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But what had I done to Claudia? And when would I have to pay for that? How long was she content to be the mystery that bound Louis and me so tightly together, the muse of our moonlit hours, the one object of devotion common to us both?
Was it inevitable that she who would never have a woman's form would strike out at the demon father who condemned her to the body of a little china doll?
I should have listened to Marius's warning. I should have stopped for one moment to reflect on it as I stood on the edge of that grand and intoxicating experiment: to make a vampire of "the least of these. " I should have taken a deep breath.
But you know, it was like playing the violin for Akasha. I wanted to do it. I wanted to see what would happen, I mean, with a beautiful little girl like that!
Oh, Lestat, you deserve everything that ever happened to you. You'd better not die. You might actually go to hell.
But why was it that for purely selfish reasons, I didn't listen to some of the advice given me? Why didn't I learn from any of them -- Gabrielle, Armand, Marius? But then, I never have listened to anyone, really. Somehow or other, I never can.
And I cannot say even now that I regret Claudia, that I wish I had never seen her, nor held her, nor whispered secrets to her, nor heard her laughter echoing through the shadowy gaslighted rooms of that all too human town house in which we moved amid the lacquered furniture and the darkening oil paintings and the brass flowerpots as living beings should. Claudia was my dark child, my love, evil of my evil. Claudia broke my heart.
And on a warm sultry night in the spring of the year 1860, she rose up to settle the score. She enticed me, she trapped me, and she plunged a knife over and over again into my drugged and poisoned body, until almost every drop of the vampiric blood gushed out of me before my wounds had the precious few seconds in which to heal.
I don't blame her. It was the sort of thing I might have done myself.
And those delirious moments will never be forgotten by me, never consigned to some unexplored compartment of the mind. It was her cunning and her will that laid me low as surely as the blade that slashed my throat and divided my heart. I will think on those moments every night for as long as I go on, and of the chasm that opened under me, the plunge into mortal death that was nearly mine. Claudia gave me that.
But as the blood flowed, taking with it all power to see or hear or move finally, my thoughts traveled back and back, way beyond the creation of the doomed vampire family in their paradise of wallpaper and lace curtains, to the dimly envisioned groves of mythical lands where the old Dionysian god of the wood had felt again and again his flesh torn, his blood spilled.
If there was not meaning, at least there was the luster of congruence, the stunning repetition of the same old theme.
And the god dies. And the god rises. But this time no one is redeemed.
With the blood of Akasha, Marius had said to me, you will survive disasters that would destroy others of our kind.
Later, abandoned in the stench and darkness of the swamp, I felt the thirst define my proportions, I felt the thirst propel me, I felt my jaws open in the rank water and my fangs seek the warm-blooded things that could put my feet on the long road back.
And three nights later, when again I had been beaten and my children left me once and for all in the blazing inferno of our town house, it was the blood of the old ones, Magnus and Marius and Akasha, that sustained me as I crawled away from the flames.
But without more of that healing blood, without a fresh infusion, I was left at the mercy of time to heal my wounds.
And what Louis could not describe in his story is what happened to me after, how for years I hunted on the edge of the human herd, a hideous and crippled monster, who could strike down only the very young or infirm. In constant danger from my victims, I became the very antithesis of the romantic demon, bringing terror rather than rapture, resembling nothing so much as the old revenants of les Innocents in their filth and rags.
The wounds I'd suffered affected my very spirit, my capacity to reason. And what I saw in the mirror every time I dared to look further shriveled my soul.
Yet not once in all this time did I call out to Marius, did I try to reach him over the miles. I could not beg for his healing blood. Better suffer purgatory for a century than Marius's condemnation. Better suffer the worst loneliness, the worst anguish, than discover that he knew everything I'd done and had long ago turned his back on me.
As for Gabrielle, who would have forgiven me anything, whose blood was powerful enough at least to hasten my recovery, I did not know even where to look.
When I had recovered sufficiently to make the long voyage to Europe, I turned to the only one that I could turn to: Armand. Armand who lived still on the land I'd given him, in the very tower where I'd been made by Magnus, Armand who still commanded the thriving coven of the Theater of the Vampires in the boulevard du Temple, which still belonged to me. After all, I owed Armand no explanations. And did he not owe something to me?
It was a shock to see him when he came to answer the knock on his door.
He looked like a young man out of the novels of Dickens in his somber and sleekly tailored black frock coat, all the Renaissance curls clipped away. His eternally youthful face was stamped with the innocence of a David Copperfield and the pride of a Steerforth -- anything but the true nature of the spirit within.
For one moment a brilliant light burned in him as he looked at me. Then he stared slowly at the scars that covered my face and hands, and he said softly and almost compassionately:
"Come in, Lestat. "
He took my hand. And we walked together through the house he had built at the foot of Magnus's tower, a dark and dreary place fit for all the Byronic horrors of this strange age.
"You know, the rumor is that you met the end somewhere in Egypt, or the Far East," he said quickly in everyday French with an animation I'd never seen in him before. He was skilled now at pretending to be a living being. "You went with the old century, and no one has heard of you since. "
"And Gabrielle?" I demanded immediately, wondering that I had not blurted it out at the door.
"No one has ever seen her or heard of her since you left Paris," he said.
