Merrick - Anne Rice [12]
Then had come a moment of pure feeling, which had made its indelible and irrational impression. I’d perused the many faces laid out upon the table, and it had seemed they were all gazing at me. It was a marked impression. The little pictures had been alive all along.
It must be the firelight and the oil lamps, I’d thought dreamily, but I’d been unable to shake the feeling; the little people had been laid out to look at Aaron and to look at me. Even their placement seemed deliberate and sly, or wondrously meaningful, I’d conjectured, as I went smoothly from suspicion to a lulled and tranquil feeling that I was in an audience with a host of the dead.
“They do seem to be looking,” Aaron had murmured, I remember, though I’m sure I hadn’t spoken. The clock had stopped ticking and I’d turned to look at it, uncertain where it was. On the mantle, yes, and its hands had been frozen, and the window-panes had given that muffled rattle that they do when the wind nudges them, and the house had wrapped me securely in its own atmosphere of warmth and secrets, of safety and sanctity, of dreaminess and communal might.
It seemed a long interval had transpired in which none of us had spoken, and Merrick had stared at me, and then at Aaron, her hands idle, her face glistening in the light.
I’d awakened sharply to realize nothing had changed in the room. Had I fallen asleep? Unforgivable rudeness. Aaron had been beside me as before. And the pictures had become once more inert and sorrowful, ceremonial testimony to mortality as surely as if she’d laid out a skull for my perusal from a graveyard fallen to ruin. But the uneasiness I’d experienced then stayed with me long after we’d all gone up to our respective rooms.
Now—after twenty years and many other strange moments—she sat across from me at this café table in the Rue St. Anne, a beauty gazing at a vampire, and we talked over the flickering candle, and the light was too much like the light of that long ago evening at Oak Haven, though tonight the late spring evening was only moist, not wet with a coming storm.
She sipped the rum, rolling it around a bit before she swallowed it. But she didn’t fool me. She’d soon start drinking it fast again. She set the glass aside and let her fingers spread wide apart on the soiled marble. Rings. Those were Great Nananne’s many rings, beautiful gold filigree with various wondrous stones. She’d worn them even in the jungles, when I’d thought it so unwise. She’d never been prone to fear of any sort.
I thought of her in those hot tropical nights. I thought of her during those steamy hours under the high canopy of green. I thought of the trek through the darkness of the ancient temple. I thought of her climbing ahead of me, in the steam and roar of the waterfall up the gentle slope.
I’d been far too old for it, our great and secret adventure. I thought of precious objects made of jade as green as her eyes.
Her voice brought me out of my selfish reverie:
“Why are you asking me to do this magic?” She put the question to me again. “I sit here and I look at you, David, and with every passing second, I become more aware of what you are and what’s happened to you. I put all kinds of pieces together from your open mind—and your mind’s as open as it ever was, David, you know that, don’t you?”
How resolute was her voice. Yes, the French was utterly gone. Ten years ago it had been gone. But now there was a clipped quality to her words, no matter how soft and low they came.
Her large eyes widened easily with her expressive verbal rhythms.
“You couldn’t even be quiet of mind on the porch the other night,” she scolded. “You woke me. I heard you, just as if you’d been tapping on the panes. You said, ‘Merrick, can you do it? Can you bring up the dead for Louis de Pointe du Lac?’ And do you know what I heard underneath it? I heard ‘Merrick, I need