PART III 5 page

were words?'

"He shook his head. 'Not the way you mean. I only know the danger to you and the child is real

because it's real to you. And I know your loneliness even with her love is almost more terrible

than you can bear.'

"I stood up then. It would seem a simple thing to do, to rise, to go to the door, to hurry quickly down that passage; and yet it took every ounce of strength, every smattering of that curious thing

I've called my detachment.

" 'I ask you to keep them away from us,' I said at the door; but I couldn't look back at him, didn't even want the soft intrusion of his voice.

" 'Don't go,' he said.

" 'I have no choice.'

"I was in the passage when I heard him so close to me that I started. He stood beside me, eye

level with my eye, and in his hand he held a key which he pressed into mine.

" 'There is a door there,' he said, gesturing to the dark end, which I'd thought to be merely a wall.

'And a stairs to the side street which no one uses but myself. Go this way now, so you can avoid

the others. You are anxious and they will see it.' I turned around to go at once, though every part

of my being wanted to remain there. 'But let me tell you this,' he said, and lightly he pressed the

back of his hand against my heart. 'Use the power inside you. Don't abhor it anymore. Use that

power! And when they see you in the streets above, use that power to make your face a mask and

think as you gaze on them as on anyone: beware. Take that word as if it were an amulet I'd given

you to wear about your neck. And when your eyes meet Santiago's eyes, or the eyes of any other

vampire, speak to them politely what you will, but think of that word and that word only.

Remember what I say. I speak to you simply because you respect what is simple. You

understand this. That's your strength.'

"I took the key from him, and I don't remember actually putting it into the lock or going up the steps. Or where he was or what he'd done. Except that, as I was stepping into the dark side street

behind the theater, I heard him say very softly to me from someplace close to me: 'Come here, to

me, when you can.' I looked around for him but was not surprised that I couldn't see him. He had

told me also sometime or other that I must not leave the Hotel Saint-Gabriel, that I must not give

the others the shred of evidence of guilt they wanted. 'You see,' he said, 'killing other vampires is very exciting; that is why it is forbidden under penalty of death.'

"And then I seemed to awake. To the Paris street shining with rain, to the tall, narrow buildings on either side of me, to the fact that the door had shut to make a solid dark wall behind me and

that Armand was no longer there.

"And though I knew Claudia waited for me, though I passed her in the hotel window above the

gas lamps, a tiny figure standing among waxen petaled flowers, I moved away from the

boulevard, letting the darker streets swallow me, as so often the streets of New Orleans had done.

"It was not that I did not love her; rather, it was that I knew I loved her only too well, that the passion for her was as great as the passion for Armand. And I fled them both now, letting the

desire for the kill rise in me like a welcome fever, threatening consciousness, threatening pain.

"Out of the mist which had followed the rain, a man was walking towards me. I can remember

him as roaming on the landscape of a dream, because the night around me was dark and unreal.

The hill might have been anywhere in the world, and the soft lights of Paris were an amorphous

shimmering in the fog. And sharp-eyed and drunk, he was walking blindly into the arms of death

itself, his pulsing fingers reaching out to touch the very bones of my face.

"I was not crazed yet, not desperate. I might have said to him, 'Pass by.' I believe my lips did form the word Armand had given me, 'Beware.' Yet I let him slip his bold, drunken arm around

my waist; I yielded to his adoring eyes, to the voice that begged to paint me now and spoke of

warmth, to the rich, sweet smell of the oils that streaked his loose shirt. I was following him,

through Montmartre, and I whispered to him, 'You are not a member of the dead.' He was

leading me through an overgrown garden, through the sweet, wet grasses, and he was laughing

as I said, 'Alive, alive,' his hand touching my cheek, stroking my face, clasping finally my chin

as he guided me into the light of the low doorway, his reddened face brilliantly illuminated by

the oil lamps, the warmth seeping about us as the door closed.

"I saw the great sparkling orbs of his eyes, the tiny red veins that reached for the dark centers, that warm hand burning my cold hunger as he guided me to a chair. And then all around me I

saw faces blazing, faces rising in the smoke of the lamps, in the shimmer of the burning stove, a

wonderland of colors on canvases surrounding us beneath the small, sloped roof, a blaze of

beauty that pulsed and throbbed. 'Sit down, sit down...' he said to me, those feverish hands

against my chest, clasped by my hands, yet sliding away, my hunger rising in waves.

"And now I saw him at a distance, eyes intent, the palette in his hand, the huge canvas obscuring the arm that moved. And mindless and helpless, I sat there drifting with his paintings, drifting

with those adoring eyes, letting it go on and on till Armand's eyes were gone and Claudia was

running down that stone passage with clicking heels away from me, away from me.

" 'You are alive...' I whispered. 'Bones,' he answered me. 'Bones...' And I saw them in heaps,

taken from those shallow graves in New Orleans as they are and put in chambers behind the

sepulcher so that another can be laid in that narrow plot. I felt my eyes close; I felt my hunger

become agony, my heart crying out for a living heart; and then I felt him moving forward, hands

out to right my face---that fatal step, that fatal lurch. A sigh escaped my lips. 'Save yourself,' I

whispered to him. 'Beware.'

"And then something happened in the moist radiance of his face, something drained the broken

vessels of his fragile skin. He backed away from me, the brush falling from his hands. And I rose

over him, feeling my teeth against my lip, feeling my eyes fill with the colors of his face, my

ears fill with his struggling cry, my hands fill with that strong, fighting flesh until I drew him up to me, helpless, and tore that flesh and had the blood that gave it life. 'Die,' I whispered when I

held him loose now, his head bowed against my coat, 'die,' and felt him struggle to look up at

me. And again I drank and again he fought, until at last he slipped, limp and shocked and near to

death, on the floor. Yet his eyes did not close.

"I settled before his canvas, weak, at peace, gazing down at him, at his vague, graying eyes, my own hands florid, my skin so luxuriously warm. 'I am mortal again,' I whispered to him. 'I am

alive. With your blood I am alive.' His eyes closed. I sank back against the wall and found

myself gazing at my own face.

"A sketch was all he'd done, a series of bold black lines that nevertheless made up my face and

shoulders perfectly, and the color was already begun in dabs and splashes: the green of my eyes,

the white of my cheek. But the horror, the horror of seeing my expression! For he had captured it

perfectly, and there was nothing of horror in it. Those green eyes gazed at me from out of that

loosely drawn shape with a mindless innocence, the expressionless wonder of that overpowering

craving which he had not understood. Louis of a hundred years ago lost in listening to the

sermon of the priest at Mass, lips parted and slack, hair careless, a hand curved in the lap and

limp. A mortal Louis. I believe I was laughing, putting my hands to my face and laughing so that

the tears nearly rose in my eyes; and when I took my fingers down, there was the stain of the

tears, tinged with mortal blood. And already there was begun in me the tingling of the monster

that had killed, and would kill again, who was gathering up the painting now and starting to flee

with it from the small house.

"When suddenly, up from the floor, the man rose with an animal groan and clutched at my boot,

his hands sliding off the leather. With some colossal spirit that defied me, he reached up for the

painting and held fast to it with his whitening hands. 'Give it back!' he growled at me. 'Give it

back!' And we held fast, the two of us, I staring at him and at my own hands that held so easily

what he sought so desperately to rescue, as if he would take it to heaven or hell; I the thing that

his blood could not make human, he the man that my evil had not overcome. And then, as if I

were not myself, I tore the painting loose from him and, wrenching him up to my lips with one

arm, gashed his throat in rage."

"Entering the rooms of the Hotel Saint-Gabriel, I set the picture on the mantel above the fire and looked at it a long time. Claudia was somewhere in the rooms, and some other presence intruded,

as though on one of the balconies above a woman or a man stood near, giving off an

unmistakable personal perfume. I didn't know why I had taken the picture, why I'd fought for it

so that it shamed me now worse than the death, and why I still held onto it at the marble mantel,

my head bowed, my hands visibly trembling. And then slowly I turned my head. I wanted the

rooms to take shape around me; I wanted the flowers, the velvet, the candles in their sconces. To

be mortal and trivial and safe. And then, as if in a mist, I saw a woman there.

"She was seated calmly at that lavish table where Claudia attended to her hair; and so still she sat, so utterly without fear, her green taffeta sleeves reflected in the tilted mirrors, her skirts

reflected, that she was not one still woman but a gathering of women. Her dark-red hair was

parted in the middle and drawn back to her ears, though a dozen little ringlets escaped to make a

frame for her pale face. And she was looking at me with two calm, violet eyes and a child's

mouth that seemed almost obdurately soft, obdurately the cupid's bow unsullied by paint or

personality; and the mouth smiled now and said, as those eyes seemed to fire: 'Yes, he's as you

said he would be, and I love him already. He's as you said.' She rose now, gently lifting that

abundance of dark taffeta, and the three small mirrors emptied at once.

"And utterly baffled and almost incapable of speech, I turned to see Claudia far off on the

immense bed, her small face rigidly calm, though she clung to the silk curtain with a tight fist.

'Madeleine,' she said under her breath, 'Louis is shy.' And she watched with cold eyes as

Madeleine only smiled when she said this and, drawing closer to me, put both of her hands to the

lace fringe around her throat, moving it back so I could see the two small marks there. Then the

smile died on her lips, and they became at once sullen and sensual as her eyes narrowed and she

breathed the word, 'Drink.'

"I turned away from her, my fist rising in a consternation for which I couldn't find words. But

then Claudia had hold of that fist and was looking up at me with relentless eyes. 'Do it, Louis,'

she commanded. 'Because I cannot do it.' Her voice was painfully calm, all the emotion under

the hard, measured tone. 'I haven't the size, I haven't the strength! You saw to that when you

made me! Do it!'

"I broke away from her, clutching my wrist as if she'd burned it. I could see the door, and it

seemed to me the better part of wisdom to leave by it at once. I could feel Claudia's strength, her

will, and the mortal woman's eyes seemed afire with that same will. But Claudia held me, not

with a gentle pleading, a miserable coaxing that would have dissipated that power, making me

feel pity for her as I gathered my own forces. She held me with the emotion her eyes had evinced

even through her coldness and the way that she turned away from me now, almost as if she'd

been instantly defeated. I did not understand the manner in which she sank back on the bed, her

head bowed, her lips moving feverishly, her eyes rising only to scan the walls. I wanted to touch

her and say to her that what she asked was impossible; I wanted to soothe that fire that seemed to

be consuming her from within.

"And the soft, mortal woman had settled into one of the velvet chairs by the fire, with the

rustling and iridescence of her taffeta dress surrounding her like part of the mystery of her, of her dispassionate eyes which watched us now, the fever of her pale face. I remember turning to her,

spurred on by that childish, pouting mouth set against the fragile face. The vampire kiss had left

no visible trace except the wound, no inalterable change on the pale pink flesh. 'How do we

appear to you?' I asked, seeing her eyes on Claudia. She seemed excited by the diminutive

beauty, the awful woman's-passion knotted in the small dimpled hands.

"She broke her gaze and looked up at me. 'I ask you... how do we appear? Do you think us

beautiful, magical, our white skin, our fierce eyes? Oh, I remember perfectly what mortal vision

was, the dimness of it, and how the vampire's beauty burned through that veil, so powerfully

alluring, so utterly deceiving! Drink, you tell me. You haven't the vaguest conception under God

of what you ask!'

"But Claudia rose from the bed and came towards me. 'How dare you!' she whispered. 'How dare

you make this decision for both of us! Do you know how I despise you! Do you know that I

despise you with a passion that eats at me like a canker!' Her small form trembled, her hands

hovering over the pleated bodice of her yellow gown. 'Don't you look away from me! I am sick

at heart with your looking away, with your suffering. You understand nothing. Your evil is that

you cannot be evil, and I must suffer for it. I tell you, I will suffer no longer!' Her fingers bit into the flesh of my wrist; I twisted, stepping back from her, foundering in the face of the hatred, the

rage rising like some dormant beast in her, looking out through her eyes. 'Snatching me from

mortal hands like two grim monsters in a nightmare fairy tale, you idle, blind parents! Fathers!'

She spat the word. 'Let tears gather in your eyes. You haven't tears enough for what you've done

to me. Six more mortal years, seven, eight... I might have had that shape!' Her pointed finger

flew at Madeleine, whose hands had risen to her face, whose eyes were clouded over. Her moan

was almost Claudia's name. But Claudia did not hear her. 'Yes, that shape, I might have known

what it was to walk at your side. Monsters! To give me immortality in this hopeless guise, this

helpless form!' The tears stood in her eyes. The words had died away, drawn in, as it were, on

her breast.

" 'Now, you give her to me!' she said, her head bowing, her curls tumbling down to make a

concealing veil. 'You give her to me. You do this, or you finish what you did to me that night in

the hotel in New Orleans. I will not live with this hatred any longer, I will not live with this rage!

I cannot. I will not abide it!' And tossing her hair, she put her hands to her ears as if to stop the sound of her own words, her breath, drawn in rapid gasps, the tears seeming to scald her cheeks.

"I had sunk to my knees at her side, and my arms were outstretched as if to enfold her. Yet I

dared not touch her, dared not even say her name, lest my own pain break from me with the first

syllable in a monstrous outpouring of hopelessly inarticulate cries. 'Oooh.' She shook her head

now, squeezing the tears out onto her cheeks, her teeth clenched tight together. 'I love you still,

that's the torment of it. Lestat I never loved. But you! The measure of my hatred is that love.

They are the same! Do you know now how much I hate you!' She flashed at me through the red

film that covered her eyes.

" 'Yes,' I whispered. I bowed my head. But she was gone from me into the arms of Madeleine,

who enfolded her desperately, as if she might protect Claudia from me---the irony of it, the

pathetic irony---protect Claudia from herself. She was whispering to Claudia, 'Don't cry, don't

cry?' her hands stroking Claudia's face and hair with a fierceness that would have bruised a

human child.

"But Claudia seemed lost against her breast suddenly, her eyes closed, her face smooth, as if all passion were drained away from her, her arm sliding up around Madeleine's neck, her head

falling against the taffeta and lace. She lay still, the tears staining her cheeks, as if all this that had risen to the surface had left her weak and desperate for oblivion, as if the room around her,

as if I, were not there.

"And there they were together, a tender mortal crying unstintingly now, her warm arms holding

what she could not possibly understand, this white and fierce and unnatural child thing she

believed she loved. And if I had not felt for her, this mad and reckless woman flirting with the

damned, if I had not felt all the sorrow for her I felt for my mortal self, I would have wrested the

demon thing from her arms, held it tight to me, denying over and over the words I'd just heard.

But I knelt there still, thinking only, The love is equal to the hatred; gathering that selfishly to

my own breast, holding onto that as I sank back against the bed.

"A long time before Made leine was to know it, Claudia had ceased crying and sat still as a statue on Madeleine's lap, her liquid eyes fixed on me, oblivious to the soft, red hair that fell around her or the woman's hand that still stroked her. And I sat slumped against the bedpost, staring back at

those vampire eyes, unable and unwilling to speak in my defense. Madeleine was whispering

into Claudia's ear, she was letting her tears fall into Claudia's tresses. And then gently, Claudia

said to her, 'Leave us.'

" 'No.' She shook her head, holding tight to Claudia. And then she shut her eyes and trembled all over with some terrible vexation, some awful torment. But Claudia was leading her from the

chair, and she was now pliant and shocked and white-faced, the green taffeta ballooning around

the small yellow silk dress.

"In the archway of the parlor they stopped, and Madeleine stood as if confused, her hand at her

throat, beating like a wing, then going still. She looked about her like that hapless victim on the

stage of the Theatre des Vampires who did not know where she was. But Claudia had gone for

something. And I saw her emerge from the shadows with what appeared to be a large doll. I rose

on my knees to look at it. It was a doll, the doll of a little girl with raven hair and green eyes,

adorned with lace and ribbons, sweet-faced and wide-eyed, its porcelain feet tinkling as Claudia

put it into Madeleine's arms. And Madeleine's eyes appeared to harden as she held the doll, and

her Lips drew back from her teeth in a grimace as she stroked its hair. She was laughing low

under her breath. 'Lie down,' Claudia said to her; and together they appeared to sink into the

cushions of the couch, the green taffeta rustling and giving way as Claudia lay with her and put

her arms around her neck. I saw the doll sliding, dropping to the floor, yet Madeleine's hand

groped for it and held it dangling, her own head thrown back, her eyes shut tight, and Claudia's

curls stroking her face.

"I settled back on the floor and leaned against the soft siding of the bed. Claudia was speaking now in a low voice, barely above a whisper, telling Madeleine to be patient, to be still, I dreaded

the sound of her step on the carpet; the sound of the doors sliding closed to shut Madeleine away

from us, and the hatred that lay between us like a killing vapor.

"But when I looked up to her, Claudia was standing there as if transfixed and lost in thought, all rancor and bitterness gone from her face, so that she had the blank expression of that doll.

" 'All you've said to me is true,' I said to her. 'I deserve your hatred. I've deserved it from those first moments when Lestat put you in my arms.'

"She seemed unaware of me, and her eyes were infused with a soft light. Her beauty burned into

my soul so that I could hardly stand it, and then she said, wondering, 'You could have killed me

then, despite him. You could have done it.' Then her eyes rested on me calmly. 'Do you wish to

do it now?'

" 'Do it now!' I put my arm around her, moved her close to me, warmed by her softened voice.

'Are you mad, to say such things to me? Do I want to do it now!"

" 'I want you to do it,' she said. 'Bend down now as you did then, draw the blood out of me drop by drop, all you have the strength for; push my heart to the brink. I am small, you can take me. I

won't resist you, I am something frail you can crush like a flower.'

" 'You mean these things? You mean what you say to me?' I asked. 'Why don't you place the

knife here, why don't you turn it?'

" 'Would you die with me?' she asked, with a sly, mocking smile. 'Would you in fact die with

me?' she pressed. 'Don't you understand what is happening to me? That he's killing me, that

master vampire who has you in thrall, that he won't share your love with me, not a drop of it? I

see his power in your eyes. I see your misery, your distress, the love for him you can't hide. Turn

around, I'll make you look at me with those eyes that want him, I'll make you listen'

" 'Don't anymore, don't... I won't leave you. I've sworn to you, don't you see? I cannot give you that woman'

" 'But I'm fighting for my life! Give her to me so she can care for me, complete the guise I must have to live! And he can have you then! I am fighting for my life!'

"I all but shoved her off. 'No, no, it's madness, it's witchery,' I said, trying to defy her. 'It's you who will not share me with him, it's you who want every drop of that love. If not from me, from

her. He overpowers you, he disregards you, and it's you who wish him dead the way that you

killed Lestat. Well, you won't make me a party to this death, I tell you, not this death! I will not

make her one of us, I will not damn the legions of mortals who'll die at her hands if I do! Your

power over me is broken. I will not!'

"Oh, if she could only have understood!

"Not for a moment could I truly believe her words against Armand, that out of that detachment

which was beyond revenge he could selfishly wish for her death. But that was nothing to me

now; something far more terrible than I could grasp was happening, something I was only

beginning to understand, against which my anger was nothing but a mockery, a hollow attempt

to oppose her tenacious will. She hated me, she loathed me, as she herself had confessed, and my

heart shriveled inside me, as if, in depriving me of that love which had sustained me a lifetime,

she had dealt me a mortal blow. The knife was there. I was dying for her, dying for that love as I

was that very first night when Lestat gave her to me, turned her eyes to me, and told her my

name; that love which had warmed me in my self-hatred, allowed me to exist. Oh, how Lestat

had understood it, and now at last his plan was undone.

"But it went beyond that, in some region from which I was shrinking as I strode back and forth,

back and forth, my hands opening and closing at my si des, feeling not only that hatred in her

liquid eyes: It was her pain. She had shown me her pain! To give me immortality in this hopeless

guise, this helpless form. I put my hands to my ears, as if she spoke the words yet, and the tears

flowed. For all these years I had depended utterly upon her cruelty, her absolute lack of pain!

And pain was what she showed to me, undeniable pain. Oh, how Lestat would have laughed at

us. That was why she had put the knife to him, because he would have laughed. To destroy me

utterly she need only show me that pain. The child I made a vampire suffered. Her agony was as

my own.

"There was a coffin in that other room, a bed for Madeleine, to which Claudia retreated to leave me alone with what I could not abide. I welcomed the silence. And sometime during the few

hours that remained of the night I found myself at the open window, feeling the slow mist of the

rain. It glistened on the fronds of the ferns, on sweet white flowers that listed, bowed, and finally broke from their ste ms. A carpet of flowers littering the little balcony, the petals pounded softly

by the rain. I felt weak now, and utterly alone. What had passed between us tonight could never

be undone, and what had been done to Claudia by me could never be undone.

"But I was somehow, to my own bewilderment, empty of all regret. Perhaps it was the night, the

starless sky, the gas lamps frozen in the mist that gave some strange comfort for which I never

asked and didn't know how, in this emptiness and aloneness, to receive. I am alone, I was

thinking. I am alone. It seemed just, perfectly, and so to have a pleasing, inevitable form. And I

pictured myself then forever alone, as if on gaining that vampire strength the night of my death I

had left Lestat and never looked back for him, as I had moved on away from him, beyond the

need of him and anyone else. As if the night had said to me, 'You are the night and the night

alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms.' One with the shadows. Without nightmare.

An inexplicable peace.

"Yet I could feel the end of this peace as surely as I'd felt my brief surrender to it, and it was breaking like the dark clouds. The urgent pain of Claudia's loss pressed in on me, behind me, like

a shape gathered from the corners of this cluttered and oddly alien room. But outside, even as the

night seemed to dissolve in a fierce driving wind, I could feel something calling to me,

something inanimate which I'd never known. And a power within me seemed to answer that

power, not with resistance but with an inscrutable, chilling strength.

"I moved silently through the rooms, gently dividing the doors until I saw, in the dim light cast by the flickering gas flames behind me, that sleeping woman lying in my shadow on the couch,

the doll limp against her breast. Sometime before I knelt at her side I saw her eyes open, and I

could feel beyond her in the collected dark those other eyes watching me, that breathless tiny

vampire face waiting.

" 'Will you care for her, Madeleine?' I saw her hands clutch at the doll, turning its face against her breast. And my own hand went out for it, though I did not know why, even as she was

answering me.

" 'Yes!' She repeated it again desperately.

" 'Is this what you believe her to be, a doll?' I asked her, my hand closing on the doll's head, only to feel her snatch it away from me, see her teeth clenched as she glared at me.

" 'A child who can't die! That's what she is,' she said, as if she were pronouncing a curse.

" 'Aaaaah...' I whispered.

" 'I've done with dolls,' she said, shoving it away from her into the cushions of the couch. She was fumbling with something on her breast, something she wanted me to see and not to see, her

fingers catching hold of it and closing over it. I knew what it was, had noticed it before. A locket

fixed with a gold pin. I wish I could describe the passion that infected her round features, how

her soft baby mouth was distorted.

" 'And the child who did die?' I guessed, watching her. I was picturing a doll shop, dolls with the same face. She shook her head, her hand pulling hard on the locket so the pin ripped the taffeta.

It was fear I saw in her now, a consuming panic: And her hand bled as she opened it from the

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 507