threatened, it bargained and it wept with rage.

Eventually, there were no words left and it wailed into the dawn until sleep took it again. Such a thunderous sound it made, we were obliged to move the cage deep underground, where that plaintive, wordless crying could no longer be heard for miles around. Even mortal ears had begun to hear the vampire’s cries and they were weaving ghost stories around the haunting sound.

When it was finally silent, its voice blown out and the whites of its once-pretty dark eyes red and black with blood, we pulled it out into the sight of a cold midnight moon and looked upon the horror it had become.

The rags of its once elegant clothing, now centuries out of date, hung rotting upon its grey, paper-thin skin, torn to ribbons by teeth and hands. Its thick hair was now dull and covered in dust. It was hunched over, turned in upon itself, spine curved and shoulder blades almost tearing through its skin, looking for all the world like wings emerging from the back of some monstrous insect. 

The only movement from the skeletal figure came from its half-concealed throat, which contracted continually behind the cascade of filthy hair, swallowing over and over, taut muscles and tendons standing out harshly under the ashen skin.

Looking at the pitiful sight hunched in the corner of its rusted cage, we goaded it to move, forcing the skull-like head up until we could see the eyes shining with dark blood; unfeeling and empty; the hole where its long, classical nose had once been and, lastly, the lipless mouth fastened on the hand, teeth clamped hard on the mound at the base of the thumb, sucking endlessly on its own blood.

Into the mouth, through the vast circuit of the body, out of the hand and back into the mouth, driven by an unceasing, instinctive need to feed, to stay alive.

Mags Campbell mainly lives in her bed on the west coast of Scotland, nursing a chronic illness and a lifelong obsession with all things supernatural. She enjoys writing about magic, the Fae, dragons, kelpies, vampires, dragons, selkies, ghosts, shapeshifters, and dragons. You can never have too many dragons. Mags wrote her first creative piece in primary school at 8-years-old and it was a Halloween story about a banshee. Nearly forty years later, she’s still writing about such things but now uses more words and better spelling.