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

Ch. 10, part 1 Quinn, 1872

Before I tell you when I went there, I should tell you how I got here, which is a queer place. Very queer. I am sure you have not heard the story, not from him here sitting by me, from Leis. You see him cringing? That is how you know you have caught him in a lie of omission. Do you see how embarrassed he is? He is the only one of us who blushes. He does it very deeply. He is like a young man, living, and handsome and abashed. Look Mini in the eyes, Leis. Have you ever told anyone this story? You told Laurent. Of course you have. I'm sorry. He is too embarrassed now. Cute face. Your sunglasses are on the vanity. Go and get them, darling, and have a cigarette. 

I will tell it to you while he is gone. He will try to interrupt. He will want you to know that he has always loved me, and wanted what was best for me, and then when he came for me it was because he felt like he could no longer live without me. You have heard those sorts of things before. You are one of those French ones. Yes I know what you are like. All of your lives are very grand and emotional. I know.

I was born in London in 1751. We will go over it quickly. In those days a family had many children, and many mouths clamoring for food, and often there was not enough of it, and often it was because of fathers swilling the money away on a drink, and it was like that. We were beaten often and vigorously, for the sake of our character, and mine especially, as my father found me effeminate, and too reserved, and so at fourteen I slept with an artist affiliated with the guild, so that he would help me leave home and give me a place to sleep. I have little talent with painting, myself. I worked mostly in mixing paint. I was good at that, and especially in the grinding of white because I have good strength in my back.

I see that look in your eye. So you know what that means, to grind lead white. That guilder, he threw me out at seventeen because of the lead poisoning, because it was making me crazy, and making me scream at the dark and drink. But I grew up dark-featured, and long in the body, and long in other ways, so I found places to sleep, and the money was all right, being that there was always a need of hands and arms deft at mixing the colors well and efficiently. I could do that. I could do that in my sleep. But I had a notion in my mind of my own greatness, and that I could learn well enough to paint even though I had gained a reputation, and nobody respectable would apprentice me, and not at my age. Often, in those days my courage found me at the bottom of a glass, and so I quit mixing and took my money down the river to work in portraiture.

It would be all right, I thought, because I had money enough, and because I would prove my ability, and even though I wasn't a part of the guild the people would buy it. Even though I had lived some life by then, I thought like that. Magical thinking. I thought that even though I flirted with my models, and slept with them, and hit them when I was pissed, there would always be models. But they told, and of course like with most unsavory things, there was a network of gossip, and soon there were only the ones who worshiped me, and didn't mind to be handled roughly and beaten up afterwards, and of course those encouraged me to drink. And whenever they left me, I would throw out all of their faces, all of the paintings, which weren't very good to begin with, and especially not good enough to find me work. 

And so I was moving all over the city, always downriver, unable to afford the places where I was living. And I would love to tell you now that I noticed Leis, and wondered over someone following me from place to place, but I didn't notice him, because I was starving and crazy from port and lead white. So now is where he would interject, if he were not purposefully smoking outside on the porch. But he may not interject, since it is me telling it, and because it was not about romance, and he is full of romantic notions. It was in 1779, and when I turned around and found him in my house, he found me sober because I could not afford to drink, and because I was near the sideboard and he was an easy target, I grabbed a knife and stabbed him. 

He came into the light of my candle then, and it made me say, "I'm sorry," because he looked sad, but he took my knife out of his stomach, over his hip, and gave it back to me. For a moment, there was nothing at all, only a crying child in the flat above, and then he was upon me, and pushing me down, and I thought, "Oh, I'm dying." And that was all right for me, because by then I knew what was waiting for me in the coming years, which was poverty, and dying slowly from lead poisoning. His blood was wet against my stomach, soaking through my shirt from where I'd stabbed him. He tore open my throat. I have rarely seen him so out of control of himself again, and it was very brief, and I lay there beneath him unresisting until he stumbled to his feet and out of my house. 

I lay on the wooden floor, gazing at the beams in the ceiling. My eyes focused upon a single point. I thought, I wish that I could see the sky. I thought, I wish I had given one of my young men another try, because maybe he had loved me, and I had been too young to appreciate it, and I tried to speak to my dead mother, and tell her that I was sorry for submitting to being beaten, and turning my face away from my father's beating of her, and for leaving my siblings behind. I thought, if I could have it to do over, I don't think that I could change anything, and it made me hope that God was real, so that he could hear it and understand that I did not want to try it over again, but by then Leis had come back, and begun to pace in my room, and the room was going black patches and white strikes of silent lightning, and I followed him with my eyes, because he was praying in Latin. I thought, "And he is Godly, who has come here, and to watch me die before he robs my corpse," and it was funny to me.

He has said that he thought that I was wanting him, but I was laughing and dying, gurgling blood, when he came back and pressed his lips to my lips. He had bitten his tongue almost off to get at the blood for me. He is genuinely capable of enduring great pain when he has an objective. I admire that. And I slept the last quiet sleep of my life, because when next I woke it was in darkness, and he had locked me in his cellar.

He was living on the lowest floor of a tenement building, slightly below street level, beneath which was a vegetable cellar, and that is where I found myself, waking into screaming. When I touched my face I found it wet with blood, but I could not care much about it, because my head and body had split with a pain that I am familiar with now. And we do not go hoarse from screaming, do we? I tried to crawl up the stairs and get out, listening to a curious humming which came through the continuous, high-pitched shriek inside of me, which I could no longer tell if was inside or coming out of my mouth, and found the door locked. And he was up there, crying, and admonishing himself, and telling me that it would be all right. "It is hard for everyone. I think it is hard for all of us." I have since learned that it is not quite so hard for the rest of you. I think you will know that I know you are all afraid of me, and that you call me "Abaddon", lord of locusts, who hears inside himself the continuous tremor and hum of their wings, and that their song is all of you. And that I am hearing you all the time, and especially when the screaming comes, the shrieking of lead white, and of needing the blood, and despising you all, for castigating me. Because it is not only for me it hurts, is it? You are afraid for yourselves. 

See, and I am now unhappy, so he comes. Here comes Leis, to save you from me. Tell him how you kept me in your cellar, darling. And how you told me if it did not suit me to love you, you would kill me. Was it for my own good? Was it? Did you not have an interest? Did you not know then that you could never love me the way you wanted me to want you? Did you not know then that you would make me want you and leave me for that whore you loved until he finally died? I will not calm down! I will not! Why did you take me there, when we were happy? After almost a hundred years, when we were happy, why did you take me? Do not lie. You are lying! Do not hold me! Do not restrain me! If you are going to tell him what happened, why don't you tell him the truth? Let me tell him what I know. Be quiet? Or what? Or what! Don't cry! I have never been enough for you, have I? You would be still seeing him now if he were not dead. You are still seeing his corpse whenever I turn my back. Oh please, please, the light, please, it is terrible, Leis, what is happening? What is happening? Take me away. Turn off the light. Please, please, God help me.