by Rice, Anne
“But why won’t she admit it?” he asked.
“They all thought that Goblin was bad for me, don’t you see? They all thought that they mustn’t encourage it, don’t you see? And that was why they didn’t want me talking with the Talamasca, because they thought that Stirling and the Talamasca would nurture this damnable ability in me, of seeing ghosts and spirits, and so, if any of them saw Goblin, if my grandparents Sweetheart and Pops ever saw him, they didn’t say.”
Lestat appeared to ponder this for a moment. And once again, I noticed that very slight difference between his eyes. I tried to shut it out of my thoughts, but one eye was ever so much brighter than the other, and definitely tinged with blood.
He said, “I think it’s time I read your letter to me, don’t you?”
“Perhaps so,” was all I could say.
He drew the envelope out of his inside coat pocket and he tore open the end of the envelope neatly, letting the onyx cameo slip out of it into his right hand, and then he smiled.
He looked rapidly several times from the deeply carved white image to me and back again, and then he rubbed the image very gently with his thumb.
“I may keep this?” he asked.
“It’s my gift to you, if you want it,” I said. “Yes, I meant it for you. It was when I thought we’d never meet face-to-face. But yes, keep it. It was made for Aunt Queen, let me confess it, but after the Dark Blood I didn’t want to give it to her. But I don’t know why I’m rambling on about such a point. I’m honored you ask to keep it. It’s yours.”
He slipped it into his side coat pocket, and then he opened the letter and read it carefully, or so it seemed to me.
There was my plea to help me destroy Goblin, and my begging for his patience that I dared to enter New Orleans in search of him, and my report of how I had known and loved the Talamasca, a confession that brought the blood teeming into my face when I thought of Stirling and what I had almost done this very night. There was my admission of how I loved Aunt Queen and how I wanted to take my leave of her, if Lestat chose to punish me by death for disobeying his only rules.
I realized now that much of the letter’s contents had been revealed to him in every other way, and that what he held was only a formal document of what he already knew.
Very respectfully he refolded the pages and doubled them over and put them back in his pocket as though he wanted to save the letter, though why I didn’t know. The envelope had been cast aside.
He regarded me for a long time in silence, his face rather open and generous, which seemed a natural expression for it, and then he spoke:
“You know, I was on the scent of Stirling Oliver when I came upon you. I knew that he was entering my flat—he’s done it more than once—and I thought it was time that he should have a little scare. I wasn’t certain how I meant to arrange that, though I had no intention of revealing myself to him, but then I came upon you about to make the little scare quite final for Mr. Oliver, and it was from your confused mind that I caught the reason you’d come.”
I nodded, then said hastily, “He doesn’t mean any harm, you saw that. I can’t tell you how thankful I am that you stopped me. I don’t think I could have survived my killing him. I’m sure of it. It would have been the finish for me, and I’m terrified of my own clumsiness, that a death like that—. But you must realize he won’t do any harm to us, either of us—.”
“Oh, yes, now you’re out to save him from destruction. Stop worrying. The Talamasca’s off limits, I told you. Besides, I gave them what they’ve wanted for some time, don’t you see?”
“Yes, a sighting of you, a talk with you.”
“Correct, and they’ll mull that over, and letters will be sent to the Elders, but I know perfectly well they can’t harm us. And he and his cohorts won’t come out here looking for you. They’re too damned honorable. But you must tell me now, in case I’ve underestimated them, do you lie by day in a safe place?”
“Very safe,” I said quickly. “On Sugar Devil Island, which they could never conceivably find. But surely you’re right, Stirling will keep his promise not to come looking for me or seek me out. I believe in him utterly. That’s why it’s so ghastly that I almost hurt him, I almost took his life.”
“And would it have been to the finish with him?” he asked. “Have you no self-control once you’ve begun?”
I was full of misery.
“I don’t know what self-control I have. On the night of my making I committed a blunder, taking an innocent life—.”
“Then that was your Maker’s blunder,” he retorted. “He should have been with you, teaching you.”
I nodded.
“Let me dream that I would have broken off with Stirling, but I wasn’t just frightened of him, frightened of him knowing about me, I was hungry for his death. I’m not sure how it would have gone. He was fighting me with an elegance of mind. He has that, an elegance of mind. Yes, I think I would have taken his life. It was tangled with my love for him. I would have been damned for it forever, and I would have found some way to put an end to myself right away. I’m damned for almost doing it. I’m damned for everything. I live, I live in a fatal frame of mind.”
“How so? What do you mean?” he asked, but he wasn’t surprised by what I’d said.
“It’s as if I’m forever in the grip of Last Rites or dictating a Last Will and Testament. I died the night my Maker brought me over; I’m like one of the pathetic ghosts of Blackwood Manor who doesn’t know he or she is dead. I can’t come back to life.”
He nodded, raising one eyebrow and then relaxing. “Ah, well, you know that argues much better for a long existence rather than recklessness and devil-may-care behavior.”
“No, I didn’t know,” I said quickly. “What I know is that I have you here and you helped me with Goblin, and you see what Goblin can do. You see that Goblin has to be … has to be destroyed. And maybe me too.”
“You haven’t the smallest idea of what you’re saying,” he returned quietly. “You don’t want to be destroyed. You want to live forever. You just don’t want to kill to do it, that’s all.”
Now I knew that I was going to cry.
I took out my pocket handkerchief and I wiped at my eyes and my nose. I didn’t turn away to do this. That would have been too cowardly. But I did look about me without moving my head, and when I looked back at him I thought, what a staggeringly beautiful creature he was.
His eyes alone would have done the trick, but he’d been gifted with so much more, the thick massive blond hair, the large finely shaped mouth and an expression eloquent of comprehension as well as intelligence, and under the light of the gasolier he was the matinee idol drifting before me, carrying me out of myself into some unmeasured moment in which I relished his appearance as if he couldn’t or didn’t know.
“And you, my timeless one,” he said in a soft sure voice with no hint of accusation in it, “I see you here in your exquisite setting of mirrors and gold, of human love and obvious patrimony, and robbed of it all in essence by some careless demon who’s left you orphaned and uneasily, no, torturously, ensconced among the mortals you still so desperately need.”
“No,” I said. “I fled my Maker. But now I seek you out, and so I have you, even if just for this night, but I do love you, love you as surely as I love Aunt Queen, and Nash, and Goblin, yes, as much as I have loved Goblin, I love you. Forgive me. I can’t keep it back.”
“There is no forgiving,” said Lestat. “Your head teems with images, and I catch them blinkering and crowding your brain as they seek a narrative, and so you must tell me, you must tell me all of your life, even what you think is not important, tell me all. Let it pour from you, and then we’ll judge what’s to be done with Goblin together.”
“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 d
eep 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.
