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

7. [Nataniellus] 2003-2013, pt.2 - "What Fear Has Made"

I dream of Escha's goat. It's funny. A little boy and his goat. He gave his love to a goat that only wanted to bite him, following it with a slim stick.

They boy that I knew was petrified of chickens, but afraid of very little, otherwise. He would suck on almonds until their papery skins dissolved in his mouth. He hated the whistle grass makes, when blown on between the lips. He learned to put up my hair, patiently folding it into a white cloth. He practiced sailors' knots with his head between my knees, sitting on the floor in my room on hot days. He liked a piece of honeycomb better if he thought it a special secret, only for him. Secrets tasted good to him, if they spoke of a quiet, private love. He winked sometimes, when he was happy, as if something were in his eye.

In my dream, he sits beneath a tree and I cannot see him. In this dream, he is grown, but the goat is there, chewing in the shade. The light is like that time of day before evening, when the light becomes murky. Escha reclines, nude, his back to me. If he is peaceful I do not know it. If it is that on the other side of him, his intestines spill, I know nothing of it. I am happy to understand this dream as pleasant.

Where I am not meant to tread I do not go, what knowledge I am not meant to know I do not seek, because it is good to remain living. Where I must not trespass, I set not a foot. In the dream, I am contented to look, to gesture at the black goat who haunts him. In this dream, I know that there is no one but the two of us, and that beyond what I can see, nothing exists. A blackness, a chasm.

"I dream of Escha," I said to Leechtin, only once, because when I said this, he turned to look at me with such a look as I had never seen on him. A startle. A disgust.

I had to learn the why of it from his little dog, his Cuca, from the litter I had been meant to kill. A child saved by a child. I learned that Leechtin had been talking of dreams, casually, as if about nothing substantial.

The infant Miou-Miou picked up on the day that he died, Cuca, was twenty-three when Laurent passed, and still living at the time of writing. He slumps around the house all day, not bothering to stand up straight or assert himself in any way except that he refuses to die. He is not allowed to work for fear of upsetting the man who he insists is not his master, and is allowed into town only rarely, in case that he learns habits that cannot be untaught. He is a creature of Leechtin's only because of the void left by Laurent's death; a carefully cultivated toy too stubborn to understand what it is. And it speaks loudly. It speaks to its friend Marcello as if no one else can hear.

Cuca says to Marcello, who is pale and wan and does not listen, "Leechtin has dreams of Laurent. He thinks they are real. They are always the same dream." Because Marcello does not listen to the twittering of foolish boys, and knows that one way to be obedient to your elders is to shut out prattle you are not meant to hear, Cuca repeats it over and over. A little dog that cannot stop barking. A little dog that does not know not to tell tales on he who feeds it. What is a secret? What is it at all?

The same dream. In it, Leechtin hears the sound of washing up, of calm limbs in a bath. He pushes open the door, already half-open, as if this door were waiting for his hand. He pushes it and there is a white porcelain bathtub that he has seen somewhere else before, perhaps in Paris. There are white subway tiles on the floor and water slopped across them. He sits beside the tub, nodding with sleep. He rests his head against the lip of the tub, and he knows what is there.

He hears, "Naranj," orange, in Sanskrit. A language Escha never spoke. He does not look. It is dark. The blood in the water is nearly colorless by this light, nearly silver, as it slops over his arms, over his nodded head. He smells the blood, as if it were real. He closes his eyes so that the water will not get in. His child does not touch him, though he would welcome the touch, whether violent or gentle. His child lies there, bleeding, features obscured by the light but still knowable, and Leechtin asks Cuca, "Is it that I choose to see him this way? I do not know if he is hostile toward me, or indifferent. I feel that it is real but it is always the same. If he would only touch me, I would live there in the dream, and instead when I wake I am already speaking, strange things, to help me. But Saumana," he says to Cuca, his private name for the boy, "it is too much for you to hear. Go and have some snack for your hunger."