Page 65 (1/2)

2

Two years passed before I was strong enough to board a ship for Louisiana And I was still badly crippled, still scarred But I had to leave Europe, where no whisper had coreat and powerful Marius, who had surely rendered his judgo home And home was New Orleans, where the war, where I still owned, throughsupply of "coin of the real white colu porches round which I could roam

And I spent the last years of the 1800s in complete seclusion in the old Garden District a block from the Lafayette Ce beneath towering oaks

I read by candle or oil laht as well have been Gabrielle trapped in her castle bedroom, save there was no furniture here And the stacks of books reached to the ceiling in one room after another as I went on to the next Now and then I h stamina to break into a library or an old bookstore for new volumes, but less and less I went out I wrote off for periodicals I hoarded candles and bottles and tin cans of oil

I do not remember when it becalier and darker, and the beauty I’d known in the old eighteenth-century days seeeois ran the world now upon dreary principles and with a distrust of the sensuality and the excess that the ancient regihts were getting ever er hunted humans And a vampire cannot thrive without huarden anis and cats And when they couldn’t be got easily, well, then there was always the ver-tailed gray rats

One night I forced h the quiet streets to a shabby little theater called the Happy Hour near the waterfront slu pictures I rapped in a greatcoat with a loves to hide ht of the daytime sky even in this imperfect film terrified me But it seemed the dreary tones of black and white were perfect for a colorless age

I did not think about other immortals Yet now and then a va who had stuendary Lestat, begging for secrets, power Horrid, these intrusions

Even the timbre of the supernatural voice shattered my nerves, drove reat the pain, I scanned each new e ofto do after that but ignore the poor hu in the vain hope of restoring h Frightened, aggrieved, shouting curses, the intruder would depart, leaving me in blessed silence

I’d slip a little deeper away fro there in the dark

I wasn’t even reading azine I read the stories of the ugly nihilistic ray-clad crooks and the bank robbers and the detectives -- and I tried to res But I was so weak I was so tired

And then early one evening, Arht at first it was a delusion He was standing so still in the ruined parlor, looking younger than ever with his short auburn cap of twentieth-century hair and narrow little, suit of dark cloth

It had to be an illusion, this figure co down at me as I lay onSa If I were going to conjure up an iinary visitor, it certainly wouldn’t have been Arue shaly, that I was nothere Then I went back to reading about the Maltese Falcon,to speak Saain, Arht, or the next night, for all I knew

He was talking about Louis He had been for some time

And I realized it was a lie he’d told me in Paris about Louis Louis had been with Ar forforLouis had coh the s

I tried to iine it Louis alive Louis here, so close, and I had not even known it

I think I laughed a little I couldn’t keep it clear in my mind that Louis wasn’t burnt up But it was really wonderful that Louis still lived It onderful that there existed still that handsonant expression, that tender and faintly i, instead of dead and gone with Claudia and Nicki

But then maybe he was dead Why should I believe Ararden out there hadn’t gotten so high A good thing for Aro out there and pull down solory vines and the wisteria were dripping off the upstairs porches and they blocked out the ht and then there were the old black oaks that had been here when there was nothing but swaested this to Arhio on Hollow he sounded Dry Yet he gathered the ht to him as he stood there And his voice still had its old resonance, its pure undertone of pain

Poor Ar a room for yourself under the Lafayette Cemetery It’s just up the street

No words spoken No audible laughter, just the secret enjoye of hi at the walls of books on all sides The rain had bled down froether like papier-mach�� bricks And I noticed it distinctly when I saw hiainst the backdrop of it And I knew all the rooms in the house alled in books like this I hadn’t thought about it until that moment, when he started to look at it I hadn’t been in the other rooms in years

It seems he came back several times after that

I didn’t see hiarden outside, looking for ht

Louis had gone away to the west

One ti in the rubble under the foundations, Ar and peered in at me, and I did see him, and he hissed at one , the one who scoffed at us! You’re mad and you feed on the rats You know, in France in the old days what they called your kind, you country lords, they called you harecatchers, because you hunted the hare so you wouldn’t starve And nohat are you in this house, a ragged haunt, a ratcatcher You’re mad as the ancient ones who cease to talk sense arid jabber at the wind! And yet you hunt the rats as you were born to do

Again I laughed I laughed and laughed I rehed

"You always hed at you under that ce to do And even when you cursed me and blamed me for all the stories about us, that was funny too If you hadn’t been about to throw h"

Delicious it was, the hatred between us, or so I thought Such unfamiliar excitement, to have him there to ridicule and despise

Yet suddenly the scene aboutin the rubble I alking through s that had covered me for years, but a fine black tailcoat and a satin-lined cape And the house, why, the house was beautiful, and all the books were in their proper place upon shelves The parquet floor glistened in the light of the chandelier and there wasfrom everywhere, the sound of a Vienna waltz, the rich harht, ht I could have easily taken the stairs two by two I could have flown out and up through the darkness, the cloak like black wings

And then I was ether on the high roof Radiant he was, in the sa over the jungle of dark singing treetops at the distant silver curve of the river and the low heavens where the stars burned through the pearl gray clouds

I eeping at the sheer sight of it, at the feel of the daainst my face And Armand stood beside iveness and sadness, of wisdoh pain "I love you, my dark brother," he whispered

And the words h me like blood itself

"It wasn’t that I wanted vengeance," he whispered His face was stricken, his heart broken He said "But you came to be healed, and you did not want me! A century I had waited, and you did not wantreally, that my restoration was illusion, that I was the sas, of course And the house was still a ruin And in the preternatural being who held ive me back the sky and the wind