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Quot;What was this change?" asked the boy. 6 page

" 'Why do you do this, Lestat?' I asked.

" 'I like to do it,' he said. 'I enjoy it.' He looked at me. 'I don't say that you have to enjoy it. Take your aesthete's tastes to purer things. Kill them swiftly if you will, but do it! Learn that you're a killer! Ah!' He threw up his hands in disgust. The girl had stopped screaming. Now he drew up a little curved-legged chair beside the coffin and, crossing his legs, he looked at the coffin lid. His was a black varnished coffin, not a pure rectangular box as they are now, but tapered at both ends and widest where the corpse might lay his hands upon his chest. It suggested the human form. It opened, and the girl sat up astonished, wild-eyed, her lips blue and trembling. 'Lie down, love,' he said to her, and pushed her back; and she lay, near-hysterical, staring up at him. 'You're dead, love,' he said to her; and she screamed and turned desperately in the coffin like a fish, as if her body could escape through the sides, through the bottom. 'It's a coffin, a coffin!' she cried. 'Let me out.'

" 'But we all must lie in coffins, eventually,' he said to her. 'Lie still, love. This is your coffin. Most of us never get to know what it feels like. You know what it feels like!' he said to her. I couldn't tell whether she was listening or not, or just going wild. But she saw me in the doorway, and then she lay still, looking at Lestat and then at me. 'Help me!' she said to me.

"Lestat looked at me. 'I expected you to feel these things instinctually, as I did,' he said. When I gave you that first kill, I thought you would hunger for the next and the next, that you would go to each human life as if to a full cup, the way I had. But you didn't. And all this time I suppose I kept from straightening you out because you were best weaker. I'd watch you playing shadow in the night, staring at the falling rain, and I'd think, He's easy to manage, he's simple. But you're weak, Louis. You're a mark. For vampires and now for humans alike. This thing with Babette has exposed us both. It's as if you want us both to be destroyed.'

" 'I can't stand to watch what you're doing,' I said, turning my back. The girl's eyes were burning into my flesh. She lay, all the time he spoke, staring at me.

" 'You can stand it!' he said. 'I saw you last night with that child. You're a vampire, the same as I am!'

"He stood up and came towards me, but the girl rose again and he turned to shove her down. 'Do you think we should make her a vampire? Share our lives with her?' he asked. Instantly I said, 'No!'

" 'Why, because she's nothing but a whore?' he asked. 'A damned expensive whore at that,' he said.

" 'Can she live now? Or has she lost too much?' I asked him.

" 'Touching!" he said. 'She can't live.'

" 'Then kill her.' She began to scream. He just sat there. I turned around. He was smiling, and the girl had turned her face to the satin and was sobbing. Her reason had almost entirely left her; she was crying and praying. She was praying to the Virgin to save her, her hands over her face now, now over her head, the wrist smearing blood in her hair and on the satin. I bent over the coffin. She was dying, it was true; her eyes were burning, but the tissue around them was already bluish and now she smiled. 'You won't let me die, will you?' she whispered. 'You'll save me.' Lestat reached over and took her wrist. 'But it's too late, love,' he said. 'Look at your wrist, your breast' And then he touched the wound in her throat. She put her hands to her throat and gasped, her mouth open, the scream strangled. I stared at Lestat. I could not understand why he did this. His face was as smooth as mine is now, more animated for the blood, but cold and without emotion.



"He did not leer like a stage villain, nor hunger for her suffering as if the cruelty fed him. He simply watched her. 'I never meant to be bad,' she was crying. 'I only did what I had to do. You won't let this happen to me, You'll let me go. I can't die like this, I can't!' She was sobbing, the sobs dry and thin. 'You'll let me go. I have to go to the priest. You'll let me go.' 'But my friend is a priest,' said Lestat, smiling. As if he'd just thought of it as a joke. 'This is your funeral, dear. You see, you were at a dinner party and you died. But God has given you another chance to be absolved. Don't you see? Tell him your sins'

"She shook her head at first, and then she looked at me again with those pleading eyes. 'Is it true?' she whispered. 'Well,' said Lestat, 'I suppose you're not contrite, dear. I shall have to shut the lid!'

" 'Stop this, Lestat!' I shouted at him. The girl was screaming again, and I could not stand the sight of it any longer. I bent down to her and took her hand. 'I can't remember my sins,' she said, just as I was looking at her wrist, resolved to kill her. 'You mustn't try. Tell God only that you are sorry,' I said, 'and then you'll die and it will be over.' She lay back, and her eyes shut. I sank my teeth into her wrist and began to suck her dry. She stirred once as if dreaming and said a name; and then, when I felt her heartbeat reach that hypnotic slowness, I drew back from her, dizzy, confused for the moment, my hands reaching for the door frame. I saw her as if in a dream. The candles glared in the corner of my eye. I saw her lying utterly still. And Lestat sat composed beside her, like a mourner. His face was still. 'Louis,' he said to me. 'Don't you understand? Peace will only come to you when you can do this every night of your life. There is nothing else. But this is everything!' His voice was almost tender as he spoke, and he rose and put both his hands on my shoulders. I walked into the parlor, shying away from his touch but not resolute enough to push him off. 'Come with me, out into the streets. It's late. You haven't drunk enough. Let me show you what you are. Really! Forgive me if I bungled it, left too much to nature. Come!'

" 'I can't bear it, Lestat,' I said to him. 'You chose your companion badly.'

" 'But Louis,' he said, 'you haven't tried!' "

The vampire stopped. He was studying the boy. And the boy, astonished, said nothing.

"It was true what he'd said. I had not drunk enough; and shaken by the girl's fear, I let him lead me out of the hotel, down the back stairs. People were coming now from the Conde Street ballroom, and the narrow street was jammed. There were supper parties in the hotels, and the planter families were lodged in town in great numbers and we passed through them like a nightmare. My agony was unbearable. Never since I was a human being had I felt such mental pain. It was because all of Lestat's words had made sense to me. I knew peace only when I killed, only for that minute; and there was no question in my mind that the killing of anything less than a human being brought nothing but a vague longing, the discontent which had brought me close to humans, to watch their lives through glass. I was no vampire. And in my pain, I asked irrationally, like a child, Could I not return? Could I not be human again? Even as the blood of that girl was warm in me and I felt that physical thrill and strength, I asked that question. The faces of humans passed me like candle flames in the night dancing on dark waves. I was sinking into the darkness. I was weary of longing. I was turning around and around in the street, looking at the stars and thinking, Yes, it's true. I know what he is saying is true, that when I kill there is no longing; and I can't bear this truth, I can't bear it.

"Suddenly there was one of those arresting moments. The street was utterly quiet. We had strayed far from the main part of the old town and were near the ramparts. There were no lights, only the fire in a window and the far-off sound of people laughing. But no one here. No one near us. I could feel the breeze suddenly from the river and the hot air of the night rising and Lestat near me, so still he might have been made of stone. Over the long, low row of pointed roofs were the massive shapes of oak trees in the dark, great swaying forms of myriad sounds under the low-hung stars. The pain for the moment was gone; the confusion was gone. I closed my eyes and heard the wind and the sound of water flowing softly, swiftly in the river. It was enough, for one moment. And I knew that it would not endure, that it would fly away from me like something torn out of my arms, and I would fly after it, more desperately lonely than any creature under God, to get it back. And then a voice beside me rumbled deep in the sound of the night, a drumbeat as the moment ended, saying, 'Do what it is your nature to do. This is but a taste of it. Do what it is your nature to do.' And the moment was gone. I stood like the girl in the parlor in the hotel, dazed and ready for the slightest suggestion. I was nodding at Lestat as he nodded at me. 'Pain is terrible for you,' he said. 'You feel it like no other creature because you are a vampire. You don't want it to go on.'

" 'No,' I answered him. 'I'll feel as I felt with her, wed to her and weightless, caught as if by a dance.'

" 'That and more.' His hand tightened on mine. 'Don't turn away from it, come with me.'

"He led me quickly through the street, turning every time I hesitated, his hand out for mine, a smile on his lips, his presence as marvelous to me as the night he'd come in my mortal life and told me we would be vampires. 'Evil is a point of view,' he whispered now. 'We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms. I want a child tonight. I am like a mother... I want a child!'

"I should have known what he meant. I did not. He had me mesmerized, enchanted. He was playing to me as he had when I was mortal; he was leading me. He was saying, 'Your pain will end.'

"We'd come to a street of lighted windows. It was a place of rooming houses, sailors, flatboat men. We entered a narrow door; and then, in a hollow stone passage in which I could hear my own breath like the wind, he crept along the wall until his shadow leapt out in the light of a doorway beside the shadow of another man, their heads bent together, their whispers like the rustling of dry leaves. 'What is it?' I drew near him as he came back, afraid suddenly this exhilaration in me would die. I saw again that nightmare landscape I'd seen when I spoke with Babette; I felt the chill of loneliness, the chill of guilt. 'She's there!' he said. 'Your wounded one. Your daughter.'

" 'What do you say, what are you talking about!'

" 'You've saved her,' he whispered. 'I knew it. You left the window wide on her and her dead mother, and people passing in the street brought her here.'

" 'The child. The little girl!' I gasped. But he was already leading me through the door to stand at the end of the long ward of wooden beds, each with a child beneath a narrow white blanket, one candle at the end of the ward, where a nurse bent over a small desk. We walked down the aisle between the rows. 'Starving children, orphans,' he said. 'Children of plague and fever.' He stopped. I saw the little girl lying in the bed. And then the man was coming, and he was whispering with Lestat; such care for the sleeping little ones. Someone in another room was crying. The nurse rose and hurried away.

"And now the doctor bent and wrapped the child in the blanket. Lestat had taken money from his pocket and set it on the foot of the bed. The doctor was saying how glad he was we'd come for her, how most of them were orphans; they came in on the ships, sometimes orphans too young even to tell which body was that of their mother. He thought Lestat was the father.

"And in moments, Lestat was running through the streets with her, the white of the blanket gleaming against his dark coat and cape; and even to my expert vision, as I ran after him it seemed sometimes as if the blanket flew through the night with no one holding it, a shifting shape traveling on the wind like a leaf stood upright and sent scurrying along a passage, trying to gain the wind all the while and truly take flight. I caught him finally as we approached the lamps near the Place d'Armes. The child lay pale on his shoulder, her cheeks still full like plums, though she was drained and near death. She opened her eyes, or rather the lids slid back; and beneath the long curling lashes I saw a streak of white. 'Lestat, what are you doing? Where are you taking her?' I demanded. But I knew too well. He was heading for the hotel and meant to take her into our room.

"The corpses were as we left them, one neatly set in the coffin as if an undertaker had already attended her, the other in her chair at the table. Lestat brushed past them as if he didn't see them, while I watched him in fascination. The candles had all burned down, and the only light was that of the moon and the street. I could see his iced and gleaming profile as he set the child down on the pillow. 'Come here, Louis, you haven't fed enough, I know you haven't,' he said with the same calm, convincing voice he had used skillfully all evening. He held my hand in his, his own warm and tight. 'See her, Louis, how plump and sweet she looks, as if even death can't take her freshness; the will to live is too strong! He might make a sculpture of her tiny lips and rounded hands, but he cannot make her fade. You remember, the way you wanted her when you saw her in that room.' I resisted him. I didn't want to kill her. I hadn't wanted to last night. And then suddenly I remembered two conflicting things and was torn in agony: I remembered the powerful beating of her heart against mine and I hungered for it, hungered for it so badly I turned my back on her in the bed and would have rushed out of the room had not Lestat held me fast; and I remembered her mother's face and that moment of horror when I'd dropped the child and he'd come into the room. But he wasn't mocking me now; he was confusing me. 'You want her, Louis. Don't you see, once you've taken her, then you can take whomever you wish. You wanted her last night but you weakened, and that's why she's not dead.' I could feel it was true, what he said. I could feel again that ecstasy of being pressed to her, her little heart going and going. 'She's too strong for me... her heart, it wouldn't give up,' I said to him. 'Is she so strong?' he smiled. He drew me close to him. 'Take her, Louis, I know you want her.' And I did. I drew close to the bed now and just watched her. Her chest barely moved with her breath, and one small hand was tangled in her long, gold hair. I couldn't bear it, looking at her, wanting her not to die and wanting her; and the more I looked at her, the more I could taste her skin, feel my arm sliding under her back and pulling her up to me, feeling her soft neck. Soft, soft, that's what she was, so soft. I tried to tell myself it was best for her to die---what was to become of her? but these were lying thoughts. I wanted her! And so I took her in my arms and held her, her burning cheek on mine, her hair falling down over my wrists and brushing my eyelids, the sweet perfume of a child strong and pulsing in spite of sickness and death. She moaned now, stirred in her sleep, and that was more than I could bear. I'd kill her before I'd let her wake and know it. I went into her throat and heard Lestat saying to me strangely, 'Just a little tear. It's just a little throat.' And I obeyed him.

"I won't tell you again what it was like, except that it caught me up just as it had done before, and as killing always does, only more; so that my knees bent and I half lay on the bed, sucking her dry; that heart pounding again that would not slow, would not give up. And suddenly, as I went on and on, the instinctual part of me waiting, waiting for the slowing of the heart which would mean death, Lestat wrenched me from her. 'But she's not dead,' I whispered. But it was over. The furniture of the room emerged from the darkness. I sat stunned, staring at her, too weak to move, my head rolling back against the headboard of the bed, my hands pressing down on the velvet spread. Lestat was snatching her up, talking to her, saying a name. 'Claudia, Claudia, listen to me, come round, Claudia.' He was carrying her now out of the bedroom into the parlor, and his voice was so soft I barely heard him. 'You're ill, do you hear me? You must do as I tell you to get well.' And then, in the pause that followed, I came to my senses. I realized what he was doing, that he had cut his wrist and given it to her and she was drinking. 'That's it dear; more,' he was saying to her. 'You must drink it to get well.'

" 'Damn you!' I shouted, and he hissed at me with blazing eyes. He sat on the settee with her locked to his wrist. I saw her white hand clutching at his sleeve, and I could see his chest heaving for breath and his face contorted the way I'd never seen it. He let out a moan and whispered again to her to go on; and when I moved from the threshold, he glared at me again, as if to say, 'I'll kill you!'

" 'But why, Lestat?' I whispered to him. He was trying now to push her off, and she wouldn't let go. With her fingers locked around his fingers and arm she held the wrist to her mouth, a growl coming out of her. 'Stop, stop!' he said to her. He was clearly in pain. He pulled back from her and held her shoulders with both hands. She tried desperately to reach his wrist with her teeth, but she couldn't; and then she looked at him with the most innocent astonishment. He stood back, his hand out lest she move. Then he clapped a handkerchief on his wrist and backed away from her, toward the bell rope. He pulled it sharply, his eyes still fixed on her.

" 'What have you done, Lestat?' I asked him. 'What have you done?' I stared at her. She sat composed, revived, filled with life, no sign of pallor or weakness in her, her legs stretched out straight on the damask, her white gown soft and thin like an angel's gown around her small form. She was looking at Lestat. 'Not me,' he said to her, 'ever again. Do you understand? But I'll show you what to do!' When I tried to make him look at me and answer me as to what he was doing, he shook me off. He gave me such a blow with his arm that I hit the wall. Someone was knocking now. I knew what he meant to do. Once more I tried to reach out for him but he spun so fast I didn't even see him hit me. When I did see him I was sprawled in the chair and he was opening the door. 'Yes, come in, please, there's been an accident,' he said to the young slave boy. And then, shutting the door, he took him from behind, so that the boy never knew what happened. And even as he knelt over the body drinking, he beckoned for the child, who slid from the couch and went down on her knees and took the wrist offered her, quickly pushing back the cuff of the shirt. She gnawed first as if she meant to devour his flesh, and then Lestat showed her what to do. He sat back and let her have the rest, his eye on the boy's chest, so that when the time came, he bent forward and said, 'No more, he's dying.... You must never drink after the heart stops or you'll be sick again, sick to death. Do you understand?' But she'd had enough and she sat next to him, their backs against the legs of the settee, their legs stretched out on the floor. The boy died in seconds. I felt weary and sickened, as if the night had lasted a thousand years. I sat there watching them, the child drawing close to Lestat now, snuggling near him as he slipped his arm around her, though his indifferent eyes remained fixed on the corpse. Then he looked up at me.

" 'Where is Mamma?' asked the child softly. She had a voice equal to her physical beauty; clear like a little silver bell. It was sensual. She was sensual. Her eyes were as wide and clear as Babette's. You understand that I was barely aware of what all this meant. I knew what it might mean, but I was aghast. Now Lestat stood up and scooped her from the floor and came towards me. 'She's our daughter,' he said. 'You're going to live with us now.' He beamed at her, but his eyes were cold, as if it were all a horrible joke; then he looked at me, and his face had conviction. He pushed her towards me. I found her on my lap, my arms around her, feeling again how soft she was, how plump her skin was, like the skin of warm fruit, plums warmed by sunlight; her huge luminescent eyes were fixed on me with trusting curiosity. 'This is Louis, and I am Lestat,' he said to her, dropping down beside her. She looked about and said that it was a pretty room, very pretty, but she wanted her mamma. He had his comb out and was running it through her hair, holding the locks so as not to pull with the comb; her hair was untangling and becoming like satin. She was the most beautiful child I'd ever seen, and now she glowed with the cold fire of a vampire. Her eyes were a woman's eyes, I could see it already. She would become white and spare like us but not lose her shape. I understood now what Lestat had said about death, what he meant. I touched her neck where the two red puncture wounds were bleeding just a little. I took Lestat's handkerchief from the floor and touched it to her neck. 'Your mamma's left you with us. She wants you to be happy,' he was saying with that same immeasurable confidence. 'She knows we can make you very happy.'

" 'I want some more,' she said, turning to the corpse on the floor.

" 'No, not tonight; tomorrow night,' said Lestat. And he went to take the lady out of his coffin. The child slid off my lap, and I followed her. She stood watching as Lestat put the two ladies and the slave boy into the bed. He brought the covers up to their chin. 'Are they sick?' asked the child.

" 'Yes, Claudia,' he said. 'They're sick and they're dead. You see, they die when we drink from them.' He came towards her and swung her up into his arms again. We stood there with her between us. I was mesmerized by her, by her transformed, by her every gesture: She was not a child any longer, she was a vampire child. 'Now, Louis was going to leave us,' said Lestat, his eyes moving from my face to hers. 'He was going to go away. But now he's not. Because he wants to stay and take care of you and make you happy.' He looked at me. 'You're not going, are you, Louis?'

" 'You bastard!' I whispered to him. 'You fiend!'

" 'Such language in front of your daughter,' he said.

" 'I'm not your daughter,' she said with the silvery voice. 'I'm my mamma's daughter.'

" 'No, dear, not anymore,' he said to her. He glanced at the window, and then he shut the bedroom door behind us and turned the key in the lock. 'You're our daughter, Louis's daughter and my daughter, do you see? Now, whom should you sleep with? Louis or me?' And then looking at me, he said, 'Perhaps you should sleep with Louis. After all, when I'm tired... I'm not so kind."'

The Vampire Stopped. The boy said nothing. "A child vampire!" he whispered finally. The vampire glanced up suddenly as though startled, though his body made no movement. He glared at the tape recorder as if it were something monstrous.

The boy saw that the tape was almost out. Quickly, he opened his brief case and drew out a new cassette, clumsily fitting it into place. He looked at the vampire as he pressed the record button. The vampire's face looked weary, drawn, his cheekbones more prominent and his brilliant green eyes enormous. They had begun at dark, which had come early on this San Francisco winter night, and now it was just before ten p.m. The vampire straightened and smiled and said calmly, "We are ready to go on?"

"He'd done this to the little girl just to keep you with him?" asked the boy.

"That is difficult to say. It was a statement. I'm convinced that Lestat was a person who preferred not to think or talk about his motives or beliefs, even to himself. One of those people who must act. Such a person must be pushed considerably before he will open up and confess that there is method and thought to the way he lives. That is what had happened that night with Lestat. He'd been pushed to where he had to discover even for himself why he lived as he did. Keeping me with him, that was undoubtedly part of what pushed him. But I think, in retrospect, that he himself wanted to know his own reasons for killing, wanted to examine his own life. He was discovering when he spoke what he did believe. But he did indeed want me to remain. He lived with me in a way he could never have lived alone. And, as I've told you, I was careful never to sign any property over to him, which maddened him. That, he could not persuade me to do." The vampire laughed suddenly, "Look at all the other things he persuaded me to do! How strange. He could persuade me to kill a child, but not to part with my money." He shook his head. "But," he said, "it wasn't greed, really, as you can see. It was fear of him that made me tight with him."

" You speak of him as if he were dead. You say Lestat was this or was that. Is he dead?" asked the boy.

"I don't know," said the vampire. "I think perhaps he is. But I'll come to that. We were talking of Claudia, weren't we? There was something else I wanted to say about Lestat's motives that night. Lestat trusted no one, as you see. He was like a cat, by his own admission, a lone predator. Yet he had communicated with me that night; he had to some extent exposed himself simply by telling the truth. He had dropped his mockery, his condescension. He had forgotten his perpetual anger for just a little while. And this for Lestat was exposure. When we stood, alone in that dark street, I felt in him a communion with another I hadn't felt since I died. I rather think that he ushered Claudia into vampirism for revenge."

"Revenge, not only on you but on the world," suggested the boy.

"Yes. As I said, Lestat's motives for everything revolved around revenge."

"Was it all started with the father? With the school?"

"I don't know. I doubt it," said the vampire. "But I want to go on."

"Oh, please go on. You have to go on! I mean, it's only ten o'clock." The boy showed his watch.

The vampire looked at it, and then he smiled at the boy. The boy's face changed. It was blank as if from some sort of shock. "Are you still afraid of me?" asked the vampire.

The boy said nothing, but he shrank slightly from the edge of the table. His body elongated, his feet moved out over the bare boards and then contracted.

"I should think you'd be very foolish if you weren't," said the vampire. "But don't be. Shall we go on?"

"Please," said the boy. He gestured towards the machine.

'Well," the vampire began, "our life was much changed with Mademoiselle Claudia, as you can imagine. Her body died, yet her senses awakened much as mine had. And I treasured in her the signs of this. But I was not aware for quite a few days how much I wanted her, wanted to talk with her and be with her. At first, I thought only of protecting her from Lestat. I gathered her into my coffin every morning and would not let her out of my sight with him if possible. This was what Lestat wanted, and he gave little suggestions that he might do her harm. 'A starving child is a frightful sight,' he said to me, 'a starving vampire even worse.' They'd hear her screams in Paris, he said, were he to lock her away to die. But all this was meant for me, to draw me close and keep me there. Afraid of fleeing alone, I would not conceive of risking it with Claudia. She was a child. She needed care.

"And there was much pleasure in caring for her. She forgot her five years of mortal life at once, or so it seemed, for she was mysteriously quiet. And from time to time I even feared that she had lost all sense, that the illness of her mortal life, combined with the great vampire shock, might have robbed her of reason; but this proved hardly the case. She was simply unlike Lestat and me to such an extent I couldn't comprehend her; for little child she was, but also fierce killer now capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child's demanding. And though Lestat still threatened me with danger to her, he did not threaten her at all but was loving to her, proud of her beauty, anxious to teach her that we must kill to live and that we ourselves could never die.

"The plague raged in the city then, as I've indicated, and he took her to the stinking cemeteries where the yellow fever and plague victims lay in heaps while the sounds of shovels never ceased all through the day and night. 'This is death,' he told her, pointing to the decaying corpse of a woman, 'which we cannot suffer. Our bodies will stay always as they are, fresh and alive; but we must never hesitate to bring death, because it is how we live.' And Claudia gazed on this with inscrutable liquid eyes.


Date: 2015-01-02; view: 561


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