Merrick tvc-7 Page 26

  Merrick was lost to him, utterly lost to him. I knew it. Her mind, insofar as I could read it, was ravaged. She was deeply affected by his seeming pain. Nothing of her sympathies was reserved.

  "Spirits exist, Louis," she said, her voice slightly tremulous, "they exist, but they tell lies. One spirit can come in the guise of another. Spirits are sometimes greedy and depraved."

  It was quite exquisite, the way that he frowned and put the back of his finger to his lip before he answered. As for her, well, I was furious with her, and saw not the slightest physical or mental fault in her. She was the woman to whom I'd surrendered passion, pride, and honor a long time before.

  "I'll know her, Merrick," said Louis. "I can't be deceived. If you can call her, and if she comes, I'll know her. I have no doubt."

  "But what if I doubt, Louis?" she responded. "What if I tell you that we've failed? Will you at least try to believe what I say?"

  "It's all settled, isn't it?" I blurted out. "We mean to do it, then, don't we?"

  "Yes, oh, yes," Louis answered, looking across the room at me considerately enough, though his large inquisitive eyes shot right back to Merrick. "Let me beg your forgiveness, Merrick, that we've troubled you for your power. I tell myself in my most awful moments that you'll take away from us some valuable knowledge and experience, that perhaps we'll confirm your faith—in God. I tell myself these things because I can't believe we've merely ruptured your life with our very presence. I hope it's so. I beg you to understand."

  He was using the very words that had come to my mind in my many feverish ruminations. I was furious with him as well as her, suddenly. Detestable that he should say these things, and the hell he couldn't read minds. I had to get myself in hand.

  She smiled, suddenly, one of the most magnificent smiles I'd ever seen. Her creamy cheeks, her dramatic green eyes, her long hair—all her charms conspired to make her irresistible, and I could see the effect of her smile upon Louis, as if she'd rushed into his arms.

  "I have no doubts or regrets, Louis," she told me. "Mine is a great and unusual power. You've given me a reason to use it. You speak of a soul that may be in torment; indeed, you speak of long, long suffering, and you suggest that we might somehow bring that soul's torment to a close."

  At this point, his cheeks colored deeply and he leant over and clasped her hand again tightly.

  "Merrick, what can I give you in exchange for what you mean to do?"

  This alarmed me. He should not have said it! It led too directly to the most powerful and unique gift that we had to give. No, he shouldn't have said it, but I remained silent, watching these two creatures become ever more enthralled with each other, watching them quite definitely fall in love.

  "Wait until it's done, and let us talk then of such things," she said, "if we ever talk of them at all. I need nothing in return, really. As I've said, you are giving me a way to use my power and that in itself is quite enough. But again, you must assure me, you will listen to my estimation of what happens. If I think we have raised something which is not from God I will say so, and you must at least try to believe what I say."

  She rose and went directly past me, with only a faint smile for me as she did so, into the open dining room behind me to fetch something, it seemed, from the sideboard along the distant wall.

  Of course, Louis, the consummate gentleman, was on his feet. Again I noticed the splendid clothing, and how lean and feline were his simplest gestures, and how stunningly beautiful his immaculate hands.

  She reentered the light before me as if reentering a stage.

  "Here, this is what I have from your darling," she said. She held a small bundle, wrapped in velvet. "Sit down, Louis, please," she resumed. "And let me put these items into your hands." She took her chair again, beneath the lamp facing him, the precious goods in her lap.

  He obeyed her with the open radiance of a schoolboy before a miraculous and brilliant teacher. He sat back as though he would yield to her slightest command.

  I watched her in profile and nothing filled my mind so much as pure, utter, base jealousy! But loving her as I did, I was wise enough to acknowledge some genuine concern as well.

  As for him, there was little doubt that he was completely as interested in her as he was in the things which had belonged to Claudia.

  "This rosary, why did she have it?" asked Merrick, extracting the sparkling beads from her little bundle. "Surely she didn't pray."

  "No, she liked it for the look of it," he said, his eyes full of a dignified plea that Merrick should understand. "I think I bought it for her. I don't think I ever even told her what it was. Learning with her was strange, you see. We thought of her as a child, when we should have realized, and then the outward form of a person has such a mysterious connection with the disposition."

  "How so?" Merrick asked.

  "Oh, you understand," he said shyly, almost modestly. "The beautiful know they have power, and she had, in her diminutive charm, a certain power of which she was always casually aware." He hesitated. It seemed he was painfully shy. "We fussed over her; we gloried in her. She looked no more than six or seven at most." The light in his face went out for a moment, as if an interior switch had shut it off.

  Merrick reached forward again and took his hand. He let her have it. He bowed his head just a little, and he lifted the hand she held, as if saying, Give me a moment. Then he resumed.

  "She liked the rosary," he said. "Maybe I did tell her the prayers. I don't remember. She liked sometimes to go with me to the Cathedral. She liked to hear the music of the evening ceremonies. She liked all things that were sensual and which involved beauty. She was girlish in her enthusiasms for a long time."

  Merrick let his hand go but very reluctantly.

  "And this?" she asked. She lifted the small white leather-bound diary. "A long time ago, this was found in the flat in the Rue Royale, in a hiding place. You never knew that she kept it."

  "No," he said. "I gave it to her as a gift, that I well recall. But I never saw her write in it. That she kept it came as something of a surprise. She was quite the reader of books, that I can tell you. She knew so much poetry. She was always quoting this or that verse in an offhanded manner. I try to remember the things she quoted, the poets she loved."

  He gazed at the diary now as if he were reticent to open it, or even to touch it. As if it still belonged to her.

  Merrick withdrew it, and lifted the doll.

  "No," Louis said adamantly, "she never liked them. They were always a mistake. No, that doesn't matter, that doll. Although if recollection serves me right, it was found with the diary and the rosary. I don't know why she saved it. I don't know why she put it away. Maybe she wanted someone in the far distant future to find it and mourn for her, to know that she herself had been locked in a doll's body; wanted some one lone individual to shed tears for her. Yes, I think that's how it must have been."

  "Rosary, doll, diary," said Merrick delicately. "And the diary entries, do you know what they say?"

  "Only one, the one Jesse Reeves read and related to me. Lestat had given her the doll on her birthday and she'd hated it. She'd tried to wound him; she'd mocked him; and he'd answered her with those lines from an old play which I can't forget."

  He bowed his head, but he wouldn't give in to his sadness, not entirely. His eyes were dry for all the pain in them as he recited the words:

  Cover her face;

  mine eyes dazzle;

  she died young.

  I winced at the recollection. Lestat had been condemning himself when he'd spoken those words to her, he'd been offering himself up to her rage. She'd known it. That's why she'd recorded the entire incident—his unwelcome gift, her weariness of playthings, her anger at her limitations, and then his carefully chosen verse.

  Merrick allowed for a small interval, and then, letting the doll rest in her lap, she offered Louis the diary once more. "There are several entries," she said. "Two are of no importance, and for one of these I'll ask yo
u to work my magic. But there is another telling one, and that you must read before we go on."

  Still Louis did not reach for the diary. He looked at her respectfully, as before, but he didn't reach for the little white book.

  "Why must I read it?" he asked Merrick.

  "Louis, think of what you've asked me to do. And yet you can't read the words she herself wrote here?"

  "That was long ago, Merrick," he said. "It was years before she died that she concealed that diary. Isn't what we do of much greater importance? Yes, take a page if you need it. Take any page of the diary, it doesn't matter, use it as you will, only don't ask that I read a word."

  "No, you must read it," Merrick said with exquisite gentleness. "Read it to me and to David. I know what is written there, and you must know, and David is here to help both of us. Please, the last entry: read it aloud."

  He stared hard at her, and now there came the faint film of red tears to his eyes, but he gave a tiny, near imperceptible, shake of his head, and then he took the diary from her outstretched hand.

  He opened it, gazing down at it, having no need as a mortal might to move the page into the light.

  "Yes," said Merrick coaxingly. "See, that one is unimportant. She says only that you went to the theater together. She says that she saw Macbeth, was Lestat’s favorite play."

  He nodded, turning the small pages.

  "And that one, that one is not significant," she went on, as though leading him through the fire with her words. "She says that she loves white chrysanthemums, she says she purchased some from an old woman, she says they are the flowers for the dead."

  Again he seemed on the very brink of losing his composure utterly, but he kept his tears to himself. Again he turned the pages.

  "There, that one. You must read it," said Merrick, and she laid her hand on his knee. I could see her fingers stretched out and embracing him in that age-old gesture. "Please, Louis, read it to me."

  He looked at her for a long moment, and then down at the page. His voice came tenderly in a whisper, but I knew that she could hear it as well as I.

  "September 21, 1859

  It has been so many decades since Louis presented me with this little book in which I might record my private thoughts. I have not been successful, having made only a few entries, and whether these have been written for my benefit I am unsure.

  Tonight, I confide with pen and paper because I know which direction my hatred will take me. And I fear for those who have aroused my wrath.

  By those I mean, of course, my evil parents, my splendid fathers, those who have led me from a long forgotten mortality into this questionable state of timeless 'bliss.'

  To do away with Louis would be foolish, as he is without question the more malleable of the pair."

  Louis paused as though he couldn't continue.

  I saw Merrick's fingers tighten on his knee.

  "Read it, please, I beg you," she said gently. "You must go on."

  Louis began again, his voice soft as before, and quite deliberately smooth.

  "Louis will do as I wish, even unto the very destruction of Lestat, which I plan in every detail. Whereas Lestat would never cooperate with my designs upon Louis. So there my loyalty lies, under the guise of love even in my own heart.

  "What mysteries we are, human, vampire, monster, mortal, that we can love and hate simultaneously, and that emotions of all sorts might not parade for what they are not. I look at Louis and I despise him totally for the making of me, and yet I do love him. But then I love Lestat every bit as well.

  "Perhaps in the court of my heart, I hold Louis far more accountable for my present state than ever I could blame my impulsive and simple Lestat. The fact is, one must die for this or the pain in me will never be scaled off, and immortality is but a monstrous measurement of what I shall suffer till the world revolves to its ultimate end. One must die so that the other will become ever more dependent upon me, ever more completely my slave. I would travel the world afterwards; I would have my way; I cannot endure either one of them unless that one becomes my servant in thought, word, and deed.

  "Such a fate is simply unthinkable with Lestat's ungovernable and irascible character. Such a fate seems made for my melancholy Louis, though the destroying of Lestat will open new passages for Louis into the labyrinthian Hell in which I already wander with every new thought that comes in my mind.

  "When I shall strike and how, I know not, only that it gives me supreme delight to watch Lestat in his unguarded gaiety, knowing that I shall humiliate him utterly in destroying him, and in so doing bring down the lofty useless conscience of my Louis, so that his soul, if not his body, is the same size at last as my own."

  It was finished.

  I could tell this merely by the blank expression of pain on his face, the way that his eyebrows quivered for one moment, and then the way he drew back in the chair, and closed the little book, and held it idly as if he'd forgotten it altogether, in his left hand. He looked neither to me nor to Merrick.

  "Do you still want to communicate with this spirit?" Merrick asked reverently. She reached for the small diary, and he gave it over without objection.

  "Oh, yes," he said in a long sigh. "I want it above anything else."

  I wanted so to comfort him, but there were no words to touch such a private pain.

  "I can't blame her for what she expressed," he resumed in a frail voice. "It always goes so tragically wrong with us." His eyes moved feverishly to Merrick. "The Dark Gift, imagine calling it that, when it goes so very wrong in the end." He drew back as if struggling against his emotions.

  "Merrick," he said, "where do they come from, the spirits? I know the conventional wisdom and how foolish it can be. Tell me your thoughts."

  "I know less now than I ever did," answered Merrick. "I think when I was a girl I was very sure of such things. We prayed to the untimely dead because we believed they hovered close to earth, vengeful or confused, and thereby could be reached. From time immemorial, witches have frequented cemeteries looking for those angry, muddled spirits, calling upon them to find the way to greater powers whose secrets might be revealed. I believed in those lonely souls, those suffering lost ones. Perhaps in my own way, I believe in them still.

  "As David can tell you, they seem to hunger for the warmth and the light of life; they seem to hunger even for blood.

  But who knows the true intentions of any spirit? From what depth did the prophet Samuel rise in the Bible? Are we to believe Scripture, that the magic of the Witch of Endor was strong?"

  Louis was fastened to her every word.

  He reached out suddenly and took her hand again, letting her curl her fingers around his thumb.

  "And what do you see, Merrick, when you look at David and at me? Do you see the spirit that inhabits us, the hungry spirit that makes us vampires?"

  "Yes, I see it, but it's mute and mindless, utterly subordinate to your brains and hearts. It knows nothing now, if it ever did, except that it wants the blood. And for the blood it slowly works its spell on your tissues, it slowly commands your every cell to obey. The longer you live, the more it thrives, and it is angry now, angry insofar as it can choose any emotion, because you blood drinkers are so few."

  Louis appeared mystified, but surely it wasn't so difficult to understand.

  "The massacres, Louis, the last here in New Orleans. They clear away the rogues and baseborn. And the spirit shrinks back into those who remain."

  "Yes," said Merrick, with a passing glance at me. "That's precisely why your thirst now is doubly terrible, and why you are so far from being satisfied with the 'little drink.' You asked a moment ago: what do I want from you? Let me say what I want of you. Let me be so bold as to answer you now."

  He said nothing. He merely gazed at her as if he could refuse her nothing. She went on.

  "Take the strong blood David can give you," she said. "Take it so you can exist without killing, take it so you can cease your heated search for the evildoer. Yes,
I know, I use your language, perhaps too freely and too proudly. Pride is always a sin with those of us who persevere in the Talamasca. We believe we have seen miracles; we believe we have worked miracles. We forget that we know nothing; we forget that there may be nothing to find out."

  "No, there is something, there's more than something," he insisted, gently moving her hand with his emphasis. "You and David have convinced me, even though it was never your intention, either of you. There are things to know. Tell me, when can we move to speak to Claudia's spirit? What more do you require of me before you'll make the spell?"

  "Make the spell?" she asked gently. "Yes, it will be a spell. Here, take this diary," she gave it over to him, "rip a page from it, whatever page you feel is strongest or whatever part you are most willing to give up."

  He took it with his left hand, unwilling to let her go.

  "What page do you want me to tear out?" he insisted.

  "You make the choice. I'll bum it when I'm ready. You'll never see those particular words again."

  She released him, and urged him on with a small gesture. He opened the book with both hands. He sighed again, as if he couldn't endure this, but then he commenced to read in a low unhurried voice:

  " 'And tonight, as I passed the cemetery, a lost child wandering dangerously alone for all the world to pity me, I bought these chrysanthemums, and lingered for some time within the scent of the fresh graves and their decaying dead, wondering what death life would have had for me had I been let to live it. Wondering if I could have hated as a mere human as much as I hate now? Wondering if I could have loved as much as I love now?' "

  Carefully, pressing the book to his leg with his left hand, he tore the page with his right hand, held it under the light for a moment, then gave it over to Merrick, his eyes following it as though he were committing a terrible theft.

  She received it respectfully and placed it carefully beside the doll in her lap.