by Anne Rice
With her whole being she said Yes.
“Yes!” she screamed aloud suddenly, drunkenly, the voice maybe that had always been her voice yet one that I had never heard. Her eyes closed and tightened and her head turned from the left and to the right. “Yes!”
I leant forward and kissed the blood on. her open lips. It sent a zinging through all my limbs and the thirst leapt out for her and tried to transform her into mere flesh. My arms slipped around her light little form and I lifted her up and up, until I was standing with her against the window, and her hair was falling down behind her, and the blood came up in her out of her lungs again, but it didn’t matter now.
All the memories of my life with her surrounded us; they wove their shroud around us and closed us off from the world, the soft poems and songs of childhood, and the sense of her before words when there had only been the flicker of the light on the ceiling above her pillows and the smell of her all around me and her voice silencing my crying, and then the hatred of her and the need of her, and the losing of her behind a thousand closed doors, and cruel answers, and the terror of her and her complexity and her indifference and her indefinable strength.
And jetting up into the current came the thirst, not obliterating but heating every concept of her, until she was flesh and blood and mother and lover and all things beneath the cruel pressure of my fingers and my lips, everything I had ever desired. I drove my teeth into her, feeling her stiffen and gasp, and I felt my mouth grow wide to catch the hot flood when it came.
Her heart and soul split open. There was no age to her, no single moment. My knowledge dimmed and flickered and there was no mother anymore, no petty need and petty terror; she was simply who she was. She was Gabrielle.
And all her life came to her defense, the years and years of suffering and loneliness, the waste in those damp, hollow chambers to which she’d been condemned, and the books that were her solace, and the children who devoured her and abandoned her, and the pain and disease, her final enemy, which had, in promising release, pretended to be her friend. Beyond words and images there came the secret thudding of her passion, her seeming madness, her refusal to despair.
I was holding her, holding her off her feet, my arms crossed behind her narrow back, my hand cradling her limp head, and I was groaning so loud against her with the pumping of the blood that it was a song in time with her heart. But the heart was slowing too quickly. Her death was coming, and with all her will she pumped against it, and in a final burst of denial I pushed her away from me and held her still.
I was almost swooning. The thirst wanted her heart. It was no alchemist, the thirst. And I was standing there with my lips parted and my eyes glazed and I held her far, far away from me as if I were two beings, the one wanting to crush her and the other to bring her to me.
Her eyes were open and seemingly blind. For a moment she was in some place beyond all suffering, where there was nothing but sweetness and even something that might be understanding, but then I heard her calling to me by name.
I lifted my right wrist to my mouth and slashed the vein and pushed it against her lips. She didn’t move as the blood spilled over her tongue.
“Mother, drink,” I said frantically, and pushed it harder, but some change had already commenced.
Her lips quivered, and her mouth locked to me and the pain whipped through me suddenly encircling my heart.
Her body lengthened, tensed, her left hand rising to grasp my wrist as she swallowed the first spurt. And the pain grew stronger and stronger so that I almost cried out. I could see it as if it were molten metal coursing through my vessels, branching through every sinew and limb. Yet it was only her pulling, her sucking, her taking the blood out of me that I had taken from her. She was standing now on her own feet, her head barely leaning against my chest. And a numbness crept over me with the pulling burning through the numbness, and my heart thundered against it, feeding the pain as it fed her pulling with every beat.
Harder and harder she drew and faster, and I felt her grip tighten and her body grow hard. I wanted to force her away, but I would not do it, and when my legs gave under me it was she who held me up. I was swaying and the room was tilting, but she went on with it and a vast silence stretched out in all directions from me and then without will or conviction, I thrust her backwards away.
She stumbled and stood before the window, her long fingers pressed flat against her open mouth. And before I turned and collapsed into the nearby chair I looked full at her white face for an instant, and her form swelling, it seemed, under the thin peeling of dark blue taffeta, her eyes like two crystal orbs gathering the light.
I think I said, “Mother,” in that instant like some stupid mortal, and I closed my eyes.
2
WAS sitting in the chair. It seemed I’d been asleep forever, but I hadn’t been asleep at all. I was home in my father’s house.
I looked around for the fire poker and my dogs, and to see if there was any wine left, and then I saw the gold drapery around the windows and the back of Notre Dame against the evening stars, and I saw her there.
We were in Paris. And we were going to live forever.
She had something in her hands. Another candelabra. A tinderbox. She stood very straight and her movements were quick. She made a spark and touched it to the candles one by one. And the little flames rose, and the painted flowers on the walls rolled up to the ceiling and the dancers on the ceiling moved for one moment and then were frozen in their circle again.
She was standing in front of me, the candelabra to the right of her. And her face was white and perfectly smooth. The dark bruises under her eyes had gone away; in fact every blemish or flaw she had ever had had gone away, though what those flaws had been I couldn’t have told you. She was perfect now.
And the lines given her by age had been reduced and curiously deepened, so that there were tiny laugh lines at the edge of each eye, and a very tiny crease on either side of her mouth. The barest fold of extra flesh remained to each eyelid, heightening her symmetry, the sense of triangles in her face, and her lips were the softest shade of pink. She looked delicate as a diamond can look delicate when preyed upon by the light.
I closed my eyes and opened them again and saw it was no delusion, any more than her silence was a delusion. And I saw that her body was even more profoundly changed. She had the fullness of young womanhood again, the breasts that the illness had withered away. They were swelling above the dark blue taffeta of her corset, the pale pink tint of her flesh so subtle it might have been reflected light. But her hair was even more astonishing because it appeared to be alive. So much color moved in it that the hair itself appeared to be writhing, billions of tiny strands stirring around the flawless white face and throat.
The wounds on her throat were gone.
Now nothing remained but the final act of courage. Look into her eyes.
Look with these vampire eyes at another being like yourself for the first time since Magnus leapt into the fire.
I must have made some sound because she responded ever so slightly as if I had. Gabrielle, that was the only name I could ever call her now. “Gabrielle,” I said to her, never having called her that except in some very private thoughts, and I saw her almost smile.
I looked down at my wrist. The wound was gone but the thirst gnashed in me. My veins spoke to me as if I had spoken to them. And I stared at her and saw her lips move in a tiny gesture of hunger. And she gave me a strange, meaningful expression as if to say, “Don’t you understand?”
But I heard nothing from her. Silence, only the beauty of her eyes looking full at me and the love perhaps with which we saw each other, but silence stretching in all directions, ratifying nothing. I couldn’t fathom it. Was she closing her mind? I asked her silently and she didn’t appear to comprehend.
“Now,” she said, and her voice startled me. It was softer, more resonant than before. For one moment we were in Auvergne, the snow was falling, and she was singing to me a
nd it was echoing as if in a great cave. But that was finished. She said, “Go … done with all of this, quickly—now!” She nodded to coax me and she came closer and she tugged at my hand. “Look at yourself in the mirror,” she whispered.
But I knew. I had given her more blood than I had taken from her. I was starved. I hadn’t even fed before I came to her.
But I was so taken with the sound of the syllables and that glimpse of snow falling and the memory of the singing that for a moment I didn’t respond. I looked at her fingers touching mine. I saw our flesh was the same. I rose up out of the chair and held her two hands and then I felt of her arms and her face. It was done and I was alive still! She was with me now. She had come through that awful solitude and she was with me, and I could think of nothing suddenly except holding her, crushing her to me, never letting her go.
I lifted her off her feet. I swung her up in my arms and we turned round and round.
She threw back her head and her laughter shook loose from her, growing louder and louder, until I put my hand over her mouth.
“You can shatter all the glass in the room with your voice,” I whispered. I glanced towards the doors. Nicki and Roget were out there.
“Then let me shatter it!” she said, and there was nothing playful in her expression. I set her on her feet. I think we embraced again and again almost foolishly. I couldn’t keep myself from it.
But other mortals were moving in the flat, the doctor and the nurses thinking that they should come in.
I saw her look to the door. She was hearing them too. But why wasn’t I hearing her?
She broke away from me, eyes darting from one object to another. She snatched up the candles again and brought them to the mirror where she looked at her face.
I understood what was happening to her. She needed time to see and to measure with her new vision. But we had to get out of the flat.
I could hear Nicki’s voice through the wall, urging the doctor to knock on the door.
How was I to get her out of here, get rid of them?
“No, not that way,” she said when she saw me look at the door.
She was looking at the bed, the objects on the table. She went to the bed and took her jewels from under the pillow. She examined them and put them back into the worn velvet purse. Then she fastened the purse to her skirt so that it was lost in the folds of cloth.
There was an air of importance to these little gestures. I knew even though her mind was giving me nothing that this was all she wanted from this room. She was taking leave of things, the clothes she’d brought with her, her ancient silver brush and comb, and the tattered books that lay on the table by the bed.
There was knocking at the door.
“Why not this way?” she asked, and turning to the window, she threw open the glass. The breeze gusted into the gold draperies and lifted her hair off the back of her neck, and when she turned I shivered at the sight of her, her hair tangling around her face, and her eyes wide and filled with myriad fragments of color and an almost tragic light. She was afraid of nothing.
I took hold of her and for a moment wouldn’t let her go. I nestled my face into her hair, and all I could think again was that we were together and nothing was ever going to separate us now. I didn’t understand her silence, why I couldn’t hear her, but I knew it wasn’t her doing, and perhaps I believed it would pass. She was with me. That was the world. Death was my commander and I gave him a thousand victims, but I’d snatched her right out of his hand. I said it aloud. I said other desperate and nonsensical things. We were the same terrible and deadly beings, the two of us, we were wandering in the Savage Garden and I tried to make it real for her with images, the meaning of the Savage Garden, but it didn’t matter if she didn’t understand.
“The Savage Garden,” she repeated the words reverently, her lips making a soft smile.
It was pounding in my head. I felt her kissing me and making some little whisper as if in accompaniment to her thoughts.
She said, “But help me, now, I want to see you do it, now, and we have forever to hold to each other. Come.”
Thirst. I should have been burning. I positively required the blood, and she wanted the taste, I knew she did. Because I remembered that I had wanted it that very first night. It struck me then that the pain of her physical death … the fluids leaving her … might be lessened if she could first drink.
The knocking came again. The door wasn’t locked.
I stepped up on the sill of the window and reached for her, and immediately she was in my arms. She weighed nothing, but I could feel her power, the tenacity of her grip. Yet when she saw the alley below, the top of the wall and the quai beyond, she seemed for a moment to doubt.
“Put your arms around my neck,” I said, “and hold tight.”
I climbed up the stones, carrying her with her feet dangling, her face turned upwards to me, until we had reached the slippery slates of the roof.
Then I took her hand and pulled her after me, running faster and faster, over the gutters and the chimney pots, leaping across the narrow alleys until we had reached the other side of the island. I’d been ready any moment for her to cry out or cling to me, but she wasn’t afraid.
She stood silent, looking over the rooftops of the Left Bank, and down at the river crowded with thousands of dark little boats full of ragged beings, and she seemed for the moment simply to feel the wind unraveling her hair. I could have fallen in a stupor looking at her, studying her, all the aspects of the transformation, but there was an immense excitement in me to take her through the entire city, to reveal all things to her, to teach her everything I’d learned. She knew nothing of physical exhaustion now any more than I did. And she wasn’t stunned by any horror such as I had been when Magnus went into the fire.
A carriage came speeding along the quai below, listing badly towards the river, the driver hunched over, trying to keep his balance on the high bench. I pointed to it as it drew near and I clasped her hand.
We leapt as it came beneath us, landing soundlessly on the leather top. The busy driver never looked around. I held tight to her, steadying her, until we were both riding easily, ready to jump off the vehicle when we chose.
It was indescribably thrilling, doing this with her.
We were thundering over the bridge and past the cathedral, and on through the crowds on the Pont Neuf. I heard her laughter again. I wondered what those in the high windows saw when they looked down on us, two gaily dressed figures clinging to the unsteady roof of the carriage like mischievous children as if it were a raft.
The carriage swerved. We were racing towards St.-Germain-des-Prés, scattering the crowds before us and roaring past the intolerable stench of the cemetery of les Innocents as towering tenements closed in.
For one second, I felt the shimmer of the presence, but it was gone so quickly I doubted myself. I looked back and could catch no glimmer of it. And I realized with extraordinary vividness that Gabrielle and I would talk about the presence together, that we would talk about everything together, and approach all things together. This night was as cataclysmic in its own way as the night Magnus had changed me, and this night had only begun.
The neighborhood was perfect now. I took her hand again, and pulled her after me, off the carriage, down into the street.
She stared dazed at the spinning wheels, but they were immediately gone. She didn’t even look disheveled so much as she looked impossible, a woman torn out of time and place, clad only in slippers and dress, no chains on her, free to soar.
We entered a narrow alleyway and ran together, arms around each other, and now and then I looked down to see her eyes sweeping the walls above us, the scores of shuttered windows with their little streaks of escaping light.
I knew what she was seeing. I knew the sounds that pressed in on her. But still I could hear nothing from her, and this frightened me a little to think maybe she was deliberately shutting me out.
But she had stopped. She was having th
e first spasm of her death. I could see it in her face.
I reassured her, and reminded her in quick words of the vision I’d given her before.
“This is brief pain, nothing compared to what you’ve known. It will be gone in a matter of hours, maybe less if we drink now.”
She nodded, more impatient with it than afraid.
We came out into a little square. In the gateway to an old house a young man stood, as if waiting for someone, the collar of his gray cloak up to shield his face.
Was she strong enough to take him? Was she as strong as I? This was the time to find out.
“If the thirst doesn’t carry you into it, then it’s too soon,” I told her.
I glanced at her and a coldness crept over me. Her look of concentration was almost purely human, so intent was it, so fixed; and her eyes were shadowed with that same sense of tragedy I’d glimpsed before. Nothing was lost on her. But when she moved towards the man she wasn’t human at all. She had become a pure predator, as only a beast can be a predator, and yet she was a woman walking slowly towards a man—a lady, in fact, stranded here without cape or hat or companions, and approaching a gentleman as if to beg for his aid. She was all that.
It was ghastly to watch it, the way that she moved over the stones as if she did not even touch them, and the way that everything, even the wisps of her hair blown this way and that by the breeze, seemed somehow under her command. She could have moved through the wall itself with that relentless step.
I drew back into the shadows.
The man quickened, turned to her with the faint grind of his boot heel on the stones, and she rose on tiptoe as if to whisper in his ear. I think for one moment she hesitated. Perhaps she was faintly horrified. If she was, then the thirst had not had time enough to grow strong. But if she did question it, it was for no more than that second. She was taking him and he was powerless and I was too fascinated to do anything but watch.