And that was something that I had not thought of before. Apparently, neither had Maggie by the expression on her face as our eyes met.
Chapter 27
Fresh from my hunt, I met with my maker in the outskirts of town along the railroad tracks that curved to head north through Clark county, eventually leading to the large hub in Meridian. The solitude of the railroad tracks gave us an advantageous travel route that kept us from needing to move through the common roads. Suspicious activity could bring us undo attention, and that was as aspect of culture that we did not need to experience, our secrets were better kept to ourselves.
Pietro stood silently with his gaze held settled on the moon and the rest of the time spent darting north to south, I assumed to pick up the air of movement. She arrived from the south as he assumed she would, her blond hair jostling along her shoulders as she walked. The streetlights of the junction played off of her skin and she wore a sun dress on this humid summer night. She looked as if she were dressed for an evening out on the town, not for some kind of dark reunion, but who was I to judge?
“Noah, this is Cerene,” Pietro said as she closed the distance between us with an inhuman rate of speed. Her hair flowed even after she stopped on the tracks. I extended my hand to her and she grasped it.
“Pleased to meet you, Noah,” she said with an accent that I could not distinguish.
“Likewise,” I said with a shake of her hand. She stood just a mere inch or two shorter than I did, just under six feet tall and she had rich, full lips that were perfectly placed on a face reminiscent of an angel. Her eyes had the common glint of silver, but I could see a tinge of blue on the outer edges of her irises. Her hair was pulled behind her ears and exposed her long neck, the light scars of her change were nothing more than a slightly paler patch of skin just above her left shoulder.
Pietro interrupted my assessment of the woman, “Cerene was with you before the change,” he said indicating that we had met previously, obviously under different circumstance.
“I stayed with you for a few nights to keep you alive while our father was away.”
I realized that she was also made by Pietro, this made her in essence, my sister. The familial bond between vampires was not unlike those of humans, even in my short life I had noticed that my loyalty to Pietro was without bounds. I wanted to make him proud, perhaps even protect him if the time arose for such occasion.
“I see,” I said with a smile, placing my hands in my pockets as was my habit, even death could not take that away.
“There is a lot for us to discuss, perhaps the park would give us a good meeting spot for our conversation?” Pietro said to Cerene.
With a nod, she agreed and together we walked towards the gazebo of the park. A dark family, unlike any that I could have ever imagined.
“What the hell, tell me these are not the same boots in these pictures. Tell me that the similarities are merely a coincidence,” I said as I finally brought words to what I was feeling. The lost sensation was now coupled with what could only be deemed as some kind of conspiracy.
Maggie grabbed the camera and photograph from me and looked at them again, side by side she drew her own conclusions, I could see the wheels turning in the same way that mine had. She too tried to bust her own hypothesis, that our creation was part of some sadistic, ritualistic, endeavor. There was no denying the dark implications of such a thing.
“It looks that way to me, too,” she said as she handed them back to me. I pressed the buttons on the camera, attempting to manipulate the folder of images and try to find something to help bridge the gap from uncertainty to something closer to tangible. It took several moments for that image to present itself. But I finally found something in my aggravated meanderings. There was another picture of my body lying on the ground of the church, but there was a reflective surface on the ground next to my body that reflected an image from the flash of the camera. I could not tell what it was on such a small screen, even after magnifying the image.
“Look at this,” I said, handing the camera back to her and pointing at the object that had intrigued me so. She lifted the camera close to her face trying to take in the details of the image despite the imperfections of the screen.
Frustrated she started rolling the camera over in her hands, searching for something.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There has to be some way to connect this thing to my computer so we can get a better look at these images. This screen with missing pixels is not doing the trick. We can’t go off half-cocked with information and expect results.” Her brow furrowed as she manipulated the plastic contraption in her hand before stumbling upon a hard, plastic lip on the bottom of it, near the battery compartment. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before,” she said as she dug her pinkie nail under the lip and lifted it, revealing a small USB connection to allow her to transfer the images to her computer.
“Yeah, what’s wrong with you,” I joked and she cut her eyes at me sarcastically rolling them as a hint of a smile crept across her lips, the true smile revealing itself in her eyes. I watched as she found the right cable to fit in the slot and made the appropriate connections. Her computer immediately registered the new device and a pop-up appeared asking for permission to access the files. Her fingers scrolled across the keyboard stroking the keys and entering in the permissions necessary to access these kinds of files. She seemed to work on auto pilot as she made the necessary entries that ultimately revealed high definition images of the files on her thirty-two-inch television screen that she chose to use as a monitor.
My eyes fell to the first image as it appeared on the large screen. The details were so much more poignant as they were now closer to scale than a two-inch screen could handle. Maggie stood up next to me with a hand held remote to allow her to scroll to the next image and to manipulate them by increasing the size or adjusting the lighting. Technology had really come a long way since the image depicting my death had been taken. I stood there and looked at my hollow, dead eyes that appeared to be opened and reflecting the flash of the camera. I peered closer to realize that the flash was not the only thing that my eyes were reflecting.
Chapter 28
“Noah, I believe that it is important for a family to know its roots. That is why I asked Cerene to join us. She is very significant to our family,” Pietro said with his hand laid upon Cerene’s knee. She sat next to him with her back straight, a certain air of dignity emoted from her. Perhaps she was once royalty, I was eager to know more about her.
“Thank you, Pietro,” she said, her voice was soft and soothing. “I first encountered Pietro more than eighteen hundred years ago. He found me as I was taken prisoner by Roman troops who had intentions in which I do not wish to speak of. Either way, I was captive in a rolling cage often used for slave trading at that time. I was used for my father to pay off his debts to the Emperor of Rome. He lost his seat in the senate, but that was not enough for his crimes and like a coward he offered up his oldest daughter.
“It was four nights after he betrayed me that I was rescued,” Cerene said, as her emotions welled into light tears in her eyes. She placed her hand in his and continued. “Unfortunately, by the time he got to me I had already been mortally wounded by one of the guards who was unwilling to allow my life to be saved. I can still remember the pain of his blade as it dug into my side as I sat, curled in a ball on the floor of the filthy cage. The sneer on the man’s face is caught in every facet of my nightmares even after so long. It was the last image that I saw before I died, perhaps it was significant enough to follow me to death.”
She paused there and Pietro then spoke, “Thank you, Cerene, for sharing your story with him. I was not willing to give up hope on her so easily and so I did the only thing that I knew how to do. I took her blood and fed her my own, the transfer that made her walk once again. A child of the night, but very much alive to live and love again.”
Cerene squeezed his hand and forced a small
smile as she looked up at me. I was caught in her story, the horror of those times, the bitterness of her betrayal. I could not force myself to understand the kind of culture that allowed such atrocities. As I sat there and looked at the two of them I could not help but notice something in her eye, I could not put my finger on it, but I was sure that it was there.
A glimmer of things left unsaid, the resentment of not telling the entire story. I remained silent, but I was certain that there were other truths behind those eyes, all of which might be of interest to me.
“Thank you, that was a heart-wrenching story,” I said under the cast of the moonlight. A slight shower began to dab raindrops on my face as I looked up to the sun. The halo of light surrounding the clouds was beautiful when cast upon the canvas of streaks of water falling from the deep hues of the sky.
“Can you increase the image around my eyes?” I asked, willing her to see the same thing that I was seeing. She fumbled with the remote and magnified that area of the image and blew it up so that the entire screen revealed just the section containing my eyes. It was magnificent to see just how intact the image stayed with so much manipulation. The pixels contained only slight distortion from the effect and I was able to see with more detail what I had thought was visible with the smaller image.
“Can you see that?” I said drawing the outlined image with my finger near the screen without actually touching it. My finger followed the evident outline of a woman's head, her hair was dark and straight and she appeared to be wearing a jacket. Both of her pale hands held the camera to keep it steady in the low lighted area, presumably to prevent too much disruption in the image. That effort did not go wasted on us, we needed these details to expose this mystery to the truth.
Maggie grabbed the photograph from her death and showed it to me again. “Look, these are women’s shoes. Things are starting to come together and it would appear that we were created by the same people.”
I looked at her picture as she held it up to me. There was no mistaking the similarities, but I could not help but feel that there was something more to this than meets the eye. “Let’s look at the other pictures and see what we can find,” I said.
“Do you want to print these images out?” She asked.
“You can do that?”
“Of course, I can. I’m the master of this kind of stuff, you know with my hundred years of experience and all,” she smiled at her own ridiculous joke as she pressed an icon on the remote and a photo printer came to life on a table in the corner of the room. Once again, she cut a smile my way, knowing that she was impressing me with her skills when it came to these newer technologies.
The printer spat out the picture in only a few seconds and I walked over to retrieve it. I held it in my hands and looked at the glossy surface, the streaks of blood looked realistic and wet on this stock image paper. I looked at her as she held her hands on her hips and the remote jutted out behind her back slightly. “Can you print them all out?”
She smiled in return and pointed the remote at the television screen and pressed another button on the remote. The printer came to life again, and I sat back and waited for the answers to my questions to become that tangible evidence that I so craved to touch, to feel, to know.
Chapter 29
Our trio stood simultaneously and left the park behind us. Cerene continued with us to what Pietro and I considered our home, the church with the sign that read Antioch. Along the way, Pietro explained why he called on Cerene.
“I have business outside of the country that I need to handle personally, Noah. That is why I have called Cerene here, to be of service to you in this new life. She will have you back while you are still learning to take control of your victims. She will be your teacher in my stead,” he said as he never took his eyes off of me.
“That sounds fabulous,” I said with all sincerity. I looked over at her and he gaze was cold, collected. I wondered again what was behind those eyes that only seemed to shine when she looked at Pietro. I wondered if there was a certain amount of hostility towards me that I was unaware of. I wondered if this was something that I should be concerned about.
“Ah, home sweet home,” he said as the large white church appeared on the horizon. The tall pine trees framed the church well and provided sufficient shading during the day that kept the inside of the broken building a bit more comfortable to our light sensitive eyes.
I followed the two of them up the three steps that led into the vestibule. Cerene watched me closely, almost studying my movements and my mannerisms. It was a bit unnerving, but I was wanted to see if I could figure her out before I made an ordeal of it. She stayed close to Pietro until the sun began to rise and we fell into our routine slumber. The day held nothing of interest for us.
My eyes opened as the last light of the sun began to fall to the west. I rose to meet my maker to find the room empty of his presence. Instead, I was met with the pitiful stare of Cerene’s eyes. “Where is Pietro?” I asked.
“He already left,” she said coldly, staring at me with intent.
“Without saying goodbye?”
“Don’t take it so harshly,” she said. “It’s not like its forever.” She rose and stalked over to me, matching my gaze with her own. I began to question how much longer my existence would last against a vampire as old and strong as she. She stood before me and looked me over. I knew that this was the end.
Together we pinned all of the pictures onto a cork board that had once held recipes and calendars in the kitchen of the cabin. There were several less significant photographs that did not fit onto the board, but the ones that were of most interest to us were situated in the well-lit room and allowed us to view them all simultaneously along with the photograph of Maggie that was taken from the post office in Petal, MS.
Maggie had a notebook and pen available to take down notes. It seemingly felt like an episode of one of the old cop shows that I had watched before I was turned, the kind of show that spanned over three hundred episodes and yet they still had a different heinous crime to stall your heart each week. This kind of story would create a similar kind of shock and awe if it were televised, though no one would really believe that vampires actually existed, at least until it was too late and they were just another nameless victim in a photograph. I shook the thought from my mind so that we could focus on the task at hand.
“All right, what are the things we already know?” I asked rhetorically, but Maggie answered anyways.
“We have similarly abandoned building where we were changed. The way the bodies are situated is similar, if not exact. The photographs indicate that there are two people present at the location, one of them a man, the other a woman. In both photographs, it seems that the male is wearing similar boots and jacket, though the time frame for these events is years apart.” She finished scribbling the notes on her paper and looked back up at me waiting for anything that I would like to add.
“Thank you, maybe we should begin character descriptions of the other people in the photograph, give us an idea of what we are looking for,” I suggested.
“Good idea, let’s start with the woman.”
I looked at the images that showed her reflection and began to describe her to Maggie as she scrawled the details down in her notebook. “She has long black hair, it appears to be straight in the photographs of my body. She is pale, most likely a vampire like us, and her face and neck are slender based on this photograph where the camera is held at a different angle,” I said as I moved my attention to that photograph. I could see her lips and her nose in the image, I could also make out what appeared to be a light-colored dress under her jacket based on the cut of the wardrobe.
“He lips are fuller on the bottom lip than the top, and her nose is slightly upturned, at least at the angle that I’m looking at.” I could hear Maggie jotting down the details as I spoke them.
“Anything else?” she asked as the pen tapped the notebook indicating that she was done writing.
“
Based on this one image she wears a dress under a dark coat. I would assume that based on the shoes worn in your picture that it may be part of her theme, the flat shoes showed no fabric resting where a pant leg might be, so perhaps she’s wearing a dress there as well.”
Maggie stood up after writing that down and looked at the picture as well with a more critical eye. “I would agree with that, good catch, were you a fashion major?” she joked at my expense. It’s not every day a guy from Mississippi can identify a woman’s wardrobe.
“No, you can thank my mother for that,” I said. “She used to drag me through the mall trying on every damned dress in a store just to leave empty handed. I hated the the mall, even after growing up and no longer being subject to having to carry her purse in public,” a tinge of resentment filled my throat as I thought back to those years with disdain. Those weren’t the worst memories, those I kept to myself.
“Awe, poor baby had to carry mommy’s purse, ha ha,” she laughed at the thought. I didn’t resent Maggie for doing so, I was sure that in her life it was not a big deal. Just for me, it was the metaphorical straw that broke the camel’s back. There was too much history there, even for a hundred-year sleep to bury in the past.
I smiled at her to cover up my true feelings going through my mind at the time. “Moving on, let’s describe the man.”
“Already got him down,” she said.
“What’s do you have?”
She read it verbatim, “Male, likes to wear black boots, pants, and jacket…the end.”
Ancient Darkness Page 10