Dark Origin
© Toby Neighbors, 2014
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Books By Toby Neighbors
Five Kingdoms Series
Wizard Rising
Magic Awakening
Hidden Fire
Fierce Loyalty
Crying Havoc
Evil Tide
Wizard Falling
Lorik Trilogy
Lorik
Lorik the Defender
Lorik the Protector
Avondale Series
Avondale
Draggah
Other Books
Third Prince
Royal Destiny
The Other Side
The New World
Dark Origin
I met Robert Ducet in the solitary wing of Tucker Maximum Security Prison. How I got there is a story I’ll share later, but suffice it to say I deserved to be there. Tucker houses a lot of very bad people. Most are in the general population and housed in half a dozen cell blocks with the standard two inmate cells. I was never very social, and solitary confinement suited my personality better than living in the gen pop herd with no privacy.
Solitary was in the oldest part of the prison, in one of the underground basement wings. It was a dark, dank, filthy place, but for a troubled soul like mine it felt like home. Unlike the name suggests, solitary confinement does not mean isolation. There are slots on the solid metal doors and a person's voice carries through the concrete passageway quite well. On one side of my cell was an old man who never uttered a word to anyone but God. He spent his waking hours in prayer, at least that was what I could gather from the muffled voice I often heard chanting for hours at a time. On the other side was Robert Ducet. He was a strange man, but I guess that could be said for everyone interred at the State Prison. He told me he was a vampire during our very first conversation.
I had been locked away in solitary for nearly a week before the need to hear another person's voice and engage in some type of conversation prompted me to speak up.
"Anyone there?" I said, my mouth close to the slot in the door.
"I am here," came a voice that sounded close.
I couldn't place the strange accent. It was foreign, but familiar. I guessed it was creole from Louisiana, but I couldn't be sure.
"I'm John," I said.
"Robert," came the reply, but the T was almost silent.
"You been here long?" I asked.
"Yes."
I turned, sitting on the rough concrete floor and leaning against the cold metal door with my shoulder.
"What'd you do?"
It was the standard prison introduction. We all had a story, even the innocent. A person's crime was the fastest way to break down the population into an easy class system. For instance, a thief was a short timer. You steal a car, you'll spend a few years in Tucker. Not long enough to lose your humanity in most cases. A short timer is usually looking to keep his nose clean and earn parole. On the other hand, a murderer commands much more respect. In most cases, release before they die is just a pipe dream, so they're looking to take as much as they can from everyone else so that their life inside isn't so bad. Of course, it's all relative. No one on the outside would consider anything about prison life to be good, but long timers have to do something to keep from going crazy. I wanted to know what Robert did to end up in what I considered my own personal hell.
"I'm a vampire," he said.
That got me thinking. I hadn't heard of a vampire in prison lingo before and wasn't sure what he meant. Of course I knew what a vampire was. I had read the books and seen the movies, but in prison crimes are often turned into colorful metaphors. Strictly speaking, we weren't allowed to discuss our crimes, so inmates used alternate terms to describe their civil disobedience. For instance, a car thief was sometimes called a rustler, and a con artist was a carny, and burglary was often referred to as a bee because the police called it Breaking and Entering, or B & E.
I let the idea of a vampire ruminate a bit. The key to doing hard time is patience. You had to savor everything good thing that came along, even just new ideas. I wanted Robert to finish his story, but I didn't want to rush things. I tried to guess what a vampire might be. A killer, that was a given, but not just a murderer, a vampire also made other vampires, at least in the movies. Perhaps vampire was prison slang for a cult leader.
I tried not to let the unsettling feeling of living next door to a killer get to me. In gen pop, I saw murderers on a regular basis, men with absolutely no soul, their dead eyes would give great white sharks nightmares. But you learned how to avoid the sadistic cons, giving them space, avoiding eye contact. In my former cell block I had been surrounded by thieves, gang members, even rapists, but having a murderer right next door made me nervous.
"What'd you do?" Robert asked.
I leaned my head back against the cinderblock wall. It was cold and unforgiving, just like the justice system that had sent me away for a crime I was guilty of, but my incarceration wasn't justice.
"I beat a man," I said. "He was an animal and I beat him almost to death."
"Did this man deserve to die?"
"Dying was too easy," I said.
An hour passed before the conversation continued. In my mind, I relived it all. The night my wife didn't come home. The doorbell going off at two in the morning, waking me from a sound sleep. I had rolled over and discovered that my wife wasn't in bed. Instantly, I knew something was wrong. My heart was thundering away in my chest like a runaway jackhammer. I couldn't slow it down. One look through the peephole confirmed my worst fears. There's nothing quite so horrifying as seeing two state policemen on your doorstep at two o'clock in the morning.
"What's a vampire?" I asked.
Chanting started up in the next cell over. I tried to make out the words, but they were too hushed, just a droning monotonous sound that seemed to seep through the high security doors. Robert never talked when Tate was praying. I never knew if that was out of respect or fear.
I dozed off waiting for an answer. A meal came. The food was always cold by the time it was delivered to the solitary confinement wing. At least eating in the cafeteria allowed you to get the food while it was still warm. Cold prison food is the absolute worst, but it broke up the long lonely intervals and gave us a sense of time.
I ate in silence, sitting on my bunk. After a while, the guards collected the empty trays and I asked my question again.
"What's a vampire?"
"That's difficult to explain," came Robert's accented voice.
"Give it a shot," I said. "What have you got to lose?"
"I'll give you the simple version," he said. "I am cursed. I live on human blood and can never stand in the light of day."
I didn't respond. It made me angry at first because I didn't like being the butt of anyone's joke. On the outside, I had been an upright, law-abiding nice guy. But prison had chiseled me down; there was no room left for an insult.
"Fuck you," I said.
Several days passed before I calmed enough to strike up a conversation with Robert again. I slept a lot. I had some books, but it was difficult to read in the poor light of my cell. No sunlight reached the basement level of the prison, and the lights in our
tiny hovels were recessed with thick plexiglass covers to keep us from busting the bulbs. The low wattage light gave the cell a hazy twilight feel. I did my best to keep busy, but eventually I caved to the temptation to talk to my neighbor again.
"So, you're a real vampire," I said, as if there had been no break in the conversation.
I figured if this guy wanted to make up a bullshit story, I would listen and pretend I was watching television.
"Is that so hard to believe?"
"Oh, I don't know," I said. "There are a lot of horrible things in the world. Why not vampires."
"Just so," Robert said.
"Why don't you turn into a bat and fly out of here," I asked.
Robert chuckled.
"Vampires are real," he said after a while. "Hollywood is not."
"So you can't turn into a bat?"
"No," Robert said. "I have no inclination toward any animals. I don't hypnotize people. I don't need permission to enter a home. I don't have fangs or millions of dollars in overseas accounts."
"Not very sexy," I said.
"No, it isn't."
"So how long have you been a blood sucker?"
"Almost three quarters of a century."
"That's not so long. I would have guessed a few hundred years at least."
"It's getting harder and harder to survive," Robert said. "My master was slain not long after I was turned."
"I thought if the master was killed then you would die too."
"Reality is nothing like what you have seen in the movies."
"So how'd you end up in here?"
"I snuck in."
"I think you better start from the beginning," I said.
I couldn't believe anyone would want to be in prison. It was easily the most hellish place on earth. I hated it. Every second was a sort of mental agony, but I felt I deserved it. For me prison was a penitence that I endured because of my failings, but I still spent hours every day fantasizing about escaping.
"I was a young man," Robert said, "fresh off my father's farm. All my life I had lived in a very small community. Everyone knew everyone else and knew everyone's business. I felt trapped. I was the strange boy, the outcast. So, as soon as I could, I left home and went to New Orleans. It was a different time; people were much more traditional. The city was a place of commerce and revelry for sailors, but I was drawn to the darker side. New Orleans was a melting pot of nations, mostly poor immigrants and visiting merchant sailors, all bringing their own religious and superstitious beliefs with them. I saw secret Voodoo rituals, cult gatherings, witchcraft. Everything you can think of was there if you were willing to look.
"It was all so mysterious to a young man trying to discover himself. I went to seances and ghost hunting parties, always trying to see what, if anything, about these occult activities was real. Eventually, I heard about a physician that some were saying was a warlock. Carlos Gautreaux was the name he used then. He specialized in bloodletting, which was still a common medical treatment in those days. Usually when a doctor drained a patient, the blood was discarded, but not by Carlos. He'd found a way to live with a measure of respectability.
"I immediately went to meet him. He worked in an ancient looking building, very dark and gothic. The windows in the waiting room were covered with heavy drapes. The air in the building seemed ancient somehow; it was liking entering a tomb. He had a familiar. Do you know what that is?"
"A human who does things for the vampire in the daylight," I said.
"Correct," Robert replied. "Of course, most people think that a familiar clings to the vampire in hopes of being turned or for some perverted sense of power. The truth is, the vampire clings to the familiar. We are helpless in most situations, especially during the daylight. Unlike popular myth, vampires are not wealthy, nor do we live forever. We do have a much longer life span, but we aren't invulnerable. Our bodies have merely stopped growing. I won't age, but if someone cuts me, I won't heal. If I break a leg, I can't walk; if someone puts out my eye, I'll be blind for the rest of my life."
"And a familiar protects you?" I asked.
"Sometimes, but they also provide shelter, money, transportation, legitimacy. Carlos' nurse was his familiar. A beautiful young woman named Valerie. She brought me in to see the doctor and I sat in a dark room full of specimen jars where leaches floated. Of all my occult experiences, this was by far the most frightening. When Carlos came in, I was surprised. He was an old man, his skin shriveled like antique leather, his hair nearly gone, but there was a depth of life in his eyes as if they had seen everything.
"It took some time, but eventually Carlos allowed me into his confidence. I had to feed him, which was difficult."
"Is that how you became a vampire?" I asked, playing along, but not really believing a word of the story.
"No," Robert said. "That is a myth. If everyone who was bitten by a vampire was turned, the world would have been destroyed thousands of years ago. And of course, vampires don't drink too much from any individual. The human body can regenerate blood at a fantastic rate. To drink a person dry would be like killing the goose that laid golden eggs."
"Good to know," I said, thinking that if a vampire was dwelling in the cell next to mine, I was glad to think that I was more useful alive than dead.
"Have you ever been afraid, John? Truly, desperately afraid?" he asked.
"When I was waiting for the police to tell me what happened to my wife," I said honestly.
I'm not sure why I felt I could be honest with Robert Ducet. I certainly didn't think he was being honest with me. And normally, I would never have shared such intimate details of my life with another inmate. Perhaps what they say about Vampires engendering trust is true; I don't know.
"I had thought that I knew fear," he continued. "I had foolishly deceived myself into believing that I was above fear. I was strong from working my father's farm, and I could fight with a savagery that not even I understood. I had tested my physical prowess many times with the sailors who filled the bars and brothels. I grew up with guns and knives. In the swamp, I had hunted everything from snakes to alligators. I thought fear was for children and maybe the weak, but not me. I was wrong.
"There is a terror beyond imagining in leaning back so that your throat is exposed and allowing a vampire to sink its fangs into your neck. I felt a fear that turned my bowels to water and made my heart tremble."
"So why'd you do it?" I asked.
"I had to know," he said. "I was driven to see and touch the supernatural."
"How'd you keep from dying?"
"Like I said, vampires rarely drink their victims dry."
"But a wound to the neck like that would be difficult to live through."
"Ah," Robert said. "Another myth, the fangs of the vampire. We don't have enlarged canines like you see in the movies. Our fangs are more like a poisonous snake. They retract into our gums just behind the teeth and then extend into the victim like a hypodermic needle. There is very little residual bleeding and if anything, it looks like a hickey."
"So you're a little trashy," I said.
We both laughed. I didn't believe what Robert was telling me, but I did find it entertaining.
"After Carlos drank from me, I learned all I could. He was old, several hundred years at least. He had been an older man when he turned, and he was smart. He found that people trusted the elderly. So he enhanced his appearance, shaving his head and using light touches of makeup to enhance the age lines across his forehead and the crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes. He used leeches to bleed his patients, and then drank from the small creatures to sustain his life."
"That makes prison food almost sound good."
"Indeed," Robert said. "It kept Carlos alive, but not healthy. Our metabolism requires fresh blood on a regular basis and plenty of sleep. Sunlight burns us almost as readily as an open flame, which makes most vampires night hunters and day sleepers. Carlos slept very little. He enjoyed spending his nights on the streets of the city, mi
ngling with the rowdy crowds that filled the saloons and brothels. Occasionally, he paid for an hour with a prostitute, but his advanced age made finding victims difficult. A younger man might lure a woman into compromise, but an elderly man was neither enticing nor frightening. He wasn't strong enough to fight, so he found a way to have people come to him."
"This is getting to be a little far-fetched," I said.
"It is. Carlos was nearing the end of his life. Times were changing. War, advances in medicine, even the advances in communications around the world were making his clandestine way of life more difficult. He was eager to pass on his gift."
"Gift? You mean he wanted to turn you into a vampire?"
"No, he wanted to turn Valerie, but she detested him. I brought him victims, usually men or women too drunk to know what was happening to them. I kept pressuring him to share his power with me, and eventually he gave in."
"How does that work?" I asked. "I mean if a bite from a vampire doesn't make you one, what do you have to do?"
"It is as you say, something the individual must do. Carlos showed me the door, but I had to walk through it."
He stopped talking and I waited for him to continue. It wasn't unusual for a convict to become distracted by something only they could see. Most felons suffered from some form of mental or learning disorder, and attention deficit was common. Then I heard the heavy thuds of the guards’ hard rubber soled boots as they came down the long corridor. Inmates in solitary confinement were not allowed outdoor exercise, but we were given some time in a long room where we could stretch our legs before our weekly shower.
Keys rattled outside my door. I was a little surprised that the guards were starting with my cell instead of Robert's.
"Back up against the door," said one of the guards in a dull voice. It was obvious they had given these instructions so many times that they could recite them in their sleep. "Get on your knees and extend your hands behind you."
I did what I was told. The keys clanked inside a lock and a shoebox-sized hatch was opened in the heavy metal door. Rough hands took hold of mine and cold cuffs were snapped around each wrist. Then the keys turned the heavy tumblers in the massive door lock. The hinges squealed as the door was opened. The guards hauled me to my feet and marched me out into the corridor. I had to crane my head around to try to see Robert's cell. There was a door, but it looked different than the heavy metal security doors of the solitary confinement cells.
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