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

Chapter 3, Part 1 - Dasius, 1921

 Nicky was lying on the train seat with his eyes closed.

"You're just going to stop there."

"Indeed," he said, voice far away, as if underground.

"And what happened then?" I asked, fanning my face with my train ticket. It had grown warm in our compartment with the window shut.

"He buried me alive."

"I have never heard anything about this old master," I said.

"Poor D," Nicky said. He sat up slowly, favoring his back.

"Why should I believe you?"

"I have no cause to lie."

"You murdered Ruby that night?"

"Yes," he said. "I snapped his neck like a green branch."

"And you stabbed Laurent."

Nicky leveled me with a look, eyes steady. "I came home because I was tired in 1869. We fought. We made up. Laurent took a lover. We fought. I was buried alive, and then when I came home, you wouldn't let me into his room, and I left both of you. The hell with you, that's what I thought. Let him kill Dasius. It took me years to recover from what that creature did to me, and you never even knew anything about it."

"Are you taunting me?" I asked.

"Yes."

"You didn't know anything about Laurent's master before that night."

"Correct. Except when he told me everything about himself a few months earlier. He grew up in Herculaneum. He fears going blind." He gestured to me to fluff his hair, and I did.

"Well, then you are lying by omission. You had just told me he never said anything about an old master."

"Well."

As the train came to a stop, I braced myself in the doorway against the jolt. Nicky hopped down from his seat tenderly. There was something wrong with his lower back. Now, it was clear. He had been hurt some time in the past fifty years and healed badly. I knelt to pick him up and he didn't struggle.

It had been three hours on the train, and now evening crept around the edges of the clouds, low in the sky. Nicky breathed in the crisp air, deeply, as we stepped onto the platform.

"And what happened then?" he asked, as I hailed a hackney cab. "Did you see that poor French lover? Leis? Did he come from England?"

"Yes, about a year on."

"For how long?"

"Only a few months. It was a disaster. Laurent was ruined. I blamed you."

I didn't know then whether to believe that the "miasma" had something to do with an old master. As much as I had wanted his answer, it seemed hard to believe that in so many hundreds of years, I had never heard anything about a childhood in Herculaneum or a fear of being blinded. Surely, Laurent would have said something any of the fifteen or so times his eyes had failed in the past hundred and thirty years. I felt there would have been a sign. But there are hardly ever any signs when something nasty is going on, or is about to happen.

As we travelled toward the teaching hospital in Liverpool, I had so many questions I knew Nicky wouldn't answer. I tried to make my peace with not knowing.

"Dasius," Nicky whispered, his hand reaching up. "Fix your hair."

I pushed my hair back.

"You're very handsome this way."