The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [35]
The vampire turned with folded arms and leaned against the window. “Why?” he asked.
The boy was at a loss. “Because I want to hear it.” He shrugged. “Because I want to know what happened.”
“All right,” said the vampire, with the same smile playing on his lips. And he went back to the chair and sat opposite the boy and turned the recorder just a little and said, “Marvellous contraption, really … so let me go on.
“You must understand that what I felt for Babette now was a desire for communication, stronger than any other desire I then felt … except for the physical desire for … blood. It was so strong in me, this desire, that it made me feel the depth of my capacity for loneliness. When I’d spoken to her before, there had been a brief but direct communication which was as simple and as satisfying as taking a person’s hand. Clasping it. Letting it go gently. All this in a moment of great need and distress. But now we were at odds. To Babette, I was a monster; and I found it horrible to myself and would have done anything to overcome her feeling. I told her the counsel I’d given her was right, that no instrument of the devil could do right even if he chose.
“ ‘I know!’ she answered me. But by this she meant that she could no more trust me than the devil himself. I approached her and she moved back. I raised my hand and she shrank, clutching for the railing. ‘All right, then,’ I said, feeling a terrible exasperation. ‘Why did you protect me last night! Why have you come to me alone!’ What I saw in her face was cunning. She had a reason, but she would by no means reveal it to me. It was impossible for her to speak to me freely, openly, to give me the communication I desired. I felt weary looking at her. The night was already late, and I could see and hear that Lestat had stolen into the wine cellar and taken our caskets, and I had a need to get away; and other needs besides … the need to kill and drink. But it wasn’t that which made me weary. It was something else, something far worse. It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn’t see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars. I think I turned away from her and put my hand to my eyes. I felt oppressed and weak suddenly. I think I was making some sound without my will. And then on this vast and desolate landscape of night, where I was standing alone and where Babette was only an illusion, I saw suddenly a possibility that I’d never considered before, a possibility from which I’d fled, rapt as I was with the world, fallen into the senses of the vampire, in love with color and shape and sound and singing and softness and infinite variation. Babette was moving, but I took no note of it. She was taking something from her pocket; her great ring of household keys jingled there. She was moving up the steps. Let her go away, I was thinking. ‘Creature of the devil!’ I whispered. ‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ I repeated. I turned to look at her now. She was frozen on the steps, with wide suspicious eyes. She’d reached the lantern which hung on the wall, and she held it in her hands just staring at me, holding it tight, like a valuable purse. ‘You think I come from the devil?’ I asked her.
“She quickly moved her left fingers around the hook of the lantern and with her right hand made the Sign of the Cross, the Latin words barely audible to me; and her face blanched and her eyebrows rose when there was absolutely no change because of it. ‘Did you expect me to go up in a