The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [84]
“I thought of this for a long time, picturing it, seeing that it must have happened. And then I heard her add thoughtfully, as she laid down her card and looked at the oval face of a white-coiffed king, ‘I could have done it.
“ ‘And why do you look that way at me?’ she asked, gathering up her cards, her small fingers struggling to make a neat pack of them and then to shuffle them.
“ ‘But you do believe … that had we burned his remains he would have died?’ I asked.
“ ‘Of course I believe it. If there is nothing to rise, there is nothing to rise. What are you driving at?’ She was dealing out the cards now, dealing a hand for me on the small oak table. I looked at the cards, but I did not touch them.
“ ‘I don’t know …’ I whispered to her. ‘Only that perhaps there was no will to live, no tenacity … because very simply there was no need of either.’
“Her eyes gazed at me steadily, giving no hint of her thoughts or that she understood mine.
“ ‘Because perhaps he was incapable of dying … perhaps he is, and we are … truly immortal?’
“For a long time she sat there looking at me.
“ ‘Consciousness in that state …’ I finally added, as I looked away from her. ‘If it were so, then mightn’t there be consciousness in any other? Fire, sunlight … what does it matter?’
“ ‘Louis,’ she said, her voice soft. ‘You’re afraid. You don’t stand en garde against fear. You don’t understand the danger of fear itself. We’ll know these answers when we find those who can tell us, those who’ve possessed knowledge for centuries, for however long creatures such as ourselves have walked the earth. That knowledge was our birthright, and he deprived us. He earned his death.’
“ ‘But he didn’t die …’ I said.
“ ‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘No one could have escaped that house unless they’d run with us, at our very side. No. He’s dead, and so is that trembling aesthete, his friend. Consciousness, what does it matter?’
“She gathered up the cards and put them aside, gesturing for me to hand her the books from the table beside the bunk, those books which she’d unpacked immediately on board, the few select records of vampire lore which she’d taken to be her guides. They included no wild romances from England, no stories of Edgar Allan Poe, no fancy. Only those few accounts of the vampires of eastern Europe, which had become for her a sort of Bible. In those countries indeed they did burn the remains of the vampire when they found him, and the heart was staked and the head severed. She would read these now for hours, these ancient books which had been read and reread before they ever found their way across the Atlantic; they were travellers’ tales, the accounts of priests and scholars. And she would plan our trip, not with the need of any pen or paper, only in her mind. A trip that would take us at once away from the glittering capitals of Europe towards the Black Sea, where we would dock at Varna and begin that search in the rural countryside of the Carpathians.
“For me it was a grim prospect, bound as I was to it, for there were longings in me for other places and other knowledge which Claudia did not begin to comprehend. Seeds of these longings had been planted in me years ago, seeds which came to bitter flower as our ship passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
“I wanted those waters to be blue. And