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“At that she moved her head to one side and studied me carefully, then seemed to smile despite herself and to nod in assent
“ ‘For you see,’ I said to her in that saht in this roohts to die, perhaps years What has died in this rooe in me of as human’
“A shadow fell over her face; clear, as if the composure were rent like a veil And her lips parted, but only with a short intake of breath Then she said, ‘Well, then you are right Indeed We are even’
“ ‘I want to burn the doll shop!’
“Madeleine told us this She was feeding to the fire in the grate the folded dresses of that dead daughter, white lace and beige linen, crinkled shoes, bonnets that s now, any of it’ She stood back watching the fire blaze And she looked at Claudia with triumphant, fiercely devoted eyes
“I did not believe her, so certain I was — even though night after night I had to lead her away froer drain dry, so satiated was she with the blood of earlier kills, often lifting her victi their throats with her ivory fingers as surely as she drank their blood — so certain I was that sooner or later this mad intensity s of this nightmare, her own luminescent flesh, these lavish rooms of the Hotel Saint-Gabriel, and cry out to be awakened; to be free She did not understand it was no experied mirrors, she was mad
“But I still did not realize how ; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her drea wheel with the reeds of the world so she ht make her oeblike universe
“I was just beginning to understand her avarice, her ic
“She had a doll with her old lover over and over the replica of her dead child, which I was to understand crowded the shelves of this shop ere soon to visit Added to that was a vampire’s skill and a vaht when I had turned her away fro, she, with that same insatiable need, created out of a few sticks of wood, with her chisel and knife, a perfect rocking chair, so shaped and proportioned for Claudia that seated in it by the fire, she appeared a wohts passed, a table of the same scale; and from a toy shop a tiny oil lamp, a china cup and saucer; and from a lady’s purse a little leather-bound book for notes which in Claudia’s hands becae volume The world crumbled and ceased to exist at the boundary of the sth and breadth of Claudia’s dressing room: a bed whose posters reached only to my breast buttons, and siant when I foundlow for Claudia’s eye; and finally, upon her little vanity table, black evening gloves for tiny fingers, a woht velvet, a tiara fro jewel, a fairy queen with bare white shoulders wandering with her sleek tresses a the rich items of her tiny world while I watched froainly, stretched out on the carpet so I could lean aze up intothe by the perfection of this sanctuary How beautiful she was in black lace, a cold, flaxen-haired woazed at otten; the eyesother thanother than the clu me, which was now marked off and nullified by someone who had suffered in it, so to suffer now, listening as it were to the tinkling of a toya hand on the toy clock I saw a vision of shortened hours and little golden minutes I felt I was mad
“I put azed at the chandelier; it was hard to disengage myself from one world and enter the other And Madeleine, on the couch, orking with that regular passion, as if i crea occasionally to blot the ed with blood from her white forehead
“I wondered, if I shut s consume the rooms around me, and would I, like Gulliver, awake to discover iant? I had a vision of houses arden es, and flowery shrubbery become trees Mortals would be so entranced, and drop to their knees to look into the small s Like the spider’s web, it would attract
“I was bound hand and foot here Not only by that fairy beauty — that exquisite secret of Claudia’s white shoulders and the rich luster of pearls, bewitching languor, a tiny bottle of perfume, now a decanter, from which a spell is released that promises Eden — I was bound by fear That outside these rooms, where I supposedly presided over the education of Madeleine — erratic conversations about killing and vampire nature in which Claudia could have instructed so much more easily than I, if she had ever showed the desire to take the lead — that outside these roohtly I was reassured with soft kisses and contented looks that the hateful passion which Claudia had shown once and once only would not return — that outside these roo to ed: the mortal part of me was that part which had loved, I was certain So what did I feel then for Armand, the creature for whom I’d transformed Madeleine, the creature for who distance? A dull pain? A nameless tremor? Even in this worldly clutter, I saw Armand in his netism
“And yet I did not o to hiht have lost Nor try to separate that loss from some other oppressive realization: that in Europe I’d found no truths to lessen loneliness, transfors of my own small soul, the pain of Claudia’s, and a passion for a vampire as perhaps more evil than Lestat, for whom I becaood in evil of which I could conceive
“It was all beyond me, finally And so the clock ticked on the ed to see the performances of the Theatres des Vaainst any vay and said, ‘Not yet, not now,’ and I lay back observing with some measure of relief Madeleine’s love for Claudia; her blind covetous passion Oh, I have so little coht she had only seen the first vein of suffering, she had no understanding of death She was so easily sharpened, so easily driven to wanton violence I supposed in my colossal conceit and
self-deception that rief for my dead brother was the only true eet how totally I had fallen in love with Lestat’s iridescent eyes, that I’d soldthat a highly reflective surface conveyed the power to walk on water