Merrick by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online

body, not when I didn’t understand what life held for me. I couldn’t. And then, then it was too late.”
    She raised her eyebrows and made a little doubting gesture with her head. She sipped the rum.
    “I understand,” she said.
    “Thank God,” I answered. “In time, Aaron would have told you about the body switching,” I insisted. “I know he would have. The story of my death was never meant for you.”
    She nodded, holding back the first response that came to her tongue.
    “I think you have to file those papers of Aaron’s,” I said. “You have to file them directly with the Elders and no one else. Forget the Superior General of the moment.”
    “Stop it, David,” she responded. “You know it is much easier to argue with you now that you are in the body of a very young man.”
    “You never had difficulty arguing with me, Merrick,” I retorted. “Don’t you think Aaron would have filed the papers, had he lived?”
    “Maybe,” she said, “and maybe not. Maybe Aaron would have wanted more that you be left to your destiny. Maybe Aaron wanted more that whatever you had become, you’d be left alone.”
    I wasn’t sure what she was saying. The Talamasca was so passive, so reticent, so downright unwilling in interfere in anyone’s destiny, I couldn’t figure what she meant.
    She shrugged, took another sip of rum, and rolled the rim of the glass against her lower lip.
    “Maybe it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I only know that Aaron never filed the pages himself.” She went on speaking:
    “The night after he was killed I went down to his house on Esplanade Avenue. You know he married a white Mayfair, not a witch by the way, but a resilient and generous woman—Beatrice Mayfair is her name, she’s still living—and at her invitation I took the papers marked ‘Talamasca.’ She didn’t even know what they contained.
    “She told me Aaron had once given her my name. If anything happened, she was to call me, and so she’d done her duty. Besides, she couldn’t read the documents. They were all in Latin, you know, Talamasca old style.
    “There were several files, and my name and number were written on the front of each, in Aaron’s hand. One file was entirely devoted to you, though only the initial, D, was used throughout. The papers on you, I translated into English. No one’s ever seen them. No one,” she said with emphasis. “But I know them almost word for word.”
    It seemed a comfort suddenly to hear her speaking of these things, these secret Talamasca things, which had once been our stock in trade. Yes, a comfort, as if the warm presence of Aaron were actually with us again.
    She stopped for another sip of the rum.
    “I feel you ought to know these things,” she said. “We never kept anything from each other, you and I. Not that I knew of, but then of course my work was in the study of magic, and I did roam far and wide.”
    “How much did Aaron know?” I asked. I thought my eyes were tearing. I was humiliated. But I wanted her to go on. “I never saw Aaron after the vampiric metamorphosis,” I confessed dully. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Can you guess why?” I felt a sharp increase in mental pain and confusion. My grief for Aaron would never go away, and I’d endured it for years without a word to either of my vampire companions, Louis or Lestat.
    “No,” she said. “I can’t guess why. I can tell you . . .,” and here she hesitated politely so that I might stop her, but I did not. “I can tell you that he was disappointed and forgiving to the end.”
    I bowed my head. I pressed my forehead into my cold hand.
    “By his own account he prayed each day that you would come to him,” she explained slowly, “that he’d have a chance for one last conversation with you—about all you’d endured together and what had finally occurred to drive you apart.”
    I must have winced. I deserved the misery, however, deserved it more than she could know. It had been