The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

Part 7 - Sweet and Pretty

In translating Leis's account of this time, what surprised me the most was how sweet and pretty his love for our Laurent was. I will admit to you willingly that listening to his tape laid me low, into a period of personal crisis, and that I took to my bed for a day or two, sick to death. Thinking of that lovely feeling, how ignorant he was, I burn under it. I want to tell you that I have come to know his nature, but the truth is that I knew it then. I knew him for a sweet creature, of innocently motivated selfishness, but the knowledge did not serve me, or it didn't matter. 

For all my loneliness, I did not consider the magnitude of what they were doing, loving each other, and how rare such a thing must have been for Laurent to lay himself down at its feet. I assure you that I seek even to understand it now, the more so that I have tasted a little of its fruit.

Oh what should I say now? What I did? I received your letter this morning, Mini. What do you mean about my coat? The one that you took. Keep it, oh, silly inquiries make me tired. Why think on these matters? I only hesitate because this coat was a Christmas present for me, but who minds about such things? Who? Yes, keep it. Oh, I don't care about it. Don't write to me anymore about useless things. I cannot stand mindless chatter. Oh it is hard on the eyes. It is distracting. Why do you purposefully crowd my thoughts with nonsense? You are causing me to lose my mind. What am I doing? 

"Sweet creature." That's a name that Laurent used for Leis. He said that to me, coming into my room in the late afternoon and saying, "Come, and help me tend to the sweet creature. He is restive," as if he had forgotten me completely. I did not mind it, to forget myself. 

"What do I do for you?" I asked him.

Laurent stood in my doorway nervously, dragging his fingers through his unbrushed hair. All the dark thoughts I'd had of him the night before had disappeared. I felt very contented and excited to look at him in my doorway, with the afternoon light at his back, highlighting the white embroidery on his new robe. "I need my big silver plate. I need a very hot pitcher of water."

"The plate is in the sideboard," I told him.

"But is it clean, though?" he asked, somehow suspicious. Why be suspicious of me? 

"Yes." 

He came close and patted my cheek.

"Have you been somewhere?" I asked him, because his cheeks looked a little wind-roughened. 

"No, no," he lied, and made a soft sound of disapproval when I sat back from his hand. 

I felt so sensitive that I could not stand to be touched, but it was not me that interested him anyway, so he went away. He left me to find the pitcher and water on my own. I built a small fire in the yellow room's brazier, blowing on it very gently through a long copper bellows. To get too close to the fire would be to dry the skin of my face and crack it, as at that age I remained very sensitive to the heat of a flame. And when the water had heated, I poured a bit of it out to extinguish the little fire. 

What a funny calm had come over me, making fire and boiling water. I watched my hands doing it through half-lidded eyes, numbed and peaceful. It startled me utterly to find them both waiting for me in the sitting room, Laurent wiping out the clean dish and Leis, oh Leis, standing very straight with his hands clasped behind his back. 

I felt assaulted, as if they were waiting to attack me, like large dogs. So menaced, I am certain that Leis saw something strange in my eyes, and he looked away. The little hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

Leis has already told you that I had tried to talk to him several times. I am not ready to disrespect him by telling you it isn't true. I did, foolishly. In those long evenings, when it was only us two in the house, loneliness had drawn me to his side, and a desire to be of use. To listen to the sound of a man drowning, as he always was, unable to breathe, it made me anxious to distract him from what sounded like slow dying. But I did not do it very many times. Oh I hated him, but still he was the boy I had loved, or so some part of me would not let me disbelieve, and I thought for brief moments that somehow the hurt between us could be healed. 

But you will know that he is pathologically frightened of me, and so it was from the first evening in that house until the last. I heard his breath quicken at my sudden appearance, with the pitcher, and my heart began to beat so feathery that it made me lightheaded. 

He was wearing translucent silk, as a spider would weave, and through which I could easily see the shape and color of his body in the sunlight. Around his shoulders this covering was loose, and had been tailored to hit the floor just so. I tried not to look. He was trying not to look at me, also. We tried not to look at each other. To say "we"! Even now, I have no dignity at all.

What did he see when he looked on me? I don't know what he saw, what he sees. The porcelain pitcher was oversmooth in my hands and I feared that I would drop it. Oh if only he would let me be his slave. I thought, anything for this angel. He looked like shy and avenging Raphael. He had made me a blushing boy of church again, looking on him. I stopped breathing, and it was alright because I didn't need to breathe. He looked down shyly at the silver dish, at Laurent's gentle urging, and I crept away, only half able to turn my back on beauty. It was impossible.

My body screamed for him. It cried out, tingling and buckling me, my knees, my back, so that I stumbled out of sight. I grit my teeth and hugged the wall of the hallway, pressing the pitcher against the rolling of my stomach muscles. If I'd been living, I am certain that I would have vomited. My face drew itself into a tight, angry cringe. Oh, I felt that he had stripped me of two hundred years, and that I was a soft and fearful boy again, filled to breaking with anxiety for my safety, and the safety of those I loved. I felt that I would split open like an overripe peach.

In the scullery alone, I cast around for some sharp object, filled so with a strong wailing that a small sound like a crying dog passed my lips continuously. I thought, kill him, kill him, kill that boy who was so afraid, because I cannot stand it, put a knife in him so he cannot suffer any longer. My hands searched the many implements on the countertop, relics from happier times when Laurent had entertained guests on the second floor. Visions of Nicky's hands, pawing at my clothes, looking for me in the dark clouded my eyes. Visions of his hollowed, angel's face, eyes lolling back, of holding his broken body. As a child of flesh and blood, he had weighed barely anything at all.

On multiple occasions, living in Jean Aureil's house, I had awoken to find Nicky still and cold beside me, blue and pale, and I had stripped him with my still warm hands, human warmth, and rubbed him until he began to breathe again, gasping back into life with eyes so round I felt certain he had been seeing the fires of hell. So many mornings, he found his way back to me from Jean Aureil's room, and if the door was unlocked he would come in and climb into my arms. He never spoke in Jean Aureil's house. He regressed so that speech was impossible for him, behaving as a mute toddler, sucking his thumb and resting his head against my neck. His head fit there, so perfectly. But if the door had been locked by Aureil, who did so if he remembered to do it, I would hear Nicky's little hands clawing at it, seeking me, and so there was dried blood and broken fingernails on that heavy door on both sides. What did he want from us? New to this, a vampire of a few minutes, I had picked his severed head up from the floor and I had contemplated it. Nicky says he doesn't remember. I know that he remembers every moment. In little ways, he gives himself away. Laurent knew it all. Standing there in the scullery, I felt that my body were a light, illuminated with a calling signal, pulsating with rotted blood, and I shut my lungs because breathing in I smelled rotting flesh, as if I were a bloated corpse. 

But there was no knife there, and so no easy death, which would have prevented what happened next, and let me die. In my head there was the sound of my crying Nicky, squealing under the bite, and the feeling of my fingernails peeling back against the door, my entire body vibrated with it, and it was then that I thought that I heard my name called. And I went back to the sitting room.

I tried to speak, to say, "See me, I am here, why have you called me?" holding onto my pitcher, but my throat had closed itself. Leis's eyes met mine, in the arms of his lover, and his lips parted, opening for "Arrete", stop, stop, stop, stop, mouth formed for this "Ar" sound, and his face contorted, eyes rolling back in his head, hands scrabbling at Laurent's back, and for just a moment he was Nicky to me, crying over the bite. A ghostly hand of memory sharply gripped my liver, and shook me, and I quivered, unable to move, even to sob, until he, angel, eyes fixed upon me, passed out.

And then I screamed. 

"Dasius?" Laurent touching my face, "Dasius, stop it," slapping me. "Be quiet," desperate, pushing me to the floor, where I bucked beneath him. "Dasius, be quiet," his mouth a bloody gash.

But I could not stop screaming, and there on the floor, inches from my face, the staring blue eyes of Leis's swooned away body, dropped as if he were a dead doll.