The Magnus Archives - season 1

MAG. 10 Vampire Killer

Statement of Trevor Herbert, regarding his life as a self-proclaimed vampire hunter.

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death of family member, child harm, physical violence, child death, immolation, heroin/alcohol abuse, gore, cancer, spousal abuse, child abuse, knife violence, blood, hemophobia, survivor's guilt, fire, death of a sibling

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ARCHIVIST

Statement of Trevor Herbert, regarding his life as a self-proclaimed vampire hunter. Original statement given July 10th, 2010. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)

Right then. Been almost 50 years I've been meaning to pay you people a visit and get this down on paper, but I finally got here. So where to start? My name is Trevor Herbert, like I put at the top of your form there, and I've been homeless for most of my life. In fact, if you lived in Manchester, there's a good chance you'd have heard of me.

They call me "Trevor the Tramp". I mean, I'm not exactly easy to miss, am I, and I've been living there in public view for so long I guess I've become kind of an institution. Helps that I've always had a kind of uncanny knack for guessing people's ages. People will come up to me on the street and ask me to guess their age, and I'll tell them and most of the time they'll be shocked when I get it right. It's fun. So everyone around Manchester knows about Trevor the Tramp, sure. I hear someone even made me a page on the Internet and it got a few thousand likes. I don't know exactly what that means but it sounds nice.

Obviously that's not why I'm here, though, is it? No, I'm here because I have also dedicated my life to finding and killing vampires.

I have killed five people that I know for sure as vampires, and there are two more that may or may not have been. There is one man I have killed, unfortunately, who I am now sure was human, but I also know he was a violent criminal so I try not to feel too badly about that. I'm sure it's hard to accept for anyone, even an organisation such as yourselves, but I do not have proof to give you except for the vampire teeth that I will leave with this statement.

Do not feel bad about reporting me to the police for the murders, as I am sure you must, since I have recently received a diagnosis of late-stage lung cancer, and it is doubtful I will be living much longer anyway. That is the main reason for finally putting down on paper the details of the mission I have been secretly undertaking for the last half a century.

I killed my first vampire in 1959. At that point I was still living a mostly normal life, save perhaps for the abuse my family was subject to from my father. He was a vile man who ended up killing my mother in '56. It was a clear-cut case of drunken murder, but the courts ruled it as an accident, and my father stayed out of jail. Luckily, myself and my brother only had to endure four months of unpleasantness from him before he finally finished drinking himself to death. I was thirteen, when he finally died, and my brother was fifteen. Following his death, there were several attempts to rehome us as orphans, but they always split us up, and we couldn't be doing with that, so we'd generally run away. After a while, it became so we were happier finding our way on the streets than in another stranger's home.

It was in autumn of 1959 that we were taken in by Sylvia McDonald. It wasn't any sort of official fostering agreement, but it was getting to be quite cold at the end of October, and it just saw us shivering in a side street next to the Kings Arms Hotel, as it was back then, on Tipping Street before the ring road took it over. Looking back, I believe it to have been visiting the pub for the purposes of locating down and outs for use as victims, and in my brother and myself, I must say, it successfully found some.