The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [193]
24
THIS is ALL a little too simple, isn’t it? I mean by that, my transformation from the zealous child who stood on the porch of the Cathedral to the happy monster making up his mind one spring night in New York City that it was time to journey south and look in on his old friend.
You know why I came here.
Let me begin at the start of this evening. You were there in the chapel when I arrived.
You greeted me with undisguised good will, so pleased to see I was alive and unharmed. Louis almost wept.
Those others, those raggedy young ones who were clustered about, two boys, I believe, and a girl, I don’t know who they were, and still don’t, only that later they drifted off.
I was horrified to see him undefended, lying on the floor, and his mother, Gabrielle, far off in the corner merely staring at him, coldly, the way she stares at everything and everyone as though she never knew a human feeling for what it was.
I was horrified that the young tramps were about, and felt instantly protective of Sybelle and Benji. I had no fear of their seeing the classics among us, the legends, the warriors—you, beloved Louis, even Gabrielle, and certainly not Pandora or Marius, who were all there.
But I hadn’t wanted my children to look on common trash infused with our blood, and I wondered, arrogantly and vainly perhaps, as I always do at such moments, how these roguish sophomoric slob vampires ever came to be. Who made them and why and when?
At such times, the fierce old Child of Darkness wakes in me, the “Coven Master beneath the Paris Cemetery who decreed when and how the Dark Blood should be given and, above all, to whom. But that old habit of authority is fraudulent and just a nuisance at best.
I hated these hangers-on because they were there looking at Lestat as though he were a Carnival Curiosity, and I wouldn’t have it. I felt a sudden temper, an urge to destroy.
But there are no rules among us now that authorize such rash actions. And who was I to make a mutiny here under your roof? I didn’t know you lived here then, no, but you certainly had custody of the Master of the Place, and you allowed it, the ruffians, and the three or four more of them that came shortly after and dared to circle him, none of them, I noticed, getting any too close.
Of course everyone was most curious about Sybelle and Benjamin. I told them quietly to stay directly beside me and not to stray. Sybelle couldn’t get it out of her mind that the piano was so near at hand, and it would have a whole new sound for her Sonata. As for Benji, he was striding along like a little Samurai, checking out monsters all around, with his eyes like saucers though his mouth was very puckered up and stern and proud.
The chapel struck me as beautiful. How could it not? The plaster walls are white and pure, and the ceiling is gently coved, as in the oldest churches, and there is a deep coved shell where once the altar stood, which makes a well for sound, so that one footfall there echoes softly throughout the entire place.
The stained glass I’d seen brilliantly lighted from the street. Unfigured, it was nevertheless lovely with its vivid colors of blue and red and yellow, and its simple serpentine designs. I liked the old black lettering of the mortals long gone in whose memory each window had been erected. I liked the old plaster statues scattered about, which I had helped you to clear from the New York apartment and send south.
I had not looked at them much; I had shielded myself from their glass eyes as if they were basilisks. But I certainly looked at them now.
There was sweet suffering St. Rita in her black habit and white wimple, with the fearful awful sore in her forehead like a third eye. There was lovely, smiling Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower of Jesus with His Crucifix and the bouquet of pink roses in her arms.
There was St. Teresa of Avila, carved out of wood and finely painted, with her eyes turned upwards, the mystic, and the feather quill in her hand that marked her as a Doctor of the Church.
There was