Merrick - Anne Rice [16]
She stopped for another sip of the rum.
“I feel you ought to know these things,” she said. “We never kept anything from each other, you and I. Not that I knew of, but then of course my work was in the study of magic, and I did roam far and wide.”
“How much did Aaron know?” I asked. I thought my eyes were tearing. I was humiliated. But I wanted her to go on. “I never saw Aaron after the vampiric metamorphosis,” I confessed dully. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Can you guess why?” I felt a sharp increase in mental pain and confusion. My grief for Aaron would never go away, and I’d endured it for years without a word to either of my vampire companions, Louis or Lestat.
“No,” she said. “I can’t guess why. I can tell you . . .,” and here she hesitated politely so that I might stop her, but I did not. “I can tell you that he was disappointed and forgiving to the end.”
I bowed my head. I pressed my forehead into my cold hand.
“By his own account he prayed each day that you would come to him,” she explained slowly, “that he’d have a chance for one last conversation with you—about all you’d endured together and what had finally occurred to drive you apart.”
I must have winced. I deserved the misery, however, deserved it more than she could know. It had been indecent not to have written to him! Lord God, even Jesse, when she’d vanished out of the Talamasca, had written to me!
Merrick went on speaking. If she read my mind at all, she gave no clue.
“Of course Aaron wrote all about your Faustian Body Switching, as he called it. He described you in the young body and made many references to some investigation of the body, something you’d engaged in together, asserting that the soul had certainly gone on. You experimented, didn’t you, you and Aaron, with trying to reach the rightful soul, even at the risk of your own death?”
I nodded, unable to speak, feeling desperate and ashamed.
“As for the wretched Body Thief, the little devil Raglan James who’d started the whole supernatural spectacle, Aaron was convinced his soul was gone into eternity, as he put it, quite utterly beyond reach.”
“That’s true,” I concurred. “The file on him is closed, I’m quite convinced of it, whether it’s incomplete or not.”
A darkness crept into her sad respectful expression. Some raw feeling had come to the surface, and for the moment she broke off.
“What else did Aaron write?” I asked her.
“He referred to the Talamasca having unofficially helped ‘the new David’ reclaim his substantial investments and property,” she answered. “He felt strongly that no File on David’s Second Youth must ever be created or committed to the archives in London or in Rome.”
“Why didn’t he want the switch to be studied?” I asked. “We had done everything we could for the other souls.”
“Aaron wrote that the whole question of switching was too dangerous, too enticing; he was afraid the material would fall into the wrong hands.”
“Of course,” I answered, “though in the old days we never had such doubts.”
“But the file was unfinished,” she continued. “Aaron felt certain he would see you again. He thought that at times he could sense your presence in New Orleans. He found himself searching crowds for your new face.”
“God forgive me,” I whispered. I almost turned away. I bowed my head and shielded my eyes for a long moment. My old friend, my beloved old friend. How could I have abandoned him so coldly? Why does shame and self-loathing become cruelty to the innocent? How is that so often the case?
“Go on, please,” I said, recovering. “I want you to tell me all these things.”
“Do you want to read them for yourself?”
“Soon,” I answered.
She continued, her tongue somewhat loosened by the rum, and her voice more melodic, with just a little of the old New Orleans French accent coming back.
“Aaron had seen the Vampire Lestat in your company once. He described the experience as harrowing, a word that Aaron rather loved but seldom used. He said it was the night he came to identify the old body of David Talbot and to see that it was properly buried. There you