ghost on the spot, which could easily have happened, but the child said No, she was waiting for Quinn, and asked everybody to leave, and when Jasmine had come running back with the cold soda in a bubbly glass with a bent straw, the girl would hardly drink it.
You can live all your life in America without ever seeing a mortal in this condition.
But in the eighteenth century when I was born it was rather common. People starved in the streets of Paris in those days. They died all around you. Same situation prevailed in nineteenth-century New Orleans when the starving Irish began to arrive. You could see many beggars of skin and bone. Now you have to go to "the foreign missions" or to certain hospital wards to see people suffering like Mona Mayfair.
Big Ramona had made a further declaration, that that was the very bed in which her own daughter died (Little Ida), and that it was no bed for a sick child. But Jasmine, her granddaughter, had told her to shush,
and Mona had taken to laughing so hard she was in agony and began to choke. She had survived.
As I stood in the cemetery, monitoring all these marvelous mirrors of near immediate events, I reckoned Mona was five-foot-one or thereabouts, destined to be delicate, and once a famous beauty, but the sickness-set into motion by a traumatic birth which was despite all my power still unclear to me-had so thoroughly done its work on her that she was under seventy pounds in weight and her profuse red hair only heightening the macabre spectacle of her total deterioration. She was so dangerously close to death that only will was keeping her going.
It had been will and witchcraft-the high persuasion of witches-that had helped her get the flowers and to force so much assistance when she arrived.
But now that Quinn had come, now that Quinn was there with her, and the one bold idea of her dying hours was consummate, the pain in her internal organs and her joints was defeating her. There was also a terrible pain in the entire surface of her skin. Merely sitting amid all the precious flowers hurt her.
As for my brave Quinn renouncing every execration he had laid on his fate and offering her the Dark Blood, no big surprise, I had to admit, but I wished to Hell he hadn't.
It's hard to watch anyone die when you know you possess this evil paradoxical power. And he was still in love with her, naturally and unnaturally, and couldn't abide her suffering. Who could?
However, as I have already explained, Quinn had received a theophany only last night, seeing Merrick and his doppelganger spirit both passing into the Light.
So why in the name of God had he not consented to merely holding Mona's hand and seeing her through it? She certainly wasn't going to live until midnight.
Fact of the matter, he didn't have the strength to let her go. Of course Quinn never would have gone to her, I should add, he'd protected her from his secret valiantly, as noted, but she'd come here to Quinn, to his very room, begging to die in his bed. And he was a male vampire, and this was his territory, his lair, so to speak, and some male juices were flowing here, vampire or no, and now she was in his arms, and a monstrous possessiveness and high imaginative perception of saving her had taken hold of him.
And as surely as I knew all that, I knew he couldn't work the Dark Trick on her. He'd never done it before, and she was too frail. He'd kill her. And that was no way to go. Shoot, the child, having opted for the Dark Blood, could go to Hell! I had to get up there. Vampire Lestat to the rescue!
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Lestat, is this a comedy? We don't want a comedy." No, it's not!
It's just that all the debasing subterfuge is falling away from me, don't you see? Not the glamour you
understand, keep your mind on the image, baby! We're only losing those elements which tended to cheapen my discourse, and throw up a barrier of-artificial quaintness, more or less.
Okay. Onward. I went the human route, through the front door, clickity click, startling Clem, throwing him an ingratiating smile, "Quinn's friend, Lestat, yeah, gotcha, hey, and Clem, have that car ready, we're going into New Orleans afterwards, okay, dude?" and headed up the circular