Quot;What was this change?" asked the boy. 8 page

"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 condition of life itself. I could hear a vague mingling of sounds now, which meant he had entered the carriage way, that he would soon be on the back stairs. And I thought of what I always felt when I heard him coming, a vague anxiety, a vague need. And then the thought of being free of him forever rushed over me like water I'd forgotten, waves and waves of cool water. I was standing now, whispering to her that he was coming.

" 'I know,' she smiled. 'I heard him when he turned the far corner.'

" 'But he'll never let us leave,' I whispered, though I'd caught the implication of her words; her vampire sense was keen. She stood en garde magnificently. 'But you don't know him if you think he'll let us leave,' I said to her, alarmed at her self-confidence. 'He will not let us go.'

"And she, still smiling, said, 'Oh... really?' "

"It was agreed then to make plans. At once. The following night my agent came with his usual complaints about doing business by the light of one wretched candle and took my explicit orders for an ocean crossing. Claudia and I would go to Europe, on the first available ship, regardless of what port we had to settle for. And paramount was that an important chest be shipped with us, a chest which might have to be fetched carefully from our house during the day and put on board, not in the freight but in our cabin. And then there were arrangements for Lestat. I had planned to leave him the rents for several shops and town houses and a small construction company operating in the Faubourg Marigny. I put my signature to these things readily. I wanted to buy our freedom: to convince Lestat we wanted only to take a trip together and that he could remain in the style to which he was accustomed; he would have his own money and need come to me for nothing. For all these years, I'd kept him dependent on me. Of course, he demanded his funds from me as if I were merely his banker, and thanked me with the most acrimonious words at his command; but he loathed his dependence. I hoped to deflect his suspicion by playing to his greed. And, convinced that he could read any emotion in my face, I was more than fearful. I did not believe it would be possible to escape him. Do you understand what that means? I acted as though I believed it, but I did not.

"Claudia, meantime, was flirting with disaster, her equanimity overwhelming to me as she read her vampire books and asked Lestat questions. She remained undisturbed by his caustic outbursts, sometimes asking the same question over and over again in different ways and carefully considering what little information he might let escape in spite of himself. 'What vampire made you what you are?' she asked, without looking up from her book and keeping her lids lowered under his onslaught. 'Why do you never talk about him?' she went on, as if his fierce objections were thin air. She seemed immune to his irritation.

" 'You're greedy, both of you!' he said the next night as he paced back and forth in the dark of the center of the room, turning a vengeful eye on Claudia, who was fitted into her corner, in the circle of her candle flame, her books in stacks about her. 'Immortality is not enough for you! No, you would look the Gift Horse of God in the mouth! I could offer it to any man out there in the street and he would jump for it...'

" 'Did you jump for it?' she asked softly, her lips barely moving.... 'but you, you would know the reason for it. Do you want to end it? I can give you death more easily than I gave you life!' He turned to me, her fragile flame throwing his shadow across me. It made a halo around his blond hair and left his face, except for the gleaming cheekbone, dark. 'Do you want death?'

" 'Consciousness is not death,' she whispered.

" 'Answer me! Do you want death!'

" 'And you give all these things. They proceed from you. Life and death,' she whispered, mocking him.

" 'I have,' he said. 'I do.'

" 'You know nothing,' she said to him gravely, her voice so low that the slightest noise from the street interrupted it, might carry her words away, so that I found myself straining to hear her against myself as I lay with my head back against the chair. 'And suppose the vampire who made you knew nothing, and the vampire who made that vampire knew nothing, and the vampire before him knew nothing, and so it goes back and back, nothing proceeding from nothing, until there is nothing! And we must live with the knowledge that there is no knowledge.'

" 'Yes!' he cried out suddenly, his hands out, his voice tinged with something other than anger.

"He was silent. She was silent. He turned, slowly, as if I'd made some movement which alerted him, as if I were rising behind him. It reminded me of the way humans turn when they feel my breath against them and know suddenly that where they thought themselves to be utterly alone... that moment of awful suspicion before they see my face and gasp. He was looking at me now, and I could barely see his lips moving. And then I sensed it. He was afraid. Lestat afraid.

"And she was staring at him with the same level gaze, evincing no emotion, no thought.

" 'You infected her with this...' he whispered.

"He struck a match now with a sharp crackle and lit the mantel candles, lifted the smoky shades of the lamps, went around the room making light, until Claudia's small flame took on a solidity and he stood with his back to the marble mantel looking from light to light as if they restored some peace. 'I'm going out,' he said.

"She rose the instant he had reached the street, and suddenly she stopped in the center of the room and stretched, her tiny back arched, her arms straight up into small fists, her eyes squeezed shut for a moment and then wide open as if she were waking to the room from a dream. There was something obscene about her gesture; the room seemed to shimmer with Lestat's fear, echo with his last response. It demanded her attention. I must have made some involuntary movement to turn away from her, because she was standing at the arm of my chair now and pressing her hand flat upon my book, a book I hadn't been reading for hours. 'Come out with me.'

" 'You were right. He knows nothing. There is nothing he can tell us,' I said to her.

"'Did you ever really think that he did?' she asked me in the same small voice. 'We'll find others of our kind,' she said. 'We'll find them in central Europe. That is where they live in such numbers that the stories, both fiction and fact, fill volumes. I'm convinced it was from there that all vampires came, if they came from any place at all. We've tarried too long with him. Come out. Let the flesh instruct the mind'

"I think I felt a tremor of delight when she said these words, Let the flesh instruct the mind. 'Put books aside and kill,' she was whispering to me. I followed her down the stairs, across the courtyard and down a narrow alley to another street. Then she turned with outstretched arms for me to pick her up and carry her, though, of course, she was not tired; she wanted only to be near my ear, to clutch my neck. 'I haven't told him my plan, about the voyage, the money,' I was saying to her, conscious of something about her that was beyond me as she rode my measured steps, weightless in my arms.

" 'He killed the other vampire,' she said.

" 'No, why do you say this?' I asked her. But it wasn't the saying of it that disturbed me, stirred my soul as if it were a pool of water longing to be still. I felt as if she were moving me slowly towards something, as if she were the pilot of our slow walk through the dark street. 'Because I know it now,' she said with authority. 'The vampire made a slave of him, and he would no more be a slave than I would be a slave, and so he killed him. Killed him before he knew what he might know, and then in panic made a slave of you. And you've been his slave.'

" 'Never really...' I whispered to her. I felt the press of her cheek against my temple. She was cold and needed the kill. 'Not a slave. Just some sort of mindless accomplice,' I confessed to her, confessed to myself. I could feel the fever for the kill rising in me, a knot of hunger in my insides, a throbbing in the temples, as if the veins were contracting and my body might become a map of tortured vessels.

" 'No, slave,' she persisted in her grave monotone, as though thinking aloud, the words revelations, pieces of a puzzle. 'And I shall free us both.'

"I stopped. Her hand pressed me, urged me on. We were walking down the long wide alley beside the cathedral, towards the lights of Jackson Square, the water rushing fast in the gutter down the center of the alley, silver in the moonlight. She said, 'I will kill him.'

"I stood still at the end of the alley. I felt her shift in my arm, move down as if she could accomplish being free of me without the awkward aid of my hands. I set her on the stone sidewalk. I said no to her, I shook my head. I had that feeling then which I described before, that the building around me---the Cabildo, the cathedral, the apartments along the square---all this was silk and illusion and would ripple suddenly in a horrific wind, and a chasm would open in the earth that was the reality. 'Claudia,' I gasped, turning away from her.

" 'And why not kill him!' she said now, her voice rising, silvery and finally shrill. 'I have no use for him! I can get nothing from him! And he causes me pain, which I will not abide!'

" 'And if he had so little use for us!' I said to her. But the vehemence was false. Hopeless. She was at a distance from me now, small shoulders straight and determined, her pace rapid, like a little girl who, walking out on Sundays with her parents, wants to walk ahead and pretend she is all alone. 'Claudia!' I called after her, catching up with her in a stride. I reached for the small waist and felt her stiffen as if she had become iron. 'Claudia, you cannot kill him!' I whispered. She moved backwards, skipping, clicking on the stones, and moved out into the open street. A cabriolet rolled past us with a sudden surge of laughter and the clatter of horses and wooden wheels. The street was suddenly silent. I reached out for her and moved forward over an immense space and found her standing at the gate of Jackson Square, hands gripping the wrought-iron bars. I drew down close to her. 'I don't care what you feel, what you say, you cannot mean to kill him,' I said to her.

" 'And why not? Do you think him so strong!' she said, her eyes on the statue in the square, two immense pools of light.

" 'He is stronger than you know! Stronger than you dream! How do you mean to kill him? You can't measure his skill. You don't know!' I pleaded with her but could see her utterly unmoved, like a child staring in fascination through the window of a toy shop. Her tongue moved suddenly between her teeth and touched her lower lip in a strange flicker that sent a mild shock through my body. I tasted blood. I felt something palpable and helpless in my hands. I wanted to kill. I could smell and hear humans on the paths of the square, moving about the market, along the levee. I was about to take her, making her look at me, shake her if I had to, to make her listen, when she turned to me with her great liquid eyes. 'I love you, Louis,' she said.

" 'Then listen to me, Claudia, I beg you,' I whispered, holding her, pricked suddenly by a nearby collection of whispers, the slow, rising articulation of human speech over the mingled sounds of the night. 'He'll destroy you if you try to kill him. There is no way you can do such a thing for sure. You don't know how. And pitting yourself against him you'll lose everything. Claudia, I can't bear this.'

"There was a barely perceptible smile on her lips. 'No, Louis,' she whispered. 'I can kill him. And I want to tell you something else now, a secret between you and me.'

"I shook my head but she pressed even closer to me, lowering her lids so that her rich lashes almost brushed the roundness of her cheeks. 'The secret is, Louis, that I want to kill him. I will enjoy it!'

"I knelt beside her, speechless, her eyes studying me as they'd done so often in the past; and then she said, 'I kill humans every night. I seduce them, draw them close to me, with an insatiable hunger, a constant never-ending search for something... something, I don't know what it is...' She brought her fingers to her lips now and pressed her lips, her mouth partly open so I could see the gleam of her teeth. 'And I care nothing about them---where they came from, where they would go---if I did not meet them on the way. But I dislike him! I want him dead and will have him dead. I shall enjoy it.'

" 'But Claudia, he is not mortal. He's immortal. No illness can touch him. Age has no power over him. You threaten a life which might endure to the end of the world!'

" 'Ah, yes, that's it, precisely!' she said with reverential awe. 'A lifetime that might have endured for centuries. Such blood, such power. Do you think I'll possess his power and my own power when I take him?'

"I was enraged now. I rose suddenly and turned away from her. I could hear the whispering of humans near me. They were whispering of the father and the daughter, of some frequent sight of loving devotion. I realized they were talking of us.

" 'It's not necessary,' I said to her. 'It goes beyond all need, all common sense, all...'

" 'What? Humanity? He's a killer!' she hissed. 'Lone predator!' She repeated his own term, mocking it. 'Don't interfere with me or seek to know the time I choose to do it, nor try to come between us.'

"She raised her hand now to hush me and caught mine in an iron grasp, her tiny fingers biting into my tight, tortured flesh. 'If you do, you will bring me destruction by your interference. I can't be discouraged.'

"She was gone then in a flurry of bonnet ribbons and clicking slippers. I turned, paying no attention to where I went, wishing the city would swallow me, conscious now of the hunger rising to overtake reason. I was almost loath to put an end to it. I needed to let the lust, the excitement blot out all consciousness, and I thought of the kill over and over and over, walking slowly up this street and down the next, moving inexorably towards it, saying, It's a string which is pulling me through the labyrinth. I am not pulling the string. The string is pulling me.... And then I stood in the Rue Conti listening to a dull thundering, a familiar sound. It was the fencers above in the salon, advancing on the hollow wooden floor, forward, back again, scuttling, and the silver zinging of the foils. I stood back against the wall, where I could see them through the high naked windows, the young men dueling late into the night, left arm poised like the arm of a dancer, grace advancing towards death, grace thrusting for the heart, images of the young Freniere now driving the silver blade forward, now being pulled by it towards hell. Someone had come down the narrow wooden steps to the street---a young boy, a boy so young he had the smooth, plump cheeks of a child; his face was pink and flushed from the fencing, and beneath his smart gray coat and ruffled shirt there was the sweet smell of cologne and salt. I could feel his heat as he emerged from the dim light of the stairwell. He was laughing to himself, talking almost inaudibly to himself, his brown hair falling down over his eyes as he went along, shaking his head, the whispers rising, then falling off. And then he stopped short, his eyes on me. He stared, and his eyelids quivered and he laughed quickly, nervously. 'Excuse me!' he said now in French. 'You gave me a start!' And then, just as he moved to make a ceremonial bow and perhaps go around me, he stood still, and the shock spread over his flushed face. I could see the heart beating in the pink flesh of his cheeks, smell the sudden sweat of his young, taut body.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 549