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

Part 14, 1960 - I Want Him

When Nataniellus came home, the first time after returning to the master, he looked tired. He came through the door without knocking, dragging his fingers through his short hair and checking the tightness of the skin of his jaw out of nervous habit. We were already living in Brighton in those tense times before the war. In those days it was a dying place, no longer the resort it had been, and not yet the city it would be.  

"Veni huc," I said to him. Come here.

He turned his head, and only his head, like an owl. His eyes reflected the light of the window, in the dark. 

"What did you find?" 

"Speak up," he said.

"Are you going to wash up?" 

"He was there, Iovita. In California."

Is that what Leechtin smelled like? From my chair, by the kitchen table, I could smell on his skin a stranger, someone who smelled like pollen, grass. We so much smell like the places we return to. Mingled with this, someone who smelled like me, of coal fire, cigarettes, sea salt. 

"Let's have a bath," I said.

"Nonus is here. What is he doing?" 

"Sleeping by Aulus. Come on upstairs, Mr. Porter."

It had been by then, maybe near a century that he had really been looking for Leechtin, ever since things had worsened with Aulus. We did not think that Aulus could be saved, but Nataniellus had got in him an instinct, like a pig, to follow a trail. If I asked him why, he would say, "I don't know. I don't know. Do you not want this?" And for a long time, I did not know what to say. I looked at Aulus, at Nonus, and I wondered what we would gain by seeking Leechtin now. 

But I think in the end, I was not used to feeling nervous in the way thinking of Leechtin made me feel. I was not used to feeling so uncertain. For so many years, though so much around us had changed, we had all remained largely the same. Though we'd had rough moments between us, and short stretches apart, in the face of time, we had all understood each other and functioned well. It had also been, for so many of our years, a violent existence, and other vampires nearly invariably threatening. The 1840s were largely years of revolution and upheaval on the Continent, and with that came the usual explosion in our population, just as tearing away a moldering wall reveals cockroaches. But as well, war brings with it famine and disease, which are both effective at cutting blood-drinkers down. The ones who survive in such years, the younger ones, emerge vicious, broken, and sneaking. They lose what they have been hanging onto. It is a matter of numbers. We had the numbers. And by the 1840s, and for a long time before that, we had the years. In many ways, we were as secure as we could be. When I thought of what we might risk, not knowing how it would be, I felt a pain in my chest, on the left, a burning. It was far riskier to seek outside ourselves than in.

So we cannot say that it was for protection that Nataniellus sought Leechtin. Was it for comfort? Not long before he told me he was off to look, we had woken to find Aulus, our great care, with his left pupil blown, the brown iris around it narrowed nearly to nothing. After he had gone still, after he was made, he had at least seemed to know what was going on around him, and if touched, would sometimes respond. Those times had become fewer and fewer, his facial expressions gone. We did not abandon him. Something had gone wrong in his making, and continued to go badly afterward, and yet he was still ours. In so many ways, in Herculaneum after Leechtin left, and in Misenum for the nearly two decades we lived there, Aulus had kept us alive. He had a level head and a steady judgment that inspired me to imitation. But for all of our years, we expected him to die.

I can only say, then, that Nataniellus did it for himself, looking for Leechtin, something for himself alone. 

In the beginning, in Misenum, we had all hoped that the master would return. At that time, waiting for him meant a return to order, to certainty, and to safety. As the years went by, and then the decades, Nataniellus grew angry, resentful. This turned to despair, then nostalgic sadness, then silence. Until he told me he would seek Leechtin, I had rarely heard him speak about him. He, suddenly it seemed to me, wanted to talk about Herculaneum, and we did, living in Calais until unrest on the Continent caused us to cross the Channel. We had always moved in the direction of peaceable tension, where people were desperate but not violent. We settled in the North, in Yorkshire. And Nataniellus from then on was sometimes away, hearing this or that from young vampires terrified of this place or that place. They were happy to tell him whatever they knew, for the chance that he would let them live. But a spider never looses a fat wasp once it is caught.