"Well, if it isn't the vampire Lestat, " I said. But all the blood in the world couldn't stop the horrors from coming over me when I went to my rest. I couldn't stop thinking of her, wondering if it was her laugh I had heard in my sleep the night before. And I wondered that she had told me nothing in the blood, until I closed my eyes and quite suddenly things came back to me, of course, wonderful things, incoherent as they were magical. She and I were walking down a hallway together-not here but in a place I knew. I think it was a palace in Germany where Haydn wrote his music-and she spoke casually as she had a thousand times to me. But tell me about all this, what do the people believe, what turns the wheels inside of them, what are these marvelous inventions . . . She wore a fashionable black hat with a great white plume on its broad brim and a white veil tied round the top of it and under her chin, and her face was merely beginning, merely young. When I opened my eyes, I knew Marius was waiting for me. I came out into the chamber and saw him standing by the empty violin case, with his back to the open window over the sea.
"You have to go now, my young one, " he said sadly. "I had hoped for more time, but that is impossible. The boat is waiting to take you away. "
"Because of what I did... " I said miserably. So I was being cast out. "He's destroyed the things in the chapel, " Marius said, but his voice was asking for calm. He put his arm around my shoulder, and he took my valise in his other hand. We went towards the door. "I want you to go now because it is the only thing that will quiet him, and I want you to remember not his anger, but everything that I told you, and to be confident that we will meet again as we said. "
"But are you afraid of him, Marius? "
"Oh, no, Lestat. Don't carry this worry away with you. He has done little things like this before, now and then. He does not know what he does, really. I am convinced of that. He only knows that someone stepped between him and Akasha. Time is all that is required for him to lapse back. " There it was, that phrase again, "lapse back. "
"And she sits as if she never moved, doesn't she? " I asked.
"I want you away now so that you don't provoke him, " Marius said, leading me out of the house and towards the cliffside stairs. He continued speaking:
"Whatever ability we creatures have to move objects mentally, to ignite them, to do any real harm by the power of the mind does not extend very far from the physical spot where we stand. So I want you gone from here tonight and on your way to America. All the sooner to return to me when he is no longer agitated and no longer remembers,
and I will have forgotten nothing and will be waiting for you. " I saw the galley in the harbor below when we reached the edge of the cliff. The stairs looked impossible, but they weren't impossible. What was impossible was that I was leaving Marius and this island right now.
"You needn't come down with me, " I said, taking the valise from him. I was trying not to sound bitter and crestfallen. After all, I had caused this. "I would rather not weep in front of others. Leave me here. "
"I wish we had had a few more nights together, " he said, "for us to consider in quiet what took place. But my love goes with you. And try to remember the things I've told you. When we meet again we'll have much to say to each other. " He paused.
"What is it, Marius? "
"Tell me truthfully, " he asked. "Are you sorry that I came for you in Cairo, sorry that I brought you here? "
"How could I be? " I asked. "I'm only sorry that I'm going. What if I can't find you again or you can't find me? "
"When the time is right, I'll find you, " he said. "And always remember: you have the power to call to me, as you did before. When I hear that call, I can bridge distances to answer that I could never bridge on my own. If the time is right, I will answer. Of that you can be sure. " I nodded. There was too much to say and I didn't speak a word. We embraced for a long moment, and then I turned and slowly started my descent, knowing he would understand why I didn't look back.
17
I did not know how much I wanted "The World " until my ship finally made its way up the murky Bayou St. Jean towards the city of New Orleans, and I saw the black ragged line of the swamp against the luminous sky. The fact that none of our kind had ever penetrated this wilderness excited me and humbled me at the same time. Before the sun rose on that first morning, I'd fallen in love with the low and damp country, as I had with the dry heat of Egypt, and as time passed I came to love it more than any spot on the globe. Here the scents were so strong you smelled the raw green of the leaves as well as the pink and yellow blossoms. And the great brown river, surging past the miserable little Place d'Armes and its tiny cathedral, threw into eclipse every other fabled river I'd ever seen. Unnoticed and unchallenged, I explored the ramshackle little colony with its muddy streets and gunwale sidewalks and dirty Spanish soldiers lounging about the calaboose. I lost myself in the dangerous waterfront shacks full of gambling and brawling flatboatmen and lovely dark- skinned Caribbean women, wandering out again to glimpse the silent flash of lightning, hear the dim roar of the thunder, feel the silky warmth of the summer rain. The low-slung roofs of the little cottages gleamed under the moon. Light skittered on the iron gates of the fine Spanish town houses. It flickered behind real lace curtains hung inside freshly washed glass doors. I walked among the crude little bungalows that spread out to the ramparts, peeping through windows at gilded furniture and enameled bits of wealth and civilization that in this barbaric place seemed priceless and fastidious and even sad. Now and then through the mire there came a vision: a real French gentleman done up in snow-white wig and fancy frock coat, his wife in panniers, and a black slave carrying clean slippers for the two high above the flowing mud. I knew that I had come to the most forsaken outpost of the Savage Garden, and that this was my country and I would remain in New Orleans, if New Orleans could only manage to remain. Whatever I suffered should be lessened in this lawless place, whatever I craved should give me more pleasure once I had it in my grasp. And there were moments on that first night in this fetid little paradise when I prayed that in spite of all my secret power, I was somehow kin to every mortal man. Maybe I was not the exotic outcast that I imagined, but merely the dim magnification of every human soul. Odd truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all. And weary finally of this complexity, we dream of that long ago time when we sat upon our mother's knee and each kiss was the perfect consummation of desire. What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now contain both heaven and helclass="underline" our doom again and again and again.