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

Part 5 - The Faun

Over the course of a year, the voice came less and less, until for some weeks it didn't come at all, and that was when I went to the darkened door, and gave them silver. 

Time had begun to drown itself; nights had begun to blur together. I went through that place as if it were underwater, swimming through the rooms, and I know the boy thought me very strange, asking if I was foreign, and asking what songs I liked, but all that I could do was sit in the alcove by his window with my eyes closed, confused about who I was and where, and when. So for many nights, he played the songs he liked for me, bawdy songs about men and boys, and came close, though when he touched me I would recoil as if burned.

He didn't like that. He was a whore. He was not used to being rebuffed. "This music is not the main course," he would say to me, speaking softly at first. "Why do you nibble at me, young master? Please, taste the grandest dish at table, won't you?" he would say, thinking me younger than himself, and melancholy. "Sir," he would say, a patient refrain, growing less patient, "show your lips to me. Don't turn your face away." He was worried that he was growing old. He would lean towards me, and run his light fingertips from my temple to my collarbones, thrilling at the involuntary shiver the body makes when a finger strokes a throat. I could hear the thrilling of his heartbeat. "Sir?" He thought me shy, and liked the idea of it.

He smelled like sweat. His mouth smelled of the sweetness of overripe strawberries and plums. His lips were without a cupid's bow, and his hair was a color like orange clay. He was very fair. Once, I bought him a platter of oysters, to watch him slip them down his throat. "What do you like, young master?" he asked me, sipping seawater from the shells. "Do you want to play at love?" touching my face, kissing the palm of his hand and touching me. I kissed his salty fingertips and he smiled tenderly. He was thirty-three years old, very old for a prostitute. They called him "The Faun", which is a name for a boy. "Little kiss, little kiss," he said, pressing his kissed fingertips to my cheek. 

"Are you married?" he would ask, humming in my ear.

"I used to be," I would say, eyes rolled back in my head from the vibration of his voice. 

He would lick the shell of my ear while he spoke to me, humming, knees pressed to the sides of my hips, sat together in the alcove. "What songs do you like?" he always asked me, even as his lyre lay forgotten across the room. 

"What songs do you know?"

"All kinds," he would say, sucking on my skin, tipping my chin back with his finger. "Greek songs, Roman songs, Persian songs, any of them, I will play for you, if you would only ask me."

If I touched the bruises and cuts on his skin which were occasionally there, he would look at my hand with an expression nearly resigned to abuse, as if, if I were to strike him, it would not surprise him at all. "Who hits you, Faun?" I would ask him, and he wouldn't remark on it except to shrug off the question and look on me sidelong, with a sly smile. He would push my tunic up my thighs and kiss the softer skin there until I pulled his head away and brought him back up to sit with me. 

Sometimes, he would only rest against me, and sing me songs of his boyhood, and I would feel his ribs through his roughspun. His heartbeat would slow, and his breath would mellow, and he always smelled like sugar, even if I knew he hadn't eaten. Sometimes, he slept, showing himself more naked than he could be in any other way, and I held him in my arms.

But I know that he was angry often, because I offended him by not wanting him the way he would be had, and the little things I said would hit him like a slap in the face. "Are you married or not?" he would demand of me, as if I hadn't answered it many times. "Why do you come to me if you don't want to sleep with older men? I don't understand," and the anger would tire him, and I would see tears in his eyes, the nakedness of his fear of growing old, that if I stopped visiting him, the master would throw him out, whether he cared for the younger boys or not. One evening, he interrupted me, and set down his lyre. "You are always calling me 'prostitute'. If you will not use me well, call me otherwise. Call me by my name."

"Faun," I said, surprised by his abruptness.

"No. It offends me. They mock me with it. That is the name of my glory, and it has faded. They spit in my face with it," he said, suddenly all anguish, beyond artifice, beyond any lie.

"Your name."

"Nataniellus."

"Come, come, Nataniellus," I said, "sit with me by the window. Let me hold you."

"No," he said, leaning forward, tossing the word at me.

"No?"

"I don't care how much silver you have, or what sweet words you want to say. I am tired of singing songs without end. I am tired of spending my own time trying to think of ways to please you. This is agony, hoping that you won't abandon me, because they will throw me on the street though I have given them twenty-five years of my own work. I," he said, standing up straight, defiant of me, "will not bend. Go."

"You please me," I said, gently, "you please me. You have always."

"I am not pleased. I am not."

"I have children. Care for them," I said. "I have silver. Let me take you."

"What's this? Love? Get out of here."

He said some things to me about his body, and gestured at me a lot, and in the end, came into my arms on his own, which is what he had wanted, to be touching me on his own terms. 

"It is not love, Nataniellus," I told him.

His hair was mussed, pushed against my mouth. "Certain?" he asked, mocking me. "No, I am not interested. You don't think other men have wanted me for their own? Care for your own and be celibate forever? Kill me."

A friend of his had died that evening, violently, choked to death by a foreign trader. I learned this only while discussing price with his master, who used it as a bargaining chip against me.