imagined, and I have not the strength now to tell the tale. Let me say only that before she was shoved out into a brick-lined air well to await the death sentence of the god Phoebus, I tried to grant her fondest wish, that she should have the body of a woman, a fit shape for the tragic dimension of her soul.
Well, in my clumsy alchemy, slicing heads from bodies and stumbling to transplant one to another, I failed. Some night when I am drunk on the blood of many victims, and more accustomed than I am now to confession, I will recount it, my crude and sinister operations, conducted with a sorcerer's willfulness and a boy's blundering, and describe in grim and grotesque detail the writhing jerking catastrophe that rose from beneath my scalpel and my surgical needle and thread.
Let me say here, she was herself again, hideously wounded, a botched reassemblage of the angelic child she'd been before my attempts, when she was locked out in the brutal morning to meet her death with a clear mind. The fire of Heaven destroyed the awful unhealed evidence of my Satanic surgery as it turned her to a monument in ash. No evidence remained of her last hours within the torture chamber of my makeshift laboratory. No one need ever have known what I say now.
For many a year, she haunted me. I could not strike from my mind the faltering image of her girlish head and tumbling curls fixed awkwardly with gross black stitching to the flailing, faltering and falling body of a female vampire whose discarded head I'd thrown into the fire.
Ah, what a grand disaster was that, the child-headed monster woman unable to speak, dancing in a frenetic circle, the blood gurgling from her shuddering mouth, her eyes rolling, arms flapping like the broken bones of invisible wings.
It was a truth I vowed to conceal forever from Louis de Pointe du Lac and all whoever questioned me. Better let them think that I had condemned her without trying to effect her escape, both from the vampires of the theatre and from the wretched dilemma of her small, enticing, flat-chested and silken-skinned angelic form.
She was not fit for deliverance after the failure of my butchery; she was as a prisoner subjected to the cruelty of the rack who can only smile bitterly and dreamily as she is led, torn and miserable, to the final horror of the stake. She was as a hopeless patient, in the reeking antiseptic death cubicle of a modern hospital, freed at last from the hands of youthful and overzealous doctors, to give up the ghost on a white pillow alone.
Enough. I won't relive it.
I will not.
I never loved her. I didn't know how.
I carried out my schemes in chilling detachment and with fiendish pragmatism. Being condemned and therefore being nothing and no one, she was a perfect specimen for my whim. That was the horror of it, the secret horror which eclipsed any faith I might have pleaded later in the high-blown courage of my experiments. And so the secret remained with me, with Armand, who had witnessed centuries of unspeakable and refined cruelties, a story unfit for the tender ears of a desperate Louis, who could never have borne such descriptions of her degradation or suffering, and who did not truly, in his soul, survive her death, cruel as it was.
As for the others, my stupid cynical flock, who listened so lasciviously at my door to the screaming, who maybe guessed the extent of my failed wizardry, those vampires died by Louis's hand.
Indeed the entire theatre paid for his grief and his rage, and justly so perhaps.
I can make no judgment.
I did not love those decadent and cynical French mummers. Those I had loved, and those who I could love, were, save for Louis de Pointe du Lac, utterly beyond my grasp.
I must have Louis, that was my injunction. I knew no other. So I did not interfere when Louis incinerated the Coven and the infamous theatre, striking, at the risk of his own life, with flame and scythe at the very hour of dawn.
Why did he come away with me afterwards?
Why did he not abhor the one whom he blamed for Claudia's death? "You were their leader; you could have stopped them." He did say those words to me.
Why did we wander for so many years together, drifting like elegant phantoms in our lace and velvet cerements into the garish electric