Page 24 - Hunter - The Vigil

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C C CHESTNUT STREET COMPACT
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fi re burns out. A candle’s fl ame gutters.
Over time, the Compact simply winked out,
its time done.
The Compact, Tonight
The Compact, Tonight
These days, the idea of the Candle
Compact is a vibrant, living thing among
many hunters. It comes up on web forums.
Sometimes it’ll be spray-painted on
passing trains or scrawled on fl yers that
are stapled and taped all over the city.
The Compact exists as something of an
ideal for many hunter cells who envision
an army of humans standing against the
horrors, who believe that in the spirit
of togetherness, humankind can overcome.
And this isn’t just a vibrant, viral idea
in Philadelphia: communities of hunters
all around the world know of the Candle
Compact (though quite often inventing or
adding apocryphal “whisper-down-the-lane”
details) and hold it aloft. Cynical (or
some say realistic) hunters claim that
it’s a pipe-dream, a naïve goal that has
the substance and strength of a house of
cards, and that to pursue it is tantamount
to giving the monsters power.
But visionaries struggle to bring the
Candle Compact to bear once more from
city to city. The efforts usually meet
with some success. Hunters from different
backgrounds and disparate ideologies may
come together for a time and, in evoking
the Compact, may manage some triumph
against a troublesome threat. But rarely
does the Compact (often named for a part
of its city: “The Coit Tower Compact” in
San Francisco or the “Underground Compact”
in London) last beyond the year.
The living dream of the Chestnut Street
Compact still thrives in Philadelphia,
too. While it’s in no way pervasive
and, like it is in other cities, it’s
always short lived, it does seem to
stir a likelier spirit of cooperation
between hunters who would normally not
be caught dead working with one another.
The whispered reverie of “revolution is
coming” is common on the lips of many
who carry the Vigil. The text of the
translated Compact in some form always
ends up taped to some store window or
dropped in one’s email inbox from an
anonymous sender. Is it a dream come
true? Or a nightmare made manifest, born
out of blood and fi re? Perhaps the truth
lies somewhere in between.

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