He fought with himself, holding it. It was slippery in his hands, wet, sticky, warm. He stared at it, the heart, looked back at the corpse, looked back at the heart, looked back at the corpse. Was I stupid, he thought, to think that it would not be easy to take it? And now what should I do with it?

It's mine, he thought, it belongs to me. Who else would it belong to? He loved me. Me. It's mine.

He thought of eating it, but could not lift his arms to do it. He sat on the floor and bent over his crossed legs, Indian style, moaning moans without sound and holding it to his chest with both hands.

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Far away long ago there was Laurent and there was Leechtin and life was easier, or it seemed easier, and people loved each other and didn't think too much about stupid s**t and did what they felt like. Good times rolled. You really couldn't ask for a better century.

It was hard too then, but it wasn’t as difficult. There weren’t as many people in the family. There weren’t as many bright lights out on the street at night. You had to watch out for gendarmes and the police in general but there was more roaming to do; a relaxing life, for sure.

There was a lot of love, and it was complicated love, but no one really was hurting each other then, not like when Mariciello loved Laurent. It became more difficult as the family grew larger, and at the same time, more lonely, more wary. The world became more dangerous for nonpersons, for ghosts who come out at night to steal away the living for their own purpose.

Is a vampire a ghost? Maybe. Individuals might say different things about it. Is a creature with no living identity in the world a ghost? What makes us dead? I don’t really know. Some might say that I am more dead than most, but I do not think that I am dead. My body lies in the mausoleum, that’s true. I cannot speak except in quiet moments, when no one is listening. I have spoken through dreams and without words, and have been heard by some but dismissed by many. My body does not decay; my heart is in a jar. It is not in Marcellus’s stomach, like many believe.

It is only now that I am “dead” that I have let truths sink into me that I could not believe when I was living. Perhaps living then itself is the illusion. Perhaps living is the ability to believe what you wish to believe. Perhaps being dead is refusing to believe, or not being able to believe, or not caring about deluding yourself. I feel more for Mariciello now that I am dead because he loved me, but I do not know what I would do with that knowledge if I were more alive for him, or if I would be able to care that I have hurt many people in the past. It is important to be remorseless when what you do in your life is kill people.
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I sat in the tomb with his cracked, starred body. I couldn’t touch it. No one had laid him straight again after all these years. Maybe no one else wants to touch him. His chest gaped where Mariciello had ripped into it, digging with his fingers and his fingernails to get Laurent’s heart, and he got it, and I held the jar with his heart in my hands, embracing it with my small frame.

You saved my life by trapping me in this body as a child, and perhaps I might save yours by putting this heart back where it belongs. But would you want me to do so? Some people say that you speak to them, in their dreams. Leis told me that you are not dead. That you are alive; that you come to him. You came to the one who made you, to Leechtin, who loved you better than everyone else. You tortured him with dreams. You have comforted Leis. You have not spoken to me. I don’t care why. I never loved you like them. But I loved you.

I set the bell jar on the ground. I had kept it in my room after Mariciello, who they call Marie, had given it to me. He never said anything about it, just put it in my arms and walked away. I had not spoken. I had been shocked by it, shocked by it as I have never been shocked by anything in my life. I did not want it for a time, did not want to look at it. But I feel that it belongs to me more than it belongs to any other one of them, them being the “family” that has been built that is “coven” to anyone else but it is a strange world, this coven, where blood is more than connection, not arbitrary. I do not think that it should be the case.

My opinion does not matter, I suppose. I am not really one of them. No one dreams of me. No one calls my name with longing. I am alone. There is the man who believes he cares for me, who holds me in his arms and goes with me where I go, and perhaps he loves me, but I am always alone.

“You knew him,” I said to the corpse, “He was your Tomcat. Aphesis. You tried to take him from me. Was it a game to you? What did you want then? I don’t care.”

I got up and moved close so I could see his face. I stared into his staring blue eyes. They were glassy. I wondered why no one had closed his eyes. I sighed and made some small ministrations, lifting his arm back onto the cold stone slab, straightening his white robe, tightening the gold belt rope, pulling it more closed over his gaping chest. I went to his feet and took off his sandals, putting them on the wet floor. I climbed up on his chest then, sitting on my heels, looking into his face.

I miss you. Can you come back so I can be with you? I’m sorry about everything I did to torture you. It wasn’t your fault that you wanted me when I was small. It was different. We were different. I don’t blame you. Come back.

They’re not as real as you were, the rest of the family. You suffered. These synthetic voices they tell me how it’s better that you’re dead. It’s what you wanted, they say. I think you wanted to disappear but I loved you I loved you how could you disappear when I needed you? You know I’ve never been like them. They’re all happy with these little stupid things like talking to each other and infighting because they’re bored. They’re bored they’re boring and with you I knew that you were really thinking about me even if you were crying, I knew you were crying because I was hurting you. You saw me when I was looking at you. You thought about me, and you remembered everything.

Do you remember when you made Miriam? Do you remember how much I hated him? I never talked to you about it, but I understood that you loved him and I was jealous. I think you knew that when you were alive, that I was jealous of Miriam because you loved him in a way that no one would ever love me. You trapped me in this body that nobody can love like that. I didn’t know that then, I was too young, that no one would ever love me the way you loved Miriam. I just want to lie in your arms and listen to you talk to me. I have never been so peaceful than when it felt like you only loved me. I let myself believe it when you held me in your arms, even though I know that you loved so many people.

I shivered with longing, pressing my hands to my closed eyes, remembering how he would kiss my cheeks and I could smell his hair when he did that. It felt weak to be with him in his tomb, so filled with longing for a time that I cannot have back. I took the bell jar and left.

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“In my dream he doesn’t look like he does now.”

“Tell me about your dream, Leis.”

“Okay I will tell you about my dream.”

Nicky sighed, smelling my hair, and I held him. He has never really liked me. I don’t know why he wants to be with me now.

“In my dream I am in the church that I went to when I was a child. A small one, in Paris. Have you been there? Maybe you have been there. I am sitting on the wooden pew and he sits down beside me. I don’t see him before he sits down, but I can hear his feet, in his sandals, slapping on the marble floor, and when he sits, the wood creaks. He leans against my shoulder on the soft red cushion, resting his head there, and I can touch his hair, smooth it out of his face, but I can’t really see his face. My eyes just pass over it as if it’s not there, but it’s there, I just can’t see it.

“We talk about things, but it’s always different, what we talk about. Sometimes he wants to know how the others are doing. You and Dasius. He says he can’t talk to you, but he wants to. He wants me to tell you not to suffer. Sometimes we talk about children, babies, young boys, how beautiful they are. He tells me about who he was, how Leechtin loves young boys, how he admires them physically. He said that he was a beautiful child, and that he can’t decide whether or not he is angry at Leechtin for taking him and loving him and having made him what he is, but that Leechtin is sorry. He doesn’t know if Leechtin should be sorry. He said that it was a good century, that time with Leechtin.

“He says that he was like you. He said he was sorry for loving you the same way that Leechtin loved him. That you did what he did himself, when you left the first time when he made Miriam and didn’t say that you would come back. He says you never really did come back. You came but it wasn’t the same, and he blamed himself but couldn’t think about it because it wouldn’t change anything to think about it.

“He left Leechtin because he wanted to be free. But he was never so free as he was when he was Leechtin’s child. There was always something empty, even when he was with Leechtin there was something missing. One time he said it was you. One time he said it was love. One time he said it was me.

“He apologizes to me every time for frightening me. He says that he didn’t mean to hurt me with how much he needed me but that I should know he did. He needed how beautiful I was and how I let things be that should be let be. He always said that I shouldn’t try too much to change. ‘You are beautiful, innocent,’ he said, always. Maybe I was. Maybe I try to be.

“Sometimes we say nothing at all.”

Nicky sighed again, his little hands in my hair, he whispered to me, “In Leechtin’s dreams Laurent is covered in blood.”

“Eno stabbed him, but Leechtin killed him, Nicky.”

He nodded. We both know that everything ends at the beginning; eventually it all comes back.

When I get into bed later with Quinn, and Quinn hugs me, I know that Nicky loves me in a way that is very desperate and very lonely and I ache for him because I know that he is aching very much. No one loved Laurent the way Nicky did. Laurent loved Nicky how he could never admit, and I don’t think they ever talked about it, and now they never will.

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All that I remember about Laurent is his hot breath on my neck and his snaky, sneaky hands on my body, hands so fast you couldn’t be sure where they were going to go and couldn’t believe where they had just been. I remember all of his good words that made me feel really special, punch drunk kinds of words that could make any man feel great great great.

I’m sure he’d had a lot of practice, but it didn’t matter because he knew how to make me feel like I was the only person in the world. It didn’t matter where we were. He was a whirlwind.

You’d see him in the club, or in the café, or on the street even, and you’d stare, because he seemed so out of place while he belonged as much as anybody. He’d stare back, and if you looked good enough, he’d mouth at you about, where do you want to go? What do you want to do? Hey, Aphesis, Tomcat, do you want to live forever? Will you love me forever? Yes yes forever forever forever.

It was a trick, but you couldn’t know that when you were with him. Maybe he might have even loved you for a few minutes, a couple of years, but I got out, and I watched him do it to others. I didn’t understand him. I can’t judge him for it. Nicky understood him, Nicky who won’t let me call him Nicky.

“He wouldn’t even remember you today,” says Nicky, “You were just another open wound to him. He’d had thousands of boys like you. Forget about that.”

I don’t know what I remember. I don’t what was real. Nicky says Laurent and I never slept together, that it wasn’t real. Then why do I remember it? But I am forgetting so many things like that, so how can I know what was real?

Nicolas takes my hands when I call his name, very soft, and he looks up into my face with his dark eyes, and sometimes he kisses my forehead, and he says that he was not meant to have me, but that it makes him glad to keep me.

“You almost killed me, when I made you. You have a scar, where I stopped you. Here, on your face. It’s small. I tried to gouge out your eye to make you stop.”

I don’t understand Nicolas. He is a small child on the outside only. My attraction to him confused me when I was alive. He used to visit my library days, and I would watch him, and he knew I was watching. Everything he read was morbid, every single book. He read about torture methods and rates of decomposition in various temperatures for human flesh. He asked to check out journals on medical topics that the steel of heart would have trouble reading. I know now that the journals were not for him, they were for his brother, but everything else he read, and he read it over and over. He is like no one else I have ever known, like no one else I have come to know through him.

I can never tell if he feels close to me, and sometimes he shudders when I touch him. I often do not know where he goes. He does not trust me. He doesn’t trust anybody. I hardly know anything about him. I don’t know how old he really is.