Blackwood Farm (The Vampire Chronicles 9)

"I was deliciously drowsy when suddenly I realized Pops was in this room. Pops was standing at the foot of the bed.

"Pops started to talk to me in his dull, flat voice:

" 'All your life you've talked of ghosts and spirits, of Goblin, and seeing shades down there in the cemetery, and now this thing has come either into our house or into your imagination, I honestly don't know which. But you have got to fight for your mind. You have got to fight for some direction of your brilliance, you, at the age of eighteen, have got to determine some ambition, and that ambition must never be clouded by these ghosts. ¡¯

"I sat up out of respect for him, and he went on.

" 'I'm angry,' he said. 'I'm real angry that you nearly burnt down this house. But I don't know what to make of what happened to you, and as angry as I am I'm convinced that something clouded your reason because you love Blackwood Farm as much as I do. ¡¯

"I said at once that this was true.

" 'Well, you get your mind in order, you hear me?' he went on. 'And in the meantime, put this woman's cameos back in her trunk. Close that trunk. Shut it up tight. That trunk is Pandora's Box. You let her spirit out when you opened it, so put everything you took out of it back. ¡¯

"He paused for a moment, and then he turned and stared at me with his wan expression and his pale face.

" 'I've given you all I can give you,' he said. 'I don't have anything more to teach you. Lynelle taught things that I could never teach you. She was better than school, I don't argue with it. But you're wasting your time now. You're wasting everything. And I know perfectly well that

you won't go to any college right now, and maybe even at age eighteen that's not the right thing. But Aunt Queen has got to come home and she's got to find you a new teacher and she's got to take you on. ¡¯

"I nodded. Aunt Queen wasn't terribly far away at this time. She was attending a seminar in Barbados, and I knew that Pops would call her and that she'd be coming home. I hated it, hated that he would interrupt her, but after what had happened she'd definitely be called home.

"Pops stared at me for a long time, and then he went out of my room.

"I felt a dull shock because in all the years I had lived with Pops he had never spoken that many words to me at any one time. Also I had seen that he was weak and washed out, and no longer the hale and hearty individual that he had always been.

"That I had caused him worry upset me something fierce.

"I went down to the parlor and I got the cameos out of the display case which I had taken from the trunk. I brought them up to my room, and I resolved that tomorrow by daylight, I'd go up to the attic and put them back. Maybe. Maybe not. After all, the ghost hadn't said anything to me about opening her trunk.

"Again I fell into a doze, and there was a delightful wicked sense of Rebecca being there. Just a thing for pleasure, that's all I ever was, Quinn. That's what I'll be to you, Quinn. This is the time, Quinn, just a thing of pleasure, that's all I ever wanted to be. Somebody's jewel, somebody's ornament, somebody's pet, who knows?

"Sometime very late Big Ramona came and roused me and told me to dress for bed. I did what she told me, and when I came out of the bathroom in my long flannel nightshirt, she looked at me and said:

" 'You're too old for me to be sleeping with you. ¡¯

" 'That's not true,' I protested at once. 'I don't want that ghost coming back. I don't want that -- what happened. If I need that, I'll take care of that somewhere else. I need you to sleep with me,' I said. 'Come on, let's say our prayers. ¡¯

"And we did, and we hugged each other close as we slept, and I slept so deep that there seemed no dreams to it, only deep deep rest until the morning light astonished me coming through the windows and spilling into the room.

"It was early, hours before my usual lazy adolescent time, but I got up quietly, taking great pains not to wake Big Ramona, and I dressed in my jeans and boots and got my heavy garden gloves and my rifle and my hunting knife, and, stopping silently in the kitchen to get a big knife -- the very knife that Patsy had waved at Pops -- I stole out of the house down towards the landing and the pirogue tied there.

"The little cemetery was bleak in the sunshine and overgrown with weeds, and somewhere in the back of my distracted mind I knew that Pops in the natural course of things would never have let it get that way, and that he was not himself anymore; that grief was bringing real harm to Pops, and I had to do something about those weeds. I had to clean up the tombs. I had to take care of more things. I had to take care of Pops too.

"I also knew that Goblin was near me but not showing himself, and I knew that Goblin was afraid.

"I didn't care about Goblin, and I thought perhaps that Goblin knew that too.

"As I look back on it now, I know that he knew it. He knew that once he had been the central mystery of my life and that he was that no longer -- Rebecca had taken his place -- and he was hanging back, weakened by my indifference and full of a panic which perhaps he had learned to feel from me.

"My heart was set on finding Sugar Devil Island, and so, with the pole in hand I pushed away from the bank and set out into the swamp. "

Chapter11

Chapter 11

11

"NOW, I HAD BEEN in the swamp plenty as a youngster. I knew how to fire the rifle. I knew how to fish. And Pops and I had ranged quite far from the banks of the farm. But there was a territory to which we adhered, and it had always seemed spacious enough for us because we caught lots of fish in it, and the swamp itself seemed so unvarying in its morass of cypress, tupelo gum and wild oak, its giant palmetto and endless snags of vine.