The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (370 page)

A stillness settled on me as if the dust of this place were a fine ice, coming down from the high peaks of haughty and monstrously selfish mountains to freeze all living things, this ice, to close up and stop forever all that breathed or felt or dreamed or lived.

He spoke in poetry:

“ ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun,’ ” he whispered. “ ‘Nor the furious winter’s rages. Fear no more …’ ”

I winced with pleasure. I knew the verses. I loved them.

I genuflected, as if before the Sacrament, and touched her clothes. “And she was little, no more than five, and she didn’t die here at all. No one killed her. Nothing so special for her.”

“How your words belie your thoughts,” he said.

“Not so, I think of two things simultaneously. There’s a distinction in being murdered. I was murdered. Oh, not by Marius, as you might think, but by others.”

I knew I spoke soft and in an assuming way, because this wasn’t meant for pure drama.

“I’m trimmed in memories as if in old furs. I lift my arm and the sleeve of memory covers it. I look around and see other times. But you know what frightens me the most—it is that this state, like so many others with me, will prove the verge of nothing but extend itself over centuries.”

“What do you really fear? What did you want from Lestat when you came here?”

“David, I came to see him. I came to find out how it was with him, and why he lies there, unmoving. I came—.” I wasn’t going to say any more.

His glossy nails made his hands look ornamental and special, caressive, comely and lovely with which to be touched. He picked up a small dress, torn, gray, spotted with bits of mean lace. Everything dressed in
flesh can yield a dizzying beauty if you concentrate on it long enough, and his beauty leapt out without apology.

“Just clothes.” Flowered cotton, a bit of velvet with a puffed sleeve no bigger than an apple for the century of bare arms by day and night. “No violence at all surrounding her,” he said as if it were a pity. “Just a poor child, don’t you think, and sad by nature as well as circumstance.”

“And why were they walled up, tell me that! What sin did these little dresses commit?” I sighed. “Good God, David Talbot, why don’t we let the little girl have her romance, her fame? You make me angry. You say you can see ghosts. You find them pleasant? You like to talk with them. I could tell you about a ghost—.”

“When will you tell me? Look, don’t you see the trick of a book?” He stood up, and dusted off his knee with his right hand. In his left was her gathered dress. Something about the whole configuration bothered me, a tall creature holding a little girl’s crumpled dress.

“You know, when you think of it,” I said, turning away, so I wouldn’t see the dress in his hand, “there’s no good reason under God for little girls and little boys. Think of it, the other tender issue of mammals. Among puppies or kittens or colts, does one find gender? It’s never an issue. The half-grown fragile thing is sexless. There is no determination. There is nothing as splendid to look at as a little boy or girl. My head is so full of notions. I rather think I’ll explode if I don’t do something, and you say make a book for you. You think it’s possible, you think …”

“What I think is that when you make a book, you tell the tale as you would like to know it!”

“I see no great wisdom in that.”

“Well, then think, for most speech is a mere issue of our feelings, a mere explosion. Listen, note the way that you make these outbursts.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But you do, but they are not the words you want to read. When you write, something different happens. You make a tale, no matter how fragmented or experimental or how disregarding of all conventional and helpful forms. Try this for me. No, no, I have a better idea.”

“What?”

“Come down with me into my rooms. I live here now, I told you. Through my windows you can see the trees. I don’t live like our friend Louis, wandering from dusty corner to dusty corner, and then back to his flat in the Rue Royale when he’s convinced himself once more and
for the thousandth time that no one can harm Lestat. I have warm rooms. I use candles for old light. Come down and let me write it, your story. Talk to me. Pace, and rant if you will, or rail, yes, rail, and let me write it, and even so, the very fact that I write, this in itself will make you make a form out of it. You’ll begin to …”

“What?”

“To tell me what happened. How you died and how you lived.”

“Expect no miracles, perplexing scholar. I didn’t die in New York that morning. I almost died.”

He had me faintly curious, but I could never do what he wanted. Nevertheless he was honest, amazingly so, as far as I could measure, and therefore sincere.

“Ah, so, I didn’t mean literally. I meant that you should tell me what it was like to climb so high into the sun, and suffer so much, and, as you said, to discover in your pain all these memories, these connecting links. Tell me! Tell me.”

“Not if you mean to make it coherent,” I said crossly. I gauged his reaction. I wasn’t bothering him. He wanted to talk more.

“Make it coherent? Armand, I’ll simply write down what you say.” He made his words simple yet curiously passionate.

“Promise?”

I flashed on him a playful look. Me! To do that.

He smiled. He wadded up the little dress and then dropped it carefully so it might fall in the middle of the pile of her old clothes.

“I’ll not alter one syllable,” he said. “Come be with me, and talk to me, and be my love.” Again, he smiled.

Suddenly he came towards me, much in the aggressive manner in which I’d thought earlier to approach him. He slipped his hands under my hair, and felt of my face, and then he gathered up the hair and he put his face down into my curls, and he laughed. He kissed my cheek.

“Your hair’s like something spun from amber, as if the amber would melt and could be drawn from candle flames in long fine airy threads and let to dry that way to make all these shining tresses. You’re sweet, boylike and pretty as a girl. I wish I had one glimpse of you in antique velvet the way you were for him, for Marius. I wish I could see for one moment how it was when you dressed in stockings and wore a belted doublet sewn with rubies. Look at you, the frosty child. My love doesn’t even touch you.”

This wasn’t true.

His lips were hot, and I could feel the fangs under them, feel the urgency suddenly in his fingers pressing against my scalp. It sent the shivers through me, and my body tensed and then shuddered, and it was sweet beyond prediction. I resented this lonely intimacy, resented it enough to transform it, or rid myself of it utterly. I’d rather die or be away, in the dark, simple and lonely with common tears.

From the look in his eyes, I thought he could love without giving anything. Not a connoisseur, just a blood drinker.

“You make me hungry,” I whispered. “Not for you but for one who is doomed and yet alive. I want to hunt. Stop it. Why do you touch me? Why be so gentle?”

“Everyone wants you,” he said.

“Oh, I know. Everyone would ravage a guilty cunning child! Everyone would have a laughing boy who knows his way around the block. Kids make better food than women, and girls are all too much like women, but young boys? They’re not like men, are they?”

“Don’t mock me. I meant I wanted only to touch you, to feel how soft you are, how eternally young.”

“Oh, that’s me, eternally young,” I said. “You speak nonsense words for one so pretty yourself. I’m going out. I have to feed. And when I’ve finished with that, when I’m full and hot, then I’ll come and I’ll talk to you and tell you anything you want.” I stepped back just a little from him, feeling the quivers through me as his fingers released my hair. I looked at the empty white window, peering too high for the trees.

“They could see nothing green here, and it’s spring outside, southern spring. I can smell it through the walls. I want to look just for a moment on flowers. To kill, to drink blood and to have flowers.”

“Not good enough. Want to make the book,” he said. “Want to make it now and want you to come with me. I won’t hang around forever.”

“Oh, nonsense, of course you will. You think I’m a doll, don’t you? You think I’m cute and made of poured wax, and you’ll stay as long as I stay.”

“You’re a bit mean, Armand. You look like an angel, and talk like a common thug.”

“Such arrogance! I thought you wanted me.”

“Only on certain terms.”

“You lie, David Talbot,” I said.

I headed past him for the stairs. Cicadas sang in the night as they often do, to no clock, in New Orleans.

Through the nine-pane windows of the stairwell, I glimpsed the flowering trees of spring, a bit of vine curling on a porch top.

He followed. Down and down we went, walking like regular men, down to the first floor, and out the sparkling glass doors and into the broad lighted space of Napoleon Avenue with its damp, sweet park of green down the middle, a park thick with carefully planted flowers and old gnarled and humble, bending trees.

The whole picture moved with the subtle river winds, and wet mist swirled but would not fall into rain itself, and tiny green leaves drifted down like wilting ashes to the ground. Soft soft southern spring. Even the sky seemed pregnant with the season, lowering yet blushing with reflected light, giving birth to the mist from all its pores.

Strident perfume rose from the gardens right and left, from purple Four O’Clocks, as mortals call them here, a rampant flower like unto weed, but infinitely sweet, and the wild irises stabbing upwards like blades out of the black mud, throaty petals monstrously big, battering themselves on old walls and concrete steps, and then as always there were roses, roses of old women and roses of the young, roses too whole for the tropical night, roses coated with poison.

There had been streetcars here once on this center strip of grass. I knew it, that the tracks had run along this wide deep green space where I walked ahead of him, slumward, riverward, deathward, bloodward. He came after me. I could close my eyes as I walked, never losing a step, and see the streetcars.

“Come on, follow me,” I said, describing what he did, not inviting him.

Blocks and blocks within seconds. He kept up. Very strong. The blood of an entire Royal Vampire court was inside him, no doubt of it. Count on Lestat to make the most lethal of monsters, that is, after his initial seductive blunders—Nicolas, Louis, Claudia—not a single one of the three able to take care of themselves alone, and two perished, and one lingering and perhaps the weakest vampire yet walking in the great world.

I looked back. His tight, polished brown face startled me. He looked lacquered all over, waxed, buffed, and once again I thought of spicy things, of the meat of candied nuts, and delicious aromas, of chocolates sweet with sugar and dark rich butterscotch, and it seemed a good thing suddenly to maybe grab ahold of him.

But this was no substitute for one rotten, cheap, ripe and odoriferous mortal. And guess what? I pointed. “Over there.”

He looked as I directed him. He saw the sagging line of old buildings. Mortals everywhere lurked, slept, sat, dined, wandered, amid tiny narrow stairs, behind peeling walls and under cracked ceilings.

I had found one, most perfect in his wickedness, a great flurry of hateful embers, of malice and greed and contempt smoldering as he waited for me.

We’d come to Magazine Street and passed it, but we were not at the river, only almost, and this was a street I had no recollection of, or knowledge of, in my wanderings of this city—their city, Louis’s and Lestat’s—just a narrow street with these houses the color of driftwood under the moon and windows hung with makeshift coverings, and inside there was this one slouching, arrogant, vicious mortal fixed to a television set and guzzling malt from a brown bottle, ignoring the roaches and the pulsing heat that pressed in from the open window, this ugly, sweating, filthy and irresistible thing, this flesh and blood for me.

The house was so alive with vermin and tiny despicable things that it seemed no more than a shell surrounding him, crackling and friable and the same color in all its shadows as a forest. No antiseptic modern standards here. Even the furniture rotted in the trashy clutter and damp. Mildew covered the grinding white refrigerator.

Only the reeky personal bed and rags gave off the clue to reigning domesticity.

It was a proper nest in which to find this fowl, this ugly bird, thick rich pluckable, devourable sack of bones and blood and shabby plumage.

I pushed the door to one side, the human stench rising like a swirl of gnats, and thereby put it off its hinges, but not with much sound.

I walked on newspapers strewn on painted wood. Orange peels turned to brownish leather. Roaches running. He didn’t even look up. His swollen drunken face was blue and eerie, black eyebrows thick and unkempt, and yet he looked quite possibly a bit angelic, due to the light from the tube.

He flicked the magic plastic twanger in his hand to make the channels change, and the light flared and flickered soundlessly, and then he let the song rise, a band playing, a travesty, people clapping.

Trashy noises, trashy images, like the trash all around him. All right, I want you. No one else does.

He looked up at me, a boy invader, David too far off for him to see, waiting.

I pushed the television set to the side. It teetered, then fell onto the floor, its parts breaking, like so many jars of energy were inside, and now splinters of glass.

A momentary fury overcame him, charging his face with sluggish recognition.

He rose up, arms out, and came at me.

Before I sank my teeth, I noticed that he had long tangled black hair. Dirty but rich. He wore it back by means of a knotted bit of rag at the base of his neck and then straggling down his checkered shirt in a thick tail.

Meantime, he had enough syrupy and beer-besotted blood in him for two vampires, delicious, ugly, and a raging lighting heart, and so much bulk it was like riding a bull to be on him.

In the midst of the feed, all odors rise to sweetness, even the most rancid. I thought I would quietly die of joy, as always.