Well, now that’s fascinating! So this dapper dude doesn’t always know what he’s doing. My thesis is correct! Why don’t you appear now so that I can laugh at you, you impotent jerk?
I tried desperately to read the thoughts behind Michael’s words, but I couldn’t. These Mayfairs were so casually and maddeningly gifted. Maybe the man wasn’t defenseless. He was just so strong he didn’t bother to put up any defenses.
I glanced at Rowan. She was staring at my hand again. How could she not notice the sheen of my fingernails? All vampires have lustrous fingernails. Mine are like glass. She reached out, then drew back.
I had only moments here.
“Can you tell me what kind of mistake Julien made?” I asked.
“I think there’s a photograph of little Stella in a sailor dress,” Michael said, drifting off into his thoughts again. He didn’t notice anything about me. He just alternated between intense thought and looking directly into my eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure there is.”
“Did you say that Stella’s brother shot her?” I asked.
“Oh, she was a woman by that time,” Michael said, half dreaming. “She’d given birth to Antha. Antha was six years old. Stella nearly ran off with a man from the Talamasca. She wanted to escape the family and the ghost that went with it. Stirling knows all about it, of course.” He looked at me as if startled. “But don’t ask Mona. Don’t say anything about all this to Mona.”
“I won’t say a word about it to Mona,” I answered.
Rowan was sensing things about me, sensing that my heart rate was far too slow for a functioning mortal. Sensing things about the way that candlelight reflected off my face.
“I’ll tell you what I think happens,” said Michael. “When they come on an errand, they leave behind the totality of salvation.”
“Ghosts, you mean,” I said.
“What was that?” Stirling asked.
“Of course, the Totality of Salvation,” I whispered. I smiled. I loved it. “Of course, they have to, don’t they? Or every haunting would be a theophany, wouldn’t it?” I flashed on Julien last night in my clutches, my questions to him coming angrily as accusations. He knew nothing about any Totality of Salvation, did he? Why, I’d already figured that out, hadn’t I? That when I’d drifted to Earth in my fantasy as Saint Lestat I had to leave behind a certain Heavenly knowledge.
“I wouldn’t trust any ghost, really,” Michael said. “I think you’re right about all that. But Julien tries to do good. He has the family’s welfare in mind when he appears. If only—.”
“If only what?” I pressed.
“Why did you ask that question about Stella?” Rowan asked. Her voice was rich yet sharp. “Where did you see Stella?” Her voice rose. “What do you know about Stella?”
“You don’t mean the ghosts have already come for Mona, do you?” asked Michael. “You realize what that means, of course. Shouldn’t we be there? Shouldn’t we be near at hand?”
“No, they haven’t come for her,” I replied. “She’ll tell us when that happens, I know she will.” But I felt the lie catch in me. They were trying to come for her, weren’t they, in some sort of grim game, or was it my soul they wanted?
I stood up.
“I’ll let you know when she needs you,” I said. “I promise you.”
“Don’t go,” said Rowan crossly but under her breath.
“Why, so you can keep studying me?” I said. I was suddenly trembling again. I didn’t know what I meant to say. “Would you like it if I gave you a sample of my blood? Is that why you’re staring at me?”
“Lestat, do be careful,” said Stirling.
“What would I do with a sample of your blood?” Rowan asked, eyes moving up and down my figure. “Do you want me to study you?” she asked coldly. “Do you want me to ask questions about you? Who you are, where you come from? I have the feeling you do. I have the feeling you’d like nothing better than to let me take a sample of your skin, your hair, your blood, everything you have to give. I see that,” she said, tapping the side of her forehead.
“Do you really?” I asked. “And you’d analyze all this in Mayfair Medical in some secret laboratory.” My heart was pumping. My brain was on overdrive. “You’re some genius doctor, aren’t you? That’s what’s behind those gray eyes, those enormous gray eyes. Not the ordinary surgeon or oncologist, not you—.” I broke off. What was I doing?
Julien’s laughter. “Yes, isn’t she a wonder? Play into her hands.” Julien near the back door of the conservatory, deep in shadow, laughing: “You’re no match for her, you impudent fiend. Maybe she’ll construct a glass enclosure for you. They have such marvelous materials in this new century. Even such exotica as you—.”
“Shut up, you miserable bastard,” I whispered in French. “It sounds to me like you’re far more fallible than you let on. What was your disastrous mistake, would you like to tell me?”
“Are you talking to Julien?” asked Michael. He glanced to the very spot. But there was nothing there.
“Detestable coward,” I said in French. “He’s gone. He won’t let anyone else see him.”
“Come, Lestat,” said Stirling, tugging at me. “It’s really time for you to go. You have Mona waiting for you.”
Rowan never once turned to look at the ghost. She was angry. She rose to her feet. I felt that push again, just as if she’d laid her two hands on my chest. Yet her face was radiant with a complex of anguish behind it that not even anger could mask.
“Where is Mona!” she demanded. Her husky voice had never been more effective. “You think I don’t know you took her away from Blackwood Manor? I was there first thing this morning, as soon as I could get away from the Medical Center. Clem drove the three of you to the Ritz Hotel last night. I went to the Ritz Hotel. No Mona. No Quinn either. And no Lestat de Lioncourt. That’s the name you signed in Aunt Queen’s funeral book, isn’t it? I checked the spelling and your flamboyant handwriting. You like signing your name, don’t you?—
“—And you have such a lovely French accent, oh, yes. Where is Mona right now, Monsieur de Lioncourt? What in the name of Heaven is going on? Why are you asking questions about Stella? You think I don’t know that you’re behind everything that’s happening? Jasmine and Big Ramona think you’re some sort of foreign prince, with your melodious French accent and your mind reading gifts and your exorcism to rid the house of ghosts and spirits. And oh, yes, Aunt Queen absolutely adored you! But you sound more like Rasputin to me! You can’t just steal Mona from me! You can’t!”
A stinging hurt spread through me, over my face, my skin. I’d never felt anything quite like it.
Julien was back there, in the shadows, laughing cruelly, collecting just a seam of the light along the edge of his face and form.
Michael was on his feet and so was Stirling.
“Rowan, please, honey,” Michael said, trying to calm her. He seemed hesitant to touch her, hesitant to enclose her with his arms, though this might have been welcomed by her.
“I’ve told you all I know,” I said. I stammered.
“Let me see you out,” said Stirling. I felt his hand on my arm.
“You tell Mona we love her,” said Michael.
“Is Mona afraid of us?” Rowan whispered. The anguish inside her defeated her anger. She drew close to me. “She’s afraid of us now, isn’t she?” She and Mona, a shared history of horrors. Yes, an unbreakable link.
Child. Woman Child.
Morrigan. No admissions and explanations. Just an image. The same image I’d seen in the Blood.
Woman Child.
“I demand that you tell me! Is she afraid!”
“No,” I said. I reached forward right through the aura of palpable power that surrounded her. I put my hands on her arms. Vague binding shock. To Hell with Michael. But Michael didn’t stop me. “Not anymore,” I said, peering into Rowan’s eyes. “Mona’s not afraid of anything. Oh, if only I could give you some peace of mind. I wish I could. Please, please wait for her to call you, and don’t think about her anymore.”
I felt her strength recede, and her eyes misted. A great glowing fire was quelled, and I had done it, and an ever present grief enfolded it. A protective surge rose in me and the wild fantasies reigned again inside of me as if no one else was present.
I let her go.
I turned and I left the company.
Behind me the ghost whispered contemptuously, “You’re not a gentleman, you never were!”
I muttered all the obscenities I knew in French and English in a tight whisper.
I walked a little too fast for Stirling. But we came together at the front doors of the house.
Rush of sweet warm air. The night was purring and grinding with the tree frogs and the cicadas. I defy a ghost to distract me from this! The sky was rosey and it would be all night. I closed my eyes and let the warm air hold me close and lovingly and totally.
The warm air didn’t care whether or not I was a gentleman, which I was not.
“What are you doing with Rowan?” Stirling demanded.
“What are you, her older brother?” I shot back.
We walked across the paved porch and onto the drive. Fragrance of grass. Roar of the River Road traffic as sweet as the roar of water.
“Perhaps I am her brother,” he said shortly, “but I mean it. What are you doing?”
“Good God, man,” I replied. “Night before last you told Quinn that Mona was dying. What was your motive? Weren’t you tempting him to go to her? He didn’t, as it turned out, but you were tempting him, goading him to use his power, to bring her over. Don’t deny it. You provoked him. You with all your records. Your volumes. Your studies. Quinn had fed on you, almost taken you. I saved your life, man. You who knew. And now you question me for a little word game with a mortal who detests me?”
“All right,” he said, “so in the back of my mind I abhorred the fact that Mona was dying, that Mona was desperate, and that Mona was so young, and I believed in sinister fairy tales and magic blood! But that woman is not dying. She is the magnate of her family. And she knows something’s profoundly wrong with you. And you’re playing with her.”
“Not so! Leave me alone!”
“I will not. You can’t entice her—.”
“I’m not enticing her!”
“Did you see Stella?” he asked. “Is that who’s haunting you?”
“Don’t go back to a civil tone with me,” I scolded. “Yes, I saw Stella. Did you think that was all part of a game? I saw her in the little sailor dress and she jumped into my lap. They were in my town house in the Rue Royale, both of them, Julien and Stella, with a whole crowd of people. Julien was out there in your fine little conservatory, taunting me. But in my flat last night, they said threatening things to me. Threatening things! Oh, I don’t know why I’m telling you.”
“Yes, you do,” he answered.
“I’ve got to get back to the intrepid wanderers,” I said. I took a deep breath.
“Threatening things?” he asked. “What threatening things did they say to you?”
“Oh, God in Heaven!” I said. “If only I were Juan Diego.”
“Who is Juan Diego?” he asked.
“Maybe nobody,” I said sadly. “But then again, maybe somebody, maybe somebody very very important!” and I went away.
11
I
WENT UP HIGH
in the air. I traveled fast—faster than a ghost, or so I figured. I drifted above the city of New Orleans, lulled by its lights and its voices. I wondered how Mona would handle this power, if she’d be weeping again. I let myself believe there were no ghosts who could touch me up here or anywhere if I used all my considerable powers, no ghosts who could make me afraid.
I said No to hunger. I said to thirst Be still.
I slipped down silently into the realm of my fellow creatures.
I caught sight of Quinn in the Rue Royale, pulling behind him a pile of suitcases, all dependent upon one huge rectangular bag equipped with excellent little wheels. He was whistling a melody by Chopin and walking very briskly, and I fell into stride beside him.
“You’re the most dashing man on the street, Little Brother,” I said. “What’s with all the suitcases?”
“Are you going to let us stay at the flat, Beloved Boss?” he asked. His eyes were fired with love. In our short acquaintance, I’d never seen him so happy. In fact, I’d never seen him happy before at all. “What do you think?” he asked. “Do we crowd you? Do you want us out?”
“Not at all, I want you there,” I replied. “I should have told you.” We walked along together, me trying to keep up with his long legs. “I’m the worst of hosts and Coven Masters, to use the old lingo. Not a gentleman. A thoroughgoing Rasputin. Settle in. You had Clem bring clothes to the Ritz? (Yes.) Clever. Where’s Princess Mona right now?”
“In the bedroom, working on the computer we bought at sunset, first thing she had to have,” he said with an airy gesture. “She’s recording every experience, every sensation, every subtle distinction, every revelation—.”
“I get it,” I said. “Hmmm. You’ve both fed.”
He nodded. “Greedily, among despicable wretches, though I had to oversee the operation somewhat. She falls into states of utter paralysis. Perhaps if I wasn’t there she wouldn’t. Physically she’s stronger than I am. I think it confuses her. It was a couple bums back of town, both drunk, nothing to it.”
“But it was her first human victim,” I said. “Particulars.”
“The men were unconscious, it was a cinch for her. She’s yet to confront the living breathing struggling type.”
“All right, that can wait. As regards her being stronger than you, you know I can level the playing ground,” I said quietly. “I don’t share the gift of my blood with many. But I’ll share it again with you.” Was there anything in the world I wouldn’t have done for Quinn?
“I know that,” he answered. “God, I love her. I love her so much it’s overtaken everything else in my mind. I don’t even think about Goblin being gone. I thought when Goblin was actually gone I’d suffer some crippling emptiness. I was sure of it. It seemed bound to happen. But Mona’s the partner of my soul, Lestat, just the way I used to dream it would be when we first met, when we were both kids, before the Blood ever came between us.”
“That’s the way it’s supposed to work, Quinn,” I said. “And Blackwood Farm? Have you any news?”
It was fun walking along the street again. Feet on the summer pavements with the heat of the sun still rising from them.
“Perfect,” said Quinn. “Tommy’s staying the week. I’ll be able to see him before he goes back to England. I wish he didn’t have to go to school in England. Of course, they’re making calls to anyone or everyone connected to Patsy. It’s the damned medicine. I should have gathered up her medicine and thrown it in the swamp with her. Then they would have assumed that she’d run away. I told them again that I murdered her. Jasmine just laughed. She said she wished she could murder Patsy right now. I think the only one who loves her, really loves her, is Cyndy, the Nurse.”
I pondered the matter, perhaps for the first time since Quinn had done it only a few nights before. A body couldn’t survive being dumped in Sugar Devil Swamp. Too many gators. It made me smile bitterly to remember that once others had tried to dispose of me in just the same way. But poor dead Patsy had lacked my resources when she tumbled down into the darkness. Her soul had fled to the Totality of Salvation, of course.
We walked on together through a crush of valiant tourists. The town was drippingly hot.
Last week at this very time I’d been a wanderer, hopelessly without companions, and then Quinn had come into my life, with a letter in his pocket, needing my help, and Stirling had tiptoed into my flat, daring me to discover him, and soon all of Blackwood Manor had materialized around me, Stirling became a player in my life, Aunt Queen had been cruelly lost on the very night I’d made her acquaintance, and then our beloved Merrick, gone from us, and now I was being drawn into the knowledge of the Mayfairs, and I was what? Scared?
Come on, Lestat. You can tell me the truth. I’m your own self, remember? I was darkly and passionately thrilled by all this, and I felt those chills again, merely thinking of Rowan berating me with all that heat only an hour ago.
And then there was Julien, who just wasn’t going to appear right now and run the risk of Quinn seeing him too. I searched the early evening crowds.
Where are you, you wretched coward, cheap second-rate phantom, accused blunderer?
Quinn turned his head just a little, never breaking his stride. “What was that? You were thinking about Julien.”
“I’ll tell you all of it later,” I said, and I meant it. “But let me ask you, you know, about the time you saw the ghost of Oncle Julien?”
“Yeah?”
“What vibe did you get in your secret soul? Good ghost? Bad ghost?”
“Hmmm, well, good, obviously. Trying to tell me I had Mayfair genes. Trying to save Mona from me, trying to keep us from breeding some
awful mutation,
which occurs now and then in the Mayfair family. A benign ghost. I’ve told you the whole story.”
“Yes, of course,” I replied. “A benign ghost and an awful mutation. Has Mona mentioned the mutation? The lost child?”
“Beloved Boss, what’s bothering you?”
“Nada,”
I said.
Now just wasn’t the time to tell him. . . .
We reached the town house. The guards gave us a friendly nod. I gave them a generous tip. It was, for mortal men in long-sleeved shirts, quite unbearably hot.
We could hear the clacking of the computer keys as we went up the iron stairs. Then the low chatter of the printer.
Mona came charging out of the bedroom clothed in last night’s white duds, page in hand.
“Listen to this,” she said. “ ‘Though this experience is undeniably evil, in that it involves predation upon other human beings, it is without question a mystical experience.’ So, what do you think?”
“That’s all you’ve written?” I asked. “That’s one paragraph. Write some more.”
“Okay.” She ran back into the bedroom. Clack went the keys. Quinn followed her with the luggage. He winked at me, smiling.
I went into my bedroom, which was opposite theirs, shut the door, hit the button for the overhead light, and peeled off all my clothes with a shudder of utter disgust, threw them into the bottom of the armoire, put on a brown cotton turtleneck, black pants, and a lightweight black silk and linen jacket with a highly visible weave, a pair of completely smooth black shoes which had never been worn and looked like a modern sculpture, combed my hair until there was no dust in it and then stood there, awash in a moment of total stillness.
Then I stretched out on my bed. Satin tufted tester above me. Satin counterpane below. Fairly shadowy. I turned my face into the down pillows, of which I always had a sizable heap, and with all my muscles sort of scrunched up against the modern world.
Not a masculine thing to do, not a macho posture, not a show of strength to otherworldly entities, not a take-charge attitude at all.
I was comforted by the sound of Mona’s clicking away, the low note of Quinn’s voice. Footsteps on the boards.
But nothing could take the edge off Rowan’s angry words, those eyes like hematite, her entire frame trembling with her passion as she accused me. How could Michael Curry stay so close to that blaze and not get scorched?
Suddenly, there was an agitation in me so great that only lying alone, scrunched up on the bed, could comfort me. Sleep. Sleep, but I could not. They weren’t wicked enough for me, Quinn and Mona. No one was.
I
wasn’t wicked enough for me!
And I had to see if the ghosts would come.
A clock ticked somewhere. A clock with a painted face and curlicue hands. Not a huge clock. A clock that with its whole soul knew only how to tick and might tick for centuries, maybe had ticked for centuries, a clock to which people would look, and which people would dust, and which people wound with a key, and which people might come to love; a clock somewhere in this flat, perhaps in the back parlor, the only piece of all this furniture that could talk. I heard it. I knew what it was saying. Its code was lovely to me.
There was a knock at the door. Funny. It sounded as if it was right by my ear.
“Come in,” I said. Damn fool that I am. But I wasn’t fooled by the sounds I heard. That wasn’t the door opening. That wasn’t the door being clicked shut.
Julien stood at the foot of the bed. He came walking up along the side. Julien in his downtown black tailcoat and white tie, hair very white under the chandelier. His eyes were black. I’d thought they were gray.
“Why did you knock?” I asked. “Why don’t you just tear my world to pieces instead?”
“I didn’t want you to forget your manners again,” he said in perfect French. “You’re atrocious when you’re ill-mannered.”
“What do you want? To make me suffer? Join the crowd. I’ve been tormented by much stronger creatures than you.”
“You haven’t begun to understand what I can do,” he said.
“You made a ‘disastrous mistake.’ What was it?” I asked. “I wonder: do you even know?”
He paled. His placid face became visibly enraged.
“Who sends you here to play with the living?”
“You’re not the living!” he said.
“Temper, temper,” I said mockingly.
He was too angry to speak. It made him all the more vivid, blanched though he was with anger. Or was it sorrow? I couldn’t bear the thought of sorrow. I had enough sorrow.
“You want her?” I asked. “Then tell her yourself.”
He didn’t reply.
I shrugged as best I could, being all snuggled up on the counterpane.
“I can’t tell her,” I said. “Who am I to say, ‘Julien says you should expose yourself to the sun and thereby enter into the Totality of Salvation.’ Or is it possible that my questions of last night were more than pertinent and you don’t know where you come from? Maybe there is no Totality of Salvation. No Saint Juan Diego. Maybe you just want her with you in a spirit world where you wander, waiting for somebody who can see you, somebody like Quinn or even Mona herself or me. Is that it? She’s supposed to want to be a ghost? I am showing you my best manners. This is my most polite voice. My mother and father would be pleased.”
There was a real knock on the door.
He vanished. I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Had Stella been sitting to my left all this time?
Mon Dieu!
I was going mad all right.
“Coward,” I whispered.
I sat up and crossed my legs, Indian style. “Come in,” I said.
Mona burst into the room, dressed in a fresh long-sleeved rose-colored silk dress and rose satin stacked heels, a quivering page of paper once more held aloft.
“Hit me with it,” I declared.
“ ‘It is my ultimate goal to transmute this experience into a level of life participation which is worthy of the immense powers that have been bequeathed to me by Lestat, a level of life experience which knows no moral shrinking from the most obvious yet painful theological questions which my transfigured state has made utterly inescapable, the first of which is, obviously, How does God view my essential being? Am I human and vampire? Or vampire only? That is, is damnation, and I speak now not of a literal Hell with flames, but of a state which is defined by the absence of God—is damnation implicit and inherent in what I am, or do I still exist in a relativistic universe in which I may attain grace on the same terms as humans can attain it, by participating in the Incarnation of Christ, an historical event in which I totally believe, in spite of the fact that it is not philosophically fashionable, though what questions of fashion have to do with me now in this transcendent and often luminous condition is moot.’ ” She looked at me. “What do you think?”
“Well, I think you ducked out of the paragraph on that ‘fashionable question.’ I think you should scrap the thing about fashionable and try to make a more solid finish, perhaps with some very concise statement about the level on which you believe in the Incarnation of Christ. And you can always use ‘transcendent’ and ‘luminous’ in another sentence. Also you misused the word ‘bequeath.’ ”
“Cool!” She dashed out of the room.
Naturally, she left the door open.
I went after her.
She was already pounding the keyboard, the computer humming on one of my many Louis XV desks; her red eyebrows puckered, her green eyes locked to the monitor when I took up my position, arms folded, looking down on her.
“Yeah, what, Beloved Boss?” she asked without stopping her writing.
Quinn was stretched out comfortably on the bed, staring at the tester. The whole flat was full of beds with testers. Well, six bedrooms, anyway, three on each side.
“Call Rowan Mayfair and tell her you’re all right. What do you think? Can you pull it off? The woman’s suffering.”
“Bummer!” Clackity-clack.
“Mona, if you possibly could do it—for their sakes, of course. Michael is suffering.”
She looked sharply up at me and froze. Then, without taking her eyes off me, she lifted the phone to the right of her on the desk and she punched in the number so rapidly with her thumb I couldn’t follow it. Her generation, with Touch-Tone phones. Big deal! I can write with a quill pen in a flurry of curlicues you wouldn’t believe; let’s see her do that. And I don’t spill a drop of ink on the parchment, either.
“Yo, Rowan, Mona here.” Hysterical crying on the other end. Mona overriding: “I’m just fine, I’m hanging with Quinn, look, don’t worry about me, I’m all better, totally.” A storm of literal questions. Mona overriding: “Rowan, listen, I’m feeling great. Yeah, a kind of miracle. Like I’ll call you later. No, no, no (overriding again), I’m wearing Aunt Queen’s clothes, they fit me perfectly, yeah, and her shoes, really cool, like she has tons of these high-heel shoes, yeah, and I never wore shoes like this; yeah, fine, no, no, no, stop it, Rowan, and Quinn wants me to wear them, they’re brand new, they’re really great. Love you, love to Michael and everybody. Bye.” Down with the phone over Rowan shouting.