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

Dasius, Part 5 - The Language of Pain

Whenever Marcellus slept, I left the house for my office. I'd had that office for many years in Boston, and sleep did not find me much in those days. After close of day, after watching television into the night with my new interest, we would go to bed, and already it was a good routine, nice for everything concerning my head and heart. The early 1980s, while fraught with emotional complications, were good for us financially after a decade or so of stagnation, and I would go into the office to monitor the numbers and make small adjustments. There didn't seem much need for heavy-lifting, but rather to make certain of our liaisons and maintain our connections in the world of the living. So often I spent most of the time making phonecalls both domestic and overseas. 

When first Nicolas crept into my office, I did not see him. I had a small glass magnifier, and had pressed my face against it and the desk to look at the little marks on a check I suspected counterfeit. He has a talent for entering rooms absolutely soundlessly, for pushing open a door so slowly that the movement fails to attract the eye. This he had done, and flattening himself, crept under the other side of my desk. 

We never say spider or ghost of Nicky. He is only himself, an old and separate creature worthy of his own designation, for there are no others like him. But he has surprised me so many times that I am no longer surprised. At the sound of his voice, my blood warms rather than runs cold. When I feel a foreign and unexpected touch, it is my brain stem that understands it will be him before it tells the rest of me.

"What are you doing?" I heard, from beneath my desk, and felt a touch on the bare skin of my ankle as he lifted my pant cuff. His hand does never feel cold, as we are of a temperature. 

I pushed back my chair a little so that he could climb into my lap. He did, refusing my help. His deep brown eyes were wide with excitement, his occasionally unhealthy color vanished. I brushed back brown curls from his high forehead and kissed him at his hairline. 

"What evil are you doing?" he asked me, picking up my glass magnifier and looking at me through it.

"God be good it will be nice to see your smile."

He gave me one, a friendly smile with all of his teeth. He pressed his face to my neck. "I am lonely though. Laurent goes to Europe without me."

"If it please you, give him a little time. You have been mad awhile."

"I am still a little mad," he murmured. "Do you think I mean to do such things as hurting his person? I do not mean to do it."

"How are you feeling?"

"Lucid. D, I cannot apologize for what I do, truly. I cannot be any other than myself, and sometimes there is more or less of the man I wish to be. May I have your glass object?" 

"May I see what you have?" 

He showed me that he still had the magnifier.

"Take it, magpie. I will get another."

"How I would like to be with you more often. You treat me with respect," he said, that familiar gravel in his voice, turning the glass over in his hands. 

I sat back, pleased with his familiar weight against me.

"So tell me now why you close your curtains on Beacon Hill," he said. "You wouldn't keep a secret?"

I hadn't known what he had been doing to our Laurent until it was over, for Laurent so hides his wounds completely. They had both kept the abuse from me, and I had only found out from Nicky in a moment of painful pique. He had visited me from California in New York in 1968, had come to me begging opiates for Laurent, with whom he sought to make amends. It was only then I had demanded for what, and found out about the violence in terrible detail. One cannot forgive Nicky, and one cannot ever say that he is sorry for what he has done. He does only ever what he sees as necessary at the time, and as I cannot speak for Laurent I cannot speak for him either. It is not in my power to excuse it, and there is no use trying.