Merrick - Anne Rice [127]
“Take your life, yes,” she said with her relentless tenderness, her eyes large and wondering—“give it up in memory of me, yes, I would have you do it, I would have you give over to me your last breath. Do it with pain for me, Louis, do it with pain that I may see your spirit through the whirlwind, struggling to free itself from your tormented flesh.”
Louis reached out for her, but Merrick caught his wrist and pushed him back.
The child continued, her words unhurried, her tone solicitous as she went on:
“Oh, how it will warm my soul to see you suffer, oh, how it will speed me on my endless wanderings. Never would I linger to be with you here. Never would I wish for it. Never would I seek you out in the abyss.”
Her face was stamped with the purest curiosity as she looked at him. There was nothing of visible hatred in her expression at all.
“Such pride,” she whispered, smiling, “that you would call me out of your habitual misery. Such pride that you would bring me here to answer your common prayers.” There came a small chilling laughter.
“How immense is your self-pity,” she said, “that you don’t fear me, when I—had I the power from this witch or any other—would take your life with my own hands.” She lifted her little hands to her face as if she would weep in them, and then let them drop to her sides again.
“Die for me, my doting one,” she said tremulously. “I think I shall like it. I shall like it as much as I liked the sufferings of Lestat, which I can scarce remember. I think, yes, that I might know pleasure once again, briefly, in your pain. Now, if you are done with me, done with my toys and your memories, release me that I may return to forgetfulness. I cannot recall the terms of my perdition. I fear I understand eternity. Let me go.”
All at once, she moved forward, her small right hand snatching up the jade perforator from the iron table, and with a great lunge, she flew at Louis, thrusting the perforator into his chest.
He fell forward over the makeshift altar, his right hand clutching at the wound in which she ground the jade pick, the cauldron spilling over onto the stones beneath her, Merrick backing up in seeming horror, and I unable to move.
The blood gushed out of Louis’s heart. His face was knotted, his mouth open, his eyes shut.
“Forgive me,” he whispered. He gave a soft groan of pure and terrible pain.
“Go back to Hell!” cried Merrick, suddenly. She ran at the floating image, arms out to reach over the cauldron, but the child withdrew with the ease of vapor, and, still clutching the jade pick, she lifted her right hand and knocked Merrick back with it, the frigid little face all the while quite still.
Merrick stumbled on the back steps of the house. I caught her arm and lifted her back on her feet.
Again, the child turned to Louis as she held the dangerous pick in both her small hands. Down the front of her sheer white dress was the dark stain from the boiling fluids of the cauldron. It meant nothing to her.
The cauldron, on its side, poured forth its contents onto the stones.
“Did you think I wasn’t suffering, Father?” she asked softly in the same small girlish voice. “Did you think that death had freed me from all my pain?” Her small finger touched the point of the jade instrument. “That’s what you thought, wasn’t it, Father,” she spoke slowly, “and that, if this woman did your will, you’d take away some precious consolation from my very lips. You believed that God would give you that, didn’t you? It seemed so very right for you after all your penitential years.”
Louis still held his wound, though his flesh was healing and the blood oozed more slowly out of his splayed hand.
“The gates can’t be locked to you, Claudia,” he said, the tears rising in his eyes. His voice was strong and sure. “That would be too monstrous a cruelty—.”
“To whom, Father?” she answered, cutting off his words. “Too monstrous a cruelty to