by Anne Rice
“Well, the peace of the house was destroyed, though there was quiet. Days passed and she asked no questions, though now she was deep into books of the occult, of witches and witchcraft, and of vampires. This was mostly fancy, you understand. Myth, tales, sometimes mere romantic horror tales. But she read it all. Till dawn she read, so that I had to go and collect her and bring her to bed.
“Lestat, meantime, hired a butler and maid and had a team of workers in to make a great fountain in the courtyard with a stone nymph pouring water eternal from a widemouthed shell. He had goldfish brought and boxes of rooted water lilies set into the fountain so their blossoms rested upon the surface and shivered in the ever-moving water.
“A woman had seen him kill on the Nyades Road, which ran to the town of Carrolton, and there were stories of it in the papers, associating him with a haunted house near Nyades and Melpomene, all of which delighted him. He was the Nyades Road ghost for some time, though it finally fell to the back pages; and then he performed another grisly murder in another public place and set the imagination of New Orleans to working. But all this had about it some quality of fear. He was pensive, suspicious, drew close to me constantly to ask where Claudia was, where she’d gone, and what she was doing.
“ ‘She’ll be all right,’ I assured him, though I was estranged from her and in agony, as if she’d been my bride. She hardly saw me now, as she’d not seen Lestat before, and she might walk away while I spoke to her.
“ ‘She had better be all right!’ he said nastily.
“ ‘And what will you do if she’s not?’ I asked, more in fear than accusation.
“He looked up at me, with his cold gray eyes. ‘You take care of her, Louis. You talk to her!’ he said. ‘Everything was perfect, and now this. There’s no need for it’
“But it was my choice to let her come to me, and she did. It was early one evening when I’d just awakened. The house was dark. I saw her standing by the French windows; she wore puffed sleeves and a pink sash, and was watching with lowered lashes the evening rush in the Rue Royale. I could hear Lestat in his room, the sound of water splashing from his pitcher. The faint smell of his cologne came and went like the sound of music from the cafe two doors down from us. ‘He’ll tell me nothing,’ she said softly. I hadn’t realized she knew that I had opened my eyes. I came towards her and knelt beside her. ‘You’ll tell me, won’t you? How it was done.’
“ ‘Is this what you truly want to know?’ I asked, searching her face. ‘Or is it why it was done to you… and what you were before? I don’t understand what you mean by “how,” for if you mean how was it done so that you in turn may do it…’
“ ‘I don’t even know what it is. What you’re saying,’ she said with a touch of coldness. Then she turned full around and put her hands on my face. ‘Kill with me tonight,’ she whispered as sensuously as a lover. ‘And tell me all that you know. What are we? Why are we not like them?’ She looked down into the street.
“ ‘I don’t know the answers to your questions,’ I said to her. Her face contorted suddenly, as if she were straining to hear me over a sudden noise. And then she shook her head. But I went on. ‘I wonder the same things you wonder. I do not know. How I was made, I’ll tell you that… that Lestat did it to me. But the real “how” of it, I don’t know!’ Her face had that same look of strain. I was seeing in it the first traces of fear, or something worse and deeper than fear. ‘Claudia,’ I said to her, putting my hands over her hands and pressing them gently against my skin. ‘Lestat has one wise thing to tell you. Don’t ask these questions. You’ve been my companion for countless years in my search for all that I could learn of mortal life and mortal creation. Don’t be my companion now in this anxiety. He can’t give us the answers. And I have none.’
“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 wh
ite 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.’