"Don't you understand, I'm with you now forever?" she asked. "Why should any one of us break away from the others?"
"It happens. In time, it happens," I answered. "Don't ask me why." Gradually our wanderings led us to Merrick's house.
She went inside alone, bidding me wait patiently for her, and came out carrying her old familiar canvas purse. My keen senses detected a strange scent from it, something acrid and chemical, something utterly alien to all I knew. It did not really matter to me, this scent, and so as we walked on together, I forgot about it, or grew accustomed to it, or stopped noticing it at all. I had no taste for lesser mysteries. My misery and my happiness were too immense. When we returned to the flat, we found Louis once more dramatically changed.
Sitting quietly again in the rear parlor with Lestat beside him, he was now so bleached and sculpted by the increased blood that he seemed, like his maker, a thing of marble rather than flesh and bone. He would have to crush ashes between his palms and spread them over his skin if he wanted to walk in places of light.
His eyes had an even greater luster than I'd observed before.
But what of his soul? What had he to say to us? Was he the same being in his heart?
I took a chair, as did Merrick, dropping her canvas bag near her feet. And I think we both agreed to wait until Louis would speak.
A long interval found us still together, still waiting, Lestat's eyes returning again and again to Merrick out of an understandable fascination, and then Louis finally began to talk:
"My heartfelt thanks go to all of you that you brought me back." It was the old cadence, the old sincerity. Maybe there was something of the old timidity as well. "All my long life among the Undead, I searched for something which I had come to believe I would never possess. Over a century ago, I went to the Old World in search of this. And after a decade, found myself in Paris, searching for this thing."
He continued, his tone rich with the old feeling.
"What I searched for was a place, a place somewhere in which I would be a part of something greater than myself. It was to be other than a perfect outcast. It was to be with those who would enclose me in a group to which I truly belonged. But nowhere did I find this, until now."
He looked at me pointedly and then to Merrick, and I saw the love come up warmly into his face.
"I'm as strong as you are now, David. And soon Merrick will be the same." He turned his steady eyes on Lestat. "I'm almost as strong as you are now, my blessed Maker. For better or for worse I feel that I am one of you all." There came from his glistening white face a long drawn-out sigh then, which was all too characteristic of him and had always been.
"Thoughts," he said, "I hear them. Music from faraway, I hear it. Those who come and go in the streets outside, I hear them. I catch their scent and it's sweet and welcoming. I look out at the night and I see far." A great wondering relief came over me. I did my best to express it by my gestures and the warmth of the expression on my face.
I felt Merrick shared it. Her love for Louis was palpable. It was infinitely more aggressive and demanding than the love she felt for me.
Lestat, somewhat weakened perhaps from all he'd endured, and his long fast of the past months, merely nodded at these words.
He looked to Merrick as if he had a task before him, and I was eager myself for that task to be done. It would be difficult for me to see Lestat take Merrick in his arms. Perhaps it would be private, as the blood exchange had been with Louis. I was ready enough to be sent away again to walk, with only the comfort of my thoughts, in the night. But I sensed that our small company was by no means ready to disband.
Merrick sat forward in her chair. She made it quite evident that she meant to address all of us.
"I have something which must be said," she began, her eyes hesitating respectfully on me for a long moment before she looked at the other two. "There is much guilt here on the part of Louis and David that I'm now one of you. And perhaps there are questions in your mind, Lestat, as well.
"Hear me out, then, for all your sakes, and decide what your feelings should be when you know the key parts of the tale. I am here because I chose to be here a long time ago.
"It has been years since David Talbot, our revered Superior General, disappeared out of the warm protective arms of the Talamasca, and I was by no means mollified by lies about how he had come to the end of his mortal life.
"As David knows, I learnt the secrets of the body switch that had removed David from the elderly body in which I'd always loved him with all my heart. But I didn't need a secret narrative written by my friend Aaron Lightner to tell me what had become of David's soul.
"I learnt the truth when I flew to London, after the death of that elderly body, that body which we called David Talbot, to pay my respects, alone with the body in the coffin before it was forever sealed. I knew when I touched the body that David had not suffered death in it, and at that unique moment my ambitions began.
"Only a short time later, I found Aaron Lightner's papers, which made it clear that David had indeed been the happy victim of a Faustian Switch, and that something unforgivable in Aaron's mind had taken David, within the young body, out of our world.
"Of course I knew it was the vampires. I didn't need popular fictions masking facts to figure how Lestat had had his way with David at last.
"But by the time I read those curious pages, with all their euphemism and initials, I had already made a potent and age-old spell. I had made it to bring David Talbot, whatever he was—young man, vampire, even ghost—back to me, back to the warmth of my affection, back to his old sense of responsibility for me, back to the love we'd once shared." She stopped speaking, and reached down and drew up a small cloth-wrapped parcel from her bag. There came the acrid smell again, which I could not classify, and then she opened the cloth to reveal what appeared to be a yellowish and somewhat molded human hand.
It was not that old blackened hand I had more than once seen on her altar. It was something altogether more recently alive, and I realized what my nostrils had failed to tell me. Before it had been severed, it had been embalmed. It was the fluid that caused the faint noxious odor. But the fluid had long since dried up and left the hand as it was, fleshly, shrunken, and curled.
"Do you recognize it, David?" she asked me gravely.
I was chilled as I stared at her.
"I took it from your body, David," she said. "I took it because I wouldn't let you go." Lestat gave a small laugh that was tender and full of easy pleasure. I think that Louis was too stunned to speak. As for me, I could say nothing. I only stared at the hand.
In the palm was engraved a whole series of small words. I knew the tongue to be Coptic, which I could not read.
"It's an old spell, David; it binds you to come to me, it binds the spirits who listen to me to drive you towards me. It binds them to fill your dreams and your waking hours with thoughts of me. As the spell builds in power it presses out all other considerations, and finally there is one obsession, that you come to me, and nothing else will do." Now it was Louis's turn for a small smile of recognition.
Lestat sat back, merely regarding the remarkable object with a raised eyebrow and a rueful smile. I shook my head.
"I don't accept it!" I whispered.
"You had no chance against it, David," she insisted. "You're blameless, blameless, as Louis was blameless for what ultimately happened to me."
"No, Merrick," said Louis gently. "I've known too much genuine love in my years to doubt what I feel for you."
"What does it say, this scribble!" I demanded angrily.
"What it says," she answered, "is a particle of what I have recited countless times as I called my spirits, the very spirits I called for you and Louis the other night. What it says is: