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

Part 17 - Lucidity

"Why do you say so?" I asked him, kissing his neck.

"Because it is the truth. Nataniellus knew that. But he was used to beautiful boys. I have never been very good at denying myself anything. If I want something, there is nothing I won't do to get it, and so often it doesn't even matter. I ask you to see me as I am, but I know that you are quite clouded with love."

I kissed him because he was grown, and he sighed.

"My brother, Aulus, little grandfather, used to sit and watch me. I asked him 'What?' and he asked me 'What must it be like to be beautiful enough to corrupt yourself?' and I didn't think much of it then, but I think of it much these days. He was only eleven and he was wiser than I am now."

"Do not pity yourself, my love. It is unbecoming on anyone at all," I whispered.

"Threaten me with ugliness. Is that not the method?" he wondered.

Because he was still young, it was easy for him to adapt to that city, and me being slower to it, he introduced me to Rome and her streets, so different from Alexandria, which had to me smelled of the sea, with its wide avenues and necropoli, and many temples. For Escha though, its bathhouses were familiar, and its wants, and he knew how to find young men willing to try a little darkness, to be kissed and sucked, because he had been one of them. "The rich are especially malleable," he told me. "They are so bored of life, and seek out new thrills to taste. Let us thrill them."

"A little and no more," I said.

Many evenings he dressed me as he wanted, piling my hair and heating kohl over a small lamp flame. He would tap the kohl in its little limestone dish, turning it round and round, to see that it was sitting even, and dip in the thin stylus, paint it on my face. He knew by then that I wore kohl because the sun beat on my high cheekbones, and made it difficult for me to see well. I sat still on the bed while he did this, face tipped up, loving him. He dressed me in white, unbanded tunic, very simply. "Let us not gild beauty," he told me. "Let them think you a glorious bed slave of Egypt and we will lure them. Us two."

"I do not wish to play the part of a young man."

"Only at the beginning, and then you may be quite yourself."

He would take me into the back rooms of these places, having tapped a network of bloodworshippers and fools, and fall on their couches, kissing and touching them, but I am not to be kissed by such men.

For Escha, whatever may be associated with blood nourished him, body and mind. For him there was no blood without heated flesh and baited breath. Sex has used him for its own ends, and he had wanted it for itself and for the sense of presence it imparted him. In those moments, he was alive, and wanted, and thinking of nothing but body. I can understand it. Dying did not take either the desire to forget or that to be wanted from him, and he did not show it to me, but I knew. What matter is it to me what he did? He would come with these men of burning flesh, and I would let them touch my face, and close their lips on my temples and my brow, there being no true intimacy in anonymous arousal, and I would kiss their fingertips, and prick them with my teeth to show Escha how to take blood slowly and easily. These men would laugh lightly at the bite, a shallow puncture on the fingertip, or palm, or flesh of the arm, and show Escha what I had done. "Look, what your friend has done to me," they would say. Because of these small fingerpricks and lying on couches, my memory of that time is good.

I liked to hear him laughing at their kisses, happy. In the small hours of morning, we would walk together through the narrow dirt avenues, weaving in and out between stacked houses, with their makeshift extra rooms and tumbledown awnings. He was very happy for a time, and without cares, in a worriless youth. I stopped him from drinking very deeply, fearing madness, obsession, thinking only of myself, and brought him home to me whenever I could.

But Rome could be as sultry in late summer as Alexandria, and when it was too hot for him, he wept for fear of blindness and burning. I held him as I had when he was a child, and seeking my coolness. He would whisper, "I am drowning, I am drowning," and I will admit, as those boys took away his pain, he took away mine. While I comforted him, there was no need to comfort myself. He took from me all of my private cares, and I wanted always for him to be happy.

When he was half-delirious from heat, I would try to talk to him of how it used to be, in Herculaneum, and tell him stories of his youth, and he would protest these, and say that he was not the same. I did not mind his saying so then. I felt that things were right between us, and that the past had been put to rest, and that he was far beyond the worries of his living youth. I thought that he had gone beyond his need of self destruction, and for harm, but these of course were my own delirium, so happy I was to be of a kind with him, and feel adored.

One evening, as I sat in contemplation, head tipped back against the wall, I heard a great crash and tumbling of silver to the floor. I rose to follow the sound, and he had cut his arms to let blood, and fallen. In an attempt to keep standing, he had grabbed at the red sesh on the table by the window, and dragged his silver mirror, jewelry, and delicate instruments to the floor with him. I went to the floor and brought him up into my arms. "I'm sorry, atta," he whispered to me, "I'm sorry. It's too hot, great love."

I tipped his head back so that he could breathe a little easier, and held it in that position with my cheek. I took the little fruit knife from his hand and put it away in my pocket. What lie? I thought. His face was flushed.

"Winter comes," I said.

"Please believe me."

"I have seen your delirium. You are lucid."

"Do not accuse me of lying."

"I have known your want of hurt."

He dissolved into tears then, and tried to lift himself to touch my face, and so I went to the floor with him, lying in his blood, as too many times already I had done, and he held me weakly, whispering many words, all of little meaning or consequence. "You are retreating from me and I don't know why," he whispered. "What have I done?"

"Am I retreating from you, sweet child?"

"Love me as I am."

His hair, near silver in the low light, had soaked in blood. He held his hand out weakly, wishing to close the small distance between us.

"Even now you do not touch me much," he whispered.

"You seem as you were the evening Vivacio died. You stayed with me in his bed, and your hair held blood as it does now."

"Please see me as I am," he whispered. "I am desperate."

I brought him close to me then, and he lay across my body, crying softly. And so, I tortured him that way, in seeing him as his child self, which he reminded me often. What does one say about it? Quietly, for two hundred years, I loved him, as himself and as my child, but I will admit to you that I did not know how to love him as he would be loved. Was that not always his desire? to be seen as he saw himself. He wanted it from you as well, I imagine. Lucidity or delirium, there is pain in it. He was seeking something that he felt I could not give. Perhaps he was right. Still, I do not know what I could have done, and I wonder so deeply about it even now it dizzies me and lays me low.

A sultry evening in mid-summer, he came to me, and sat on his knees before me, parted mine, pushed his head against my belly. I knew his mind. It grieved me. He whispered, "Do not cry, atta. I'm sorry." I put my hands in his hair, and held his face to me, and wept. "Tell me to stay and I will," he had whispered, "tell me and I will, atta. I love you, tell me and I will."

I could not speak.

Even as he stood in my doorway, awkward and small, beloved, he waited for my word.

He took my ring and his favorite wooden comb, the same I had brushed his hair with all those many years, with its broken teeth, and left into the warm evening.

The next morning, tired and beyond speaking, I traveled to the Hercynian forest of Germania, shuttered and mourning for Herculaneum. I tread its leaves and slept in its branches, and did not hear another voice, living or dead, for eight hundred years.

Darling, that is how it was. Darling, see my ring now? He kept it for me all the days he lived.