by Rice, Anne
“This means you’ve forgiven me?”
“No, it means I’m playing with you. I may even destroy you for what you did to me. I haven’t made up my mind. Aren’t you afraid?”
“No. If you meant to do away with me, it would already be done.”
“Don’t be so certain. I’m not myself, and yet I am, and then I am not again.”
Long silence, with only the sounds of Mojo breathing hoarsely and deeply in his sleep.
“I’m glad to see you,” he said. “I knew you would win. But I didn’t know how.”
I didn’t answer. But I was suddenly boiling inside. Why were both my virtues and my faults used against me?
But what was the use of it—to make accusations, to grab him and shake him and demand answers from him? Maybe it was better not to know.
“Tell me what happened,” he said.
“I will not,” I replied. “Why in the world do you want to know?”
Our hushed voices echoed softly in the nave of the church. The wavering light of the candles played upon the gilt on the tops of the columns, on the faces of the distant statues. Oh, I liked it here in this silence and coolness. And in my heart of hearts I had to admit I was so very glad that he had come. Sometimes hate and love serve exactly the same purpose.
I turned and looked at him. He was facing me, one knee drawn up on the pew and his arm resting on the back of it. He was pale as always, an artful glimmer in the dark.
“You were right about the whole experiment,” I said. At least my voice was steady, I thought.
“How so?” No meanness in his tone, no challenge, only the subtle desire to know. And what a comfort it was—the sight of his face, and the faint dusty scent of his worn garments, and the breath of fresh rain still clinging to his dark hair.
“What you told me, my dear old friend and lover,” I said. “That I didn’t really want to be human. That it was a dream, and a dream built upon falsehood and fatuous illusion and pride.”
“I can’t claim that I understood it,” he said. “I don’t understand it now.”
“Oh, yes, you did. You understand very well. You always have. Maybe you lived long enough; maybe you have always been the stronger one. But you knew. I didn’t want the weakness; I didn’t want the limitations; I didn’t want the revolting needs and the endless vulnerability; I didn’t want the drenching sweat or the searing cold. I didn’t want the blinding darkness, or the noises that walled up my hearing, or the quick, frantic culmination of erotic passion; I didn’t want the trivia; I didn’t want the ugliness. I didn’t want the isolation; I didn’t want the constant fatigue.”
“You explained this to me before. There must have been something … however small … that was good!”
“What do you think?”
“The light of the sun.”
“Precisely. The light of the sun on snow; the light of the sun on water; the light of the sun … on one’s hands and one’s face, and opening up all the secret folds of the entire world as if it were a flower, as if we were all part of one great sighing organism. The light of the sun … on snow.”
I stopped. I really didn’t want to tell him. I felt I had betrayed myself.
“There were other things,” I said. “Oh, there were many things. Only a fool would not have seen them. Some night, perhaps, when we’re warm and comfortable together again as if this never happened, I’ll tell you.”
“But they were not enough.”
“Not for me. Not now.”
Silence.
“Maybe that was the best part,” I said, “the discovery. And that I no longer entertain a deception. That I know now I truly love being the little devil that I am.”
I turned and gave him my prettiest, most malignant smile.
He was far too wise to fall for it. He gave a long near-silent sigh, his lids lowered for a moment, and then he looked at me again.
“Only you could have gone there,” he said. “And come back.”
I wanted to say this wasn’t true. But who else would have been fool enough to trust the Body Thief? Who else would have plunged into the venture with such sheer recklessness? And as I thought this over, I realized what ought to have been plain to me already. That I’d known the risk I was taking. I’d seen it as the price. The fiend told me he was a liar; he told me he was a cheat. But I had done it because there was simply no other way.
Of course this wasn’t really what Louis meant by his words; but in a way it was. It was the deeper truth.
“Have you suffered in my absence?” I asked, looking back at the altar.
Very soberly he answered, “It was pure hell.” I didn’t reply.
“Each risk you take hurts me,” he said. “But that is my concern and my fault.”
“Why do you love me?” I asked.
“You know, you’ve always known. I wish I could be you. I wish I could know the joy you know all the time.”
“And the pain, you want that as well?”
“Your pain?” He smiled. “Certainly. I’ll take your brand of pain anytime, as they say.”
“You smug, cynical lying bastard,” I whispered, the anger cresting in me suddenly, the blood even rushing into my face. “I needed you and you turned me away! Out in the mortal night you locked me. You refused me. You turned your back!”
The heat in my voice startled him. It startled me. But it was there and I couldn’t deny it, and once again my hands were trembling, these hands that had leapt out and away from me at the false David, even when all the other lethal power in me was kept in check.
He didn’t utter a word. His face registered those small changes which shock produces—the slight quiver of an eyelid, the mouth lengthening and then softening, a subtle clabbering look, vanishing as quickly as it appeared. He held my accusing glance all through it, and then slowly looked away.
“It was David Talbot, your mortal friend, who helped you, wasn’t it?” he asked.
I nodded.
But at the mere mention of the name, it was as if all my nerves had been touched by the tip of a heated bit of wire. There was enough suffering here as it was. I couldn’t speak anymore of David. I wouldn’t speak of Gretchen. And I suddenly realized that what I wanted to do most in the world was to turn to him and put my arms around him and weep on his shoulder as I’d never done.
How shameful. How predictable! How insipid. And how sweet.
I didn’t do it.
We sat there in silence. The soft cacophony of the city rose and fell beyond the stained-glass windows, which caught the faint glow from the street lamps outside. The rain had come again, the gentle warm rain of New Orleans, in which one can walk so easily as if it were nothing but the gentlest mist.
“I want you to forgive me,” he said. “I want you to understand that it wasn’t cowardice; it wasn’t weakness. What I said to you at the time was the truth. I couldn’t do it. I can’t bring someone into this! Not even if that someone is a mortal man with you inside him. I simply could not.”
“I know all that,” I said.
I tried to leave it there. But I couldn’t. My temper wouldn’t cool, my wondrous temper, the temper which had caused me to smash David Talbot’s head into a plaster wall.
He spoke again. “I deserve whatever you have to say.”
“Ah, more than that!” I said. “But this is what I want to know.” I turned and faced him, speaking through my clenched teeth. “Would you have refused me forever? If they’d destroyed my body, the others—Marius, whoever knew of it—if I’d been trapped in that mortal form, if I’d come to you over and over and over again, begging you and pleading with you, would you have shut me out forever! Would you have held fast?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t answer so quickly. Look for the truth inside yourself. You do know. Use your filthy imagination. You do know. Would you have turned me away?”
“I don’t know the answer!”
“I despise you!” I said in a bitter, harsh whisper. “I
ought to destroy you—finish what I started when I made you. Turn you into ashes and sift them through my hands. You know that I could do it! Like that! Like the snap of mortal fingers, I could do it. Burn you as I burnt your little house. And nothing could save you, nothing at all.”
I glared at him, at the sharp graceful angles of his imperturbable face, faintly phosphorescent against the deeper shadows of the church. How beautiful the shape of his wide-set eyes, with their fine rich black lashes. How perfect the tender indentation of his upper lip.
The anger was acid inside me, destroying the very veins through which it flowed, and burning away the preternatural blood.
Yet I couldn’t hurt him. I couldn’t even conceive of carrying out such awful, cowardly threats. I could never have brought harm to Claudia. Ah, to make something out of nothing, yes. To throw up the pieces to see how they will fall, yes. But vengeance. Ah, arid awful distasteful vengeance. What is it to me?
“Think on it,” he whispered. “Could you make another, after all that’s passed?” Gently he pushed it further. “Could you work the Dark Trick again? Ah—you take your time before answering. Look deep inside you for the truth as you just told me to do. And when you know it, you needn’t tell it to me.”
Then he leant forward, closing the distance between us, and pressed his smooth silken lips against the side of my face. I meant to pull away, but he used all his strength to hold me still, and I allowed it, this cold, passionless kiss, and he was the one who finally drew back like a collection of shadows collapsing into one another, with only his hand still on my shoulder, as I sat with my eyes on the altar still.
Finally I rose slowly, stepping past him, and motioned for Mojo to wake and come.
I moved down the length of the nave to the front doors of the church. I found that shadowy nook where the vigil candles burn beneath the statue of the Virgin, an alcove full of wavering and pretty light.
The scent and sound of the rain forest came back to me, the great enclosing darkness of those powerful trees. And then the vision of the little whitewashed chapel in the clearing with its doors thrown open, and the eerie muted sound of the bell in the vagrant breeze. And the scent of blood coming from the wounds in Gretchen’s hands.
I lifted the long wick that lay there for the lighting of candles, and I dipped it into an old flame, and made a new one burst into being, hot and yellow and finally steady, giving off the sharp perfume of burnt wax.
I was about to say the words “For Gretchen,” when I realized that it was not for her at all that I had lighted the candle. I looked up at the face of the Virgin. I saw the crucifix above Gretchen’s altar. Again, I felt the peace of the rain forest around me, and I saw that little ward with those small beds. For Claudia, my precious beautiful Claudia? No, not for her either, much as I loved her …
I knew the candle was for me.
It was for the brown-haired man who had loved Gretchen in Georgetown. It was for the sad lost blue-eyed demon I had been before I became that man. It was for the mortal boy of centuries ago who went off to Paris with his mother’s jewels in his pocket, and only the clothes on his back. It was for the wicked impulsive creature who had held the dying Claudia in his arms.
It was for all those beings, and for the devil who stood here now, because he loved candles, and he loved the making of light from light. Because there was no God in whom he believed, and no saints, and no Queen of Heaven.
Because he had kept his bitter temper and he had not destroyed his friend.
Because he was alone, no matter how near to him that friend. And because happiness had returned to him, as if it were an affliction he’d never fully conquer, the impish smile already spreading on his lips, the thirst leaping inside him, and the desire in him rising just to step outside again and wander in the slick and shining city streets.
Yes. For the Vampire Lestat, that little candle, that miraculous tiny candle, increasing by that small amount all the light in the universe! And burning in an empty church the night long among those other little flames. It would be burning on the morrow when the faithful came; when the sun shone through these doors.
Keep your vigil, little candle, in darkness and in sunshine.
Yes, for me.
THIRTY-TWO
Did you think the story was finished? That the fourth installment of the Vampire Chronicles had come to a close?
Well, the book should be ended. It really should have ended when I lit that small candle, but it didn’t. I realized that the following night when I first opened my eyes.
Pray continue to Chapter Thirty-three to discover what happened next. Or you can quit now, if you like. You may come to wish that you had.
THIRTY-THREE
Barbados.
He was still there when I caught up with him. In a hotel by the sea.
Weeks had passed, though why I let so much time go by, I don’t know. Kindness was no part of it, nor cowardice either. Nevertheless I had waited. I had watched the splendid little flat in the Rue Royale being restored, step by step, until there were at least some exquisitely furnished rooms in which I could spend my time, thinking about all that had happened, and which might yet take place. Louis had returned to take up residence with me, and was busy searching for a desk very like the one which had once stood in the parlour over a hundred years before.
David had left many messages with my man in Paris. He would be leaving soon for the carnival in Rio. He missed me. He wished I would come join him there.
All had gone well with the settlement of his estate. He was David Talbot, a young cousin of the older man who had died in Miami, and the new owner of the ancestral home. The Talamasca had accomplished these things for him, restoring to him the fortune he had left to them, and settling upon him a generous pension. He was no longer their Superior General, though he maintained his quarters in the Motherhouse. He would be forever under their wing.
He had a small gift for me, if I wanted it. It was the locket with the miniature of Claudia. He’d found it. Exquisite portrait; fine gold chain. He had it with him, and would send it to me if I liked. Or would I not come to see him, and accept it from his hands myself?
Barbados. He had felt compelled to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak. The weather was beautiful. He was reading Faust again, he wrote to me. He had so many questions he wanted to ask me. When would I come?
He had not seen God or the Devil again, though he had, before leaving Europe, spent a long time in various Paris cafés. He wasn’t going to spend this lifetime searching for God or the Devil either. “Only you can know the man I am now,” he wrote. “I miss you, I want to talk to you. Can you not remember that I helped you, and forgive me everything else?”
It was that seaside resort he’d described to me, of handsome pink stucco buildings, and great sprawling bungalow roofs, and soft fragrant gardens, and endless vistas of the clean sand and the sparkling translucent sea.
I didn’t go there until I’d been in the gardens up the mountain, and had stood on those very cliffs he had visited, looking out over the forested mountains, and listening to the wind in the branches of the noisy clacking coconut palms.
Had he told me about the mountains? That you could look immediately down into the deep soft valleys and that the neighboring slopes seemed so close you thought you could touch them, though they were far, far away?
I don’t think so, but he had described well the flowers—the shrimp plant with its tiny blossoms, and the orchid tree and the ginger lilies, yes, those fierce red lilies with their delicate shivering petals, and the ferns nestled in the deep glades, and the waxen bird-of-paradise and the tall stiff pussy willows, and the tiny yellow-throated blossoms of the trumpet vine.
We should walk there together, he had said.
Well, that we would do. Soft the crunch of the gravel. And oh, never had the high swaying coconut palms looked so beautiful as on these bluffs.
I waited until it was past midnight before I made my descent upon the spra
wling seaside hotel. The courtyard was as he had said, full of pink azaleas and large waxen elephant ears and dark glossy shrubs.
I passed through the empty darkened dining room and its long open porches and went down on the beach. I went far out in the shallows, so that I might look back from a distance upon the bungalow rooms with their roofed verandas. I found him at once.
The doors to the little patio were completely pulled back, and the yellow light spilled out on the small paved enclosure with its painted table and chairs. Inside, as if on a lighted stage, he sat at a small desk, facing the night and the water, typing away on a small portable computer, the tight small clicking of the keys carrying in the silence, even over the whisper of the lazy softly foaming surf.
He was naked except for a pair of white beach shorts. His skin was very darkly golden as though he spent his days sleeping in the sun. Streaks of yellow shone in his dark brown hair. There was a glow to his naked shoulders and smooth, hairless chest. Very firm muscles at his waist. A slight golden sheen came from the down on his thighs and legs and the very scant bits of hair on the backs of his hands.
I hadn’t even noticed that hair when I was alive. Or maybe I hadn’t liked it. Didn’t really know. I liked it now well enough. And that he seemed a little more slender than I had been in that frame. Yes, all the bones of the body were more visible, conforming I suppose to some modern style of health which says we must be fashionably underfed. It suited him; it suited the body; I suppose it suited them both.
The room was very neat behind him and rustic in the style of the islands with its beamed ceiling and rose-tiled floor. The bed was covered in a gay pastel fabric printed with a jagged geometric Indian design. The armoire and chests were white and decorated with brightly painted flowers. The many simple lamps gave off a generous light.
I had to smile though that he sat amid all this luxury, typing away—David the scholar, dark eyes dancing with the ideas inside his head.
Drawing nearer, I noted that he was very clean-shaven. His nails had been trimmed and buffed, perhaps by a manicurist. His hair was still the same full wavy mop I’d worn so carelessly when I’d been in this body, but it, too, had been trimmed and had an altogether more pleasing shape. There lay his copy of Goethe’s Faust beside him, open, a pen lying across it, and many of the pages folded, or marked with small silver paper clips.