Merrick - Anne Rice [151]
“Know I love you,” I said, and I could hear the terrible remorse, the terrible plea for penance in my own voice.
“Don’t you understand, I’m with you now forever?” she asked. “Why should any one of us break away from the others?”
“It happens. In time, it happens,” I answered. “Don’t ask me why.”
Gradually our wanderings led us to Merrick’s house.
She went inside alone, bidding me wait patiently for her, and came out carrying her old familiar canvas purse. My keen senses detected a strange scent from it, something acrid and chemical, something utterly alien to all I knew.
It did not really matter to me, this scent, and so as we walked on together, I forgot about it, or grew accustomed to it, or stopped noticing it at all. I had no taste for lesser mysteries. My misery and my happiness were too immense.
When we returned to the flat, we found Louis once more dramatically changed.
Sitting quietly again in the rear parlor with Lestat beside him, he was now so bleached and sculpted by the increased blood that he seemed, like his maker, a thing of marble rather than flesh and bone. He would have to crush ashes between his palms and spread them over his skin if he wanted to walk in places of light.
His eyes had an even greater luster than I’d observed before.
But what of his soul? What had he to say to us? Was he the same being in his heart?
I took a chair, as did Merrick, dropping her canvas bag near her feet. And I think we both agreed to wait until Louis would speak.
A long interval found us still together, still waiting, Lestat’s eyes returning again and again to Merrick out of an understandable fascination, and then Louis finally began to talk:
“My heartfelt thanks go to all of you that you brought me back.” It was the old cadence, the old sincerity. Maybe there was something of the old timidity as well. “All my long life among the Undead, I searched for something which I had come to believe I would never possess. Over a century ago, I went to the Old World in search of this. And after a decade, found myself in Paris, searching for this thing.”
He continued, his tone rich with the old feeling.
“What I searched for was a place, a place somewhere in which I would be a part of something greater than myself. It was to be other than a perfect outcast. It was to be with those who would enclose me in a group to which I truly belonged. But nowhere did I find this, until now.”
He looked at me pointedly and then to Merrick, and I saw the love come up warmly into his face.
“I’m as strong as you are now, David. And soon Merrick will be the same.” He turned his steady eyes on Lestat. “I’m almost as strong as you are now, my blessed Maker. For better or for worse I feel that I am one of you all.”
There came from his glistening white face a long drawn-out sigh then, which was all too characteristic of him and had always been.
“Thoughts,” he said, “I hear them. Music from faraway, I hear it. Those who come and go in the streets outside, I hear them. I catch their scent and it’s sweet and welcoming. I look out at the night and I see far.”
A great wondering relief came over me. I did my best to express it by my gestures and the warmth of the expression on my face.
I felt Merrick shared it. Her love for Louis was palpable. It was infinitely more aggressive and demanding than the love she felt for me.
Lestat, somewhat weakened perhaps from all he’d endured, and his long fast of the past months, merely nodded at these words.
He looked to Merrick as if he had a task before him, and I was eager myself for that task to be done. It would be difficult for me to see Lestat take Merrick in his arms. Perhaps it would be private, as the blood exchange had been with Louis. I was ready enough to be sent away again to walk, with only the comfort of my thoughts, in