'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:
''I command you to drench his soul, his mind, his heart with a heat for me, to inflict upon his nights and days a relentless and torturous longing for me; to invade his dreams with the images of me; to let there be nothing that he eats or drinks that will solace him as he thinks of me, until he returns to me, until he stands in my presence, until I can use every power at my command on him as we speak together. Do not for a moment let him be quiet; do not for a moment let him turn away.''
'It wasn't like that,' I insisted.
She went on, her voice lower, kinder:
''May he be a slave to me, may he be the faithful servant of my designs, may he have no power to refuse what I have confided to you, my great and faithful spirits. May he fulfill that destiny which I choose of my own accord.'' She let the silence fill the room again. I heard nothing for the moment, except a low secretive laughter from Lestat. But it was not mocking, this laughter. It was simply eloquent of astonishment, and then Lestat spoke:
'And so you are absolved, gentlemen,' he said. 'Why don't you accept it, accept it as an absolutely priceless gift which Merrick has the right to give?'
'Nothing can ever absolve me,' said Louis.
'Let it be your choice, then, both of you,' answered Merrick, 'if you wish to believe you are responsible. And this, this remnant of your corpse I'll return to the earth. But let me say, before I put a seal on the subject for both of your hearts, that the future was foretold.'
'By whom? How?' I demanded.
'An old man,' she said, addressing me most particularly, 'who used to sit in the dining room of my house listening to Sunday Mass on the radio, an old man with a gold pocket watch which I coveted, a watch which he told me, simply, was not ticking for me.'
I winced. 'Oncle Vervain,' I whispered.
'Those were his only words on the matter,' she said with soft humility. 'But he sent me to the jungles of Central America to find the mask I would use to raise Claudia. He had sent me earlier, with my mother and my sister, to find the perforator with which I would slash Louis's wrist to get the blood from him, not only for my raising of a spirit, but for the spell with which I brought Louis to me.'
The others said nothing. But Louis and Lestat understood her. And it was the pattern, the intricate pattern
