“All right then,” she said. “You go wandering if you must. But I have something that might help you with your meditations, something I arranged especially for you.”
She led me out of the room and down a long passage that was covered in soft glittering gold like so much of what I’d already seen. But soon another cruder and unadorned passage led us away from this one and down a long steep rock-cut stairs.
It seemed we were in a labyrinth. And I caught the scent of human beings.
We came finally to a long ramp that led into a small room illuminated only by a couple of thick candles on ledges, and there beyond a wall of iron bars stood a golden-skinned human being staring at me out of the shadows with bitter furious black eyes.
The scent was overpowering, delicious, almost irresistible.
The man began to shake the bars with all his strength and rail at Sevraine in the most vulgar and coarse French I’d ever heard. He hurled one threat after another at her of confederates who would come to rip her limb from limb and visit every erotic abomination on her that he could conceive.
He swore his “brothers” would never let anyone live who had done harm to him, that she didn’t know what she had done to herself, and so forth and so on, round now in circles, damning her under the worst words ever created in any language to denounce a female being.
I was fascinated. It had been a long time since I’d encountered anyone so totally given over to evil, and so blatant in his fury. The smell of the sea came off his filthy dungarees and his sweat-soaked denim shirt, and I saw scars cut into his face and into his right arm that had hardened into seams of pure white flesh.
Behind me a heavy door was closed.
The creature and I were alone. I saw the key to his cell on a hook to the right of the gate that held him back, and I took it down while he went on raving and cursing, and I turned it slowly in the lock.
He flung the gate back immediately and lunged at me, his hands moving to my throat.
I let him do this, let him hurl his full force at a body that did not yield even by a quarter of an inch. And there he was, trying to press his fingers into my neck and utterly impotent to make the slightest indentation in my skin and staring into my eyes.
He backed up, calculating, and took another tack. Did I want money? He had plenty of money. All right, he was dealing here with something he hadn’t encountered before. Yes, we weren’t human. He saw that. But he wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t a fool. What did we want?
“Tell me,” he roared at me in French. His eyes moved feverishly over the ceiling, the floor, the walls. The doors.
“I want you,” I said in French. I opened my mouth and ran my tongue under my fangs.
He didn’t believe what he saw, of course he didn’t believe, that was preposterous that such creatures as that were real. “Stop trying to frighten me!” he roared again.
He fell into a crouch, shoulders hunched, arms at the ready, fingers balled into fists.
“You’re enough to take my mind off anything,” I said.
I moved closer, sliding my arms around him, sliding them right against that delicious salty sweat, and drove my teeth swiftly into his neck. That’s the least painful way to do it, go right for the artery and just let that first pull on his heart quiet his fear.
His soul broke open like a rotten carcass, and all of the filth of his life spent in smuggling and thievery and random murder, always murder, murder after murder, poured out like black viscid crude oil in his blood.
We were on the floor of the cell. He was still alive. I was drinking the last dregs slowly, letting the blood drain from his brain and his internal organs and pulling it towards me with the steady slow cooperation of his powerful heart.
He was a little boy now, a trusting little boy filled with curiosity and dreams and roaming some countryside very like my own fields and slopes in the Auvergne, and there was so much he wanted to know, so much he wanted to fathom, so many things that he would do. He would grow up and discover the answers. He would know. The snow fell suddenly on the place where he was playing, running, jumping, and spinning in circles with his arms out. And he threw his little head back to swallow the falling snow.
The heart stopped.
I lay there for a long moment, still feeling the warmth of his chest against me, the side of his face under me, feeling some last quiver of life pass through his arms.
Then the Voice spoke.
The Voice was there, low, confidential, right there. And the Voice said:
“You see I want to know all those things too. You see, I wanted to know, wanted to know with my whole heart, what is snow? And what is beautiful and what is love? I still want to know! I want to see with your eyes, Lestat, and hear with your ears, and speak with your voice. But you have denied me. You have left me in blindness and misery and you will pay for that.”
I climbed to my feet.
“Where are you, Voice?” I asked. “What have you done to Mekare?”
He wept bitterly. “How can you ask me such a question? You, of all the blood drinkers spawned by me and sustained by me. You know how helpless I am inside of her! And for me you have no pity, and only hate.”
He was gone.
I tried to anatomize how I knew, what it was I felt, when he left me, what were the tiny indications of his sudden abandonment, but I couldn’t really even remember all the tiny little aspects of it. I just knew he was gone.
“I don’t despise you, Voice,” I said aloud. My voice sounded unnatural in the empty stone chamber. “I have never really despised you. I was guilty of only one thing, not knowing who you really are. You might have told me, Voice. You might have trusted me.”
But he was gone, gone to some other part of the great Savage Garden to do mischief, no doubt.
I left the dead man, since there seemed no proper place to dump his bloodless carcass, and I started back through the maze to find the others.
Somewhere along the way, when stone passages had once more given way to brightly painted passages and golden passages, I heard singing.
It was the softest most ethereal singing, words spun out by high clear soprano voices in Latin, one thread of melody interweaving with another, and under this the sounds of what had to be a lyre.
The sounds of running water came to me with the exquisite music, singing—running water, splashing water, and the laughter of blood drinkers. Sevraine laughing. My mother laughing. I smelled the water. I smelled sunlight, green grass in the water. Somehow the freshness and sweetness of the water mingled in my mind with the richly satisfying blood that had just flooded my mouth and my brain. And I could all but see the music in golden ribbons winding through the air.