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.“There are several entries,” she said.“Two are of no importance, and for one of these I’ll ask you to work my magic.But there is another telling one, and that you must read before we go on.”Still Louis did not reach for the diary.He looked at her respectfully, as before, but he didn’t reach for the little white book.“Why must I read it?” he asked Merrick.“Louis, think of what you’ve asked me to do.And yet you can’t read the words she herself wrote here?”“That was long ago, Merrick,” he said.“It was years before she died that she concealed that diary.Isn’t what we do of much greater importance? Yes, take a page if you need it.Take any page of the diary, it doesn’t matter, use it as you will, only don’t ask that I read a word.”“No, you must read it,” Merrick said with exquisite gentleness.“Read it to me and to David.I know what is written there, and you must know, and David is here to help both of us.Please, the last entry: read it aloud.”He stared hard at her, and now there came the faint film of red tears to his eyes, but he gave a tiny, near imperceptible, shake of his head, and then he took the diary from her outstretched hand.He opened it, gazing down at it, having no need as a mortal might to move the page into the light.“Yes,” said Merrick coaxingly.“See, that one is unimportant.She says only that you went to the theater together.She says that she saw Macbeth, which was Lestat’s favorite play.”He nodded, turning the small pages.“And that one, that one is not significant,” she went on, as though leading him through the fire with her words.“She says that she loves white chrysanthemums, she says she purchased some from an old woman, she says they are the flowers for the dead.”Again he seemed on the very brink of losing his composure utterly, but he kept his tears to himself.Again he turned the pages.“There, that one.You must read it,” said Merrick, and she laid her hand on his knee.I could see her fingers stretched out and embracing him in that age-old gesture.“Please, Louis, read it to me.”He looked at her for a long moment, and then down at the page.His voice came tenderly in a whisper, but I knew that she could hear it as well as I.“September 21, 1859It has been so many decades since Louis presented me with this little book in which I might record my private thoughts.I have not been successful, having made only a few entries, and whether these have been written for my benefit I am unsure.Tonight, I confide with pen and paper because I know which direction my hatred will take me.And I fear for those who have aroused my wrath.By those I mean, of course, my evil parents, my splendid fathers, those who have led me from a long forgotten mortality into this questionable state of timeless ‘bliss.’To do away with Louis would be foolish, as he is without question the more malleable of the pair.”Louis paused as though he couldn’t continue.I saw Merrick’s fingers tighten on his knee.“Read it, please, I beg you,” she said gently.“You must go on.”Louis began again, his voice soft as before, and quite deliberately smooth.“Louis will do as I wish, even unto the very destruction of Lestat, which I plan in every detail.Whereas Lestat would never cooperate with my designs upon Louis.So there my loyalty lies, under the guise of love even in my own heart.“What mysteries we are, human, vampire, monster, mortal, that we can love and hate simultaneously, and that emotions of all sorts might not parade for what they are not.I look at Louis and I despise him totally for the making of me, and yet I do love him.But then I love Lestat every bit as well.“Perhaps in the court of my heart, I hold Louis far more accountable for my present state than ever I could blame my impulsive and simple Lestat.The fact is, one must die for this or the pain in me will never be sealed off, and immortality is but a monstrous measurement of what I shall suffer till the world revolves to its ultimate end.One must die so that the other will become ever more dependent upon me, ever more completely my slave.I would travel the world afterwards; I would have my way; I cannot endure either one of them unless that one becomes my servant in thought, word, and deed.“Such a fate is simply unthinkable with Lestat’s ungovernable and irascible character.Such a fate seems made for my melancholy Louis, though the destroying of Lestat will open new passages for Louis into the labyrinthian Hell in which I already wander with every new thought that comes in my mind.“When I shall strike and how, I know not, only that it gives me supreme delight to watch Lestat in his unguarded gaiety, knowing that I shall humiliate him utterly in destroying him, and in so doing bring down the lofty useless conscience of my Louis, so that his soul, if not his body, is the same size at last as my own.”It was finished.I could tell this merely by the blank expression of pain on his face, the way that his eyebrows quivered for one moment, and then the way he drew back in the chair, and closed the little book, and held it idly as if he’d forgotten it altogether, in his left hand.He looked neither to me nor to Merrick.“Do you still want to communicate with this spirit?” Merrick asked reverently.She reached for the small diary, and he gave it over without objection.“Oh, yes,” he said in a long sigh.“I want it above anything else.”I wanted so to comfort him, but there were no words to touch such a private pain.“I can’t blame her for what she expressed,” he resumed in a frail voice.“It always goes so tragically wrong with us.” His eyes moved feverishly to Merrick.“The Dark Gift, imagine calling it that, when it goes so very wrong in the end.” He drew back as if struggling against his emotions.“Merrick,” he said, “where do they come from, the spirits? I know the conventional wisdom and how foolish it can be.Tell me your thoughts.”“I know less now than I ever did,” answered Merrick.“I think when I was a girl I was very sure of such things.We prayed to the untimely dead because we believed they hovered close to earth, vengeful or confused, and thereby could be reached.From time immemorial, witches have frequented cemeteries looking for those angry, muddled spirits, calling upon them to find the way to greater powers whose secrets might be revealed.I believed in those lonely souls, those suffering lost ones.Perhaps in my own way, I believe in them still.“As David can tell you, they seem to hunger for the warmth and the light of life; they seem to hunger even for blood.But who knows the true intentions of any spirit? From what depth did the prophet Samuel rise in the Bible? Are we to believe Scripture, that the magic of the Witch of Endor was strong?”Louis was fastened to her every word.He reached out suddenly and took her hand again, letting her curl her fingers around his thumb.“And what do you see, Merrick, when you look at David and at me? Do you see the spirit that inhabits us, the hungry spirit that makes us vampires?”“Yes, I see it, but it’s mute and mindless, utterly subordinate to your brains and hearts.It knows nothing now, if it ever did, except that it wants the blood.And for the blood it slowly works its spell on your tissues, it slowly commands your every cell to obey.The longer you live, the more it thrives, and it is angry now, angry insofar as it can choose any emotion, because you blood drinkers are so few.”Louis appeared mystified, but surely it wasn’t so difficult to understand.“The massacres, Louis, the last here in New Orleans [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]