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

Part 2 - The Laziest Boy in the World

"Hullo, darling," I said, entering the yellow-haired boy's room.

"Don't hide your accent," Escha said, not hiding his own, heavy and purring, "just because it is low class."

I advanced and he held open his arms open to me, perched on the edge of his bed. The room was airless and he sat perched on the edge of his coverlet, going through letters. He had a face like a porcelain doll's, skin made the more perfect by a mole beneath his lower lip. He had grown up to be every drop as fine as we had all suspected he would be. As a child, his features had been large. He had combed his unruly blond curls hair back into a high knot. "Sit up straight, love," I said, embracing him and sitting beside him on the bed. 

He licked the tip of his index finger and flipped his paper. It was not our first meeting. Upon seeing me in the 40s, he had suffered a complete and quiet nervous breakdown, punishing his master for weeks with distress. It would have been amusing if it weren't dangerous. He had come to see Faya and had not expected for anyone to be there, least of all me. "No," he had protested, backing from me, deeply troubled, "you are quite dead. All of you. You are quite dead. Why are you not dead as you should be?" He had made it clear that he wanted little to do with us. The more time I spent with him, the more I saw that he was still like the child I had known, who told himself stories of his greatness to hide a fragile temperament. He was the one who had survived, and who'd had to go on because we were dead. We were the innocent martyrs, though perhaps not so innocent, in a story in which he was grande dame, and the story would not go easily. "Look," he said, beside me on the bed, "at this nice letter from my child."

I took the letter and it smelled heavily of almonds. "You are still a child yourself," I told him, "showing me your trinkets one by one."

"Shall I line my treasures up on the vanity for you so we can go through them in order?" he took my hand with a weak grip, and held my unprotesting fingers against his thigh as he looked over a different letter.

"Faya says that you like to hear stories of yourself. Should we talk about you?"

"That letter is from my young man. See how he talks of me?" he asked. "He talks of me very highly though I am vain and indulgent. See how he writes to me?"

"Your neck is uncovered. Won't you cover it? You are seeming cold," I said.

"Do you think I should cover it? Don't treat me like I am old. If I am anything, it is damnably young," he murmured, abandoning my hand so that his could flutter near his naked flesh. "Do you make your old ones cover themselves?"

"I do. We dress for the weather. If they are cold I will not be blamed."

"Well that is for England, with all of the wet. Here it is temperate. Does my neck offend you?"

"Yes because it is pumping blood into your impertinent brain and powering your impertinent jaw," I said.

"Do not harass me, officer. I am only sitting in my room," he murmured, again under his breath, likely pleased to be allowed the chance to be prickly and show off.

"Why come you here?" I asked him, trying to take his hand, but he struggled against my grip in slow motion, like an irritated sloth. "Oh you are too lazy even to shake me. You are the laziest boy in the world. Look at me when I am speaking to you. Chatting with you is my one task for the day."

"And reading letters from Jacquot is mine. I am busy and in between my scheduled appointments for lying about. Let go of me, you swine," he rejoined.

"Here give it to me again and we will read it faster."

"Oh good. Read it aloud as if you were a handsome contemporary gentleman with an undetectable lisp. Jacquot is very tall, so you will have to affect a very gentle baritone, and the most subtle hint of harsh accent, like a whore."