Nosferatu
Something dead approaches. You shouldn’t even know that it’s there. But you do! Imagine them all lurking, the sad monsters. Just hanging around unseen. Trying to feel like part of the surrounding humanity. They sit in cafes. They go to movies. They ride in cabs next to people on their way to the airport. Pretend they’re having conversations with the warm folk. Yet, their curse weeps like a cyst. People get the creeps. They don’t know why. You wake up with a horrid taste in your throat, thinking you swallowed a statistical spider. You don’t see the thing hanging above your face, drooling with longing. Oh, you would quiver to know what it would take to make a sad monster glad.
All vampires should be feared, but the Nosferatu control fear. They might look horrifying, or they might look like anyone else, but there’s something about them. Something of the grave, something of the deep places that writhe with too many eyes and imbs and fingers that are not fingers, something just…wrong.
The Haunts have always been there. Haven’t they? In the dark corners and crawly cracks of things. They haunted ancient Greece. Mothers prayed to them, even as their blackened babes ripened with plague. They called upon the name Nosophoros, “disease-bearing”; cursed by Artemis and Apollo to carry pestilent blessings. “O dread eater,” they prayed. “O glorious worm, O ruined mouth, O pale thing that is both ghost and flesh, please pass over my household tonight.” They haunted Rome, where the Brothers and Sisters Worm held court in the forever-dark of Necropolis. They haunted the hidden places of Romania when the empire fell. Through the dead rats, waste, and clotting gutters, they wriggled down the centuries, an undulant dread, lubricated on disgust.
Terror is a constant. Always, there is fear, always pouring, and the Nosferatu drink from a chipped cup. They wake to these strange nights, where grotesquery is chic. Always, they emulate not just the underground, but the Underworld. Look to the names of their modern Necropoli: Sheol in Los Angeles, Muspelheim in Hamburg, The Fields of Aaru in Detroit, and Mictlan in Mexico City. They answer the echo of something chthonic that wriggles in the ruins of their ribs. The elder Haunts tell stories of the Hidden Ones, the Gods Below, and even the most skeptical neonate can almost hum along to the song of the ancient and the sleeping. Whatever is in their Blood, it moves with a sickening plasticity of purpose. Every black drop is a carnival freak show. Horrid delights, grotesque wonders, endless putrid potential all stored in the family Vitae, expressed in endless variety through the petri dish of each living soul it slithers into.
See the street artist. For ten bucks, she’ll draw the most insightful caricature that you ever did see. They say for a little extra, she’ll draw something that’ll turn your hair white. You ask for the extra. Eels squeeze your lungs. Legs give out. You can’t take your eyes off your own warped face and what the impossible lines and angles reveal about yourself. She walks toward you, face like a rain-damaged charcoal drawing. She takes her payment.
See the urban legend. Sometimes he is a hook-handed brute stalking lovers’ lanes, or a masked maniac with a corn knife. Sometimes he appears as a bleeding woman when teenagers dare to say her name nine times before a darkened mirror. He writes spiraling limericks on bathroom stall walls, and if you read them backwards, you’ll die in three days. So they say. Sometimes he researches local legends. Sometimes he makes up his own. He creates living stories that evolve and mutate as they pass from lips to ears, fingers to keyboards. He infects minds, just as his Curse and fangs and Blood infect the neighborhood. The Kindred don’t know why he does this. Some say the circulating myths carry secret messages over the Cacophony. Some say it’s for his own vanity, an attempt at a more complete immortality.
See the underground cinema club. Very exclusive. Hushhush. But you knew a cataphile who had an in with the urban subterranean exploration movement. “Do not fail to see this,” he said. How long have you been down here? One hundred seventy miles of catacombs beneath Paris. Roman-hewn stone. Walls of skull and bone. Everyone walks silently. Tunnels full of glowing paint. Strange symbols. Melting-wax faces in the half light. An amphitheatre, terraces cut into the rock. Fullystocked concession stand and bar. Short horror films play on the full-sized screen. The things you see. The nervous laughter. The shrieks. Strobes interrupt the film, backlighting the silver screen, revealing the things writhing behind it. You’re so proud of yourself, the last one to keep from screaming, even when you cut your hand squeezing the Pepsi can. You join the chorus when pale salamanders, eyes sewn shut, lap up your blood.
The Haunts are still here. They never left. They perch on the edge of your periphery. They swim with the floaters, contaminating your vitreous humor. Always behind you. The more you turn, the more tired you get. Hush now. There are no such things as monsters.
Why you want to be us
Never back down. Look the biggest, baddest guy you know in the eye and he’ll look away first. Even in the city’s most dangerous places, people give you a wide berth. Want to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers? Done and done. Want to scare the shit out of your asshole brother-in-law? Brother, it’s easy.
Why you should fear us
You don’t get a choice in the face of the Nosferatu. You can’t be brave. Your fear isn’t yours; it’s his, and he can mold it as he wishes. You will quake. You will cower. You will run. And you can’t do a damn thing about it. Terror, real terror, is not sweaty palms, pounding hearts, and screams — these are incidental. Terror is the stripping away of every construct of ego and society, all the things we like to think about ourselves. The Haunts have the power to tear that curtain down and force you to look at what’s hiding there. And nobody, but nobody, likes what they see.
Why we should fear ourselves
Better to be feared than loved? Maybe, but Machiavelli was presuming the prince had a choice. The Nosferatu don’t have that choice. They’ll always be outsiders among outsiders; and even if they can wield that as a weapon, it’s a weapon that can cut back. Isolation is their lot, and isolation feeds the Beast.
Nickname: Haunts
Clan Bane: The Lonely Curse
You are an avatar of disgust. Dread and discomfort oozes from you, scabbing everything over in the putrid film of your rotting soul’s exhaust. Your body is warped, or the world around you warps. This could manifest in ways grotesque or subtle. Fear and all its gibbering siblings come easy for you. Most other forms of social communion do not. Yours is a lonely Requiem.
Favored Attributes: Composure or Strength
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