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

Chapter 1, Part 1 - Dasius, 1921

Ch. 1 - Dasius, 1921

On May 5th, 1921, I went to Selfridges department store on Oxford street, and I bought a tube of pale lipstick, which cost me twelve pence. The day was overcast, and I didn't stay long, because it was getting late and I knew that I should get home.

In the back of a hackney cab, I played with the brass screw on the side of the tube but didn't open it, because it wasn't for me. It wasn't as if it had been asked for, or wanted, but he was so much on my mind, I couldn't pass it by. It had been a long few years in England, and because we were leaving soon, I had wanted to get him something new to try. He had been down ever since we left Marseille, in June of 1912, and I thought of nothing else but his melancholy then.

In nine years, Laurent had left the house maybe five times. It would not be an exaggeration to say it was the war that destroyed him. You, the younger ones, knew him as something of a shell, but I have photographs. Don't think he had always been like that. You think of me, I know, as something pathetic, some sick shadow of a sick shadow, but I have not always been like this. We had lived between France and Germany for four hundred beautiful years, since 1494, accidentally safe and other times wounded. Leaving the continent ruined him, and he no longer wished to live. It would be eighty more years before he succeeded in dying, and fifty before I knew for sure that he wanted it.

But around that time, in 1921, I could only sense some feeling of dread I couldn't identify, but I don't think even he thought of it yet. The entire day I had been thinking about him, and when I finally arrived home, I found him sitting in the foyer, spread out on the bench by the hall vanity, asleep. He has never acted like he needed me, but you see? He did. His long blond hair looked matted and dirty. The curls needed to be washed and turned around my fingers. His face, his delicate features, were drawn in sleep, as if in pain. His sweet pink lips were pursed and eyes shut tightly. I felt determined to give him a bath later on, though I knew that he would try to bite me and sink his nails into any flesh he could catch.

"D," he said, hearing the door close. He tried to sit up and I saw that there was blood caked between his fingers, where he had washed his hands carelessly this morning.

I touched my tabbed collar, remembering his mouth. "L," I said.

"I fell asleep," he said, pretending to laugh, his electric blue eyes swimming in their sockets.

He couldn't see. I realized in that moment that I'd let him go blind by not replacing his eyes in too long. "Can you see?" I asked, sitting down beside him on the cushion, taking his hand so that he could sit up properly.

He pushed himself against me to get upright and I could see the muscles in his upper arm working. He wore a floral silk dressing gown, tied at the shoulder to expose his arms. I pushed his hair back from his forehead, which made him sigh. "I can see well enough. Your hair is short. You've put in too much pomade."

I put the lipstick in his hand so he could touch it, knowing him for a liar. He felt it greedily with one hand, the other touching the sharp curve of my collar. "You feel warm," he said, by my ear.

He could not see at all.

His eyes had been gouged out in 1794. He liked to go walking by the Seine at night in Paris, his city, the one he always loved the best. At that time, I hadn't known where he was born, and I thought it must have been in Paris. I didn't know how old he was. He was the only vampire I knew. It was a difficult time for us, and he often left the house in a rousing passion, slamming the door behind himself. It wasn't unusual for him to be gone until morning, to come back flushed and wild-eyed, laughing at me. He would call me whorish names and go to bed. I was his completely, and still young.