The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (526 page)

“And me?” I asked. I was exuberant. I was crazed. “We’ll judge what’s to be done with me?”

“Don’t let me scare you so much, Little Brother,” he said in the kindest tone. “The worst thing I’d do to you is leave you—vanish on you as if we’d never met. And I don’t think of that now. I think rather of knowing you, that I’m fond of you and have begun to treasure you, and your conscience shines rather bright for me. But tell me, haven’t I failed you already? Surely you don’t see me now as the hero you once imagined.”

“How so?” I asked, amazed. “You’re here, you’re with me. You saved Stirling. You stopped a disaster.”

“I wasn’t able to destroy your beastly phantom,” he said with an amiable shrug. “I can’t even see him, and you’ve counted on me. And I threw the Fire at him with all I had.”

“Oh, but we’ve only just started,” I responded. “You’ll help me with him, won’t you? We’ll figure it out together.”

“Yes, that’s precisely what we’ll do,” he responded. “The thing is strong enough to menace others, no doubt of it. If it can fight you as it did, it can attack others—that much I can tell, and that it responds to gravity, which for our purposes is a good sign.”

“How so gravity?” I asked.

“It sucked the very air when it left you,” he answered. “It’s material. I told you. It has some chemistry in the physical world. All ghosts are material in probability. But there are those who know more of this than me. I only once saw a human ghost, talked to a human ghost, spent an hour with a ghost, and it terrified me quite out of my mind.”

“Yes,” I replied, “it was Roger, wasn’t it, who came to you in the Chronicle called
Memnoch the Devil.
I read how you talked with him and how he persuaded you to care for his mortal daughter, Dora. I read every word. I believed it; I believed that you saw Roger and that you went to Heaven and Hell.”

“And well you should,” he rejoined. “I never lied in those pages, though it was another that took the dictation of it. I have been with Memnoch the Devil, though what he really was—devil or playful spirit—I still don’t know.” He paused. “It’s more than plain to me,” he said, “that you’ve noticed the difference between my eyes.”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it,” I said quickly. “It isn’t a disfigurement.”

He made a gesture of dismissal along with a kind smile.

“This right eye was torn from me,” he said, “just as I described it, by those spirits who would have prevented me from fleeing Memnoch’s Hell. And then it was returned to me, here on Earth, and sometimes I believe that this eye can see strange things.”

“What strange things?”

“Angels,” he said, musing, “or those who call themselves angels, or would have me conclude that they’re angels; and they have come to me in the long years since I fled Memnoch. They’ve come to me as I lay like one in a coma on the chapel floor of St. Elizabeth’s, the building in New Orleans which was bequeathed to me by Roger’s daughter. It seems my stolen eye, my restored eye, my bloodshot eye, has established some link with these beings, and I could tell you a tale of them, but now is not the time.”

“They harmed you, didn’t they?” I asked, sensing it in his manner.

He nodded.

“They left my body there for my friends to watch over,” he explained, and for the first time since I’d seen him, he looked troubled, indecisive, even faintly confused.

“But my spirit they took with them,” he went on. “And in a realm as palpable as this very room they set me down to do their bidding, always threatening to snatch back this right eye, to take it forever if I didn’t do what they bid me to do.”

He hesitated, shaking his head.

“I think it was the eye,” he said, “the eye which gave them the claim on me, the ability to reach down to me, in this realm, and take me—it was the eye, stolen in another dominion and then returned on Earth to its rightful socket. You might say that as they looked down from their lofty Heaven, if Heaven it is, they could see, through the mists of Earth, this bright and shining eye.”

He sighed as if he were suddenly miserable. He looked at me searchingly.

“This wounded eye, this tarnished eye,” he continued, “gave them their compass to find me, their opening, as it were, between the dominions, and down they came to enlist my spirit against my will.”

“Where did they take you? What did they do?”

“Oh, if I only knew that they were Heavenly beings,” he declared in a low passionate voice. “If I only knew that Memnoch the Devil and those who came after him had shown me truths! It would all be a different matter and I could somehow save my soul!”

“But you don’t know. They never convinced you,” I pushed.

“How can I accept a world full of injustice, along with their august designs?”

He shook his head again and looked off and then down, as though searching for some spot for his focus, and then back to me as he went on.

“I can’t entirely accept what I learned from Memnoch and those who came afterwards. I’ve never told anyone of my last spiritual adventure, though the others, the Blood Drinkers who love me—you know, my lusty troop of beloveds, I call them that now, the Troop of Beloveds—they know that something happened, they sense it only too well. I don’t even know which of my bodies was the true one—the body that lay on the floor of the chapel of St. Elizabeth’s, or the body that roamed with the so-called angels. I was an unwilling trafficker in knowledge and illusions. The story of my last adventure, my secret unknown adventure, the adventure I haven’t confided to anyone, weighs on my soul as if to make my spiritual breath die out.”

“Can you tell me now of this adventure?” I asked.

It took a great sense of power in him, I thought, to look so readily abject, to show me such affliction.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t the strength for the telling of that story yet, that’s the plain truth.”

He shrugged and shook his head and then continued:

“I need more than strength. I need courage for that confession, and right now my heart’s warm from being with you. You have a story to tell, yes, or we have a story to live together. Right now my greedy heart is fastened to you.”

I was overcome. I cried like a silent baby. I blew my nose and tried to remain calm. Blood on the handkerchief. Body of Blood. Mind of Blood. Flash of his eyes on me. Violet.

“I should take my good fortune,” I said, “and not question it, but I can’t resist. What’s kept you from destroying me, from punishing me for coming into your flat, for doing what I did to Stirling? I have to know.”

“Why do you have to know?” he asked, laughing softly. “Why is it so very important to know?”

I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. I wiped at my eyes again.

“Is it vanity in me to press the question?” I asked.

“Probably,” he said, grinning. “But shouldn’t I understand? I, the most vain of creatures?” He chuckled. “Didn’t you see me preening for your aunt downstairs?”

I nodded.

“All right,” he said. “Here comes the litany of reasons I didn’t kill you. I like you. I like that you have a woman’s lineaments and a man’s body, a boy’s curious eyes and a man’s large easy gestures, a child’s frank words and a man’s voice, a blundering manner and an honest grace.”

He smiled at me quite deliberately, and winked his right eye, and then went on.

“I like that you loved Stirling,” he said. “I like that you honor your glorious Aunt Queen so candidly.” He smiled mischievously. “Maybe I even like it that you went down on your knees and kissed her feet, though that gesture came rather late in the game of my deciding. I like that you love so many around you. I like it that you’re more generous than I am. I like that you hate the Dark Blood, and that your Maker wronged you. Now—isn’t that pretty? Isn’t that enough?”

I was quietly delirious with gratitude.

“Don’t think it so very unselfish of me to be here,” he went on, eyes widening, voice gaining a little heat. “It’s not. I need you or I wouldn’t be here. I need your need of me. I need to help you, positively need it. Come, Little Brother, carry me deep into your world.”

“My world,” I whispered.

“Yes, Little Brother,” he said. “Let’s proceed together. Tell me the history you inherited and the life you’ve lived. Tell me about this beastly and beguiling Goblin and how he has gained his strength. I want to hear everything.”

“I’m in love with you,” I responded.

He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh.

“Of course you are,” he replied. “I understand perfectly because I’m in love with myself. The fact that I’m not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control.”

It was my turn to laugh.

“But your love for me,” he went on, “is the reason why you’ll tell me all about yourself and Blackwood Farm. Start with the family history and then go into your own.”

I sighed. I pondered. I took the plunge.

7

“Childhood for me involved two distinct polarities—being with Goblin, and listening to adults talk.

“Goblin and I were the only children here at Blackwood Manor because the tourists who came almost never brought children with them, and so I soon learned the vocabulary of adults and that it was fun to play in the kitchen and listen to their endless storytelling and arguing, or to tag after the tour guides—my great-grandfather Gravier and later my grandfather Pops—as they went through the house detailing its riches and its legends, including the gloomy tale of Manfred, the Great Old Man.

“Great-grandfather Gravier was truly the very best at this, having a deep sonorous voice and being a dignified man in a black suit with a white silk tie to match his white shirt, but he was very old when I was little and he went away to a hospital and died there, before I was five I think, and I have no clear memory of his funeral. I don’t think I went to his funeral. But he had made an indelible impression upon me.

“And he at once became a famous family ghost apparently, on the sole authority of my having come down the stairs one morning and seen him standing by the front door, smiling at me placidly and waving his right hand. He was gone in an instant.

“Everybody told me to stop telling such stories, Great-grandfather Gravier was in Heaven, and I must certainly know that, and we ought to light a candle for him before the Blessed Virgin on the little altar in the kitchen, which we did—which made a total of ten-odd candles burning on the little altar for various ancestors, rather like the altars one sometimes sees in Chinese laundries. And furthermore, it was said I shouldn’t try to scare people.

“Nevertheless, during every house tour ever given by anyone at Blackwood Manor, the whole world of our paying guests was told about my having seen Great-grandfather Gravier.

“Pops, Gravier’s only son and my grandfather, took up the job of guide with gusto after Gravier’s death, and though Pops was far more plain-spoken and rough at the edges, he was a grand storyteller, nevertheless.

“Gravier had been a man of considerable accomplishment, in that he had practiced law for years and even served on the bench as a local judge. But Pops was a rural man who had no ambition beyond Blackwood Manor, and if that meant he had to talk to the guests, he did it.

“My grandmother Sweetheart sometimes was recruited, much against her will, as she was always up to her elbows in flour and baking powder, but she knew all the family legends, and, heavy as she was, looked very pretty in a fine black gabardine dress with a purple orchid corsage on her left breast and a string of pearls around her neck. She was one of those women who, inclined to embonpoint, have round smooth wrinkleless faces until they die.

“And then there was Jasmine, our beloved black housekeeper, whom you’ve met, who could in a twinkling change from her kitchen clothes to a swanky black skirt and leopard-skin blouse, along with spike heels of which Aunt Queen would have been proud, to take everyone from room to room, very properly adding to the concoction of tales that she herself had seen Great-great-grandfather William’s ghost in his bedroom, front right, or across the hall from us, as well as the ghost of Great-great-great-aunt Camille tiptoeing up the attic stairs.

“I don’t know that you noticed Jasmine in her fancy red sheath tonight, but Jasmine has the figure of a model, rail thin with strong shoulders, and, with closets of loving cast-offs from Aunt Queen, she cuts a beautiful image as a tour guide, her pale green eyes positively flashing as she tells her earnest ghost stories and sighs before the portraits, or leads the expectant guests to the attic stairs.

“It was Jasmine’s brilliant idea to include the attic in the usual tour, that is, to take the tourists right up and into it, instructing them to notice the delicious smell of the warm wooden rafters as they stood there, and to point out the fine steamer trunks and wardrobe trunks from earlier times, some open and heaped with furs and pearls rather like props for
A Streetcar Named Desire,
and the wicker wheelchair in which Great-great-grandfather William had spent his last days on the lawn. The attic was—before my own inevitable raid upon it—a wilderness of rare and antique wicker, and tales devolved around it all.

“Let me return to the big picture.

“The bed-and-board guests were always company and a bit of an inspiration to me, because they were often friendly and attractive—I tend to see most people as attractive until someone comes along and points out to me that they’re not—and these people frequently invited me into their rooms, or wanted me to sit down at breakfast with them at the big table and chat about the Manor House, as we so pretentiously called it, and I warmed to all this friendship, and Goblin found it interesting because whenever I spoke to or of him, which was all the time, these guests thought Goblin the most intriguing thing in the world.

“ ‘So you have a little spirit friend!’ one said triumphantly, as though she had discovered Confederate gold buried outside. ‘Tell us about your little ghost,’ said another, and when I petted or stroked Goblin while talking of him, he was very happy, indeed. He would flash on solid for a long time, and only sadly go transparent and then dissolve when he had to.

“I couldn’t have done better had I been a paid performer whose sole occupation was to increase the mystery of Blackwood Farm. And I loved it. And then the guests kicked in their support of the mythology gratis, as I’ve explained, with all their sightings of the Old Man, Manfred, scowling in a mirror, or sweet Virginia Lee, roaming from room to room in search of her orphaned children.

“I learned from all this, from the endless variety with which the tales of our house were woven, and I learned from adults how to think and feel like an adult, and Goblin fed off the easy way in which he fitted into everything. And I came to think of myself from early on as being a maverick like the Old Man.

“Manfred, the Old Man, had come out to these parts in 1881 with a new bride, Virginia Lee. He had started out as a saloon keeper in the Irish Channel but gone on to make a fortune in merchandising in New Orleans, but could find no locale suitable to his visions of splendor and so was drawn north across Lake Pontchartrain to this open land.

“Here he found a parcel of real estate that is composed of high ground on which he could build a fabulous mansion, with servants’ quarters, stables, terraces and pastures, plus two hundred acres of thick swamp in which he could hunt, and a charming abandoned cemetery with its shell of a stone church, a tribute to those whose families had long ago died out or decamped.

“Manfred sent his architects to the fine homes of Natchez to choose the very best of attributes for this mansion, and he supervised its Greek Revival style, circular stairs and hallway murals himself.

“All was for the love of Virginia Lee, who had a particular affection for the cemetery and sometimes went to the empty little stone church to pray.

“The four oak trees that guard the cemetery now were already well grown at that time, and the proximity of the old graveyard to the swamp with its greedy hideous cypress trees and endless tangles of Spanish moss no doubt added to, and adds to, the overall sense of melancholy.

“But she was no sappy Victorian girl, Virginia Lee. She had been an educated and devoted nurse to Manfred in a New Orleans hospital where he suffered a severe bout of Yellow Fever and, like many an Irishman, almost died of the disease. It was with great reluctance that she gave up her vocation to nurse the sick, but Manfred, being much older and very persuasive, successfully enchanted her.

“It was for Virginia Lee that Manfred had the portrait of himself painted, which is now hung in the parlor, and always was, as far as I know. He was in his forties when the portrait was painted, but he had already come to resemble a bulldog in some respects, with heavy jowls, an up-thrust obdurate mouth and large mournful blue eyes. He had thick gray hair by that time, circa 1885, and he still had a full head of it when Aunt Queen had her strange meeting with him some forty years later, when he gave her the cameos before he disappeared into the swamp.

“He doesn’t look like a mean man in the portrait. In fact, I’ve always found the picture strongly compelling, and the man himself must have been lacking in vanity, that he allowed such an honest portrait of himself to be hung in his house.

“Virginia Lee was undeniably pretty, as you saw from her portrait in the dining room, a girlish woman with pale blond hair and intense blue eyes. She was said to have had a quick sense of humor and an eternal but gentle sense of irony, and to be utterly loving to William and Camille, the two surviving children she bore before she died. As to those which she lost to lockjaw and influenza, Isabel and Philip, nothing could ever take her mind off them.

“Galloping consumption is the disease that took Virginia Lee, who had also become quite sick from malaria, and only after a valiant struggle during which she dressed herself completely and independently every day, including the Saturday on which she died, at which time she had carried on amusing conversation, with her famous good cheer and self-deprecating humor, in the front parlor, lying on the sofa, until she took her last breath around noon.

“She was buried in the sky blue dress that she wears in her portrait. And if our house has a family saint, it’s Virginia Lee. I’m not above praying to Virginia Lee.

“It was said that Manfred went out of his head when Virginia Lee died. He roared and mumbled. Not being able to endure the sight of a grave for Virginia Lee in the little cemetery—and it probably wasn’t legal to bury her there in his own backyard anyway—he bought a huge crypt for the entire family in the new Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans, which is where our family are buried to this day.

“I’ve seen the mausoleum twice—when Sweetheart died and when Pops died. I presume little Isabel and Philip were uprooted to the crypt from wherever they’d been buried, but frankly I never asked.

“It’s a small rectangular chapel of marble and granite, this Metairie Cemetery tomb, with two five-foot, well-carved granite guardian angels beside its bronze gates, and a stained-glass window in back. Three coffin slots lie on either side of the little aisle.

“You know how those tombs work, I’m sure. Coffins are placed in the slots until all the slots are full, and then when someone new dies, the oldest coffin is opened up, bones dumped in the vault below the ground, and the coffin smashed to pieces and discarded. The new coffin is given the place of honor above ground.

“It’s where I always thought I’d be buried when I died, but now it doesn’t seem that destiny will allow me that luxury or the long adventure I once contemplated to take me to that end. But who knows? Maybe my mortal remains could somehow be secreted into that crypt on some future occasion, after I have the courage to put an end to my own life.

“But let’s return to Mad Manfred, as those around the parish began to call my unfortunate ancestor, who took to going out into Sugar Devil Swamp alone and muttering and cursing, and sometimes not returning for days at a time.

“There was a general commotion to it because all knew that Sugar Devil Swamp had never been logged and was damned near impenetrable for a pirogue, and legends already existed as to bears that habitually hunted there, and cougars and bobcats, and even worse creatures which howled in the night.

“That Manfred was snake-bit more than once and survived it was part of his growing reputation, and it was said he fired on a stranger he’d seen out there some distance from the house, and brought back the wounded poacher and heaved his body on the bank with oaths and vicious warnings to his workmen that this ought to be a lesson to anyone who dared to come into his swamp or onto his land.

“Soon it became known that there was an island out there, and it was to this island that Manfred went, pitching a tent for himself and shooting what he needed for food.

“You can just picture this guy tearing birds apart with his teeth.

“He made no secret of his island sanctuary, only warning again that no one must ever attempt to follow him to his ‘lair,’ as he called it, threatening open season on trespassers and boasting that he had shot and killed several bears.

“Rumor had it that the island was cursed and Manfred was cursed, and that his gold was ill-gotten from gambling, if not worse vices, and that his name, Manfred, he had taken from the play by Lord Byron, with the intent to signal other Demon Worshipers of his own ilk, and that he had sold his soul to the Devil long before he had ever laid eyes on the humble and sweet Virginia Lee, and that she had been his very last chance at salvation.

“As for their little children, William and Camille, it was Jasmine’s ancestors who brought them up—Ora Lee and Jerome are the famous names—both of them Creole people of color with French accents, and something of a distinctive history, their parents having been free artisans before the Civil War.

“For Ora Lee and Jerome, Manfred built the bungalow out back to the far right, a real Creole-looking building, with a deep porch and rocking chairs, and two stories of good-sized rooms.

“Members of the clan have broken off all along to go to college and enter professions, but there are always some who stay in the bungalow, and they have their own vegetable and flower gardens and their own company whenever they choose.

“When I was a kid they still had their own cow and some chickens, but now it’s too easy to go to market for anything a person needs.

“It’s a charming house, a kind of tropical mansion in its own way, full of treasured antiques and various displays of needlework done by the women and furniture made by the men. It’s also full of cast-offs from the big house, and Aunt Queen is famous for refurnishing the front room and giving all the old items to Jasmine, as if Jasmine had a warehouse rather than a family home. It’s on a human scale, Jasmine’s house. Blackwood Manor was built for ‘giants in the earth.’

“Because African and Spanish and French and Anglo-Saxon genes were all scrambled in the lineage of Jasmine’s people before they came, and down through the years by marriage to other people of all colors, Jasmine’s family are all different shades of yellow, red, brown and black.