Merrick - Anne Rice [36]
I was taken aback. Surely I wasn’t going to hazard a hasty answer. And I didn’t have one, besides. His question went too deep. Blood was essential to Candomble. It was essential to real Voodoo as well.
He went on:
“I don’t speak of your God in particular,” he said kindly, “but the God of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass has demanded blood, and indeed the Crucifixion has come down to us as one of the most renowned blood sacrifices of all time. But what of all the other gods, the gods of old Rome for whom blood had to be shed in the arena as well as on the altar, or the gods of the Aztecs who were still demanding bloody murder as the price of running the universe when the Spanish arrived on their shores?”
“Maybe we’re asking the wrong question,” I said finally. “Maybe blood does not matter to the gods. Maybe blood matters to us. Maybe we’ve made it the vehicle of Divine transmission. Maybe that’s something which the world can move beyond.”
“Hmmm, it’s not a mere anachronism,” he said. “It’s a genuine mystery. Why should the natives of ancient South America have but one word in their language for both flowers and blood?”
He rose from the chair again, looking altogether restless, and went to the window once more and looked out through the lace.
“I have my dreams,” he said in a whisper. “I dream she will come, and she will tell me that she is at peace and she will show me the courage to do what I must do.”
These words saddened and disturbed me.
“The Everlasting has not fixed his canon against my self-slaughter,” he said, paraphrasing Shakespeare, “because all I need do to accomplish it is not seek shelter at the rising of the sun. I dream she may warn me of hellfires and of the need for repentance. But then, this is a little miracle play, isn’t it? If she comes, she may be groping in darkness. She may be lost among the wandering dead souls whom Lestat saw when he traveled out of this world.”
“Absolutely anything is possible,” I answered.
A long interval occurred during which I went quietly up to him and laid my hand on his shoulder, to let him know in my way that I respected his pain. He didn’t acknowledge this tiny intimacy. I made my way back to the sofa and I waited. I had no intention of leaving him with such thoughts in his mind.
At last he turned around.
“Wait here,” he said quietly, and then he went out of the room and down the passage. I heard him open a door. Within a brief moment he was back again with what appeared to be a small antique photograph in his hand.
I was immensely excited. Could it be what I thought?
I recognized the small black gutter perche case into which it was fitted, so like the ones that framed the daguerreotypes belonging to Merrick. It appeared intricate and well preserved.
He opened the case and looked at the image, and then he spoke:
“You mentioned those family photographs of our dearly beloved witch,” he said reverently. “You asked if they were not vehicles for guardian souls.”
“Yes, I did. As I told you, I could have sworn those little pictures were looking at Aaron and at me.”
“And you mentioned that you could not imagine what it had meant to us to see daguerreotypes—or whatever they might be called—for the first time so many years ago.”
I was filled with a sort of amazement as I listened to him. He had been there. He had been alive and a witness. He had moved from the world of painted portraits to that of photographic images. He had drifted through those decades and was alive now in our time.
“Think of mirrors,” he said, “to which everyone is accustomed. Think of the reflection suddenly frozen forever. That is how it was. Except the color was gone from it, utterly gone, and there lay the horror, if there was one; but you see, no