to their house only to report they'd disappeared, and then the father was at our door, pounding the knocker. He stood back on the brick sidewalk regarding me with that grave suspicion that sooner or later crept into the faces of all mortals who-knew us for any length of time, the forerunner of death, as pallor might be to a fatal fever; and I tried to explain to him they had not been here, mother or daughter, and we must begin some search.
"'It's she!' Lestat hissed from the shadows when I shut the gate.'She's done something to them and brought risk for us all. I'll make her tell me!' And he pounded up the spiral stairs from the courtyard. I knew that she'd gone, slipped out while I was at the gate, and I knew something else also: that a vague stench came across the courtyard from the shut, unused kitchen, a stench that mingled uneasily with the honeysuckle-the stench of graveyards. I heard Lestat coming down as I approached the warped shutters, locked with rust to the small brick building. No food was ever prepared there, no work ever done, so that it lay like an old brick vault under the tangles of honeysuckle. The shutters came loose, the nails having turned to dust, and I heard Lestat's gasp as we stepped into the reeking dark. There they lay on the bricks, mother and daughter together, the arm of the mother fastened around the waist of the daughter, the daughter's head bent against the mother's breast, both foul with feces and swarming with ' . A great cloud of gnats rose as the shutter fell back, and I waved them away from me in a convulsive disgust. Ants crawled undisturbed over the eyelids, the mouths of the dead pair, and in the moonlight I could see the endless map of silvery paths of snails.'Damn her!' Lestat burst out, and I grabbed his arm and held him fast, pitting all my strength against him.'What do you mean to do with her)' I insisted.'What can you do? She's not a child anymore that will do what we say simply because we say it. We must teach her.'
"'She knows!' He stood back from me brushing his coat.'She knows! She's known for years what to dot What can be risked and what cannot. I won't have her do this without my permission) I won't tolerate it.'
"'Then, are you master off us all? You didn't teach her that. Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience? I don't think so. She sees herself as equal to us now, and us as equal to each other. I tell you we must reason with her, instruct her to respect what is ours. As all of us should respect it.'
"He stalked off, obviously absorbed in what rd said, though he would give no admission of it to me. And he took his vengeance to the city. Yet when he came home, fatigued and satiated, she was still not there. He sat against the velvet arm of the couch and stretched his long legs out on the length of it.'Did you bury them?' he asked me.
"'They're gone,' I said. I did not care to say even to myself that I had burned their remains in the old unused kitchen stove.'But there is the father to deal with, and the brother,' I said to him. I feared his temper. I wished at once to plan some way to quickly dispose of the whole problem. But he said now that the father and the brother were no more, that death had come to dinner in their small house near the ramparts and stayed to say grace when everyone was done.'Wine,' he whispered now, running his finger on his lip.'Both of them had drunk too much wine. I found myself tapping the fence posts with a stick to make a tune,' he laughed.'But I don't like it, the dizziness. Do you like it?' And when he looked at me I had to smile at him because the wine was working in him and he was mellow; and in that moment when his face looked warm and reasonable, I leaned over and said,'I hear Claudia's tap on the stairs. Be gentle with her. It's all done.'
"She came in then, with her bonnet ribbons undone and her little boots caked with dirt. I watched them tensely, Lestat with a sneer on his lips, she as unconscious of him as if he