PART II 12 page

beside her. And there now in the coffin; beneath a glass cover, I saw to my horror the skeleton of

Lestat, the wrinkled skin now pressed into the very texture of his bones, his eyes but sockets, his

blond hair billowed on the white satin.

"The procession stopped. The mourners moved out, filling the dusty pews without a sound, and

Claudia, turning with her book, opened it and lifted the veil back from her face, her eyes fixed on

me as her finger touched the page. 'And now art thou cursed from the earth,' she whispered, her

whisper rising in echo in the ruins. 'And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened

her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not

henceforth yield unto thee her strength. A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth...

and whoever slayeth thee, vengeance shall be taken on him seven-fold.'

"I shouted at her, I screamed, the scream rising up out of the depths of my being like some great rolling black force that broke from my lips and sent my body reeling against my will. A terrible

sighing rose from the mourners, a chorus growing louder and louder, as I turned to see them all

about me, pushing me into the aisle against the very sides of the coffin, so that I turned to get my

balance and found both my hands upon it. And I stood there staring down not at the remains of

Lestat, but at the body of my mortal brother. A quiet descended, as if a veil had fallen over all

and made their forms dissolve beneath its soundless folds. There was my brother, blond and

young and sweet as he had been in life, as real and warm to me now as he'd been years and years

beyond which I could never have remembered him thus, so perfectly was he re-created, so

perfectly in every detail. His blond hair brushed back from his forehead, his eyes closed as if he

slept, his smooth fingers around the crucifix on his breast, his lips so pink and silken I could

hardly bear to see them and not touch them.

"And as I reached out just to touch the softness of his skin, the vision ended.

"I was sitting still in the Saturday night cathedral, the smell of the tapers thick in the motionless air, the woman of the stations gone and darkness gathering behind me, acro ss from me, and now

above me. A boy appeared in the black cassock of a lay brother, with a long extinguisher on a

golden pole, putting its little funnel down upon one candle and then another and then another. I

was stupefied. He glanced at me and then away, as if not to disturb a man deep in prayer. And

then, as he moved on up to the next chandelier, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

"That two humans should pass this close to me without my hearing, without my even caring,

registered somewhere within me that I was in danger, but I did not care. I looked up now and

saw a gray-haired priest. 'You wish to go to confession?' he asked. 'I was about to lock up the

church.' He narrowed his eyes behind his thick glasses. The only light now came from the racks

of little red-glass candles which burned before the saints; and shadows leaped upon the towering

walls. 'You are troubled, aren't you? Can I help you?'

" 'It's too late, too late,' I whispered to him, and rose to go. He backed away from me, still

apparently unaware of anything about my appearance that should alarm him, and said kindly, to

reassure me, 'No, it's still early. Do you want to come into the confessional?'

"For a moment I just stared at him. I was tempted to smile. And then it occurred to me to do it.

But even as I followed him down the aisle, in the shadows of the vestibule, I knew this would be

nothing, that it was madness. Nevertheless, I knelt down in the small wooden booth, my hands

folded on the priedieu as he sat in the booth beside it and slid back the panel to show me the dim

outline of his profile. I stared at him for a moment. And then I said it, lifting my hand to make

the Sign of the Cross. 'Bless me, father, for I have sinned, sinned so often and so long I do not

know how to change, nor how to confess before God what I've done.'

" 'Son. God is infinite in His capacity to forgive,' he whispered to me. 'Tell Him in the best way you know how and from your heart.'

" 'Murders, father, death after death. The woman who died two nights ago in Jackson Square, I

killed her, and thousands of others before her, one and two a night, father, for seventy years. I

have walked the streets of New Orleans like the Grim Reaper and fed on human life for my own

existence. I am not mortal, father, but immortal and damned, like angels put in hell by God. I am

a vampire.'

"The priest turned. 'What is this, some sort of sport for you? Some joke? You take advantage of

an old man!' he said. He slid the wooden panel back with a splat. Quickly I opened the door and

stepped out to see him standing there. 'Young man, do you fear God at all? Do you know the

meaning of sacrilege?' He glared at me. Now I moved closer to him, slowly, very slowly, and at

first he merely stared at me, outraged. Then, confused, he took a step back. The church was

hollow, empty, black, the sacristan gone and the candles throwing ghastly light only on the

distant altars. They made a wreath of soft, gold fibers about his gray head and face. 'Then there is

no mercy!' I said to him and suddenly clamping my hands on his shoulders, I held him in a

preternatural lock from which he couldn't hope to move and held him close beneath my face. His

mouth fell open in horror. 'Do you see what I am! Why, if God exists, does He suffer me to

exist!' I said to him. 'You talk of sacrilege!' He dug his nails into my hands, trying to free

himself, his missal dropping to the floor, his rosary clattering in the folds of his cassock. He

might as well have fought the animated statues of the saints. I drew my lips back and showed

him my virulent teeth. 'Why does He suffer me to live?' I said. His face infuriated me, his fear,

his contempt, his rage. I saw in it all the hatred I'd seen in Babette, and he hissed at me, 'Let me

go! Devil!' in sheer mortal panic.

"I released him, watching with a sinister fascination as he floundered, moving up the center aisle as if he plowed through snow. And then I was after him, so swift that I surrounded him in an

instant with my outstretched arms, my cape throwing him into darkness, his legs scrambling still.

He was cursing me, calling on God at the altar. And then I grabbed him on the very steps to the

Communion rail and pulled him down to face me there and sank my teeth into his neck." The

vampire stopped.

Sometime before, the boy had been about to light a cigarette. And he sat now with the match in

one hand, the cigarette in the other, still as a store dummy, staring at the vampire. The vampire

was looking at the floor. He turned suddenly, took the book of matches from the boy's hand,

struck the match, and held it out. The boy bent the cigarette to receive it. He inhaled and let the

smoke out quickly. He uncapped the bottle and took a deep drink, his eyes always on the

vampire.

He was patient again, waiting until the vampire was ready to resume.

"I didn't remember Europe from my childhood. Not even the voyage to America, really. That I

had been born there was an abstract idea. Yet it had a hold over me which was as powerful as the

hold France can have on a colonial. I spoke French, read French, remembered waiting for the

reports of the Revolution and reading the Paris newspaper accounts of Napoleon's victories. I

remember the anger I felt when he sold the colony of Louisiana to the United States. How long

the mortal Frenchman lived in me I don't know. He was gone by this time, really, but there was

in me that great desire to see Europe and to know it, which comes not only from the reading of

all the literature and the philosophy, but from the feeling of having been shaped by Europe more

deeply and keenly than the rest of Americans. I was a Creole who wanted to see where it had all

begun.

"And so I turned my mind to this now. To divesting my closets and trunks of everything that was

not essential to me. And very little was essential to me, really. And much of that might remain in

the town house, to which I was certain I would return sooner or later, if only to move my

possessions to another similar one and start a new life in New Orleans. I couldn't conceive of

leaving it forever. Wouldn't. But I fixed my mind and heart on Europe.

"It began to penetrate for the first time that I might see the world if I wanted. That I was, as Claudia said, free.

"Meantime, she made a plan. It was her idea most definitely that we must go first to central

Europe, where the vampire seemed most prevalent. She was certain we could find something

there that would instruct us, explain our origins. But she seemed anxious for more than answers:

a communion with her own kind. She mentioned this over and over, 'My own kind,' and she said

it with a different intonation than I might have used. She made me feel the gulf that separated us.

In the first years of our life together, I had thought her like Lestat, imbibing his instinct to kill, though she shared my tastes in everything else. Now I knew her to be less human than either of

us, less human than either of us might have dreamed. Not the faintest conception bound her to

the sympathies of human existence. Perhaps this explained why---despite everything I had done

or failed to do---she clung to me. I was not her own kind. Merely the closest thing to it."

"But wouldn't it have been possible," asked the boy suddenly, "to instruct her in the ways of the human heart the way you'd instructed her in everything else?"

"To what avail?" asked the vampire frankly. "So she night suffer as I did? Oh, I'll grant you I should have taught her something to prevail against her desire to kill Lestat. For my own sake, I

should have done that. But you see, I had no confidence in anything else. Once fallen from grace,

I had confidence in nothing."

The boy nodded. "I didn't mean to interrupt you. You were coming to something," he said.

"Only to the point that it was possible to forget what had happened to Lestat by turning my mind to Europe. And t he thought of the other vampires inspired me also. I had not been cynical for one

moment about the existence of God. Only lost from it. Drifting, preternatural, through the natural

world.

"But we had another matter before we left for Europe. Oh, a great deal happened indeed. It began with the musician. He had called while I was gone that evening to the cathedral, and the next

night he was to come again. I had dismissed the servants and went down to him myself. And his

appearance startled me at once.

"He was much thinner than I'd remembered him and very pale, with a moist gleam about his face

that suggested fever. And he was perfectly miserable. When I told him Lestat had gone away, he

refused at first to believe me and began insisting Lestat would have left him some message,

something. And then he went off up the Rue Royale, talking to himself about it, as if he had little

awareness of anyone around him. I caught up with him under a gas lamp. 'He did leave you

something,' I said, quickly feeling for my wallet. I didn't know how much I had in it, but I

planned to give it to him. It was several hundred dollars. I put it into his hands. They were so thin I could see the blue veins pulsing beneath the watery skin. Now he became exultant, and I sensed

at once that the matter went beyond the money. 'Then he spoke of me, he told you to give this to

me!' he said, holding onto it as though it were a relic. 'He must have said something else to you!'

He stared at me with bulging, tortured eyes. I didn't answer him at once, because during these

moments I had seen the puncture wounds in his neck. Two red scratch-like marks to the right,

just above his soiled collar. The money flapped in his hand; he was oblivious to the evening

traffic of the street, the people who pushed close around us. 'Put it away,' I whispered. 'He did

speak of you, that it was important you go 'on with your music.'

"He stared at me as if anticipating something else. 'Yes? Did he say anything else?' he asked me.

I didn't know what to tell him. I would have made up anything if it would have given him

comfort, and also kept him away. It was painful for me to speak of Lestat; the words evaporated

on my lips. And the puncture wounds amazed me. I couldn't fathom this. I was saying nonsense

to the boy finally that Lestat wished him well, that he had to take a steamboat up to St. Louis,

that he would be back, that war was imminent and he had business there... the boy hungering

after every word, as if he couldn't possibly get enough and was pushing on with it for the thing

he wanted. He was trembling; the sweat broke out fresh on his forehead as he stood there

pressing me, and suddenly he bit his lip hard and said, 'But why did he go!' as if nothing had

sufficed.

" 'What is it?' I asked him. 'What did you need from him? I'm sure he would want me to...'

" 'He was my friend!' He turned on me suddenly, his voice dropping with repressed outrage.

" 'You're not well,' I said to him. 'You need rest. There's something...' and now I pointed to it, attentive to his every move '...on your throat.' He didn't even know what I meant. His fingers

searched for the place, found it, rubbed it.

" 'What does it matter? I don't know. The insects, they're everywhere,' he said, turning away from me. 'Did he say anything else?'

"For a long while I watched him move up the Rue Royale, a frantic, lanky figure in rusty black,

for whom the bulk of the traffic made way.

"I told Claudia at once about the wound on his throat.

"It was our last night in New Orleans. We'd board the ship just before midnight tomorrow for an

early morning departure. We had agreed to walk out together. She was being solicitous, and

there was something remarkably sad in her face, something which had not left after she had

cried. 'What could the marks mean?' she asked me now. 'That he fed on the boy when the boy

slept, that the boy allowed it? I can't imagine...' she said.

" 'Yes, that must be what it is.' But I was uncertain. I remembered now Lestat's remark to Claudia that he knew a boy who would make a better vampire than she. Had he planned to do that?

Planned to make another one of us?

" 'It doesn't matter now, Louis,' she reminded me. We had to say our farewell to New Orleans.

We were walking away from the crowds of the Rue Royale. My senses were keen to all around

me, holding it close, reluctant to say this was the last night.

"The old French city had been for the most part burned a long time ago, and the architecture of

these days was as it is now, Spanish, which meant that, as we walked slowly through the very

narrow street where one cabriolet had to stop for another, we passed whitewashed walls and

great courtyard gates that revealed distant lamplit courtyard paradises like our own, only each

seemed to hold such promise, such sensual mystery. Great banana trees stroked the galleries of

the inner courts, and masses of fern and flower crowded the mouth of the passage. Above, in the

dark, figures sat on the balconies, their backs to the open doors, their hushed voices and the

flapping of their fans barely audible above the soft river breeze; and over the walls grew wisteria

and passiflora so thick that we could brush against it as we passed and stop occasionally at this

place or that to pluck a luminescent rose or tendrils of honeysuckle. Through the high windows

we saw again and again the play of candlelight on richly embossed plaster ceilings and often the

bright iridescent wreath of a crystal chandelier. Occasionally a figure dressed for evening

appeared at the railings, the glitter of jewels at her throat, her perfume adding a lush evanescent

spice to the flowers in the air.

"We had our favorite streets, gardens, corners, but inevitably we reached the outskirts of the old city and saw the rise of swamp. Carriage after carriage passed us coming in from the Bayou

Road bound for the theater or the opera. But now the lights of the city lay behind us, and its

mingled scents were drowned in the thick odor of swamp decay. The very sight of the tall,

wavering trees, their limbs hung with moss, had sickened me, made me think of Lestat. I was

thinking of him as I'd thought of my brother's body. I was seeing him sunk deep among the roots

of cypress and oak, that hideous withered form folded in the white sheet. I wondered if the

creatures of the dark shunned him, knowing instinctively the parched, crackling thing there was

virulent, or whether they swarmed about him in the reeking water, picking his ancient dried flesh

from the bones.

"I turned away from the swamps, back to the heart of the old city, and felt the gentle press of

Claudia's hand comforting. She had gathered a natural bouquet from all the garden walls, and she

held it crushed to the bosom of her yellow dress, her face buried in its perfume. Now she said to

me in such a whisper that I bent my ear to her, 'Louis, it troubles you. You know the remedy. Let

the flesh... let the flesh instruct the mind.' She let my hand go, and I watched her move away

from me, turning once to whisper the same command. 'Forget him. Let the flesh instruct the

mind...'

"It brought back to me that book of poems I'd held in my hand when she first spoke these words

to me, and I save the verse upon the page:

Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as

leprosy, The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.

"She was smiling from the far corner, a bit of yellow silk visible for a moment in the narrowing dark, then gone. My companion, my companion forever.

"I was turning into the Rue Dumaine, moving past darkened windows. A lamp died very slowly

behind a broad scrim of heavy lace, the shadow of the pattern on the brick expanding, growing

fainter, then vanishing into blackness. I moved on, nearing the house of Madame LeClair,

hearing faint but shrill the violins from the upstairs parlor and then the thin metallic laughter of

the guests. I stood across from the house in the shadows, seeing a small handful of them moving

in the lighted room; from window to window to window moved one guest, a pale lemon-colored

wine in his stem glass, his face turned towards the moon as if he sought something from a better

vantage and found it finally at the last window, his hand on the dark drape.

"Across from me a door stood open in the brick wall, and a light fell on the passage at the far

end. I moved silently over the narrow street and met the thick aromas of the kitchen rising on the

air past the gate. The slightly nauseating smell of cooking meat. I stepped into the passage.

Someone had just walked fast across the courtyard and shut a rear door. But t hen I saw another

figure. She stood by the kitchen fire, a lean black woman with a brilliant tignon around her head,

her features delicately chiseled and gleaming in the light like a figure in diorite. She stirred the

mixture in the kettle. I caught the sweet smell of the spices and the fresh green of marjoram and

bay; and then in a wave came the horrid smell of the cooking meat, the blood and flesh decaying

in the boiling fluids. I drew near and saw her set down her long iron spoon and stand with her

hands on her generous, tapered hips, the white of her apron sash outlining her small, fine waist.

The juices of the pot foamed on the lip and spit in the glowing coals below. Her dark odor came

to me, her dusky spiced perfume, stronger than the curious mixture from the pot, tantalizing as I

drew nearer and rested back against a wall of matted vine. Upstairs the thin violins began a

waltz, and the floorboards groaned with the dancing couples. The jasmine of the wall enclosed

me and then receded like water leaving the clean-swept beach; and again I sensed her salt

perfume. She had moved to the kitchen door, her long black neck gracefully bent as she peered

into the shadows beneath the lighted window. 'Monsieur!' she said, and stepped out now into the

shaft of yello w light. It fell on her great round breasts and long sleek silken arms and now on the

long cold beauty of her face. 'You're looking for the party, Monsieur?' she asked. 'The party's

upstairs...'

" 'No, my dear, I wasn't looking for the party,' I said to her, moving forward out of the shadows.

'I was looking for you.'

"Everything was ready when I woke the next evening: the wardrobe trunk on its way to the ship

as well as chest which contained a coffin; the servants gone; the furnishings draped in white. The

sight of the tickets and a collection of notes of credit and some other papers all placed together in a flat black wallet made the trip emerge into the bright light of reality. I would have forgone

killing had that been possible, and so I took care of this early, and perfunctorily, as did Claudia;

and as it neared time for us to leave, I was alone in the flat, waiting for her. She had been gone

too long for my nervous frame of mind. I feared for her---though she could bewitch almost

anyone into assisting her if she found herself too far away from home, and had many times

persuaded strangers to bring her to her very door, to her father, who thanked them profusely for

returning his lost daughter.

"When she came now she was running, and I fancied as I put my book down that she had

forgotten the time. She thought it later than it was. By my pocket watch we had an hour. But the

instant she reached the door, I knew that this was wrong. 'Louis, the doors!' she gasped, her chest

heaving, her hand at her heart. She ran back down the passage with me behind her and, as she

desperately signaled me, I shut up the doors to the gallery. 'What is it?' I asked her. 'What's come

over you?' But she was moving to the front windows now, the long French windows which

opened onto the narrow balconies over the street. She lifted the shade of the lamp and quickly

blew out the fame. The room went dark, and then lightened gradually with the illumination of the

street. She stood panting, her hand on her breast, and then she reached out for me and drew me

close to her beside the window.

" 'Someone followed me,' she whispered now. °I could hear him block after block behind me. At

first, I thought it was nothing!' She stopped for breath, her face blanched in the bluish light that

came from the windows across the way. 'Louis, it was the musician,' she whispered.

" 'But what does that matter? He must have seen you with Lestat.'

" 'Louis, he's down there. Look out the window. Try to see him.' She seemed so shaken, almost

afraid.

"As if she would not stand exposed on the threshold. I stepped out on the balcony, though I held her hand as she hovered by the drape; and she held me so tightly that it seemed she feared for

me. It was eleven o'clock and the Rue Royale for the moment was quiet: shops shut, the traffic of

the theater just gone away. A door slammed somewhere to my right, and I saw a woman and a

man emerge and hurry towards the corner, the woman's face hidden beneath an enormous white

hat. Their steps died away. I could see no one, sense no one. I could hear Claudia's labored

breathing. Something stirred in the house; I started, then recognized it as the jingling and rustling of the birds. We'd forgotten the birds. But Claudia had start ed worse than I, and she pulled near

to me. 'There is no one, Claudia...' I started to whisper to her.

"Then I saw the musician.

"He had been standing so still in the doorway of the furniture shop that I had been totally

unaware of him, and he must have wanted this to be so. For now he turned his face upwards,

towards me, and it shone from the dark like a white light. The frustration and care were utterly

erased from his stark features; his great dark eyes peered at me from the white flesh. He had

become a vampire.

" 'I see him,' I murmured to her, my lips as still as possible, my eyes holding his eyes. I felt her move closer, her hand trembling, a heart beating in the palm of her hand. She let out a gasp when

she saw him now. But at that same moment, something chilled me even as I stared at him and he

did not move. Because I heard a step in the lower passage. I heard the gate hinge groan. And

then that step again, deliberate, loud, echoing under the arched ceiling of the carriage way,

deliberate, familiar. That step advancing now up the spiral stairs. A thin scream rose from

Claudia, and then she caught it at once with her hand. The vampire in the furniture shop door had

not moved. And I knew the step on the stairs. I knew the step on the porch. It was Lestat. Lestat

pulling on the door, now pounding on it, now ripping at it, as if to tear it loose from the very

wall. Claudia moved back into the corner of the room, her body bent, as if someone had struck

her a sharp blow, her eyes moving frantically from the figure in the street to me. The pounding

on the door grew louder. And then I heard his voice. 'Louis!' he called to me. 'Louis!' he roared

against the door. And then came the smash of the back parlor window. And I could hear the latch

turning from within. Quickly, I grabbed the lamp, struck a match hard and broke it in my frenzy,

then got the flame as I wanted it and held the small vessel of kerosene poised in my hand 'Get

away from the window. Shut it,' I told her. And she obeyed as if the sudden clear, spoken

command released her from a paroxysm of fear. 'And light the other lamps, now, at once.' I heard

her crying as she struck the match. Lestat was coming down the hallway.

"And then he stood at the door. I let out a gasp, and, not meaning to, I must have taken several steps backwards when I saw him. I could hear Claudia's cry. It was Lestat beyond question,

restored and intact as he hung in the doorway, his head thrust forward, his eyes bulging, as if he

were drunk and needed the door jamb to keep him from plunging headlong into the room. His

skin was a mass of scars, a hideous covering of injured flesh, as though every wrinkle of his

'death' had left its mark upon him. He was seared and marked as if by the random strokes of a hot

poker, and his once clear gray eyes were shot with hemorrhaged vessels.

" 'Stay back... for the love of God...' I whispered. 'I'll throw it at you. I'll burn you alive,' I said to him. And at the same moment I could hear a sound to my left, something scraping, scratching

against the facade of the town house. It was the other one. I saw his hands now on the wrought-

iron balcony. Claudia let out a piercing scream as he threw his weight against the glass doors.

"I cannot tell you all that happened then. I cannot possibly recount it as it was. I remember

heaving the lamp at Lestat; it smashed at his feet and the flames rose at once from the carpet. I

had a torch then in my hands, a great tangle of sheet I'd pulled from the couch and ignited in the

flames. But I was struggling with him before that, kicking and driving savagely at his great

strength. And somewhere in the background were Claudia's panicked screams. And the other

lamp was broken. And the drapes of the windows blazed. I remember that his clothes reeked of

kerosene and that he was at one point smacking wildly at the flames. He was clumsy, sick,

unable to keep his balance; but when he had me in his grip, I even tore at his fingers with my

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 692