“Disasters large and small, my friend, a life line that goes on as long as any, stars of strength, and a brood of offspring.”
“Stop it, I don’t accept it. The hand’s not mine.”
“You have no other body now,” she countered. “Don’t you think the body will conform to its new soul? The palm of a hand changes over time. But I don’t want to make you angry. I didn’t come here to study you. I didn’t come here to stare in cold fascination at a vampire. I’ve glimpsed vampires. I’ve even been close to them, in these very streets. I came because you asked me and because I wanted . . . to be with you.”
I nodded, overcome and unable for the moment to speak. With quick gestures I pleaded for her silence.
She waited.
Then at last:
“Did you ask permission of the Elders for this meeting?”
She laughed but it wasn’t cruel. “Of course I did not.”
“Then know this,” I said. “It started the same way with me and the Vampire Lestat. I didn’t tell the Elders. I didn’t let them know how often I saw him, that I brought him into my house, that I conversed with him, traveled with him, taught him how to reclaim his preter-natural body when the Body Thief tricked him out of it.”
She tried to interrupt me but I would have none of it.
“And do you realize what’s happened to me?” I demanded. “I thought I was too clever for Lestat ever to seduce me. I thought I was too wise in old age for the seduction of immortality. I thought I was morally superior, Merrick, and now you see what I am.”
“Aren’t you going to swear to me that you’ll never hurt me?” she asked, her face beautifully flushed. “Aren’t you going to assure me that Louis de Pointe du Lac would never bring me harm?”
“Of course I am. But there’s a bit of decency left in me, and that decency compels me to remind you that I’m a creature of supernatural appetite.”
Again she tried to interject, but I wouldn’t allow it.
“My very presence, with all its signals of power, can erode your own tolerance for living, Merrick; it can eat away your faith in a moral order, it can hurt your willingness to die an ordinary death.”
“Ah, David,” she said, chiding me for my official tone. “Speak plainly. What’s in your heart?” She sat up straight in the chair, her eyes looking me up and down. “You look boyish and wise in this young body. Your skin’s darkened like mine! Even your features have the stamp of Asia. But you’re more David than you ever were!”
I said nothing.
I watched through dazed eyes as she drank more of the rum. The sky darkened behind her, but bright, warm electric lights filled up the outside night. Only the café itself was veiled in dreary shadow, what with its few dusty bulbs behind the bar.
Her cool confidence chilled me. It chilled me that she had so fearlessly touched me, that nothing in my vampire nature repelled her, but then I could well remember how Lestat in all his subdued glory had attracted me. Was she attracted? Had the fatal fascination begun?
She kept her thoughts half concealed as she always had.
I thought of Louis. I thought of his request. He wanted desperately for her to work her magic. But she was right. I needed her. I needed her witness and her understanding.
When I spoke, my words were full of heartbreak and wonder, even to myself.
“It’s been magnificent,” I said. “And unendurable. I am most truly out of life and can’t escape from it. I have no one to whom I can give what I learn.”
She didn’t argue with me or question me. Her eyes seemed suddenly to be full of sympathy, her mask of composure to be gone. I’d seen such sharp changes in her many times. She concealed her emotions except for such silent and eloquent moments.
“Do you think,” she asked, “that if you hadn’t taken up life in the young body, that Lestat would have forced you as he did? If you’d still been old—our David, our
blessed David,
aged seventy-four, wasn’t it?—do you think if you’d still been our honorable Superior General that Lestat would have brought you over?”
“I don’t know,” I said shortly, but not without feeling. “I’ve often asked myself the same question. I honestly don’t know. These vampires . . . ah, I mean, we . . . we vampires, we love beauty, we feed on it. Our definition of beauty expands enormously, you can’t quite imagine how much. I don’t care how loving your soul, you can’t know how much we find beautiful that mortals don’t find beautiful, but we do propagate by beauty, and this body has beauty which I’ve used to evil advantage countless times.”
She lifted her glass in a small salute. She drank deeply.
“If you’d come up to me with no preamble,” she said, “whispering in a crowd as you touched me—I would have known you, known who you were.” A shadow fell over her face for a moment, and then her expression became serene. “I love you, old friend,” she said.
“You think so, my darling?” I asked. “I have done many things to feed this body; not so very lovely to think about that at all.”
She finished the glass, set it down, and, before I could do it for her, she reached for the bottle again.
“Do you want Aaron’s papers?” she asked.
I was completely taken aback.
“You mean you’re willing to give them to me?”
“David, I’m loyal to the Talamasca. What would I be if it weren’t for the Order?” She hesitated, then: “But I’m also deeply loyal to you.” For a few seconds she was musing. “You
were
the Order for me, David. Can you imagine what I felt when they told me you were dead?”
I sighed. What could I say in answer?
“Did Aaron tell you how we grieved for you, all those of us who weren’t entrusted with a speck of the truth?”
“From my soul, I’m sorry, Merrick. We felt we kept a dangerous secret. What more can I say?”
“You died here in the States, in Miami Beach, that was the story. And they’d flown the remains back to England before they even called to tell me you were gone. You know what I did, David? I made them hold the casket for me. It was sealed shut when I got to London but I made them open it. I made them do it. I screamed and carried on until they gave in to me. Then I sent them out of the room and I stayed alone with that body, David, that body all powdered and prettied up and nestled in its satin. I stayed there for an hour perhaps. They were knocking on the door. Then finally I told them to proceed.”
There was no anger in her face, only a faint wondering expression.
“I couldn’t let Aaron tell you,” I said, “not just then, not when I didn’t know whether I’d survive in the new body, not when I didn’t understand what life held for me. I couldn’t. And then, then it was too late.”
She raised her eyebrows and made a little doubting gesture with her head. She sipped the rum.
“I understand,” she said.
“Thank God,” I answered. “In time, Aaron would have told you about the body switching,” I insisted. “I know he would have. The story of my death was never meant for you.”
She nodded, holding back the first response that came to her tongue.
“I think you have to file those papers of Aaron’s,” I said. “You have to file them directly with the Elders and no one else. Forget the Superior General of the moment.”
“Stop it, David,” she responded. “You know it is much easier to argue with you now that you are in the body of a very young man.”
“You never had difficulty arguing with me, Merrick,” I retorted. “Don’t you think Aaron would have filed the papers, had he lived?”
“Maybe,” she said, “and maybe not. Maybe Aaron would have wanted more that you be left to your destiny. Maybe Aaron wanted more that whatever you had become, you’d be left alone.”
I wasn’t sure what she was saying. The Talamasca was so passive, so reticent, so downright unwilling in interfere in anyone’s destiny, I couldn’t figure what she meant.
She shrugged, took another sip of rum, and rolled the rim of the glass against her lower lip.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I only know that Aaron never filed the pages himself.” She went on speaking:
“The night after he was killed I went down to his house on Esplanade Avenue. You know he married a white Mayfair, not a witch by the way, but a resilient and generous woman—Beatrice Mayfair is her name, she’s still living—and at her invitation I took the papers marked ‘Talamasca.’ She didn’t even know what they contained.
“She told me Aaron had once given her my name. If anything happened, she was to call me, and so she’d done her duty. Besides, she couldn’t read the documents. They were all in Latin, you know, Talamasca old style.
“There were several files, and my name and number were written on the front of each, in Aaron’s hand. One file was entirely devoted to you, though only the initial, D, was used throughout. The papers on you, I translated into English. No one’s ever seen them. No one,” she said with emphasis. “But I know them almost word for word.”
It seemed a comfort suddenly to hear her speaking of these things, these secret Talamasca things, which had once been our stock in trade. Yes, a comfort, as if the warm presence of Aaron were actually with us again.
She stopped for another sip of the rum.
“I feel you ought to know these things,” she said. “We never kept anything from each other, you and I. Not that I knew of, but then of course my work was in the study of magic, and I did roam far and wide.”
“How much did Aaron know?” I asked. I thought my eyes were tearing. I was humiliated. But I wanted her to go on. “I never saw Aaron after the vampiric metamorphosis,” I confessed dully. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Can you guess why?” I felt a sharp increase in mental pain and confusion. My grief for Aaron would never go away, and I’d endured it for years without a word to either of my vampire companions, Louis or Lestat.
“No,” she said. “I can’t guess why. I can tell you . . .,” and here she hesitated politely so that I might stop her, but I did not. “I can tell you that he was disappointed and forgiving to the end.”
I bowed my head. I pressed my forehead into my cold hand.
“By his own account he prayed each day that you would come to him,” she explained slowly, “that he’d have a chance for one last conversation with you—about all you’d endured together and what had finally occurred to drive you apart.”
I must have winced. I deserved the misery, however, deserved it more than she could know. It had been indecent not to have written to him! Lord God, even Jesse, when she’d vanished out of the Talamasca, had written to me!
Merrick went on speaking. If she read my mind at all, she gave no clue.
“Of course Aaron wrote all about your Faustian Body Switching, as he called it. He described you in the young body and made many references to some investigation of the body, something you’d engaged in together, asserting that the soul had certainly gone on. You experimented, didn’t you, you and Aaron, with trying to reach the rightful soul, even at the risk of your own death?”
I nodded, unable to speak, feeling desperate and ashamed.
“As for the wretched Body Thief, the little devil Raglan James who’d started the whole supernatural spectacle, Aaron was convinced his soul was gone into eternity, as he put it, quite utterly beyond reach.”
“That’s true,” I concurred. “The file on him is closed, I’m quite convinced of it, whether it’s incomplete or not.”
A darkness crept into her sad respectful expression. Some raw feeling had come to the surface, and for the moment she broke off.
“What else did Aaron write?” I asked her.
“He referred to the Talamasca having unofficially helped ‘the new David’ reclaim his substantial investments and property,” she answered. “He felt strongly that no File on David’s Second Youth must ever be created or committed to the archives in London or in Rome.”
“Why didn’t he want the switch to be studied?” I asked. “We had done everything we could for the other souls.”
“Aaron wrote that the whole question of switching was too dangerous, too enticing; he was afraid the material would fall into the wrong hands.”
“Of course,” I answered, “though in the old days we never had such doubts.”
“But the file was unfinished,” she continued. “Aaron felt certain he would see you again. He thought that at times he could sense your presence in New Orleans. He found himself searching crowds for your new face.”
“God forgive me,” I whispered. I almost turned away. I bowed my head and shielded my eyes for a long moment. My old friend, my beloved old friend. How could I have abandoned him so coldly? Why does shame and self-loathing become cruelty to the innocent? How is that so often the case?
“Go on, please,” I said, recovering. “I want you to tell me all these things.”
“Do you want to read them for yourself?”
“Soon,” I answered.
She continued, her tongue somewhat loosened by the rum, and her voice more melodic, with just a little of the old New Orleans French accent coming back.
“Aaron had seen the Vampire Lestat in your company once. He described the experience as harrowing, a word that Aaron rather loved but seldom used. He said it was the night he came to identify the old body of David Talbot and to see that it was properly buried. There you were, the young man, and the vampire stood beside you. He’d known you were on intimate terms with one another, you and this creature. He had been afraid for you as much then as ever in his life.”
“What more?” I asked.
“Later on,” she said, her voice low and respectful, “when you disappeared quite completely, Aaron was certain that you’d been forcibly changed by Lestat. Nothing short of that could explain your sudden break in communication, coupled with the clear intelligence from your banks and agents that you were most definitely still alive. Aaron missed you desperately. His life had been consumed with the problems of the white Mayfairs, the Mayfair Witches. He needed your advice. He wrote many times in many ways that he was certain you never asked for the vampiric blood.”
For a long time I couldn’t speak to answer her. I didn’t weep because I don’t. I looked off, eyes roaming the empty café until they saw nothing, except perhaps the blur of the tourists as they crowded the street outside on their way to Jackson Square. I knew perfectly well how to be alone in the midst of a terrible moment, no matter where it actually occurred. I was alone now.