PART II 9 page

but he would not be ignored; and once he even flew at her, shouting that he would slap her, and I

found myself in the wretched position of fighting him as I'd done years before she'd come to us.

'She's not a child any longer,' I whispered to him. 'I don't know what it is. She's a woman.' I

urged him to take it lightly, and he affected disdain and ignored her in turn. But one evening he

came in flustered and told me she'd followed him though she'd refused to go with him to kill,

she'd followed him afterwards. 'What's the matter with her!' he flared at me, as though I'd given

birth to her and must know.

"And then one night our servants vanished. Two of the best maids we'd ever retained, a mother

and daughter. The coachman was sent to their house only to report they'd disappeared, and then

the father was at our door, pounding the knocker. He stood back on the brick sidewalk regarding

me with that grave suspicion that sooner or later crept into the faces of all mortals who knew us

for any length of time, the forerunner of death, as pallor might be to a fatal fever; and I tried to

explain to him they had not been here, mother or daughter, and we must begin some search.

" 'It's she!' Lestat hissed from the shadows when I shut the gate. 'She's done something to them and brought risk for us all. I'll make her tell me!' And he pounded up the spiral stairs from the

courtyard. I knew that she'd gone, slipped out while I was at the gate, and I knew something else

also: that a vague stench came across the courtyard from the shut, unused kitchen, a stench that

mingled uneasily with the honeysuckle---the stench of graveyards. I heard Lestat coming down

as I approached the warped shutters, locked with rust to the small brick building. No food was

ever prepared there, no work ever done, so that it lay like an old brick vault under the tangles of

honeysuckle. The shutters came loose, the nails having turned to dust, and I heard Lestat's gasp

as we stepped into the reeking dark. There they lay on the bricks, mother and daughter together,

the arm of the mother fastened around the waist of the daughter, the daughter's head bent against

the mother's breast, both foul with feces and swarming with insects. A great cloud of gnats rose

as the shutter fell back, and I waved them away from me in a convulsive disgust. Ants crawled

undisturbed over the eyelids, the mouths of the dead pair, and in the moonlight I could see the

endless map of silvery paths of snails. 'Damn her!' Lestat burst out, and I grabbed his arm and

held him fast, pitting all my strength against him. 'What do you mean to do with her!' I insisted.

'What can you do? She's not a child anymore that will do what we say simply because we say it.

We must teach her.'

" 'She knows!' He stood back from me brushing his coat. 'She knows! She's known for years

what to do. What can be risked and what cannot. I won't have her do this without my permission.

I won't tolerate it.'

" 'Then, are you master of us all? You didn't teach her that. Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience? I don't think so. She sees herself as equal to us now, and us as equal to

each other. I tell you we must reason with her, instruct her to respect what is ours. As all of us

should respect it.'

"He stalked off, obviously absorbed in what I'd said, though he would give no admission of it to me. And he took his vengeance to the city. Yet when he came home, fatigued and satiated, she

was still not there. He sat against the velvet arm of the couch and stretched his long legs out on

the length of it. 'Did you bury them?' he asked me.

" 'They're gone,' I said. I did not care to say even to myself that I had burned their remains in the old unused kitchen stove. 'But there is the father to deal with, and the brother,' I said to him. I

feared his temper. I wished at once to plan some way to quickly dispose of the whole problem.

But he said now that the father and the brother were no more, that death had come to dinner in

their small house near the ramparts and stayed to say grace when everyone was done. 'Wine,' he

whispered now, running his finger on his lip. 'Both of them had drunk too much wine. I found

myself tapping the fence posts with a stick to make a tune,' he laughed. 'But I don't like it, the

dizziness. Do you like it?' And when he looked at me I had to smile at him because the wine was

working in him and he was mellow; and in that moment when his face looked warm and

reasonable, I leaned over and said, 'I hear Claudia's tap on the stairs. Be gentle with her. It's all done.'

"She came in then, with her bonnet ribbons undone and her little boots caked with dirt. I watched them tensely, Lestat with a sneer on his lips, she as unconscious of him as if he weren't there.

She had a bouquet of white chrysanthemums in her arms, such a large bouquet it made her all the

more a small child. Her bonnet fell back now, hung on her shoulder for an instant, and then fell

to the carpet. And all through her golden hair I saw the narrow petals of the chrysanthemums.

'Tomorrow is the Feast of All Saints,' she said. 'Do you know?'

" 'Yes,' I said to her. It is the day in New Orleans when all the faithful go to the cemeteries to care for the graves of their loved ones. They whitewash the plaster walls of the vaults, clean the

names cut into the marble slabs. And finally t hey deck the tombs with flowers. In the St. Louis

Cemetery, which was very near our house, in which all the great Louisiana families were buried,

in which my own brother was buried, there were even little iron benches set before the graves

where the families might sit to receive the other families who had come to the cemetery for the

same purpose. It was a festival in New Orleans; a celebration of death, it might have seemed to

tourists who didn't understand it, but it was a celebration of the life after. 'I bought this from one of the vendors,' Claudia said. Her voice was soft and inscrutable. Her eyes opaque and without

emotion.

" 'For the two you left in the kitchen!' Lestat said fiercely. She turned to him for the first time, but she said nothing. She stood there staring at him as if she'd never seen him before. And then

she took several steps towards him and looked at him, still as if she were positively examining

him. I moved forward. I could feel his anger. Her coldness. And now she turned to me. And then,

looking from one to the other of us, she asked:

" 'Which of you did it? Which of you made me what I am?'

"I could not have been more astonished at anything she might have said or done. And yet it was

inevitable that her long silence would thus be brok en. She seemed very little concerned with me,

though. Her eyes fixed on Lestat. 'You speak of us as if we always existed as we are now,' she

said, her voice soft, measured, the child's tone rounded with the woman's seriousness. 'You speak

of them out there as mortals, us as vampires. But it was not always so. Louis had a mortal sister,

I remember her. And there is a picture of her in his trunk. I've seen him look at it! He was mortal

the same as she; and so was I. Why else this size, this shape?' She opened her arms now and let

the chrysanthemums fall to the floor. I whispered her name. I think I meant to distract her. It was

impossible. The tide had turned. Lestat's eyes burned with a keen fascination, a malignant

pleasure:

" 'You made us what we are, didn't you?' she accused him.

"He raised his eyebrows now in mock amazement. 'What you are?' he asked. 'And would you be

something other than what you are?' He drew up his knees and leaned forward, his eyes narrow.

'Do you know how long it's been? Can you picture yourself? Must I find a hag to show you your

mortal countenance now if I had let you alone?'

"She turned away from him, stood for a moment as if she had no idea what she would do, and

then she moved towards the chair beside the fireplace and, climbing on it, curled up like the most

helpless child. She brought her knees up close to her, her velvet coat open, her silk dress tight

around her knees, and she stared at the ashes in the hearth. But there was nothing helpless about

her stare. Her eyes had independent life, as if the body were possessed.

" 'You could be dead by now if you were mortal!' Lestat insisted to her, pricked by her silence.

He drew his legs around and set his boots on the floor. 'Do you hear me? Why do you ask me

this now? Why do you make such a thing of it? You've known all your life you're a vampire.'

And so he went on in a tirade, saying much the same things he'd said to me many times over:

know your nature, kill, be what you are. But all of this seemed strangely beside the point. For

Claudia had no qualms about killing. She sat back now and let her head roll slowly to where she

could see him across from her. She was studying him again, as if he were a puppet on strings.

'Did you do it to me? And how?' she asked, her eyes narrowing. 'How did you do it?'

" 'And why should I tell you? It's my power.'

" 'Why yours alone?' she asked, her voice icy, her eyes heartless. 'How was it done?' she

demanded suddenly in rage.

"It was electric. He rose from the couch, and I was on my feet immediately, facing him. 'Stop

here' he said to me. He wrung his hands. 'Do something about her! I can't endure her?' And then

he started for the door, but turned and, coming back, drew very close so that he towered over

Claudia, putting her in a deep shadow. She glared up at him fearlessly, her eyes moving back and

forth over his face with total detachment. 'I can undo what I did. Both to you and to him,' he said

to her, his finger pointing at me across the room. 'Be glad I made you what you are,' he sneered.

'Or I'll break you in a thousand pieces!'

"Well, the peace of the house was destroyed, though there was quiet. Days passed and she asked

no questions, though now she was deep into books of the occult, of witches and witchcraft, and

of vampires. This was mostly fancy, you understand. Myth, tales, sometimes mere romantic

horror tales. But she read it all. Till dawn she read, so that I had to go and collect her and bring

her to bed.

"Lestat, meantime, hired a butler and maid and had a team of workers in to make a great fountain in the courtyard with a stone nymph pouring water eternal from a widemouthed shell. He had

goldfish brought and boxes of rooted water lilies set into the fountain so their blossoms rested

upon the surface and shivered in the ever-moving water.

"A woman had seen him kill on the Nyades Road, which ran to the town of Carrolton, and there

were stories of it in the papers, associating him with a haunted house near Nyades and

Melpomene, all of which delighted him. He was t he Nyades Road ghost for some time, though it

finally fell to the back pages; and then he performed another grisly murder in another public

place and set the imagination of New Orleans to working. But all this had about it some quality

of fear. He was pensive, suspicious, drew close to me constantly to ask where Claudia was,

where she'd gone, and what she was doing.

" 'She'll be all right,' I assured him, though I was estranged from her and in agony, as if she'd been my bride. She hardly saw me now, as she'd not seen Lestat before, and she might walk

away while I spoke to her.

" 'She had better be all right!' he said nastily.

" 'And what will you do if she's not?' I asked, more in fear than accusation.

"He looked up at me, with his cold gray eyes. 'You take care of her, Louis. You talk to her!' he said. 'Everything was perfect, and now this. There's no need for it'

"But it was my choice to let her come to me, and she did. It was early one evening when I'd just awakened. The house was dark. I saw her standing by the French windows; she wore puffed

sleeves and a pink sash, and was watching with lowered lashes the evening rush in the Rue

Royale. I could hear Lestat in his room, the sound of water splashing from his pitcher. The faint

smell of his cologne came and went like the sound of music from the cafe two doors down from

us. 'He'll tell me nothing,' she said softly. I hadn't realized she knew that I had opened my eyes. I came towards her and knelt beside her. 'You'll tell me, won't you? How it was done.'

" 'Is this what you truly want to know?' I asked, searching her face. 'Or is it why it was done to you... and what you were before? I don't understand what you mean by "how," for if you mean how was it done so that you in turn may do it...'

" 'I don't even know what it is. What you're saying,' she said with a touch of coldness. Then she turned full around and put her hands on my face. 'Kill with me tonight,' she whispered as

sensuously as a lover. 'And tell me all that you know. What are we? Why are we not like them?'

She looked down into the street.

" 'I don't know the answers to your questions,' I said to her. Her face contorted suddenly, as if she were straining to hear me over a sudden noise. And then she shook her head. But I went on. 'I

wonder the same things you wonder. I do not know. How I was made, I'll tell you that... that

Lestat did it to me. But the real "how" of it, I don't know!' Her face had that same look of strain. I was seeing in it the first traces of fear, or something worse and deeper than fear. 'Claudia,' I said to her, putting my hands over her hands and pressing them gently against my skin. 'Lestat has

one wise thing to tell you. Don't ask these questions. You've been my companion for countless

years in my search for all that I could learn of mortal life and mortal creation. Don't be my

companion now in this anxiety. He can't give us the answers. And I have none.'

"I could see she could not accept this, but I hadn't expected the convulsive turning away, the

violence with which she tore at her own hair for an instant and then stopped as if the gesture

were useless, stupid. It filled me with apprehension. She was looking at the sky. It was smoky,

starless, the clouds blowing fast from the direction of the river. She made a sudden movement of

her lips as if she'd bitten into them, then she turned to me and, still whispering, she said, 'Then he made me... he did it... you did not!' There was something so dreadful about her expression, I'd

left her before I meant to do it. I was standing before the fireplace lighting a single candle in

front of the tall mirror. And there suddenly, I saw something which startled me, gathering out of

the gloom first as a hideous mask, then becoming its three-dimensional reality: a weathered

skull. I stared at it. It smelled faintly of the earth still, but had been scrubbed. 'Why don't you

answer me?' she was asking. I heard Lestat's door open. He would go out to kill at once, at least

to find the kill. I would not.

"I would let the first hours of the evening accumulate in quiet, as hunger accumulated in me, till the drive grew almost too strong, so that I might give myself to it all the more completely,

blindly. I heard her question again clearly, as though it had been floating in the air like the

reverberation of a bell... and felt my heart pounding. 'He did make me, of course! He said so

himself. But you hide something from me. Something he hints at when I question him. He says

that it could not have been done without you!'

"I found myself staring at the skull, yet hearing her as if the words were lashing me, lashing me to make me turn around and face the lash. The thought went through me more like a flash of cold

than a thought, that nothing should remain of me now but such a skull. I turned around and saw

in the light from the street her eyes, like two dark flames in her white face. A doll from whom

someone had cruelly ripped the eyes and replaced them with a demonic fire. I found myself

moving towards her, whispering her name, some thought forming on my lips, then dying,

coming towards her, then away from her, fussing for her coat and her hat. I saw a tiny glove on

the door which was phosphorescent in the shadows, and for just a moment I thought it a tiny,

severed hand.

" 'What's the matter with you...?' She drew nearer, looking up into my face. 'What has always

been the matter? Why do you stare at the skull like that, at the glove?' She asked this gently,

but... not gently enough.

"There was a slight calculation in her voice, an unreachable detachment.

" 'I need you,' I said to her, without wanting to say it. 'I cannot bear to lose you. You're the only companion I have in immortality.'

" 'But surely there must be others! Surely we are not the only vampires on earths.' I heard her

saying it as I had said it, heard my own words coming back to me now on the tide of her self-

awareness, her searching. But there's no pain, I thought suddenly. There's urgency, heartless

urgency. I looked down at her. 'Aren't you the same as I?' She looked at me. 'You've taught me

all I know!'

" 'Lestat taught you to kill.' I fetched the glove. 'here, come... let's go out. I want to go out...'

I was stammering, trying to force the gloves on her. I lifted the great curly mass of her hair and

placed it gently over her coat. 'But you taught me to see!' she said. 'You taught me the words

vampire eyes,' she said. 'You taught me to drink the world, to hunger for more than...'

" 'I never meant those words that way, vampire eyes,' I said to her. 'It has a different ring when you say it....' She was tugging at me, trying to make me look at her. 'Come,' I said to her, 'I've

something to show you....' And quickly I led her down the passage and down the spiral stairs

through the dark courtyard. But I no more knew what I had to show her, really, than I knew

where I was going. Only that I had to move toward it with a sublime and doomed instinct.

"We rushed through the early evening city, the sky overhead a pale violet now that the clouds

were gone, the stars small and faint, the air around us sultry and fragrant even as we moved away

from the spacious gardens, towards those mean and narrow streets where the flowers erupt in the

cracks of the stones, and the huge oleander shoots out thick, waxen stems of white and pink

blooms, like a monstrous weed in the empty lots. I heard the staccato of Claudia's steps as she

rushed beside me, never once asking me to slacken my pace; and she stood finally, her face

infinitely patient, looking up at me in a dark and narrow street where a few old slope-roofed

French houses remained among the Spanish facades, ancient little houses, the plaster blistered

from the moldering brick beneath. I had found the house now by a blind effort, aware that I had

always known where it was and avoided it, always turned before this dark lampless corner, not

wishing to pass the low window where I'd first heard Claudia cry. The house was standing still.

Sunk lower than it was in those days, the alley way crisscrossed with sagging cords of laundry,

the weeds high along the low foundation, the two dormer windows broken and patched with

cloth. I touched the shutters. 'It was here I first saw you,' I said to her, thinking to tell it to her so she would understand, yet feeling now the chill of her gaze, the distance of her stare. 'I heard you

crying. You were there in a room with your mother. And your mother was dead. Dead for days,

and you didn't know. You clung to her, whining, crying pitifully, your body white and feverish

and hungry. You were trying to wake her from the dead, you were hugging her for warmth, for

fear. It was almost morning and...'

"I put my hand to my temples. 'I opened the shutters... I came into the room. I felt pity for you.

Pity. But... something else.'

"I saw her lips slack, her eyes wide. 'You... fed on me?' she whispered. 'I was your victim!'

" 'Yes!' I said to her. 'I did it.'

"There was a moment so elastic and painful as to be unbearable. She stood stark-still in the

shadows, her huge eyes gathering the light, the warm air rising suddenly with a soft noise. And

then she turned. I heard the clicking of her slippers as she ran. And ran. And ran. I stood frozen,

hearing the sound grow smaller and smaller; and then I turned, the fear in me unraveling,

growing huge and insurmountable, and I ran after her. It was unthinkable that I not catch her,

that I not overtake her at once and tell her that I loved her, must have her, must keep her, and

every second that I ran headlong down the dark street after her was like her slipping away from

me drop by drop; my heart was pounding, unfed, pounding and rebelling against the strain. Until

I came suddenly to a dead stop, She stood beneath a lamppost, staring mutely, as if she didn't

know me. I took her small waist in both hand and lifted her into the light. She studied me, her

face contorted, her head turning as if she wouldn't give me her direct glance, as if she must

deflect an overpowering feeling of revulsion. 'You killed me,' she whispered 'You took my life!'

" 'Yes,' I said to her, holding her so that I could feel her heart pounding. 'Rather, I tried to take it.

To drink it away. But you had a heart like no other hear I've ever felt, a heart that beat and beat

until I had to let you go, had to cast you away from me lest you quickened my pulse till I would

die. And it was Lestat who found me out; Louis the sentimentalist, the fool feasting on a golden-

haired child, a Holy Innocent a little girl. He brought you back from the hospital where they'd put

you, and I never knew what he mean to do except teach me my nature. "Take her, finish it," he said. And I felt that passion for you again. Oh, I know I've lost you now forever. I can see it in

your eyes! You look at me as you look at mortals from aloft, from some region of cold self -

sufficiency l can't understand. But I did it. I felt it for you again, a vile unsupportable hunger for your hammering heart, this cheek, this skin. You were pink and fragrant as mortal children are,

sweet with the bite of salt and dust, I held you again, I took you again. And when I though your

heart would kill me and I didn't care, he parted us and, gashing his own wrist, gave it to you to

drink. And drink you did. And drink and drink until you nearly drained him and he was reeling.

But you were a vampire then. And that very night you drank a human's blood and have every

night thereafter.'

"Her face had not changed. The flesh was like the wax of ivory candles; only the eyes showed

life. There was nothing more to say to her. I set her down. 'I took your life,' I said. 'He gave it

back to you.'

" 'And here it is,' she said under her breath. 'And I hate you both! "'

The vampire stopped.

"But why did you tell her?" asked the boy after a respectful pause.

"How could I not tell her?" The vampire looked up in mild astonishment. "She had to know it.

She had to weigh one thing against the other. It was not as if Lestat had taken her full from life

as he had taken me; I had stricken her. She would have died! There would have been no mortal

life for her. But what's the difference? For all of us it's a matter of years, dying! So what she saw more graphically then was what all men knew: that death will come inevitably, unless one

chooses... this!" He opened his white hands now and looked at the palms.

"And did you lose her? Did she go?"

"Go! Where would she have gone? She was a child no bigger than that. Who would have

sheltered her? Would she have found some vault, like a mythical vampire, lying down with

worms and ants by day and rising to haunt some small cemetery and its surroundings? But that's

not why she didn't go. Something in her was as akin to me as anything in her could have been.

That thing in Lestat was the same. We could not bear to live alone! We needed our little

company! A wilderness of mortals surrounded us, groping, blind, preoccupied, and the brides

and bridegrooms of death.

" 'Locked together in hatred,' she said to me calmly afterwards. I found her by the empty hearth, picking the small blossoms from a long stem of lavender. I was so relieved to see her there that I

would have done anything, said anything. And when I heard her ask me in a low voice if I would

tell her all I knew, I did this gladly. For all the rest was nothing compared to that old secret, that I had claimed her life. I told her of myself as I've told you, of how Lestat came to me and what

went on the night he carried her from the little hospital. She asked no questions and only

occasionally looked up from her flowers. And then, when it was finished and I was sitting there,

staring again at that wretched skull and listening to the soft slithering of the petals of the flowers on her dress and feeling a dull misery in my limbs and mind, she said to me, 'I don't despise you!'

I wakened. She slipped off the high, rounded damask cushion and came towards me, covered

with the scent of flower, the petals in her hand. 'Is this the aroma of mortal child?' she whispered.

'Louis. Lover.' I remember holding her and burying my head in her small chest, crushing her

bird-shoulders, her small hands working into my hair, soothing me, holding me. 'I was mortal to

you,' she said, and when I lifted my eyes I saw he smiling; but the softness on her lips was

evanescent and in a moment she was looking past me like some one listening for faint, important

music. 'You gave me your immortal kiss,' she said, though not to me, but to herself. 'You loved

me with your vampire nature.'

" 'I love you now with my human nature, if ever I had it,' I said to her.

" 'Ah yes...' she answered, still musing. 'Yes, and that's your flaw, and why your face was

miserable when I said as humans say, "I hate you," and why you look at me as you do now.

Human nature. I have no human nature. And no short story of a mother' corpse and hotel rooms

where children learn monstrosity can give me one. I have none. Your eyes grow cold with fear

when I say this to you. Yet I have your tongue. Your passion for the truth. Your need to drive the

needle of the mind right to the heart of it all like the beak of the hummingbird, who beats so wild

and fast that mortals might think he had no tiny feet, could never set, just go from quest to quest,

going again and again for the heart of it. I am your vampire self more than you are. And now the

sleep of sixty five years has ended'

"The sleep of sixty-five years has ended! I heard her say it, disbelieving, not wanting to believe she knew and meant precisely what she'd said. For it had been exactly that since the night I tried

to leave Lestat and failed and, falling in love with her, forgot my teeming brain, my awful

questions. And now she had the awful questions on her lips and must know. She'd strolled slowly

to the center of the room and strewn the crumpled lavender all around her. She broke the brittle

stem and touched it to her lips. And having heard the whole story said, 'He made me then... to be

your companion. No chains could have held you in your loneliness, and he could give you

nothing. He gives me nothing.... I used to think him charming. I liked the way he walked, the

way he tapped the flagstones with his walking stick and swung me in his arms. And the abandon

with which he killed, which was as I felt. But I no longer find him charming. And you never

have. And we've been his puppets, you and I; you remaining to take care of him, and I your

saving companion. Now's time to end it, Louis. Now's time to leave him.'

"Time to leave him.

"I hadn't thought of it, dreamed of it in so long; I'd grown accustomed to him, as if he were a

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 637