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

Part 8 - Loyal Factotum

 We like to think of Laurent as the stunning petit, but that is not all of him. For so many years, he has been all romance and fainting over couches, smiling behind a delicate hand and sympathy, but he has had his fair share of opportunities to play the devil, and as he slunk away from the kitchen, I kept my feet square.

After some time, the cupboard door popped open and I stuck my head in to see my brother, whose wheezing had quieted. He was sitting on the damp floor, limbs askew and forgotten, head pressed against the stone wall. He seemed broken, and the smell of his blood was everywhere. "Put your fingers in," he whispered, gesturing lightly to his chest and neck. "See how deep it goes." His silk dressing gown had been slashed and ruined, but when I tried to take it off him he struggled against my hand.

"Decency, now?" I protested.

His eyes were fierce.

I did as asked and found a sucking wound on his chest, between two ribs, and I pressed my index and middle fingers into it. The letter opener's blade had been longer than my fingers, and I could not feel the end of the wound. "Too deep," I said. I touched his ribs and his breath fluttered at the gentleness of it.

He cursed and whispered that he needed to sew it.

"Your ribs are quite broken," I said, looking under his robe to see. "You're all blue."

"That will be fine. It's the pits that need mending." He put out his elbow for me to help him rise.

I touched it with both of my hands. "Dasius, there's someone here," I said.

There must have been something of hysteria in my voice, because he ignored it. "Help me," he said.

I braced myself against the wall to support the pressure of his getting up. He gestured for me to push open the door and I did, following his slow progress through the wreckage to his office, where he shut the door. I watched him hobble to his desk, marveling at the restorative properties of our bodies, that an hour ago he clung to life enough to whisper "Pater Noster" and now he could stand. He flexed and unflexed his hands, like a man trying on a new pair of gloves.

He showed me his curved needles and catgut sutures, his alcohol and matchbooks, his scissors and glassware. Lighting a match, he heated one of the steel needles, and looped it with catgut, and showed me how to suture on his arm, so that I could do it. I listened for any other sound in the house, any small scream and evidence of intruders, but it was all silence. Under my brother's fingernails, I could see blood and hair.

Beneath everything, Dasius is a loyal factotum. That I know. He serves without complaint, happy merely to feel wanted. But I can't, on my very life, understand how he can take abuses such as these and put them away. I have never seen him seek revenge or a life for himself. He has been in love twice in his life and tried to murder the object of his affection both times, without ever having said a word to them. And both times, he has been foiled in it by Laurent, and both times, those lovers have fallen hopelessly for him instead. Even you, the one who records this, you know what I am speaking of. Do not contest it. You pine after Laurie even now. But beyond what Dasius did to you, so long ago, why do you persist in scorning him? In truth, he cuts a fearsome figure. I will not deny it, but to treat him as you do, do you not feel that you deserve punishment? Are you completely without compassion? Miriam, but God, you have distracted me from the task my brother put me to. "Fill out the story," he said, because there are so many secrets, and because he won't have Laurent forgotten. So I will do it for him, because more than anyone, perhaps more even than me, he is left with nothing now. Put an end to the scornful, impish behavior you have demonstrated over these now five hundred years. What use is there in it beyond routine? I shall not touch you because he forbids it, but mark me, I have dreamed of your injury with feverish joy. Shall we now return to artifice? Know that when you sleep at night, monsters desire your screaming.

I counted the wounds as I sewed them. I recall that feeling, because it is what I feel now, so angry that I could not keep my hands still on my work. While I searched for yawning flesh, Dasius quietly closed his eyes and fell asleep on his metal table. There were fourteen places, all well planted to do damage. I kissed them each once after stitching them closed, the black catgut rough against my lips. On the table I found the crook of his arm and curled up into it, whispered to him that I was no factotum, me, and that going away from this place would be easy, and that I knew warm places in Morocco we could go, and an old house in Vienna like the back of my hand, and the cold reaches of Finland if he preferred, where we could be safe, because I had killed all of the old ones haunting those houses, and they feared me in the shadows there. No one would say an ill word against us. We could lead a quiet life, and it would all be quite fine. But though I knew he had woken up at my light touch, he made no response at all, feigning sleep and breathing deeply. And I knew that he could never leave, not for long, and had always known that Dasius, who has never resisted the thrall of our beautiful maker, who loved him from the first, doggedly and forever, would always choose to forgive. I wish that things were more simple. I wish that what he felt was only love, because then I might break it, like a slim branch, and whip him with it until he would go away with me, and though it was impossible, I persisted in my silly aim. Get him away. Live a simpler life.

But it's not always drama with Laurie, and that is what Dasius loves, and though the violence is hard, I believe he came to need it in its intermittance, because it meant a lack of indifference, and he became used to it. I weep over it still. I will not see myself in him. But I couldn't watch. How sweet cruelty is, when there is no love in it, but I am bitter now over romantic words, and should say no more of their relationship. "Relationship", such that it is. They were not lovers.