Your Cheating Vampire Heart

saved my life

Barnabus Collins, House of Dark Shadows, circa 1970

When I was 12, I went to see the horror movie The House of Dark Shadows, even though I was strictly forbidden. My parents said it would give me nightmares. The vampire looked directly into the camera, swam the channel of our eye contact, and captured my soul. I heard the click when it happened. For years after, I had a screaming nightmare 2-3 times a week, a psychic wounding that served as an initiation, a shamanic descent into a watery Underworld of darkness and depth, a dance with the archetype of evil that would rule the course of my life.

In the dream, I rise from my bed, dressed in sacrificial white, and stand at my bedroom window overlooking the Merrimack River glittering past our house under a hunter’s moon. A man’s disembodied face hovers—his eyes hypnotizing prey. I open the window. A mist flows over the sill, and a vampire swirls into form beside me, so filled with erotic desire his exhale catches in ragged little gasps. He tilts my chin to expose the line of my neck and traces a finger along my jugular, raising downy hairs on the back of my neck. He sucks in a breath, fangs glint, his mouth descends. Teeth brush my skin. I panic. NONONONO. I scream. I want to live.

The first time, the whole family came running. My mother sat on the bed and rocked me while I cried. The brothers, confused and disoriented, returned to their beds. My father ran a helpless hand through his crew cut, crooning, “You’re safe now.” But night after night, the vampire returned. And night after night, I let him in.

After a while, my brothers groaned, “Can’t you make her stop?” My mother merely called to me, “Wake up, Susan.” Eventually, my father just yelled without getting out of bed, “For Christ’s sake, Susan! Shut the hell up.”

The devouring monster was stalking us all. I still wonder if my father might have lived if only we had taken those warning screams more seriously.

When I was 17, my father puttered his lobster boat up the Merrimack River, threw the engines into neutral, and, gaff in hand, tightroped the catwalk to catch the mooring in front of our house. On the trip back to the wheelhouse, he slipped into the frigid April waters and drowned. His body was missing for 14 days, which is still mostly a lacuna for me, though my mother told me how odd it was that I didn’t cry.

So, imagine my mother’s shock when, at 25, I fell in love at first sight with Dracula after a Halloween midnight performance at our local dinner theater. Dressed in black tie, he was 6 feet 4, dark hair, dark eyes. Drop-dead gorgeous. A gaggle of twitterpated middle-aged mothers were swooning around him, waiting for their turn to be twirled by a dangerous flamenco dancer, swirled inside his cape, and bitten in the neck until they squealed.

He dipped a poodle perm into position, looked up, smoldering eyes cutting a channel directly into mine. “Don’t go,” he said, and each word rippled through reality.

My mother scoffed, “Love at first sight? This is your nightmare.”

Less than a year later, Joseph and I moved from small-town New England to big-city LA to become actors. We were living our dream, settling into a pattern of replaying my parents’ early marriage, which meant plenty of drinking, but without the domestic violence. That was still in its early stages, but it was developing. I had hit Joseph once, and the next morning he stood in the bedroom doorway and said, “If you ever hit me again, I will hit you back. Hard.”

Joseph found a job with a market research company that conducted advanced screenings of soon-to-be-released movies. The job took him to most major cities in the United States, just as my father’s career in commercial insurance had involved frequent business trips. I became my mother, spending half my time as a lady in waiting, and the other half celebrating my man’s return.

Then, Joseph’s job started taking him back to Boston repeatedly. He said he had requested the assignments so he could visit his family. I was jealous.

So, one night while Joseph was in Boston, I sputtered awake at 4 am. I gasped, like a woman held underwater to the point of drowning. And I just knew: Joseph was having an affair, and the proof was in the phone bill. Now, this was in the time before cell phones, when everything in the world was different.

I padded out to the kitchen. Call after call to the same number in Massachusetts, charged back to our bill from a pay phone. After half an hour circling the phone, picking it up, and putting it back down, I called the number.

“Hello?” the Whore of Babylon answered.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

After a long pause, she said, “You called me. Who are you?”

Panicked, I slammed the receiver down. Shock waves rippled all the way back to my father’s death.

I called the phone company. The number belonged to a woman I knew from our Playhouse days. The calls had been made from the pay phone in the lobby of our apartment building.

A day later, when Joseph finally called, he said, “I didn’t do anything.”

“Come home today,” I said.

“I have five more days on this job,” he said.

“Tell them it’s an emergency,” I begged.

Of course, he didn’t call again for the whole five days. What was there to say? And, I was back in that same frozen Underworld I’d suffered through when my father died. A country called: he’s dead, but there’s no body.

Except this time, I did cry. And just as I feared, I couldn’t stop. I had to call in sick. The ocean of grief I’d once refused came pouring through like I was a full wineskin and Joseph was a pin.

In one of the few moments I remember from the time my father’s body was missing, my mother was convinced he’d washed up on some shore, trudged to a bar, and simply neglected to call her. Except that he was never one for bars; he did his drinking at home. I heard her ask the police: “Did you look in Jake’s? The Grog?”

And like her, I told myself some stories too. Joseph would be sorry. I’d be hurt. Sure, I’d punish him, but eventually, I would forgive him, and we would be the better for it—we’d quit drinking. Maybe go to couples therapy. We’d heal everything and start fresh.

But like my dad, Joseph said no to healing. When he finally washed up on my shore, he said, “But I love her. I’m moving back.” And just as when my father died, I wasn’t enough of a reason to live. The cost of facing everything was too high. And I get that—too many hours logged in the fetal position, releasing the frozen past from my bone marrow. If I could have skipped it, I would have.

I never saw Joseph again. Because we were 3k miles apart, I never ran into him at the store or walked into a party to find him there. I never called him, and he never called me. And in all the times I went back to visit my family in that tiny New England town? It’s been 40 years, and I’ve still never seen him.

But if I did see Joseph again, I’d tell him how grateful I am. I don’t think there was any other way for me to wake up from the nightmare. See, Joseph was my fourth and most devastating re-father—tortured men who loved me but disappeared without a trace anyway. Every detail of my father’s death was replayed, synchronistically perfect, and that’s a kind of grace. Though I thought Joseph and his lover were the monsters, it was undeniable. The monster was inside me. And just as my childhood dream predicted, I fought to live.

It took years, but now I live in joy. Because of the shamanic descent Joseph initiated me into, I died and was reborn so many times that the old Susan ceased to exist. That’s such a gift. Who wants to be trapped in a 1970s horror movie anyway?

Because Joseph’s betrayal left me no choice, I live in joy today. The old Susan died and was reborn so many times, she has ceased to exist. It’s for the best. She was a fiction anyway.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

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