The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [26]
“Not until one summer evening when, passing for a shadow, I heard through the open doors of the black foreman’s cottage a conversation which convinced me that Lestat and I slept in real danger. The slaves knew now we were not ordinary mortals. In hushed tones, the maids told of how, through a crack in the door, they had seen us dine on empty plates with empty silver, lifting empty glasses to our lips, laughing, our faces bleached and ghostly in the candlelight, the blind man a helpless fool in our power. Through keyholes they had seen Lestat’s coffin, and once he had beaten one of them mercilessly for dawdling by the gallery windows of his room. ‘There is no bed in there,’ they confided one to the other with nodding heads. ‘He sleeps in the coffin, I know it.’ They were convinced, on the best of grounds, of what we were. And as for me, they’d seen me evening after evening emerge from the oratory, which was now little more than a shapeless mass of brick and vine, layered with flowering wisteria in the spring, wild roses in summer, moss gleaming on the old unpainted shutters which had never been opened, spiders spinning in the stone arches. Of course, I’d pretended to visit it in memory of Paul, but it was clear by their speech they no longer believed such lies. And now they attributed to us not only the deaths of slaves found in the fields and swamps and also the dead cattle and occasional horses, but all other strange events; even floods and thunder were the weapons of God in a personal battle waged with Louis and Lestat. But worse still, they were not planning to run away. We were devils. Our power inescapable. No, we must be destroyed. And at this gathering, where I became an unseen member, were a number of the Freniere slaves.
“This meant word would get to the entire coast. And though I firmly believed the entire coast to be impervious to a wave of hysteria, I did not intend to risk notice of any kind. I hurried back to the plantation house to tell Lestat our game of playing planter was over. He’d have to give up his slave whip and golden napkin ring and move into town.
“He resisted, naturally. His father was gravely ill and might not live. He had no intention of running away from stupid slaves. ‘I’ll kill them all,’ he said calmly, ‘in threes and fours. Some will run away and that will be fine.’
“ ‘You’re talking madness. The fact is I want you gone from here.’
“ ‘You want me gone! You,’ he sneered. He was building a card palace on the dining room table with a pack of very fine French cards. ‘You whining coward of a vampire who prowls the night killing alley cats and rats and staring for hours at candles as if they were people and standing in the rain like a zombie until your clothes are drenched and you smell like old wardrobe trunks in attics and have the look of a baffled idiot at the zoo.’
“ ‘You’ve nothing more to tell me, and your insistence on recklessness has endangered us both. I might live in that oratory alone while this house fell to ruin. I don’t care about it!’ I told him. Because this was quite true. ‘But you must have all the things you never had of life and make of immortality a junk shop in which both of us become grotesque. Now, go look at your father and tell me how long he has to live, for that’s how long you stay, and only if the slaves don’t rise up against us!’
“He told me then to go look at his father myself, since I was the one who was always ‘looking,’ and I did. The old man was truly dying. I had been spared my mother’s death, more or less, because she had died very suddenly on an afternoon. She’d been found with her sewing basket, seated quietly in the courtyard; she had died as one goes to sleep. But now