forehead.
Darkness fell around the little house.
There was a fire burning in the little hearth, and Gretchen was lying beside me. She had put on a long flannel gown, very thick and white; and her hair was loose, and she was holding me as I shivered. I liked the feel of her hair against my arm. I held on to her, frightened I’d hurt her. Over and over again, she wiped my face with a cool cloth. She forced me to drink the orange juice or cold water. The hours of the night were deepening and so was my panic.
“I won’t let you die,” she whispered in my ear. But I heard the fear which she couldn’t disguise. Sleep rolled over me, thinly, so that the room retained its shape, its color, its light. I called upon the others again, begging Marius to help me. I began to think of terrible things—that they were all there as so many small white statues with the Virgin and with Saint Rita, watching me, and refusing to help.
Sometime before dawn, I heard voices. A doctor had come—a tired young man with sallow skin and red-rimmed eyes. Once again, a needle was put into my arm. I drank greedily when the ice water was given me. I could not follow the doctor’s low murmuring, nor was I meant to understand it. But the cadences of the voice were calm and obviously reassuring. I caught the words “epidemic” and “blizzard” and “impossible conditions.”
When the door shut, I begged her to come back. “Next to your beating heart,” I whispered in her ear as she lay down at my side. How sweet this was, her tender heavy limbs, her large shapeless breasts against my chest, her smooth leg against mine. Was I too sick to be afraid?
“Sleep now,” she said. “Try not to worry.” At last a deep sleep was coming to me, deep as the snow outside, as the darkness.
“DON’T you think it’s time you made your confession?” asked Claudia. “You know you really are hanging by the proverbial thread.” She was sitting in my lap, staring up at me, hands on my shoulders, her little upturned face not an inch from mine.
My heart shrank, exploding in pain, but there was no knife, only these little hands clutching me, and the perfume of crushed roses rising from her shimmering hair.
“No. I can’t make my confession,” I said to her. How my voice trembled. “Oh, Lord God, what do you want of me!”
“You’re not sorry! You’ve never been sorry! Say it. Say the truth! You deserved the knife when I put it through your heart, and you know it, you’ve always known it!”
“No!”
Something in me broke as I stared down at her, at the exquisite face in its frame of fine-spun hair. I lifted her, and rose, placing her in the chair before me and I dropped to my knees at her feet.
“Claudia, listen to me. I didn’t begin it. I didn’t make the world! It was always there, this evil. It was in the shadows, and it caught me, and made me part of it, and I did what I felt I must. Don’t laugh at me, please, don’t turn your head away. I didn’t make evil! I didn’t make myself!”
How perplexed she was, staring at me, watching me, and then her small full mouth spread beautifully in a smile.
“It wasn’t all anguish,” I said, my fingers digging into her little shoulders. “It wasn’t hell. Tell me it wasn’t. Tell me there was happiness. Can devils be happy? Dear God, I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand, but you always do something, don’t you?”
“Yes, and I’m not sorry. I’m not. I would roar it from the rooftops right up into the dome of heaven. Claudia, I would do it again!” A great sigh passed out of me. I repeated the words, my voice growing louder. “I would do it again!”
Stillness in the room.
Her calm remained unbroken. Was she enraged? Surprised? Impossible to know as I looked into her expressionless eyes.
“Oh you are evil, my father,” she said in a soft voice. “How can you abide it?”
David turned from the window. He stood over her shoulder, looking down at me as I stayed there on my knees.
“I am the ideal of my kind,” I said. “I am the perfect vampire. You are looking at the Vampire Lestat when you look at me. No one outshines this figure you see before you—no one!” Slowly I rose to my feet. “I