Page 187

"Your mother, she's headed there also," said Merrick. "She wants to leave, however. Try to keep her. We have to talk to her. Tell her that we have to talk to her. Use any means you can to keep her there. "

"But why?" I asked.

"When we get together," said Merrick, "you'll understand. "

The limousine was waiting for me. And so were Tommy, Patsy, Big Ramona, Nash, Jasmine and Clem.

I glanced back once at the coffin and the mortuary personnel and the cemetery workers as they prepared the crypt -- just what they had not wanted us to see -- and then I went back to take two red roses from the bank of flowers, and, glancing up, I saw Goblin.

He stood at the very door of the mausoleum. He was dressed as I was, in a black suit, and his hair was like mine, full but trimmed, and he stared at me with wild, sparkling eyes, and all through him, solid though he was, I could see an intricate web of blood, as it infected all that made up the illusion. The image remained for one second, perhaps two, and then winked out as though it had been a flame.

I shuddered. I felt the breeze. The emptiness.

Taking the two roses with me, I got into the car and we headed for Blackwood Manor.

Patsy cried all the way. "I haven't been right up to that damn tomb in all these years," she kept saying. "And we have to come in the middle of the night on account of Quinn, little Quinn, how fitting, little Quinn!"

"You didn't have to come," said Big Ramona. "Now shush, you're making yourself sick. "

"Oh, damn you, damn you all, what do you know about sick?"

And so on it went for the long ride home.

By the time we reached the house my anxious hands had involuntarily crushed both roses into wanton petals.

Chapter47

47

PATSY WAS in the front bedroom across from mine, and as soon as we reached home, Cindy, our beloved nurse, went up to attend to her, to make certain she had taken her medicines and to give her some sort of mild tranquilizer. She was soon in an official Blackwood Manor flannel nightgown with no intentions of going anywhere, though when she saw me pass the door to my room she screamed at me that I had made her nauseated by dragging us all to the cemetery "at midnight. "

It was not yet midnight.

As for Goblin, everyone knew the danger. I did not have to tell Jasmine and Clem to look after Jerome, or tell Nash to keep his eye close on Tommy. Everyone knew what Goblin had done to Aunt Queen. Even Patsy believed it and Big Ramona was now her companion and guardian.

No one was to climb the staircase alone. No one was to react with panic to the breaking of glass. Everybody was to remain within the house, in pairs or threes, including me, who had my "two friends" visiting in my private parlor.

And they were waiting for me just as they had promised. We clustered around the center table, Merrick, Lestat and I, and Merrick, a tall, very lean woman with almond-colored skin and full dark hair, who had taken off her white scarf and her big glasses, immediately began to talk.

"This creature, this ghost that's haunting you, he's related to you by blood, and the connection is more than important. "

"But how can that be?" I said. "I've always believed him to be a spirit. I've been haunted by ghosts. They declare who they are. They have histories; they have patterns. "

"He has a history and a pattern too, believe me. "

"But what is it?" I asked.

"You have no idea?" she probed, looking me in the eye as if I was concealing something from myself perhaps.

"None whatsoever," I replied. I found it easy to talk to her. I felt she would understand. "He was always with me," I said, "from the beginning. I thought that I created him almost. That I drew him to myself, out of the void, and developed him in my own image. Oh, I know he's made of something. Ether. Astral particles -- some form of matter. Something, yes, something that obeys natural laws. Mona Mayfair explained to me once that such spirits have a nucleus, a kind of heart, and a circulatory system, and I understand that my blood feeds that system now, and that he's becoming stronger and stronger as he draws blood from me after I feed. But I've never had an inkling that he was the ghost of somebody. "

"I saw him in the cemetery," she responded. "Just as you did. "

"You saw him before our crypt? When I went to take the roses?"

"I saw him before that," she said. "He was very strong there. Tarquin, he's your twin. "

"Yes, I know, my absolute doppelg?nger. "