Vampires & Victims - the Tales behind the Dolls of Hallowe'en '24

Malinja was somewhat precocious, learning to fly before she was three years old, & venturing upon on solo hunting expeditions at the age of eight. Oh, so many many years ago!  And many were the kind-hearted souls who stopped to assist the lost young girl, sobbing gently at the roadside. I wish I could say that they lived to regret their charitable instincts, but, alas, they did not live at all.

On one memorable night, she dispatched an entire carriage-full of Carmelite nuns...but the indigestion that plagued her for the next six months has taught her to be less greedy these days.

Do not, however, let that knowledge lull you into a false sense of security...


 

 
 
Amalia has always been a quiet one, more interested in her watercolours & embroidery than pursuing lusty farmhands or making unchaperoned trips to the city. (If only the same could be said of Adelina!)
How fortunate, then, that she met such a like-minded friend in Magdalena - who just happened to be strolling along the same woodland path & loitering in the same bluebell-strewn glade as Amalia one fateful evening.
 
How quickly they became bosom friends - although, curiously, Magdalena was never free to socialise before sunset. 
 
And how very quickly Amalia began to fade thereafter...
 

 

 
Magdalena has, unfortunately, proved the undoing of more souls than just poor Amalia.
 
She once - briefly - dwelled with a poet in a picturesque cottage beside the perfect babbling brook.  The very night of her arrival, they lay beneath the night sky, gazing rapt at the boundless swathe of stars as he composed sonnets to his love's own incomparable beauty.
 
He may well have written the most moving lines in literary history, the very apogee of the poet's art...but alas we shall never know.  He had not chance to record his words upon paper; his still, cold corpse was dicoveres the next morning yet clutching a lock of sanguine hair between his bloodless fingers.
 

 

 
 
Adelina was, as you may already have surmised, a bit of a floozie.  Not an outright strumpet, but improperly fond of flirting with those lusty farm boys. (Do not be surprised to find a stalk or two of straw among her flowing locks.)  How her father despaired of her reputation, & how difficult she made it to secure an advantageous marriage - preferring, as she did, a handsome face to a sizeable bank balance.
 
Indeed, it was behind a haystack that she was discovered one summer morning, not, as her parents had feared, ravaged by the reapers, but gathered to his bosom by the Grim Reaper himself, her pale & perfect throat marred by two small puncture wounds which still seeped a little gore upon her snowy lace gown.
 

 

 

Mateja may have a curious aversion to daylight & a love of her weirdly earthy-scented bed, but she also enjoys playing the Baroque lute (not, please note, the Renaissance or Mediterranean varieties), has an inordinate fondness for hopscotch, & loves to garden.

Many is the trench she digs towards the back of the flower beds; planting lupins she claims, although none ever seem to bloom. Perhaps that is on account of her poor choice of placement - lupins are known to thrive in open, sunny spaces, while Mateja chooses particularly well-shaded, dank spots for her moon-lit planting.  Or perhaps it is due to the fact that it is not seeds but bodies that she inters.
Naughty girl!
 

 

 

Arianna made, alas, a fatal mistake one summer's night, sheltering from a unexpected thunderstorm amidst the ruins of the ruined church which lay in the fields outside her village.  Although not fond of the crashing thunder & sizzling lightning bolts, she felt quite safe in the company of her trusty beau.
 
But did he protect his love when the shadows began to encroach upon their hiding place?  Did he defend her from the figure emerging from the depths of the darkness?
We cannot know, as no trace of him was found save one blood-spattered boot.  And Arianna, stretched out before the abandoned altar, was quite as cold as the stones upon which she lay.
 

 

 

Mirema once met the Count himself, prowling the alleys of a certain small town which I shall not name for fear of causing panic therein.  Fortunately for our blue-haired beauty, he recognised her as one of his own kind before sinking those infamous fangs into her flesh - even she would have battled to survive his blood-draining attentions.
 
She loves to share the story of the hours they spent hunting together, swooping from the dark sky to ambush any unfortunate soul abroad, revelling in their bloodlust & finding a voyeuristic thrill in observing each other's technique. How many poor souls died that night? Suffice it to say that their joint depradations left enough exsanguinated bodies behind for the nobleman's servants to resort to extraordinary methods of disposal, procuring a farm cart in which to transport the remains to a convenient sea cliff.