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

Part 5 - Love is Lured with Kind Words

Laurent sat by the casket for many hours. When it came dark enough to open the lid, he pushed it up on his own, and it surprised me that he didn't want to talk about Aulus to us. After a little while, Nonus could not resist going to sit beside Laurent, so that he could be with Aulus in the dark. Even then, Laurent did not speak to Nonus, his chin on the lip of the casket and hair pushed up into a now familiar bun on his head. 

I stood still awhile and watched them sitting together, from the hallway. To be honest, it had not been my prerogative to ever look for Escha, or to want him. I suppose that for many years, when I was younger, I felt angry about him. In Misenum, when I thought of Faya, Escha to me felt an obstacle, proof perhaps that Faya had abandoned us pointedly, and me most of all. I slept alone though the children told me I could join them. We had one room, and a straw mattress, but I could not stand to sleep in a soft place because it made the fever dreams I had dreamed in Faya's bed come back to me. 

We'd had a few months after my making, and in his bed I had so often dreamed of him warm in my arms, as if he were living, and dark-skinned, and breathing. He had told me finally that he had come from Assyria, and my dreaming mind made him Persian flesh, and I would wake searching for him with my arms. In Misenum, I slept against the wall if sleep took me, but Iovita is right to doubt that I slept much for fear of intruders. Sometimes I stayed up wondering what I would have done if Faya had taken me instead, and left the children. Though I knew I would not have given their lives for it, it was easy to blame Escha for our suffering, and I did. I pitied him because I could not hate a child, that Escha had been too weak to leave behind, that Faya had taken him only because he would have died on the road to Misenum, for it would have been inevitable that we would leave the house. I thought of him and sat up at night in horror of myself and of the sweet boy I hoped would die so that Faya would come and look for us.

For a long time, I imagined he would come. In my spirit, I knew that he wouldn't. His leaving had been too clean. He had taken nothing but Escha, and silently. Still, I had kept the children in the house as long as I could in denial. Why would he take me from the brothel, and keep me alive as he had done only to leave me? In my spirit I knew the truth, and did not need it confirmed those many years later, that Faya loved Escha, and that his love had made him weak, that he had not meant to take anything. 

And look at Escha now, I thought, sitting in his muslin sheath, so like the tunic of slaves in Herculaneum, and just a man. I struggled with it even then, wondering what it was about Escha that had kept him alive for so long. Instinctively, I disliked him for his charm. Charm does not make a man, as it is a mask cultivated to hide his true nature. I made a soft sound, and Nonus did not look up.

"Red, come away with me," Iovita whispered, coming along quietly and slipping his arm around my waist.

I put my foot down meaningfully and refused to be moved.

"You've been set up here hours," he said, soothing me.

"I want to be with my children."

"Leave Escha alone. He's out of sorts."

He tried to push me but he couldn't.

"Pretend I'm master and do what I say. You're obsessing," he said, and I yielded.

While I slept and dreamed of Misenum, Escha told Nonus about what had been happening to him in California. In the little hour before daybreak, which we can feel in the little bones of our fingers, Nonus came into my room where I was sitting in a fabric chair making macrame. He sat down on the arm of my chair, and I wanted him to tip himself and lie upon me, but he had been hesitant to do that lately. I think that he was too preoccupied with worry that Aulus might pass, too afraid to touch anyone else for fear that if he relaxed his Aulus would die. He could be compelled to do so if the situation called for it, but had long stopped volunteering his touch without cause.