under God it might be ended. I had not the courage to end it, I knew, without that answer. And in time the waters of the Mediterranean became, in fact, the waters of the Black Sea"
The vampire sighed. The boy was resting on his elbow, his face cradled in his right palm; and his avid expression was incongruous with the redness of his eyes.
"Do you think I'm playing with you?" the vampire asked, his fine dark eyebrows knitted for an instant.
"No," the boy said quickly. "I know better than to ask you any more questions. You'll tell me everything in your own time." And his mouth settled, and he looked at the vampire as though he were ready for him to begin again.
There was a sound then from far off. It came from somewhere in the old Victorian building around them, the first such sound they'd heard. The boy looked up towards the hallway door. It was as if he'd forgotten the building existed. Someone walked heavily on the old boards. But the vampire was undisturbed. He looked away as if he were again disengaging himself from the present.
"That village. I can't tell you the name of it; the name's gone. I remember it was miles from the coast, however, and we'd been traveling alone by carriage. And such a carriage! It was Claudia's doing, that carriage, and I should have expected it; but then, things are always taking me unawares. From the first moment we. arrived in Varna, I had perceived certain changes in her which made me at once aware she was Lestat's daughter as well as my own. From me she had learned the value of money, but from Lestat she had inherited a passion for spending it; and she wasn't to leave without the most luxurious black coach we could manage, outfitted with leather seats that might have accommodated a band of travelers, let alone a man and a child who used the magnificent compartment only for the transportation of an ornately carved oak chest. To the back were strapped two trunks of the finest clothes the shops there could provide; and we went speeding along, those light enormous wheels and fine springs carrying that bulk with a frightening ease over the mountain roads. There was a thrill to that when there was nothing else in this strange country, those horses at a gallop and the gentle listing of that carriage.
"And it was strange country. Lonely, dark, as rural country is. always dark, its castles and ruins often obscured when the moon passed behind the clouds, so that I felt an anxiety during those hours I'd never quite experienced in New Orleans. And the people themselves were no relief. We were naked and lost in their tiny hamlets, and conscious always that amongst them we were in grave danger.
"Never in New Orleans had the kill to be disguised. The ravages of fever, plague, crime--these things competed with us always there, and outdid us. But here we had to go to great lengths to make the kill unnoticed. Because these simple country people, who might have found the crowded streets of New Orleans terrifying, believed completely that the dead did walk and did drink the blood of the living. They knew our names: vampire, devil. And we, who were on the lookout for the slightest rumor, wanted under no circumstances to create rumor ourselves.
"We traveled alone and fast and lavishly amongst them, struggling to be safe within our ostentation, finding talk of vampires all too cheap by the inn fires, where, my daughter sleeping peacefully against my chest, I invariably found someone amongst the peasants or guests who spoke enough German or, at times, even French to discuss with me the familiar legends.
"But finally we came to that village which was to be the turning point in our travels. I savor nothing about that journey, not the freshness of the air, the coolness of the nights. I don't talk of it without a vague tremor even now.
"We had been at a farmhouse the night before, and so no news prepared us---only the desolate appearance of the place: because it wasn't late when we reached it, not late enough for all the shutters of the little street to be bolted or for a darkened lantern to be swinging from the broad archway of the inn.
"Refuse was collected in the doorways. And there were other signs that something was wrong. A small box of withered flowers beneath a shuttered