“ ‘She’ll be all right,’ I assured him, though I was estranged from her and in agony, as if she’d been my bride. She hardly saw me now, as she’d not seen Lestat before, and she might walk away while I spoke to her.
“ ‘She had better be all right!’ he said nastily.
“ ‘And what will you do if she’s not?’ I asked, more in fear than accusation.
“He looked up at me, with his cold gray eyes. ‘You take care of her, Louis. You talk to her!’ he said. ‘Everything was perfect, and now this. There’s no need for it’
“But it was my choice to let her come to me, and she did. It was early one evening when I’d just awakened. The house was dark. I saw her standing by the French windows; she wore puffed sleeves and a pink sash, and was watching with lowered lashes the evening rush in the Rue Royale. I could hear Lestat in his room, the sound of water splashing from his pitcher. The faint smell of his cologne came and went like the sound of music from the cafe two doors down from us. ‘He’ll tell me nothing,’ she said softly. I hadn’t realized she knew that I had opened my eyes. I came towards her and knelt beside her. ‘You’ll tell me, won’t you? How it was done.’
“ ‘Is this what you truly want to know?’ I asked, searching her face. ‘Or is it why it was done to you… and what you were before? I don’t understand what you mean by “how,” for if you mean how was it done so that you in turn may do it…’
“ ‘I don’t even know what it is. What you’re saying,’ she said with a touch of coldness. Then she turned full around and put her hands on my face. ‘Kill with me tonight,’ she whispered as sensuously as a lover. ‘And tell me all that you know. What are we? Why are we not like them?’ She looked down into the street.
“ ‘I don’t know the answers to your questions,’ I said to her. Her face contorted suddenly, as if she were straining to hear me over a sudden noise. And then she shook her head. But I went on. ‘I wonder the same things you wonder. I do not know. How I was made, I’ll tell you that… that Lestat did it to me. But the real “how” of it, I don’t know!’ Her face had that same look of strain. I was seeing in it the first traces of fear, or something worse and deeper than fear. ‘Claudia,’ I said to her, putting my hands over her hands and pressing them gently against my skin. ‘Lestat has one wise thing to tell you. Don’t ask these questions. You’ve been my companion for countless years in my search for all that I could learn of mortal life and mortal creation. Don’t be my companion now in this anxiety. He can’t give us the answers. And I have none.’
“I could see she could not accept this, but I hadn’t expected the convulsive turning away, the violence with which she tore at her own hair for an instant and then stopped as if the gesture were useless, stupid. It filled me with apprehension. She was looking at the sky. It was smoky, starless, the clouds blowing fast from the direction of the river. She made a sudden movement of her lips as if she’d bitten into them, then she turned to me and, still whispering, she said, ‘Then he made me… he did it… you did not!’ There was something so dreadful about her expression, I’d left her before I meant to do it. I was standing before the fireplace lighting a single candle in front of the tall mirror. And there suddenly, I saw something which startled me, gathering out of the gloom first as a hideous mask, then becoming its three-dimensional reality: a weathered skull. I stared at it. It smelled faintly of the earth still, but had been scrubbed. ‘Why don’t you answer me?’ she was asking. I heard Lestat’s door open. He would go out to kill at once, at least to find the kill. I would not.
“I would let the first hours of the evening accumulate in quiet, as hunger accumulated in me, till the drive grew almost too strong, so that I might give myself to it all the more completely, blindly. I heard her question again clearly, as though it had been floating in the air like the reverberation of a bell… and felt my heart pounding. ‘He did make me, of course! He said so himself. But you hide something from me. Something he hints at when I question him. He says that it could not have been done without you!’
“I found myself staring at the skull, yet hearing her as if the words were lashing me, lashing me to make me turn around and face the lash. The thought went through me more like a flash of cold than a thought, that nothing should remain of me now but such a skull. I turned around and saw in the light from the street her eyes, like two dark flames in her white face. A doll from whom someone had cruelly ripped the eyes and replaced them with a demonic fire. I found myself moving towards her, whispering her name, some thought forming on my lips, then dying, coming towards her, then away from her, fussing for her coat and her hat. I saw a tiny glove on the door which was phosphorescent in the shadows, and for just a moment I thought it a tiny, severed hand.
“ ‘What’s the matter with you…?’ She drew nearer, looking up into my face. ‘What has always been the matter? Why do you stare at the skull like that, at the glove?’ She asked this gently, but… not gently enough.
“There was a slight calculation in her voice, an unreachable detachment.
“ ‘I need you,’ I said to her, without wanting to say it. ‘I cannot bear to lose you. You’re the only companion I have in immortality.’
“ ‘But surely there must be others! Surely we are not the only vampires on earths.’ I heard her saying it as I had said it, heard my own words coming back to me now on the tide of her self-awareness, her searching. But there’s no pain, I thought suddenly. There’s urgency, heartless urgency. I looked down at her. ‘Aren’t you the same as I?’ She looked at me. ‘You’ve taught me all I know!’
“ ‘Lestat taught you to kill.’ I fetched the glove. ‘here, come… let’s go out. I want to go out…’
I was stammering, trying to force the gloves on her. I lifted the great curly mass of her hair and placed it gently over her coat. ‘But you taught me to see!’ she said. ‘You taught me the words vampire eyes,’ she said. ‘You taught me to drink the world, to hunger for more than…’
“ ‘I never meant those words that way, vampire eyes,’ I said to her. ‘It has a different ring when you say it…’ She was tugging at me, trying to make me look at her. ‘Come,’ I said to her, ‘I’ve something to show you…’ And quickly I led her down the passage and down the spiral stairs through the dark courtyard. But I no more knew what I had to show her, really, than I knew where I was going. Only that I had to move toward it with a sublime and doomed instinct.
“We rushed through the early evening city, the sky overhead a pale violet now that the clouds were gone, the stars small and faint, the air around us sultry and fragrant even as we moved away from the spacious gardens, towards those mean and narrow streets where the flowers erupt in the cracks of the stones, and the huge oleander shoots out thick, waxen stems of white and pink blooms, like a monstrous weed in the empty lots. I heard the staccato of Claudia’s steps as she rushed beside me, never once asking me to slacken my pace; and she stood finally, her face infinitely patient, looking up at me in a dark and narrow street where a few old slope-roofed French houses remained among the Spanish facades, ancient little houses, the plaster blistered from the moldering brick beneath. I had found the house now by a blind effort, aware that I had always known where it was and avoided it, always turned before this dark lampless corner, not wishing to pass the low window where I’d first heard Claudia cry. The house was standing still. Sunk lower than it was in those days, the alley way crisscrossed with sagging cords of laundry, the weeds high along the low foundation, the two dormer windows broken and patched with cloth. I touched the shutters. ‘It was here I first saw you,’ I said to her, thinking to tell it to her so she would understand, yet feeling now the chill of her gaze, the distance of her stare. ‘I heard you crying. You were there in a room with your mother. And your mother was dead. Dead for days, and you didn’t know. You clung to her, whining, crying pitifully, your body white and feverish and hungry. You were trying to wake her from the dead, you were hugging her for warmth, for fear. It was almost morning and…’