The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [253]
And that’s what he was doing, wasn’t he? Picturing things like that.
It was dead quiet; that is, if you didn’t hear the televisions chattering behind the green shutters and the old vine-covered walls; and the raucous noise from Bourbon; a man and a woman fighting deep within a house on the other side of the street.
But no one about; only the shining pavements; and the shut-up shops; and the big clumsy cars parked over the curb, the rain falling soundlessly on their curved roofs.
No one to see me as I walked away and then turned and made the quick feline leap, in the old manner, to the balcony and came down silently on the boards. I peered through the dirty glass of the French doors.
Empty; scarred walls; the way Jesse had left them. A board nailed up here, as though someone had tried once to break in and had been found out; smell of burnt timbers in there after all these years.
I pulled down the board silently; but now there was the lock on the other side. Could I use the new power? Could I make it open? Why did it hurt so much to do it—to think of her, to think that, in that last flickering moment, I could have helped her; I could have helped head and body to come together again; even though she had meant to destroy me; even though she had not called my name.
I looked at the little lock. Turn, open. And with tears rising, I heard the metal creak, and saw the latch move. Little spasm in the brain as I kept my eye on it; and then the old door popped from its warped frame, hinges groaning, as if a draft inside had pushed it out.
He was in the hallway, looking through Claudia’s door.
The coat was perhaps a little shorter, a little less full than those old frock coats had been; but he looked so very nearly like himself in the old century that it made the ache in me deepen unbearably. For a moment I couldn’t move. He might as well have been a ghost there: his black hair full and disheveled as it had always been in the old days, and his green eyes full of melancholy wonder, and his arms rather limp at his sides.
Surely he hadn’t contrived to fit so perfectly into the old context. Yet he was a ghost in this flat, where Jesse had been so frightened; where she’d caught in chilling glimpses the old atmosphere I’d never forget.
Sixty years here, the unholy family. Sixty years Louis, Claudia, Lestat.
Could I hear the harpsichord if I tried?—Claudia playing her Haydn; and the birds singing because the sound always excited them; and the collected music vibrating in the crystal baubles that hung from the painted glass shades of the oil lamps, and in the wind chimes even that hung in the rear doorway before the curving iron stairs.
Claudia. A face for a locket; or a small oval portrait done on porcelain and kept with a curl of her golden hair in a drawer. But how she would have hated such an image, such an unkind image.
Claudia who sank her knife into my heart and twisted it, and watched as the blood poured down my shirt. Die, Father. I’ll put you in your coffin forever.
I will kill you first, my prince.
I saw the little mortal child, lying there in the soiled covers; smell of sickness. I saw the black-eyed Queen, motionless on her throne. And I had kissed them both, the Sleeping Beauties! Claudia, Claudia, come round now, Claudia . . . That’s it, dear, you must drink it to get well.
Akasha!
Someone was shaking me. “Lestat,” he said.
Confusion.
“Ah, Louis, forgive me.” The dark neglected hallway. I shuddered. “I came here because I was so concerned . . . about you.”
“No need,” he said considerately. “It was just a little pilgrimage I had to make.”
I touched his face with my fingers; so warm from the kill.
“She’s not here, Louis,” I said. “It was something Jesse imagined.”
“Yes, so it seems,” he said.
“We live forever; but they don’t come back.”
He studied me for a long moment; then he nodded. “Come on,” he said.
We walked down the long hallway together;