Not In Kansas Anymore

by Christine Wicker

  “It’s whatever you want to do,” he said. He grinned and put his palms face up. “I’ll do it if you want.” In an echo of the Dapper Gent at the vampire ball, Kioni was telling me that I had to choose.

  “No,” I said. “No. Why don’t we just go get some lunch and you can show me where you used to live?” So that’s what we did. We also drove along the Indian River looking at the rich people’s mansions, talking about which kind Kioni would have someday.

  Jesus said that in his father’s house are many mansions. He said he went to prepare a place. Magic says, “As above, so below.” Put them together, which Kioni does, and there’s a mansion in his future. He believed it without a doubt, and, for a little while, as we drove along and I listened to him, I believed it too. It was a great afternoon.

  But I left Florida disappointed in myself. If I was going to get below the surface of magic, I would have to be more intrepid. I obviously wasn’t ready to commit. If I could feel something, maybe I’d move a little closer.

  For feeling, I looked to the vampires, because they specialize in that most important concept of magical thought: energy. As I’ve already noted, the idea of an energy or vital force available in the universe for human use is a central idea of magic. It got a boost in the 1700s from a man named Franz Anton Mesmer, who believed that a kind of psychic ether pervades all space. This ether is moved by the heavenly bodies just as sea tides are. Ill health comes when a person’s etheric tides are blocked in some way. Mesmer believed he could use energy that he called animal magnetism to cure people of illness, and he seemed to have success. Mesmerism, as his method came to be known, is so close to hypnosis that the terms are still sometimes used interchangeably. Mary Baker Eddy also thought an atmospheric vital force was the secret of good health. Today thousands of people practice forms of energetic healing. Some are based on Asian medicine, some channel divine energy, and others remove energy blockages and tangles.

  One primary difference between what the psychic, or psi, vamps are doing and what other energy workers and religious folk do is that the vampires don’t draw energy out of the ozone or from gods or goddesses or from natural objects—they pass it back and forth among themselves and other humans, not as a healing force but as life energy. They believe they need the energy of other people to survive. The idea of feeding off other people seemed a rather wacky notion to me. Why would people who thought such things about themselves admit it, much less adopt a name for it and tell everyone? Another magical mystery.

  When I heard that a vampire family called the House of Kheperu was having an open weekend of workshops, I signed up. The house’s founder is a long-legged thirty-two-year-old named Michelle Belanger. She is a woman who definitely has strong energy. She wears her hair man-short, henna-colored with a blond forelock. The way she moves about a room reminded me of the rangy ease of cowboys. One year when I was at a Wyoming guest ranch, I asked a group of cowboys to stand before a weathered old barn so I could take their picture. They were reluctant to do it, but once in position, they effortlessly fell into the world’s most understated macho poses. Then I took a photo of their wives, who were beautiful women with great force of their own, but their photos seemed so pallid and lifeless in comparison that I despaired. Michelle would have posed with the guys.

  Early on during the House of Kheperu weekend, we formed circles to trade energy. About forty people were there, most in their twenties or early thirties and most in black, with a bit of leather and a few chains. Some had shaved heads, some sported fluorescent hair, but mostly the hair was black. I saw a few things that you don’t see every day, at least I don’t. One evening a very pretty thin girl with long red hair asked a bald guy if she could lick his head: “I just love to lick bald heads.” He noted that his head was shaved and might not feel too good, but she insisted she would love it. She started at the back of his head but couldn’t reach the top. So he knelt down, and she licked from the base of his neck over the top of his head and finished looking very satisfied.

  Before we formed the circle for exchanging energy, the vamps cleared the space by walking through it pushing energy out. Neo-pagans and Wiccans clear sacred space by performing banishing rituals and calling the watchtowers in all four directions. Watchtowers are something like guardians of the world and are manned by gods and angels, as I understand it. Some magical people clear space by simply standing in the middle of the room and telling everything to get out. Others envision a sort of sphere in the center of their mind.

  As we stood in our circles holding hands the plan was to send our energy left to right. A pretty little woman with glossy black hair apologized for hitting people with her wings. Her wings had a forty-foot span, she said. They were invisible, of course. I didn’t feel them, but someone else in the circle said, “So that’s what that was.”

  At one point she and Joe, another vampire, stood facing each other with their palms held shoulder high, in patty-cake position, but not touching. They were making ozone, they said. Nobody could make ozone like they could, I was told. Some people could smell it. I couldn’t. Others smelled pine and lilacs. I couldn’t. I never felt a thing either, but others also noted that our circle had been kind of a bust.

  A guy I’ll call Will seemed to be the problem. He was described by his girlfriend, the glossy-haired woman with wings, as a dead zone. Will generally stood with his arms dangling at his sides, a lank flop of hair hanging over his forehead, pale and serious but seemingly not offended by talk of his deficits. During the circle he was next to me, his hand trembling in mine. The girlfriend said Will had no hands energetically and a big block at the knees that balled up the energy.

  After the circle, the vampire leader, Michelle, worked on him. She ran her hands over his body without touching it and then opened his shirt between buttons, put her mouth on his chest, sucked the energy, and then blew it out. But it didn’t seem to work. The only way he had ever been able to ground was through his ass, he said, which sounded intriguing but meant only that he had to sit on the ground. A couple of us migrated out to the parking lot where he could sit on the pavement.

  He sat and was worked on for some time by Joe, who finally gave up.

  “Have you ever seen anything like it?” his girlfriend said, shaking her head in wonder.

  Another vamp who described himself as having no energetic legs (“I have to sort of hotwire myself to get energy moving”) told the girlfriend that she would have to construct an energetic body for Will, but it would take a lot of work. It might take all day, he said.

  “To tell you the truth, I’d just off your legs,” he told Will.

  It was clear that they felt something real was happening. I had promised myself I’d stop rationalizing, but I couldn’t. In past times, people interpreted the world through religious lenses. Now we psychologize. I put the two together with the help of Joseph Campbell. He believed that the sense of original sin comes from humans’ knowing that in order for them to live other things must die. Being meat-eaters is so traumatic that cultures make sacrifices to animals, ask their permission, bless them as they are killed, or, in our case, package meat in such a way that makes it completely separate from the idea of a living being and give it names that distance it even further from the reality of what it is. Campbell believed that vegetarians have the same guilt because they too must kill living things.

  Were the vampires responding to that old guilt but giving it a different name? They had adopted one of the bloodiest archetypes available, one that sucks blood and gives the “kiss of death” in order to live, but then they modified vampirism so that it was about energy, a renewable resource that doesn’t require the death of others. Or maybe there really is energy and they need it to survive, just like they say.

  “Vampire” is a clumsy term for what her family actually is, Michelle believes. Some psi vamps have abandoned the term altogether and simply call themselves by the name of their house, or they change the spelling to “vampyre.” Michelle and a New York City
vamp called Father Todd Sebastian have helped lead the vampire community away from exchanging blood. They’ve written a code of ethics for the community that forbids taking energy from others without their knowledge.

  They believe that exchanging energy can be good for everyone. People often feel sexual energy rising when they are fed upon. One woman had an orgasm that she proclaimed to be the best she’d ever had. Her name was Jody, and she came to Michelle because she was lethargic and her libido was down. Michelle hardly touched her, but afterward Jody’s libido returned to a satisfying degree.

  Michelle’s story of being a vampire began when she was still a child and would induce neighborhood children to play a game of chase in which she was the vampire and they were her prey. In her late teens she had a past life memory of herself as a ten-year-old in an Egyptian temple. She was stamping her foot in protest over the cosmic rule that said that reincarnated beings would not remember their past lives. If people couldn’t remember what they’d learned, then they would have to start over each time, she told the adults, who weren’t sympathetic. “That’s just how it is,” they told her.

  But the little girl who became Michelle many lifetimes later wasn’t satisfied. There is a connection between the universal life force and each individual, Michelle came to believe. It comes out of the belly area. The universal life force feeds energy through that connection, but along with that energy comes amnesia about past lives. If that connection were cut, a person would be free to roam back through other lives and pick the wisdom found there, Michelle reasoned.

  So sometime in her late teens she went into a trance state and cut the connection. That severed her from the energy that is available to normal human beings. It made her a vampire who cannot survive without the energy of others. But in return she gained access to wisdom. Her vampire family’s title, the House of Kheperu, would translate as House of Transformation, she said. She described her house as following a pre-Egyptian wisdom tradition.

  At one point, hoping to get a PhD in English and become a professor, she resisted the idea that she was a vampire and stopped exchanging energy. She began to sicken and almost died. Her heart was damaged by the experience to the point that she required surgery, she said. Later, when she wore a low-cut shirt, I was able to see clear scars on her chest.

  One afternoon we went to a local park said to be the site of extraordinarily excellent energy, with lots of ley lines, which are energetic lines in the earth. We were there to learn dowsing, which is still so popular that classes are held on it all over the country. There’s even an association of dowsers, I was told.

  When I arrived, the vamps were gathered in a little knot of about eight people at a picnic table. In pitched tents around the parking lot were troops of Boy Scouts. The scouts were in uniform. The vamps were too. They were mostly wearing black with tattoos. One girl in a bustier showed a vast amount of bruised breast. Another wore a black shirt with white lettering: “I’d rather be masturbating.” There were a few chains and some leather. Conversation was about what they planned to wear to the ball that night. One mentioned four-buckle leather boots called stompers. They exchanged information about fangs. A good set costs about a hundred dollars, and not many in the group had that kind of money.

  Eyeing the bare-kneed Boy Scouts, one raven-haired vamp said happily, “No one told me lunch was being provided.”

  The vampires were showing each other various knives and other weapons when one of the Boy Scouts began blowing a trumpet. One of the vamps stood still to listen.

  “‘Ode to Joy,’” she said, as if citing memories from another life.

  Another grimaced and said, “Maybe you could blow him up with your mind.”

  As a half-dozen cars swung into the parking lot, one of the vamps sang out a fanfare, “Dum, da, da, dum,” and said, “Now we can attack.”

  A dozen black-clad vamps piled out. A vampire-leprechaun named Dreaming Squirrel, wearing his faded red DON’T TRY TO OUTWEIRD ME T-shirt with a Terry Walsh autograph scrawled across the chest, was carrying a large lance with feathers down the length of it. A vampire named Sorrowsheart, who was to teach us dowsing, wore a long leather coat and high lace-up boots. Married with a small son, Sorrowsheart holds down two jobs, one of them at night. Vamps prefer night jobs. A number of the Kheperians work as hotel desk clerks. He looked sleepy. He was carrying an armful of coat hangers and some wire cutters.

  He instructed the group to cut their hangers and bend them so that they had two pieces of wire bent into an “L” shape. They would hold the short end and let the long ends float free, he explained. The direction the wires pointed would show where ley lines were. It took a while for everyone to get the wires fixed, but eventually it was done.

  “Are we ready?” he shouted out.

  “Hell, yes. Tallyho,” someone shouted back.

  As we stomped past the scouts’ tents into the forest, a middle-aged man sitting in a lawn chair smiled and shook his head. A younger man, short-haired in a clean-cut way, glowered as the vamps marched by.

  Sorrowsheart called out, “Follow the weird-looking people.” Then reconsidered. “No. Follow the normal-looking people. If you follow the weird-looking people, you’ll end up with the Boy Scouts.”

  By the end of the weekend I’d experienced nothing. It was all just talk. So on the last afternoon of the open house I asked Michelle if she would feed off me. It was a risk to ask. I knew she might refuse for all sorts of reasons.

  She wouldn’t take energy from anyone who was physically ill; even touching someone sick might affect her. She also wouldn’t take energy if she didn’t have a good feeling about the person. In her work as a hotel desk clerk, she often set up energy shields between herself and guests so that she didn’t absorb too many negative energies. Once a man came in who seemed so evil to her that she thought he must be up to no good. All the while he was there she expected something bad to happen, but nothing did.

  She had me sit in a straight-backed chair as she stood behind me. I could tell that she was waving her hands about my body in the way of energetic healers. She held them over my head, then ran them along the contours of my back, not touching. When she placed her hands on my shoulders, they felt like long blocks of ice. I could feel the chill through two layers of clothing. She moved her hands slightly forward so that they rested on my upper chest.

  She asked that I take off my cloth jacket. Energy would flow more easily with less cloth between our skins. Skin to skin was best. My hands rested on my knees, palms up. Taking one hand at a time, she cradled it with her left hand and stroked the palm with her fingers. My hands began to feel cold. Hers were feeling warmer.

  When she moved behind me again, I could feel the heat from her body, radiating like a portable space heater. I was feeling more and more chilly. At one point she stood to my right side, kneeling with my hand held in hers again. The left side of my body tingled briefly. If I felt pressure around my heart, we would stop immediately, she said. I didn’t.

  Standing behind me once more, she asked if she could put her mouth on the back of my neck. I tilted my head forward as she put her mouth over the vertebra. After a few seconds she turned her head to the side and exhaled with a whooshing sound. The exhalation released the parts of my energy that her body didn’t need to take in, she said.

  “Your energy is delicate,” she said. “It’s almost papery. When I exhaled, it felt as if I was breathing out a powder.” Later she said the powder was gone. My energy was clearer, still delicate.

  “Your energy flows. There don’t seem to be any blockages. It’s very balanced and calm. That’s probably a reflection of your personality.” Calm and balanced? Maybe compared to vampires. She was being gentle with me, she said, because if she was too aggressive even the touch of her fingers might leave marks on my skin. That would have been something to see, but it didn’t happen.

  By the end of the exchange, my forehead felt hot and damp. The rest of me was chilly, and my hands were icy. My face was h
ot because she had drawn the energy through the top of my head, Michelle said. Her hands, once so cold, were now warming mine. I could feel the heat coming from her when she was a foot away. My change in temperature might have come about because I took off my jacket, but I hadn’t felt that the room was cool before. Her change in temperature was a common by-product of her feeds, she said. Her hands were often so cold before a feeding that the nails were blue. “I die a little,” she said.

  I wasn’t entirely convinced that our shift in temperature was magical, but I did experience it. It isn’t easy to believe your own perceptions, much less to make something of them. It’s easier to wait for the scientists or the preachers or your own anxieties to tell you what you can believe, but if you want to be magical, you have to choose your own feelings over what authorities tell you. I had learned that much.

  My first magical experience had been the lessoning of my travel fear when I purchased the mojo bag and burned the candle as I said the Psalms over it. It hadn’t been much, a slight shifting toward being more hopeful and courageous. The second experience had been the eerie dream of being paralyzed by the jailer’s injections and then reading that a similar paralysis is typical of voodoo possession. Because of my old ideas about Jesus, I’d taken a terrible dream as a good sign. If you want good magic, you have to claim the good even if you feel like a fool for doing it. I had also learned that good is a stronger force than most of us think. Just as evil can claim people, so can good. Put together with the change in temperature when Michelle fed on me, I’d experienced three events that could be called magical. Were they self-fulfilling prophecies? Wild interpretations. Maybe.