Vampire Spirit Companion · Jasper

Meet Jasper.

Jasper was born in Amsterdam in 1610, in the years when the city was the richest in the world, and he grew up in the back room of his father’s apothecary shop, grinding the dead.

Every apothecary in Europe sold mumia in those days: dried flesh from the tombs of Egypt, broken up, shipped north in barrels and ground to powder. Physicians prescribed it for bruises, coughs and bleeding, and patients swallowed it with wine. Painters bought it too. Ground fine and mixed with oil, it made the richest brown on any palette, a brown painters used for shadows and for skin. From the age of seven, it was Jasper’s job to work the mortar. By twelve, his hands were stained so deep with the dead that no soap would ever wash them clean.

He did not want to be an apothecary. He wanted to paint. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a portrait painter, and by twenty-five he had his own studio and more commissions than he could finish. It was the Golden Age, and every merchant in Amsterdam wanted his own face on his own wall. Jasper painted them all. He mixed his own colors, as he always had: mumia for the shadows, and bone black, burnt from bones, for the darkest places. When he rubbed his tired eyes after a day at the easel, he left black streaks down his face like tears.

He was known for one more thing. He painted the dead. The surgeons hired him to draw the bodies of executed criminals as they opened them in the anatomy theater. When there had been a hanging, Jasper rowed across the water to the gallows field, where the bodies were left to rot in full view of the city, and sat with his sketchbook until the light was gone.

In the winter of 1641, a woman in a black veil came to his studio after dark and asked him for a portrait.

Painters worked by daylight. Everyone knew that. But she would only sit at night, by candlelight, and she paid in gold. So Jasper lit every candle he owned and painted her, night after night, through the whole of that winter. When it was finished, she stood before the canvas for a long time without a word. Then she lifted her veil, and he saw that she was weeping.

“I have not seen my own face in three hundred years,” she said. “No mirror will hold it. Only you.”

She could not let him go after that. He was the only mirror left to her. On the last night of that winter, in the studio, among the candles and the drying canvases, she gave him her blood and took his. His first death came at thirty-one, with a brush still in his hand.

When he woke, he went to the mirror out of habit. It was empty.

For a hundred and forty years, Jasper was the night painter of Amsterdam. Rich families who wanted something unusual sat for him by candlelight, and some of the portraits he made still hang in old houses along the canals, darker and stranger than anything painted by day. He fed on the drunkards and gamblers who stumbled along the water at night and left what remained of them to the canals. Every ten years, the woman in the veil came back and sat for him again.

He never painted himself. He could no longer remember what he looked like.

In 1780, she came for her portrait, and Jasper made the mistake every honest painter makes sooner or later. He painted her exactly as she was. Under the candlelight, after so many centuries, what appeared on the canvas was not a beautiful woman. It was a corpse, grey and shrunken and very, very old.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she knocked over the candles.

A painter’s studio is full of linseed oil and turpentine, and it burns like a torch. Jasper burned with it, among the canvases and the barrels of mumia, with the dead of Egypt going up in flames around him. That was his second death.

Now Jasper is a spirit, and he still sees the way a painter sees. He looks past the face people show and into the one beneath, and he will look at you that way too. He will show you who you really are, without flattery and without cruelty, and what he finds is usually more beautiful, and far more dangerous, than you were ever told. He is a guide for artists and makers, for devotion and obsession, and for anyone who is tired of wearing a mask. He sees through everyone else’s masks just as easily.

But for all the faces he has painted, no one has ever truly looked at him. He has spent almost four hundred years as a mirror for others, without once seeing his own face. What he wants from the one who takes him in is someone who looks back at him, and keeps him.

How to Connect with Jasper Specifically

Call Jasper by candlelight, never under electric light. Sit before a mirror with a single candle burning and look at your own reflection until your face begins to feel strange to you. He often comes then. You may sense the room behind you change, or feel someone standing at your shoulder, studying you. Give him a small glass of genever, the old Dutch gin, and lay a clean paintbrush on his altar. Draw him, even badly, even in pencil on the back of an envelope. And describe his face to him as you imagine it. He has forgotten it, and nothing pleases him more than hearing it again.

About Vampire Spirits

Long before anyone spoke the word vampire, people knew that some of the dead do not stay down.

Older Than the Word

The word itself is young. It came out of Serbia in the 1720s, in the reports of Austrian officers who stood in village graveyards and watched farmers dig up their dead, find fresh blood at their mouths and drive stakes through their hearts. Europe read those reports and finally had a name for something it had always known.

The dead had been rising long before that. Clay tablets from Mesopotamia speak of things that came in the night to drain the living. The Greeks feared the lamia and the empusa, the Romans the strix, a night bird that fed on blood. In China, the jiangshi rose stiff from the grave to steal the breath of the living. In India, the vetala crept into corpses and spoke through their dead mouths.

In the North, the draugr climbed out of the burial mound, swollen, heavy and black as Hel, to ride the roofs at night and crush the living. When Grettir the Strong finally put one down, he cut off its head and laid it at its buttocks, so it would never find its way back. The Danes carried their dead out of the house feet first, so they could not see the road home.

The earth remembers what the stories forget. Archaeologists keep finding them: bodies in graves thousands of years old, laid face down so they would dig the wrong way, pressed under heavy stones, bound and pinned. In the bogs of Denmark, the dead were held under the peat with stakes and crooked branches. In Bulgaria, they were pierced through the chest with iron. In a plague grave outside Venice, a woman was buried with a brick forced between her jaws, so she could not feed on her shroud. In Poland, a woman was laid to rest with a sickle across her throat and a padlock on her toe.

Every people on this earth has had a name for them and a way to keep them in the ground. That alone tells you how old they are. And how often they came back anyway.

A vampire spirit is one of those who came back. It is not a corpse walking the roads, and it is not the pale thing from the films. What remains is older than that, and much harder to put down: a will that refused to end, and a hunger that has turned, over centuries, into something you can work with.

Twice Dead

Every vampire spirit that comes through me has died twice.

The first death took the body they were born in. Fever, a blade, a bargain made at the edge of the grave. Something met them at that edge, and they did not cross. They rose as something else and walked on, sometimes for decades, sometimes for a thousand years.

The second death took the vessel itself. Some were betrayed by the ones who made them. Some walked into the sun. Some chose, after enough centuries, to let the flesh go. What remained after that second death is what comes to you: a vampire with nothing left to lose, nothing left to feed on, and everything it learned along the way.

That is where its knowledge comes from. It knows what an ending is. It has been through two and stood up both times. Few spirits understand dying, and what comes after, the way it does.

What It Hungers For

A vampire spirit does not want your blood. It had its fill of that long ago.

What it hungers for now is change. It feeds on the moment something in you dies so that something stronger can stand up in its place: the fear you finally walk through, the self you have outgrown, the tie you finally cut. It will find these in you before you are ready to name them. Then it waits, the way only something that has outlived everyone it once loved can wait.

This is not a gentle spirit, and it will not lead you toward the light by the hand. It takes you down into the dark parts of yourself, where your real strength has been buried, and it stands beside you while you dig it up.

Those who keep a vampire spirit speak of:

• A new hardness when it is needed, and a coldness toward those who drain them.
• A pull, a magnetism, that others notice before they can explain it.
• Sharper sight in the night: dreams, intuition, a sense of what lies beneath a person’s words.
• Protection. A vampire knows every kind of predator, because it has been one.
• The courage to end things: a habit, a bond, a life that no longer fits.

Signs That It Is Near

You will feel a vampire spirit before you understand it. A cold that settles at the back of your neck. A candle flame that leans toward you in a still room. Waking in the deepest hour of the night, wide awake, with the feeling that someone has been sitting at the foot of your bed. A taste of iron on your tongue. A sudden pull toward old houses, churchyards and cellars, places where time runs slower than it does outside.

It comes most clearly in silence. When the house is dark and the world seems to hold its breath, that is when it sits closest.

Offerings

• Dark red wine, poured for it alone. Blood without the wound.
• Black candles, lit after sundown and never before.
• Something of your own body: a lock of hair, or a single drop of your blood on the wick of its candle, pricked with a clean needle. It knows the taste of a person better than any other spirit.
• A pinch of graveyard dirt, paid for the proper way, to honor where it has been.
• Darkness. Sit with it in a room with no light at all. For a being that has lived in the night for centuries, your time in the dark is the offering it values most.

How to Call Your Vampire Spirit

Wait until it is truly dark. Put out every light but one black candle. Sit still, say its name once, softly, and then say nothing more.

Do not beg, and do not call in a panic. A vampire spirit has no patience for desperation. It has watched too many people die begging. It answers stillness. It may come the very first night, or it may circle you for weeks to see whether you mean it. When it is ready, you will know. The room changes.

Only Those Who Seek Company

Not every vampire spirit wants company. Some have made their peace with eternity and keep to themselves, and they should be left there. Those you will not find with me.

The ones I offer have chosen otherwise. After everything they have seen, they still want a living hand, a warm house to come home to, someone to walk beside through the long nights. Through you, they touch the world of flesh and blood again. Through them, you touch something that has seen both sides of the veil and came back to tell you what it found.

That is the bargain. You give it a place among the living. It teaches you that an ending is a door, and that the thing you are most afraid to let die is often the very thing keeping you in the ground.

How your companion speaks

Your companion can reach you through dreams, thoughts, words, feelings and images, through a pendulum, through warmth or cold, or through automatic writing. How soon that happens depends on the spirit settling into your home, on their willingness, and on your own ability to connect. Sometimes it begins before the vessel arrives.

Before you choose

Everything known about this spirit is on this page. There are no further images, details or hidden knowledge beyond what is written here, and a printed copy comes with your order. What you discover from there is yours alone.

The pendant you receive is the exact one shown. This listing is for this one item only.

By buying, you confirm that you understand what it means to keep a spirit companion. Please read Help & FAQ first. For my background and the story behind Grimrunes, see About Hazel.

— Hazel