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.

It was January 31st, and cold. I was cleaning metal instruments in the small washroom off of my study. Cadavers were not hard to get then, because of the Terror, and in those days I often took advantage of that, learning medical science through trial and error. My hands had gone red and chapped in the cold water, and when I took the deep basin behind the house to slop it out, it occurred to me that it must be around six and he had not come home yet. The old dead leaves on the trees were beginning to turn red in the pale light of morning. Though it was mostly darkness, I was young, and being outside hurt me like the flicking of a rubber band against raw skin.

I went into the house to see if he was there, if I had somehow missed him, but he wasn't. His bed was empty and the wash basin on his dresser was dry.

Though the light has never hurt him much, he has always hated daylight, preferring to sleep through it into evening, which is easier on our eyes. There is too much to see in the full light of day, which he has complained to me many times. So it was terribly unusual for him to be gone so long, even after a particularly frightening invective, and I found a coat to take to him, hoping to find him somewhere by the river. We were always having terrible fights in those days, and our passions so often up.

As I walked, the ripped up cobblestones of our poor neighborhood became the packed, stony dirt of the area near Pigalle, and I did not find him. I visited many of the little places he haunted then, the little cafes and glorified alleyways which became seedy bordellos by night, but he was nowhere, and as I headed home, I was hating him.

Why did he do this? I thought, beginning in that time after so many years at his side, to desire rebellion. The previous night he had taken a slim hatpin and threatened me with it, kissing my neck and drawing it up the soft flesh of my forearm. He had paused at my inner elbow, poised to plunge it into the thick vein there. "If I did this, what would you say?" he asked me, the laugh in his voice, ready to bubble out. "If I did this, what would you call me?"

I refused to respond to threats, but I found his lips near mine, as if he could steal the quickened breaths which betrayed my fear of pain. And he stayed there for some ten minutes, hand frozen around the long, evil pin, listening to me.

"Poor D," he said, letting the pin go loose in his fingers, holding it by its little amber jewel. "Look, it's nothing."

When I continued to be silent his eyes turned cold.

"You do it to spite me, all the time, being so silent," he whispered, violence in his tone. And that's when he had taken me hard by the wrist and pulled me into my study to my metal table and drawn hateful words into me, stabbing me with the pin until he could get me to say that I hated him, which was both true and untrue. He'd gone out, stiff and silent in his demode heels and dark frock coat.

He was angry at the French. He was powerful with anger in that time. He was angry at them for what they had done to his beloved ancien regime, and it made him passionate and cold. I had known him already for three centuries, but he had never been crazy or foolish until then. During the revolution he had refused to leave. And when the tide began to turn against the Jacobins, it had made him so happy for a time that he had forgotten to be angry at me for being boring. It was dangerous to dress the way he did, but he has always cared about principles. He wore a red silk thread of ribbon around his neck, like the young aristocrats. I worried that he had been accosted by some young man and hurt.

When I found him he was so close to home it stabbed my heart. I went to my knees beside him in the alley, trying to pull his arms away from his face, because I was worried he would hurt his eyes with his wrists. I was confused because there was so much blood on his face and in his hair but no body, and he was gasping but I couldn't make out that the words were "The little knife the little knife" until he pushed me away and I saw the wreckage behind his arms. "D," he said, "D," and my head swam from the light and the shock. He cried and covered his head while I put his coat over him, taking the old one from his shoulders and throwing it away.

When I had him on his feet he told me that he had met a young man in an unusual place and walked for a long time with him, enjoying the evening breeze, but that when he had tried to kiss the boy the knife had come so quickly he hadn't even seen it.

"It went into my left eye first," he said, holding onto my body, "and he twisted it. He said that if I wouldn't give him money he would do it again." Before he could respond, it had all gone darkness and blood. "It seems so familiar, like I know this story," L whispered, "like I've seen this before. When? When?"

"Be quiet now. You're shocked."

At home I pressed him to the floor and dosed him with arsenic against his will. It was easy because he was afraid, and I took the eyes from the dead man L had knocked off my surgery table while he was earlier stabbing me with the pin. And I sewed them into his face.

Blue eyes, the wrong color. Ugly, petty revenge.