Darkest Heart by Nancy A. Collins

finally told me that my father was dead and my mother was listed as missing, but presumed dead.
    "Upon hearing the news of my parents' deaths, I cried like the little kid I used to be, not the teenaged boy I had become. Then Dr. Morrissey asked me if I remembered what had happened to my mother. The next thing I knew order lies were pulling me off him. Every stick of furniture in his office except maybe the desk was smashed into kindling. I was sedated and stuffed into a straitjacket.
    "After that, I was put back into the wards. It was weird. I didn't like being in gen-pop at all. Most of the patients reeked of spoiled milk, piss and worldclass body funk. What made it even weirder was how all the loonies and retards and nurses knew me by name, but I didn't know any of them.
    "Using hypnosis therapy, Dr. Morrissey attempted to tap into my buried memories, hoping to discover what was triggering such violent responses in me. While I was strung out on sodium pentothal I related to Dr. Morrissey the exact same story I just told you. But Dr. Morrissey thought Blackheart was a means of projecting negative emotions onto someone besides my father, whom he was convinced had murdered my

    Create PDF files without this message by purchasing novaPDF printer ( http://www.novapdf.com ) mother before committing suicide in front of me. It was all a defense mechanism generated by an immature mind unable to deal with the horror it had witnessed.
    "As much as I wanted to believe Dr. Morrissey's explanation, deep down I knew that he was wrong and I was right. No matter how often Dr. Morrissey tried to talk me out of my story, I refused to accept his version of events. Finally he was reduced to prescribing electroshock, hoping it would break me of my
    `persistent delusions of vampires.'
    "I can't really blame him for giving me the juice. After all, Morrissey was a man of science. Vampires were not permitted to exist in his world, at least not the kind I claimed to have seen. After the third round of electroshock treatments, I realized my only hope of escaping the Institute with my mind intact was to go along with the doctors. Once I started to play ball with them, the electroshock was discontinued and I was removed from the wards and given my own room. But the laugh was on them: because I never once stopped believing that Blackheart was real. Not for one moment.
    "After so many years spent in limbo, I became obsessed with physical activity. The Institute had a gym for the use of the staff, and I was allowed full use of it. What was at first therapy to strengthen my muscles from years of disuse became a regimen of calisthenics and bodybuilding. One of the orderlies even taught me how to box. But it was not just my body that cried out for exercise. After a decade in eclipse, my mind was hungry for information. Like a man left to wander in the desert, my thirst for knowledge was overwhelming. Once I mastered the alphabet, I was a voracious reader, leapfrogging from Go Dog Go to A Tale of Two Cities within months.
    "On my twenty-first birthday I was released from the sanitarium. The doctors said I was sound of mind and body. I even had a piece of paper to prove it. I was `cured,' if indeed I had ever been ill. I had a sizeable inheritance at my disposal, thanks to my father's investments and the various offshore bank accounts he had opened in my name.
    "Now that I was free to go wherever I wished and to do as I pleased, I decided to find out more about my father's business dealings with Blackheart. I was hoping it might shed some light on where I could find the man who had killed my parents. I was already aware of the fact that Blackheart had loaned my father money to bail out the label. When I went through the records that had been warehoused following the review of the estate, I discovered that my father's company was being used to launder money and distribute narcotics... mostly heroin and cocaine. Somewhere along the line my father began to skim the