The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [310]
“Ah, but you’re so simple,” she said. “You see, but you don’t see. How many mortal years did you live? Do you remember anything of them? What you’ve perceived is not the sum total of the passion I feel for my son. I have loved him as I have never loved any other being in creation. In my loneliness, my son is everything to me. How is it you can’t interpret what you see?”
“It’s you who fail to interpret,” he answered in the same soft manner. “If you had ever felt real longing for any other one, you would know that what you feel for your son is nothing at all.”
“This is futile,” I said, “to talk like this.”
“No,” she said to him without the slightest wavering. “My son and I are kin to each other in more ways than one. In fifty years of life, I’ve never known anyone as strong as myself, except my son. And what divides us we can always mend. But how are we to make you one of us when you use these things like wood for fire! But understand my larger point: what is it of yourself that you can give that we should want you?”
“My guidance is what you need,” he answered. “You’ve only begun your adventure and you have no beliefs to hold you. You cannot live without some guidance …”
“Millions live without belief or guidance. It is you who cannot live without it,” she said.
Pain coming from him. Suffering.
But she went on, her voice so steady and without expression it was almost a monologue:
“I have my questions,” she asked. “There are things I must know. I cannot live without some embracing philosophy, but it has nothing to do with old beliefs in gods or devils.” She started pacing again, glancing to him as she spoke.
“I want to know, for example, why beauty exists,” she said, “why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a tree and its beauty, and what connects the mere existence of the sea or a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, then why do they retain for us such symbolic power? Lestat calls it the Savage Garden, but for me that is not enough. And I must confess that this, this maniacal curiosity or call it what you will, leads me away from my human victims. It leads me into the open countryside, away from human creation. And maybe it will lead me away from my son, who is under the spell of all things human.”
She came up to him, nothing in her manner suggesting a woman now, and she narrowed her eyes as she looked into his face.
“But that is the lantern by which I see the Devil’s Road,” she said. “By what lantern have you traveled it? What have you really learned besides devil worship and superstition? What do you know about us, and how we came into existence? Give that to us, and it might be worth something. And then again, it might be worth nothing.”
He was speechless. He had no art to hide his amazement.
He stared at her in innocent confusion. Then he rose and he slipped away, obviously trying to escape her, a battered spirit as he stared blankly before him.
The silence closed in. And I felt for the moment strangely protective for him. She had spoken the unadorned truth about the things that interested her as had been her custom ever since I could remember, and as always, there was something violently disregarding about it. She spoke of what mattered to her with no thought of what had befallen him.
Come to a different plane, she had said, my plane. And he was stymied and belittled. The degree of his helplessness was becoming alarming. He was not recovering from her attack.
He turned and he moved towards the benches again, as if he would sit, then towards the sarcophagi, then towards the wall. It seemed these solid surfaces repelled him as though his will confronted them first