All right, Lestat, be a monster. Throw the most interesting woman you’ve ever met out of the house.
“Listen to me, both of you,” I said, fixing Rowan in my gaze, and then flashing on Fr. Kevin. “I want you to go home. Mona’s as psychic as you are. It distresses her dreadfully that you’re down here. She senses it. She feels it. It adds to her pain.” (All this was true, wasn’t it?) “I gotta go back up there now and comfort her. Please leave. That’s what she wants. That’s what gave her the strength to drive here. Now I promise you I will contact you when it’s all over. Please go.”
I rose, and I took Rowan’s arm and all but lifted her out of the chair.
“You are a perfect lout,” said the ghost, disgustedly.
Fr. Kevin was on his feet.
Rowan stared at me, transfixed. I guided her into the hallway and to the front door, and the priest followed.
Trust in me. Trust that it’s what Mona wants.
Could they hear Mona’s sobs now?
Without taking my eyes off Rowan’s eyes, I opened the front door. Blast of summer heat, scent of flowers. “You go now,” I said.
“But the oxygen, the morphine,” said Rowan. Whiskey voice, they called it. It was so seductive. And behind her delicate probing frown was this conflict, this unadmitted and sinful power. What was it?
We stood on the front porch, like dwarves underneath the columns. The purple light was suddenly soothing and the moment lost its proportions. It was like eternal dusk here in the country. I could hear the birds of the night, the distant unquiet waters of the swamp.
Fr. Kevin instructed the orderlies. They brought in the supplies.
I couldn’t break away from this woman. What had I been saying to her? The ghost was laughing. I was getting confused.
What is your secret?
I felt a physical push, as though she had stretched out her two hands and laid them on my chest and tried to move me back from where I stood. I saw the ghost over her shoulder. It came from her, the push. It had to come from her.
Her face was engraved with a hostile beauty.
She tossed her hair just slightly, let it stroke her cheeks.
She narrowed her eyes. “Take care of Mona for me,” she said. “I love her with all my heart. You cannot know what it means to me that I failed with her—that all my gifts, all my resources—.”
“Of course. I know how you love her,” I said. “I love her and I hardly know her.” This was babble. This woman was suffering. Was I suffering? The ghost was accusing me. A tall man right behind her but she had no sense of him.
What was it that was slipping out of her conscious to me? Something so very dreadful that it had shaped her entire existence; and she felt it keenly at this moment.
I have taken life.
I shuddered. Her eyes wouldn’t let me move.
I have taken life again and again.
The orderlies swept by with more equipment. Cool air flooded out of the open front door. Jasmine was there. The ghost stood firm. It seemed to me that the curve of the limbs of the pecan trees marching down the gravel drive meant something, a secret communication from the Lord of the Universe, but what?
“Come to me,” I said to Rowan. A life founded upon suffering, upon reparation. I couldn’t bear it, I had to touch it, enclose it, save it.
I took her in my arms, Dear God Forgive Me, kissing her cheeks and then her mouth.
Don’t fear for Mona.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered. In a scalding moment I saw the hospital room, a torture cell of machines and pulsing numbers, glistening plastic bags feeding into dangling tubes, and Mona sobbing, sobbing the way she was now, and Rowan standing in the doorway.
Almost used the power, almost killed—.
“I see, I do,” I said. “And it was not the right time and she wanted to come to Quinn,” I whispered the words in her ear.
“Yes,” she said, her own tears rising, “and I frightened her. You see. She knew what I meant to do, she knew I had the power, it would have showed up as a stroke on the autopsy, just a stroke, but she knew! I almost. . . . I terrified her. And. . . .”
I held her so tight. I drew in my breath.
I kissed her tears. I wished I was a saint. I wished I was the priest who stood by the car waiting for her, pretending not to see our kissing. What was kissing? Mortal kissing? I kissed her mouth again. Mortal loving and all the while the thundering desire for the link of the blood, not her death, no, Dear God, no, just the link of the blood, the knowing. Who was this Rowan Mayfair! My head swam.
And the ghost beyond her glared as though he’d harrow Hell to bring its forces against me.
“How could you tell when was the right moment?” I answered. “And the thing to cling to is that you didn’t do it. And now she has her time with Quinn.” Oh, such deceitful euphemisms for one who detests all euphemisms, and with reason. I kissed her hard and eagerly and felt her body soften, felt her lock to me for one precious instant, and then the flash of icy coldness as she pulled away.
She hurried down the steps, her heels barely making a sound. Fr. Kevin was holding the door of the car open for her. The ambulance was already backing up. She turned and looked at me and then she waved at me.
Such a tender, unexpected gesture. I felt my heart grow huge, and its beating too much for me.
No, you poor darling. You didn’t kill her. I did it. I killed her. I’m guilty. And she’s sobbing again. And the ghost knows.
5
N
ONE OF THE MORTALS
in the house could hear Mona sobbing. The walls were too thick.
Meantime, the middle of the dining room table was being draped and set for supper, and Jasmine wanted to know if Quinn and I would join Tommy and Nash; I told her No, we couldn’t leave Mona, which she already knew.
I told her to please call Cindy, the Nurse, though she probably wasn’t needed, and to put the oxygen tank and the medicine out of the way. (Actually, this lovely lady spells her name Cyndy, so we will start spelling it this way from here on.)
I went into the living room. I tried to clear my head. The simple perfume of Rowan on my hands paralyzed me. I had to get straight.
Snap to a tender affection for everybody in the house. Go to Mona.
What
was
all this succumbing to a human witch! The entire Mayfair family was full of troublemakers! Mayfair design and Mayfair will were quickening my pulse. I think I even cursed Merrick, that she had planned to immolate herself last night on that altar, that she’d somehow found a way to save her immortal soul, and left me to my own usual damnation.
And then there was the ghost. The Mayfair ghost had returned to his corner. He stood there giving me the most malevolent look I’ve ever seen on any creature, vampire or human.
I took his measure: a male, aged sixty perhaps, short curly hair, snow white; eyes gray or black; excellent facial features and regal bearing, though why the age of sixty I couldn’t figure unless he’d felt most especially powerful at that earthly time of life, because I knew for a fact that he’d died long before Mona and could therefore haunt in any guise he chose.
These thoughts didn’t bait him. There was something so intrinsically menacing in his stillness that I couldn’t bear it.
“All right, then, be quiet,” I said firmly. I detested the quaver in my voice. “Why the Hell are you haunting me? You think I can undo what I’ve done? I can’t. Nobody can. You want her to die, haunt her, not me.”
No change in him.
And no way could I trivialize and diminish the woman who’d just waved to me before stepping into the car, salt of her tears still on my lips to be licked. So why keep trying? What had befallen me?
Big Ramona, who happened to glance in from the hall, drying her hands on her apron, said, “And now we have another madman talking to himself, and right by the desk that Grandpa William used to go to all the time for no reason. Now that was a ghost that Quinn used to see, and me and Jasmine too.”
“What desk, where?” I stammered. “Who is Grandpa William?” But I knew that story. And I saw the desk. And Quinn had seen the ghost over and over pointing to the desk, and they had searched it over and over, year in and year out, and found nothing.
Snap back, you idiot!
Upstairs Quinn tried tenderly and desperately to comfort Mona.
Tommy and the ever distinguished Nash came down for their dinner and passed, without noticing me, into the dining room across the way, their low conversation uninterrupted throughout, and seated themselves.
I went to the cameo case near the piano. That meant walking away from the ghost who was to my far right, but it made no difference. His eyes followed me.
This case was where Aunt Queen’s cameos were displayed, and it was never locked. I opened the glass top—it was hinged like the cover of a book—and I picked up an oval cameo with a tiny display of Poseidon and his consort in a chariot pulled by sea horses, with a god to lead them over billowing waves, all of this spectacular progress intricately wrought. Cool.
I slipped the cameo into my pocket and went upstairs.
I found Mona lying on the bed, crying dreadfully among the flowers, with a desperate Quinn standing by the far side of the bed, leaning over her and trying to comfort her. Quinn was more frightened than I’ve ever seen him. I made a quick gesture to let him know everything was working well.
The ghost wasn’t in the room. I could neither feel him nor see him. Cagey. So he doesn’t want to be seen by Mona?
Mona was naked, Lady Godiva hair everywhere, her body shimmering and fine as she lay sobbing among the poetic blooms; and the neat stack of Aunt Queen’s white garments had fallen and was scattered all over the floor.
For a moment I felt a deep stab of horror, a horror I deserved and couldn’t escape, and which I didn’t intend to confide to either Quinn or Mona as long as we all lived, no matter how many years or decades that might be; a horror of what whim and will can do and had done. But as usual with grand moral realizations, there was no time for it.
I looked at Quinn—my Little Brother, my pupil.
He’d been made by monsters he’d loathed and it had never occurred to him to weep in their presence. What Mona was doing was entirely predictable.
I lay down on the bed right beside her, and when I lifted her hair back and looked into her eyes, she went utterly silent.
“What the Hell’s the matter with you?” I demanded.
A pause in which her loveliness struck me with all the subtilty of an avalanche.
“Well, nothing,” she said, “if you’re going to put it like that.”
“For the love of God, Lestat,” said Quinn, “don’t be cruel to her. Surely you know what she’s going through.”
“I’m not being cruel,” I said. (Who, me, cruel?) I kept my tight focus on her. “Are you afraid of me?” I asked.
“No,” she said. Her eyebrows puckered. The blood tears stained her cheeks. “It’s only that I know so well that I should have died,” she said.
“Then sing a requiem,” I said. “Let me supply some words: ‘O heat, dry up my brains! Tears seven-times salt, burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye!’ ”
She laughed.
“Very well, honey bunch, let me hear it. I’m the Maker. Let it go.”
“I knew that for so long, that I ought to die. God, when I think of it, it’s the only thing I really know right now! I was supposed to die.” Her words flowed calmly. “People around me got so used to it, they slipped up. They’d say, ‘You used to be so beautiful, we’ll never forget that.’ Dying, that had become the central obligation of my life. I used to lie there and try to figure how to make it easier for people. I mean they were so miserable. This went on slowly for years—.”
“Keep talking,” I said. I loved her easy trust, her immediate openness.
“There was a period of time where I could still enjoy music and chocolate, you know, special things, like bed jackets with lace too. And I could dream of my child, my lost child. Then I couldn’t really eat anything anymore. And the music only made me jittery. I kept seeing people who weren’t really there. I thought Maybe I never had that child. Morrigan, gone so fast. But then I wouldn’t have been dying if I hadn’t had Morrigan. I saw ghosts. . . .”
“Oncle Julien?” I asked.
She hesitated, then: “No. Oncle Julien only came to me way, way back, when he wanted me to do something, and it was always in a dream. Oncle Julien is in the Light. He doesn’t come to the Earth unless there’s a really important reason.”
(Deep carefully concealed shudder.)
She went on, the vampiric musicality sharpening her soft words: “These ghosts I saw were just really dead people like my father and my mother who were waiting for me—you know, the ones who come to take you across—but they wouldn’t speak to me. It wasn’t time yet, that’s what Fr. Kevin said. Fr. Kevin’s a powerful witch. He never knew until he came home South. He goes into St. Mary’s Assumption Church in the night when it’s completely dark except for the candles, you know, and he lies down on the marble, full-length, you know—.”
(Secret heartache.
I know.
)
“—and with his arms outstretched, he contemplates Christ on the Cross. He imagines himself kissing the bloody wounds of Christ.”
“And you in your pain? Did you pray?”
“Not very much,” she said. “It was like prayer would have required a certain coherence. This last year, I was incapable of that coherence.”
“Ah, yes, I see,” I said. “Go on.”
“And things happened,” she said. “People wanted me to die. Something happened. Someone . . . People wanted me to get it over with. . . .”
“Did you want to get it over with?”
She didn’t answer right away, then she said, “I wanted to escape. But when someone . . . someone. . . . My thoughts became—”
“—became what?”
“Became trivial.”
“No, not so,” I insisted.
“How to get out of the room, how to get all the way down the steps, how to scoot behind the wheel of the limo, how to get the flowers, how to get to Quinn—.”
“I see. Poetic. Specific. Not trivial.”
“A destination with the sanction of poetry, perhaps,” she said. “ ‘There with fantastic garlands did she come.’ And so I did.”
“Most certainly,” I said. “But before you could do it—you were going to say something, you were about to say something about someone. . . .”
Silence.
“Then Rowan came,” she said. “You don’t know my cousin Rowan.”
(I don’t?)
Flash of pain in her clear brilliant eyes.
“Yeah, well, Rowan came,” she said. “Rowan has this power. . . .”
“Was it for your sake or her sake that she was going to kill you?”
She smiled. “I don’t know. I don’t think she knew, either.”
“But she realized you knew and she didn’t use her power.”
“I told her, I said, ‘Rowan, you’re scaring me! Stop it, you’re scaring me!’ And she burst into tears. Or was it me? I think I burst into tears! It was one of us. I was so scared.”
“And so you escaped.”
“Yes, I did, indeed I did.”
“ ‘Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes.’ ”
She smiled again. Would she talk about the Woman Child? She lay very still.
I could feel Quinn’s anxiety, and the outpouring of his love.
All the while, he hadn’t moved the hand that lay on her shoulder.
“I’m not dying,” she said with a shrug. “I’m here.”
“No, you’re not,” I said, “that’s finished.”
“I’ve got to reach back and remember when I wanted things.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “That’s mortal talk. You’re Mona—Born to Darkness now.” I tried to take it slowly, watching her smile come and go. Faint freckles on her face. The inevitable glister of her skin.
“That’s it,” I said. “Let your eyes drink me in. You’re seeing colors you never saw before. You’re realizing sensations you never even dreamt about. The Dark Blood’s a magnificent teacher. You shiver because you think the pain’s going to come back, but you couldn’t go back to that pain if you wanted to. Stop shivering. I mean it. Stop.”
“What are you asking of me?” she said, “that I surrender to you or to the Blood?”
I laughed under my breath. “I don’t know why women always surprise me,” I said. “Men don’t. I think I underestimate women in general. They distract me. Their loveliness always strikes me as alien.”
She laughed outright. “What do you mean, alien?”
“You’re the Great Unknown, Sweetheart.”
“Elaborate,” she said.
“Well, think about Adam in the Bible, I mean this guy is the Wimp of All Time saying to Almighty God, the Creator, Yahweh Who made the stars, ‘The woman gave me to eat!’ I mean the poor slob is just a spineless hopeless jerk! And this is Original Sin, no less! The Primal Catastrophe. Oh, I mean—pa-lease. BUT! When you see a magnificent woman—like you—with your green eyes just the perfect distance apart, tinsel voice giving out intelligent words, lying naked and staring with an expression of keen unerring comprehension, you can sort of read into Adam an inevitable bafflement in the face of Eve, something that defies clarification, and that’s how Adam could come up with such a ludicrous excuse! ‘This completely weird, way out, strange, mysterious inscrutable seductive being which you made out of my rib, gave me to eat.’ Get it?”
Quinn gave me a little laugh against his will. He was seething with possessiveness. Me and her on the bed. But this was nice, his laughter.
I locked in on her again. Enough about the Garden of Eden. (And enough about what had just happened downstairs on the front porch between me and someone infinitely better than any figment of my longing.)
Hell. It was the damned flowers all over the bed! She was patiently waiting, naked breasts against me, red hair snarled in the roses, just looking at me, green eyes and soft mouth actually sweet. A preternatural being, and I had known the most miraculous of them. What was getting to me? Kindly continue as if nothing was wrong.
As if you have not done Evil again, you fiend!
“Surrender to both of us, me and the Blood,” I said. “I want you and Quinn to be perfect the way I’m not. I want to take you through an apprenticeship that’s flawless. You hear me? Quinn was twice maimed when twice born. Bad mothers. I want to erase that from his heart.”
I felt Quinn’s gentle squeeze on my arm. An assent even though I was lying practically on top of the succulent little love of his life, now transformed into his immortal companion.
“The Blood told me things,” she said. She was in no hurry. Her tears were dried, like ashes flaking on her cheeks. “It was coherent, the Blood,” she said. “I didn’t realize it until it was over. It felt too good. Then came the thoughts. I know you’ve survived centuries. You’ve even survived yourself. You went into a desert place like Christ. You didn’t die because your blood’s too strong. You’re afraid you can’t die. Everything you’ve believed in has been shattered. You tell yourself you have no illusions, but that’s not true.”
She shivered again. It was advancing too fast for her. Maybe too fast for me. Where was that ghost? Tell her about the ghost? No. I was relieved she couldn’t read my mind anymore.
“I have no theology of us,” I said to her. I was really talking to Quinn too. “God tolerates us, but what does that mean?”
She smiled almost bitterly. “Who has a theology of now, anyway?” she asked.
“Lots of people. Your Fr. Kevin, it seems,” I replied.
“He has a Christology,” she replied. “It’s different.”
“Sounds awfully good to me,” I said.
“Oh, come on, he couldn’t convert you if he had the next hundred years.”
I thought bitterly of Memnoch, the Devil. I thought of God Incarnate, with whom I’d spoken. I thought of all my doubts that any of it had been real, of all my suspicions that I was the mere pawn of spirits in some elaborate game, and of how I’d fled Perdition, with its myriad roaring holographs of confrontational guilt for the cold snow-filled streets of New York, avowing the material, the sensual, the solid above all illusions. Did I really not believe in those things which I saw? Or had I simply found that cosmos to be unendurable?