alley around me narrow and black as any in which I had ever been. And I heard them before they seemed, quite purposefully and abruptly, to silence themselves.
I was too anxious and miserable to play with them! I was too dazed. I shouted the old question, “Who are you, speak to me!” The glass panes rattled in the nearby windows. Mortals stirred in their little chambers. There was no cemetery here. “Answer me, you pack of cowards. Speak if you have a voice or once and for all get away from me!”
And then I knew, though how I knew, I can’t tell you, that they could hear me and they could answer me, if they chose. And I knew that what I had always heard was the irrepressible evidence of their proximity and their intensity, which they couldn’t disguise. But their thoughts they could cloak and they had. I mean, they had intellect, and they had words.
I let out a long low breath.
I was stung by their silence, but I was stung a thousand times more by what had just happened, and as I’d done so many times in the past I turned my back on them.
They followed me. This time they followed, and no matter how swiftly I moved, they came on.
And I did not lose that strange toneless shimmer of them until I reached the place de Gréve and went into the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
I SPENT the remainder of the night in the cathedral, huddled in a shadowy place by the right wall. I hungered for the blood I’d lost, and each time a mortal drew near I felt a strong pulling and tingling where the wounds had been.
But I waited.
And when a young beggar woman with a little child approached, I knew the moment had come. She saw the dried blood, and became frantic to get me to the nearby hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu. Her face was thin with hunger, but she tried to lift me herself with her little arms.
I looked into her eyes until I saw them glaze over. I felt the heat of her breasts swelling beneath her rags. Her soft, succulent body tumbled against me, giving itself to me, as I nestled her in all the bloodstained brocade and lace. I kissed her, feeding on her heat as I pushed the dirty cloth away from her throat, and I bent for the drink so skillfully that the sleepy child never saw it. Then I opened with careful trembling fingers the child’s ragged shirt. This was mine, too, this little neck.
There weren’t any words for the rapture. Before I’d had all the ecstasy that rape could give. But these victims had been taken in the perfect semblance of love. The very blood seemed warmer with their innocence, richer with their goodness.
I looked at them afterwards, as they slept together in death. They had found no sanctuary in the cathedral on this night.
And I knew my vision of the garden of savage beauty had been a true vision. There was meaning in the world, yes, and laws, and inevitability, but they had only to do with the aesthetic. And in this Savage Garden, these innocent ones belonged in the vampire’s arms. A thousand other things can be said about the world, but only aesthetic principles can be verified, and these things alone remain the same.
I was now ready to go home. And as I went out in the early morning, I knew that the last barrier between my appetite and the world had been dissolved.
No one was safe from me now, no matter how innocent. And that included my dear friends at Renaud’s and it included my beloved Nick.
13
I WANTED them gone from Paris. I wanted the playbills down, the doors shut; I wanted silence and darkness in the little rattrap theater where I had known the greatest and most sustained happiness of my mortal life.
Not a dozen innocent victims a night could make me stop thinking about them, could make this ache in me dissolve. Every street in Paris led to their door.
And an ugly shame came over me when I thought of my frightening them. How could I have done that to them? Why did I need to prove to myself with such violence that I could never be part of them again?
No. I’d bought Renaud’s. I’d turned it into the showcase of the boulevard. Now I would close it down.
It was not that they suspected anything, however. They believed the simple stupid