The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (369 page)

I think he knew I was at a loss. I was looking up at the gloom above me. I wanted to reach the attic of this place, the half-concealed clothing of the dead child. I wondered at this story of the dead child. I had the impertinence to let my mind drift, though he was waiting.

He brought me back with his gentle words:

“Sybelle and Benji will be with me when you want them,” he said. “You can find us. We aren’t far. You’ll hear the
Appassionata
when you want to hear it.” He smiled.

“You’ve given her a piano,” I said. I spoke of golden Sybelle. I had shut out the world from my preternatural hearing, and I didn’t want just yet to unstop my ears even for the lovely sound of her playing, which I already missed overly much.

As soon as we’d entered the convent, Sybelle had seen a piano and asked in a whisper at my ear if she could play it. It was not in the chapel where Lestat lay, but off in another long empty room. I had told her it wasn’t quite proper, that it might disturb Lestat as he lay there, and we couldn’t know what he thought, or what he felt, or if he was anguished and trapped in his own dreams.

“Perhaps when you come, you’ll stay for a while,” Marius said. “You’ll like the sound of her playing my piano, and maybe then we’ll talk together, and you can rest with us, and we can share the house for as long as you like.”

I didn’t answer.

“It’s palatial in a New World sort of way,” he said with a little mockery in his smile. “It’s not far at all. I have the most spacious gardens and old oaks, oaks far older than those even out there on the Avenue, and all the windows are doors. You know how I like it that way. It’s the Roman style. The house is open to the spring rain, and the spring rain here is like a dream.”

“Yes, I know,” I whispered. “I think it’s falling now, isn’t it?” I smiled.

“Well, I’m rather spattered with it, yes,” he said almost gaily. “You come when you want to. If not tonight, then tomorrow …”

“Oh, I’ll be there tonight,” I said. I didn’t want to offend him, not in the slightest, but Benji and Sybelle had seen enough of white-faced monsters with velvet voices. It was time to be off.

I looked at him rather boldly, enjoying it for a moment, overcoming a shyness that had been our curse in this modern world. In Venice of old, he had gloried in his clothes as men did then, always so sharp
and splendidly embellished, the glass of fashion, to use the old graceful phrase. When he crossed the Piazza San Marco in the soft purple of evening, all turned to watch him pass. Red had been his badge of pride, red velvet—a flowing cape, and magnificently embroidered doublet, and beneath it a tunic of gold silk tissue, so very popular in those times.

He’d had the hair of a young Lorenzo de’ Medici, right from the painted wall.

“Master, I love you, but now I must be alone,” I said. “You don’t need me now, do you, Sir? How can you? You never really did.” Instantly I regretted it. The words, not the tone, were impudent. And our minds being so divided by intimate blood, I was afraid he’d misunderstand.

“Cherub, I want you,” he said forgivingly. “But I can wait. Seems not long ago I spoke these same words when we were together, and so I say them again.”

I couldn’t bring myself to tell him it was my season for mortal company, how I longed just to be talking away the night with little Benji, who was such a sage, or listening to my beloved Sybelle play her sonata over and over again. It seemed beside the point to explain any further. And the sadness came over me again, heavily and undeniably, of having come to this forlorn and empty convent where Lestat lay, unable or unwilling to move or speak, none of us knew.

“Nothing will come of my company just now, Master,” I said. “But you will grant me some key to finding you, surely, so that when this time passes …” I let my words die.

“I fear for you!” he whispered suddenly, with great warmth.

“Any more than ever before, Sir?” I asked.

He thought for a moment. Then he said, “Yes. You love two mortal children. They are your moon and stars. Come stay with me if only for a little while. Tell me what you think of our Lestat and what’s happened. Tell me perhaps, if I promise to remain very quiet and not to press you, tell me your opinion of all you’ve so recently seen.”

“You touch on it delicately, Sir, I admire you. You mean why did I believe Lestat when he said he had been to Heaven and Hell, you mean what did I see when I looked at the relic he brought back with him, Veronica’s Veil.”

“If you want to tell me. But more truly, I wish you would come and rest.”

I put my hand on top of his, marveling that in spite of all I’d endured, my skin was almost as white as his.

“You will be patient with my children till I come, won’t you?” I asked. “They imagine themselves so intrepidly wicked, coming here to be with me, whistling nonchalantly in the crucible of the Undead, so to speak.”

“Undead,” he said, smiling reprovingly. “Such language, and in my presence. You know I hate it.”

He planted a kiss quickly on my cheek. It startled me, and then I realized that he was gone.

“Old tricks!” I said aloud, wondering if he were still near enough to hear me, or whether he had shut up his ears to me as fiercely as I shut mine to the outside world.

I looked off, wanting the quiet, dreaming of bowers suddenly, not in words but in images, the way my old mind would do it, wanting to lie down in garden beds among growing flowers, wanting to press my face to earth and sing softly to myself.

The spring outside, the warmth, the hovering mist that would be rain. All this I wanted. I wanted the swampy forests beyond, but I wanted Sybelle and Benji, too, and to be gone, and to have some will to carry on.

Ah, Armand, you always lack this very thing, the will. Don’t let the old story repeat itself now. Arm yourself with all that’s happened.

Another was nearby.

It seemed so awful to me suddenly, that some immortal whom I didn’t know should intrude here on my random private thoughts, perhaps to make a selfish approximation of what I felt.

It was only David Talbot.

He came from the chapel wing, through the bridge rooms of the convent that connect it to the main building where I stood at the top of the staircase to the second floor.

I saw him come into the hallway. Behind him was the glass of the door that led to the gallery, and beyond that the soft mingled gold and white light of the courtyard below.

“It’s quiet now,” he said. “And the attic’s empty and you know that you can go there, of course.”

“Go away,” I said. I felt no anger, only the honest wish to have my thoughts unread and my emotions left alone.

With remarkable self-possession he ignored me, then said:

“Yes, I am afraid of you, a little, but then terribly curious too.”

“Oh, I see, so that excuses it, that you followed me here?”

“I didn’t follow you, Armand,” he said. “I live here.”

“Ah, I’m sorry then,” I admitted. “I hadn’t known. I suppose I’m glad of it. You guard him. He’s never alone.” I meant Lestat of course.

“Everyone’s afraid of you,” he said calmly. He had taken up a position only a few feet away, casually folding his arms. “You know, it’s quite a study, the lore and habits of the vampires.”

“Not to me,” I said.

“Yes, I realize that,” he said. “I was only musing, and I hope you’ll forgive me. It was about the child in the attic, the child they said was murdered. It’s a tall story, about a very small little person. Maybe if your luck is better than that of everyone else, you’ll see the ghost of the child whose clothes were shut up in the wall.”

“Do you mind if I look at you?” I said. “I mean if you’re going to dip your beak into my mind with such abandon? We met some time ago before all this happened—Lestat, the Heavenly Journey, this place. I never really took stock of you. I was indifferent, or too polite, I don’t know which.”

I was surprised to hear such heat in my voice. I was volatile, and it wasn’t David Talbot’s fault.

“I’m thinking of the conventional knowledge about you,” I said. “That you weren’t born in this body, that you were an elderly man when Lestat knew you, that this body you inhabit now belonged to a clever soul who could hop from living being to living being, and there set up shop with his own trespassing soul.”

He gave me a rather disarming smile.

“So Lestat said,” he answered. “So Lestat wrote. It’s true, of course. You know it is. You’ve known since you saw me before.”

“Three nights we spent together,” I said. “And I never really questioned you. I mean I never really even looked directly into your eyes.”

“We were thinking of Lestat then.”

“Aren’t we now?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“David Talbot,” I said, measuring him coldly with my eyes, “David Talbot, Superior General of the Order of Psychic Detectives known as the Talamasca, had been catapulted into the body in which he now walks.” I didn’t know whether I paraphrased or made it up as I went along. “He’d been entrenched or chained inside it, made a prisoner by so many ropey veins, and then tricked into a vampire as a fiery unstanchable blood invaded his lucky anatomy, sealing his soul up in it
as it transformed him into an immortal—a man of dark bronzed skin and dry, lustrous and thick black hair.”

“I think you have it right,” he said with indulgent politeness.

“A handsome gent,” I went on, “the color of caramel, moving with such cadike ease and gilded glances that he makes me think of all things once delectable, and now a potpourri of scent: cinnamon, clove, mild peppers and other spices golden, brown or red, whose fragrances can spike my brain and plunge me into erotic yearnings that live now, more than ever, to play themselves out. His skin must smell like cashew nuts and thick almond creams. It does.”

He laughed. “I get your point.”

I had shocked myself. I was wretched for a moment. “I’m not sure I get myself,” I said apologetically.

“I think it’s plain,” he said. “You want me to leave you alone.”

I saw the preposterous contradictions in all this at once.

“Look,” I whispered quickly. “I’m deranged,” I whispered. “My senses cross, like so many threads to make a knot: taste, see, smell, feel. I’m rampant.”

I wondered idly and viciously if I could attack him, take him, bring him down under my greater craft and cunning and taste his blood without his consent.

“I’m much too far along the road for that,” he said, “and why would you chance such a thing?”

What self-possession. The older man in him did indeed command the sturdier younger flesh, the wise mortal with an iron authority over all things eternal and supernaturally powerful. What a blend of energies! Nice to drink his blood, to take him against his will. There is no such fun on Earth like the raping of an equal.

“I don’t know,” I said, ashamed. Rape is unmanly. “I don’t know why I insult you. You know, I wanted to leave quickly. I mean I wanted to visit the attic, and then be out of here. I wanted to avoid this sort of infatuation. You are a wonder, and you think me a wonder, and it’s rich.”

I let my eyes pass over him. I’d been blind to him when we met last, that was most true.

He dressed to kill. With the cleverness of olden times, when men could preen like peacocks, he’d chosen golden sepia and umber colors for his clothes. He was smart and clean and fretted all over with careful bits of pure gold, in a wristband timepiece and buttons and a slender
pin for his modern tie, that tailored spill of color men wear in this age, as if to let us grab them all the more easily by its noose. Stupid ornament. Even his shirt of polished cotton was tawny and full of something of the sun and the warmed earth. Even his shoes were brown, glossy as beetles’ backs.

He came towards me.

“You know what I’m going to ask,” he said. “Don’t wrestle with these unarticulated thoughts, these new experiences, all this overwhelming understanding. Make a book out of it for me.”

I couldn’t have predicted that this would be his question. I was surprised, sweetly so, but nevertheless taken off guard.

“Make a book? I? Armand?”

I went towards him, turned sharply and fled up the steps to the attic, skirting the third floor and then entering the fourth.

The air was thick and warm here. It was a place daily baked by the sun. All was dry and sweet, the wood like incense and the floors splintery.

“Little girl, where are you?” I asked.

“Child, you mean,” he said.

He had come up behind me, taking a bit of time for courtesy’s sake.

He added, “She was never here.”

“How do you know?”

“If she were a ghost, I could call her,” he said.

I looked over my shoulder. “You have that power? Or is this just what you want to say to me right now? Before you venture further, let me warn you that we almost never have the power to see spirits.”

“I’m altogether new,” David said. “I’m unlike any others. I’ve come into the Dark World with different faculties. Dare I say, we, our species, vampires, have evolved?”

“The conventional word is stupid,” I said. I moved further into the attic. I spied a small chamber with plaster and peeling roses, big floppy prettily drawn Victorian roses with pale fuzzy green leaves. I went into the chamber. Light came from a high window out of which a child could not have seen. Merciless, I thought.

“Who said that a child died here?” I said. All was clean beneath the soil of years. There was no presence. It seemed perfect and just, no ghost to comfort me. Why should a ghost come from some savory rest for my sake?

So I could cuddle up perhaps to the memory of her, her tender legend.

How are children murdered in orphanages where only nuns attend? I never thought of women as so cruel. Dried up, without imagination perhaps, but not aggressive as we are, to kill.

I turned round and round. Wooden lockers lined one wall, and one locker stood open, and there the tumbled shoes were, little brown Oxfords, as they called them, with black strings, and now I beheld, where it had been behind me, the broken and frayed hole from which they’d ripped her clothes. All fallen there, moldy and wrinkled they lay, her clothes.