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images, the torture, to surround it with language . . . When I stepped
into the stairwell, it was like being caught in a whirlwind of his cries,
his human smell. And all the remembered scents mingled with it-the
afternoon sunshine on a wooden table, the red wine, the smoke of the
little fire.
"Lestat! Do you hear me! Lestat! " Thunder of fists against the door.
Memory of childhood fairy tale: the giant says he smells the blood of a
human in his lair. Horror. I knew the giant was going to find the
human. I could hear him coming after the human, step by step. I was
the human. Only no more. Smoke and salt and flesh and pumping
blood.
"This is the witches' place! Lestat, do you hear me! This is the
witches' place! " Dull tremor of the old secrets between us, the love,
the things that only we had known, felt. Dancing in the witches' place.
Can you deny it? Can you deny everything that passed between us?
Get him out of France. Send him to the New World. And then what?
All his life he is one of those slightly interesting but generally tiresome
mortals who have seen spirits, talk of them incessantly, and no one
believes him. Deepening madness. Will he be a comical lunatic
finally, the kind that even the ruffians and bullies look after, playing
his fiddle in a dirty coat for the crowds on the streets of Port-au-
Prince?
"Be the puppeteer again, " she had said. Is that what I was? No one
will ever believe his mad tales. But he knows the place where we lie,
Mother. He knows our names, the name of our kin-too many things
about us. And he will never go quietly to another country. And they
may go after him; they will never let him live now. Where are they? I
went up the stairs in the whirlwind of his echoing cries, looked out the
little barred window at the open land. They'll be coming again. They
have to come. First I was alone, then I had her with me, and now I
have them! But what was the crux? That he wanted it? That he had
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screamed over and over that I had denied him the power? Or was it
that I now had the excuses I needed to bring him to me as I had
wanted to do from the first moment? My Nicolas, my love. Eternity
awaits. All the great and splendid pleasures of being dead. I went
further up the stairs towards him and the thirst sang in me. To hell
with his cries. The thirst sang and I was an instrument of its singing.
And his cries had become inarticulate-the pure essence of his curses, a
dull punctuating to the misery that I could hear without need of any
sound. Something divinely carnal in the broken syllables coming from
his lips, like the low gush of blood through his heart. I lifted the key
and put it in the lock and he went silent, his thoughts washing
backwards and into him as if the ocean could be sucked back into the
tiny mysterious coils of a single shell. I tried to see him in the shadows
of the room, and not it the love for him, the aching, wrenching
months of longing for him, the hideous and unshakable human need
for him, the lust. I tried to see the mortal who didn't know what he
was saying as he glared at me:
"You, and your talk of goodness "-low seething voice, eyes glittering-
"your talk of good and evil, your talk of what was right and what was
wrong and death, oh yes, death, the horror, the tragedy . . . " Words.
Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in
the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart:
". . . and you shared it with her, the lord's son giveth to the lord's
wife his great gift, the Dark Gift. Those who live in the castle share the
Dark Gift-never were they dragged to the witches' place where the
human grease pools on the ground at the foot of the burnt stake, no,
kill the old crone who can no longer see to sew, and the idiot boy who
cannot till the field. And what does he give us, the lord's son, the
wolfkiller, the one who screamed in the witches' place? Coin of the
realm! That's good enough for us! " Shuddering. Shirt soaked with
sweat. Gleam of taut flesh through the torn lace. Tantalizing, the
mere sight of it, the narrow tightly muscled torso that sculptors so love
to represent, nipples pink against the dark skin.
"This power "-sputtering as if all day long he had been saying the
words over with the same intensity, and it does not really matter that
now I am present- "this power that made all the lies meaningless, this
dark power that soared over everything, this truth that obliterated. . .
" No. Language. No truth. The wine bottles were empty, the food [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]