Merrick - Anne Rice [129]
20
I LEFT HER CURLED UP on Great Nananne’s bed in the front room.
I went back into the garden, picked up the broken pieces of the jade perforator, and found the mask broken in half. How brittle was this strong jade. How bad had been my intentions, how evil the result.
These things I brought with me into the house. I could not bring myself to lay my superstitious hands upon the skull of Honey in the Sunshine.
I put the collection of jade remnants on the bedroom altar, amid the glass-covered candles, and then I settled next to her, sitting beside her, and I put my arm around her.
She turned and laid her head on my shoulder. Her skin felt feverish and sweet. I wanted to cover her in kisses, but I couldn’t give in to this impulse, anymore than I could give in to the darker impulse to bring through the blood the rhythm of her heart in time with my own.
There was dried blood all over her white silk dress, and on the inside of her right arm.
“I should never have done it, never,” she said in a hushed and anxious voice, her breasts yielding softly against me. “It was madness. I knew what would happen. I knew his brain would be fodder for disaster. I knew it. And now he’s lost; he’s wounded and lost to us both.”
I lifted her so that I could look into her eyes. As always their brilliant green color startled me, and enthralled me, but I couldn’t concern myself with her charms now.
“But you do believe that it was Claudia?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. Her eyes were still red around the edges from her crying. I saw the tears standing there. “It was Claudia,” she declared. “Or that thing which now calls itself Claudia, but the words it spoke? They were lies.”
“How can you know that?”
“The same way I know when a human being is lying to me. The same way I know when someone’s read another one’s mind and is preying upon that other’s weakness. The spirit was hostile, once called into our realm. The spirit was confused. The spirit told lies.”
“I didn’t feel it was lying,” I argued.
“Don’t you see,” she said, “it took Louis’s very, very worst fears and morbid thoughts for its matter. His mind was full of the verbal instruments by which he could bring about his own despair. He’s found his conviction. And whatever he is—wonder, horror, damnable monster—he’s lost now. Lost to us both.”
“Why couldn’t it have been speaking pure truth?” I asked.
“No spirit speaks pure truth,” she insisted. She wiped at her reddened eyes with the back of her hand. I gave her my linen handkerchief. She pressed it to her eyes. Then she looked up at me again. “Not when it’s called, it doesn’t. It speaks truth only when it comes on its own.”
I took this idea into my thoughts. I had heard it before. Every member of the Talamasca had heard it. Spirits who are called are treacherous. Spirits who come on their own possess some guiding will. But no spirit can in fact be trusted. It was old knowledge. It gave neither comfort nor clarity to me just now.
“Then the picture of eternity,” I said, “it was false, that’s what you’re saying.”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s exactly what I’m saying.” She wiped her nose with the handkerchief. She began to shiver. “But he will never accept it.” She shook her head. “The lies are too near to what he absolutely believes.”
I didn’t speak. The words of the spirit were too nearly to what I actually believed as well.
She rested her head on my chest again, her arm about me loosely. I held her, staring before me at the smaller altar between the front windows, staring at the patient faces of the different saints.
A quiet and dangerous mood fell over me, in which I saw rather plainly all the long years of my life. One thing remained constant during this journey, whether I was the young man in the Candomble temples of Brazil, or the vampire prowling the streets of New York in the company of Lestat. That constant thing was that, no matter what I’d said to the contrary, I suspected there was nothing