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

Part 12 - Please, that you must live

Then, one morning, while I was washing his feet, I heard a small fearful taking in of breath, and when I looked up, kitten was looking at me as if he knew me, blue eyes wide and soft lips parted.

"Laurent," I said quietly, holding onto Leis's foot.

Laurent was sitting at my desk, flipping through one of the books. He made a nonverbal noise of acknowledgement, absorbed. I imagined that his legs were crossed at the ankles, and that he licked his fingers to turn the pages.

"Will you come in, darling?" I asked. 

"Help me, dove, if you want to," he said. 

I went to Laurent's side, and he put his arm over my shoulder so that I could help him cross the short distance to Leis's bed. It was much darker in that room, because Laurent insisted on low light or no light at all in case of harming vulnerable eyes, but it was enough to see by. In a moment, I could see that Laurent saw what I had seen, that Leis knew us, that he seemed lucid. I felt Laurent's hand on my abdomen, low, pushing me gently backwards. I stepped back. 

"Pet, is it you?" Laurent asked, not for the first time. 

Leis had seemed a little better over the past few days, maybe three days, not crying as much, quieter, smiling occasionally in his sleep. He looked now to his left hand, which was tied as fast as his right to the bedpost.

"Can we untie him, dove?" Laurent asked, deferring to me. 

I thought that it would be all right. We had been caring for him for weeks. Perhaps I just wanted for things to be different in some way, for progress to be made. It had started to feel like we would be this way, nursing him, forever, in the dark. I knew that Laurent felt the same, that he had begun to hallucinate, that he had begun to fight me when I tried to make him stop bleeding himself. I was tired of the misery of it, how misery seemed to have become our neutral state. I remembered how things used to be, and felt that we were living in limbo, unsure if kitten would live or die. I had grown tired, and careless. "I think that it is worth trying," I said. 

I reached for Leis's hand, for the leather thong binding him to the bedpost, and he shrunk from me. This seemed further proof of lucidity. 

I think now, about what you said, Mini, about this being for the children. I wonder if you know how Marcellus and the other younger ones would feel about this. I wonder it genuinely. I don't know. They seem so selfish to me, and unfeeling, and I suppose very like you. Not to say that I am not selfish myself. I know that I have been. But do you know what he says to me when I tell him the import of what I write? He says, "Didi," in that annoying tone he has, that tone, "why do you only write terrible things? Who wants to remember all those bad things? I like it when you're funny." And he makes me sit and wonder it myself. I tell him, "But we are writing about him dying." And he says, "Well I suppose that's alright then. To talk about him dying." 

Are there other reasons? Will you tell me them? Sometimes, because it is so terrible I forget. You said, "So we won't forget about them." But how could I ever forget about them? My darling, I still hear him at night. Will I tell you that when I dream of kitten, it is only this terrible one I dream about? Who is so unlike the one we know, and who yet still harbors a horror of himself, as if he, so soft and gentle, could ever be that way again. So why should I remember Leis like that, and write it down?

I let Laurent unbind him, and the pretty thing said, "Come near," extending his now free hand, and I backed to the curtain, into the dark, and drew it over myself, so that he would not see me well, but that I would be close. I pulled the fabric taut, obscuring half of my face in its shadow. 

I had brushed Laurent's shorter hair into a neat side part, letting it curl, and Leis's hand went into this, clutching him gently, as a lover. And his lips to Laurent's ear, speaking softly, and a kiss of that ear, which I turned away from, towards the dark avenue outside, distorted by the glass. There was a sliver of moon hanging there, and the thickness of the glass gave it a large and hazy halo, which I looked at for some time, trying not to listen to the soft and happy sounds of relief, and pleasure, which did not include me.