The Vampire Lestat (25 page)

We listened carefully for any sign of Nicki or Roget, but the house appeared deserted and dark.

“They are near, however,” she whispered. “I think somewhere further down . . . ”

“Nicki’s flat,” I said. “And from Nicki’s flat someone could be watching the mare, a servant posted to watch in case we came back.”

“Better to leave the horse and steal another,” she said.

“No, it’s mine,” I said. But I felt her grip on my hand tighten.

Our old friend again,
the presence
, and this time it was moving along the Seine on the other side of the island and towards the Left Bank.

“Gone,” she said. “Let’s go. We can steal another mount.”

“Wait. I’m going to try to get her to come to me. To break the tether.”

“Can you do that?”

“We’ll see.” I concentrated all my will on the mare, telling her silently to back up, to pull loose from the bond holding her and come.

In a second, the horse was prancing, jerking at the leather. Then she reared and the tether broke.

She came clattering towards us over the stones, and we were on her immediately, Gabrielle leaping up first and I right behind her, gathering up what was left of the rein as I urged the horse to go into a dead run.

As we crossed the bridge I felt something behind us, a commotion, the tumult of mortal minds.

But we were lost in the black echo chamber of the Ile de la Cité.

W
HEN
we reached the tower, I lighted the resin torch and took her down with me into the dungeon. There was no time now to show her the upper chamber.

Her eyes were glassy and she looked about herself sluggishly as we
descended the screw stairs. Her scarlet clothes gleamed against the dark stones. Ever so slightly she recoiled from the dampness.

The stench from the lower prison cells disturbed her, but I told her gently it was nothing to do with us. And once we had entered the huge burial crypt, the smell was shut out by the heavy iron-studded door.

The torchlight spread out to reveal the low arches of the ceiling, the three great sarcophagi with their deeply graven images.

She did not seem afraid. I told her that she must see if she could lift the stone lid of the one she chose for herself. I might have to do it for her.

She studied the three carved figures. And after a moment’s reflection, she chose not the woman’s sarcophagus but the one with the knight in armor carved on the top of it. And slowly she pushed the stone lid out of place so she could look into the space within.

Not as much strength as I possessed but strong enough.

“Don’t be frightened,” I said.

“No, you mustn’t ever worry on that account,” she answered softly. Her voice had a lovely frayed sound to it, a faint timbre of sadness. She appeared to be dreaming as she ran her hands over the stone.

“By this hour,” she said, “she might have already been laid out, your mother. And the room would be full of evil smells and the smoke of hundreds of candles. Think how humiliating it is, death. Strangers would have taken off her clothes, bathed her, dressed her—strangers seen her emaciated and defenseless in the final sleep. And those whispering in the corridors would have talked of their good health, and how they have never had the slightest illness in their families, no, no consumption in their families. ‘The poor Marquise,’ they would have said. They would have been wondering, did she have any money of her own? Did she leave it to her sons? And the old woman when she came to collect the soiled sheets, she would have stolen one of the rings off the dead woman’s hand.”

I nodded. And so we stand in this dungeon crypt, I wanted to say, and we prepare to lie down on stone beds, with only rats to keep us company. But it’s infinitely better than that, isn’t it? It has its dark splendor, to walk the nightmare terrain forever.

She looked wan, cold all over. Sleepily, she drew something out of her pocket.

It was the golden scissors she’d taken from the lady’s table in the faubourg St.-Germain. Sparkling in the light of the torch like a bauble.

“No, Mother,” I said. My own voice startled me. It leapt out echoing too sharply under the arched ceiling. The figures on the other sarcophagi seemed merciless witnesses. The hurt in my heart stunned me.

Evil sound, the snipping, the shearing. Her hair fell down in great long locks on the floor.

“Ooooh, Mother.”

She looked down at it, scattering it silently with the tip of her boot, and then she looked up at me, and she was a young man now certainly, the short hair curling against her cheek. But her eyes were closing. She reached out to me and the scissors fell out of her hands.

“Rest now,” she whispered.

“It’s only the rising sun,” I said to reassure her. She was weakening sooner than I did. She turned away from me and moved towards the coffin. I lifted her and her eyes shut. Pushing the lid of the sarcophagus even farther to the right, I laid her down inside, letting her pliant limbs arrange themselves naturally and gracefully.

Her face had already smoothed itself into sleep, her hair framing her face with a young boy’s locks.

Dead, she seemed, and gone, the magic undone.

I kept looking at her.

I let my teeth cut into the tip of my tongue until I felt the pain and tasted the hot blood there. Then bending low I let the blood fall in tiny shining droplets on her lips. Her eyes opened. Violet blue and glittering, they stared up at me. The blood flowed into her opening mouth and slowly she lifted her head to meet my kiss. My tongue passed into her. Her lips were cold. My lips were cold. But the blood was hot and it flowed between us.

“Good night, my darling one,” I said. “My dark angel Gabrielle.” She sank back into stillness as I let her go. I closed the stone over her.

I
DID not like rising in the black underground crypt. I didn’t like the chill in the air, and that faint stench from the prison below, the feeling that this was where all the dead things lay.

A fear overcame me. What if she didn’t rise? What if her eyes never opened again? What did I know of what I’d done?

Yet it seemed an arrogant thing, an obscene thing to move the lid of the coffin again and gaze at her in her sleep as I had done last night. A mortal shame came over me. At home, I would never have dared to open her door without knocking, never dared to draw back the curtains of her bed.

She would rise. She had to. And better that she should lift the stone for herself, know how to rise, and that the thirst should drive her to it at the proper moment as it had driven me.

I lighted the torch on the wall for her, and went out for a moment to breathe the fresh air. Then leaving gates and doors unlocked behind me, I went up into Magnus’s cell to watch the twilight melt from the sky.

I’d hear her, I thought, when she awakened.

An hour must have passed. The azure light faded, the stars rose, and the distant city of Paris lighted its myriad tiny beacons. I left the windowsill where I had sat against the iron bars and I went to the chest and began to select jewels for her.

Jewels she still loved. She had taken her old keepsakes with her when we left her room. I lighted the candles to help me see, though I didn’t really need them. The illumination was beautiful to me. Beautiful on the jewels. And I found very delicate and lovely things for her—pearl-studded pins that she might wear in the lapels of her mannish little coat, and rings that would look masculine on her small hands if that was what she wanted.

I listened now and then for her. And this chill would clutch my heart. What if she did not rise? What if there had been only that one night for her? Horror thudding in me. And the sea of jewels in the chest, the candlelight dancing in the faceted stones, the gold settings—it meant nothing.

But I didn’t hear her. I heard the wind outside, the great soft rustle of the trees, the faint distant whistling of the stable boy as he moved about the barn, the neighing of my horses.

Far off a village church bell rang.

Then very suddenly there came over me the feeling that someone was watching me. This was so unfamiliar to me that I panicked. I turned, almost stumbling into the chest, and stared at the mouth of the secret tunnel. No one there.

No one in this small empty sanctum with the candlelight playing on the stones and Magnus’s grim countenance on the sarcophagus.

Then I looked straight in front of me at the barred window.

And I saw her looking back at me.

Floating in the air she seemed to be, holding to the bars with both hands, and she was smiling.

I almost cried out. I backed up and the sweat broke out all over my body. I was embarrassed suddenly to be caught off guard, to be so obviously startled.

But she remained motionless, smiling still, her expression gradually changing from serenity to mischievousness. The candlelight made her eyes too brilliant.

“It’s not very nice to frighten other immortals like that,” I said. She laughed more freely and easily than she ever had when she was alive.

Relief coursed through me as she moved, made sounds. I knew I was blushing.

“How did you get there!” I said. I went to the window and reached through the bars and clasped both her wrists.

Her little mouth was all sweetness and laughter. Her hair was a great shimmering mane around her face.

“I climbed the wall, of course,” she said. “How do you think I got here?”

“Well, go down. You can’t come through the bars. I’ll go to meet you.”

“You’re very right about that,” she said. “I’ve been to all the windows. Meet me on the battlements above. It’s faster.”

She started climbing, hooking her boots easily into the bars, then she vanished.

She was all exuberance as she’d been the night before as we came down the stairs together.

“Why are we lingering here?” she said. “Why don’t we go on now to Paris?”

Something was wrong with her, lovely as she was, something not right . . . what was it?

She didn’t want kisses now, or even talk, really. And that had a little sting to it.

“I want to show you the inner room,” I said. “And the jewels.”

“The jewels?” she asked.

She hadn’t seen them from the window. The cover of the chest had blocked her view. She walked ahead of me into the room where Magnus had burned, and then she lay down to crawl through the tunnel.

As soon as she saw the chest, she was shocked by it.

She tossed her hair a little impatiently over her shoulder and bent to study the brooches, the rings, the small ornaments so like those heirlooms she’d had to sell long ago one by one.

“Why, he must have been collecting them for centuries,” she said. “And such exquisite things. He chose what he would take, didn’t he? What a creature he must have been.”

Again, almost angrily, she pushed her hair out of her way. It seemed paler, more luminous, fuller. A glorious thing.

“The pearls, look at them,” I said. “And these rings.” I showed her the ones I’d already chosen for her. I took her hand and slipped the rings on her fingers. Her fingers moved as if they had life of their own, could feel delight, and again she laughed.

“Ah, but we are splendid devils, aren’t we?”

“Hunters of the Savage Garden,” I said.

“Then let’s go into Paris,” she said. Faint touch of pain in her face, the thirst. She ran her tongue over her lips. Was I half as fascinating to her as she was to me?

She raked her hair back from her forehead, and her eyes darkened with the intensity of her words.

“I want to feed quickly tonight,” she said, “then go out of the city, into the woods. Go where there are no men and women about. Go where there is only the wind and the dark trees, and the stars overhead. Blessed silence.”

She went to the window again. Her back was narrow and straight, and her hands at her sides, alive with the jeweled rings. And coming as they did out of the thick cuffs of the man’s coat, her hands looked all the more slender and exquisite. She must have been looking at the high dim clouds, the stars that burned through the purple layer of evening mist.

“I have to go to Roget,” I said under my breath. “I have to take care of Nicki, tell them some lie about what’s happened to you.”

She turned, and her face looked small and cold suddenly, the way it could at home when she was disapproving. But she’d never really look that way again.

“Why tell them anything about me?” she asked. “Why ever even bother with them again?”

I was shocked by this. But it wasn’t a complete surprise to me. Perhaps I’d been waiting for it. Perhaps I’d sensed it in her all along, the unspoken questions.

I wanted to say Nicki sat by your bed when you were dying, does that mean nothing? But how sentimental, how mortal that sounded, how positively foolish.

Yet it wasn’t foolish.

“I don’t mean to judge you,” she said. She folded her arms and leaned against the window. “I simply don’t understand. Why did you write to us? Why did you send us all the gifts? Why didn’t you take this white fire from the moon and go where you wanted with it?”

“But where should I want to go?” I said. “Away from all those I’d known and loved? I did not want to stop thinking of you, of Nicki, even of my father and my brothers. I did what I wanted,” I said.

“Then conscience played no role in it?”

“If you follow your conscience, you do what you want,” I said. “But it was simpler than that. I wanted you to have the wealth I gave you. I wanted you . . . to be happy.”

She reflected for a long time.

“Would you have had me forget
you
?” I demanded. It sounded spiteful, angry.

She didn’t answer immediately.

“No, of course not,” she said. “And had it been the other way around, I would never have forgotten you either. I’m sure of it. But the rest of them? I don’t give a damn about them. I shall never exchange words with them again. I shall never lay eyes on them.”

I nodded. But I hated what she was saying. She frightened me.

“I cannot overcome this notion that I’ve died,” she said. “That I am utterly cut off from all living creatures. I can taste, I can see, I can feel. I can drink blood. But I am like something that cannot be seen, cannot affect things.”