Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [275]
Lestat helped her to her feet. He kissed her on the mouth and stroked her long brown hair. He helped her into the chair.
“I wanted to burn him!” he said. “God, I was seething to do it.”
“So was I,” I said. I straightened her white skirt. I took out my handkerchief and began to blot the bloody scratches he had left all over her.
“No, it was too soon for the Fire,” she said, “and our meeting had to come. I had to be sure of everything.”
“And he is the ghost of my twin? It’s true?” I asked.
“Yes, it’s true,” she said quietly. She motioned for me to stop with my handkerchief, taking my hand gently and kissing it. “He’s the ghost of the baby buried in Metairie Cemetery, and that’s why he’s always been strongest here,” she explained. “It’s why you couldn’t take him with you to Europe, as Lestat told me. It’s why he was transparent and weak when you went as far as New York. It’s why he was even stronger when you went into New Orleans. It’s why he appeared so very strongly by the mausoleum tonight. His remains are inside of it.”
“But he doesn’t really understand, does he?” I asked. “He doesn’t know where he comes from or what his real name is?”
“No, he doesn’t know,” said Merrick.
I could see the little wounds vanishing, leaving her again the alluring woman she had been before. Her long wavy brown hair was gorgeously mussed, and her green eyes were bloodshot still, and she appeared over-all to still be shaken.
“But he can be made to know,” she continued, “and this is our most powerful weapon. Because a ghost, unlike a pure spirit, is connected to his remains, and this ghost is most connected. He is connected to you by blood, and that is why, don’t you see, he feels he has always had a right to what you have.”
“Of course,” I said, “oh, of course!” Only now was it hitting me. “He thinks it’s his right. We were in the womb together.” I felt a deep rivet of pain in my heart.
“Yes, and try to imagine for a moment what death was like for this spirit. First off, he was a twin, and we know of twins that they feel the loss of the other terribly. Patsy speaks of your crying at his funeral. Of Aunt Queen begging her to console you. Aunt Queen knew that you were feeling Garwain’s death. Well, Garwain had felt this separation from you in the incubator as well, and at death, undoubtedly his spirit was confused and had not gone on into the Light as it should have gone.”
“I see,” I responded. “And now for the first time in all these months I feel pity for him again. I feel . . . mercy.”
“Feel mercy for yourself,” said Merrick kindly. Her entire manner was gracious. In fact, she reminded me very much of Stirling Oliver. “But when you were brought to that funeral for him,” she went on, “when you were carried there on the day of his interment, his poor miserable little spirit, cast adrift, found its living twin in you, Tarquin, and became your doppelgänger. Indeed, he became something far stronger than a mere doppelgänger. He became a companion and a lover, a true twin who felt he had a right to your patrimony.”
“Yes, and we began our long journey together,” I said, “two genuine twins, two genuine brothers.” I tried my damndest to remember that I had once loved him. I wondered if she could see into my soul and sense the animosity I now felt for him, the enslavement which had been so vicious for me all during this long year since Petronia had so rudely made me. And the loss of Aunt Queen—the unspeakable loss of Aunt Queen.
“And now that you’ve been given the Dark Blood,” said Lestat in a cross voice, “he wants what he sees as his share of it.”
“But that’s not all that’s happening,” said Merrick, continuing in her subdued fashion. She looked intently at me. “I want you to describe for me, if you will, what goes on when he attacks you.”
I considered for a moment, then I spoke, my eyes moving from Merrick to Lestat and back again.
“It’s like a fusion, a fusion I never felt when I was alive. Oh, he was inside me at times. Mona Mayfair told me that he was. She said when we made love that he was in me and she