Chapter 24
“As your father, I suspect that you might want to know where I come from,” Pietro said as I listened intently. “I was born in the first century before the birth of Christ, near the Carpathian Mountains in a land known at that time as Dacia. As an adult, I joined the military and fought several battles. It was during this time that I was sent to Greece as an ambassador and met my fate.
“I was in my mid-thirties at this time and had grown from the status of a soldier to officer in the Dacian army. That pride was short-lived, though, while in Greece I found myself lost in their nightlife. There were many harlots in the cities of those times and I found myself in good company there. It was during one of the nights of idol worship, in the arms of a fellow worshiper that my life was taken from me. The blood sacrifice for the gods and goddesses had sent an aroma to the beast that dwelt in the darkness.
“In my frailty, I was unable to fight this dark enemy, but after some time I no longer wanted to. She had me caught in her arms, her gaze fell upon me, and then her fangs. They entered the weak flesh of my neck and served her divinely. I could feel the venom of her own fangs numbing me, sending me into euphoria. This was a goddess who responded in kind to her worshipers, the likes of which I had never seen in my homeland.
“The time after that I was changed. My memory of it is fuzzy, but I remember her being there for me when I was awakened from the first death and I stepped out into this new life condemned to darkness. I was unafraid for the many years that she had been by my side. Alas, she was taken from me by one who called himself a Christian. He labeled her a monster for the blood that she consumed, but she was my mother, forever beautiful, forever my love.
A pang of deep regret swept Pietro’s face and I sat there, feeling as if the air had been sucked from the room even though I no longer needed it. The soft quiet of the moment made me think about how I felt when I awakened. Pietro had been there for me as well, perhaps a trait that he had learned from his creator. “What was her name?” I asked.
“Lilana, but she had many names in history. Some called her Pandora, some knew her as Anesidora, others called her Lilith, but for me, she called herself Lilana. She told me it meant ‘once loved’ as a reminder of her creation before the world turned against her. For me, that love never faded. I can still feel the pain of losing her as I did over a thousand years ago.”
He sat quietly, his hands folded in his lap and his expressive eyes were welled with red tinted tears. Had his heart still beat it would have been broken. The first lesson of immortality is loss, one in which he still carried the scars of learning.
“Son of a,” my curse broke off as I pulled the camera free from the cloth and looked at it curiously. I had expected the blade that Longinus had held, pointing at the ground where I had dug up this lackluster object. I wanted answers, but I did not find them. Only more questions.
“A camera?” Maggie pulled it from my hand as I knelt back and rested on my haunches. I rubbed my hands together to remove the dirt residue that had accumulated from my amateur archaeological excavation. “It’s a digital camera,” she said as she looked it over. The hard, plastic case of it looked larger in her small hands. She fumbled around with it and looked for a way to control the effective use of it. I could see her pressing the buttons, but the relic did not turn on. I figured if it even had batteries in it then they would be corroded over and were useless anyways. That truth was only magnified when she opened the battery compartment and a white powdery substance was caked on the alkaline cylinders.
Sometimes it sucked to be right.
“Just another mystery,” I said with a notable amount of pissed off in my voice. I stood up and stretched my legs, allowing the weight to be redistributed to them in a more comfortable position.
She looked up at me and smiled. “All is not lost, Noah.” She gave me a wink to accompany her cheerful demeanor.
“Yeah? How do you figure?” I asked, barely willing to bite the bait that she was using to lure my curiosity.
She answered with a movement of her hand. A small door on the camera opened to reveal a tiny memory card. I remembered a larger version of these memory cards from some of the newer cameras that were in stores when I was still a mortal man. I assumed that this camera was released sometime around that time frame or shortly after. Technology always seemed to outdo itself back then. The future on proved more of the same existed a hundred years later.
“Great,” I said. “But how can we see what’s on it?”
She looked at it and moved it in her fingers lightly, not wanting to damage the little electrodes that protruded from the soft plastic frame. “There’s a little bit of tarnish on the gold plating, but I’m pretty sure my computer at home can read these kinds of cards.”
“Well,” I said. “With a little bit of luck maybe the secrets inside this tiny little thing will be revealed, you know, despite the seemingly never ending turns we’ve been making.” I cut her a glance of skepticism and put my hands in my pockets as she stood up next to me. Her hands still clutched the useless camera while the small chip was planted firmly between two fingers. She brought it up to a pocket on her jacket and handed me the camera.
“And for you…a paperweight,” she smiled as she patted the pocket containing the chip.
“And for us…answers to the past.”
I spoke the words as positively as I could, but deep down possibility of failure nudged me in the gut, and I knew to never dismiss a gut feeling.
Chapter 25
The unnatural silence after Pietro’s story was unnerving. He maintained his mournful gaze for a long period of time, I did not know whether to try to provide comfort for him or not. He was my creator, and for that reason alone I loved him, but our relationship was not one easily defined by human standards of expression. Would he welcome my support, or take offense to it? I stilled myself against any action and waited for him to break his silence.
“Do you know where we come from?” he asked after several long minutes of silence. I shook my head no, I only knew the myths by which the lore spread throughout history. I was certain that two thousand years had warped the legend that stemmed from the truth into a gross shadow of its true glory. “We are God’s creation, but we are more than that as well. We are the incorruptible youth cast in God’s own image but born of the flesh of men. We are like humans in appearance only, these shells containing the true essence of creation. We are more than dirt and clay, we are spiritual beings woven into the fold of time. We are chosen by her to be eternal. We share in the curse of never walking in the day, of never dying from the grief that destroys men. Time is not a gift, it is a curse of God’s own creation.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” I said questioningly.
“I don’t,” he replied, arms folded like a man of learning who held the answers to the universe.
“Yet you mention Him, give him the glory with your words.” I was puzzled by his methods, how could he ride the fence so evenly, so contradictory?
“There is a difference in belief and believing, Noah. Religion has corrupted the truth and turned it into a perverse version of what they consider the truth. Take a look at the world you lived in, the only difference between your mortal life and mine is what name they called their new religion, what name they deified for their causes, what laws they put in place to control one another. Do you think a true God cares for the laws of men?”
He posed the question in a way that I had never thought of before. I had dismissed any concept of God for the same reasons he expressed, but the idea that the truth of God was buried by lies and Hid existence was true had never crossed my mind. Was there truly a difference between belief and believing? How did he come to this pseudo-understanding of God? “Do you know the truth?” I asked, needing to hear it one way or the other. What truth or lie was held behind those cold eyes?
He pondered my question with a curt expression painted on his face before answering. “I know many truths, an
d in time I will reveal them to you.” It was the first time that I feared the truth, one that I knew I had longed to know in my mortality.
The lights in the cabin did little to squelch my fears of encountering another road block. Our investigation brought us to this small camera, presumably it held secrets to my past, but without opening the files contained in its small memory card then it was a useless find. Maggie inserted the card into her computer for the third time, and for the third time, it came back unresponsive.
“What the hell,” she said with an edge of disgust. I held my head low as I felt my own frustration seep into existence. It had been held at bay as she scrubbed the tarnished, gold plated contacts. “What do we do now?”
I looked at the camera that laid with the corroded battery compartment open on her desk. The lamplight showed the solid mass of leaked electrolyte and the powdery corrosive base that had congealed into that small compartment. “Is there a way to power the camera without batteries?” I asked, grasping for something, anything.
“No,” she exhaled after looking it over and tossing it clumsily onto the desk again. She leaned back in the chair and threw her hands in her hair, rattling the waves of hair into dishevelment. “It’s just a useless artifact found too many years too late.”
I felt my anger and worry build up until I felt like I wanted to explode. All I had to show for myself was a cryptic poem and a small Gideons Bible that amounted to nothing. Couple that with the visions that I had and I was left with more questions than I previously had.
Dammit.
Maggie grabbed the camera again and used a metal ink pen to scrap at the corroded chunk of alkaline that was stuck to the battery compartment door like dried mud. The entire chunk fell off in a single piece and left only fragments of itself on the door, but it looked as if all was not lost by her action.
“There you go, keep scraping that off while I get more alcohol and a wire brush,” I said as I shot off towards the kitchen where I had left those supplies when we cleaned the memory card. I came back to find three solid chunks of whitish rock on the desk and a proud look of satisfaction on Maggie’s face.
“Here, I’ll give you the honors this time, the alcohol dries out my skin,” she said with a smirk.
I grabbed the camera from her and spritzed the alcohol into the battery compartment. The black plastic looked glossier where the liquid stained its walls. I could see the corroded areas turn to a white/gray muddy substance and I immediately began to use the brush against it. The area spread out along the plastic door of the battery compartment and eventually became nothing more than a chalky watery substance. I used a hand towel to dry that area off and I was greeted with pristine metal contacts for the positive and negative terminals of two double ‘A’ batteries.
Indeed, there was hope, after all, I thought to myself as I moved on to the slightly more challenging area of the battery compartment as Maggie watched with wide, expectant eyes. I was determined to find answers, come hell or high water, and I imagined that she was as committed as I was.
Chapter 26
The darkness beckoned me, or perhaps it was the blood for which I stirred. Either way, I was willing to stand in the open air and extend my senses out to the world, the sounds of hearts beating, the smell of iron-rich blood, sweet, and warm, and ready to nourish. I was already high from the euphoria of the night priors kill, but this was a special occasion Pietro had told me, this was the night I would meet another like us. The nervousness of such a task had brought me to this place, the dingy bars awarded lives ripe and ready for my death kiss, the alcohol depressed them into a need for belonging.
I would entertain that need and consume their thinned blood, allowing it to flow freely.
My victim represented herself as a stumbling drunk, though not the obnoxious, giggling spectacle often associated with lightweight drinkers. No, this woman was almost a professional drinker. Her blood was rich in the intoxicating liquid, it served me no purpose, but I would take it anyway. My creator had told me that caution needed to be used in this day and age, the harlots and thieves were better protected with the technology of the day. I was not concerned, I grew up in this world, knew the secrets of the dark alleys and the element of surprise. I unveiled it as she turned to the parked car that stood paralleled to the building that had seen better days.
Laurel, MS had grown over the years, but I still loved the brick streets of the downtown area most of all. I was attracted to the historical look, I was also attracted to the sound of heeled shoes touching those bricks in a rhythm that showed uneasy steps that were slightly out of sync. It was perfect.
She clicked the electronic door lock as she fumbled with her keys, the blurriness of her vision did not alert her to my presence, not did the disdain she felt for having dropped them as she opened her car door. In my mortal life, I would have viewed her choice to drive drunk with condemnation, but now she made herself an easy target and I found myself grateful for the stupidity that allowed such things to occur.
The woman pressed her hands against her car door to settle herself as she reached down to claim her keys. I was there, just behind her, waiting for her to rise and expose the flesh of her neck to my bared fangs. I would not attack her as a brutal beast would, I would allow her to slump into my arms and feed me. It worked just as I intended, as I willed it to. The blood rush to her head caused her to fall back into my arms when she stood up too quickly, the gentle beat of her heart began to fade as her life leaked from the two pricks in her jugular.
I willed my essence into her, paralyzing her fears and strengthening her intoxicated state. It was easy to do as the venom replaced her blood, the burn that flowed to her heart would eventually numb it, stop its beat and release my victim from the perils of this world. It was a public service in which I would serve proudly for the rest of my unnatural life.
My dedication to preserving the camera was met with laughter and excitement as Maggie placed two new batteries into the compartment and pressed the power button. A small blue LED light shown from the top of the camera and the small screen came to a dull life seconds later. It took time for the screen to appear fully, but I figured we were lucky that it worked at all. There were some problems with the display that interfered with our ability to see the entire picture, but all of the other functions of the camera seemed to work just fine, including its ability to register the memory card date as she slid it into place with a delicate push.
Maggie scrolled over the controls and finally found the documents that had been left for our discovery. The pictures were taken in relative darkness, but they showed the form of a human man that I assumed was myself. The body was slumped in a cathartic state, possibly drugged or passed out. Maggie adjusted the saturation of the image in order to make use of what light was there, and I could see more detail of my surroundings.
“It’s the church where we found the camera,” I said, knowing that she recognized that fact as well.
“Yes, but there’s not much else to go on besides that,” she answered.
“Are there more pictures?” I asked, willing some kind of detail to jump off the small two-inch screen at me.
She pressed the scroll button in answer to my question and revealed another image. It looked much like the other picture with the exception of a black boot, its wearer stood about three feet from my head and a long black jacket or cloak danced around mid-calf on his or her leg. I assumed it was a man based on the size and shape of the boot, though.
“Oh my God,” Maggie said with a gasp. She placed the camera down on her desk and put her hands on her jacket’s pockets searching for something. “Where is it, where is it, where is it,” she repeated in a whisper as she frantically searched her pants pockets as she stood up abruptly.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
She was too caught up in her search to respond to my question, instead, she darted off into the next room and shuffled through some other items. “Ah ha,” she shouted, the muffled words co
ming from the other room were mixed with glee and a questioning tone, I assumed that she had found what she was looking for.
“What is it?” I asked as she emerged from the shadowy hallway that had led into the bedroom where I had heard the shuffling of papers.
“Here, take a look for yourself,” she said as she handed me the picture that we found at the post office in Petal, along highway eleven.
I took the picture from her and examined it in the light, searching for something that I thought would reveal itself to me, but I could not see what she was referring to. There was nothing in the picture to make me share in her excitement. I looked up art her, meeting her eyes, puzzled.
She quickly grabbed the camera and shoved it into my left hand. “Notice anything similar when you hold them side by side?”
I looked at both images, the light from the screen bled onto the printed picture in my right hand. I held my gaze to it for several moments, calculating the similarities. There were a few.
Both victims were sprawled on the ground, looking close to death.
Both victim’s mouths were lined with pale streaks of blood as if they had consumed blood with their own lips, and most likely had in the transfer that led to our change.
But the most striking similarity that had her peaked was what presented itself at the top, right-hand side of both images. The black boots were identical. The dark coat or cloak was identical. The ritualistic image of both of us lying there was essentially identical. That could mean only one thing.
Ancient Darkness Page 9