The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [694]
End of the corridor. I put my key into the steel door between the shop that sold Chinese rugs made by little girls and the tobacconist who slept now among the Dutch pipes, his magazine over his face.
Silent hallway into the bowels of the villa.
One of them was playing the piano. I listened for a long moment. Pandora, and the music as always had a dark sweet luster, but it was more than ever like an endless beginning—a theme ever building to a climax which would never come.
I went up the stairs and into the living room. Ah, you can tell this is a vampire house; who else could live by starlight and the glow of a few scattered candles? Luster of marble and velvet. Shock of Miami out there where the lights never go out.
Armand still playing chess with Khayman and losing. Daniel lay under the earphones listening to Bach, now and then glancing to the black and white board to see if a piece had been moved.
On the terrace, looking out over the water, her thumbs hooked in her back pockets, Gabrielle stood. Alone. I went out to her, kissed her cheek, and looked into her eyes; and when I finally won the begrudging little smile I needed, then I turned and wandered back into the house.
Marius in the black leather chair reading the newspaper, folding it as a gentleman might in a private club.
“Louis is gone,” he said, without looking up from the paper.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“To New Orleans,” Armand said without looking up from the chessboard. “To that flat you had there. The one where Jesse saw Claudia.”
“The plane’s waiting,” Marius said, eyes still on the paper.
“My man can drive you down to the landing strip,” Armand said with his eyes still on the game.
“What is this? Why are you two being so helpful? Why should I go get Louis?”
“I think you should bring him back,” Marius said. “It’s no good his being in that old flat in New Orleans.”
“I think you should get out and do something,” Armand said. “You’ve been holed up here too long.”
“Ah, I can see what this coven is going to be like, advice from all sides, and everyone watching everyone else out of the corner of an eye. Why did you ever let Louis go off to New Orleans anyway? Couldn’t you have stopped him?”
I LANDED in New Orleans at two o’clock. Left the limousine at Jackson Square.
So clean it all was; with the new flagstones, and the chains on the gates, imagine, so the derelicts couldn’t sleep on the grass in the square the way they’d done for two hundred years. And the tourists crowding the Café du Monde where the riverfront taverns had been; those lovely nasty places where the hunting was irresistible and the women were as tough as the men.
But I loved it now; always would love it. The colors were somehow the same. And even in this blasted cold of January, it had the old tropical feel to it; something to do with the flatness of the pavements; the low buildings; the sky that was always in motion; and the slanting roofs that were gleaming now with a bit of icy rain.
I walked slowly away from the river, letting the memories rise as if from the pavements; hearing the hard, brassy music of the Rue Bourbon, and then turning into the quiet wet darkness of the Rue Royale.
How many times had I taken this route in the old days, coming back from the riverfront or the opera house, or the theater, and stopping here on this very spot to put my key in the carriage gate?
Ah, the house in which I’d lived the span of a human lifetime, the house in which I’d almost died twice.
Someone up there in the old flat. Someone who walks softly yet makes the boards creak.
The little downstairs shop was neat and dark behind its barred windows; porcelain knickknacks, dolls, lace fans. I looked up at the balcony with its wrought-iron railings; I could picture Claudia there, on tiptoe, looking down at me, little fingers knotted on the rail. Golden hair spilling down over her shoulders, long streak of violet ribbon. My little immortal six-year-old beauty; Lestat, where have you been?
And that’s what he was doing, wasn’t he? Picturing things like that.
It