“ ‘I have to go now, Lestat,’ I said to him. I felt weary, weary of him and weary of this sadness. And I longed again for the stillness outside, that perfect quiet to which I’d become so completely accustomed. But I realized, as I rose to my feet, that I was taking the little baby with me.
“Lestat looked up at me now with his large, agonized eyes and his smooth, ageless face. ‘But you’ll come back… you’ll come to visit me… Louis?’ he said.
“I turned away from him, hearing him calling after me, and quietly left the house. When I reached the street, I looked back and I could see him hovering at the window as if he were afraid to go out. I realized he had not gone out for a long, long time, and it occurred to me then that perhaps he would never go out again.
“I returned to the small house from which the vampire had taken the child, and left it there in its crib.”
“Not very long after that I told Armand I’d seen Lestat. Perhaps it was a month, I’m not certain. Time meant little to me then, as it means little to me now. But it meant a great deal to Armand. He was amazed that I hadn’t mentioned this before.
“We were walking that night uptown where the city gives way to the Audubon Park and the levee is a deserted, grassy slope that descends to a muddy beach heaped here and there with driftwood, going out to the lapping waves of the river. On the far bank were the very dim lights of industries and river-front companies, pinpoints of green or red that flickered in the distance like stars. And the moon showed the broad, strong current moving fast between the two shores; and even the summer heat was gone here, with the cool breeze coming off the water and gently lifting the moss that hung from the twisted oak where we sat. I was picking at the grass, and tasting it, though the taste was bitter and unnatural. The gesture seemed natural. I was feeling almost that I might never leave New Orleans. But then, what are such thoughts when you can live forever? Never leave New Orleans again?’ Again seemed a human word.
“ ‘But didn’t you feel any desire for revenge?’ Armand asked. He lay on the grass beside me, his weight on his elbow, his eyes fixed on me.
“ ‘Why?’ I asked calmly. I was wishing, as I often wished, that he was not there, that I was alone. Alone with this powerful and cool river under the dim moon. ‘He’s met with his own perfect revenge. He’s dying, dying of rigidity, of fear. His mind cannot accept this time. Nothing as serene and graceful as that vampire death you once described to me in Paris. I think he is dying as clumsily and grotesquely as humans often die in this century… of old age.’
“ ‘But you… what did you feel?’ he insisted softly. And I was struck by the personal quality of that question, and how long it had been since either of us had spoken to the other in that way. I had a strong sense of him then, the separate being that he was, the calm and collected creature with the straight auburn hair and the large, sometimes melancholy eyes, eyes that seemed often to be seeing nothing but their own thoughts. Tonight they were lit with a dull fire that was unusual.
“ ‘Nothing,’ I answered.
“ ‘Nothing one way or the other?’
“I answered no. I remembered palpably that sorrow. It was as if the sorrow hadn’t left me suddenly, but had been near me all this time, hovering, saying, ‘Come.’ But I wouldn’t tell this to Armand, wouldn’t reveal this. And I had the strangest sensation of feeling his need for me to tell him this… this, or something… a need strangely akin to the need for living blood.
“ ‘But did he tell you anything, anything that made you feel the old hatred…’ he murmured. And it was at this point that I became keenly aware of how distressed he was.
“ ‘What is it, Armand? Why do you ask this?’ I said.
“But he lay back on the steep levee then, and for a long time he appeared to be looking at the stars. The stars brought back to me something far too specific, the ship that had carried Claudia and me to Europe, and those nights at sea when it seemed the stars came down to touch the waves.
“ ‘I thought perhaps he would tell you something about Paris…’ Armand said.
“ ‘What should he say about Paris? That he didn’t want Claudia to die?’ I asked. Claudia again; the name sounded strange. Claudia spreading out that game of solitaire on the table that shifted with the shifting of the sea, the lantern creaking on its hook, the black porthole full of the stars. She had her head bent, her fingers poised above her ear as if about to loosen strands of her hair. And I had the most disconcerting sensation: that in my memory she would look up from that game of solitaire, and the sockets of her eyes would be empty.
“ ‘You could have told me anything you wanted about Paris, Armand,’ I said. ‘Long before now. It wouldn’t have mattered.’
“ ‘Even that it was I who…?’
“I turned to him as he lay there looking at the sky. And I saw the extraordinary pain in his face, in his eyes. It seemed his eyes were huge, too huge, and the white face that framed them too gaunt.
’That it was you who killed her? Who forced her out into that yard and locked her there?’ I asked. I smiled. ‘Don’t tell me you have been feeling pain for it all these years, not you.’
“And then he closed his eyes and turned his face away, his hand resting on his chest as if I’d struck him an awful, sudden blow.
“ ‘You can’t convince me you care about this,’ I said to him coldly. And I looked out towards the water, and again that feeling came over me… that I wished to be alone. In a little while I knew I would get up and go off by myself. That is, if he didn’t leave me first. Because I would have liked to remain there actually. It was a quiet, secluded place.
“ ‘You care about nothing…’ he was saying. And then he sat up slowly and turned to me so again I could see that dark fire in his eyes. ‘I thought you would at least care about that. I thought you would feel the old passion, the old anger if you were to see him again. I thought something would quicken and come alive in you if you saw him… if you returned to this place.’
“ ‘That I would come back to life?’ I said softly. And I felt the cold metallic hardness of my words as I spoke, the modulation, the control. It was as if I were cold all over, made of metal, and he were fragile suddenly; fragile, as he had been, actually, for a long time.
“ ‘Yes!’ he cried out. ‘Yes, back to life!’ And then he seemed puzzled, positively confused. And a strange thing occurred. He bowed his head at that moment as if he were defeated. And something in the way that he felt that defeat, something in the way his smooth white face reflected it only for an instant, reminded me of someone else I’d seen defeated in just that way. And it was amazing to me that it took me such a long moment to see Claudia’s face in that attitude; Claudia, as she stood by the bed in the room at the Hotel Saint-Gabriel pleading with me to transform Madeleine into one of us. That same helpless look, that defeat which seemed to be so heartfelt that everything beyond it was forgotten. And then he, like Claudia, seemed to rally, to pull on some reserve of strength. But he said softly to the air, ‘I am dying!’
“And I, watching him, hearing him, the only creature under God who heard him, knowing completely that it was true, said nothing.
“A long sigh escaped his lips. His head was’ bowed. His right hand lay limp beside him in the grass. ‘Hatred… that is passion,’ he said ‘Revenge, that is passion…’