Part 11 - The Night Nicky Disappeared

After that, I was not sure what I should do. But he seemed more mellow, sweeter, unburdened. We went to the theaters together around Place Pigalle, and to the opera, and the ballet, as in old times. I amused myself by wandering into the lives of old women, and by taking their jewelry, and giving it to Laurent, who would squirrel it away without looking at it. It all seemed a perfect calm, and while I had not forgiven him, things were good between us.


We often went to L'Odalisque at night, with its sickly sweet opium smell. When we didn't go there, we went to Paris's secret parties, whose existence had been whispered to us on lovers' lips. Once, I hacked Laurie's hair into a more masculine shape and we went on the train to see the cathedral at Reims, where his beloved French kings were crowned, and Laurent marvelled at it very much indeed. Later on, when he learned that it had been shelled by the Germans in the Great War, he wept for many days. But I could tell then that being at Reims made him ache for that French boy across the Channel, who had written him that letter. Though, that love affair seemed innocent now, in the face of his true history. Because I knew that once he told me that his master's return had endangered my life, our days were numbered and counting down fast. His heartbeat in my ear was as a ticking clock, reminding me that I must go.


But I stayed very long, because he had such need of me, now that I knew his secret, or what part of it he had chosen to reveal. Dasius stayed outside of our door, sitting on the floor. Most nights, I slept curled in the curve of Laurent's body, smelling his familiar smell. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine him as a child, but I couldn't. It led me into trying to imagine myself at his age, long and weathered by the world, and I couldn't do that either, which saddened me and made me melancholy. I climbed his vanity one evening and covered the mirror with one of his silk robes, unwilling to think of myself the way it showed me, diminished and small, face drawn. When I seemed beaten down, he would take me out of the house and we would walk the Seine by gaslight, which made the water glow. We would stand on the little bridges, watching the black water shudder and ripple beneath us. I thought of his young men beneath the sea, which he shouted at his master of, and I wondered what he meant. I wondered what he had seen. I wondered what his master looked like, and whether his hold over Laurie was like Laurie's over me. But I thought that it must be different, because more than anything, Laurent seemed afraid.


I thought of the rough, raw bites I had seen on his arms and neck the night Laurent had attacked my brother with the letter opener. How ripped open and cruel they seemed. For my part, when I kiss away a little blood from him, it is only a brief sting, which draws not even a gasp. But blood is quite beautiful, especially from one's master, who for us is the origin of all things. When I would finish drinking and dreaming, I would kiss his parted lips, and he would smile, as if waking from pleasant sleep. In those times, bringing pain to him was a horror to me, and I promised him it would always be so. I shied from searching his scars, which were dimples and shallow rents, but could not avoid touching them, looking at them, memorizing them. I wondered at the shape of the very small brand he had been burned with, which marked him for a runaway, but he has always hidden it beneath the facsimile of a simple mole, on the left side beneath his lip. It looks like the mark of an eyebrow pencil, sultry on his pale skin.


Occasionally during that year, I felt the presence of that strange miasma, but I knew that it wasn't his master. Rather, I deduce that it was something associated with him, far darker and beyond my understanding. Whenever it crept into my mind, I banished thoughts of it, for fear. Laurent, however, did not seem to feel it.


But it was not all so perfect as I would like to think now. I confess that I am mercurial by nature, easily tempted into violence and mad behavior. And I know that I spent some nights screaming, locked in the washroom. I know that I broke a mirror and tried to carve away my features, horrified with my body, and that Dasius found me with the glass and took it from me. I remember seeing the aftermath of his experiments on young vampires too, what terrible things he has done to understand our flesh, and that I cried to him that he was a monster, and should be destroyed. But I benefit from those things now, as much as I ache to forget them. As apology for myself, I would take my brother to the 6th arrondisement and buy him beautiful things, so that he could make himself lovely for our beloved, because Dasius has never understood that a well-dressed young man makes Laurent absolutely mad with desire. After so many hundreds of years, I cannot understand how he doesn't know that.


And then came the night when I could not control my anger, because he had taken a lover in secret, and because I hated myself for not being enough for him, and I took out my knife, which blade says "Let my blow be mortal" and stuck it in him. I try to say to myself that I was wrong, that to want him to myself was impossible, but cannot convince myself of it. He knew my mind, that I could not take him with a lover then, that everything I had was the idea of his need of me, that I had even poisoned him a little that year, so that that he could not go very far away. So I took my knife and stuck it between his ribs, which made him scream, and I cried that he was a liar, and nothing like what he had told me, and that I would go away.


"Don't go," he said. "Let us go out. Let it all be forgiven. You have killed my little jewel. We will forget this," as if he were drowning, trying to swim to the surface through his own blood, which bubbled past his lips. It soaked into his hair and into the bedlinen, dark and thick, polluted with the blood of his lover, whose picture I had found.


I went to his vanity, still covered, and pulled the drawer out where he kept his powders and rouges and pins and colognes. I pulled it until the delicate drawer frame cracked apart, and I threw his tin of powder blindly, so that it opened and dusted across his bedspread like lightly fallen snow. His eyes were closed. He covered his face. I hissed that he was nothing better than a whore, and that he should have died in Herculaneum, and I put my hands around his neck, trying with all my strength to take off his head, and you see that I was cruel, and why I deserved what I got next. Because in that year, I had quite forgotten the real reason he had told me his story, which was to warn me off, and when I felt arms take me around the waist, I thought it was my brother trying to break us up. And then I heard Laurent scream as a dying swan screams, in a language I didn't know, and I understood what was happening to me.


I went dizzy with fear, unable to breathe, because I knew that the creature holding me was older than any I had ever seen, and its arms were as marble cased in supple flesh. I heard its voice for the first time, "Cur non?" Its fingers dug into my tender belly, poised to spill out my insides, and I made sounds like a crying kitten, trying to find my maker's hands, so that he would see that I was sorry, and not let me die. A hand came and pulled my knife from Laurent's chest, and he breathed in a gasp; the hand holding me felt as if it were burning my flesh, because it was pinching me with its nails, ready to sink them in and push through me until I was dead.


 And then, though Laurent clawed at it and pleaded for me, it took me away.

Comment