bring all your possessions here, and those girls of yours, should you want to keep them.”
We walked down the stairs, we entered another room. It took all Marius’s strength to pull back the door, which meant simply that no mortal man could do it.
There lay a sarcophagus, plain, of granite.
“Can you lift the lid of the sarcophagus?” Marius asked.
“I am feeling weak!”
“It’s the sun rising, try to lift the lid. Slide it to one side.”
I did, and inside I found a bed of crushed lilies and rose petals, of silken pillows, and bits of dried flower kept for scent.
I stepped in, turned around, sat and stretched out in this stone prison. At once he took his place in the tomb beside me, and pushed the lid back to its place, and all the world’s light in any form was shut out, as if the dead would have it so.
“I’m drowsy. I can hardly form words.”
“What a blessing,” he said.
“There is no need for such an insult,” I murmured. “But I forgive you.”
“Pandora, I love you!” he said helplessly.
“Put it inside me,” I said, reaching between his legs. “Fill me and hold me.”
“This is stupid and superstitious!”
“It is neither,” I said “It is symbolic and comforting.”
He obeyed. Our bodies were one, connected by this sterile organ which was no more to him now than his arm, but how I loved the arm he threw over me and the lips he pressed to my forehead.
“I love you, Marius, my strange, tall and beautiful Marius.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said his voice barely a whisper.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll despise me soon enough for what I’ve done to you.”
“Not so, oh, rational one. I am not as eager to grow old wither and die, as you might think. I should like a chance to know more, to see more . . . ”
I felt his lips against my forehead.
“Did you really try to marry me when I was fifteen?”
“Oh, agonizing memories! Your Father’s insults still sting my ears! He had me all but thrown out of your house!”
“I love you with my whole heart,” I whispered. “And you have won. You have me now as your wife.”
“I have you as something, but I do not think that ‘wife’ is the word for it. I wonder that you’ve already forgotten your earlier strenuous objection to the term.”
“Together,” I said, scarce able to talk on account of his kisses. I was drowsy, and loved the feel of his lips, their sudden eagerness for pure affection. “We’ll think of another word more exalted than ‘wife.’ ”
Suddenly I moved back. I could not see him in the dark.
“Are you kissing me so that I will not talk?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I was doing,” he said.
I turned away from him.
“Turn back, please,” he said.
“No,” I said.
I lay still, realizing dimly that his body felt quite normal to me now, because mine was as hard as his was, as strong perhaps. What a sublime advantage. Oh, but I loved him. I loved him! So let him kiss the back of the neck! He could not force me to turn towards him!
The sun must have risen.
For a silence fell on me which was as if the universe with all its volcanoes and raging tides—and all its Emperors, Kings, judges, Senators, philosophers and Priests—had been erased from existence.
11
ELL, David, there you have it.
I could continue the Plautus-Terence style comedy for pages. I could vie with Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. But that is the basic story. That is what lies behind the flippant capsule version in The Vampire Lestat, fashioned into its final trivial form by Marius or Lestat, who knows.
Let me lead you through those points which are sacred and burn still in my heart, no matter how easily they have been dismissed by another.
And the tale of our parting is not mere dissonance but may contain some lesson.
Marius taught me to hunt, to catch the evildoer only, and to kill without pain, enwrapping the soul of my victim in sweet visions or allowing the soul to illuminate its own death with a cascade of fantasies which I must not judge, but merely devour, like the blood. All that does not require detailed documentation.
We were matched in strength. When some burnt and ruthlessly ambitious blood drinker did find his way to Antioch, which happened only a few times and then not at all, we executed the supplicant together. These were monstrous mentalities, forged in ages we could hardly understand, and they sought the Queen like jackals