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

Part 12 - May I Touch You, Faya?

I'm afraid I neglected Escha for a time, in Alexandria. I paid our way across the sea in a merchant long boat. We lived in an unwashed district in the outer ring of the city, an enclave of Egyptians a little south and east of the royal palace, and we slept in the same bed there, above a tallow renderer's, so it was always smelling like melting flesh. When I complained of the light, Escha brought reed mats home from the market and fixed them over the windows, so that it was dark. When he needed a trade, I taught him how to tell fortunes, and he raised up friendships and connections in the city, who thought him a handsome, homeless urchin. 

He would come to me at night, and clutch my fingers, and whisper, "Faya, please come out." He would tell me that he was hungry, or frightened, or that someone had harassed him, but I found it hard to do more than whisper. He learned to speak a mixture of Latin and Egyptian, and he tried this pidgin with me, asking me to embrace him, but he ranged widely so as not to be home. The women who worked downstairs took a liking to him, and washed his hair some evenings, so that when he came upstairs he would be happy, and smelling good. I think that he was happiest then, when those women bathed him, as if he was theirs.

In 79, when the sky darkened, I saw Ariel sitting in the corner of my room, in the dark, wordless, eyes shining like a cat's. I have not said that he was blond like Escha, or that his body was long, and that he was as a man, though in no way like men, and that his presence could be punishing, if he exerted himself. But he was there so briefly, between blinks of my eyes in the dark. He smiled his love of death and contentment over my seeing his prophecy for the truth, and of saving us. I do not know what Ariel knows of human life, or feeling. I think that Ariel only knows the pleasure of anguish in others, and the coldness of lacking it. One moment, he was there with his oppressive atmosphere, and the next, disappeared. On that day, the air was thick even in Alexandria, and I covered my face with a cloth to breathe, before the merciful wind blew the poisonous air away.

But Escha told he had seen a man in blond hair, many times, beckoning to him, which raised a chill me unlike any other chill, because he was seeing a spectre which to me was like a reoccuring nightmare, which made Ariel real. I told him, "Don't speak to it. It is a spirit of the earth which feeds upon earthly horrors," and Escha said yes, but I knew that he loved beauty, and Ariel, of death, like madness, was delicious to dream of at a distance. "Keep close," I told him, "Don't range so far that I can't save you." But he ranged far, because though my Escha tried to draw me out, I spent my waking hours in torment. That day I had seen Ariel, Escha came to me, crying like a kicked kitten, and crawled up next to me, sniffling and sighing tears, and asked "Have they survived?" because he knew me to be beyond his knowledge of fleshly understanding. I held him and could say nothing. He begged for knowledge of his brothers, but I was lost to him, and time went through me and drained out so easily that often I did not know if it was day or night.

Escha, when he was very young, told me he dreamed of people drowning in the harbor of Herculaneum, of young men, and women, and babies, pushing each other in the sea in the press of the crowd. He said that he dreamed of young men speaking to him from the bottom of the sea. He would wake up crying and shaking and wet, and look around the room, hungry for the reality of Alexandria, and our escape, and for me. He would go cold in our humid room from the dreams and feel me with his fingers and cry, and I would wash him, and sit up with him until he fell asleep again. While it was visible, he was always going outside to look at the darkness across the sea, but after a year or so, unless he was in real distress, he never spoke of it much.

Escha came to me with his little wonders. He would come with a little frog to show me, or a river flower to put in my hair, or some small trinket or other that a friend had given him, and I was very glad of his friends, though he often smelled of them so strongly I worried that he had been corrupted. Even then, I could not rouse myself to deal with his concerns. He would show me a frog and say, "Look, I've named it 'Alexander'. He is a conquering frog. He is the master of all frogs," and I remember that frog, which he kept for some months until he lost it, and came in tears, inconsolable, until he found another frog, which he called "Eudoxia, queen of the seven islands to the east." You see, even then, his fantasies were royal. He would sit at the table in the room and stroke his frog's back with the side of his finger, and eat spelt bread. When he was a child, he did a very good imitation of a frog croak, which made me smile. He would come into our bed and say, "Faya, what's my frog's name?" and I still remember, because he needed a friend after the loss of his brothers, someone to love and talk to, and his frogs were important to him. He had many frogs, and I still remember all of their names.