10

IT HAD NOT BEEN EASY for me to tell this story to Louis, and it was not finished. I had much more to say.

But as I paused, it was as if I had wakened to the parlor around me, and to Louis's attentive presence, and I felt both immediate comfort and crushing guilt. For a moment I stretched my limbs and I felt my vampiric strength in my veins.

We sat like two wholesome beings together, in the comfort of the glassshaded lamps.

For the first time since I'd begun the story, I stared up at the paintings along the walls of the room. These were all wonderfully colored Impressionist treasures which Louis had long ago collected and once kept in a small uptown house, where he lived until Lestat burnt that house, and, in reconciliation, begged Louis to come and join him here.

I looked at a painting by Monet¡ªone I'd come to neglect of late due to familiarity¡ªa painting full of sunshine and greenery, of a woman at work on her needlepoint by a window under the limbs of delicate indoor trees. Like so many Impressionist paintings it was both highly intellectual, with its obvious brush strokes, and flagrantly domestic. And I let its stalwart sanctification of the ordinary soothe my suffering heart.

I wanted to feel our domesticity here in the Rue Royale. I wanted to feel morally safe, which of course I would never feel again.

It had exhausted my soul to revisit those times when I was a living mortal being, when I had taken the wet daytime heat of New Orleans for granted, when I'd been a trusted friend to Merrick, for that is what I had been, regardless of what Honey in the Sunshine had condemned me for being¡ªwith a boy named Joshua who had lived many, many years before.

As for that matter, Aaron and Mary never questioned me about it. But I knew that neither of them would ever look at me in the same way again. Joshua had been too young and I had been too old for the relationship. And I had only confessed my transgressions¡ªa precious few nights of love¡ªto the Elders long after Joshua was dead. They had condemned me for it and charged me never to let such a thing occur again.

When I'd been appointed Superior General, the Elders had exacted a confirmation that I was well beyond such breaches of morality, and I had given it, humiliated that it had been mentioned again.

As for Joshua's death, I did blame myself for what happened to him. He had begged me to go on the climb, which itself was not terribly dangerous, to visit a shrine in the Himalayas which had been part of his study in Tibetan lore. Other members of the Order were with him and they came home safe. The fall had been the result of a small but sudden avalanche, as I understood it, and Joshua's body had not been recovered for several months.

Now as I reviewed these things for Louis, now as I pondered that I had approached the woman Merrick in my dark and eternal guise as a vampire, I felt the sharpest and most profound guilt. It wasn't something for which I could ever seek absolution. And it wasn't something that could prevent me from seeing Merrick again.

It had been done. I had asked Merrick to raise Claudia's ghost for us. And I had much more to tell Louis before the two could come together, and more within myself that had to be resolved.

All this while, Louis had listened without saying a word. With his finger curled under his lip, his elbow on the arm of the couch, he had merely studied me as I recounted the memories, and now he was eager for the tale to go on.

"I knew this woman was powerful," he said gently. "What I didn't know was how much you loved her."

I marveled at his customary manner of speaking, the melting quality of his voice and the way his words seemed barely to disturb the air.

"Ah, well, neither did I," I replied. "There were so many of us, bound together by love, in the Talamasca, and each one is a special case."

"But this woman, you truly love her," he pressed gently. "And I've asked you to go against your heart."

"Oh, no, you haven't," I confessed. I faltered. "It was inevitable that I contact the Talamasca," I insisted. "But it should have been contact with the Elders, in writing, and not this."

"Don't condemn yourself so much for contacting her," he said with an uncommon selfconfidence. He seemed earnest and, as always, forever young.

"Why not?" I asked. "I had thought you were a specialist in guilt?"

He laughed politely at this, and then again made a silent chuckle. He shook his head.

"We have hearts, don't we?" he replied. He shifted a little against the pillows of the couch. "You tell me you believe in God. That's more than the others have ever said to me. Quite truly it is. What do you think God has planned for us?"

"I don't know that God plans anything," I said a little bitterly. "I know only that He's there."

I thought of how much I loved Louis, and had ever since I had become Lestat's fledgling. I thought of how deeply I depended upon him, and what I would do for him. It was the love of Louis which had at times crippled Lestat, and enslaved Armand. Louis need have no consciousness of his own beauty, of his own obvious and natural charm.

"David, you have to forgive me," he said suddenly. "I want so desperately to meet this woman myself that I urge you on for selfish reasons, but I mean it when I say that we do have hearts in every sense of the word."

"Of course, you do," I replied. "I wonder if angels have hearts," I whispered. "Ah, but it doesn't matter, does it? We are what we are."

He didn't answer me, but I saw his face darken for a moment and then he fell into reverie, with his habitual expression of curiosity and quiet grace.

"But when it comes to Merrick," I said, "I have to face that I've contacted her because I need her desperately. I could not have gone on for long without contacting her. Every night that I spend in New Orleans, I think of Merrick. Merrick haunts me as though she was a ghost herself."

"Tell me the rest of your story," Louis prodded. "And, if when you're finished you wish to conclude the matter with Merrick¡ªend the contact, so to speak¡ªthen I shall accept it without another word."