I moved back. I found myself against the wall again, trembling, with my hands clamped to the sides of my head. At least this time I had not upset the lilies, but I was crying again.
Marius closed the tabernacle doors. He made the bolt inside slip into place.
We went into the passage and he made the inner bolt rise and go into its brackets. He put the outside bolt in with his hands.
“Come, young one,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs.”
But we had walked only a few yards when we heard a crisp clicking sound, and then another. He turned and looked back.
“They did it again,” he said. And a look of distress divided his face like a shadow.
“What?” I backed up against the wall.
“The tabernacle, they opened it. Come. I’ll return later and lock it before the sun rises. Now we will go back to my drawing room and I will tell you my tale.”
When we reached the lighted room, I collapsed in the chair with my head in my hands. He was standing still just looking at me, and when I realized it, I looked up.
“She told you her name,” he said.
“Akasha!” I said. It was snatching a word out of the whirlpool of a dissolving dream. “She did tell me! I said Akasha out loud.” I looked at him, imploring him for answers. For some explanation of the attitude with which he stared at me.
I thought I’d lose my mind if his face didn’t become expressive again.
“Are you angry with me?”
“Shhh. Be quiet,” he said.
I could hear nothing in the silence. Except maybe the sea. Maybe a sound from the wicks of the candles in the room. Maybe the wind. Not even their eyes had appeared more lifeless than his eyes now seemed.
“You cause something to stir in them,” he whispered.
I stood up.
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe nothing. The tabernacle is still open and they are merely sitting there as always. Who knows?”
And I felt suddenly all his long years of wanting to know. I would say centuries, but I cannot really imagine centuries. Not even now. I felt his years and years of trying to elicit from them the smallest signs and getting nothing, and I knew that he was wondering why I had drawn from her the secret of her name. Akasha. Things had happened, but that had been in the time of Rome. Dark things. Terrible things. Suffering, unspeakable suffering.
The images went white. Silence. He was stranded in the room like a saint taken down off an altar and left in the aisle of a church.
“Marius!” I whispered.
He woke and his face warmed slowly, and he looked at me affectionately, almost wonderingly.
“Yes, Lestat,” he said and gave my hand a reassuring squeeze.
He seated himself and gestured for me to do the same, and we were once again facing each other comfortably. And the even light of the room was reassuring. It was reassuring to see, beyond the windows, the night sky.
His former quickness was returning, the glint of good humor in his eyes.
“It’s not yet midnight,” he said. “And all is well on the islands. If I’m not disturbed, I think there is time for me to tell you the whole tale.”
MARIUS’S STORY
5
“IT HAPPENED in my fortieth year, on a warm spring night in the Roman Gallic city of Massilia, when in a dirty waterfront tavern I sat scribbling away on my history of the world.
“The tavern was deliciously filthy and crowded, a hangout for sailors and wanderers, travelers like me, I fancied, loving them all in a general sort of way, though most of them were poor and I wasn’t poor, and they couldn’t read what I wrote when they glanced over my shoulder.
“I’d come to Massilia after a long and studious journey that had taken me through all the great cities of the Empire. To Alexandria, Pergamon, Athens I’d traveled, observing and writing about the people, and now I was making my way through the cities of Roman Gaul.
“I couldn’t have been more content on this night had I been in my library at Rome. In fact, I liked the tavern better. Everywhere I went I sought out such places in which to write, setting up my candle and ink and parchment at a table close to the wall, and I did my best work early in the evening when the places were at their noisiest.
“In retrospect, it’s easy to see that I lived my whole life in