But he was frantic. He wouldn’t listen to me. The flames were finally smothered, but half her face was burnt away and most of her torso and her right arm. It was a dreadful sight. He slit his wrist, he let the thick, viscid blood pour down on her body, but nothing happened. I knew what he wanted to happen. I knew the lore.

“She’s gone,” I said again. “I saw her go. I saw her in the Light. She waved farewell.”

Lestat stood up. He wiped at his blood tears and at the soot on his face. He couldn’t stop crying. I loved him.

We lifted her remains and put them on the altar together. We built up the fire and it wasn’t long before the body was ashes, and we scattered them. And the fire and Merrick’s body were no more.

The humid night was quiet and calm and the cemetery lay in darkness.

Lestat cried.

“She was so young among us,” he said. “It’s always the young ones who end it. The ones for whom mortality holds magic. As we grow older it’s eternity that is our boon.”

CHAPTER 51

51

LESTAT WAS still covered in soot. He didn’t much care about it. We rang the front doorbell of Oak Haven, and it was Stirling himself who answered, in his heavy quilted robe, and perfectly astonished to see the pair of us right there at the Retreat House of the Talamasca—two wanderers in the night.

Of course he invited us into the library and we accepted the invitation, and we settled into the big leather wing chairs that were so comfortably arranged everywhere, and Stirling told the agreeable little housekeeper that we didn’t require anything, and then we were alone.

Slowly, in a broken voice, Lestat told Stirling what had happened to Merrick. He described the ceremony and how Merrick had climbed onto the altar, and what he had seen—the baby come alive, and Goblin descending into it.

And then I told Stirling what I had seen—the Light and the figures moving in the Light. Lestat had not seen this Light but he never doubted me.

“May I put this into our records?” Stirling asked. He took out his handkerchief and wiped at his nose. He was crying inside for Merrick. And then the tears came and he let them flow for a moment and then he wiped them away.