"I see your meaning," he said. "You're warning me that this woman can do things that will baffle us as easily as they might baffle mortal men."
"Yes, that is my intent here, partly," I answered. "However, Merrick may do more than simply baffle us, you understand me. We must approach Merrick and what she will do with the utmost respect."
"I do understand you," he said. "But if human beings have souls that survive death, souls that can manifest as spirits to the living, then human beings have magical components as well."
"Yes, a magical component, and you and I still possess this magical component, along with some additional vampiric component, but when a soul truly leaves its physical body? Then it is in the realm of God."
"You believe in God," he murmured, quite amazed.
"Yes, I think so," I answered. "Indeed, I know so. What's the point of hiding it as if it were an unsophisticated or foolish frame of mind?"
"Then you do indeed have great respect for Merrick and her magic," he said. "And you believe that Great Nananne, as you call her, might be a very powerful spirit indeed."
"Precisely," I said.
He settled back in the chair, and his eyes moved back and forth a little too rapidly. He was quite excited by all I'd told him, but his general disposition was one of profound sorrow, and nothing made him look happy or glad.
"Great Nananne might be dangerous, that's what you're saying," he murmured. "Great Nananne might want to protect Merrick from ... you and me."
He looked rather splendid in his sorrow. Again he made me think of the paintings of Andrea del Sarto. There was something lush in his beauty, for all the sharp and clear well-drawn lines of his eyes and mouth.
"I don't expect my faith to make a particle of difference to you," I said. "But I want to emphasize these feelings, because this Voodoo, this matter of spirits, is indeed a dangerous thing."
He was perturbed but hardly frightened, perhaps not even cautious. I wanted to say more. I wanted to tell him of my experiences in Brazil, but it wasn't the time or place.
"But David, on the matter of ghosts," he said finally, again maintaining a respectful tone, "surely there are all kinds of ghosts."
"Yes, I think I know what you mean," I responded.
"Well, this Great Nananne, if indeed she appeared of her own volition, from where precisely did she come?"
"We can't expect to know that, Louis, about any ghost."
"Well surely some ghosts are manifestations of earthbound spirits, don't students of the occult maintain this truth?"
"They do."
"If these ghosts are the spirits of the dead who are earthbound, how can we say they are purely magical? Aren't they still within the atmosphere? Aren't they struggling to reach the living? Aren't they divorced from God? How else can one interpret Claudia's haunting of Jesse? If it was Claudia, then Claudia has not gone on into a purely spiritual realm. Claudia is not a partaker of the laws beyond us. Claudia is not at peace."
"Ah, I see," I answered. "So that is why you want to attempt the ritual." I felt foolish for not having seen it all along.
"You believe that Claudia's suffering."
"I think it's entirely possible," he said, "if Claudia did appear to Jesse as Jesse seemed to think." He looked miserable.
"And frankly, I hope that we can't rouse Claudia's spirit. I hope that Merrick's power doesn't work. I hope that if Claudia had an immortal soul, that soul has gone to God. I hope for things in which I can't believe."
"So this is why the story of Claudia's ghost has so tormented you. You don't want to speak to her. You want to know that she's at peace."
"Yes, I want to do this thing because she may be a restless and tormented spirit. I can't know from the stories of others. I myself have never been haunted, David. As I've told you, I have never heard this harpsichord music, nor the singing of caged birds here. I have never witnessed anything to indicate that Claudia exists anywhere in any form any longer at all. I want to try to reach Claudia so that I will know."
This confession had cost him dearly, and he sat back again and looked away, perhaps into some private corner of his soul.
Finally, his eyes still fixed on some invisible spot in the shadows, he spoke:
"If only I had seen her, I could make some assessment, no matter how poor that assessment might be. I tell myself no vagrant spirit could ever fool me into believing it was Claudia, but I've never seen a vagrant spirit, either. I have never seen anything like it. I have only Jesse's story of what happened, which Jesse herself sought to soften on account of my feelings, and of course Lestat's ramblings, that he was sure Claudia came to him, that past experiences quite literally engulfed him when he was suffering his adventures with the Body Thief."
"Yes, I've heard him talk of it."
"But with Lestat, one never knows . . ." he said. "Lestat may have been characterizing his conscience in those stories. I don't know. What I do know is that I want desperately for Merrick Mayfair to try to raise Claudia's spirit, and I'm prepared for whatever might come."
"You think you're prepared," I said hastily, perhaps unfairly.
"Oh, I know. The spell tonight has shaken you."
"You can't imagine," I said.
"Very well, I admit it. I can't imagine. But tell me this. You speak of a realm beyond the earth and that Merrick is magical when she reaches for it. But why does it involve blood? Surely her spells will involve blood." He went on, a little angrily. "Voodoo almost always involves blood," he averred. "You speak of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as magical, and I understand you, because if the Bread and Wine are transformed into the Holy Sacrifice of the Crucifixion, it is magical, but why does it involve blood? We are earthly beings, yes, but a small component of us is magical, and why does that component demand blood?"
He became quite heated as he finished, his eyes fixing on me severely almost, though I knew his emotions had little to do with me.
"What I'm saying is, we might compare rituals the world over in all religions and all systems of magic, forever, but they always involve blood. Why? Of course I know that human beings can not live without blood; I know that 'the blood is the life,' saith Dracula; I know that humankind speaks in cries and whispers of blood-drenched altars, of bloodshed and blood kin, and blood will have blood, and those of the finest blood. But why? What is the quintessential connection that binds all such wisdom or superstition? And above all, why does God want blood?"
I was taken aback. Surely I wasn't going to hazard a hasty answer. And I didn't have one, besides. His question went too deep. Blood was essential to Candomble. It was essential to real Voodoo as well.
He went on:
"I don't speak of your God in particular," he said kindly, "but the God of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass has demanded blood, and indeed the Crucifixion has come down to us as one of the most renowned blood sacrifices of all time. But what of all the other gods, the gods of old Rome for whom blood had to be shed in the arena as well as on the altar, or the gods of the Aztecs who were still demanding bloody murder as the price of running the universe when the Spanish arrived on their shores?"
"Maybe we're asking the wrong question," I said finally. "Maybe blood does not matter to the gods. Maybe blood matters to us. Maybe we've made it the vehicle of Divine transmission. Maybe that's something which the world can move beyond."
"Hmmm, it's not a mere anachronism," he said. "It's a genuine mystery. Why should the natives of ancient South America have but one word in their language for both flowers and blood?"
He rose from the chair again, looking altogether restless, and went to the window once more and looked out through the lace.
"I have my dreams," he said in a whisper. "I dream she will come, and she will tell me that she is at peace and she will show me the courage to do what I must do."
These words saddened and disturbed me.
"The Everlasting has not fixed his canon against my self-slaughter," he said, paraphrasing Shakespeare, "because all I need do to accomplish it is not seek shelter at the rising of the sun. I dream she may warn me of hellfires and of the need for repentance. But then, this is a little miracle play, isn't it? If she comes, she may be groping in darkness. She may be lost among the wandering dead souls whom Lestat saw when he traveled out of this world."
"Absolutely anything is possible," I answered.
A long interval occurred during which I went quietly up to him and laid my hand on his shoulder, to let him know in my way that I respected his pain. He didn't acknowledge this tiny intimacy. I made my way back to the sofa and I waited. I had no intention of leaving him with such thoughts in his mind.
At last he turned around.
"Wait here," he said quietly, and then he went out of the room and down the passage. I heard him open a door. Within a brief moment he was back again with what appeared to be a small antique photograph in his hand. I was immensely excited. Could it be what I thought?
I recognized the small black gutter perche case into which it was fitted, so like the ones that framed the daguerreotypes belonging to Merrick. It appeared intricate and well preserved.
He opened the case and looked at the image, and then he spoke:
"You mentioned those family photographs of our dearly beloved witch," he said reverently. "You asked if they were not vehicles for guardian souls."
"Yes, I did. As I told you, I could have sworn those little pictures were looking at Aaron and at me."
"And you mentioned that you could not imagine what it had meant to us to see daguerreotypes—or whatever they might be called—for the first time so many years ago."
I was filled with a sort of amazement as I listened to him. He had been there. He had been alive and a witness. He had moved from the world of painted portraits to that of photographic images. He had drifted through those decades and was alive now in our time.
"Think of mirrors," he said, "to which everyone is accustomed. Think of the reflection suddenly frozen forever. That is how it was. Except the color was gone from it, utterly gone, and there lay the horror, if there was one; but you see, no one thought it was so remarkable, not while it was happening, and then it was so common. We didn't really appreciate such a miracle. It went popular too very fast. And of course when it first started, when they first set up their studios, it was not for us."
"For us?"
"David, it had to be done in daylight, don't you see? The first photographs belonged to mortals alone."
"Of course, I didn't even think of it."
"She hated it," he said. He looked again at the image. "And one night, unbeknownst to me, she broke the lock of one of the new studios—and there were many of them—and she stole all the pictures she could find. She broke them, smashed them in a fury. She said it was ghastly that we couldn't have our pictures made. 'Yes, we see ourselves in mirrors, and old tales would have it not,' she screamed at me. 'But what about this mirror? Is this not some threat of judgment?' I told her absolutely it was not.