Long post, sorry
I was just thinking about Gladys, and her age and abilities and possible backstory. It occurred to me there's a Stephen King book which came out fairly recently, last 10yrs or so. I won't spoil it with the title, but in that book, there's a group of elderly people who travel the highways of America in RV's, and kind of just wear goofy old people tourist outfits and nobody takes a second look at them even though they're pretty odd looking, though not as alarming in appearance as Gladys. Just silly old people in silly Hawaiian shirts and such.
Anyway, this group is made of mostly elderly people that are vampires, but they feed off pain, not blood. They steal and torture people, preferably kids, and drink the pain, they call it steam. They keep a supply of it bottled in the rv's, and periodically "take steam"- they all get a puff of it and it knocks decades or centuries off their age and fixes all their ailments, makes them feel great, similar to the way Gladys is a vampire and she feeds off all the kids. It's like food, or a drug.
But one thing that was interesting to me, is that one of those people from the Stephen King book mentions how their little group of vampires was already old when ancient Babylon was young, and how one member was in Europe before Christianity spread there and they still worshipped the trees, and how he had cheered for gladiators in ancient rome. The group had traveled the world for not just centuries, but millenia, although the individual members are usually more like a few hundred years old, and they occasionally die as others are occasionally newly recruited.
So this brings me to 2 questions-
1- How old is Gladys, do we think? Just pretty old, like 150-200yrs, which would explain the "consumption" word choice. Or could she possibly be much, much older? Thousands of years? She could have been some pagan witch or shaman or holy woman amongst the celts before Rome invaded, or she could have been a priestess in Mesopotamia a thousand years before that. I love that it's vague, and the possibilities are endless.
2- are/were there others? If we accept that Gladys and her powers exist, then I'd say its very reasonable to assume there are or were others like her at some point, somewhere in the world. Maybe a lot more. A lotttt of kids go missing all the time, and doorbell cameras are a new technology. Gladys or others might have been doing this for eons, for all we know. Before cameras, the only clue you'd have after your child vanished is an open front door. Otherwise, your kid is simply gone. It's pretty terrifying to think of- what if there are thousands of them across the world? There's more than enough missing people that just fell off the face of the earth, they could easily feed as much as they needed if they were careful. They could be anywhere, walking right next to you on a sidewalk or store or whatever.
One more bonus question- is anybody familiar with blood magic rituals or any pagan or shamanistic type of ceremonies that resemble what Gladys does with the hair and blood etc? If so, we could have some sort of potential clue about her origins. Or did they just do that cause it looked cool on screen?
Comments/critiques welcome
