The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [199]
I could hear in the ringing silence only Benjamin’s small sharp mortal voice. “But what happened to him. What happened? The blond one didn’t hit him. I saw it. It didn’t happen. He didn’t—.”
My face hidden, my face soaked with tears, I covered my head with my trembling hands, my bitter smile unseen, though my sobs were heard.
I cried and cried for a long time, and then gradually, as I knew it would, my scalp began to heal. The evil blood mounted to the surface of my skin and, tingling there, did its evil ministrations, sewing up the flesh like a little laser beam from Hell.
Someone gave me a napkin. It had the faint scent of Louis on it, but I couldn’t be sure. It was a long long time, perhaps even so long as an hour before I finally clasped it and wiped all the blood off my face.
It was another hour, an hour of quiet and of people respectfully slipping away, before I turned over and rose and sat back against the wall. My head no longer hurt, the wound was gone, the blood that had dried there would soon flake away.
I stared at him for a long and quiet time.
I was cold and solitary and raw. Nothing anyone murmured penetrated my hearing. I did not note the gestures or the movements around me.
In the sanctum of my mind I went over, mostly slowly, exactly, what I had seen, what I had heard—all that I’ve told you here.
I rose finally. I went back to him and I looked down at him.
Gabrielle said something to me. It was harsh and mean. I didn’t actually hear it. I heard only the sound of it, the cadence, that is, as if her old French, so familiar to me, was a language I didn’t know.
I knelt down and I kissed his hair.
He didn’t move. He didn’t change. I wasn’t the slightest bit afraid that he would, or hopeful that he would either. I kissed him one more time on the side of his face, and then I got up, and I wiped my hands on the napkin which I still had, and I went out.
I think I stood in a torpor for a long while, and then something came back to me, something Dora had said a long long time ago, about a child having died in the attic, about a little ghost and about old clothes.
Grasping that, clutching it tight, I managed to propel myself towards the stairs.
It was there that I met you a short time afterwards. Now you know, for better or worse, what I did or didn’t see.
And so my symphony is finished. Let me write my name to it. When you’re finished with your copying, I will give my transcript to Sybelle. And Benji too perhaps. And you may do with the rest what you will.
25
THIS IS NO EPILOGUE. It is the last chapter to a tale I thought was finished. I write it in my own hand. It will be brief, for I have no drama left me and must manipulate with the utmost care the bare bones of the tale.
Perhaps in some later time the proper words will come to me to deepen my depiction of what happened, but for now to record is all that I can do.
I did not leave the convent after I inscribed my name to the copy which David had so faithfully written out. It was too late.
The night had spent itself in language, and I had to retire to one of the secret brick chambers of the place which David showed me, a place where Lestat had once been imprisoned, and there sprawled on the floor in perfect darkness, overexcited by all that I’d told David, and, more completely exhausted than I’d ever been, I went into immediate sleep with the rise of the sun.
At twilight, I rose, straightened out my clothes and returned to the chapel. I knelt down and gave Lestat a kiss of unreserved affection, just as I had the night before. I took no notice of anyone and did not even know who was there.
Taking Marius at his word, I walked away from the convent, in a wash of early evening violet light, my eyes drifting trustingly over the flowers, and I listened for the chords of Sybelle’s Sonata to lead me to the proper house.
Within seconds I heard the music, the distant but rapid phrases of the Allegro assai, or the First Movement,