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

Part 10 - A Choking Sound

He tried to beat me, to threaten me, to tell me he would abandon me if I wouldn't speak to him, but I couldn't speak, and when Laurent realized that, he tried instead to be gentle. 

"Tell me what happened," he said. "You will be rewarded. Only, tell me what you did."

He had me at my desk, my arms pinned to the mahogany armrests beneath his hands. The breath he took in to speak to me smelled like iron, because he had been drawing on kitten's laced blood, and spitting it out. To me it smelled of rot, and it made me whimper. As I drew back, he drew closer, filling my field of vision, and when I tried to close my eyes, he pinched my arm sharply. The stuttered gasp of pain and surprise tightened his features.

"Dasius. Tell me what you did." 

The words stuck in my throat, and so he made me write it on the only slip of paper I had, which was the one I had found with my name on the back. 

For a moment, it seemed he would take this paper from me, and I lifted my hands off of it. But instead, after a moment, he took a pen from my inkwell, inspected the silver nib, and struck my name out. 

"Write it," he said, wiping the pen on his robe and handing it to me by its end. 

So I wrote, telegraphically, "Went to Valentin's. Party at des rubins. Valentin says hurt Leis, please you. I disagree, hurt you as well. Satisfied. Invite him to des rubins. Good. Arsenic. Valentin demanding of good death. I felt wanted to darken everything. Lights too bright. Hurt. Kill myself?"

"Now tell me what we should do."

I wrote, "No remedy. Wash. Bleed. Feed him. Strap him down. If seizing clear airway. Cut away his hair."

He took my piece of paper and held it to his heart, and turned away, and walking, muttered, "Oh no. Oh, dove. Oh," until he shut the door to the yellow room, and left me by myself.

He stayed in the room, unresponsive to light knocking. I felt pathetic. 

After I finished scrubbing the floor of blood, from the grey room to the scullery, I took my new knife and scraped up what had dried between the floorboards. Doing this occupied me for half a day, but when Laurent would not come out of his room, I could not wait. I went into my room, where Leis was sleeping on a clean mattress and sheets hastily dragged from upstairs, and I sat up his comatose body, and I hacked his hair away with my knife. 

I will not say "lovely hair" or "beautiful blond curls" or something like that. I did not have a straight razor. He bled from the scalp from places where shallowly I had cut him, and so I drew a bath, and I washed him. 

His body sank into the copper tub as if he were a leaden doll. We do not float. And the light from the late day sun reflected on the metal, and this light danced on his terribly white skin. And then I caught a glimpse of my hand, and saw that Valentin's ring was still on my finger.

We had lifted the body from the bed, Laurent and I, and Laurent had said, "Bring me stones. Heavy ones." He said, "Cut the body open," and so I slit Valentin from sternum to tailbone, deeply. Laurent saw how it disturbed me, and made me shudder, and he did not address it. He told me to take out the intestines and liver, which I did, and told me to put them to fire in the brazier, which I did. And so we filled the body with stones, and Laurent took it away, and I think he must have sunk it in the Seine. I am not sure. I don't know why we bother. It was not uncommon in those days to occasionally see bloated corpses in the water. I sewed him back together with a broken hatpin and silk painted with gossamer-winged butterflies. The body was too full. It was a hack job, and I thought of putting the needle in my throat and pulling it out the other side. I think how easily I could sew such a wound now, and how different it is to repair a corpse than it is a living person, and how macabre it seemed, how it made me feel truly a creature who deals in death, and is not of the beautiful world, to touch the cold, dead flesh with my hands and how trying to make it close used all of my strength.