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

Part 11 - God, if He is there.

But I could see as well the other side, and that other side was far more present to me. Because Laurent had begun to look that way again, that terrible way. I have described it to you already, and if you were in his life at all near the end, you know it yourself. I don't know if you were. It was more than frailty. It was in his eyes.

On the first day, when I forbade him to go to Leis sleeping, his looks were fierce. He was weak from the bite and afraid to fight me. "Let me go. You will regret it," he said. And on the second day, still fierce, yet more pointed, his eyes narrowed, his lips pursed, and saying, "Please." On the third day, unable to bear the moaning and crying, he shook me, who had stopped trying to restrain him, and the look in his eyes was that of a man pursued, hunted until he could not run anymore, and said nothing. He had begun to pant when we heard the sounds, and to dig his fingernails into me instead of speaking. I know that he knew what I did. It did not occur to that he needed the delusion that it would be all right, and all the same as it had been, and very soon. I had thought those same thoughts for a moment but relied on caution and on sense. I was hard on him.

He stopped dressing himself properly. His mind was elsewhere. As Leis remained nonverbal, Laurent's anxiety went unabated, and he stopped brushing his hair. I tasked him with going into town, and combed his curls, lay out his clothes to his specifications, and said to "get sharp scissors. Whatever sort you like, but very sharp." And he went. And when he came back, he brought more than that. 

The scissors were good ones, and he put them in my hands, and he said, very lucidly, "Dasius, cut my hair, too. I won't have you looking at it, have you worrying about it." He set down several books he'd brought on my secretary table, and went up the stairs to our unused dining room. 

I did not resist him. I followed with the scissors, and finding him up there he had uncovered one chair and set it by the window. The window had a nice view of the sun setting, and the light fading over the city, which we could see our fair share of on our hill, even from only the second floor, and with half the view obscured by the pointed leaves of a linden tree. 

"I know," he said, very softly, "that you want to cut it. I don't want you to be nervous about my hair. It will grow back. It is only hair. I hear your worrying about it and about me. I bought these very nice scissors from a barber surgeon. He says they will even cut flesh as if it were fat." 

"All right," I said.

I approached and he held up his hand, facing away from me, toward the window.  I took it, soft, strong hand. "I am glad that we are speaking again," he said. "Cut it very close."

"You don't like to cut your hair," I told him, but of course he knew that, and even as I said so, I cut it. 

While I did it, his head remained tipped down. The scissors were very sharp, as he had promised, easily nicking his ear once by accident, though he made no sound in reaction to it, as his pain tolerance has always been very high. It disturbed me viscerally that the little wound did not bleed at all. I finished the cutting, and said that I would sweep up his hair, and he said, sounding tired, "Leave it," and took me by the wrist. My fingers were still in the scissors' finger guards. 

I think that you will understand what his hair meant to him. I think that you will suspect, as I do, that he had not cut it for centuries, and that he hated to look tired, or afraid. I did my best with the scissors. He took me to bed in the yellow room, and bade me go under the duvet, and him with me, where he let out a puppy's breath, and wanted me to hold his naked head against my chest with my palm. And so I did. Then, at the highest point of the day, dark in our room with its heavy curtains, he woke and patted me as if I were sleeping. Seeing that I wasn't, he pointed to something near the door, and made a soft grunting, pointing. 

I looked and his sword was there. He has had many swords, and it was the bigger of the two he had at the time, the same he had given me when I'd gone away, now in its long scabbard. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and went to get it. It had become familiar to me during my time away, and it smelled like him, because he did then and always had perfumed his hands. He delicately gestured for me to come back and I did.

He took his sword from me, and without investigating it, turned away from me in bed with it and went back to sleep.

But I could not sleep, and seeing him safe, went to my desk to see the books he had left there. They were covered in roach dust, so I took the three of them out to the back door and shook them and blew on them until they were passably clean, and of course these were anatomy textbooks.

They were not the first I'd ever had, but you will understand that these found me at the correct moment, and unable to sleep, I read them cover to cover over a period of weeks. 

And except for the moaning, it was a period of great and unexpected contentment for me. I went up the stairs and swept Laurent's hair into a small bundle, and tied it in a white cloth, to save. Leis's hair, when I cut it, always while he was sleeping, I burned, except for the bits Laurent could get away from me. And having gotten it away from me, I watched him make, with slow but patient dexterity, a bracelet which looked as if it were made of very fine flax, which seemed to comfort him. Somehow, he seemed content as well, taking my sharp scissors, and plunging them into his wrists every day. 

To me it seemed macabre, as it should have, as if a hairless angel attempting to return to heaven through rehearsing a thousand mortal deaths. How might I have known that in another life he had already done this? For it seems clear to me now that he was content to move through our house as if he were in that other place, of his childhood, cutting himself open and nearly insensible from the feebleness of blood loss. If I asked him to stop, he would hear none of it, as if he barely understood I was there.

So that was how it was until Leis began to speak again. Rehearsal.

Oh if you could hear my lover now, crying for me to come bed. What pleasant music it is, compared with the sounds I can still hear in my head, of his father shattered by the things kitten said to him. I say, "Marcellus," to quiet him now behind me, and he says, "If you don't come now I will be angry, because you are suffering." How demanding are lovers, who have never suffered, and don't know what it looks like.