Excerpt: Secret Kept

My inner child was wide awake that afternoon, my head full of dreams and my eyes enjoying the scenery with a wild passion. I can’t remember exactly, but I’m nearly positive that I was never again as happy as I was in those days. Those delicious summer days that never seemed to end, those days were the last of my innocence and my old life. Just to be with Charlie in her old thunderbird, riding for only the act of riding, was—and the memory of it still is—very good for my soul. Not that many people would say that I have a soul these days, at least not the people who know what I really am. Perhaps I don’. But if the soul is what causes you to feel endless agony and bittersweet longing, I very much have one. (Can the soul ever be extracted? If so, please take it from me. I will pay any price.)

My life wasn’t always this way, with everyone I love dead, my heart blackened by the passage of time and loneliness, guilt and vengeance. The inner child was brutally murdered along with my innocence and my hopeless compassion for my doomed species: humans. I became something other than human, I became (as corny as it may sound) a creature of darkness, an essence of vile necessity. The darkness became my only true friend, a place where I could hide when I needed shelter, a mindset that I took up so that I could feel less guilty about the things that I did. My transformed state of being hasn’t been named by anyone, no author or poet has ever been able to conjure anything exactly like me. They all have their bogeymen, their dark shadows that come out at night and do evil to the peacefully sleeping innocents. I am not evil, nor am I a pristine white. Some may think of me as a type of vampire, but I don’t have to do any of those “requireds” like drinking blood (though I have had my share.) I’m not afraid of my reflection (I just don’t like the way I look, that has never changed) I’m not allergic to garlic, and—since it doesn’t exist—I’m not afraid of holy water. Back when I first transformed, I did sleep in a coffin, but it wasn’t because the coffin belonged to me. It was just that the coffin was much more comfortable than the cold marble floor of the mausoleum where I’d locked myself.

I am darkness, uncharted and unwritten.

Without further hesitation, I wish to introduce myself and tell you, dear reader, my story. There isn’t much purpose for it, I suppose. It is my vain attempt to perhaps reach you and give the facts of what exists in this wonderful world that you may not know of. There are things about us that you could never dream of. The most shocking bit of information I have for you? I, with all of my black prowess and undeniable thirst for a death that won’t come, am just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

My name is Secret. This is my story.