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

Dasius, Part 5 - The Language of Pain

That evening is the only time he has ever let me examine the scar on his back, the only time he has ever volunteered himself to be cut open, and the opportunity was certainly offered only to pacify my upset. He said only "Ssuh!" to anesthesia, and endured the knife rather than be dulled a single moment. 

"You should have come to me directly," I had told him in 1968, all lamentation at not having known he was in constant pain, at not having known what he had done to our Laurent. "I would have helped you. We would have been spared all of this pain. Can you imagine that Laurent will not grieve over what you have done to his body forever? Can you imagine that when you look upon yourself in the mirror, you will not see that you have lost a piece of your soul in doing this? Can you not see that those that know about this will never forget it, and seek you out if there is ever a chance of vengeance?"

"When I look in the mirror there is no one I recognize," he murmured, without bravado. "If they will kill me, let them come. I will draw blood before it is over and be thus satisfied to 'hallo' Death. Out of the corner of my eye I have seen Him. In the West, He moves in daylight."

"And what of me, if you are killed? What of me, that you have done this violence? What of Laurent, if he is too spiritually torn apart to live? You are the most precious to him in the world. Every knife wound tears him apart. Perhaps if his spirit has escaped from any of those openings you made in his flesh? I cannot hurt him as a single word from you may do. With your knife you would cut him more deeply than any other could."

Under my knife he was still as I cut through the scar tissue. He did not make a sound, though I felt the tension of his back beneath my hand. Immediately, I found myself confronted with bullet fragments embedded near his spine. As I examined them, I dated them easily to the 1910s, and so found myself suddenly a little faint, that he had been suffering already when he came back to us in 1921, that what I had suspected to be pain in his gait at that time indeed had been. Quickly I steadied my hands, as already his eager flesh crowded the incision I had made, knitting itself with healthful activity.

"You could not have prevented it," he murmured.

"Nicky, I will give you blood for balm, for your pain, for your sanity. Do not go back there to California anymore. Do not stalk his counterparts, his children. You endanger yourself."

"I cannot promise you that I will not seek him, my brother. Though he seeks a self I no longer know, I need to hear his voice."

"He never fights back against you, does he? He cannot raise a hand to you. Oh I know that. Do not make me into the monster that must stop you."

"And so that is what I fear," he said, face pressed against the steel table. "For no matter what I do to Laurent, he is always seeing me as a child, and it is only you in whose eyes I may turn dark and unknowable. I feared your judgment in 1920. I so fear it now."

Beneath my fingertips there was dead nerve, dead muscle, grey and purple. It would do him no help to cut it out, and only mutilate his shape. Already, his body had isolated this dead part, and yet the pain remained with him. I had not ever seen anything like it before. I cleaned out the metal fragments, irrigated the wound, and sewed it sound. I whispered, "Who shot you?"

"I would not tell you now, if it is meet with you. Still it is difficult to talk of it directly."

All I know of what happened to him is what Laurent has told me Nicky said while delirious with pain. And in delirium, one cannot know if there is a single lucid thought, or if the hallucination mixes with all parts of a man's life, and clouds his sense of truth. Nicky raves of a woman that he loved, and who could know him, of her death, of a bullet that knew what he was. He once whispered, completely mad, in Laurent's ear that he loved a woman so ugly that she liked him to call her "aubergine", an eggplant, after the port-wine birthmark on her face. I do not know how much of that is true. Perhaps all of it is. All I can know is what I am told, and of the relationship between Nicky and Laurent so much is hidden. There is nothing that can excuse the violence, and I cannot apologize or make amends for it, but to my knowledge Nicky stopped attacking Laurent's body and mind in 1968, and though he continued to stalk Laurent's associates, he also refrained from inflicting them grievous and irreparable bodily harm.