House Hunting

Low to the ground, hidden by a combination of vampiric hypnosis and the human tendency to ignore what they don't want to see, Dagon crouched in a gutter near a nondescript house in Carnegie. Dagon was the kind of monster that actually looked like one on the outside, and even Dagon was terrified of that house and what it had seen inside it. Dagon had long since grown to accept its own monstrousness, but that house harbored something beyond the ken of even fellow monsters. There was at least one episode of The Twilight Zone that Dagon would never be able to watch again.

In truth, Dagon had no way of knowing if the things it had seen were even still inside. There was much about the house and its undoubtedly terrifying history that Dagon as yet did not know. Though Dagon would never admit it to its pack, and certainly not to anyone else, the Nosferatu was unwilling to get close enough to the house to confirm its suspicions or fears. Even so, the house had become something of an obsession, and Dagon spent long hours after its initial encounter therein just watching the building from across the street, flinching at real or imagined shadows glimpsed behind the curtains.

Fear informed the bulk of Dagon's morbid curiosity, but some part of the vampire mind, some other instinct, was also at work. Any vampire, confronted with the unknown, asks the same question, either loudly or privately: Can I take this power for my own? The monster lurked, as monsters do, and its mind attacked the problem like a school of piranha. There must, it was certain, be some way to turn this awful thing it had found into an advantage.