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

Part 11 - God, if He is there.

Oh, should I tell you what he says to me? That boy. I'll tell you. When he is angry, this boy in my life, he says, "D, D," from the doorway. "D." He is like the buzzing of a trapped wasp, insistent, always in my ear wherever he is in the house. He says that he wants intimacy, that it is my body, my voice, my head he wants to hold, but I am telling you that he wants my blood. Intimacy! It is a fine thing, have no doubt, but he says it in the service of a lie, and I want to shake him, and throw up my hands, and tell him, "Have you ever for one moment, in your life, thought of anything higher than your body?" but I know that he hasn't. When he was a young man, I envied him his simplicity, his young willfulness and lustiness, how of the moment he seemed to be. But he says that the scratching of my pen drives him mad, and that when he is mad it is only blood for him, and come to bed and cease it. What rows!

And here I am only thinking to write to you, for what? And when he calms himself down, he comes to me and says, "I'm sorry, forgive me. I know how you feel about this project." As if he could know anything! "You are too harsh to me," he says, when I go too far. Perhaps that is so. God knows. I am capable of it. How he can cry. That I could cry like that. How good he feels, afterwards, and very settled and too tired to be angry anymore. There he is now, in our bed behind me, sleeping from a long cry. Would L be pleased to know how well I suffer from torment in his absence? I am sure that he would tell me I have earned it on my own, and perhaps I have. Perhaps that dead sucking of love is the second face of Janus, but he is beautiful to me.

I sit alone, with my eyes closed, and I think of my young man, who like Leis still breathes, but only because he refuses to give it up, and so while he sleeps there is that continuous in and out of breathing, easy and deep with slumber. And I wish that I had not made him like us so soon, because I would that I could have seen him older, and what sort of man he would have made, shaped by the mortal peril of human life, that torturous inevitability of death, rather than the present threat of it in ours. They do not seem to live long do they? Most of the young ones. When faced with immortality, as far as we know, how they seem to die so soon, like paper suddenly burnt up into black wisps, only to float away on breezes so faint they cannot even be felt, and yet the ash is directed by them. Where do these little breezes, these notions of dying come from? Little reasons, unknown to anyone but the dying, and perhaps God, if he is there.

And so I thought it would be with Leis, and wanted it off and on, depending on the day, the hour, the moment. How easily he could die, and yet he did not die. How easily some little notion of death, as have afflicted us all, could have intruded upon him, and lifted his spirit up and away from that body, and yet he stayed. And I wonder if it was because in madness it is only blood, like with my M, and the creature that is vampire stayed in the body because it was mad with poison, and thirsted for us. Certainly, whenever I entered the room, its blue eyes followed me, with no more soul than a painting what eyes do the same.

It was a pattern. If he was docile, gentled and wondering, we washed him first. If he was violent, and screaming, and biting, we bled him first.

Whenever he slept, that then was the worst, because when most we expected him to be at peace he was in the most torment, crying and screaming as if even in sleep he could feel pain. And when he slept he was most like himself, and I took Laurent in my arms, who would try to go in and hold onto him, and Laurent would beat on me and abjure me, "Can't you hear him? Is it you who knows nothing about comforting the tortured? Let me go to him," and cry. "Maybe he is back, dove, please, I cannot listen to it," but if he woke there hid disaster in it, in letting Laurent into the bed of a sleeping creature, who one couldn't know who it would be when it woke up. And perhaps more than anything, these two faces, of tranquility and animal violence were the most damaging.

At one moment all felt of a peace, and that perhaps he would come back to himself, a gentle spirit, like an ethereal child wondering at us and our treatment of it, and in a snap, he would have my Laurent in his arms, a vise-grip I could do little to break, biting until I could pry his arms apart, and bind him. "Listen, can't you hear how he suffers? Dasius, let me go to him." I could hear.