Chapter 46 Just expand yourself
what blood he could until he came to the shacks of those immigrants or those scattered country houses. And what a spectacle he must have been!' She gazed at the hanging lamp, her eyes narrow, her voice muted, without emotion. \`And then what did he do? It's clear to me. If he could not have gotten back to New Orleans in time, he could most definitely have reached the Old Bayou cemetery. The charity hospital feeds it fresh coffins every day. And I can see him clawing his way through the moist earth for such a coffin, dumping the fresh contents out in the swamps, and securing himself until the next nightfall in that shallow grave where no manner of man would be wont to disturb him. Yes . . . that is what he did, I'm certain.'
"I thought of this for a long time, picturing it, seeing that it must have happened. And then I heard her add thoughtfully, as she laid down her card and looked at the oval face of a white-coiffed king, \`I could have done it.
" \`And why do you look that way at me?' she asked, gathering up her cards, her small fingers struggling to make a neat pack of them and then to shuffle them.
" \`But you do believe . . . that had we burned his remains he would have died?' I asked.
" \`Of course I believe it. If there is nothing to rise, there is nothing to rise. What are you driving at?' She was dealing out the cards now, dealing a hand for me on the small oak table. I looked at the cards, but I did not touch them.
" \`I don't know . . : I whispered to her. \`Only that perhaps there was no will to live, no tenacity . . . because very simply there was no need of either.'
"Her eyes gazed at me steadily, giving no hint of her thoughts or that she understood mine.
" \`Because perhaps he was incapable of dying . . . perhaps he is, and we are . . . truly immortal?'
"For a longtime she sat there looking at me.
" \`Consciousness in that state . . : I finally added, as I looked away from her. \`If it were so, then mightn't there be consciousness in any other? Fire, sunlight . . . what does it matter?'
" \`Louis,' she said, her voice soft. \`You're afraid. You don't stand en garde against fear. You don't understand the danger of fear itself. We'll know these answers when we find those who can tell us, those who've possessed knowledge for centuries, for however long creatures such as ourselves have walked the earth. That knowledge was our birthright, and he deprived us. He earned his death.'
" 'But he didn't die . . .' I said.
" \`He's dead,' she said. \`No one could have escaped that house unless they'd run with us, at our very side. No. He's dead, and so is that trembling aesthete, his friend.
Consciou
sness, what does it matter?'
"She gathered up the cards and put them aside, gesturing for me to hand her the books from the table beside the bunk, those books which she'd unpacked immediately on board, the few select records of vampire lore which she'd taken to be her guides. They included no wild romances from England, no stories of Edgar Allan Poe, no fancy.
Only those few accounts of the vampires of eastern Europe, which had become for her a sort of Bible. In those countries indeed they did burn the remains of the vampire when they found him, and the heart was staked and the head severed. She would read these now for hours, these ancient books which had been read and reread before they ever found their way across the Atlantic; they were travelers' tales, the accounts of priests and scholars. And she would plan our trip, not with the need of any pen or paper, only in her mind. A trip that would take us at once away from the glittering
capitals of Europe towards the Black Sea, where we would dock at Varna and begin that search in the rural countryside of the Carpathians.
"For me it was a grim prospect, bound as I was to it, for there were longings in me for other places and other knowledge which Claudia did not begin to comprehend. Seeds of these longings had been planted in me years ago, seeds which came to bitter flower as our ship passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
"I wanted those waters to be blue. And they were not. They were the nighttime waters, and how I suffered then, straining to remember the seas that a young man's untutored senses had taken for granted, that an undisciplined memory had let slip away for eternity. The Mediterranean was black, black off the coast of Italy, black off the coast of Greece, black always, black when in the small cold hours before dawn, as even Claudia slept, weary of her books and the meager fare that caution allowed her vampire hunger, I lowered a lantern down, down through the rising vapor until the fire blazed right over the lapping waters; and nothing came to light on that heaving surface but the light itself, the reflection of that beam traveling constant with me, a steady eye which seemed to fix on me from the depths and say, \`Louis, your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths.
Men's treasures are not yours.'
"But oh, how the quest for the Old World vampires filled me with bitterness in those moments, a bitterness I could all but taste, as if the very air had lost its freshness. For what secrets, what truths had those monstrous creatures of night to give us? What, of necessity, must be their terrible limits, if indeed we were to find them at all? What can the damned really say to the damned?
"I never stepped ashore at Piraeus. Yet in my mind I roamed the Acropolis at Athens, watching the moon rise through the open roof of the Parthenon, measuring my height by the grandeur of those columns, walking the streets of those Greeks who died at Marathon, listening to the sound of wind in the ancient olives.