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

Part 3 - All Words

I had been forbidden from looking in on Leis, and so while the house was empty but for us, I often lay on the sitting room floor. It was cool there, under the high ceiling in the dark, and as spring began to warm, the heat grew hard to bear. Fortunately for the young one, the temperature stole his consciousness from him, and so he did not suffer under the early heat waves of that month. With the curtains drawn and the windows shut, the air fairly shimmered. I thought, if it is very hot, and he sleeps, let me pick myself up off the floor and have a look at him, and so I did that.

I thought, who is L to tell me where and how I may look? I whispered to myself, over and over, brushing my hair and brushing it again, I do not look to like, only look, and so I should do as I desire. The thought would not leave me. I do not look on him for love, let me look. What will he know about it? So when it was very hot, though I had been forbidden it, I crept to the door of his room as often as I could, and looked in.

That yellow room had been Nicky's, and a far better room than mine. It was all gold damask and papered walls, and the window glass unmarked by the blower's pipe. The light in my grey room was murky with that cheaper glass, and though I liked that well enough, Nicky had liked to look out, and when that house was fitted, Laurent could not give Nicky enough, and so the room cost a small fortune to kit. Nicky returned to that room only a few times after Leis was made, and unlike himself, he never said a word about the love affair then, only leaving in the night and disappearing. It hurt me, what emotions I could spare, that he had not tried to take me with him as the other times, and I wondered what I had done to offend him. But these are not useful ruminations to have, and he does not like to talk about those times. Still, I worry about his disappearing again. Why do I write so? What use is it to write this?

Confound you. I do not fear a pen. I stuck my head into that yellow room, door cracked only enough to allow the gap, and observed Leis in the dimness. That there was so unlike the boy I had first spied in the Tuileries. Laurent had washed his hair and scrubbed his skin very patiently, and beneath it he was as pale as milk and yellow blond. The curl of his hair was somewhat loose, and with all of the mats cut out of it, long enough to reach the small of his back. I marveled at him, at the fine line of his strong features, the prominent aquiline nose and small, full lips, the high cheekbones and straightness of his brow. I had not taken him for beautiful, but only for tall and gentle, and I stopped breathing in those times, because when I would try to draw breath in the heated air, it would choke me. I thought that I should never have looked, but kept the picture in my head of him that I knew, because I thought "he is too beautiful for the likes of me" and it hurt me deeply. I carried on as if a man stabbed, crying quietly at my failings, but I could not stop my looking. I am weak by nature. Without Nicky, I was very alone.

But the heat did not last, and as the days cooled off, Laurent came home more often in the early evening to see to Leis, who had become restive. I think that Laurent thought my agony some child's trifle, something to stroke me over and coo about, and while I will not castigate him for it, he did not realize the severity or depth of my disturbance, and the evening in which injury came to me would not have damaged us so deeply had he looked beyond his own nose and seen me as I was.

I had no right to that boy. Though I had followed him long, and knew all of his patterns, and soft gestures, and had memorized the tilt of his head, I had never known him, and any possibility of it had fled at what I had done, and if I had not thought then that God had abandoned me long ago, I would have sought forgiveness at His hand, but there was no forgiving what I had done, and so when I turned in the hall and Leis was there looking upon me, I did nothing to stop it.

I should say that it was a blur, but I remember every moment in detail. I had dressed to go out in dark frock coat and cravat, and had paused only to take a wide brimmed hat from the table at hand. When I turned at the sound of soft footsteps, there he was on Laurent's arm, and the expression on L's face at finding me there was very sour indeed, though nothing at all as compared to the naked fury and witless madness contorting Leis's features beside him. Leis is taller than both of us, and stronger than I was when living, and when he bowled into me, it was like being hit by a kicking charger. He slammed me backwards against the door, which was enough to break blood from my liver and expel it past my lips. He dragged me to the floor with ripping fingers, slashing at my face, and biting at my neck with such ferocious strength that when he tore the linen cravat, he tore the flesh beneath it as well, and wherever that mouth was, pieces of me came away with it. The pain was the pain of being taken apart, and what perhaps lasted half a minute seemed drawn over ten.