The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles)

by Rice, Anne

  “Yes, people searched, as the Old Man had been convalescent for two years before this bizarre and desperate flight, but they never found any island, and they had to shoot many a gator just to survive, and came back with the gators to sell for their hides, but not with Manfred.

  “And so it was that the idea took hold that there was no real island. And that the Old Man had simply drowned to put an end to his wheezing and choking misery, for he was surely at death’s door when he bolted for the pirogue and headed out as if to cross the River Styx.

  “Then, some seven years later, when his will was finally opened, there was found contained within the strong exhortation that no Blackwood or anyone belonging to the Blackwood household was ever to fish or hunt beyond the mud banks of Sugar Devil Swamp, and the admonition, in Manfred’s own hand, that Sugar Devil Island was a danger not only to flesh and blood but to a being’s immortal soul.

  “A very good copy of these pages of Manfred’s Last Will and Testament, all notarized in the year 1900, is framed and mounted on the living room wall. Guests adored it. I remember my teachers, Nash in particular, just howling with laughter when they read it. And it did certainly seem to me, as I was growing up, that the lawyer, the notary and Mad Manfred were all poets in Byronic cahoots with one another when they wrote this.

  “But it doesn’t seem that way to me now.

  “Let me continue. Of William, Manfred’s only surviving son, and Camille, his only surviving daughter, there are huge portraits in the parlor, very handsome paintings if nothing else, and the current tale that William has often appeared to family and guests, rummaging through a desk in the living room, is true.

  “The desk is a beautiful piece, Louis XV, I believe, with inlaid wood, cabriole legs and ormolu—you know, the works—and I have myself glimpsed him once hovering near it.

  “I have no doubt of what I’ve seen with my own eyes, but I will get to that when I return to the account of me and Goblin. It’s enough to say right now that I never found anything in the desk. There are no secret compartments or documents.

  “Camille’s ghost is almost always seen on the attic stairs, a woman with tastefully coiffed gray hair, and in an old-lady black dress and old-lady thick-heeled shoes, with a double strand of pearls around her neck, ignoring those to whom she appears and vanishing at the attic doorway.

  “And then there are the rushing feet of little children in the upstairs hall, these ascribed to Manfred’s little daughter Isabel, who died when she was three, and his son Philip, who didn’t live even that long.

  “When it came to the rest of the family, it was simply a matter of elegantly painted portraits—Gravier’s is especially fine, but then I did see Gravier, didn’t I? But his wife, Blessed Alice, a lovely portrait subject, and Pops and Sweetheart, who reluctantly posed for their portraits, though it wasn’t their nature, have never appeared to anyone. So far …

  “Then there’s the living legend of Aunt Queen—Miss Queen to all those of this parish—and of her heroic travels crisscrossing the globe. The guests were delighted to hear that she was ‘presently in Bombay’ or ‘celebrating New Year’s Eve in Rio’ or ‘resting in her villa on Santorini’ or ‘engaged in a major shopping spree in Rome.’ It proved as exciting to them as any ghost story.

  “That Aunt Queen was a great collector of cameos was also well known, and in those days, the public days, there was a dainty glass case in the parlor, perched on spindly legs in the corner, which held a display of her finest pieces.

  “Bed-and-breakfast guests at Blackwood Manor never stole things, I’m relieved to report—I think they’re far more interested in homemade biscuits, jam and architecture—and I was the one who periodically changed the display of Aunt Queen’s cameos. I grew to like them. I could see the variations. Sweetheart had no real interest in them. And Pops was the outdoor man.

  “Aunt Queen can be said to have been a living haunt, or a protective spirit, which was a remarkable thing to me when I was a child, because I felt safe merely thinking about her, and her visits were like the apparitions of a saint.

  “Others died in this house. An infant born to Gravier and Blessed Alice; there are times when I swear I can hear a baby crying. Guests used to hear it too, and sometimes they would remark on it rather innocently.

  “Gravier had a younger brother, Patrick, who fell from a horse and died of the concussion in the middle upstairs bedroom. His portrait hangs in there over the fireplace. His wife, Regina, lived out her life here, much beloved by the Kitchen Gang, of which she was a baking, frying, slicing, dicing bonafide member. Their only daughter, Nanette, moved away long years ago to New Orleans.

  “There, in a cheap French Quarter boardinghouse, Nanette drank a whole bottle of bourbon and ate a whole bottle of aspirin and died of the result. I don’t know any more of it than that. If her ghost walks, it doesn’t do so at Blackwood Manor. Patrick too seems to be resting well in the family crypt. So is his wife, Regina.

  “Professional ghost hunters came once and found evidence of multiple hauntings, and made a tantalizing presentation to the guests who had gathered for the Halloween weekend, and so the tradition of the Halloween Weekend came to be.

  “The Halloween Weekend was always marvelous fun, with huge white tents on the terraces and on the far lawns, with chilled champagne and Bloody Marys. Tarot-card readers and palm readers, fortune-tellers and psychics were hired for the event, and the climax was a costume ball to which people came from all the parish around.

  “If Aunt Queen happened to be at home, which was seldom, a great number of old friends of hers joined the festivities, and the costumes were wonderfully lavish, the place being full of princes and princesses of all description, elegant vampires, stereotypical black-hatted witches, sorceresses, Egyptian queens, moon goddesses and the occasional ambitious mummy, dripping with white gauze.

  “I loved all of the Halloween Weekend, you can tell by the way I dote on it. And it won’t surprise you to learn that the expert ghost hunters never once took notice of Goblin, even when Goblin danced around them in a circle and did the abominable trick of stretching his mouth.

  “Of course Goblin isn’t the ghost of a living person, but these experts were very good at declaring that poltergeists were working their subtle activities in the kitchen and pantry, accounting for pings and pongs of noise that one could scarce hear, or the sound of a radio devolving from music into static; and poltergeists are pure spirits as far as I know.

  “This was my life growing up—this and the Christmas banquet of which I’ve already told you, with the caroling and the singing on the staircase and of course the huge dinner of roast turkey, goose and ham along with all the usual trimmings, and the weather outside being sometimes cold enough for the women to wear their old fur coats that smelled of moth balls, and the gentlemen joining in the singing with full hearts.

  “It seemed at times that the men singing the Christmas carols made me cry. I expected the women to sing, it seemed natural, but for the men to join in, men of all ages, and to do it with such stout hearts, that seemed especially reassuring and wonderful. I cried every year. It was that and the purity of the soprano who sang ‘O Holy Night,’ and ‘What Child Is This?’ Of course I joined in the singing myself.

  “And lest I overlook it, there was the Spring Festival, when the azaleas planted all around Blackwood Manor were blooming, in pink and white and red, and we would have a huge buffet, almost like that of a wedding, outside on the lawn. There was always an Easter Buffet as well.

  “Then I suppose I should throw in all the weddings again and the commotion they brought, and the fascinating waiters I would meet in the kitchen, who to a one felt the ‘vibrations’ of spirits, and the brides becoming hysterical because their hair was not done right and the hairdresser had already gone, and Sweetheart, my darling Sweetheart, portly and ever solicitous, huffing and puffing up the stairs to the rescue and snatching up her electric curling iron and doing a few excellent tricks she knew to make every
thing right.

  “There was Mardi Gras too, when, even though we’re an hour and a half from New Orleans, we were booked solid, and we decorated in the traditional colors of purple, green and gold.

  “Sometimes, a very few times, I went into the city to see some of the Mardi Gras parades. Sweetheart’s sister, Aunt Ruthie, lived on St. Charles Avenue, which you know is the main parade route. But she wasn’t a Blackwood, and her sons, though probably normal, appeared to me to be monsters with too much body hair and overly deep voices, and I felt uncomfortable there.

  “So Mardi Gras didn’t penetrate to me very much except for all the gaiety out here at the house, and the inevitable costume ball we held on the night of Fat Tuesday itself. It was amazing how many revelers came back at sunset from New Orleans, after hours of watching Zulu, Rex and the interminable truck parades, to drink themselves sick at our festive bar.

  “Of course I did very occasionally encounter other children here—at the Halloween party and at the Christmas party in particular, and sometimes at the weddings—but I didn’t take to them. They seemed to me to be freaky little people. I have to laugh at myself for thinking such a thing. But as I’ve said, my world was made up of spirits and adults, and I just didn’t know what to do with children.

  “I think I feared children as treacherous and even a little dangerous. I’m not sure why exactly, except that Goblin didn’t like them, but Goblin really didn’t like me to be with anyone very long.

  “I hung with the adults by natural inclination and strong choice.

  “I can’t think about the weddings now, as we talk together, without thinking of something ghastly that I have to confess to you—something that happened far from Blackwood Manor, and on the night I was made a Blood Hunter. But the time will come for that, I know.

  “That’s the family history, as it came down to me when I was innocent and protected by the umbrella of Pops and Sweetheart, and Aunt Queen, who was ever like a fairy godmother, dipping down to Earth only now and then with her stacked heels and invisible wings.

  “There are other family members—connections of William’s wives—he had two, the first of whom was the mother of Gravier, and the second, the mother of Aunt Queen, and of Gravier’s wife, and, of course, connections of Sweetheart’s. But though I’ve seen such cousins from time to time, they are not part of this story, and they had no impact on me whatsoever, except perhaps a feeling on my part of being unordinary and hopelessly strange.

  “It’s time now for me to move on to the tale of me and Goblin, and the account of how I got educated.

  “But before I do, let me trace the Blackwood lineage, for what it’s worth. Manfred was the patriarch, and William was his son. William begat Gravier. Gravier begat Pops. And Pops, late in life when he and Sweetheart had despaired of having a child, begat Patsy. At age sixteen, Patsy gave birth to me and named me Tarquin Anthony Blackwood. As to my father, let me state now plainly and unequivocally that I don’t have one.

  “Patsy has no clear recollection of what was happening to her in the weeks during which I might have been conceived, except that she was singing with a band in New Orleans, with fake identification to get her into the club where the band was playing, and she and a whole mob of musicians and singers were hanging together in a flat on Esplanade Avenue, ‘with plenty of weed and plenty of wine and plenty of company.’

  “I’ve often wondered why Patsy didn’t seek an abortion. She certainly could have managed it. And I’m tormented by the suspicion that Patsy thought that if she was a mother she would be an adult, and Pops and Sweetheart would give her freedom and money. She didn’t get either one. And so there she was at sixteen, with a baby brother of a child, and obviously no notion of what to do with me, as she went on with her dreams of becoming a country-western singer and of having her own band.

  “I have to remember all this when I think of her. I have to try not to hate her. I wish I could stop feeling pain every time I think of her. I’m ashamed to say it again but I would like to kill her.

  “Now on to the story of me and Goblin and how I was educated and how I educated him.”

  8

  “You’ve heard me say that Goblin is my double, and let me emphasize it, because the duplication of me is always perfect, and so I’ve had all my life a mirror held up to me in Goblin in which I could see, if not know, myself.

  “As to Goblin’s personality? His wishes? His temper? All this was wholly different in that he could be a perfect devil when it humiliated me and embarrassed me, and I could seldom control him, though I did learn early on that if I ignored him completely, which took an immense act of will, he might fade and disappear.

  “There have been moments when I did nothing but inspect Goblin, the better to know how I myself looked, and when some alteration came in my appearance, such as the trimming of my hair, Goblin would clench his fists, make ugly faces and stomp his noiseless foot. For that reason I often wore my hair bushy. And as the years passed Goblin took an interest in our clothes, and sometimes threw down on the floor the pair of overalls he wanted me to wear, and the shirt as well.

  “But I’m plunging too fast into the condition of things, and not telling memories as they are lodged.

  “My first distinct memory is a third birthday party in the kitchen, with my grandma Sweetheart and Jasmine and her sister, Lolly, and their mother, Little Ida, and her mother, Big Ramona—and all of them on high stools or chairs at the white-enameled kitchen table, gazing down at me as I sat at my child’s table, with Goblin right beside me, talking away with Goblin and telling him how to pick up his fork the way I’d been taught to do and eat his cake.

  “He had his own little chair to the left of me and a place set for him, and milk and cake, the same as me. And at one point he grabbed my left hand—I’m left-handed and he’s right-handed—and he made me smear my cake all over my plate.

  “I started crying because I’d never known him to be so strong—he had truly made my hand move, though not perhaps as he wanted it to—and I didn’t want my cake smeared, I wanted to eat it, and right away the kitchen was in a flying commotion, with everybody jumping up from the stools and Sweetheart trying to wipe my tears and at the same time tell me that I was ‘making a mess.’

  “Goblin was as solid as I was, both of us in navy blue sailor suits for the occasion, and I had some vague sense even then that he was at his strongest because of the heavy rain that was falling outside.

  “I loved the kitchen on those rainy days, loved to stand at the back screen door and watch the rain come down in sheets, with the kitchen all warm and full of bright electric light behind me, the radio singing oldies, or Pops playing the harmonica, and all those beloved adults, and the smell of cooking from the stove.

  “But let me return to my third birthday party.

  “Now Goblin had ruined it and I was sobbing. And he, the little idiot, after crossing his eyes and rocking his head from side to side, took his two first fingers and stretched his mouth on both sides wide as he could, which made me scream.

  “I know I would never have stretched my mouth like that, but he did it often with his mouth, just to get a rise out of me.

  “Then he vanished, completely vanished, and I started to bellow his name.

  “My last distinct picture of that event is of all the women trying to comfort me, the four black women who were as gentle as my grandmother Sweetheart, and even Pops coming in, drying the rain off himself with a towel and asking what was wrong.

  “I was hollering, ‘Goblin, Goblin,’ over and over again, and Goblin wouldn’t come back.

  “A terror erupted in me as it always did when he would vanish, and how it was resolved then I don’t know.

  “It’s dim, this memory, but it’s fixed because I remember the giant number three on the birthday cake, and everybody saying so proudly that I was three years old, and then Goblin being so strong and so full of spite.

  “Also Pops gave me a harmonica on that birthday and taught me how
to blow in it, and I sat with him and we played together for a little while, and ever after we did that in the evenings right after supper before Pops headed up early to bed.

  “What comes next is a series of memories of Goblin and me playing together alone in my room. Happy, happy memories. We played at blocks, with a marvelous set full of columns and arches, creating buildings of a vague classical bent to be sent crashing down, and for the purpose of crashing and banging we had fine little fire trucks and automobiles, but sometimes we just did the crashing with our hands or feet.

  “Goblin didn’t have the strength to do it on his own right away, but over time he acquired it, but before that he would take my left hand to do it, or to roll the fire truck into our marvelous structures, and then he’d smile, and break loose of me, and dance about.

  “My memory of these rooms is pretty clear. Little Ida, Jasmine’s mother, slept in the big bed with me, as I was already too old for a crib, and Goblin slept with us, and this room here was the playroom and filled with toys of all kinds.

  “But I was easy with Goblin and he had no reason to be mean.

  “And gradually, in spite of my young age, I began to see that Goblin didn’t want to share me with the world, and was happiest, by far, when he had my full attention, which made him strong.

  “Goblin didn’t even want me to play the harmonica, because he lost me when I did, even though he loved to dance to the radio or to songs that the women in the kitchen sang. He had me laughing at him or dancing with him at those times. But when I played the harmonica, especially with Pops, I was in another world.

  “Of course, I learned the knack of playing the harmonica especially for Goblin, nodding and winking at him (I could wink really early in life, with either eye) as he danced, and so he started to put up with it as the years passed.

  “Most of the time, Goblin had what he wanted. We had our own table up here for crayons and drawing. And I let him guide me, his right hand on my left hand, but all he’d create was scribble scratch, whereas I wanted to draw stick figures, or figures made of circles, and faces with little circles for eyes. I taught him how to do the stick figures, or the egg people, as Little Ida called them, and how to make pictures of a garden with big round flowers that I liked to do.