Ancient Darkness

by D. A. Alexander

  I could feel the beating of each individual heart. The old man on the porch swing had some kind of heart disease, the beating rhythm of it was often disrupted in a way that would kill him later. I considered giving him that gift of death early by feeding on him. He would be my target, it would be merciful.

  “Noah,” he said my name in a hushed whisper, barely audible to my own sensitive hearing. I looked to him for guidance. “We shall wait until the last one leaves and the one left behind will be your target, follow my lead.” He stayed hidden in the darkness and wrapped his arms around his body, steadying his coat to prevent the movement from the wind from distracting one of the humans. It was a form of stealth that he had most likely developed over the course of centuries. I followed suit, and wrapped my arms around myself, revealing new clothing that I did not remember wearing at the time of my death. I also felt the corded muscles of my arms, their solidity was surprising to me. I could feel an essence of strength inside me that I had never felt before, it danced with the craving I felt in my throat, opposing one another, yet in sync with the other. I looked up at him and he winked. I knew then that there was much more that I would soon learn.

  The undying need for comfort in a time of need was not lost in my damned, immortal existence. Maggie knew this feeling more than I did and made an effort to show comfort that I had neglected to do for her. It was a wretched thing for me to have ignored in her time of need, but she did not reciprocate that failure. Instead, she moved over to move and placed her hand on my chest, pushing me down so that I laid lengthwise on the cushions of the furniture. She draped herself over me and the cold bodies of two immortals touched in sweet beauty.

  I held her in my arms, feeling a warmth that was not formed by our unnaturally cool body heat, it was something much deeper than that. I felt the gentle flop of her hair upon my face and the welcoming smell of lavender that took me to heaven. I could feel the rise and fall of her body as the muscle memory that remained from years of breathing followed her into death. Lungs no longer filled with air, but the involuntary act as a basis for our keen sense of smell. The strong attraction to the smell of blood would not exist without this simple act, its evolutionary advantage for our existence.

  She stirred slightly, “Are you worried about what we may find?”

  “Of course, I am,” I said. It was true, there was a sense of being damned regardless of what the outcome was. As in most cases, the revelation of truth tended to create scars and often the pain involved changed a person. Would that be true in my case? I hoped against it, but my basis for hope was not one that I held much regard for.

  “I’ll be here for you every step of the way,” she said as she pulled her face from my chest and moved closer to my face. Her eyes still held the original soft green of her irises when I saw them up close. The color was faint, but it was still there nonetheless. I had always loved the look of the human eye, the wonderment of what was behind those eyes made me think that the beauty of an object could hide either more beauty or something horrendous. I wondered what my own eyes held during the lost years since my mortal life had ended.

  “And for that I thank you,” I said as I pulled her closer to me, pressing my lips against hers, feeling the gentle exhale of air from her nostrils along my cheek. The taste of her tongue entered my open mouth and I was in rapture to her openness. I embraced her with renewed strength, no longer keeping my feelings for her at bay, afraid of the outcome. I knew her feelings for me. I tasted it on her lips, I prayed that she felt my love seep into her as well. Unwilling to risk it, I spoke the words anyway. “I love you.”

  She shifted her body and wrapped her arms around me, two bodies woven tightly together and burning with passion. “I love you too,” she whispered between deep kisses as the rays of the sun shone through the window and danced through my fluttering eyelids, the dull light basking around us and inspiring me to hope, that with her, the sun would always rise.

  Chapter 21

  Like clockwork, the various people fell away from the front porch and their conversations. Soon we were left with the old man, just the three of us, with one soon to be failing heartbeat. Pietro stepped out into the dim street light first. He had never spoken his name to me, I felt as though I was ‘born’ into this knowledge in some way. I followed my creator across the street quietly and we ascended the wooden steps leading to the porch.

  The portly old man had his back turned to us with his body half inside the dark home in which he resided. The screen door was flung open and did not slam shut because the spring had been disconnected from it, this was a priceless gift in maintaining silence as Pietro grabbed the old man and held his head solidly in his cold hands. The look of fear on the man’s face could have produced pity had my heart still cared for this world…it did not, and I did what I was born to do.

  My fangs descended slightly from my gums and made contact with the flesh of his neck. I was a monster reflected back in the old man’s eyes. The thrum of his heart elevated momentarily from fear, but I relieved him of it in short order. His dead stare revealed my reflection. My hair was thick and dark and my eyes were the same silver specters as I had seen from the other vampires. My white skin was without blemish and I appeared to be younger than I looked when I had passed. The beard had been removed prior to my turning, and I could now see the glimmer of blood seep from the corners of my mouth.

  There was something captivating about witnessing my first kill in the eyes of the dying. It was like performing in front of an audience and winning them over. Though in this instance, I was my own audience, and I was excited about the show. By the dance of the moonlight in Pietro’s eyes, I could see his excitement shown through as well, and his extended to the smile that I watched creep upon his thin pale lips.

  Another drop of blood marred the glorious, romantic evening we had planned for investigating her murder. That was what I silently chose to call it. Her life had been forfeit for another’s cruelty. That truth burned me more than a midday sun, that someone as beautiful as Maggie would fall prey to something as monstrous as what we were. We walked hand in hand, leaving the dead dog in a heap behind us. I loved dogs in my mortal life, now I had sunken to the point of killing strays that I otherwise would have taken in and provided a home for.

  I guess it did beat the alternative of drinking human blood, but it did little to soothe the scars of disdain growing in my silent heart.

  I could honestly say that I hated the thing that I had become, the commodity of it was not worth the lifestyle that I was forced to live. I wiped my hand across my mouth and carried away a smudged drop of blood from my chin, the evidence of the ancient darkness inside us.

  “I want us to go back to Antioch,” she said, breaking the silence of the night.

  “We already searched there,” I said, uninterested in repeating the failed attempt of discovering the past. I brushed my brown hair from my eyes and looked over to see her facing me. The lights of a car moved past and illuminated her eyes, penetrating her gaze into the soulless shell of a man that I was.

  “I know, but I was hoping that another vision would be triggered. Something to lead us to your maker. You know, like they do with patients who suffer from amnesia.” She said the word, hinting at what it was that I had. It was not a hint, I was the patient here, and it pissed me off. There was a kind of handicap associated with memory loss, almost like you could not meet your full potential because of the setbacks. I couldn’t even remember my potential in my early vampiric life.

  “I suppose,” I said. I wasn’t fond of the idea, but her logic was sound. I remembered reading reports about the process in a scientific magazine for one of the college classes I had taken. Patients rebuilt their memories from triggers such as smells, sounds, sights, and other sensory inputs.

  We ran the miles in mere moments and stood before the structure that had birthed me into this life. I crawled up the same steps as I had the night before, pushed myself through the same thresh hold as the night before. Ev
erything was the same, except a kind of calling that arose from withing me. I guess you could call it a longing, like a child reaching out to its mother after being sat into his or her crib. I felt that sense of abandonment, and despite the temperature of my preternatural flesh, I still felt a chill run down my spine. Some things really are universal, and emotions seemed to run the gamete.

  Chapter 22

  The feeding of a vampire was hard to explain. There was a certain sensation of arousal, kind of like the excitement a child feels at Christmas with the anticipation of opening a gift. That high carried into the entire process, from the stalking to the attack, to the draw of blood through the flesh of the prey. It was something magical to take part in, almost as if you came to know your victim in a way that they were never known by anyone else.

  I carried that knowledge back with me, the old man’s name was Stanley Gregory, he was a veteran of the Vietnam era but never saw any action. Instead, he hammered a nail into his foot before boarding the plane that delivered him and several other soldiers to the fight. It was an act that would see him dishonorably discharged and ridiculed for many years after.

  He had three children who barely spoke to him, he thought it was because of his drinking problem in the eighties, but it really stemmed from his ill treatment of their mother who had passed away in the mid-nineties. They never forgave him for the abuse, and they would not miss him now, I knew this because he knew it. He may have never spoken the words, but they rang true in his heart as the blood left his body and entered my throat. His entire essence spilled into me and the sweet rapture of being pulled away from it was mesmerizing. Still, I hated the man for his cowardice. He was a womanizer to boot, he did not deserve the long life that he plagued the earth for. His lot would have been better cast into the war and sorted out from there. Would he have died? Most certainly, it was what kept him awake at night the days leading to the flight.

  I could feel his anxiety across the span of four and half decades. His fears ran deeper than he would ever know. That one act dictated his entire life, and it was shambles because of it. I dropped the waste of a man clumsily onto the porch and allowed the screen door to rest against his dead body. Pietro smiled a cunning smile at me and steeped his fingers together under his chin. No response was necessary from him, this was the mark of approval on a job well done. I could tell that he sensed the same thing from my victim as I had. There was a bond between us that may never be broken. I cherished that fact as he stepped next to me and placed his arm around my shoulders. We walked out into the night together and left the dead behind us. The dim future was brighter for the damned than that old man’s soul would ever know, and the wickedness of satisfaction curled my lips as I tasted his blood once more on my tongue. A reminder of why I now lived, so that others may pass from this world, and I may walk for eternity in the night.

  “Do you feel anything?” she asked, the words breaking the air around me in a staccato pattern, she did not need to ask.

  I felt nothing.

  “No,” I finally answered. The feeling of loss and failure were my only companions beside her presence. I could still see the previous vision in full detail, but only in my mind. The dark-featured man with the blade pointing down at the earth. The wind whipped his overcoat, but still, he had looked me in the eye knowingly, confirming my thoughts that this man was part of my past in some significant way.

  The blade always pointed downward.

  There was a smell much like iron, the wind picked it up and carried it into the welcoming confines of my nostrils. A hint of blood tickled my senses, but it was like a dream, only there in the metaphysical sense. I could feel the vision manifest itself at that moment. The trigger being the blood, the one thing that something such as myself would be lured to.

  He stood before me again as the present fell away like pieces of a digital jigsaw puzzle. The swooping and crashing of layers fell upon deaf ears, nothing existed except for the man of my dream world.

  His eyes bore into me, the serious, hardened expression of something almost monstrous, something cursed. I could see a vein throb with his pulse in his neck. A heartbeat broke the silence and I knew he was significant, but not my master. He was not my creator. He fingered the silver blade in his hand, the etchings along the metal flashed with reflective light as it shifted in space, conforming to the movements of his hand.

  The blade always faced downward.

  His head shook assuringly, it was as if he could read my mind. A dull word was spoken, though his lips never moved. The sound was muffled like it was spoken under water. I heard it again, but this time the sound was like listening to a person speak through a tin can. The sound reverberating against the metal, adding that texture to the sound, corrupting it, making it more dissonant than it should naturally sound. Still, his lips did not move. I looked down at his hand again, at the weapon he held.

  The blade always faced downward.

  The beginnings of a smile spread across his lips, no longer pursed in the solemnity of anonymity. He wanted me to know more, this man who was named Longinus. The man who had stabbed that blade into the side of Christ. The man who sinned, but became a saint. Who was he? Who was he really?

  I knew the answer would only pose more questions.

  The blade always faced downward.

  The answer was not in his eyes, it was in his hand. The blade pointed to the answer.

  With that realization, the vision fell away and I was once again standing near the church sign, the chirping of crickets brought me back to reality.

  “Noah,” it was the word that I had heard in my vision, but it no longer sounded distant as it left her throat. I had been somewhere else entirely. Caught between two opposing worlds, the truth and the lie blended together as my cursed soul wandered between them. “Noah,” she spoke again, drawing my attention back to her.

  I turned and face her, her eyes were wide with all ranges of questions probably sprawling in her mind like a web, trying to connect the dots between what was going on in my own head. I could not hold back the smile as the thirst for treasure provoked me to act. “I need your help.”

  “With what?” she asked.

  “Digging,” I said as I fell to the ground next to the side and pried my fingers through the damp soil of the earth.

  Chapter 23

  “Do you feel the awkwardness in your steps, child?” Pietro asked after I had awakened from the slumber of rest. I stepped closer to him, satiated with the blood from the previous day, restoration and strength in my grasp.

  “I feel much better now. My rest has made me feel renewed, especially after having my fill last night,” I said thinking back to the two victims whom I consumed before the sun rose fully. The first victim had been an old man, a practice round that afforded me the opportunity to succeed or fail on my own. I had succeeded, but the satisfaction demanded more after a time. It was at that point I was led to the next test.

  He had taken me to a wooded area, where hunters often waited for their kill to arrive in perched stands nestled in the trees. The orange hat of the young man had caught my eye from a distance of over a hundred yards. The darkness was no hindrance to my vision. I was the night, after all, and I would have my fill.

  The stalking of the hunter, already smelling of vodka and deer urine, was a simple task. I had taken him my surprise, thirty feet in the air. He had no time to cry out, no time to fight me off. My lightning fast reflexes took control of the situation and he was an easier kill than the older man had been. See? The practice really did pay off.

  Pietro took my hands in his and sat me down. “Today you will learn about the past, Noah. Today you will know where we came from, and what is yet to be for our future. Once those lessons are learned then we shall feed on the blood of our neighbors,” he said boisterously. I was willing to learn, and even more so to feed. The warmth and satisfaction of feeding was like a drug, and I felt the side effect of fasting from it. “Are you ready for the lesson to begin?”


  “Yes,” I replied, seated next to the nearest thing to a god that I had ever experienced. He held my gaze and a glint of a smile formed in the corner of his eye, followed by his lips, almost responding to the deep gaze he penetrated me with. “I’m ready.” And I was.

  She fell beside me and thrust herself headlong into the task at hand. “What are we looking for?” she asked as clumps of dirt fell from her dirty, pale hands. The manicured nails now looked like miniature shovels, stained with earth.

  “A blade, a long silver blade,” I answered shoveling more dirt away with my hands. The excitement of discovery pushed me along, applauding me with the sound of dirt plummeting to the ground in a pile beside me.

  I scrapped into the hard clay that made up the Mississippi mud for which it was commonly referred to as. The dark gray clay mixed with the brown soil that fed earthworms and other insects, their ecosystem disrupted by my endeavor.

  “What kind of blade?”

  “I don’t know,” I exhaled the grit that formed in my mouth from my labor. “I will know it when I see it.”

  Just then my nails came in contact with a smooth, metallic surface. My eyes widened as I took in the sight by the pale moonlight. I dug around it and finally was able to put my fingers underneath it. I pulled up as the ground gave birth to reward. The object was a box, much like a security lock box, though the lid was merely held together by two aluminum latches that were rust covered and weakened by time.

  I pulled up on both latches simultaneously and paused before drawing the lid open. I could feel Maggie’s gaze fall upon the box and then rise up to look at my face. I ignored the impulse to return her gaze and instead I ran my finger along the ridge of the box and used my thumbs to lift it. The hinges of the box gave way as the rust broke away from the friction of movement. There in the box laid the object that was left for me, wrapped in a cloth that protected it from further deterioration. I removed the cloth a revealed my prize, but it was not what I had expected.