Ancient Darkness Read online

  “I was hoping that I could find some answers around here. Maybe I could enlist your help in that matter.”

  “How so?” she asked, the curiosity seemed to light up her face despite the darkness in which we were entrenched.

  “I have no memories of my afterlife. You seem to have the upper hand in that regard. Maybe you can answer some questions.”

  She smiled at the thought that coursed through her mind and extended her hand to me. I grasped it with my hand and felt the cool touch of her skin. It felt like home ought to feel and I wondered if she felt it too. “Two conditions,” she said.

  “All right,” I said expectantly.

  “First, no human blood will be taken in this area. A lot of the people in this town are relatives of mine and I refuse to feed upon them or allow anyone else to do so. Do you understand?” I nodded my agreement to that term. Satisfied she continued, “Second, I don’t work with strangers,” she finished with what I took as a wink of her eye, nudging me towards some kind of hint.

  Realization crept into my mind as I held her hand there in greeting. She did not know my name after two encounters together. Embarrassed I provided it, “Noah Paxton,” I smiled and gripped her hand tighter as we shook. She had me mesmerized in a way that was far too human to be true. I did not know if it was because of her beauty or if it was a gift she had to lure in her victims, but I was willing on either accord. She smiled in return and the diluted blood that stained her teeth was almost as endearing as the rest of her. I smiled at the thought.

  I looked forward to our future together.

  Chapter 3

  “A taste and nothing more, my child,” his voice was like heaven, it was haunting and mesmerizing. He was a dark angel of the night, and he called me his child though he looked younger than I did. I drew my lips closer to his neck and sucked the blood from the wound that he had inflicted upon himself. I knew the thought was blasphemous, but I felt as though I was drinking from Christ himself. ‘This is my blood, shed for you, drink this in remembrance of me’. I was delighted to do so.

  The small confines of the space in which we were holed up felt like a prison to the body and but a festival for the soul. I was weightless now, no longer condemned to this earth. I felt astral and fatal and violent in a tender way. I swallowed hard as his hands wrapped around me and drew me ever closer. I closed my eyes and fell back to sleep. The blood coursed through my veins again and lingered for a while. With dreams I slept, of the dying, of the yearning, of the past, and present, and future.

  The burden of supply and demand once again took its toll on my body. I felt like a subway station of sustenance as the others brought me forward unto themselves. I was drained again as my father looked on, cold, heartless. My eyes drifted to him and the image was replaced by thoughts of my human father, long since dead, was it for years or decades? I no longer could remember a bearing for the time. I just existed, weak and powerless. I was a slave to the blood and a god to the thirsty. Together we created an unholy trinity that forced an uneasy smile to stretch my broken lips and reveal a monster that housed the devil inside his own flesh, tearing for a release from the chains that bound, that inhibited, that burned a heavenly fire in his soul. Deep into unconsciousness, I strolled, as my wakefulness fell away and greeted me with darkness once more.

  She was a welcoming host, to say the least. Her home was a renovated cabin that must have been built early in the previous century. The windows had been blackened out almost entirely with some opaque paint that had been applied to the glass. Even in the relative darkness, I could see the swirls of the painter’s brush as the color was a set layer after layer. There were dim lights that emanated from small lamps on the end tables in the living room. The shelves were adorned with paperbacks that I could tell had been read countless times as the spines of each were to the point of fracture. Most titles were unreadable, but those that were I could tell were placed in order by author’s last names. Perhaps a bit of OCD had resulted in the filing system. Maybe it was a form of carry-over from her first life. I didn’t think it proper to ask, though.

  “Please make yourself comfortable,” she said as she stalked over to a recliner in the corner of the room. Thoughts of coffins tucked away into damp basements were replaced with the reality of how a child of the night really lives. Based on the sheer number of tomes strewn about the cabin I could see that her days and nights were an agony of pure boredom.

  “Thank you,” I said as I sat on a plush love seat that was centered perfectly along a wall. Above it, a shelf held nick knacks of a time that many had probably forgotten. A smile reached my lips as I read the titles of the old compact discs that were as properly categorized as the books had been. Artist and bands were listed alphabetically and the album titles were also alphabetical. It was a sound method of a relatively large collection. “I remember these,” I said as I grabbed one of them from the shelf and opened the brittle plastic case. The dust had settled haphazardly between the booklet and the clear plastic, almost making it hard to read the faded font of the band’s name. “Alabama” was the name of the band, and it showed bearded men that brought me back to a human moment of listening to the radio in an old green Ford truck with my father behind the wheel. I never listened to country music, accept with him, it broke up the silence of the long rides down potholed highways.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, breaking me away from my memories. I thankful reprieve from a time that was a blessing and a curse rolled into one.

  “Of course,” I lied. Before my transformation, I had been riddled with the guilt of things said, and those left unsaid. I was never able to tell him what he had meant to me. Now the tides of time had turned into my enemy forever more. I was doomed to remember the love and bitterness of a broken home. A sweet hell that defined me for the rest of my human life. “Tell me a bit about yourself,” I said, in an attempt to draw the attention away from the silence that was filling the room. I hated silence as much as I hated commotion. I guess I was hard to please that way.

  She looked up at me and I could see her better than I ever had before in the lamp light. She was adorned in jeans and a black long-sleeved blouse. It was unbuttoned in a very mature way that any man would appreciate. Her hair was dark, but not black, and her eyes were silver and reflective like a cat’s. I noticed perfectly manicured nails that might have been fake, but those kinds of things had always been lost on me. She wore boots that were suitable for hiking but were dainty enough to not take away from her feminine beauty. She was a country girl, even after death in this kind of life between heaven and hell.

  “What is it that you would like to know?” she asked.

  “Everything, anything at all. I’m just curious about you, this world that I’m only vaguely familiar with.”

  “Well, who can argue with that?” she smiled and leaned her head against a delicate, deadly hand, and looked up at me. “I suppose the best time to start would be the beginning?” I nodded. “Well, I was born right here in this town and went to school about twelve miles away in a county school that no longer exists. I moved away to Hattiesburg when I graduated and went to school for nursing. I never made it through because of what happened.”

  “What happened?”

  She drew her hands in towards her and pointed towards her neck where faded scars that once had been her bite marks were now only a slight discoloration of her porcelain skin. “I don’t have many memories of the moment, to be honest. I think her blood did something to my memories. I can only remember a glimpse here or a spoken word there. I’m kind of like you in that regard. I woke up a few weeks after my abduction and was alone, unguided, unwanted. The only thing that I wanted more than blood was to come home, and I’ve been here ever since.”

  I sank back against the cushion of the love seat and leaned my head against the sheet rock wall and closed my eyes. “I thought a vampire’s maker always stayed with them after turning them. That’s how it was in all the movies and books that I remember.”r />
  Maggie laughed, not a stifled snicker, but a full bore laugh that I knew I had not heard in decades. It brought a smile even to my ignorant lips that had just uttered such stupidity. Basing anything on literature or film was as far-fetched as taking a liar’s oath for truth. She smiled harder and I could see dimples in her cheeks from the widespread grin. “I guess our makers forgot about that!” She choked out through chuckles.

  “What about your parents?”

  The smile on her face faded with swift authority after the questioned escaped my lips. “They died years ago,” she said solemnly, looking towards the painted window as if she could see something happening outside.

  “No, I mean, what about them? Who were they?”

  “Oh, my father’s name was William and he worked at the shipyard in Pascagoula. My mother’s name was Magdalene which is where I got my name. She was from New Orleans and was of Cajun decent. She raised me while my dad spent a lot of time at work to pay for my mother’s expensive tastes. This cabin belonged to him, and he would bring me here during the summer when he took some time off,” she paused in deep thought and ran her hand through her hair and let it fall back in clumps over her face. It was clear she had fond memories of her father, not quite so for her mother, for some unspoken reason. “I’d rather not speak about them if you don’t mind.”

  I understood the sentiment for what it was and decided to move the conversation forward. “You said that you woke up alone, so how did you make it through without someone there to guide you?” I asked her.

  She straightened out and uncovered her face once again. She looked at me in almost a pitiful way, I could not tell if it was for me or for herself, and then she spoke. “It’s not like I was no longer human, Noah. I woke up feeling more than human, more than anything I had ever been before. I felt alive, I felt powerful, I felt deadly, and I felt hungry. That has been my existence ever since. Notice that I’ve never felt like a monster because I don’t think that we are. I have taken no more than three human lives in my entire existence. In those moments, I was weak with the blood lust and I felt out of control because of it. It does something to you, almost like a possession of the body by some kind of demon. I hated myself for it, I hated God for it, I hated whoever the bitch was who made me for it. That’s how I made it through, with a lot of self-condemnation and loathing. Any more questions?” she asked as she sat back, seemingly exhausted by her self-reflection.

  “No, I can’t say that I do,” I said as a pinprick of light shown through a bit of chipped paint in the window. I watched the gray-hued light of the morning steadily grow brighter until I could no longer keep my eyes open, not due to the light, but due to the sleepiness that beckoned me to fall into a daytime slumber. Wrapped in the warmth of Maggie’s cabin, with her laid across from me in utter silence, I slowly closed my eyes and drifted once again into the sleep of the dead.

  Chapter 4

  “You called him your child,” a woman’s voiced spewed resentment towards her counterpart. I could see them standing there, facing off between long flutters of my eyelashes.

  “You know nothing for which I do, Abigail,” he replied stoically. The two stood and stared at each other large beautiful marble statues for a long while. I was mesmerized by their beauty. I could hear a commotion outside, but it was paled by what was happening in this room. I strained to keep my eyes open, searching for a clue as to where I was.

  A smell reached my nostrils that reminded me of a different time, one where I had accompanied my grandmother to her church several years ago. It was a Wednesday night, a Baptist revival where the preacher cried between solemn words depicting the end of the world. Preparation for the soul was his currency, paying the way from church to church. I noticed a hint of alcohol on his breath prior to his departure, or perhaps it was a smell stained into the seats of his car when the door opened on that hot July night.

  That was not the smell that I noticed now, though, there was a hint of old water-stained paper like the ones that the hymnals that night had as the organist played the droning nineteenth-century hymns that were so popular in the south. I remembered bringing the stale old hymnal to my face and smelling its contents. That was the smell that accompanied me as I laid, listening to the stalemate between creator and angel. The questioning of loyalty, the questioning of leadership, the questioning of my future.

  I woke to the sound of silence with her eyes watching me. I sensed them as much as anything else in the room. They bore into me with a curiosity unrivaled by anything else in all of my experiences, at least the ones that I could remember. I opened my eyes to reveal that I was right, she stared hard, the gaze of a huntress. “Good morning?” I said with a questioning tone.

  She seemingly shook her head before looking back at me, maybe I had caught her off guard. “Um, more like afternoon, but to each their own,” she smiled, it was friendly and inviting.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I was just lost in thought,” she replied as she stretched her long body and the popping sounds of stiff bones rang through the air dully.

  “Yeah? What about?”

  “The past, almost a century of what ifs and what was. How did you sleep?” she asked quickly, almost cutting herself off from the previous conversation, despite the brevity of it, it was a conversation that struck me more curiously than she would have wanted.

  “Perfect,” I said smiling, hoping to warm her heart, or whatever it was that drove people like us, in our current state. “What’s on the agenda for tonight?”

  “I was thinking about investigating our past,” she said as matter-of-fact as she could.

  “Our past? I thought you had yours all figured out.”

  “Hardly, but I’ve been thinking about it and would like to know where I came from as well. Maybe between the two of us, we can figure it out. Two new friends on a mission of discovery. What do you say?”

  “I say yes,” I replied with a smile. “Where do we begin?”

  “Do you know where you were changed?” she asked. Her eyes were wide, expectant.

  I thought about it as hard as I could, but I came up short. “Not really. I think maybe a church, but the memories are so scattered and fuzzy that I’m not certain. It all feels like a weird dream that you wake up from in the middle of the night and forget right away.”

  “Well, luckily I remember just where I was changed,” she said as she stood up.

  “Where was that?” I asked, standing next to her.

  “In a closed down post office outside of Hattiesburg, in a town called Petal. At least that’s where I woke up after the transformation. It was empty, except for the post office boxes that lined the walls and bare counters along the walls. The windows had been boarded up, but the door was open and invited me outside in the warmth of the night air. I was more confused than anything when I woke up, but I think it might be a good idea to start there.”

  I shook my head in agreement, anything was better than sitting and pondering the meaning of life with nothing to go on. I marveled at the idea that both of us through different circumstances shared similar experiences. I wondered if this was more common than not.

  I wondered a lot of things.

  “It’s as good a place as any,” I said, slowly trying to put the pieces of her past together in my head. She was a mystery that I wanted to solve, and maybe in so doing, I could solve my own as well.

  “All right, we can leave as soon as the sun falls past the horizon,” she said with a nod towards the waning light that clutched the walls of the cabin, lingering in its brilliance, but destined to die as the world spun into oblivion.

  I smiled at the notion. Finally, I might find some answers. I just hoped that I was ready for them.

  Chapter 5

  The sun was just falling behind the horizon based on the way the darkness crept into existence. The pale illumination of a passing day through blurred stained glass had provided limited warmth in what I knew was a vacant church. The hardwood fl
oors of the pulpit were my bed and the gentle chime of the church bell through wind torrents of the coming winter played a soft melody to my ears.

  I was not yet turned, thanks mostly to my would-be sister in this coven, or whatever you would call it. I was still lucid to the point of endless slumber, but the days that had passed since their last feeding had allowed me a certain amount of recovery. It wasn’t much, but it made me alert enough to recognize my surroundings. The church had been one built in the early twentieth century. Owned by a black minister whose son had been active in the American civil rights movement. That historically significant act had prevented this dilapidated old building from being destroyed by bulldozers when I was a young child. I could still hear the chants of protesters with their picket signs and bullhorns that had scared me so at the time.

  The history imprinted on this place did nothing to preserve the structural integrity of the building, only a brass plaque adjacent to the rubble concrete steps showed any significance whatsoever to this forgotten realm. I was not even sure the family still lived in Mississippi, to be honest. The thought had never occurred to me until this small, lonesome moment. A small reprieve from the company that I was currently keeping. I thought it ignorant that my mind would drift to things that I did not need to remember instead of to my family. How long had it been since I had seen them? Were they still alive, or were they playthings in the same way that I now was a plaything. I felt like a mouse in a tiger’s cage. It was only a matter of time before the play became dull and I was consumed by the predators. I gently held on to that thought as my eyes closed, once more consumed into the sleep of the eternal. I tried to keep a hold on the outside world, but the canticle of the bell’s chimes drifted me deeper into sleep, deeper into the darkness, deeper into nonexistence.