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

Part 11 - Someday, Come Home to Me

I have heard many times, "Tell me how it was." I hear it whispered, "Tell me how it was, please." It is not only me who remembers badly. I sit at night, and close my eyes in the dark, listening for frogs, and in the summer I hear them sometimes, and it is then that I remember best. If I smell a strawberry or pomegrantate, I am back there. If I see a child twist his knife to open an oyster, I go back there. Between this world and that one is only a thin distance. If I close my eyes with you now, and you touch my neck with your gentle fingers, and whisper "Faya", I will think you my lover, who was so changeable and hard for me to understand. Perhaps if you touch me there, very lightly, I will kiss you, and murmur to you, and it will be like we are young lovers, because when you say love, I go all the way back, for just a moment. I feel my body, as it was, as an old man in the sun, with white in my hair, of human flesh, and it is not hard to imagine who I was before this. But when you stop touching me, I will lose him, my old self. Mini, touch me a moment, so that I can tell you the story you want to hear. Pretend to be my Nataniellus, and ask me what you want to know.

I don't know what this word means, "diabetes." Say it to me again. Oh don't tell me that he was sick. I didn't know. We didn't know what that was in those days. Speak no more of it. It disturbs me. Oh kiss me like that again, on the collarbone. This shade of lipstick does not suit you. Be quiet now, the spirit comes. Are they your lips or his? My mind had broken, and that is not a lie. Maybe Escha whispered to you that it was, once, maybe he never told you about this at all, but I was not lucid. Perhaps that is not important. You know that once he attaches himself to someone, Escha will not let go, and you have been in his hold, but it is that I am the same. Yes I am distressed. Do not fear for me, sweet child. I see why he liked you well.

My lover was angry with me, my Nataniellus, after that evening, and he stayed angry awhile, and I was so mad with desire of him, of his body and his love, that I left the house, because I could not stand it. I went into cool water, the quiet water, in the forest some miles away, and Yaksha was there, great silent bird. He sat on a rock and watched me swim into the deep, and I saw him stand up on his rock as I let myself sink below its surface. I saw his strange, kind eyes grow wide, and mouth open, but my body was hot with madness, and the small thread of me who was Leechtin, the one you know, said "Go in the water and grow colder, my darling, and come out no more until the madness leaves us, and the memories go, and it will be alright then," and I listened to him, my true self, unhurt by the many years, who is gentle. And there at the bottom, in the silty, murky water, it was cool enough to close my eyes and pass away to an inner darkness for several days.

There under the water, my body was much soothed, and mind much calmed.

I dreamed of Nataniellus there, and his playing of the lyre, and of him eating tiny clams, and licking his fingers of honey and rosewater. I dreamed myself close to him, and measured my faculties, and thought of Escha, who loved me well. I listened to my whispering self, whose voice came like the current, passing my ears and disturbed by the vibration of fishtails and swimming children. When after those few days I felt a different self, and washed of confusion and anger, I walked home again, dripping, with Yaksha a silent shadow on my trail. I shed my heavy, wet robe, and he picked it up, so that when I walked into my house, I was wearing only a white tunic, which clung to my skin.

And it was deathly silent there, and when I listened, there was the quiet sound of a single voice praying. I walked the atrium, around the shallow pool, and reaching the other side, found dried red blood on the marble cladding, a trail of it smeared full with little footprints, which led to my cubiculum, and Nataniellus was there. 

I did not think about it. There was a bolt of fine red linen tucked away, and I ripped it, and I bound him. You, who are kissing my neck, is it Nataniellus? Yes. I bound you. I'm sorry. Don't worry about my tears. I'm sorry.