The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [169]
“Of course, it was several nights later before I realized he was gone. His coffin remained. But he did not return to it. And it was several months before I had that coffin taken to the St. Louis cemetery and put into the crypt beside my own. The grave, long neglected because my family was gone, received the only thing he’d left behind. But then I began to be uncomfortable with that. I thought of it on waking, and again at dawn right before I closed my eyes. And I went downtown one night and took the coffin out, and broke it into pieces and left it in the narrow aisle of the cemetery in the tall grass.
“That vampire who was Lestat’s latest child accosted me one evening not long after. He begged me to tell him all I knew of the world, to become his companion and his teacher. I remember telling him that what I chiefly knew was that I’d destroy him if I ever saw him again. ‘You see, someone must die every night that I walk, until I’ve the courage to end it,’ I told him. ‘And you’re an admirable choice for that victim, a killer as evil as myself.’
“And I left New Orleans the next night because the sorrow wasn’t leaving me. And I didn’t want to think of that old house where Lestat was dying. Or that sharp, modern vampire who’d fled me. Or of Armand.
“I wanted to be where there was nothing familiar to me. And nothing mattered.
“And that’s the end of it. There’s nothing else.”
THE BOY SAT MUTE, staring at the vampire. And the vampire sat collected, his hands folded on the table, his narrow, red-rimmed eyes fixed on the turning tapes. His face was so gaunt now that the veins of his temples showed as if carved out of stone. And he sat so still that only his green eyes evinced life, and that life was a dull fascination with the turning of the tapes.
Then the boy drew back and ran the fingers of his right hand loosely through his hair. “No,” he said with a short intake of breath. Then he said it again louder, “No!”
The vampire didn’t appear to hear him. His eyes moved away from the tapes towards the window, towards the dark, gray sky.
“It didn’t have to end like that!” said the boy, leaning forward.
The vampire, who continued to look at the sky, uttered a short, dry laugh.
“All the things you felt in Paris!” said the boy, his voice increasing in volume. “The love of Claudia, the feeling, even the feeling for Lestat! It didn’t have to end, not in this, not in despair! Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? Despair!”
“Stop,” said the vampire abruptly, lifting his right hand. His eyes shifted almost mechanically to the boy’s face. “I tell you and I have told you, that it could not have ended any other way.”
“I don’t accept it,” said the boy, and he folded his arms across his chest, shaking his head emphatically. “I can’t!” And the emotion seemed to build in him, so that without meaning to, he scraped his chair back on the bare boards and rose to pace the floor. But then, when he turned and looked at the vampire’s face again, the words he was about to speak died in his throat. The vampire was merely staring at him, and his face had that long drawn expression of both outrage and bitter amusement.
“Don’t you see how you made it sound? It was an adventure like I’ll never know in my whole life! You talk about passion, you talk about longing! You talk about things that millions of us won’t ever taste or come to understand. And then you tell me it ends like that. I tell you …” And he stood over the vampire now, his hands outstretched before him. “If you were to give me that power! The power to see and feel and live forever!”
The vampire’s eyes slowly began to widen, his lips parting. “What!” he demanded softly. “What!”
“Give it to me!” said the boy, his right hand tightening in a fist, the fist pounding his chest. “Make me a vampire now!” he said as the vampire stared aghast.
What happened