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

Part 13 - Unraveling

And so, as has tended to happen, a routine developed in my life, though I remember it now as emotional. I should say, of course that it was. I have mentioned to you already the way that he could look. He glowed with the fever of death, Laurent, incandescent against the golden covers in the dark. His skin felt so cool against mine that it seemed hot. I have never known one of us, unless in great distress, to sweat in any way. Rarely is physical distress enough. He was not only despaired, but enraged, struggling. For me, the one in the other room was beyond my concern. Leis for me was barely more than my own heartbeat, expected, essential, yet ignored.

I have never understood the terrible power of love well. Perhaps I have intimated to you that I do now in some way. I do not. I could not even say to him, "Let that other die and let us go away" because it was impossible for me to say that. Perhaps Laurent would not have heard it in any case. He was busy with the nasty things inside of his head. The arrows shot at him by his lover clung to his mind like sucking leeches, drawing away from him his spirit. He clung to me, babbling, soft palms, sharp fingernails. 

"Come to me, dark one, come," he moaned, unseeing, mad from the torment and the inability to bleed. "Touch me." And I was not accustomed to his neediness at that time.

In the years following, I would learn to give him the things he wanted without offering him my body. A sense of wholeness, of fullness, to help forget how alone he had begun to feel. He had become occupied with his own body, and how he used it. I would catch him on the second floor, pale shadow, investigating his lean muscles, moles, the turn of his back in the one mirror he kept up there. 

Perhaps I do badly in blaming love. I would do badly also to blame vanity. I will tell you what I believe, and it's that he thought of himself as old, and used up, and wanted Leis because it made him feel different, and I think that even as I say that, it is a false notion, or not enough. I have also told you that I have always been badly at explaining him, or defending him. 

I am poorly these days. I am much consumed with thinking of him, and Leis has been here, and I see that he is poor condition as well. He says that you have been calling him, and he goes with Nicky to church, and I don't know what they talk about. He must be very pressed indeed to seek me out for an ear. He does better with Nicky, who has always liked him, though I don't know why. With Nicky, there are always reasons, and it is never very often that I know them. And Nicky comes to me at night, shouting Marcellus down and out of bed, so that Nicky may lie with me, and ask me to treat him as if he were like his age, and forget about before. 

But it is hard to forget when I am writing to you about it all of the time, though we are near an end here, aren't we? And if I have let Nicky write a little of it, since you have admitted an inability to fulfill your end of our bargain, that is reasonable, isn't it? You will agree I think, that it must be. Oh what is it that you are after? You are after news of Laurent, aren't you? And didn't Nicky know him far more deeply than I did? Or you will not think so, since you feel that Nicky is psychotic and not in control of his impulses. But Nicky is far more in control of himself than you or I, or is that too alien to you? 

Can you not even make out the difference in writing? Between our hands? When you see this close, careful hand, do you not know it is Nicky? Does Dasius not write in a rush, as if the cold breeze of death is breathing into his ear? So like a fool! When you profess to want to be bosom friends in letters that you keep writing, Miriam, as if you do not realize that it has been the two of us. The things you say about me. Oh I will be a good scrivener! Let us return to what D is saying behind me, remonstrating about kicking his lover out of bed. But I will do that! Old shoe. The boy, his lover, has lost all of the fire he had when living. D says, "What are you writing so furiously?" I say, if he will tear away the curtain then why should I not speak directly to you? and he says that it is not a matter of charade but one of manners. So do we talk of breeding? Are we not both sons of whores and raised up by the same hand? And loved well and the same? But he seems so tired that I shall bend. He is always so tired this time of year. The seasons change. The bitch is unraveling.