Dear Lunatics,
Tonight, the Lunar Dispatch rises from the dead!
Apologies for missing my last few celestial deadlines due to illness. Thanks everyone for your well-wishes and forbearance.
As you no doubt noticed, I’ve titled this dispatch the Blood Worm Moon, harkening back to the dramatic lunar eclipse that took place on March 14th.
I actually did write a dispatch that night as I sat waiting for the Moon to be dipped in gore. But in my weakened state, I fell asleep before I could send it—and proceeded to snooze through the total eclipse.
In a strange way, I felt as though I had already seen the eclipse.
Earlier that evening, I watched the latest version of Nosferatu. In one memorable scene, the vampire Count Orlok extends his demonic influence over a sleeping German town.
As Orlok mutters ominously in an extinct dialect called Dacian, we see the giant shadow of his right arm rippling over the rooftops, his gnarled fingers reaching out toward his prey, his hand blocking out the Moon.
It is a simple yet chilling effect.
For the past two decades, the vampire of popular culture has been defanged—no longer an immortal monster but a teenage heartthrob who can’t seem to graduate high school.
Yet in Nosferatu, the writer-director Robert Eggers makes the vampire scary again—just as it was always meant to be.
When Dracula was brought to the stage in 1927, it so terrified its London audiences that a uniformed nurse had to be stationed in the lobby for every performance. During one performance, at least 39 theatergoers fainted and had to be revived with smelling salts and generous doses of medicinal brandy.
My neck may not show puncture wounds but my childhood was marked by a fear of vampires—born, no doubt, from a too-early encounter with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I didn’t make it all the way through the novel but I read enough to populate my dreams with fresh horrors: columns of fog with red eyes, shaggy wolves with lolling tongues, and coffins that contained only beds of soil alive with worms.
It didn’t help matters that Bram Stoker had blended his gothic fiction with historical fact, basing Dracula on Vlad Țepeș, a 15th-century Wallachian ruler and real-life sadist who impaled an estimated 100,000 human beings.
It was in my copy of Stoker’s cursed book—a Penguin children’s edition that may as well have been bound in human flesh—that I learned vampires could transform into more than just bats. They could “come on moonlight rays as elemental dust.”
Elemental dust?
While boards nailed across my bedroom window could conceivably keep out a fluttering bat, one finger dragged along my window sill revealed the hopelessness of trying to keep my room dust-free. I might have been willing to whittle a wooden stake out of my brother’s baseball bat, but at ten years old, I was not prepared to stoop to the level of vacuuming.
So I secretly assembled a “bug-out bag”—a pair of sweats, a flashlight, and a blanket—all stuffed into an old knapsack shoved behind my dresser, which, in a vampire emergency, I was prepared to heave onto my back as I made a run for the holy ground of my local church.
All these years later, I’m back in my childhood bedroom. I haven’t checked if the bug-out bag is still wedged behind the dresser, though I’m sure the flashlight batteries are dead and the diminutive sweatpants would better serve me as a bandana.
The eclipse is coming, but right now the Moon is still whole.
It shines in my window like a wafer caught in sunlight.
What would I do as an adult if Dracula, riding on the sheen of a moonbeam, slid under my windowsill?
Even if I could run, I would have nowhere to run to.
Last week, my local church was demolished.
Luckily, I did not remained defenseless for long.
Just days later, on my 41st birthday, I found on my doorstep the strangest gift I have ever received.
Before I unwrap the package for you, I first have to transport you to a straw hut on Shangchuan Island, just off the coast of China, where a future saint lay dying in December 1552.
Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuit Society, had fallen ill on his way to meet the Jiajing Emperor of the Ming Dynasty.
As Xavier, the great missionary, lay delirious with fever, he called out to God in the many languages he had mastered. He died with a devotional candle burning in his hand.
The following year, Xavier was exhumed and inspected by a group of Jesuits, who were shocked to discover that his body was uncorrupted. They observed, on the silk pillow supporting his neck, fresh bloodstains.
After it was transported to Goa, Xavier’s body was enclosed in a casket. However, the lid did not stay shut for long.
In 1614, Pope Paul V demanded that Xavier’s right arm—the arm that had baptized nearly 100,000 souls—be brought to Rome.
When Xavier’s coffin was pried open in 1614 and his right arm removed, other small fragments of bone and clothing were scavenged.
These relics have journeyed across centuries and continents, trailing miracles in their wake.
On Wednesday, one of them was left on my doorstep.
Held in a golden monstrance, a splinter of St. Francis Xavier now stands on my windowsill, burning like a candle in the moonlight.
It watches over me as I sit here contemplating my enemies—both my childhood adversary, the vampire, and my adulthood adversary, this rare illness that occurs only in one in 100,000 people.
But with St. Xavier guarding me, I don’t think either stands a chance.
See you on the Strawberry Moon!
—WD
Missed your posts and so glad to see this one when I opened Substack this morning. Your post reminded me that having a chronic illness is like being attacked by a vampire. No longer in control, and fighting for energy. Yet I personally find the moon so calming and energizing. Wishing you better moments, hours, and days ahead.
I too have a fascination and fear of vampires. Dracula is one of my favourite books, but it was Salem’s Lot that gave me the fear. I love how you had a bag ready to run to sacred ground.
Take care Will, go easy and wishing you well.