As I've told you, Greece is no stranger to vampire legends. Its ancient mythology featured a female character known as the lamaia. No delicate or beautiful creature was she, with her lower extremities taking on a snake-like silhouette. She had no eyelids and every four months shed her skin. It was said her feet were "unpaired"—one human-like and the other that of a goat or young ox. Yet, as a female, she had the envious ability to transform herself into a fetchingly beautiful young woman when her hunger for blood became unmanageable. This unfortunate addiction, coupled with a crafty mind and taste for youthful body fluids made her the murderess of young children abducted from their homes in the night, as well as the slayer of eager young men wishing to sleep with and enjoy her illusionary beauty.

            This ancient literature is spiced with stories of young lovers said to have been beguiled by the lamaia and her lethal disguise. She was to leave their lifeless corpses discovered blood-drained in the morning by horrified friends or relatives. This sad demise always followed a sexual dalliance the night before--no doubt worthy of the blissful frolicking known  to the Greek gods and goddesses.  Nevertheless, these female beasts were featured in many ancient writings about love and deception—stories which an Italian writer would later immortalize in 1492 called Lamaia, as would the Romantic British poet John Keats  in his haunting poem by the same name in 1819.

             On that first evening in my rented room on Mykonos, I prepared to turn in early—none of that all night reveling for me yet on this little 'island that never sleeps.' There would be plenty more nights for that, as I had booked a full month on this floating playground for the sensually inclined. I simply had realized that after a quick shower, my exhaustion had become totally brain-numbing. And for a good reason. It followed a previous day and night of air travel from California's LAX, plus the six hour ferry ride out from Athens to my present locale—dead center in the Aegean Sea.

        I had planned to re-read in my small, yet delightfully comfortable bed, one of the better and earliest documented encounters with an 'undead' individual on the island. Truth being, I could barely lift the French botanist Pitton de Tourmefort's book close to my face I was so tortuously tired. The details about the wanderings of a hideous and noisy corpse through the little town of Mykonos, recorded by witnesses in 1701, would just have to wait for my precious sleep.        

        As I drifted off into that unconscious world of both pleasantries and horrors, the last thing I could hear was the steady beat of Deep House music wafting in through my open window. It was pumping out steadily into the warm night under the summer moon. People at that moment were obviously hooking up in abandonment with strangers from all over the world. And some possibly with pasts and bloodlines which if known would only defy your belief.

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