Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [147]
I’d given Mona and Quinn all I could in my own fashion. And that wasn’t enough. No, it simply wasn’t enough. The problem was probably what Maharet had called my “moral evolution.” But I wasn’t so sure.
I’d wanted to make “the perfect vampire” in Mona. But my plan had been quickly swallowed by forces which had taught me more than I could ever teach anybody else.
And Maharet was so right that I did not want to be taken to her famous jungle compound. No, not for me that fabled place of stone rooms and screened enclosures, where she the ancient lady who looked more like a statue in alabaster than a living thing held quiet court with her mute twin sister. And as for the legendary archives with their ancient tablets, scrolls and codices of unimaginable revelations, I could wait forever for those treasures as well. What can’t be revealed to the world of men and women can’t be revealed to me. I had no taste or patience for it.
I was going in quite the other direction—caught in the thrall of Blackwood Farm—this lost corner of the South where things more mundane were far more precious to me.
I was at peace with it. I was also weak in my soul, without doubt. And it was from my battle with Julien, and sure enough, he was nowhere about.
I folded the letter.
I got undressed.
I put all my clothes properly on hangers like a decent mortal individual, put on the flannel nightshirt, pulled out the copy of “Little Nell” from under the pillow and read until the sun came creeping over the horizon and over my consciousness, locking me down into emptiness and peace.
31
THIS BOOK’S FINISHED. You know it. I know it. After all, what more is there to say? So why am I still writing? Read on and find out.
How many nights passed? I don’t know. I don’t count well. I get numbers and ages wrong. But I feel time. I feel it the way I feel the evening air when I walk outside, the way I feel the roots of the oak tree under my foot.
Nothing could have made me leave Blackwood Farm. So long as I was on the property, I was safe. I even put off Stirling for a while. Just can’t talk about the Taltos now, though it is a most interesting subject, of course, but you see, she’s wrapped up in it, she’s at the core of it—.
So when I wasn’t reading “Little Nell” or David Copperfield, I went walking on the property, down along the swamp where I’d encountered Patsy, or through the little cemetery, or over the broad lawns to admire the flower beds that were still tended so faithfully even though Pops, the man who planted them all, is gone.
I had no predictable path, but I did have a predictable time. I usually went out about three hours before dawn.
If I had a favorite place it was the cemetery. All those nameless graves, and the four oaks that surrounded it, and the swamp so perilously close.
They’d cleaned away all the soot from the grave on which Merrick Mayfair had built her pyre. One would never know there had been such a blaze there. And the leaves were raked regularly, and the little chapel, quite a building, was swept clean every day.
It had no real door; its windows had no glass. It was a Gothic piece of work, all pointed arches. And inside there was a bench where one could sit and meditate.
But that wasn’t my favorite spot.
My favorite spot was to sit at the foot of the biggest of the oak trees, the one that had a limb that lay on the ground above the cemetery, a limb that stretched into the swamp.
I headed there with my head down. I wasn’t thinking of much of anything, except perhaps that I had seldom been this happy or this miserable in my life. I didn’t need blood but I wanted it. I craved it unbearably at times. Especially on these walks. I dreamt of the prowl and of the murder. I dreamt of the soiled intimacy—the needle of my hunger plunged into heated hatefulness. But I didn’t have the stamina for it just now.
The boundaries of Blackwood Farm were the boundaries of my soul.
I headed to my oak. I was going to sit there and look over the cemetery, look at the little iron lace