Anne Rice - Merrick

It would all seem routine to the authorities, the deaths of these two unfortunates, that they had died by the drugs they were ingesting. As for the old woman in the back room, she continued with her prayers, though she was making them now into a song for the baby, who had begun to utter small cries.

"Leave her something for the funerals," I said in a hushed voice to Louis. This seemed to confuse him.

I quickly went around to the front door, slipped inside, and left a substantial offering of money on the top of a broken table which was littered with overflowing ashtrays and glasses half filled with stale wine. I put some more money atop an old bureau as well.

Louis and I made our way home. The night was warm and damp, yet felt clean and lovely, and the smell of ligustrum filled my lungs.

We were soon walking back towards the lighted streets we loved.

His step was brisk and his manner entirely human. He stopped to pick the flowers that grew over the fences or out of the little gardens. He sang to himself something soft and unobtrusive. Now and then he looked up at the stars.

All of this was pleasant to me, though I wondered how in the name of Heaven I would have the courage to feed upon the evildoer only, or to answer a prayer as Louis had just done. I saw the fallacy in all of it. Another wave of desolation passed over me, and I felt a terrible need to explain my various points of view, but this did not seem the time.

It struck me very heavily that I had lived to an old age as a mortal man, and so had ties with the human race that many another blood drinker simply did not possess. Louis had been twenty-four when he had struck his bargain with Lestat for the Dark Blood. How much can a man learn in that time, and how much can he later forget?

I might have continued to think in this vein and indeed to start some conversation with Louis, however I was once again bothered by something outside of myself, and that is that a black cat, a very huge black cat, shot out of the shrubbery ahead of us and stopped in our path.

I stopped in my tracks. So did Louis, only because I had.

A passing car then sent its beams into the eyes of the cat, and for a moment they were purely golden; then the animal, truly one of the largest domestic cats I've ever beheld, and a most unwholesome specimen, shot away into the shadows as swiftly as it had come.

"Surely you don't take that as a bad omen," said Louis, smiling at me, almost teasing me. "David, you're not superstitious, as mortals would say."

I loved the bit of levity in his voice. I loved seeing him so full of the warm blood that he might have been human. But I couldn't respond to the words.

I didn't like the cat at all. I was furious at Merrick. I could have blamed the rain on Merrick had it started to pour. I felt challenged by Merrick. I was working myself up to a little fit of pique. I didn't say a word.

"When will you let me meet Merrick?" he asked.

"First her story," I said, "or that part of it which I know. Tomorrow, feed early, and when I come to the flat I'll tell you the things you need to know."

"And then we speak of a meeting?"

"Then you can make up your mind."

THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, I rose to find the sky uncommonly clear and full of visible stars. A good omen to all those in a state of grace. This is not the normal thing for New Orleans, as the air is very filled with moisture, and frequently the sky has a veiled appearance and little spectacle of cloud and light.

Having no need to feed, I went directly to the Windsor Court Hotel, once again entering its very lovely modern lobby, a space which has all the usual elegance of an older establishment, and went up to Merrick's suite.

She had only just left, I was informed, and a maid was engaged in preparing the rooms for a next guest.

Ah, she had stayed longer than I had expected, but not as long as I'd hoped. However, imagining her to be safely on her way back to Oak Haven, I checked with the desk to see if she had left any message for me. She had.

I waited until I was alone outside to read the short note:

"Have gone to London to retrieve from the vault those few items which we know are connected with the child."

So things had progressed so far!

Of course, she was referring to a rosary and a diary which our fieldworker Jesse Reeves had found in the flat in the Rue Royale over ten years before. And if memory served me correctly, there were a few other things which had been collected a century earlier from an abandoned hotel room in Paris where rumor had led us to believe that vampires had lodged.

I was alarmed.

But what had I expected? That Merrick would resist my request?

Nevertheless, I'd never anticipated that she would act so quickly. Of course I knew that she could obtain the items in question. She was quite powerful within the Talamasca. She had unlimited access to the vaults.

It occurred to me to try to call her at Oak Haven, to tell her that we must discuss the matter a little further. But I couldn't risk it.

The members of the Talamasca there were only a small number, but each was gifted psychically and in a different way. The phone can be a powerful connecter between souls, and I simply could not have someone there sensing something "strange" about the voice on the other end of the line.

There I left the matter, and I set out for our flat in the Rue Royale.

As I entered the carriageway, something soft moved past my leg. I stopped and searched the darkness until I made out the shape of another giant black cat. Surely it had to be another. I couldn't imagine the creature I had seen the night before having followed us home with no incentive of food or milk.

The cat vanished in the rear courtyard garden and was gone when I reached the back iron stairs. But I didn't like this. I didn't like this cat. No, not at all. I took my time in the garden. I walked about the fountain, which had recently been cleaned and stocked with large goldfish, and I spent more than a few moments gazing at the faces of the stone cherubs, with their conches held high, now quite overrun with lichen, and then looking about at the overgrown flower patches along the brick walls.

The yard was kept, yet out of hand, its flagstones swept, but its plants gone wild. Lestat probably wanted it that way, insofar as he cared. And Louis loved it.

Suddenly, when I had just about resolved to go upstairs, I saw the cat again, a huge black monster of a thing in my book, but then I don't like cats, creeping on the high wall.

A multitude of thoughts crowded my mind. I felt an ever increasing excitement about this project with Merrick and a certain foreboding which seemed a necessary price. It frightened me suddenly that she had left so abruptly for London, that I had worked such a distraction upon her that she had abandoned whatever projects in which she might have been engaged.

Should I tell Louis what she had set out to do? It would certainly bring about a finality to our plans.

Entering the flat, I turned on all the electric lights in every room, a detail which was our custom by this time, and one upon which I depended heavily for some sense of normality, no matter that it was a mere illusion, but then, perhaps normality is always an illusion. Who am I to say?

Louis arrived almost immediately after, coming up the rear stairs with his usual silken step. It was the heartbeat I heard in my alert state, not the footfall at all.

Louis found me in the rear parlor, the one more distant from the noises of the tourists in the Rue Royale, and with its windows open to the courtyard below. I was in fact looking out the window, looking for the cat again, though I didn't tell myself so, and observing how our bougainvillea had all but covered the high walls that enclosed us and kept us safe from the rest of the world. The wisteria was also fierce in its growth, even reaching out from the brick walls to the railing of the rear balcony and finding its way up to the roof.