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

Part 4 - Delirium

If he had drunk, I could see the cloud of his breath in the air, warmed by the blood in his body. If he hadn't, he could come cold and invisible into the cool room, and make his serpent's way up the coverlet. He would take me out of bed and sit me in a white, gold-leafed settee by the window. From there I could watch the street below from behind a carefully drawn curtain. I had only to twitch up the fabric to look out. I spent many good hours there, watching the street as if a young king in a ruined palace. It passed the time, listening to them argue in the adjoining room, because Laurent wouldn't take blood on account of me and it made Dasius completely desperate. It was my first encounter with blood. I didn't know anything about it. Nothing.

Now of course I know the difference between great loves and small affairs, that blood can be such a small affair, but ignorance made me selfish then. I had no frame of reference for what he felt for me or what I felt. All I knew of him was that he had become my entire world, and I assumed I was his. I didn't know anything about his history, or his patterns. I know now that he is attached to me, and in dark rooms, near the end, he would talk to me when he wouldn't talk to others. In his last days, when he was living in the back of his closet, he would let me slide the door open, and lie in my arms, and let me beg him to stay. I think he liked to imagine the early days we had together, when I depended on him wholly, and could not even stand to think of him with any other and we were all sweet words and playful debauchery. How things turned around on us. How life has its way. I am one of those who remembers the true color of his eyes, and their warmth, and their goodness.

For me, yes, he was truthfully good. In those first weeks, all noise and light was pain. I have heard others compare it to being beaten with thin reeds, pricked with sewing needles, drawn through an unforgiving silver sieve, but I won't compare it to anything. Too much light, too much stimulation of any kind would bring about on me an acute, entire body pain, more like sensitivity to sound than one confined to the physical realm. When he came cool and serpentine to me, sitting up in my bed when I couldn't stand to be touched, I was glad to have him to myself, but when I was in a spiral of pain, I wished for the blood he might have given me. My body had knowledge of the blood that I didn't, that it would make me stronger, hasten an essential change in me which would spirit earthly cares away.

There was a tree outside of my window, just tall enough that its fullest boughs were within reach; or they would have been had my window ever been open. I was sitting there, observing its birds, the first time I realized that I wanted to take my order back. Go out. Leave me. Bring me a young boy to have. Ten of them. Twenty. A thousand. Give me every child who has ever sung a note. Get me the virgin boys of Rome who sing like the heavenly host. Get me the dirty urchins who flee from the gaslights and haunt the carriagewheels of the painted bourgeoisie. Get me the sad-eyed orphans who play by the dockyards of Marseille, who let me play with them as a boy even though I knew my mother. Give them to me. Anything to put that pain away.

Birds in the trees were puffed up, their feathers on end, as spring approached. They chased each other from branch to branch, and when I closed my eyes, their songs were wordless appeals to God to forget Leis, who still prays to Him, because his wants and cries are brutality, and sometimes I knocked on the window glass to disturb the flirting birds. They fluttered their wings not at all at my attention, because I was locked up in a room, and they had so much sky to sing in they need take no note of me. I rested my face on the cool glass and thought ahead to summer, when it would surely be too hot to bear. I feared the weather a bit, but I needed the daylight, to somehow measure the passage of days. I was past counting my prayers whenever I was left alone, but I kept the rosary looped from a button on my shirt to an interior pocket on my waistcoat, so that I could feel the Virgin close when my thoughts turned to self-harm.

I suppose I have always been more easily led into self-destruction than introspection. I shouldn't like to think of myself much. Even then, my thoughts ran more to what was happening to my body than what would become of me. And I can't say that I thought Laurent would stay with me forever, because, as much as I begged him to stay with me, I didn't think of that at all. It was all words, because in the evening, with the curtains drawn, I often hurt so much I didn't know who I was, or where I was, or why. But in the weak daylight, on the eastern side of the house, I listened to the furious whispered rows between Dasius and Laurent, catching stray words. "Please" "Don't" "Can't stand" "I would rather die" "Destroying yourself" and when Laurent couldn't argue anymore, my door would open, and he would come in.