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

Part 2 - The Slim Blade

In the dark, I thought of Dasius. I pressed myself against his bedroom wall, head inclined towards the shut door. When I shut my eyes, I tried to think of his face, but it had been a long time. My mind gave me an impression of him, grey, owl eyes, penetrating when they wanted to be. He has a tendency to look severe when he is anxious or going near madness, brushing his black hair pin-straight and wearing high collars, bespoke coats, manicured nails. I wondered if it would be that Dasius who walked through the door, or the tired, pragmatic one who seemed held together only by good taste and manners. Always, he looked put together, seeming older than the age he was made, but brotherly love could not excuse what I thought he had done to our beloved, and sense could not penetrate me in my state. I wanted to have at him, maybe more because I was angry to have missed him. Devastation and weakness.

I wondered, sitting against the wall, what might he be doing outside in the long evening. He has always been the more retiring of the two of us. While I waited, I listened to the sounds outside his window. There the occasional passing carriage; the metal ping of a worn down carriage wheel against uneven flagstones. There were gas streetlamps but it was still dark then. While I sat there, I saw two men walk by, on their nightly circuit around their parts of the city, lighting the lamps. Their light swam up the uneven lead glass in Dasius's window, illuminating them in fire briefly. I kept my knife tucked in both hands, as I had no pockets large enough to hide it. I could only wear what I could take from little corpses then, and there were less of them than before. I listened for the rhythm of his walk, which is sure and purposeful.

When the door flew back, I stayed still a moment longer, to get the full size of him. And there he was suddenly, my brother, my Dasius, and my body flushed with the adrenaline of disgust. I leapt out, and dug my sharp knife into his back.

He has never been one to hold back screaming, and he did cry out then, going to the floor under me while I stabbed him and stabbed him, twisting the blade, and him unable to get at me with his hands. I drew the instrument up to his throat, pinning him beneath me with my knees. He could have had me off had I not known to sit myself high on his shoulders, at the tender place just below the neck. "Brother," I whispered, "make a confession." I pressed the point behind his ear, remembering his fastnesses and hollows with the blade.

He pressed his arms to the floor and made no sound. He went loose under my body, as if asleep. His head turned slightly on the wooden floor, as his neck relaxed.

I swept his hair from his neck and kissed him at the hairline.

"Let me go," he said, muffled against the floor. "Nicolas, I am bleeding."

It was my turn to be silent. I clutched the knife tighter, pressing the slim blade against the supple pink skin behind his ear. If I did it, it would bleed and bleed, which he knew.

"If you want him he is here. Go to him. Leave me in peace."

When I said nothing, he continued.

"Let up a little, so that I might see you."

"Perhaps I'll cut out one of your eyes so you can watch while I crush it. Perhaps I will hack up your face and ruin your beauty."

Outside, the leaves on the linden trees hummed and whispered, like the rubbing together of many hands. Beneath my knees, blood had begun to soak into my white stockings. It was finding its way up into the delicate fibers, climbing them like a silken ladder. He refused to speak, waiting out my anger. I knew that he would try to do that, but I had been waiting for a long time myself with no relief.

When I cut him behind the ear, he made no sound, even when I bit the knife in deeper. "Struggle," I intoned. The blood came and made my hands too slick to hold tight.

He said nothing, so I threw my knife and sat back, and when I did that he was up like a shot, pinning me with one hand, his long hair thrown over my face, and him impassive of me and anger. When I opened my mouth to shout he pulled the stop out of a silvery phial with his teeth. I cried, "Don't do it!", losing his game, because I could see that it was quicksilver, and didn't know what it would do to me. He pressed his hand to my throat so that my mouth opened to gasp and tipped the phial to its end.

Over the hours that followed, the mercury cut itself out of my body, searching its way out all of my orifices, pushing against the walls of my body to make egress. It came out of my eyes and nose, and he watched over me, still without expression, called me fascinating. I wanted to feel horror, but there was too much in the moment to feel anything. I didn't know that he had begun experimenting on other vampires to learn what he could and that he had become a harder creature. He had always been capable of enough cruelty without sharp steel scissors, though evidence of his studied ruthlessness had been scantier before. I wished that I could speak so that I could beg him to put me out of my agony.

He undressed himself while I laid on his table, immobilized by the working of my body to expel the mercury. He unbuttoned his starched collar and set aside a short gold stickpin. His hair went up into a loose chignon, and he shed the shirt, turning in his mirror to examine his back. He drew his hands up the knife wounds, ugly and seeping against his pretty, milky skin. But it was quickly finished, him going to a narrow bureau and producing a long black dressing gown of cotton. He pulled it over his shoulders and drew the tie at the waist, came barefoot to study me. Up close I could see the black on black silk embroidery curling over and under itself along the fabric. His face came close to my face, with its unblinking grey eyes, and narrow nose. Prick.

He showed me the gold stickpin. "Look," he said. "I read in the Lancet that mercury can dissolve pure gold."

I couldn't speak, gasping. Expeling the mercury felt like I was caving in, as if I were being repeatedly struck by countless snakes, burning. The silvery fluid mixed with blood from my body and pulled itself from my flesh.

"I know that you are emotional, and impulsive, and I love you more than any other in the world. But if you attack me one more time, I am going to put this inside of you and fill your little body with quicksilver again, because I have been wanting to see if the gold can come out of the eyes, too. I'm very interested in how we expel compounds. I want to know why we can absorb some poisons but not others. Where do the parts of the blood we can't use go? I want to know, and I have a series of procedures to test. The trouble is, I have to find vampire flesh to use. Do you want to help me by hiding in my room and stabbing me again? It would be interesting to see if there are different results with a smaller body."

His hand was under my back and he was helping me sit up, and I shuddered under his touch. After he collected the mercury, he left me there, shaking. 

I have sometimes mourned for the brother that I knew in my youth, but if I am honest, I always knew that he was one of us.