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

Part 16 - Lecne and Raske

I left him with everything valuable I had in the world. I left him in a room in the Jewish quarter, where he might be kept a secret. Forgive me, I cannot speak about it. Do not make me talk of it. Mini, is it alright? If I do not talk about it, will you go? Say that you will stay here, even if I cannot give you everything you want.

Kissing. Do you think this is good for me? I am not a lover of kissing. Do you enjoy it? I would rather be touched, hummed to. If it is your wish to soothe me, do it that way. Here is my hand. Suck on my fingers. Kiss between them. You are shaking from blood. Soothe yourself. I will talk to you.

What did I feel? Horror. I have told you how he was as a child. His bravery and boldness, his beholdence to beauty and the glory of things, his obedience and earnesty. To see him suffer, it was not in my power. To see him beg for blood and cry in pain, to claw at his eyes and body until he bled. I try not to imagine that he was lucid, but I know that he was and knew his agony. I wrapped white linen around his eyes, whispering to him that it would protect them, but his eyes were raw and bloody in his delicate face already. In his sensitivity, the humid air had scalded them as if it had been steam, and when he wept, calling for me, he screamed at the fresh torment of blooded tears on ravaged eyes. It tore my spirit.

There is no usefulness in telling you my reasons. What reasons? I traveled across the sea and north. I walked on my own, away from people. I found the Danube and slept beside its waters, wishing to feel alone. I thought, "I will forget them all" and slept dreamlessly. But I knew that I could not leave my child.

His was not a character which could remain innocent for long. He was curious and had grown to like pain, and in his way, could not be turned away from the hard realities of life, or its pleasures. He loved easily, with loyalty. Perhaps you think him cruel, but vampires are not cruel. It is humans who are. A vampire takes only what it needs. A vampire is predictable and does not need cruelty, because it is an animal. It is the living who take pleasure or withhold it, who are playful or hard. What of your nature remains to you, Mini? I find you charming in your innocence and your willingness to mold your needs to those of others. I find you cunning and flexible. These things are naive. In time your nature will begin to suit the creature you are becoming, and then you will bloom, and we will see what you are. Perhaps you will not be able to accept it. Perhaps you will be many creatures. Perhaps you will have many lives.

Perhaps, in the flowering of your body, and in the loss of your youth, you will find old enemies have not forgotten what you were, and wish to harm neither body nor mind, but the flower of your love, and take from you your comfort, which is most precious in the world for us. I speak of another who came from the darkness, and found no contentment in harming my person, at cutting me open, mind and belly. He, who I could in no way placate. My dear, I have deserved my fate many times, and I have lived long enough to meet fate face to face more than once. Did I deserve what has been taken from me? Have I? I do not wonder it much, what is the use of it? But I ask it of the Fates. Is this what is due me? To pay for an old sin with all I had in the world? But what do I know of fairness, who is old and blind, who is tired?

I will tell you about the boy I knew in Etruria, who grew old in his young body, and came for me many evenings, and waited for my weakened child to show himself, so that he could gut my beautiful Escha like a bleeding pig. He was a former steward, a slave. Yes. I laid table for two hundred boys eight hundred years before Herculaneum, among the Etruscans. That boy who killed my child's name was Lecne then. He came to me a silent youth, twenty, tongue cut out, with his young son. I took him in and trained him to work for me well.

I will tell you that I was a mad and thirsting creature then, who did not know his own mind, or understand his wants. They called me "Raske" and I moved as fluid with the heat, a snake of gold and silks and coolness. Raske wanted the young child, I did, for its own, and Lecne would not give him up. He would look at me, in my bed, with his black eyes, hard and fearful. Shall I tell you the full horror of what I did? Of mutilating Lecne further? Of drinking the blood of his child and breaking its body? Of making it like me and destroying it to torture Lecne? Have I not told you that I have done things I must forget? What is this look, compassion? Is it the tone of my voice or that you have had my blood now and are as a slave to my body? Close your eyes. I am no Raske, but I betray nothing in telling you that when they say I am a snake, they are not wrong. You are swayed by my sadness. You are weak.