Author: Anne Rice
Year: 1995




"STARTLING . . . FIENDISH . . . MEMNOCH'S TALE IS COMPELLING."
--New York Daily News

"Like Interview with the Vampire, Memnoch has a half-maddened, fever-pitch intensity. . . . Narrated by Rice's most cherished character, the vampire Lestat, Memnoch tells a tale as old as Scripture's legends and as modern as today's religious strife."
--Rolling Stone

"SENSUAL . . . BOLD, FAST-PACED."
--USA Today

"Rice has penned an ambitious close to this long-running series. . . . Fans will no doubt devour this."
--The Washington Post Book World

"MEMNOCH THE DEVIL OFFERS PASSAGES OF POETIC BRILLIANCE."
--Playboy

"[MEMNOCH] is one of Rice's most intriguing and sympathetic characters to date. . . . Rice ups the ante, taking Lestat where few writers have ventured: into heaven and hell itself. She carries it off in top form."
--The Seattle Times

Prologue

Lestat here. You know who I am? Then skip the next few paragraphs. For those whom
I have not met before, I want this to be love at first sight.
Behold: your hero for the duration, a perfect imitation of a blond, blue-eyed, six-foot
Anglo-Saxon male. A vampire, and one of the strongest you’ll ever encounter. My
fangs are too small to be noticed unless I want them to be; but they’re very sharp, and
I cannot go for more than a few hours without wanting human blood.
Of course, I don’t need it that often. And just how often I do need it, I don’t know,
because I’ve never put it to the test.
I’m monstrously strong. I can take to the air. I can hear people talking on the other
side of the city or even the globe. I can read minds; I can bind with spells.
I’m immortal. I’ve been virtually ageless since 1789.
Am I unique? By no means. There are some twenty other vampires in the world of
whom I know. Half of these I know intimately; one half of those I love.
Add to this twenty a good two hundred vagabonds and strangers of whom I know
nothing but now and then hear something; and for good measure another thousand
secretive immortals, roaming about in human guise.
Men, women, children—any human being can become a vampire. All it takes is a
vampire willing to bring you into it, to suck out most of your blood, and then let you
take it back, mixed with his or her own. It’s not all that simple; but if you survive,
you’ll live forever. While you’re young, you’ll thirst unbearably, probably have to
kill each night. By the time you’re a thousand years old, you’ll look and sound wise,
even if you were a kid when you started, and you will drink and kill because you
cannot resist it, whether you need it anymore or not.
If you live longer than that, and some do, who knows? You’ll get tougher, whiter,
ever more monstrous. You’ll know so much about suffering that you will go through
rapid cycles of cruelty and kindness, insight and maniacal blindness. You’ll probably
go mad. Then you’ll be sane again. Then you may forget who you are.
I myself combine the best of vampiric youth and old age. Only two hundred years old,
I have been for various reasons granted the strength of the ancients. I have a modern
sensibility but a dead aristocrat’s impeccable taste. I know exactly who I am. I am
rich. I am beautiful. I can see my reflection in mirrors. And in shopwindows. I love to
sing and to dance.
What do I do? Anything that I please.
Think about it. Is it enough to make you want to read my story?
Have you perhaps read my stories of the vampires before?
Here’s the catch: it doesn’t matter here that I’m a vampire. It is not central to the tale.
It’s just a given, like my innocent smile and soft, purring French-accented voice and
graceful way of sauntering down the street. It comes with the package. But what
happened here could have happened to a human being; indeed, it surely has happened
to humans, and it will happen to them again.
We have souls, you and I.
We want to know things; we share the same earth, rich and verdant and fraught with
perils. We don’t either of us know what it means to die, no matter what we might say
to the contrary. It’s a cinch that if we did, I wouldn’t be writing and you wouldn’t be
reading this book.
What does matter very much, as we go into this story together, is that I have set for
myself the task of being a herb in this world. I maintain myself as morally complex,
spiritually tough, and aesthetically relevant a being of blazing insight and impact, a
guy with things to say to you.
So if you read this, read it for that reason that Lestat is talking again, that he is
frightened, that he is searching desperately for the lesson and for the song and for the
raison d’etre, that he wants to understand his own story and he wants you to
understand it, and that it is the very best story he has right now to tell. If that’s not
enough, read something else.
If it is, then read on. In chains, to my friend and my scribe, I dictated these words.
Come with me. Just listen to me. Don’t leave me alone.

Chapter One

I saw him when he came through the front doors. Tall, solidly built, dark brown hair
and eyes, skin still fairly dark because it had been dark when I’d made him a vampire.
Walking a little too fast, but basically passing for a human being. My beloved David.
I was on the stairway. The grand stairway, one might say. It was one of those very
opulent old hotels, divinely overdone, full of crimson and gold, and rather pleasant.
My Victim had picked it. I hadn’t. My victim was dining with his daughter. And I’d
picked up from my victim’s mind that this was where he always met his daughter in
New York, for the simple reason that St. Patrick’s Cathedral was across the street.
David saw me at once a slouching, blond, long-haired youth, bronze face and hands,
the usual deep violet sunglasses over my eyes, hair presentably combed for once,
body tricked out in a dark-blue, doubled-breasted Brooks Brothers suit.
I saw him smile before he could stop himself. He knew my vanity, and he probably
knew that in the early nineties of the twentieth century, Italian fashion had flooded the
market with so much shapeless, hangy, bulky, formless attire that one of the most
erotic and flattering garments a man could choose was the well-tailored navy-blue
Brooks Brothers suit.
Besides, a mop of flowing hair and expert tailoring are always a potent combination.
Who knows that better than I?
I didn’t mean to harp on the clothes! To hell with the clothes. It’s just I was so proud
of myself for being spiffed up and full of gorgeous contradictions a picture of long
locks, the impeccable tailoring, and a regal manner of slumping against the railing and
sort of blocking stairs.
He came up to me at once. He smelled like the deep winter out-side where people
were slipping in the frozen streets, and snow had turned to filth in the gutters. His face
had the subtle preternatural gleam which only I could detect, and love, and properly
appreciate, and eventually kiss.
We walked together onto the carpeted mezzanine.
Momentarily, I hated it that he was two inches taller than me. But I was so glad to see
him, so glad to be near him. And it was warm in here, and shadowy and vast, one of
the places where people do not stare at others.
“You’ve come,” I said. “I didn’t think you would.”
“Of course,” he scolded, the gracious British accent breaking softly from the young
dark face, giving me the usual shock. This was an old man in a young man’s body,
recently made a vampire, and by me, one of the most powerful of our remaining kind.
“What did you expect?” he said, tete-a-tete. “Armand told me you were calling me.
Maharet told me."
"Ah, that answers my first question." I wanted to kiss him, and suddenly I did put out
my arms, rather tentatively and politely so that he could get away if he wanted, and
when he let me hug him, when he returned the warmth, I felt a happiness I hadn't
experienced in months.
Perhaps I hadn't experienced it since I had left him, with Louis. We had been in some
nameless jungle place, the three of us, when we agreed to part, and that had been a
year ago.
"Your first question?" he asked, peering at me very closely, sizing me up perhaps,
doing everything a vampire can do to measure the mood and mind of his maker,
because a vampire cannot read his maker's mind, any more than the maker can read
the mind of the fledgling.
And there we stood divided, laden with preternatural gifts, both fit and rather full of
emotion, and unable to communicate except in the simplest and best way, perhaps
with words.
"My first question," I began to explain, to answer, "was simply going to be: Where
have you been, and have you found the others, and did they try to hurt you? All that
rot, you know how I broke the rules when I made you, et cetera."
"All that rot," he mocked me, the French accent I still possessed, now coupled with
something definitely American. "What rot."
"Come on," I said. "Let's go into the bar there and talk. Obviously no one has done
anything to you. I didn't think they could or they would, or that they'd dare. I wouldn't
have let you slip off into the world if I'd thought you were in danger."
He smiled, his brown eyes full of gold light for just an instant.
"Didn't you tell me this twenty-five times, more or less, before we parted company?"
We found a small table, cleaving to the wall. The place was half crowded, the perfect
proportion exactly. What did we look like? A couple of young men on the make for
mortal men or women? I don't care.
"No one has harmed me," he said, "and no one has shown the slightest interest in it."
Someone was playing a piano, very tenderly for a hotel bar, I thought. And it was
something by Erik Satie. What luck.
"The tie," he said, leaning forward, white teeth flashing, fangs completely hidden, of
course. "This, this big mass of silk around your neck! This is not Brooks Brothers!"
He gave a soft teasing laugh. "Look at you, and the wing-tip shoes! My, my. What's
going on in your mind? And what is this all about?"
The bartender threw a hefty shadow over the small table, and murmured predictable
phrases that were lost to me in my excitement and in the noise.
"Something hot," David said. It didn't surprise me. "You know, rum punch or some
such, whatever you can heat up."
I nodded and made a little gesture to the indifferent fellow that I would take the same
thing.
Vampires always order hot drinks. They aren't going to drink them; but they can feel
the warmth and smell them if they're hot, and that is so good.
David looked at me again. Or rather this familiar body with David inside looked at
me. Because for me, David would always be the elderly human I'd known and
treasured, as well as this magnificent burnished shell of stolen flesh that was slowly
being shaped by his expressions and manner and mood.
Dear Reader, he switched human bodies before I made him a vampire, worry no more.
It has nothing to do with this story.
"Something's following you again?" he asked. "This is what Armand told me. So did
Jesse."
"Where did you see them?"
"Armand?" he asked. "A complete accident. In Paris. He was just walking on the
street. He was the first one I saw."
"He didn't make any move to hurt you?"
"Why would he? Why were you calling to me? Who's stalking you? What is all this?"
"And you've been with Maharet."
He sat back. He shook his head. "Lestat, I have pored over manuscripts such as no
living human has seen in centuries; I have laid my hands on clay tablets that..."
"David, the scholar," I said. "Educated by the Talamasca to be the perfect vampire,
though they never had an inkling that that is what you'd become."
"Oh, but you must understand. Maharet took me to these places where she keeps her
treasures. You have to know what it means to hold in your hands a tablet covered in
symbols that predate cuneiform . And Maharet herself, I might have lived how many
centuries without ever glimpsing her."
Maharet was really the only one he had ever had to fear. I suppose we both knew it.
My memories of Maharet held no menace, only the mystery of a survivor of
Millennia, a living being so ancient that each gesture seemed marble made liquid, and
her soft voice had become the distillation of all human eloquence.
"If she gave you her blessing, nothing else much matters," I said with a little sigh. I
wondered if I myself would ever lay eyes upon her again. I had not hoped for it nor
wanted it.
"I've also seen my beloved Jesse," said David.
"Ah, I should have thought of that, of course."
"I went searching for my beloved Jesse. I went crying out from place to place, just the
way you sent out the wordless cry for me."
Jesse. Pale, bird-boned, red-haired. Twentieth-century born. Highly educated and
psychic as a human. Jesse he had known as a human; Jesse he knew now as an
immortal. Jesse had been his human pupil in the order called the Talamasca. Now he
was the equal of Jesse in beauty and vampiric power, or very near to it. I really did not
know.
Jesse had been brought over by Maharet of the First Brood, born as a human before
humans had begun to write their history at all or barely knew that they had one. The
Elder now, if there was one, the Queen of the Damned was Maharet and her mute
sister, Mekare, of whom no one spoke anymore much at all.
I had never seen a fledgling brought over by one as old as Maharet.
Jesse had seemed a transparent vessel of immense strength when last I saw her. Jesse
must have had her own tales to tell now, her own chronicles and adventures.
I had passed onto David my own vintage blood mixed with a strain even older than
Maharet's. Yes, blood from Akasha, and blood from the ancient Marius, and of course
my own strength was in my blood, and my own strength, as we all knew, was quite
beyond measure.
So he and Jesse must have been grand companions, and what had it meant to her to
see her aged mentor clothed in the fleshly raiment of a young human male?
I was immediately envious and suddenly full of despair. I'd drawn David away from
those willowy white creatures who had drawn him into their sanctuary somewhere far
across the sea, deep in a land where their treasures might be hidden from crisis and
war for generations. Exotic names came to mind, but I could not for the moment think
where they had gone, the two red-haired ones, the one ancient, the one young. And to
their hearth, they had admitted David.
A little sound startled me and I looked over my shoulder. I settled back, embarrassed
to have appeared so anxious, and I focused silently for a moment on my victim.
My Victim was still in the restaurant very near us in this hotel, sitting with his
beautiful daughter. I wouldn't lose him tonight. I was sure enough of that.
I sighed. Enough of him. I'd been following him for months. He was interesting, but
he had nothing to do with all this. Or did he? I might kill him tonight, but I doubted it.
Having spied the daughter, and knowing full well how much the Victim loved her, I
had decided to wait until she returned home. I mean, why be so mean to a young girl
like that? And how he loved her. Right now, he was pleading with her to accept a gift,
something newly discovered by him and very splendid in his eyes. However, I
couldn't quite see the image of the gift in her mind or his.
He was a good victim to follow flashy, greedy, at times good, and always amusing.
Back to David. And how this strapping immortal opposite me must have loved the
vampire Jesse, and become the pupil of Maharet. Why didn't I have any respect for
the old ones anymore? What did I want, for the love of heaven? No, that was not the
question. The question t me right now? Was I running from it?
He was politely waiting for me to look at him again. I did. But I didn't speak. I didn't
begin. And so he did what polite people often do, he talked slowly on as if I were not
staring at him through the violet glasses like one with an ominous secret.
"No one has tried to hurt me," he said again in the lovely calm British manner, "no
one has questioned that you made me, all have treated me with respect and kindness,
though everyone of course wanted to know all the details firsthand of how you
survived the Body Thief. And I don't think you know quite how you alarmed them,
and how much they love you."
This was a kindly reference to the last adventure which had brought us together, and
driven me to make him one of us. At the time, he had not sung my praises to Heaven
for any part of it.
"They love me, do they?" I said of the others, the remnants of our revenant species
around the world. "I know they didn't try to help me." I thought of the defeated Body
Thief.
Without David's help, I might never have won that battle. I could not think of
something that terrible. But I certainly didn't want to think of all my brilliant and
gifted vampiric cohorts and how they'd watched from afar and done nothing.
The Body Thief himself was in Hell. And the body in question was opposite me with
David inside it.
"All right, I'm glad to hear I had them a little worried," I said. "But the point is, I'm
being followed again, and this time it's no scheming mortal who knows the trick of
astral projection and how to take possession of someone else's body. I'm being
stalked."
He studied me, not so much incredulous as striving perhaps to grasp the implications.
"Being stalked," he repeated thoughtfully.
"Absolutely." I nodded. "David, I'm frightened. I'm actually frightened. If I told you
what I think this thing is, this thing that's stalking me, you'd laugh."
"Would I?"
The waiter had set down the hot drinks, and the steam did feel glorious. The piano
played Satie ever so softly. Life was almost worth living, even for a son of a bitch of a
monster like myself. Something crossed my mind.
In this very bar, I'd heard my victim say to his daughter two nights ago, "You know I
sold my soul for places just like this."
I'd been yards away, quite beyond mortal hearing, yet hearing every word that fell
from my Victim's lips, and I was enthralled with the daughter. Dora, that was her
name. Dora. She was the one thing this strange and succulently alluring Victim truly
loved, his only child, his daughter.
I realized David was watching me.
"Just thinking about the victim who brought me here," I said. "And his daughter.
They're not going out tonight. The snow's too deep and the wind too cruel. He'll take
her back up to their suite, and she'll look down on the towers of St. Patrick's. I want to
keep my victim in my sights, you know."
"Good heavens, have you fallen in love with a couple of mortals?"
"No. Not at all. Just a new way of hunting. The man's unique, a blaze of individual
traits. I adore him. I was going to feed on him the first time I saw him, but he
continues to surprise me. I've been following him around for half a year."
I flashed back on them. Yes, they were going upstairs, just as I thought. They had just
left their table in the restaurant. The night was too wretched even for Dora, though she
wanted to go to the church and to pray for her father, and beg him to stay there and
pray too. Some memory played between them, in their thoughts and fragmentary
words. Dora had been a little girl when my Victim had first brought her to that
cathedral.
He didn't believe in anything. She was some sort of religious leader. Theodora. She
preached to television audiences on the seriousness of values and nourishment of the
soul. And her father? Ah, well, I'd kill him before I learnt too much more, or end up
losing this big trophy buck just for Dora's sake.
I looked back at David, who was watching me eagerly, shoulder resting against the
dark satin-covered wall. In this light, no one could have known he wasn't human.
Even one of us might have missed it. As for me, I probably looked like a mad rock
star who wanted all the world's attention to crush him slowly to death.
"The victim's got nothing to do with it," I said. "I'll tell you all that another time. It's
just we're in this hotel because I followed him here. You know my games, my hunts. I
don't need blood any more than Maharet does, but I can't stand the thought of not
having it!"
"And so what is this new sort of game?" he said politely in British.
"I don't look so much for simple, evil people, murderers, you know so much as a more
sophisticated kind of criminal, someone with the mentality of an Iago. This one's a
drag dealer. Highly eccentric. Brilliant. An art collector. He loves to have people shot,
loves to make billions in a week off cocaine through one gateway and heroin through
another. And then he loves his daughter. And she, she has a televangelist church."
"You're really enthralled with these mortals."
"Look right now, past me, over my shoulder. See the two people in the lobby moving
towards the elevators?" I asked.
"Yes." He stared at them fixedly. Perhaps they'd paused in just the right spot. I could
feel, hear, and smell both of them, but I couldn't know precisely where they were
unless I turned around. But they were there, the dark smiling man with his pale-faced
eager and innocent little girl, who was a woman-child of twenty-five if I had reckoned
correctly.
"I know that man's face," said David. "He's big time. International. They keep trying
to bring him up on some charges. He pulled off an extraordinary assassination, where
was it?" "The Bahamas."
"My God, how did you happen on him? Did you really see him in person somewhere,
you know, like a shell you found on the beach, or did you see him in the papers and
the magazines?"
"Do you recognize the girl? Nobody knows they're connected." "No, I don't recognize
her, but should I? She's so pretty, and so sweet. You're not going to feed on her, are
you?"
I laughed at his gentlemanly outrage at such a suggestion. I wondered if David asked
permission before sucking the blood of his victims, or at least insisted that both parties
be properly introduced. I had no idea what his killing habits were, or how often he
fed. I'd made him plenty strong. That meant it didn't have to be every night. He was
blessed in that.
"The girl sings for Jesus on a television station," I said. "Her church will someday
have its headquarters in an old, old convent building in New Orleans. Right now she
lives there alone, and tapes her programs out of a studio in the French Quarter. I think
her show goes through some ecumenical cable channel out of Alabama." "You're in
love with her."
"Not at all, just very eager to kill her father. Her television appeal is peculiar. She
talks theology with gripping common sense, you know, the kind of televangelist that
just might make it all work. Don't we all fear that someone like that will come along?
She dances like a nymph or a temple virgin, I suppose I should say, sings like a
seraph, invites the entire studio audience to join with her. Theology and ecstasy,
perfectly blended. And all the requisite good works are recommended."
"I see," he said. "And this makes it more exciting for you, to feast on the father? By
the way, the father is hardly an unobtrusive man. Neither seem disguised. Are you
sure no one knows they're connected?"
The elevator door had opened. My Victim and his daughter were rising floor after
floor into the sky.
"He slips in and out of here when he wants. He's got bodyguards galore. She meets
him on her own. I think they set it up by cellular phone. He's a computer cocaine
giant, and she's one of his best-protected secret operations. His men are all over the
lobby. If there'd been anyone nosing around, she would have left the restaurant alone
first. But he's a wizard at things like that. There'll be warrants out for him in five
states and he'll show up ringside for a heavyweight match in Atlantic City, right in
front of the cameras. They'll never catch him. I'll catch him, the vampire who's just
waiting to kill him. And isn't he beautiful?"
"Now, let me get this clear," David said. "You're being stalked by something, and it's
got nothing to do with this victim, this, er, drug dealer, or whatever, or this
televangelist girl. But something is following you, something frightening you, but not
enough to make you Stop tracking this dark-skinned man who just got into the
elevator?"
I nodded, but then I caught myself in a little doubt. No, there Couldn't be any
connection.
Besides, this thing that had me rattled to the bone had started before I saw the Victim.
It had "happened" first in Rio, the stalker, not long after I'd left Louis and David and
gone back to Rio to hunt.
I hadn't picked up this Victim until he'd walked across my path in own city of New
Orleans. He'd come down there on a whim to Dora for twenty minutes; they'd met in a
little French Quarter and I had been walking past and seen him, sparkling like a fire,
her white face and large compassionate eyes, and wham! It was hunger.
"No, it's got nothing to do with him," I said. "What's stalking me started months
before. He doesn't know I'm following him. I didn't catch on right away myself that I
was being followed by this thing, this.. . ."
"This what?"
"Watching him and his daughter, it's like my miniseries, you know. He's so intricately
evil."
"So you said, and what is stalking you? Is this a thing or a person or ...?"
"I'll get to that. This Victim, he has killed so many people. Drugs. Such people
wallow in numbers. Kilos, kills, coded accounts. And the girl, the girl of course turned
out not to be some dim-witted little miracle worker telling diabetics she can cure them
with the laying on of hands."
"Lestat, your mind's wandering. What's the matter with you? Why are you afraid?
And why don't you kill this victim and get that part over?"
"You want to go back to Jesse and Maharet, don't you?" I asked suddenly, a feeling of
hopelessness descending on me. "You want to study for the next hundred years,
among all those tablets and scrolls, and look into Maharet's aching blue eyes, and hear
her voice, I know you do. Does she still always choose blue eyes?"
Maharet had been blind eyes torn out when she was made a vampire queen. She took
eyes from her victims and wore them -until they could see no more, no matter how the
vampiric blood tried to preserve them. That was her shocking feature the marble
queen with the bleeding eyes. Why had she never wrung the neck of some vampire
fledgling and stolen his or her eyes? It had never occurred to me before. Loyalty to
our own kind? Maybe it wouldn't work. But she had her scruples, and they were as
hard as she was. A woman that old remembers when there was no Moses and no
Hammurabi's Code. When only the Pharaoh got to walk through the Valley of
Death.... "Lestat," David said. "Pay attention. You must tell me what you are talking
about. I've never heard you admit so readily that you were afraid. You did say afraid.
Forget about me for the moment. Forget that victim and the girl. What's up, my
friend? Who's after you?" "I want to ask you some more questions first."
"No. Just tell me what's happened. You're in danger, aren't you? Or you think you
are. You sent out the call for me to come to you here. It was an unabashed plea."
"Are those the words Armand used, 'unabashed plea'? I hate Armand."
David only smiled and made a quick impatient gesture with both hands. "You don't
hate Armand and you know you don't." "Wanna bet?"
He looked at me sternly and reprimandingly. English schoolboy stuff probably.
"All right," I said. "I'll tell you. Now, first, I have to remind you of something. A
conversation we had. It was when you were alive still, when we last talked together in
your place in the Cotswolds, you know, when you were just a charming old
gentleman, dying in despair—"
"I remember," he said patiently. "Before you went into the desert."
"No, right after, when we knew I couldn't die as easily I thought I could, when I'd
come back burnt. You cared for me. Then you started talking about yourself, your life.
You said something about an experience you'd had before the war, you said, in a Paris
cafe. You remember? You know what I'm talking about?"
"Yes. I do. I told you that when I was a young man I thought I'd seen a vision."
"Yes, something about the fabric of life ripping for a moment so you glimpsed things
you shouldn't have seen."
He smiled. "You're the one who suggested that, that the fabric had ripped somehow
and I'd seen through the rip accidentally. I thought then and I still think now that it
was a vision I was meant to see. But fifty years have passed since then. And my
memory, my memory is surprisingly dim of the whole affair."
"Well, that's to be expected. As a vampire, you will remember everything that
happens to you from now on vividly, but the details of mortal life will slip rather fast,
especially anything that had to do with the senses, you'll find yourself chasing after it
what did wine taste like?"
He motioned for me to be quiet. I was making him unhappy. I hadn't meant to do this.
I picked up my drink, savored the fragrance. It was some sort of not Christmas punch.
I think they called it wassail in England. I set down the glass. My hands and face were
still dark from that excursion o the desert, that little attempt to fly into the face of the
sun. That helped me pass for human. What an irony. And it made my hand a little
more sensitive to the warmth.
A ripple of pleasure ran through me. Warmth! Sometimes I think I get my money out
of everything! There's no way to cheat a sensualist like me, somebody who can die
laughing for hours over the pattern of the carpet in a hotel lobby.
I became aware again of his watching me.
He seemed to have collected himself somewhat or forgiven me for the one thousandth
time for having put his soul into a vampire's body without his permission, indeed
against his will. He looked at me, almost lovingly suddenly, as if I needed that
reassurance.
I took it. I did.
"In this Paris cafe, you heard two beings talking to each other," I said, going back to
his vision of years before. "You were a young man. It all happened gradually. But you
realized they weren't 'really' there, the two, in a material sense, and the language they
were speaking was understandable to you even though you didn't know what it was."
He nodded. "That's correct. And it sounded precisely like God and the Devil talking to
each other."
I nodded. "And when I left you in the jungles last year, you said I wasn't to worry, that
you weren't going off on any religious quest to find God and the Devil in a Paris cafe.
You said you'd spent your mortal life looking for such things in the Talamasca. And
now you would take a different turn."
"Yes, that's what I said," he admitted agreeably. "The vision's dimmer now than it was
when I told you. But I remember it. I still remember it, and I still believe I saw and
heard something, and I'm as resigned as ever that I'll never know what it was."
"You're leaving God and the Devil to the Talamasca, then, as you promised."
"I'm leaving the Devil to the Talamasca," he said. "I don't think the Talamasca as a
psychic order was ever that interested in God."
All this was familiar verbal territory. I acknowledged it. We both kept our eye on the
Talamasca, so to speak. But only one member of that devout order of scholars had
ever known the true fate of David Talbot, the former Superior General, and now that
human being was dead. His name had been Aaron Lightner. This had been a great
sadness to David, the loss of the one human who knew what he was now, the human
who had been his knowing mortal friend, as David had been mine.
He wanted to pick up the thread.
"You've seen a vision?" he asked. "That's what's frightening you?"
I shook my head. "Nothing as clear as that. But the Thing is stalking me, and now and
then it lets me see something in the blink of an eye. I hear it mostly. I hear it
sometimes talking in a normal conversational voice to another, or I hear its steps
behind me on the street, and I spin around. It's true. I'm terrified of it. And then when
it shows itself, well, I usually end up so disoriented, I'm sprawled in the gutter like a
common drunk. A week will pass. Nothing. Then I'll catch that fragment of
conversation again. ..." "And what are the words?"
"Can't give the fragments to you in order. I'd been hearing them before I realized what
they were. On some level, I knew I was hearing a voice from some other locale, so to
speak, you knew it wasn't a mere mortal in the next room. But for all I knew, it could
have had a natural explanation, an electronic explanation."
"I understand."
"But the fragments are things like two people talking, and one says-the one, that is—
says, 'Oh, no, he's perfect, it has nothing to do with vengeance, how could you think I
wanted mere vengeance?' " I broke off, shrugged. "It's, you know, the middle of a
conversation."
"Yes," he said, "and you feel this Thing is letting you hear a little of it... just the way I
thought the vision in the cafe was meant for me."
"You've got it exactly right. It's tormenting me. Another time, this was only two days
ago, I was in New Orleans; I was sort of spying on the Victim's daughter, Dora. She
lives there in the convent build - I mentioned. It's an old 1880s convent, unoccupied
for years, and gutted, so that it's like a brick castle, and this little sparrow of a girl,
lovely little woman, lives there fearlessly, completely alone. She walks about the
house as if she were invincible. Well, anyway, I was down there, and I had come into
the courtyard of this building—it's, you know, a shape as old as architecture, main
building, two long wings, inner courtyard."
The rather typical late-nineteenth-century brick institution." Exactly, and I was
watching through the windows, the progress of that little girl walking by herself
through the pitch-black corridor. She was carrying a flashlight. And she was singing
to herself, one of her hymns. They're all sort of medieval and modern at the same
time."
"I believe the phrase is 'New Age,' " David suggested.
"Yes, it's somewhat like that, but this girl is on an ecumenical religious network. I told
you. Her program is very conventional. Believe in Jesus, be saved. She's going to sing
and dance people into Heaven, especially the women, apparently, or at least they'll
lead the way."
"Go on with the story, you were watching her...."
"Yes, and thinking how brave she was. She finally reached her own quarters; she lives
in one of the four towers of the building; and I listened as she threw all the locks. And
I thought, not many mortals would like to go prowling about this dark building, and
the place wasn't entirely spiritually clean."
"What do you mean?"
"Little spirits, elementals, whatever, what did you call them in the Talamasca?"
"Elementals," he said.
"Well, there are some gathered about this building, but they're no threat to this girl.
She's simply too brave and strong.
"But not the Vampire Lestat, who was spying her. He was out in the courtyard, and he
heard the voice right next to his ear, as if Two Men were talking at his right shoulder
and the other one, the one who is not following me, says quite plainly, 'No, I don't see
him in the same light.' I turned round and round trying to find this Thing, close in on it
mentally and spiritually, confront it, bait it, and then I realized I was shaking all over,
and you know, the elementals, David, the little pesky spirits ...the ones I could feel
hanging about the convent... I don't think they even realized this person, or whoever
he was, had been talking in my ear."
"Lestat, you do sound as if you've lost your immortal mind," he said. "No, no, don't
get angry. I believe you. But let's backtrack. Why were you following the girl?"
"I just wanted to see her. My Victim, he's worried—about who he is, what's he done,
what the officials know about him. He's afraid he'll blemish her when the final
indictment comes and all the newspaper stories. But the point is, he'll never be
indicted. I'm going to kill him first."
"You are. And then it actually might save her church, is that not right? Your killing
him speedily, so to speak. Or am I mistaken?"
"I wouldn't hurt her for anything on this earth. Nothing could persuade me to do that."
I sat silent for a moment.
"Are you sure you are not in love? You seem spellbound by her."
I was remembering. I had fallen in love only a short time ago with a mortal woman, a
nun. Gretchen had been her name. And I had driven her mad. David knew the whole
story. I'd written it; written all about David, too, and he and Gretchen had passed into
the world in fictional form. He knew that.
"I would never reveal myself to Dora as I did with Gretchen," I said. "No. I won't hurt
Dora. I learnt my lesson. My only concern is to kill her father in such a way that she
experiences the least suffering and the maximum benefit. She knows what her father
is, but I'm not sure she's prepared for all the bad things that could happen on account
of him."
"My, but you are playing games."
"Well, I have to do something to keep my mind off this Thing that's following me or
I'll go mad!"
"Shhhh ...what's the matter with you? My God, but you're rattled."
"Of course I am," I whispered.
"Explain more about the Thing. Give me more fragments."
"They're not worth repeating. It's an argument. It's about me, I tell you. David, it's like
God and the Devil are arguing about me."
I caught my breath. My heart was hurting me, it was beating so fast, no mean feat for
a vampiric heart. I rested back against the wall, let my eyes range over the bar—
middle-aged mortals mostly, ladies in old-style fur coats, balding men just drunk
enough to be loud and careless and almost young.
The pianist had moved on into something popular, from the Broadway stage, I think.
It was sad and sweet, and one of the old women in the bar was rocking slowly to the
music, and mouthing the words with her rouged lips as she puffed on a cigarette. She
was from that generation that had smoked so much that stopping now was out of the
question. She had skin like a lizard. But she was a harmless and beautiful being. All of
them were harmless and beautiful beings.
My victim? I could hear him upstairs. He was still talking with his daughter. Would
she not take just one more of his gifts? It was a picture, a painting perhaps.
He would move mountains for his daughter, this victim, but she didn't want his gift,
and she wasn't going to save his soul.
I found myself wondering how late St. Patrick's stayed open. She wanted so badly to
go there. She was, as always, refusing his money. It's "unclean," she said to him now.
"Roge, I want your soul. I can't take the money for the church! It comes from crime.
It's filthy."
The snow fell outside. The piano music grew more rapid and urgent.
Andrew Lloyd Webber at his best, I thought. Something from Phantom of the Opera.
There was that noise again out in the lobby, and I turned abruptly in my chair and
looked over my shoulder, and then back at David. I listened. I thought I heard it again,
like a footstep, an echoing footstep, a deliberately terrifying footstep. I did hear it. I
knew I was trembling. But then it was gone, over. There came no voice in my ear.
I looked at David.
"Lestat, you're petrified, aren't you?" he asked, very sympathetically.
"David, I think the Devil's come for me. I think I'm going to Hell."
He was speechless/After all, what could he say? What does a vampire say to another
vampire on such subjects? What would I have said if Armand, three hundred years
older than me, and far more wicked, had said the Devil was coming for him? I would
have laughed at him. I would have made some cruel joke about his fully deserving it
and how he'd meet so many of our kind down there, subject to a special sort of
vampiric torment, far worse than mere damned mortals ever experienced. I shuddered.
"Good God," I said under my breath.
"You said you've seen it?"
"Not quite. I was ... somewhere, it's not important. I think New York again, yes, back
here with him—"
"The victim."
"Yes, following him. He had some transaction at an art gallery. Midtown. He's quite a
smuggler. It's all part of his peculiar personality, that he loves beautiful and ancient
objects, the sort of tilling you love, David. I mean, when I finally do make a meal of
him, I might bring you one of his treasures."
David said nothing, but I could see this was distasteful to him, the idea of purloining
something precious from someone whom I had not yet killed but was surely to kill.
"Medieval books, crosses, jewelry, relics, that's the sort of thing he deals in. It's what
got him into the dope, ransoming church art that had been lost during the Second
World War in Europe, you know, priceless statues of angels and saints that had been
pillaged. He's got his most valued treasures stashed in a flat on the Upper East Side.
His big secret. I think the dope money started as a means to an end. Somebody had
something he wanted. I don't know. I read his mind and then I tire of it. And he's evil,
and all those relics have no magic, and I'm going to Hell."
"Not so fast," he said. "The Stalker. You said you saw something. What did you see?"
I fell silent. I had dreaded this moment. I had not tried to describe these experiences
even to myself. But I had to continue. I had called David here for help. I had to
explain.
"We were outside, out there on Fifth Avenue; he—the Victim—was traveling in a car,
uptown, and I knew the general direction, the secret flat where he keeps his treasures.
"I was merely walking, human style. I stopped at a hotel. I went inside to see the
flowers. You know, in these hotels you can always find flowers. When you think
you're losing your mind on account of winter, you can go into these hotels and find
lavish bouquets of the most overwhelming lilies."
"Yes," he said with a little soft, halfhearted sigh. "I know."
"I was in the lobby. I was looking at this huge bouquet. I wanted to ... to, ah ... leave
some sort of offering, as if it were a church ... to those who'd made this bouquet,
something like that, and I was thinking to myself, Maybe I should kill the Victim, and
then ... I swear this is the way it was, David—
"—the ground was gone. The hotel was gone. I wasn't anywhere or anchored to
anything, and yet I was surrounded by people, people howling and chattering and
screaming and crying, and laughing, yes, actually laughing, and all this was
happening simultaneously, and the light, David, the light was blinding. This wasn't
darkness, this wasn't the cliched flames of the inferno, and I reached out. I didn't do
this with my arms. I couldn't find my arms. I reached out with everything, every limb,
every fiber, just trying to touch something, to regain equilibrium, and then I realized I
was standing on terra firma, and this Being was in front of me, its shadow was falling
over me. Look, I don't have any words for this. It was horrific. It was very certainly
the worst thing I've ever seen! The light was shining behind it, and it stood between
me and this light and it had a face, and the face was dark, extremely dark, and as I
looked at it I lost all control. I must have roared. Yet I have no idea if in the real world
I made a sound.
"When I came to my senses, I was still there, in the lobby. Everything looked
ordinary, and it was as if I'd been in that other place for years and years, and all sorts
of fragments of memory were slipping away from me, flying away from me, so fast
that I couldn't catch any one thought or finished proposition or suggestion.
"All I could remember with any certainty is what I just told you. I stood there. I
looked at the flowers. Nobody in the lobby noticed me. I pretended everything was
normal. But I kept trying to remember, kept chasing these fragments, beset by bits and
pieces of talk, or threat or description, and I kept seeing very clearly this truly ugly
dark Being before me, exactly the sort of demon you'd create if you wanted to drive
someone right out of his reason. I kept seeing this face and...."
"Yes?"
"...I've seen him twice again."
, I realized I was mopping my forehead with the little napkin the waiter had given me.
He'd come again. David placed an order. Then he leant close to me.
"You think you've seen the Devil."
"There's not much else that could frighten me, David," I said. "We both know that.
There isn't a vampire in existence who could really frighten me. Not the very oldest,
not the wisest, not the cruelist. Not even Maharet. And what do I know of the
supernatural other than us? The elementals, the poltergeists, the little addlebrained
spirits, we all know and see ... the things you called up with Candomble witchcraft."
"Yes," he said.
"This was The Man Himself, David."
He smiled, but it was by no means unkind or unsympathetic. "For you, Lestat," he
teased softly, seductively, "for you, it would have to be the Devil Himself."
We both laughed. Though I think it was what writers call a mirthless laugh. I went on.
"The second time it was in New Orleans. I was near home, our flat in the Rue Royale.
Just walking. And I started to hear those steps behind me, like something deliberately
following me and letting me know it. Damn it, I've done this to mortals myself and it's
so vicious. God! Why was I ever created! And then the third time, the Thing was
even closer. Same scenario. Huge, towering over me. Wings, David. Either it has
wings or I in my fear am endowing it with wings. It is a Winged Being, and it is
hideous, and this last time, I kept hold of the image long enough to run from it, to flee,
David, like a coward. And then I woke up, as I always do, in some familiar place,
where I started actually, and everything's just the way it was. Nobody has a hair out of
place."
"And it doesn't talk to you when it appears like this?"
"No, not at all. It's trying to drive me crazy. It's trying to ... to make me do something,
perhaps. Remember what you said, David, that you didn't know why God and the
Devil had let you see them."
"Hasn't it occurred to you that it is connected with this victim you're tracking? That
perhaps something or someone does not want you to kill this man?"
"That's absurd, David. Think of the suffering in the world tonight. Think of those
dying in Eastern Europe, think of the wars in the Holy Land, think of what's
happening in this very city. You think God or the Devil gives a damn about one man?
And our kind, our kind preying for centuries on the weak and the attractive and the
unlucky. When has the Devil ever interfered with Louis, or Armand, or Marius, or any
of us? Oh, would that it were so easy to summon his august presence and know once
and for all!"
"Do you want to know?" he asked earnestly.
I waited, thought about it. Shook my head. "Could be something explainable. I detest
being afraid of it! Maybe this is madness. Maybe that's what Hell is. You go mad.
And all your demons come and get you just as fast as you can think them up."
"Lestat, it is evil, you are saying that?"
I started to answer and then stopped. Evil.
"You said it was hideous; you described intolerable noise, and a light. Was it evil?
Did you feel evil?"
"Well, actually, no. I didn't. I felt the same thing I feel when I hear those bits of
conversation, some sort of sincerity, I suppose is the word for it, sincerity and
purpose, and I'll tell you something, David about this Being, this Being who's
stalking me—he has a sleepless mind in his heart and an insatiable personality."
"What?"
"A sleepless mind in his heart," I insisted, "and an insatiable personality," I had
blurted out. But I knew it was a quote. I was quoting it from something, but what I
had no idea, some bit of poetry?
"What do you mean?" he asked patiently.
"I don't know. I don't even know why I said it. I don't even know why those words
came into my mind. But it's true. He does have a sleepless mind in His heart, and He
has an insatiable personality. He's not mortal. He's not human!"
" 'A sleepless mind in his heart,' " David quoted the words.
" 'Insatiable personality.'"
"Yes. That's The Man, all right, the Being, the male Thing. No, wait, stop, I don't
know if it's male; I mean ...why, I don't know what gender it is ... it's not distinctly
female, let's put it that way, and not being distinctly female, it seems therefore ... to be
male."
"I understand."
"You think I've gone mad, don't you? You hope so, don't you?"
"Of course I don't."
"You ought to," I said. "Because if this being doesn't exist inside my head, if he exists
outside, then he can get you too."
This made him very obviously thoughtful and distant and then he said strange words
to me I didn't expect.
"But he doesn't want me, does he? And he doesn't want the others, either. He wants
you."
I was crestfallen. I am proud, I am an egomaniac of a being; I do love attention; I
want glory; I want to be wanted by God and the Devil. I want, I want, I want, I want.
"I'm not upbraiding you," he said. "I'm merely suggesting that this thing has not
threatened the others. That in all of these hundreds of years, none of the others ... none
that we know has ever spoken of such a thing. Indeed, in your writing, in your books,
you've been most explicit that no vampire had ever seen the Devil, have you not?"
I admitted it with a shrug. Louis, my beloved pupil and fledgling, had once crossed
the world to find the "eldest" of the vampires, and Armand had stepped forward with
open arms to tell him that there was no God or Devil. And I, half a century before
that, had made my own journey for the "eldest" and it had been Marius, made in the
days of Rome, who had said the very same thing to me. No God. No Devil.
I sat still, conscious of stupid discomforts, that the place was stuffy, that the perfume
was not really perfume, that there were no lilies in these rooms, that it was going to be
very cold outside, and I couldn't think of rest until dawn forced me to it, and the night
was long, and I was not making sense to David, and I might lose him ... and that
Thing might come, that Thing might come again.
"Will you stay near me?" I hated my own words.
"I'll stand at your side, and I'll try to hold on to you if it tries to take you."
"You will?"
"Yes," he said.
"Why?"
"Don't be foolish," he said. "Look, I don't know what I saw in the cafe. Never again in
my life did I ever see anything like that or hear it. You know, I told you my story
once. I went to Brazil, I learned the Candomble secrets. The night you ...you came
after me, I tried to summon the spirits."
"They came. They were too weak to help."
"Right. But...what is my point? My point is simply that I love you, that we're linked in
some way that none of the others is linked. Louis worships you. You're some sort of
dark god to him, though he pretends to hate you for having made him. Armand envies
you and spies on you far more than you might think."
"I hear Armand and I see him and I ignore him," I said.
"Marius, he hasn't forgiven you for not becoming his pupil, I think you know that, for
not becoming his acolyte, for not believing in history as some sort of redemptive
coherence."
"Well put. That is what he believes. Oh, but he's angry with me for much greater
things than that, you weren't one of us when I woke the Mother and the Father. You
weren't there. But that's another tale."
"I know all of it. You forget your books. I read your work as soon as you write it, as
soon as you let it loose into the mortal world."
I laughed bitterly. "Maybe the Devil's read my books too," I said.
Again, I loathed being afraid. It made me furious.
"But the point is," he said, "I'll stand with you." He looked down at the table, drifting,
the way he so often had when he was mortal, when I could read his mind yet he could
defeat me, consciously locking me out. Now it was simply a barrier. I would never
again know what his thoughts felt like.
"I'm hungry," I whispered.
"Hunt."
I shook my head. "When I'm ready, I'll take the Victim. As soon as Dora leaves New
York. Soon as she goes back to her old convent. She knows the bastard's doomed.
That's what she will think after I've done it, that one of his many enemies got him, that
his evil came back on him, very Biblical, when all the time it was just a species of
killer roaming the Savage Garden of the Earth, a vampire, looking for a juicy mortal,
and her father had caught my eye, and it's going to be over, just like that."
"Are you planning to torture this man?"
"David. You shock me. What an impolite question."
"Will you?" he asked more timidly, more imploringly.
"I don't think so. I just want to...." I smiled. He knew now well enough. Nobody had
to tell him anymore about drinking the blood, the soul, the memory, the spirit, the
heart. I wouldn't know that wretched mortal creature until I took him, held him against
my chest, opened up the only honest vein in his body, so to speak. Ah, too many
thoughts, too many memories, too much anger.
"I'm going to stay with you," he said. "Do you have rooms here?"
"Nothing proper. Find something for us. Find it close to ... close to the cathedral."
"Why?"
"Well, David, you should know why. If the Devil starts chasing me down Fifth
Avenue, I'll just run into St. Patrick's and run to the High Altar and fall on my knees
before the Blessed Sacrament and beg God to forgive me, not to sink me into the river
of fire up to my eyes."
"You are on the verge of being truly mad."
"No, not at all. Look at me. I can tie my shoelaces. See? And my tie. Takes some care,
you know, to get it all around your neck and into your shirt and so forth, and not look
like a lunatic with a big scarf around your neck. I'm together, as mortals so bluntly
state it. Can you find us some rooms?"
He nodded.
"There's a glass tower, right over there somewhere, beside the cathedral. Monstrous
building."
"The Olympic Tower."
"Yes, could you get us some rooms there? Actually I have mortal agents who can do
this sort of thing, I don't know why in the world I'm whining like a fool in this place,
asking you to take care of humiliating particulars...."
"I'll take care of it. It's probably too late tonight, but I can swing it tomorrow evening.
It will be under the name David Talbot."
"My clothes. There's a stash of them here under the name Isaac Rummel. Just a
suitcase or two, and some coats. It's really winter, isn't it?" I gave him the key to the
room. This was humiliating. Rather like making a servant of him. Perhaps he'd
change his mind and put our new lodgings under the name of Renfield.
"I'll take care of it all. We'll have a palatial base of operations by tomorrow. I'll see
that keys are left for you at the desk. But what are you going to be doing?"
I waited, I was listening for the Victim. Still talking to Dora. Dora was leaving in the
morning.
I pointed upwards. "Killing that bastard. I think I'll do it tomorrow right after sunset if
I can zone in on him quickly enough. Dora will be gone. Oh, I am so hungry. I wish
she'd take a midnight plane out of here. Dora, Dora."
"You really like this little girl, don't you?"
"Yes. Find her on television sometime, you'll see. Her talent's rather spectacular, and
her teaching has that dangerous emotional grip to it."
"Is she really gifted?"
"With everything. Very white skin, short black hair, bobbed, long thin yet shapely
legs, and she dances with such abandon, arms flung out, rather makes one think of a
whirling dervish or the Sufis in their perfection, and when she speaks it's not humble
precisely, it's full of wonder and all very, very benign."
"I should think so."
"Well, religion isn't always, you know. I mean she doesn't rant about the coming
Apocalypse or the Devil coming to get you if you don't send her a check."
He reflected for a moment, then said meaningfully, "I see how it is."
"No, you don't. I love her, yes, but I'll soon forget her completely. It's just that...well,
there's a convincing version of something there, and delicacy, and she really believes
in it; she thinks Jesus walked on this earth. She thinks it happened."
"And this thing that's following you, it's not connected in any way with this choice of
victim, her father?"
"Well, there is a way to find out," I said.
"How?"
"Kill the son of a bitch tonight. Maybe I'll do it after he leaves her. My Victim won't
stay here with her. He's too scared of bringing danger to her. He never stays in the
same hotel with her. He has three different apartments here. I'm surprised he's stayed
this long."
"I'm staying with you."
"No, go on, I have to finish this one. I need you, I really need you. I needed to tell
you, and to have you with me, the age-old venerable human needs, but I don't need
you at my side. I know you're thirsting.
I don't have to read your mind to feel that much. You starved as you came here, so
that you wouldn't disappoint me. Go prowl the city." I smiled. "You've never hunted
New York, have you?"
He shook his head in the negative gesture. His eyes were changing.
It was the hunger. It was giving him that dull look, like a dog who had caught the
scent of the bitch in heat. We all get that look, the bestial look, but we are nothing as
good as bestial, are we? Any of us. I stood up. "The rooms in the Olympic Tower," I
said. "You'll get them so that they look down on St. Patrick's, won't you? Not too high
up, low if you can do it, so that the steeples are close." "You are out of your brilliant
preternatural mind."
"No. But I'm going out into the snow now. I hear him up there.
He's planning to leave her, he's kissing her, chaste and loving kisses. His car is
prowling around out front. He'll go way uptown to that secret place of his where the
relics are kept. He thinks his enemies in crime and government know nothing of it, or
believe it's just the junk shop of a friend. But I know of it. And what all those
treasures mean to him. If he goes up there, I'll follow.... No more time, David."
"I've never been so completely confused," he said. "I wanted to say God go with you."
I laughed. I leant to give him a quick kiss on the forehead, so swift others would not
make anything of it if they saw it, and then swallowing the fear, the instantaneous
fear, I left him. In the rooms high above, Dora cried. She sat by the window watching
the snow and crying. She regretted refusing his new present for her. If only.... She
pushed her forehead against the cold glass and prayed for her father.
I crossed the street. The snow felt rather good, but then I'm a monster.
I stood at the back of St. Patrick's, watching as my handsome Victim came out,
hurriedly through the snow, shoulders hunched, and plunged into the backseat of his
expensive black car. I heard him give the address very near to that junk-shop flat
where he kept his treasures.
All right, he'd be alone up there for a while. Why not do it, Lestat?
Why not let the Devil take you? Go ahead! Refuse to enter Hell in fear. Just go for it.

Chapter Two

I reached his house on the Upper East Side before he did.
I'd tracked him here numerous times. I knew the routine. Hirelings lived on the lower
and upper floors, though I don't think they knew who he was. It wasn't unlike a
vampire's usual arrangement. And between those two flats was his long chain of
rooms, the second story of the town house, barred like a prison, and accessible by him
through a rear entrance.
He never had a car let him out in front of the place. He'd get out on Madison and cut
deep into the block to his back door. Or sometimes he got out on Fifth. He had two
routes, and some of the surrounding property was his. But nobody—none of his
pursuers—knew of this place.
I wasn't even sure that his daughter, Dora, knew the exact location. He'd never
brought her there in all the months I'd been watching him, savoring and licking my
lips over his life. And I'd never caught from Dora's mind any distinct image of it.
But Dora knew of his collection. In the past, she had accepted his relics. She had some
of them scattered about the empty convent castle in New Orleans. I'd sensed a
glimmer or two of these fine things the night when I'd pursued her there. And now my
Victim was still lamenting that she'd refused the latest gift. Something truly sacred, or
so he thought.
I got into the flat simply enough.
One could hardly call it a flat, though it did include a small lavatory, dirty in the way
barren, unused places become dirty, and then room after room was crammed with
trunks, statues, bronze figures, heaps of seeming trash that no doubt concealed
priceless discoveries.
It felt very strange to be inside, concealed in the small rear room, because I had never
done more than look through the windows. The place was cold. When he came, he
would create heat and light simply enough.
I sensed he was only halfway up Madison in a crush of traffic, and I began to explore.
At once, a great marble statue of an angel startled me. I came round out of the door
and almost ran smack into it. It was one of those angels that used to stand inside
church doors, offering holy water in half shells. I had seen them in Europe and in New
Orleans.
It was gigantic, and its cruel profile stared blindly into the shadows. Far down the
hall, the light came up from the busy little street that ran into Fifth. The usual New
York songs of traffic were coming through the walls.
This angel was poised as if he had just landed from the skies to offer his sacred basin.
I slapped his bent knee gently and went around him. I didn't like him. I could smell
parchment, papyrus, various kinds of metal. The room opposite appeared to be filled
with Russian icons. The walls were veritably covered with them and the light was
playing on the halos of the sad-eyed Virgins or glaring Christs.
I went on to the next room. Crucifixes. I recognized the Spanish style, and what
appeared to be Italian Baroque, and very early work which surely must have been
very rare—the Christ grotesque and poorly proportioned yet suffering with
appropriate horror on the worm-eaten cross.
Only now did I realize the obvious. It was all religious art. There was nothing that
wasn't religious. But then it's rather easy to say that about all art from the end of the
last century backwards, if you think about it. I mean, the great majority of art is
religious.
The place was utterly devoid of life.
Indeed, it stank of insecticide. Of course, he had saturated it to save his old wooden
statues, he would have had to do that. I could not hear or smell rats, or detect any
living thing at all. The lower flat was empty of its occupants, though a small radio
chattered the news in a bathroom.
Easy to blot out that little sound. On the floors above, there were mortals, but they
were old, and I caught a vision of a sedentary man, with earphones on his head,
swaying to the rhythm of some esoteric German music, Wagner, doomed lovers
deploring the "hated dawn" or some heavy, repetitive, and distinctly pagan
foolishness. Leitmotiv be damned. There was another person up there, but she was too
feeble to be of any concern, and I could catch only one image of her and she appeared
to be sewing or knitting.
I didn't care enough about any of this to bring it into loving focus. I was safe in the
flat, and He'd be coming soon, filling all these rooms with the perfume of his blood,
and I'd do my damnedest not to break his neck before I'd had every drop. Yes, this
was the night.
Dora wouldn't find out until she got home tomorrow anyway.
Who would know that I'd left his corpse here?
I went on into the living room. This was tolerably clean; the room where he relaxed
and read and studied and fondled his objects. There were his comfortable bulky
couches, fitted with heaps of pillows, and halogen lamps of black iron so delicate and
light and modern and easy to maneuver that they looked like insects poised on tables
and on the floor itself, and sometimes on top of cardboard boxes.
The crystal ashtray was full of butts, which confirmed he preferred safety to
cleanliness, and I saw scattered glasses in which the liquor had long ago dried to a
glaze that was now flaked like lacquer.
Thin, rather frowsy drapes hung over the windows, making the light soiled and
tantalizing.
Even this room was jammed with statues of saints—a very lurid and emotional St.
Anthony holding a chubby Child Jesus in the crook of his arm; a very large and
remote Virgin, obviously of Latin American origin. And some monstrous angelic
being of black granite, which even with my eyes I could not fully examine in the
gloom, something resembling more a Mesopotamian demon than an angel.
For one split second this granite monster sent the shivers through me. It resembled ...
no, I should say its wings made me think of the creature I'd glimpsed, this Thing that I
thought was following me.
But I didn't hear any footsteps here. There was no rip in the fabric of the world. It was
a statue of granite, that's all, a hideous ornament perhaps from some gruesome church
full of images of Hell and Heaven.
Lots of books lay on the tables. Ah, he did love books. I mean, there were the fine
ones, made of vellum and very old and all that, but current books, too, titles in
philosophy and religion, current affairs, memoirs of currently popular war
correspondents, even a few volumes of poetry.
Mircea Eliade, history of religions in various volumes, might have been Dora's gift,
and there, a brand-new History of God, by a woman named Karen Armstrong.
Something else on the meaning of life—
Understanding the Present, by Bryan Appleyard. Hefty books. But fun, my kind,
anyway. And the books had been handled. Yes, it was his scent on these books,
heavily his scent, not Dora's. He had spent more time here than I ever realized.
I scanned the shadows, the objects, I let the air fill my nostrils.
Yes, he'd come here often and with someone else, and that person... that person had
died here! I hadn't realized any of this before, of course, and it was just more
preparation for the meal. So the murderer drug dealer had loved a young man in these
digs once, and it hadn't been all clutter. I was getting flashes of it in the worst way,
more emotion than image, and I found myself fairly fragile under the onslaught. This
death hadn't occurred all that long ago.
Had I passed this Victim in those times, when his friend was dying, I would never
have settled on him, just let him go on. But then he was so flashy!
He was coming up the back steps now, the inner secret stairway, cautiously taking
each step, his hand on the handle of his gun inside his coat, very Hollywood style,
though there wasn't much else about him that was predictable. Except, of course, that
many who deal in cocaine are eccentric.
He reached the back door, saw that I'd opened it. Rage. I slipped over into the corner
opposite that overbearing granite statue, and I stood back between two dusty saints.
There wasn't enough light for him to see me right off. He'd have to turn on one of the
little halogens, and they were spots.
Right now, he listened, he sensed. He hated it that someone had broken open his door;
he was murderous and had no intention of not investigating, alone; a little court case
was held in his mind. No, no one could possibly know about this place, the judge
decided. Had to be a petty thief, goddamn it, and those words were heaped in rage
upon the accidental.
He slipped the gun out, and he started going through his rooms, through rooms I'd
skipped. I heard the light switch, saw the flash in the hall. He went on to another and
another.
How on earth could he tell this place was empty? I mean, anyone could be hiding in
this place. I knew it was empty. But what made him so sure? But maybe that's how
he'd stayed alive all this time, he had just the right mixture of creativity and
carelessness.
At last came the absolutely delicious moment. He was satisfied he was alone.
He stepped into the living-room door, his back to the long hall, and slowly scanned
the room, failing to see me, of course, and then he put his large nine-millimeter gun
back in his shoulder holster, and he slipped off his gloves very slowly.
There was enough light for me to note everything I adored about him.
Soft black hair, the Asian face that you couldn't clearly identify as Indian or Japanese,
or Gypsy; could even have been Italian or Greek; the cunning black eyes, and the
remarkably perfect symmetry of the bones—one of the very few traits he'd passed on
to his daughter, Dora. She was fair skinned, Dora. Her mother must have been milk
white. He was my favorite shade, caramel.
Suddenly something made him very uneasy. He turned his back to me, eyes quite
obviously locked to some object that had alarmed him. Nothing to do with me. I had
touched nothing. But his alarm had thrown up a wall between my mind and his. He
was on full alert, which meant he wasn't thinking sequentially.
He was tall, his back very straight, the coat long, his shoes those Savile Row
handmade kind that takes the English shops forever. He took a step away from me,
and I realized immediately from a jumble of images that it was the black granite statue
that had startled him.
It was perfectly obvious. He didn't know what it was or how it had gotten here. He
approached, very cautious, as though someone might be hiding in the vicinity of the
thing, then pivoted, scanned the room, and slowly drew out his gun again.
Possibilities were passing through his mind in rather orderly fashion.
He knew one art dealer who was stupid enough to have delivered the thing and left the
door unlocked, but that dealer would have called him before ever coming.
And this thing? Mesopotamian? Assyrian? Suddenly, impulsively, he forgot all
practical matters and put his hand out and touched the granite. God, he loved it. He
loved it and he was acting stupid.
I mean, there could have been one of his enemies here. But then why would a
gangster or a federal investigator come bearing a gift such as that?
Whatever the case, he was enthralled by the piece. I still couldn't see it clearly. I
would have slipped off the violet glasses, which would have helped enormously, but I
didn't dare move. I wanted to see this, this adoration of his for the object that was
new. I could feel his uncompromising desire for this statue, to own it, to have it here
... the very sort of desire which had first attracted him to me.
He was thinking only about it, the fine carving, that it was recent, not ancient, for
obvious stylistic reasons, seventeenth century perhaps, a fleshed-out rendering of a
fallen angel.
Fallen angel. He did everything but step on tiptoe and kiss the thing. He put his left
hand up and ran it all over the granite face and the granite hair. Damn, I couldn't see
it! How could he put up with this darkness? But then he was smack up against it, and I
was twenty feet away and stuffed between two saints, without a good perspective.
Finally, he turned and switched on one of the halogen lamps. Thing looked like a
preying mantis. He moved the thin black iron limb so the beam shone up on the
statue's face. Now I could see both profiles beautifully!
He made little noises of lust. This was unique! The dealer was of no importance, the
back door forgiven, the supposed danger fled. He slipped the gun in the holster again,
almost as if he wasn't even thinking about it, and he did go up on tiptoe, trying to get
eye level with this appalling graven image. Feathered wings. I could see that now.
Not reptilian, feathered. But the face, classical, robust, the long nose, the chin .. . yet
there was a ferocity in the profile. And why was the statue black? Maybe it was only
St. Michael pushing devils into hell, angry righteous. No, the hair was too rank and
tangled for that.
Armour, breastplate, and then of course I saw the most telling details.
That it had the legs and feet of a goat. Devil.
Again there came a shiver. Like the thing I'd seen. But that was stupid! And I had no
sense of the Stalker being near me now. No disorientation. I wasn't even really afraid.
It was just a frisson, nothing more.
I held very still. Now take your time, I thought. Figure this out. You've got your
Victim and this statue is just a coincidental detail that further enriches the entire
scenario. He turned another halogen beam on the thing. It was almost erotic the way
he studied it. I smiled. Erotic the way I was studying him—this forty-seven-year-old
man with a youth's health and a criminal's poise. Fearlessly he stood back, having
forgotten any threat of any kind, and looked at this new acquisition. Where had it
come from? Whom? He didn't give a damn about the price. If only Dora. No, Dora
wouldn't like this thing. Dora. Dora, who had cut him to the heart tonight refusing his
gift.
His entire posture changed; he didn't want to think about Dora again, and all the
things Dora had said—that he had to renounce what he did, that she'd never take
another cent for the church, that she couldn't help but love him and suffer if he did go
to court, that she didn't want the veil.
What veil? Just a fake, he'd said, but one of the best he'd found so far. Veil? I
suddenly connected his hot little memory with something hanging on the far wall, a
framed bit of fabric, a painted Christface. Veil. Veronica's veil.
And just an hour ago he'd said to Dora, "Thirteenth century, and so beautiful, Dora,
for the love of heaven. Take it. If I can't leave these things to you, Dora...."
So this Christface had been his precious gift?
"I won't take them anymore, Daddy, I told you. I won't."
He had pressed her with the vague scheme that this new gift could be exhibited for the
public. So could all his relics. They could raise money for the church.
She had started to cry, and all this had been going on back at the hotel, whilst David
and I had been in the bar only yards from them.
"And say these bastards do manage to pick me up, some warrant, something I haven't
covered, you're telling me you won't take these things? You'll let strangers take
them?"
"Stolen, Daddy," she had cried. "They are not clean. They are tainted."
He really could not understand his daughter. It seemed he'd been a thief ever since he
was a child. New Orleans. The boardinghouse, the curious mixture of poverty and
elegance and his mother drunk most of the time. The old captain who ran the antique
shop. All this was going through his mind. Old Captain had had the front rooms of the
house, and he, my Victim, had brought the breakfast tray each morning to Old
Captain, before going on to school. Boardinghouse, service, elegant oldsters, St.
Charles Avenue. The time when the men sat on the galleries in the evening and the
old ladies did, too, with their hats. Daylight times I'd never know again.
Such reverie. No, Dora wouldn't like this. And he wasn't so sure he did either,
suddenly. He had standards which were often difficult to explain to people. He began
some defense as though talking to the dealer who'd brought this. "It's beautiful, yes,
but it's too Baroque! It lacks that element of distortion that I treasure."
I smiled. I loved this guy's mind. And the smell of the blood, well.
I took a deliberate breath of it, and let it turn me into a total predator. Go slowly,
Lestat. You've waited for months. Don't rush it. And he's such a monster himself. He'd
shot people in the head, killed them with knives. Once in a small grocery he had shot
both his enemy and the proprietor's wife with utter indifference. Woman in the way.
And he had coolly walked out. Those were early New York days, before Miami,
before South America. But he remembered that murder, and that's why I knew about
it.
He thought a lot about those various deaths. That's why I thought about them.
He was studying the hoofed feet of this thing, this angel, devil, demon. I realized its
wings reached the ceiling. I could feel that shiver again if I let myself. But again, I
was on firm ground, and there was nothing from any other realm in this place.
He slipped off his coat now, and stood in shirtsleeves. That was too much. I could see
the flesh of his neck, of course, as he opened his collar. I could see that particularly
beautiful place right below his ear, that special measure between the back of the neck
of a human and the lobe of his ear, which has so much to do with male beauty.
Hell, I had not invented the significance of necks. Everyone knew what those
proportions meant. He was all over pleasing to me, but it was the mind, really. To hell
with his Asian beauty and all that, even his vanity which made him glow for fifty feet
in all directions. It was the mind, the mind that was locked onto the statue, and had for
one merciful moment let thoughts of Dora go.
He reached for another one of the little halogen spots and clamped his hand over the
hot metal and directed it hill on the demon's wing, the wing I could best see, and I too
saw the perfection he was thinking about, the Baroque love of detail; no. He did not
collect this sort of thing. His taste was for the grotesque, and this thing was only
grotesque by accident. God, it was hideous. It had a ferocious mane of hair, and a
scowl on its face that could have been designed by William Blake, and huge rounded
eyes that fixed on him in seeming hatred.
"Blake, yes!" he said suddenly. He turned around. "Blake. The damned thing looks
like one of those drawings by Blake."
I realized he was staring at me. I had projected the thought, carelessly, yes, obviously
with purpose. I felt a shock of connection. He saw me. He saw the glasses perhaps,
and the light, or maybe my hair.
Very slowly I stepped out, with my arms at my sides. I wanted nothing so vulgar as
his reaching for his gun. But he hadn't reached for it. He merely looked at me, blinded
perhaps by the bright little lights so near to him. The halogen beam threw the shadow
of the angel's wing on the ceiling. I came closer.
He said absolutely nothing. He was afraid. Or rather, let me say, he was alarmed. He
was more than alarmed. He felt this might very well be his last confrontation.
Someone had gotten by him totally! And it was too late to be reaching for guns, or
doing anything so literal, and yet he wasn't actually in fear of me.
Damned if he didn't know I wasn't human.
I came swiftly towards him, and took his face in both my hands. He went into a sweat
and tremble, naturally, yet he reached up and pulled the glasses off my eyes and they
fell on the floor.
"Oh, it's gorgeous, finally," I whispered, "to be so very close to you!"
He couldn't form words. No mortal in my grip like this could have been expected to
utter anything but prayers, and he had no prayers! He stared right into my eyes, and
then very slowly took my measure, not daring to move, his face still fixed in both my
cold, cold hands, and he knew. Not human.
It was the strangest reaction! Of course I'd confronted recognition before, in lands the
world over; but prayer, madness, some desperate atavistic response, something always
accompanied it. Even in old Europe where they believed in the nosferatu, they'd
scream out a prayer before I sank my teeth.
But this, what was this, his staring at me, this comical criminal courage!
"Going to die like you lived?" I whispered.
One thought galvanized him. Dora. He went into a violent struggle, grabbing at my
hands, realizing they felt like stone, and then convulsing, as he tried to pull himself
loose, held mercilessly by the face. He hissed at me.
Some inexplicable mercy came over me. Don't torture him like this. He knows too
much. Understands too much. God, you've had months of watching him, you don't
have to stretch this out. On the other hand, when will you find another kill like this
one!
Well, hunger overcame judgment. I pressed my forehead against his neck first,
shifting my hand to the back of his head, let him feel my hair, heard him draw in his
breath, and then I drank.
I had him. I had the gush, and him and Old Captain in the front room, the streetcar
crashing past outside, and him saying to Old Captain, "You ever show it to me again
or ask me to touch it and I won't ever come near you." And Old Captain swearing he
never would. Old Captain taking him to the movies, and to dinner at the Monteleone,
and on the plane to Atlanta, having vowed never to do it again, "Just let me be around
you, son, just let me be near you, I'll never, I swear." His mother drunk in the
doorway, brushing her hair. "I know your game, you and that old man, I know just
what you're doing. He bought you those clothes? You think I don't know." And then
Terry with the bullet hole in the middle of her face, a blond-haired girl turning to the
side and crumpling to the floor, the fifth murder and it has to be you, Terry, you. He
and Dora were in the truck. And Dora knew. Dora was only six and she knew. Knew
he'd shot her mother, Terry. And they'd never, never spoken a word about it. Terry's
body in a plastic sack. Ah, God, plastic. And him saying, "Mommy's gone." Dora
hadn't even asked. Six years old, she knew. Terry screaming, "You think you can take
my daughter from me, you son of a bitch, you think you can take my child, I'm
leaving tonight with Jake and she's going with me." Bang, you're dead, honey. I
couldn't stand you anyway. In a heap on the floor, the very flashy cute kind of
common girl with very oval pale pink nails, and lipstick that always looks
extraordinarily fresh, and hair from a bottle. Pink shorts, little thighs.
He and Dora driving in the night, and they never had spoken a word.
What are you doing to me! You are killing me! You are taking my blood, not my soul,
you thief, you... what in the name of God?
"You talking to me?" I drew back, blood dripping from my lips, Good God, he was
talking to me! I bit down again, and this time I did break his neck, but he wouldn't
stop.
Yes, you, what are you? Why, why this, the blood? Tell me, damn you into hell!
Damn you!
I had crushed the bones of his arms, twisted his shoulder out of the socket, the last
blood I could get was there on my tongue. I stuck my tongue into the wound, give me,
give me, give me....
But what, what is your name, under God, who are you?
He was dead. I dropped him and stepped back. Talking to me! Talking to me during
the kill? Asking me who / was? Piercing the swoon?
"Oh, you are so full of surprises," I whispered. I tried to clear my head. I was warmly
full of blood. I let it stay in my mouth. I wanted to pick him up, tear open his wrist,
drink anything that was left, but that was so ugly, and the truth was, I had no intention
of touching him again! I swallowed and ran my tongue along my teeth, getting the last
taste, he and Dora in the truck, she six years old, Mommy dead, shot in the head, with
Daddy now forever.
"That was the fifth killing!" he'd said aloud to me, I'd heard him.
"Who are you?"
"Talking to me, you bastard!" I looked down at him, ooh, the blood was just flooding
my fingertips finally and moving down my legs; I closed my eyes, and I thought, Live
for this, just for this, for this taste, this feeling, and his words came back to me, words
to Dora in a fancy bar, "I sold my soul for places like this."
"Oh, for God sakes, die, damn it!" I said. I wanted the blood to keep burning, but
enough of him, hell, six months was plenty for a love affair between vampire and
human! I looked up.
The black thing wasn't a statue at all. It was alive. And it was studying me. It was
living and breathing and watching me under its furious shining black scowl, looking
down at me.
"No, not true," I said aloud. I tried to fall into the deep calm that danger often
produces in me. Not true.
I nudged his dead body on the floor deliberately just to be sure I was still there, and
not going mad, and in terror of the disorientation, but it didn't come, and then I
screamed.
I screamed like any kid.
And I ran out of there.
I tore out of there, down the hall, out of the back and into the wide night.
I went up over the rooftops, and then in sheer exhaustion slipped down in a narrow
alley, and lay against the bricks. No, that couldn't have been true. That was some last
image he projected, my Victim; he threw that image out in death, a sweet vengeance.
Making that statue look alive, that big dark winged thing, that goat-legged....
"Yeah," I said. I wiped my lips. I was lying in dirty snow. There were other mortals in
this alley. Don't bother us. I won't. I wiped my lips again. "Yeah, vengeance; all his
love," I whispered aloud, "for all the things in that place, and he threw that at me. He
knew. He knew what I was. He knew how...."
And besides, the Thing that stalked me had never been so calm, so still, so reflective.
It had always been swelling and rising like so much thick, stinking smoke and those
voices ...That had been a mere statue standing there.
I got up, furious with myself, absolutely furious for having fled, for having passed up
the last little trick involved in the whole kill. I was furious enough to go back there,
and kick his dead body and kick that statue, which no doubt returned to granite the
instant that conscious life went completely out of the dying brain of its owner.
Broken arms, shoulders. As if from the bloody heap I'd made of him, he'd called up
that thing.
And Dora will hear about this. Broken arms, shoulders. Neck broken.
I went out onto Fifth Avenue. I walked into the wind.
I stuffed my hands in the pockets of my wool blazer, which was far too light to look
appropriate in this quiet blizzard, and I walked and walked. "All right, damn it, you
knew what I was, and for a moment, you made that thing look alive."
I stopped dead still, staring over the traffic at the dark snow-covered woods of Central
Park.
"If it "• all connected, come for me." I was talking not to him now, or the statue, but to
the Stalker. I simply refused to be afraid. I was just completely out of my head.
And where was David? Hunting somewhere? Hunting ... as he had so loved to do as a
mortal man in the Indian jungles, hunting, and I'd made him the hunter of his brothers
forever.
I made a decision.
I was going back at once to the flat. I'd look at the damned statue, and see for myself
that it was utterly inanimate, and then I'd do what I ought to do for Dora—that is, get
rid of her father's corpse.
It took me only moments to get back, to be going up the narrow pitch-dark back stairs
again, and into the flat. I was past all patience with my fear, simply furious,
humiliated and shaken, and at the same time curiously excited—as I always am by the
unknown.
Stench of his freshly dead body. Stench of wasted blood.
I could hear or sense nothing else. I went into a small room which had once been an
active kitchen and still contained the remnants of housekeeping from the time of that
dead mortal whom the Victim had loved. Yes, just what I wanted under the sink pipes
where mortals always shove it, a box of green plastic garbage sacks, just perfect for
his remains.
It suddenly hit me that he had chucked his murdered wife, Terry, into such a bag, I'd
seen it, smelled it, when I was feasting on him. Oh, hell with it. So he'd given me the
idea.
There were a few pieces of cutlery around, though nothing that would allow a surgical
or artistic job. I took the largest of the knives, carbon-steel blade, and went into the
living room, deliberately with out hesitation, and turned and looked at the mammoth
statue.
The halogens were still shining; bright, deliberate beams in the shadowy clutter.
Statue; goat-legged angel.
You idiot, Lestat.
I went up to it and stood before it, looking coldly at the details. Probably not
seventeenth-century. Probably contemporary, executed by hand, yes, but it had the
utter perfection of something contemporary, and the face did have the William Blake
sublime expression—an evil, scowling, goat-legged being with the eyes of Blake's
saints and sinners, full of innocence as well as wrath.
I wanted it suddenly, would liked to have kept it, gotten it down some way to my
rooms in New Orleans as a keepsake for practically falling down dead in fear at its
feet. Cold and solemn it stood before me. And then I realized that all these relics
might be lost if I didn't do something with them. As soon as his death was known, all
this would be confiscated, that was his whole point with Dora, that this, his true
wealth, would pass into indifferent hands.
And Dora had turned her narrow little back to him and wept, a waif consumed with
grief and horror and the worst frustration, the inability to comfort the one she most
loved.
I looked down. I was standing over his mangled body. He still looked fresh, wrecked,
murdered by a slob. Black hair very soft and mussed, eyes half open. His white
shirtsleeves were stained an evil pinkish color from the little blood that oozed out of
the wounds I'd accidentally inflicted, crushing him. His torso was at a hideous angle
in relation to his legs. I'd snapped his neck, and snapped his spine.
Well, I'd get him out of here. I'd get rid of him, and then for a long time no one would
know. No one would know he was dead; and the investigators couldn't pester Dora, or
make her miserable. Then I'd think about the relics, perhaps spiriting them away for
her.
From his pockets I took his identification. All bogus, nothing with his real name.
His real name had been Roger.
I knew that from the beginning, but only Dora had called him Roger. In all his
dealings with others, he'd had exotic aliases, with odd medieval sounds. This passport
said Frederick Wynken. Now that amused me. Frederick Wynken.
I gathered all identifying materials and put them in my pockets to be totally destroyed
later.
I went to work with the knife. I cut off both his hands, rather amazed at their delicacy
and how well-manicured were his nails. He had loved himself so much, and with
reason. And his head, I hacked that off, more through brute strength forcing the knife
through ten-don and bone than any sort of real skill. I didn't bother to close his eyes.
The stare of the dead holds so little fascination, really. It mimics nothing living. His
mouth was soft without emotion, and cheeks smooth in death. The usual thing.
These—the head, and the hands—I put into two separate green sacks, and then I
folded up the body, more or less, and crammed it into the third sack.
There was blood all over the carpet, which I realized was only one of many, many
carpets layering this floor, junk-shop style, and that was too bad. But the point was,
the body was on its way out. Its decay wouldn't bring mortals from above or below.
And without the body, no one might ever know what had become of him .. . best for
Dora, surely, than to have seen great glossy photographs of a scene such as I had
made here.
I took one last look at the scowling countenance of the angel, devil, or whatever he
was with his ferocious mane and beautiful lips and huge polished eyes. Then, hefting
the three sacks like Santa Claus, I went out to get rid of Roger piece by piece.
This was not much of a problem.
It gave me merely an hour to think as I dragged myself along through the snowy,
empty black streets, uptown, searching for bleak chaotic construction sights, and
heaps of garbage, and places where rot and filth had accumulated and were not likely
to be examined anytime soon, let alone cleared away.
Beneath a freeway overpass, I left his hands buried in a huge pile of trash. The few
mortals hovering there, with blankets and a little fire going in a tin can, took no notice
of what I did at all. I shoved the plastic-wrapped hands so deep in the rubble no one
could conceivably try to retrieve them. Then I went up to the mortals, who didn't so
much as look up at me, and I dropped a few bills down by the fire. The wind almost
caught the money. Then a hand, a living hand, of course, the hand of one of these
bums, flashed out in the firelight and caught the bills and drew them back into the
breathing darkness.
"Thanks, brother."
I said, "Amen."
The head I deposited in a similar manner much farther away. Back door dumpster.
Wet garbage of a restaurant. Stench. I took no last look at the head. It embarrassed
me. It was no trophy. I would never save a man's head as a trophy. The idea seemed
deplorable. I didn't like the hard feel of it through the plastic. If the hungry found it,
they'd never report it. Besides, the hungry had been here for their share of the
tomatoes and lettuce and spaghetti and crusts of French bread. The restaurant had
closed hours ago. The garbage was frozen; it rattled and clattered when I shoved his
head deep into the mess.
I went back downtown, still walking, still with this last sack over my shoulder, his
miserable chest and arms and legs. I walked down Fifth, past the hotel of the sleeping
Dora, past St. Patrick's, on and on, past the fancy stores. Mortals rushed through
doorways beneath awnings; cabbies blew their horns in fury at hulking, slow
limousines.
On and on I walked. I kicked at the sludge and I hated myself. I could smell him and
hated this too. But in a way, the feast had been so divine that it was just to require this
aftermath, this cleaning up.
The others—Armand, Marius, all my immortal cohorts, lovers, friends, enemies—
always cursed me for not "disposing of the remains."
All right, this time Lestat was being a good vampire. He was cleaning up after
himself.
I was almost to the Village when I found another perfect place, a huge warehouse,
seemingly abandoned, its upper floors filled with the pretty sparkle of broken
windows. And inside it, refuse of every description, in a massive heap. I could smell
decayed flesh. Someone had died in there weeks ago. Only the cold kept the smell
from reaching human nostrils. Or maybe no one cared.
I went farther into the cavernous room—smell of gasoline, metal, red brick. One
mountain of trash stood as big as a mortuary pyramid in the middle of the room. A
truck was there, parked perilously close to it, the engine still warm. But no living
beings were here.
And there was decayed flesh aplenty in the largest pile. I reckoned by scent at least
three dead bodies, scattered through the rubble. Per haps there were more. The smell
was utterly loathsome to me, so I didn't spend a great deal of time anatomizing the
situation.
"Okay, my friend, I give you over to a graveyard," I said. I shoved the sack deep, deep
among the broken bottles, smashed cans, bits of stinking fruit, heaps and stacks of
cardboard and wood and trash. I almost caused an avalanche. Indeed there was a small
trash quake or two and then the clumsy pyramid re-formed itself quietly. The only
sounds were the sounds of rats. A single beer bottle rolled on the floor, a few feet free
of the monument, gleaming, silent, alone.
For a long moment, I studied the truck; battered, anonymous, warm engine, smell of
recent human occupants. What did I care what they did here? The fact is they came
and went through the big metal doors, ignoring or occasionally feeding this charnel
heap. Most likely ignoring it. Who would park next to one's own murder victims?
But in all these big dense modern cities, I mean the big-time cities, the world-class
dens of evil—New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong you can find the strangest
configurations of mortal activity. Criminality had begun to fascinate me in its many
facets. That's what had brought me to him.
Roger. Good-bye, Roger.
I went out again. The snow had stopped falling. It was desolate here, and sad. A bare
mattress lay on the corner of the block, the snow covering it. The streetlamps were
broken. I wasn't certain precisely where I was.
I walked in the direction of the water, to the very end of the island, and then I saw one
of those very ancient churches, churches that went back to the Dutch days of
Manhattan, with a little fenced graveyard attached to it with stones that would read
awesome statistics such as 1704, or even 1692.
It was a Gothic treasure of a building, a tiny bit of the glory of St.Patrick's, and
possibly even more intricate and mysterious, a welcome sight for all its detail and
organization and conviction amid the big-city blandness and wastes.
I sat on the church steps, rather liking the carved surfaces of the broken arches, rather
liking to sink back in the darkness against sanctified stone.
I realized very carefully that the Stalker was nowhere about, that tonight's deeds had
brought me no visits from another realm, or horifying footsteps, that the great granite
statue had been inanimate, and that I still had Roger's identification in my pocket, and
this would give Dora weeks, perhaps even months, before her peace of mind was
disturbed by her father's disappearance, and she would now never know the details.
So much for that. The end of the adventure. I felt better, far better than when I'd
spoken with David. Going back, looking at that monstrous granite thing, it had been
the perfect thing to do.
Only problem was that Roger's stench clung to me. Roger. He'd been "the Victim"
until when? Now I was calling him Roger. Was that emblematic of love? Dora called
him Roger and Daddy and Roge and Dad. "Darling, this is Roge," he'd say to her from
Istanbul. "Can you meet me in Florida, just for a few days. I have to talk to you...."
I pulled out the phony identification. The wind was harsh and cold, but no more snow,
and the snow that was on the ground was hardening. No mortal would have sat here
like this, in this shallow high broken arch of a church door, but I liked it.
I looked at this fake passport. Actually it was a complete set of false papers, some of
which I didn't understand. There was a visa for Egypt. Smuggling from there, no
doubt! And the name Wynken made me smile again because it is one of those names
that makes even children laugh when they hear it. Wynken, Blinken, and Nod. Wasn't
that the poem?
It was a simple matter to tear all this into tiny fragments, and let it
blow away into the night, over the tiny upright stones of the small graveyard. What a
gust. It went like ashes, as if his identity had been cremated and the final tribute was
being paid.
I felt weary, full of blood, satisfied, and foolish now for having been so afraid when I
talked to David. David no doubt thought I was a fool. But what had I really
ascertained? Only that the Thing stalking me wasn't particularly protective of Roger,
the Victim, or had nothing to do with Roger. Hadn't I already known this? It didn't
mean the Stalker was gone.
It just meant the Stalker chose his own moments and maybe they had nothing to do
with what I did.
I admired the little church. How priceless and ornate and incongruous among the
other buildings of lower Manhattan, except that nothing in this strange city is exactly
incongruous anymore because the mix of Gothic and ancient and modern is so very
thick. The nearby street sign said Wall Street.
Was I at the very foot of Wall Street? I rested back against the stones, closed my eyes.
David and I would confer tomorrow night. And what of Dora? Did Dora sleep like an
angel in her bed in the hotel opposite the cathedral? Would I forgive myself if I took
one last secret, safe, forlorn peek at Dora in her bed before letting go of the whole
adventure? Over.
Best to get the idea of the little girl out of my mind; forget the figure moving through
the huge dark corridors of that empty New Orleans convent with the electric torch in
hand, brave Dora. Not at all like the last mortal woman I'd loved. No, forget about it.
Forget about it, Lestat, you hear me?
The world was full of potential victims, when you began to think in terms of an entire
life pattern, an ambience to an existence, a complete personality, so to speak. Maybe
I'd go back down to Miami if I could get David to go with me. Tomorrow night David
and I could talk.
Of course he might be thoroughly annoyed that I'd sent him to seek refuge in the
Olympic Tower and was now ready to move south. But then maybe we wouldn't
move south.
I became acutely aware that if I heard those footsteps now, if I sensed the Stalker, I'd
be trembling tomorrow night in David's arms. The Stalker didn't care where I went.
And the Stalker was real.
Black wings, the sense of something dark accumulating, thick smoke, and the light.
Don't dwell on it. You have done enough gruesome thinking for one night, haven't
you?
When would I spot another mortal like Roger? When would I see another light
shining that bright? And the son of a bitch talking to me through it all, talking through
the swoon! Talking to me! And managing to make that statue look alive somehow
with some feeble telepathic impulse, damn him. I shook my head. Had I brought that
on? Had I done something different?
By tracking Roger for months had I come to love him so much that I was talking to
him as I killed him, in some soundless sonnet of devotion? No. I was just drinking and
loving him, and taking him into myself. Roger in me.
A car came slowly through the darkness, stopping beside me. Mortals who wanted to
know if I needed shelter. I gave a wave of my head, turned, crossed the little
graveyard, stepping on grave after grave as I made my way through the headstones,
and was off towards the Village, moving so fast probably they could not have even
seen me go.
Imagine it. They see this blond young man in a double-breasted navy-blue blazer,
with a flaming scarf around his neck, sitting in the cold on the steps of the quaint little
church. And then the figure vanishes. I laughed out loud, loving the sound of it as it
went up the brick walls. Now I was near music, people walking arm in arm, human
voices, the smell of cooking. There were young people about, healthy enough to think
that bitter winter could be fun.
The cold had begun to annoy me. To be almost humanly painful.
I wanted to go inside.

Chapter Three

I walked on only a few steps, saw revolving doors, pushed into the lobby of
someplace or other, a restaurant I think, and found myself sitting at the bar. Just what
I wanted, half empty, very dark, too warm, bottles glittering in the center of the
circular counter. Some comforting noise from the diners beyond the open doors.
I put my elbows on the bar, my heels hooked on the brass rail. I sat there on die stool
shivering, listening to mortals talk, listening to nothing, listening to the inevitable
sloth and stupidity of a bar, head down, sunglasses gone—damn, I had lost my violet
glasses!—yes, nice and dark here, very, very dark, a kind of late-night languor lying
over everything, a club of some sort? I didn't know, didn't care. "Drink, sir?" Lazy,
arrogant face.
I named a mineral water. And as soon as he set down the glass, I dipped my fingers
into it and washed them. He was gone already. Wouldn't have cared if I had started
baptizing babies with the water. Other customers were scattered at tables in the
darkness ... a woman crying in some far-off corner and a man telling her harshly that
she was attracting attention. She wasn't. Nobody gave a damn. I washed my mouth
off with the napkin and water.
"More water," I said. I pushed the polluted glass away from me.
Sluggishly, he acknowledged my request, young blood, bland personality,
ambitionless life, then drifted off.
I heard a little laugh nearby ...the man to my right, two stools away, perhaps, who'd
been there when I came in, youngish, scentless. Utterly scentless, which was most
strange.
In annoyance I turned and looked at him.
"Going to run again?" he whispered. It was the Victim.
It was Roger, sitting there on the stool.
He wasn't broken or battered or dead. He was complete with his head and his hands.
He wasn't there. He only appeared to be there, very solid and very quiet, and he
smiled at me, thrilled by my terror. "What's the matter, Lestat?" he asked in that voice
I so loved after six months of listening to it. "No one in all these centuries has ever
come back to haunt you?"
I said nothing. Not there. No, not there. Material, but not the same material as
anything else. David's word. Different fabric. I stiffened. That's a pathetic
understatement. I was rigid with incredulity and rage.
He got up and moved over onto the stool close to me. He was getting more distinct
and detailed by the second. Now I could catch something like a sound coming from
him, a sound of something alive, or organized, but certainly no breathing human
being.
"And in a few minutes more I'll be strong enough perhaps to ask for a cigarette or a
glass of wine," he said.
He reached into his coat, a favorite coat, not the one in which I'd killed him, another
coat made for him in Paris, that he liked, and he drew out his flashy little gold lighter
and made the flame shoot up, very blue and dangerous, butane.
He looked at me. I could see that his black curly hair was combed, his eyes very clear.
Handsome Roger. His voice sounded exactly the way it had when he was alive:
international, originless, New Orleans-born and world-traveled. No British
fastidiousness, and no Southern patience. His precise, quick voice.
"I'm quite serious," he said. "You mean in all these years, not one single victim has
ever come back to haunt you?"
"No," I said.
"You're amazing. You really won't tolerate being afraid for a moment, will you?"
"No."
Now he appeared completely solid. I had no idea whether anyone else could see him.
No idea, but I suspected they could. He looked like anyone might look. I could see the
buttons on his white cuffs, and the soft white flash of his collar at the back of the
neck, where the fine hair came down over it. I could see his eyelashes, which had
always been extraordinarily long.
The bartender returned and set down the water glass for me, without looking at him. I
still wasn't sure. The kid was too rude for that to be proof of anything except that I
was in New York.
"How are you doing this?" I asked.
"The same way any other ghost does it," he said. "I'm dead. I've been dead for over an
hour and a half now, and I have to talk to you! I don't know how long I can stay here,
I don't know when I'll start to ... God knows what, but you have to listen to me."
"Why?" I demanded.
"Don't be so nasty," he whispered, appearing truly hurt. "You murdered me."
"And you? The people you've killed, Dora's mother? She ever come back to demand
an audience with you?"
"Ooh, I knew it. I knew it!" he said. He was visibly shaken. "You know about Dora!
God in Heaven, take my soul to Hell, but don't let him hurt Dora."
"Stop being absurd. I wouldn't hurt Dora. It was you I was after. I've followed you
around the world. If it hadn't been for a passing respect for Dora, I would have killed
you long before now."
The bartender had reappeared. This brought the most ecstatic smile to my
companion's lips. He looked right at the kid.
"Yes, my dear boy, let me see, the very last drink unless I'm very badly mistaken,
make it bourbon. I grew up in the South. What do you have? No, I'll tell you what,
son, just make it Southern Comfort." His laugh was private and convivial and soft.
The bartender moved on, and Roger turned his furious eyes on me. "You have to
listen to me, whatever the Hell you are, vampire, demon, devil, I don't care, you
cannot hurt my daughter."
"I don't intend to hurt her. I would never hurt her. Go on to hell, you'll feel better.
Good night."
"You smug son of a bitch. How many years do you think I had?" Droplets of sweat
were breaking out on his face. His hair was moving a little in the natural draft through
the room.
"I couldn't give less of a damn!" I said. "You were a meal worth waiting for."
"You've got quite a swagger, don't you?" he said acidly. "But you're nothing as
shallow as you pretend to be."
"Oh, you don't think so? Try me. You may find me 'as sounding brass or a tinkling
cymbal.' "
That gave him pause.
It gave me pause too. Where did those words come from? Why did they roll off my
tongue like that? I was not likely to use that sort of imagery!
He was absorbing all this, my preoccupation, my obvious self-doubt. How did it
manifest itself, I wonder? Did I sag or fade slightly as some mortals do, or did I
merely look confused?
The bartender gave him the drink. Very tentatively now, he was trying to put his
fingers around it and lift it. He managed and got it to his lips and took a taste. He was
amazed, and thankful, and suddenly so full of fear that he almost disintegrated. The
illusion was almost completely dispersed.
But he held firm. This was so obviously the person I had just killed, hacked to pieces
and buried all over Manhattan, that I felt physically sick staring at him. I realized only
one thing was saving me from panic. He was talking to me. What had David said
once, when he was alive, about talking to me? That he wouldn't kill a vampire
because the vampire could talk to him? And this damned ghost was talking to me.
"I have to talk to you about Dora," he said.
"I told you I will never hurt her, or anyone like her," I said. "Look, what are you
doing here with me! When you appeared, you didn't even know that I knew about
Dora! You wanted to tell me about Dora?"
"Depth, I've been murdered by a being with depth, how fortunate, someone who
actually keenly appreciated my death, no?" He drank more of the sweet-smelling
Southern Comfort. "This was Janis Joplin's drink, you know," he said, referring to the
dead singer whom I, too, had loved. "Look, listen to me out of curiosity, I don't give a
damn. But listen. Let me talk to you about Dora and about me. I want you to know. I
want you to really know who I was, not what you might think. I want you to look out
for Dora. And then there's something back at the flat, something I want you..."
"Veronica's veil in the frame?"
"No! That's trash. I mean, it's four centuries old, of course, but it's a common version
of Veronica's veil, if you have enough money. You did look around my place, didn't
you?"
"Why did you want to give that veil to Dora?" I asked.
This sobered him appropriately. "You heard us talking?"
"Countless times."
He was conjecturing, weighing things. He looked entirely reasonable, his dark Asian
face evincing nothing but sincerity and great care.
"Did you say 'look out for Dora'?" I asked. "Is that what you asked me to do? Look
out for her? Now that's another proposition and why the hell do you want to tell me
the story of your life! You're running through your personal afterdeath judgment with
the wrong guy! I don't care how you got the way you were. The things at the flat, why
would a ghost care about such things?"
This was not wholly honest on my part. I was being far too flippant and we both knew
it. Of course he cared about his treasures. But it was Dora that had made him rise from
the dead.
His hair was a deeper black now, and the coat had taken on more texture. I could see
the weave of the silk and the cashmere in it. I could see his fingernails, professionally
manicured, very neat and buffed. Same hands I threw in the garbage! I don't think all
these details had been visible moments ago.
"Jesus Christ," I whispered.
He laughed. "You're more afraid than I am."
"Where are you?"
"What are you talking about?" he asked. "I'm sitting next to you. We're in a Village
bar. What do you mean, where am I? As for my body, you know where you dumped
the pieces of it as well as I."
"That's why you're haunting me."
"Absolutely not. Couldn't give less of a damn about that body. Felt that way the
moment I left it. You know all this!"
"No, no, I mean, what realm are you in now, what is it, where are you, what did you
see when you went... what..."
He shook his head with the saddest smile.
"You know the answer to all that. I don't know where I am. Something's waiting for
me, however. I'm fairly certain of that. Something's waiting. Perhaps it's merely
dissolution. Darkness. But it seems personal. It's not going to wait forever. But I don't
know how I know.
"And I don't know why I'm being allowed to get through to you, whether it's sheer
will, my will, I mean, of which I have a great deal by the way, or whether it's some
sort of grant of moments, I don't know! But I went after you-1 followed you from the
flat and back to it and then out with the body and I came here and I have to talk to
you. I'm not going to go without a struggle, until I've spoken with you."
"Something's waiting for you," I whispered. This was awe. Plain and simple. "And
then, after we've had our chat, if you don't dissolve, where exactly are you going to
go?"
He shook his head and glared at the bottle on the center rack, flood of light, color,
labels.
"Tiresome," he said crossly. "Shut up."
It had a sting to it. Shut up. Telling me to shut up.
"I can't go looking out for your daughter," I said.
"What do you mean?" He threw an angry glance at me, and took another sip of his
drink, then gestured to the bartender for another.
"Are you going to get drunk?" I asked.
"I don't think I can. You have to look out for her. It's all going to go public, don't you
see? I have enemies who'll kill her, for no other reason than that she was my child.
You don't know how careful I've been, and you don't know how rash she is, how
much she believes in Divine Providence. And then there's the government, the hounds
of government, and my things, my relics, my books!"
I was fascinated. For about three seconds, I'd utterly forgotten that he was a ghost.
Now my eyes gave me no evidence of it. None. But he was scentless, and the faint
sound of life that emanated from him still had little to do with real lungs or a real
heart.
"All right, let me be blunt," he said. "I'm afraid for her. She has to get through the
notoriety; enough time has to pass that my enemies forget about her. Most of them
don't know about her. But somebody might. Somebody's bound to know, if you
knew."
"Not necessarily. I'm not a human being."
"You have to guard her."
"I can't do such a thing. I won't"
"Lestat, will you listen to me?"
"I don't want to listen. I want you to go."
"I know you do."
"Look, I never meant to kill you, I'm sorry, it was all a mistake, I should have picked
someone. ..." My hands were shaking. Oh, how fascinating all this would sound later,
and right now I begged God, of all people, please make this stop, all of it, stop.
"You know where I was born, don't you?" he asked. "You know that block of St.
Charles near Jackson?"
I nodded. "The boardinghouse," I said. "Don't tell me the story of your life. There's no
reason. Besides, it's over. You had your chance to write it down when you were alive,
just like anyone else. What do you expect me to do with it?"
"I want to tell you the things that count. Look at me! Look at me, please, try to
understand me and to love me and to love Dora for me! I'm begging you."
I didn't have to see his expression to understand this keen agony, this protective cry. Is
there anything under God that can be done to us that will make us suffer as badly as
seeing our child suffer? Our loved ones? Those closest to us? Dora, tiny Dora walking
in the empty convent. Dora on a television screen, arms flung out, singing.
I must have gasped. I don't know. Shivered. Something. I couldn't clearing head for a
moment, but it was nothing supernatural, only misery, and the realization that he was
there, palpable, visible, expecting something from me, that he had come across, that
he had survived long enough in this ephemeral form to demand a promise of me.
"You do love me," he whispered. He looked serene and intrigued.
Way beyond flattery, Way beyond me.
"Passion," I whispered. "It was your passion."
"Yes, I know. I'm flattered. I wasn't run down by a truck in the street, or shot by a hit
man. You killed me! You, arid you must be one of the best of them."
"Best of what?"
"Whatever you call yourself. You're not human. Yet you are. You sucked my blood
out of my body, took it into your own. You're thriving on it now. Surely you're not the
only one." He looked away. "Vampires," he said. "I saw ghosts when I was a boy in
our house in New Orleans."
"Everybody in New Orleans sees ghosts."
He laughed in spite of himself, a very short, quiet laugh. "I know," he said, "but really
I did and I have, and I've seen them in other places. But I never believed in God or the
Devil or Angels or Vampires or Werewolves, or things like that, things that could
affect fate, or change the course of some chaotic-seeming rhythm that governed the
universe."
"You believe in God now?"
"No. I have the sneaking suspicion that I'll hold firm as long as I can in this form—
like all the ghosts I've ever glimpsed—then I'll start to fade. I'll die out. Rather like a
light. That's what's waiting for me. Oblivion, And it isn't personal. It just feels that
way because my mind, what's left of it, what's clinging to the earth here, can't
comprehend anything else. What do you think?"
"It terrifies me either way or any way." I was not going to tell him about the Stalker. I
was not going to ask him about the statue. I knew now he had had nothing to do with
the statue seeming animate. He had been dead, going up.
"Terrifies you?" he asked respectfully. "Well, it's not happening to you. You make it
happen to others. Let me explain about Dora." "She's beautiful. I'll. ,. I'll try to look
out for her."
"No, she needs something more from you. She needs a miracle."
"A miracle?"
"Look, you're alive, whatever you are, but you're not human. You can make a miracle,
can't you? You could do this for Dora, it would be no problem for a creature of your
abilities at all!"
"You mean some sort of fake religious miracle?"
"What else? She's never going to save the world without a miracle and she knows it.
You could do it!"
"You're remaining earthbound and haunting me in this place to make a sleazy
proposition like this!" I said. "You're unsalvageable. You are dead. But you're still a
racketeer and a criminal. Listen to yourself. You want me to fake some spectacle for
Dora? You think Dora would want that?"
He was flabbergasted, clearly. Much too much so to be insulted.
He put the glass down and sat there, composed and calm, appearing to scan the bar.
Looking dignified and about ten years younger than he had been when I killed him. I
don't guess anyone wants to come back as a ghost except in beautiful form. It was
only natural. And I felt a deepening of my inevitable and fatal fascination, this, my
Victim. Monsieur, your blood is inside me!
He turned.
"You're right," he said in the most torn whisper. "You're absolutely right. I can't make
some deal with you to fake miracles for her. It's monstrous. She'd hate it."
"Now you're talking like the Grateful Dead," I said.
He gave another lithe contemptuous laugh. Then with a low sombre emotion, he said,
"Lestat, you have to take care of her ... for a while,"
When I didn't answer, he persisted gently: "Just for a little while, until the reporters
have stopped, and the horror of it is over; until her faith is restored, and she's whole
and Dora after all, and back to her life. She has her life, yet, She can't be hurt because
of me, Lestat, not because of me, it's not fair."
"Fair?"
"Call me by my name," he said. "Look at me."
I looked at him. It was exquisitely painful. He was miserable. I didn't know whether
human beings could express this same intensity of misery. I actually didn't know.
"My name's Roger," he said. He seemed even younger now, as though he were
traveling backwards in time, in his mind, or merely becoming innocent, as if the dead,
if they are going to stick around, have a right to remember their innocence.
"I know your name," I said. "I know everything about you, Roger.
Roger, the Ghost. And you never let Old Captain touch you; you just let him adore
you, and educate you, and take you places, and buy you beautiful things, and you
never even had the decency to go to bed with him."
I said those things, about the images I'd drunk with his blood, but without malice. I
was just talking in wonder of how bad we all are, the lies we tell.
He said nothing for the moment.
I was overwhelmed. It was grief veritably blinding me, and bitterness and a deep ugly
horror for what I had done to him, and to others, and that I had ever harmed any living
creature. Horror.
What was Dora's message? How were we to be saved? Was it the same old canticle of
adoration?
He watched me. He was young, committed, a magnificent semblance of life. Roger.
"All right," he said, the voice soft and patient, "I didn't sleep with Old Captain, you're
right, but he never really wanted that of me, you see, it wasn't like that, he was far too
old. You don't know what it was really like. You might know the guilt I feel. But you
don't know later how much I regretted not having done it. Not having known that with
Old Captain. And that's not what made me go wrong. It wasn't that. It wasn't the big
deception or heist that you imagine it to be. I loved the things he showed me. He
loved me. He lived two, three more years, probably because of me. Wynken de Wilde,
we loved Wynken de Wilde together. It should have turned out different. I was with
Old Captain when he died, you know. I never left the room. I'm faithful that way
when I am needed by those I loved."
"Yeah, you were with your wife, Terry, too, weren't you?" It was cruel of me to say
this, but I'd spoken without thinking, seeing her face again as he shot her. "Scratch
that, if you will," I said. "I'm sorry. Who in the name of God is Wynken de Wilde?"
I felt so utterly miserable. "Dear God, you're haunting me," I said. "And I'm a coward
in my soul! A coward. Why did you say that strange name? I don't want to know. No,
don't tell me—This is enough for me. I'm leaving. You can haunt this bar till
doomsday if you want. Get some righteous individual to talk to you."
"Listen to me," he said. "You love me. You picked me. All I want to do is fill in the
details."
"I'll take care of Dora, somehow or other, I'll figure some way to help her, I'll do
something. And I'll take care of all the relics, I'll get them out of there and into a safe
place and hold on to them for Dora, until she feels she can accept them."
"Yes!"
"Okay, let me go."
"I'm not holding you," he said.
Yes, I did love him. I did want to look at him. I did want him to tell me everything,
every last little detail! I reached out and touched his hand. Not alive. Not human flesh.
Something with vitality, however. Something burning and exciting.
He merely smiled.
He reached across with his right hand and clamped his fingers around my right wrist
and drew near. I could feel his hair touching my forehead, teasing my skin, just a
loose wisp of hair. Big dark eyes looking at me.
"Listen to me," he said again. Scentless breath.
"Yes... ."
He started talking to me in a low, rushed voice. He began to tell me the tale.

Chapter Four

The point is, Old Captain was a smuggler, a collector. I spent years with him. My
mother had sent me to Andover, then brought me home, couldn't live without me; I
went to Jesuit, I didn't belong with anyone or anywhere, and maybe Old Captain was
the perfect person. But Wynken de Wilde, that started with Old Captain and the
antiques he sold through the Quarter, usually small, portable things.
"And I'll tell you right now, Wynken de Wilde amounts to nothing, absolutely
nothing, except a dream I had once, a very perverse plan. I mean my lifelong
passion—aside from Dora—has been Wynken de Wilde, but if you don't care about
him after this conversation, no one will. Dora does not."
"What was this Wynken de Wilde all about?"
"Art, of course. Beauty. But I got it mixed up in my head when I was seventeen that I
was going to start a new religion, a cult—free love, give to the poor, raise one's hand
against no one, you know, a sort of fornicating Amish community. This was of course
1964, the time of the flower children, marijuana, Bob Dylan seeming to be singing all
the time about ethics and charity, and I wanted a new Brethren of the Common Life,
one in tune with modern sexual values. Do you know who the Brethren were?"
"Yes, popular mysticism, late Middle Ages, that anyone could know God."
"Yes! Ah, that you know such a thing."
"You didn't have to be a priest or monk."
"Exactly. And so the monks were jealous, but my concept of this as a boy was all
wound up with Wynken, whom I knew to have been influenced by German mysticism
and all those popular movements, Meister Eckehart, et cetera, though he worked in a
scriptorium and still did old-fashioned parchment prayer books of devotion by hand.
Wynken's books were completely different from those of others. I thought if I could
find all Wynken's books I'd have it made."
"Why Wynken, what made him different?"
"Let me tell it my way. See, this is how it happened, the boarding-house was shabbyelegant,
you know the kind, my mother didn't get her own hands dirty, she had three
maids and an old colored man who did everything; the old people, the boarders—they
were on hefty private incomes, limousines garaged around the Garden District, three
meals a day, red carpets. You know the house. Henry Howard designed it. Late
Victorian. My mother had inherited it from her mother."
"I know it, I've seen it, I've seen you stop in front of it. Who owns it now?"
"I don't know. I let it slip away. I ruined so many things. But picture this: drowsy
summer afternoon there, I'm fifteen and lonely, and Old Captain invites me in, and
there on the table in the second parlour—he rents the two front parlours—he lives in a
sort of wonderland of collectibles and brass and such—"
"I see it."
"—and there are these books on the table, medieval books! Tiny medieval prayer
books. Of course, I know a prayer book when I see it; but a medieval codex, no; I was
an altar boy when I was very little, went to Mass every day for years with my mother,
knew liturgical Latin as was required. The point is, I recognize these books as
devotional and rare, and something that Old Captain is inevitably going to sell.
" 'You can touch them, Roger, if you're careful,' he tells me. For two years, he had let
me come and listen to his classical records, and we'd taken walks together. But I was
just becoming sexually interesting to him, though I didn't know it, and it's got nothing
to do with what I have to say until later on.
"He was on the phone talking to somebody about a ship in the harbour.
"Within a few minutes we were off to the ship. We used to go on these ships all the
time. I never knew what we were doing. It had to be smuggling. All I remember is
Old Captain sitting at a big round table with all the crew, they were Dutch, I think,
and some nice officer with a heavy accent giving me a tour of the engine room, the
map room, and the radio room. I never tired of it. I loved the ships. The New Orleans
wharves were active then, full of rats and hemp."
"I know."
"Do you remember those long ropes that ran from the ships to the dock, how they had
the round steel rat shields on them—disks of steel that the rats couldn't climb over?"
"I remember."
"We get home that night and instead of going to bed as I would have done, I beg him
to let me come in and see those books. I have to see them before he sells them. My
mother wasn't in the hallway, so I supposed she'd gone to bed.
"Let me give you an image of my mother and this boardinghouse. I told you it was
elegant, didn't I? You can imagine the furnishings, heavy Renaissance revival,
machine-made pieces, the kind that junked up mansions from the i88os on."
"Yes."
"The house has a glorious staircase, winding, set against a stained-glass window, and
at the foot of the stairs, in the crook of it, this masterpiece of a stairs of which Henry
Howard must have been profoundly proud—in the stairwell—stood my mother's
enormous dressing table, imagine, and she'd sit there in the main hall, at the dressing
table, brushing her hair! All I have to do is think of that and my head aches. Or it used
to when I was alive. It was such a tragic image, and I knew it, even though I grew up
seeing it every day; that a dressing table of marble and mirrors and sconces and
filigree, and an old woman with dark hair, does not belong in a formal hallway...."
"And the boarders just took it in?" I asked.
"Yes, because the house was gobbled up for this one and that one, Old Mister Bridey,
living in what had once been a servants' porch, and Blind Miss Stanton in the little
fainting room upstairs! And four apartments carved out of the servants' quarters in
back. I am keenly sensitive to disorder; you find around me either perfect order or the
neglected clutter of the place in which you killed me."
"I realize that."
"But if I were to inhabit that place again.... Ah, this is not important.
The point I'm trying to make is that I believe in order and when I was young I used to
dream about it. I wanted to be a saint, well, a sort of secular saint. Let me return to the
books."
"Go on."
"I hit the sacred books on the table. One of them I took from its own little sack. I was
charmed by the tiny illustrations. I examined each and every book that night, planning
to thereafter take my time. Of course the Latin was unreadable to me in that form."
"Too dense. Too many pen strokes."
"My, you do know things, don't you?"
"Maybe we're surprising each other. Go on."
"I spent the week thoroughly examining all of them. I cut school all the time. It was so
boring. I was way ahead of everybody, and wanted to do something exciting, you
know, like commit a major crime."
"A saint or a criminal."
"Yes, I suppose that does seem a contradiction. Yet it's a perfect description."
"I thought it was."
"Old Captain explained things about the books. The book in the sack was a girdle
book. Men carried such books with them. And this particular one was a prayer book,
and another of the illuminated books, the biggest and thickest, was a Book of the
Hours, and then there was a Bible in Latin, of course. He was casual about all of it.
"I was incredibly drawn to these books, can't tell you why. I have always been
covetous of things that are shining and bright and seemingly valuable, and here was
the most condensed and seemingly unique version of such I'd ever beheld."
I smiled. "Yes, I know exactly."
"Pages full of gold, and red, and tiny beautiful little figures. I took out a magnifying
glass and started to study the pictures in earnest. I went to the old library at Lee
Circle—remember it?—and I studied up on the entire question. Medieval books. How
the Benedictines had done them. Do you know Dora owns a convent? It isn't based on
the plan of St. Gall, but it's just about the nineteenth-century equivalent."
"Yes, I saw it, I saw her there. She's brave and doesn't care about the darkness or the
aloneness."
"She believes in Divine Providence to the point of idiocy and she can make something
of herself only if she isn't destroyed. I want another drink. I know I'm talking fast. I
have to."
I gestured for the drink. "Continue, what happened, who's Wynkende Wilde?"
"Wynken de Wilde was the author of two of these precious books that Old Captain
had in his possession. I didn't figure that out for months. I was going over the little
illustrations, and gradually I determined two of the books were done by the same
artist, and then in spite of Old Captain insisting that there would be no signature, I
found his name, in several places in both books. Now you know Captain sold these
types of things. I told you. He dealt in them through a shop on Royal Street."
I nodded.
"Well, I lived in terror of the day he was going to have to sell these two books! These
books weren't like the other books. First off, the illustrations were exceedingly
detailed. One page might contain the motif of a flowering vine, with blossoms from
which birds drank, and in these blossoms there were human figures intertwined, as if
in a bower. Also, these were books of psalms. When you first examined them you
thought they were psalms of the Vulgate, you know, the Bible we accept as
canonical."
"Yes...."
"But they weren't. They were psalms that never appeared in any Bible. I figured that
much out, simply by comparing them to other Latin reprints of the same period that I
got out of the library. This was some sort of original work. Then the illustrations, the
illustrations contained not only tiny animals and trees and fruit but naked people, and
the naked people were doing all sorts of things!"
"Bosch."
"Exactly, like Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, that kind of luscious sensuous
paradise! Of course, I hadn't seen Bosch's painting yet in the Prado. But it was here in
miniature in these books. Little figures frolicking beneath the abundant trees. Old
Captain said, 'Garden of Eden imagery,' that it was very common. But two books full
of it? No. This was different. I had to crack these books, get an absolutely clear
translation of every word.
"And then Old Captain did the kindest thing for me he'd ever done, the thing that
might have made a great religious leader out of me, and may still make one in Dora,
though hers is wholly another creed."
"He gave you the books."
"Yes! He gave me the books. And let me tell you more. That summer, he took me all
over the country to look at medieval manuscripts! We went to the Huntington Library
in Pasadena, and the Newbury Library in Chicago. We went to New York. He would
have taken me to England, but my mother said no.
"I saw all types of medieval books! And I came to know that Wynken's were unlike
any others. Wynken's were blasphemous and profane. And nobody, nobody at any of
these libraries had a book by Wynken de Wilde, but the name was known!
"Captain still let me keep the books! And I set to work on translating them right away.
Old Captain died in the front room, the first week of my senior year. I didn't even start
school till after he was buried. I refused to leave him. I sat there with him. He slipped
into a coma. By the third day of the coma, you could not have told who he was, his
face had so changed. He didn't close his eyes anymore, and didn't know they were
open, and his mouth was just a slack sort of oval, and his breath came in even gasps. I
sat there. I told you."
"I believe you."
"Yes, well, I was seventeen, my mother was very sick, there wasn't any money for
college, which every other senior boy at Jesuit was talking about, and I was dreaming
of flower children in the Haight Ashbury of California, listening to the songs of Joan
Baez, and thinking that I would go to San Francisco with the message of Wynken de
Wilde, and found a cult.
"This was what I knew then through translation. And in that regard I had had the help
of an old priest at Jesuit for quite some time, one of those genuinely brilliant Latin
scholars who has to spend half the day making boys behave. He had done die
translation for me gladly, and of course there was a little of the usual promise in it of
my proximity and intimacy, he and I being alone and close for hours."
"So you were selling yourself again, even before Old Captain died?"
"No. Not really. Not the way you think. Well, sort of. Only this priest was a genuine
celibate, Irish, almost impossible to understand now, this sort of priest. They never did
anything to anyone. I doubt they even masturbated. It was all being near boys and
occasionally breathing heavily or something. Nowadays religious life doesn't attract
that particular kind of robust and completely repressed individual. A man like that
could no more molest a child than he could get up on the altar at Mass and start to
shout."
"He didn't know he felt an attraction for you, that he was giving you special favors."
"Precisely, and so he spent hours with me translating Wynken. He kept me from
going crazy. He always stopped in to visit with Old Captain. If Old Captain had been
Catholic, Father Kevin would have given him the Last Rites, Try to understand this,
will you? You can't judge people like Old Captain and Father Kevin."
"No, and not boys like you."
"Also, my mother had a disastrous new boyfriend that last year, a sugar-coated mock
gentleman, actually, one of those people who speaks surprisingly well, has overly
bright eyes, and is obviously rotten inside, and from a totally unconvincing
background. He had too many wrinkles in his youngish face; they looked like cracks.
He smoked du Maurier cigarettes. I think he thought he was going to marry my
mother for the house. You follow me?"
"Yes, I do. So after Old Captain died, you had only the priest."
"Right. Now you get it. Father Kevin and I worked a lot at the boardinghouse, he
liked that. He'd drive up, park his car on Philip Street and come around and we'd go
up to my room. Second floor, front bedroom. I had a great view of the parades on
Mardi Gras. I grew up thinking that was normal, for an entire city to go mad two
weeks out of every year. Anyway, we were up there during one of the night parades,
ignoring it as natives can do, you know, once you've seen enough papier-mâché floats
and trinkets and flambeaux—"
"Horrible, lurid flambeaux."
"Yes, you said it." He stopped. The drink had come and he was gazing at it.
"What is it?" I asked him. I was alarmed because he was alarmed.
"Look at me, Roger. Don't start fading, keep talking. What did the translation of the
books reveal? Were they profane? Roger, talk to me!"
He broke his frigid meditative stillness. He picked up the drink, tossed down half of it.
"Disgusting and I adore it. Southern Comfort was the first thing I ever drank when I
was a boy."
He looked at me, directly.
"I'm not fading," he assured me. "It's just I saw and smelled the house again. You
know? The smell of old people's rooms, the rooms in which people die. But it was so
lovely. What was I saying? All right, it was during Proteus, one of the night parades,
that Father Kevin made the incredible breakthrough that both these books had been
dedicated by Wynken de Wilde to Blanche De Wilde, his patron, and that she was
obviously the wife to his good brother, Damien; it was all embedded in the designs of
the first few pages.
And that threw an entirely different light on the psalms. The psalms were filled with
lascivious invitations and suggestions and possibly even some sort of secret codes for
clandestine meetings. Over and over again there appeared paintings of the same little
garden—understand we're talking miniatures here—"
"I've seen many examples."
"And in these little tiny pictures of the garden there would always be one naked man
and five women dancing around a fountain within the walls of a medieval castle, or so
it seemed. Magnify it five times and it was just perfect. And Father Kevin began to
laugh and laugh.
" 'No wonder there isn't a single saint or biblical scene in any of this,' Father Kevin
said, laughing. 'Your Wynken de Wilde was a raving heretic! He was a witch or a
diabolist. And he was in love with this woman, Blanche.' He wasn't shocked so much
as amused.
" 'You know, Roger,' he said, 'if you did get in touch with one of the auction houses,
very likely these books could put you through Loyola, or Tulane. Don't think of
selling them down here. Think about New York; Butterfield and Butterfield, or
Sotheby's.'
"He had in the last two years copied out by hand about thirty-five different poems for
me in English, the best sort of translation—straight prose from the Latin—and now
we went over them, tracing repetitions and imagery, and a story began to emerge.
"First thing we realized was that there had been many books originally, and what we
possessed were the first and third. By the third, the psalms reflected not mere
adoration for Blanche, who was again and again compared to the Virgin Mary in her
purity and brightness, but also answers to some sort of correspondence about what the
lady was suffering at the hands of her spouse.
"It was clever. You have to read it. You have to go back to the flat where you killed
me and get those books."
"Which means you didn't sell them to go to Loyola or Tulane?"
"Of course not. Wynken, having orgies with Blanche and her four friends! I was
fascinated. Wynken was my saint by virtue of his talent, and sexuality was my
religion because it had been Wynken's and in every philosophical word he wrote he
encoded a love of the flesh!
You have to realize I didn't believe any orthodox creed really, I never had. I thought
the Catholic Church was dying. And that Protestantism was a joke. It was years before
I understood that the Protestant approach is fundamentally mystic, that it is aiming for
the very oneness with God that Meister Eckehart would have praised or that Wynken
wrote about."
"You are being generous to the Protestant approach. And Wynken did write about
oneness with God?"
"Yes, through union with the women! It was cautious but clear;
'In thine arms I have known the Trinity more truly than men can teach,' like that. Oh,
this was the new way, I was sure. But then I knew Protestantism only as materialism,
sterility and Baptist tourists who got drunk on Bourbon Street because they could not
dare do it in their hometowns."
"When did you change your opinion?" I asked.
"I'm speaking in broad generalities. I mean, I saw no hope for religions in existence in
the West at our time. Dora feels very much the same, but we'll come to Dora."
"Did you finish the entire translation?"
"Yes; just before Father Kevin was transferred. I never saw him again. He did write to
me later, but by that time I had run away from home.
"I was in San Francisco. I'd left without my mother's blessing, and taken the
Trailways Bus because it was a few cents cheaper than the Greyhound. I didn't have
seventy-five dollars in my pocket. I'd squandered everything Captain ever gave me.
And when he died, did those relatives of his from Jackson, Mississippi, ever clean out
those rooms!
"They took everything. I always thought Captain had left something for me, you
know. But I didn't care. The books were his greatest gift and all those luncheons at the
Monteleone Hotel when we had had gumbo together, and he let me break up all my
saltine crackers in the gumbo till it was porridge. I just loved it.
"What was I saying? I bought the ticket to California and saved a small balance for
pie and coffee at each stop. A funny thing happened. We carne to a point of no return.
That is, when we passed through some town in Texas I realized I didn't have enough
money to go back home, even if I wanted to. It was the middle of the night. I think it
was El Paso! Anyway, then I knew there was no going back.
"But I was headed for San Francisco and the Haight Asbury, and I was going to found
a cult based on the teachings of Wynken in praise of love and union and claiming that
sexual union was godlike union and I would show his books to my followers. It was
my dream, though to tell you the truth, I had no personal feeling about God at all.
"Within three months, I had discovered that my credo was by no means unique. The
entire city was full of hippies who believed in free love, and panhandling, and though
I gave regular lectures to large loose circles of friends on Wynken, holding up the
books and reciting the psalms—these are very tame, of course—"
"I can imagine."
"—my principle job was that of business manager and boss of three rock musicians
who wanted to become famous and were too stoned to remember their bookings, or
collect the proceeds at the door. One of them, Blue, we called him, could really sing
well. He had a high tenor, and quite a range. The band had a sound. Or at least we
thought it did.
"Father Kevin's letter found me when I was living up in the attic of the Spreckles
Mansion on Buena Vista Park, do you know that house?"
"I do know it. It's a hotel."
"Exactly, and it was a private home in those days, and the top floor had a ballroom
with bath and kitchenette. This was well before any restoration. Nobody had invented
'bed and breakfast,' and I just rented the ballroom and the musicians played there and
we all used the filthy bath and kitchen, and in the day, when they were asleep all over
the floor, I'd dream about Wynken and think about Wynken and wonder how I would
ever find out more about this man and what these love poems were. I had all sorts of
fantasies about him.
"That attic, I wonder about it now. It had windows at three points of the compass, and
deep window seats with tattered old velvet cushions. You could see San Francisco in
every direction but east as I remember, but I don't have a good sense of direction. We
loved to sit in those window alcoves and talk and talk. My friends loved to hear about
Wynken. We were going to write some songs based on Wynken's poems. Well, that
never happened."
"Obsessed."
"Completely. Lestat, you must go back for those books, no matter what you believe of
me when we're finished here. All of them are in the flat. Every single one that
Wynken ever did. It was my life's work to get those books, I got into dope for those
books. Even back in the Haight.
"I was telling you about Father Kevin. He wrote me a letter, said that he had looked
up Wynken de Wilde in some manuscripts and found that Wynken had been the
executed leader of a heretical cult. Wynken de Wilde had a religion of strictly female
followers, and his works were officially condemned by the church. Father Kevin said
all that was 'history,' and I ought to sell the books. He'd write more later. He never
did. And two months later I committed multi-murder completely on the spur of the
moment, and it changed the course of things."
"The dope you were dealing?"
"Sort of, only I wasn't the one who made the slipup. Blue dealt more than me. Blue
carried around grass in suitcases. I was into little sacks of it, you know, it made just
about as much as the band made for me. But Blue bought by the kilo and lost two
kilos. Nobody knew what happened to them. He actually lost them in a taxi, we
figured, but we never knew.
"There were a lot of stupid kids walking around then. They would get into dealing'
never realizing that the supply was originating with some vicious individual who
thought nothing of shooting people in the head. Blue thought he could talk his way
out of it, he'd make some explanation, he'd been ripped off by friends, that sort of
thing. His connections trusted him, he said, they'd even given him a gun.
"The gun was in the kitchen drawer, and they'd told him they might need him to use it
sometime, but of course he would never do that. I guess when you are that stoned, you
think everybody else is stoned. These men, he said, they were just heads like us,
nothing to worry about, that had been just talk. We would all be as famous as Big
Brother and the Holding Company and Janis Joplin very soon.
"They came for him during the day. I was the only one home, except for him.
"He was in the big room, the ballroom, at the front door, giving these two men the
runaround. I was out of sight in the kitchen, hardly listening. I might have been
studying Wynken, I'm not sure. Anyway, very gradually I realized what they were
talking about out there in the ballroom.
"These two men were going to kill Blue. They kept telling him in very flat voices that
everything was okay, and please come with them, and come on, they had to go, and
no, he had to come now, and no, he had to come along quickly. And then one of them
said in a very low, vicious voice, 'Come on, man!' And for the first time Blue stopped
jabbering in hippie platitudes, like it will all come around, man, and I have done no
evil, man, and there was this silence, and I knew they were going to take Blue and
shoot him and dump him. This had already happened to kids! It had been in the
papers. I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I knew Blue didn't have a
chance.
"I didn't think about what I was doing. I completely forgot about the gun in the
kitchen drawer. This surge of energy overtook me. I walked into the big room. Both
these men were older, hard-looking guys, not hippies, nothing hippified about them.
They weren't even Hell's Angels. They were just killers. And both sort of visibly
sagged when they discovered there was an impediment to dragging my friend out of
the room.
"Now, you know me, that I am as vam as you are probably, and then I was truly
convinced of my special nature and destiny, and I came glistening and flashing
towards these two men, you know, throwing off sparks, making a dance out of the
walk. If I had any idea in my head, it was this: If Blue could die, that would mean I
could die. And I couldn't let something like that be proven to me then, you know?"
"I can see it."
"I started talking to these characters very fast, chattering in a kind of intense,
pretentious manner, as if I were a psychedelic philosopher, throwing out four-syllable
words and walking right towards them all the time, lecturing them on violence, and
implying that they had disturbed me and 'all the others' in the kitchen. We were
having a class out there, me and the others. '
"And suddenly one of them reached into his coat and pulled out his gun. I think he
thought it would be a slam dunk. I can remember this so distinctly. He simply pulled
out the gun and pointed it at me. And by the time he had it aimed, I had both hands
on it, and I yanked it away from him, kicked him as hard as I could, and shot and
killed both men."
Roger paused.
I didn't say anything. I was tempted to smile. I liked it. I only nodded. Of course it had
begun that way with him, why hadn't I realized it? He hadn't instinctively been a
killer; he would never have been so interesting if that had been the case.
"That quick, I was a killer," he said. "That quick. And a smashing success at it, no
less, imagine."
He took another drink and looked off, deep into the memory of it. He seemed
securely anchored in the ghost body now, revved up like an engine.
"What did you do then?" I asked.
"Well, that's when the course of my life changed. First I was going to go to the police,
going to call the priest, going to go to hell, phone my mother, my life was over, call
Father Kevin, flush all the grass down the toilet, life finished, scream for the
neighbors, all of that.
"Then I just closed the door and Blue and I sat down and for about an hour I talked.
Blue said nothing. I talked. I prayed, meanwhile, that nobody had been in a car
outside waiting for those two, but if there came a knock I was ready because I had
their gun now, and it had lots of bullets, and I was sitting directly opposite the door.
"And as I talked and waited and watched and let the two bodies lie there, and Blue
simply stared into space as if it had been a bad LSD trip, I talked myself into getting
the hell out of there. Why should I go to jail for the rest of my life for those two?
Took about an hour of expressed logic."
"Right."
"We cleaned out that pad immediately, took everything that had belonged to us, called
the other two musicians, got them to pick up their stuff at the bus station. Said it was a
drug bust coming down.
They never knew what happened. The place was so full of fingerprints from all our
parties and orgies and late-night jam sessions, nobody would ever find us. None of us
had ever been printed. And besides, I kept the gun.
"And I did something else, too, I took the money off the men.
Blue didn't want any of it, but I needed bucks to get out of there.
"We split up. I never saw Blue again. I never saw Ollie or Ted, the other two. I think
they went to L.A. to make it big. I think Blue probably became a drug crazy. I'm not
sure. I went on. I was totally different from the instant it happened. I was never the
same again."
"What made you different?" I asked. "What was the source of the change in you, I
mean, what in particular? That you'd enjoyed it?"
"No, not at all. It was no fun. It was a success. But it wasn't fun. I've never found it
fun. It's work, killing people, it's messy. It's hard work. It's fun for you to kill people,
but then you're not human. No, it wasn't that. It was the fact that it had been possible
to do it, to just walk up to that son of a bitch and make the most unexpected gesture,
to just take that gun from him like that, because it was the last thing he ever expected
could happen, and then to kill them both without hesitation. They must have died with
surprise."
"They thought you were kids."
"They thought we were dreamers! And I was a dreamer, and all the way to New York
I kept thinking, I do have a great destiny, I am going to be great, and this power, this
power to simply shoot down two people had been the epiphany of my strength!"
"From God, this epiphany."
"No, from fate, from destiny. I told you I never really had any feeling for God. You
know they say in the Catholic Church that if you don't feel a devotion to the Blessed
Virgin Mary, well, they fear for your soul. I never had any devotion to her. I never
had any devotion to any real personal deity or saint. I never felt it. That's why Dora's
development surprised me in that particular, that Dora is so absolutely sincere. But
we'll get to that. By the time I got to New York, I knew my cult was to be of this
world, you know, lots of followers and power and lavish comforts and the
licentiousness of this world."
"Yes, I see."
"That had been Wynken's vision. Wynken had communicated this to his women
followers, that there was no point in waiting until the next world. You had to do
everything now, every kind of sin ... this was a common conception of heretics,
wasn't it?"
"Yes, of some. Or so their enemies said."
'The next killing I did purely for money. It was a contract. I was the most ambitious
boy in town. I was managing some other band again, a bunch of no-accounts, we
weren't making it, though other rock stars were making it overnight. I was into dope
again, and was being a hell of a lot smarter about it, and developing a personal
distaste for it. This was the real early days, when people flew the grass across the
border in little planes, and it was almost like cowboy adventures.
"And the word came down that this particular man was on the shit list of a local
power broker who'd pay anyone thirty thousand dollars for the killing. The guy
himself was particularly vicious. Everybody was scared of him. He knew they wanted
to kill him. He was walking around in broad daylight and everyone was scared to
make a move.
"I guess everybody else figured that somebody else would do it. How connected
these people were to what and to whom I had no idea. I just knew the guy was game,
you know? I made sure.
"I figured a way to do it. I was nineteen by then - I dressed up like a college boy in a
crew-neck sweater, a blazer, flannel slacks, had my hair cut Princeton style, and
carried a few books with me. I found out where the man lived on Long Island, and
walked right up to him in his back driveway as he got out of his car one evening, and
shot him dead five feet from where his wife and kids were eating dinner inside."
He paused again, and then said with perfect gravity, "It takes a special kind of animal
to do something so vicious. And not to feel any remorse."
"You didn't torture him the way I tortured you," I said softly.
"You know everything you've done, don't you? You really understand!
I didn't get the whole picture when I was following you. I imagined you were more
intimately perverse, wrapped up in your own romance. An arch self-deceiver."
"Was that torture, what you did to me?" he asked. "I don't remember pain being
involved in it, only fury that I was going to die. Whatever the case, I killed this man
in Long Island for money. It meant nothing to me. I didn't even feel relief afterwards,
only a kind of strength, you know, of accomplishment, and I wanted to test it again
soon and I did."
"And you were on your way."
"Absolutely. And in my style too. The word was out. If the task seems impossible, get
Roger. I could get into a hospital dressed like a young doctor, with a name tag on my
coat and a clipboard in my hand, and shoot some marked guy dead in his bed before
anyone was the wiser. I did that, in fact.
"But understand, I didn't make myself rich as a hit man. It was heroin first, and then
cocaine, and with the cocaine it was going back to some of the very same cowboys I'd
known in the beginning, who flew the cocaine over the border same fashion, same
routes, same planes! You know the history of it. Everyone does today. The early dope
dealers were crude in their methods. It was 'cops and robbers' with the government
guys. The planes would outrun the government planes, and when the planes landed,
sometimes they were so stuffed with cocaine the driver couldn't wriggle out of the
cockpit, and we'd run out and get the stuff, and load it up and get the hell out of
there."
"So I've heard."
"Now there are geniuses in the business, people who know how to use cellular phones
and computers and laundering techniques for money which no one can trace. But
then? I was the genius of the dopers! Sometimes the whole thing was as cumbersome
as moving furniture, I tell you. And I went in there, organizing, picking my confidants
and my mules, you know, for crossing the borders, and even before cocaine ever hit
the streets, so to speak, I was doing beautifully in New York and L.A. with the rich,
you know, the kind of customers to whom you deliver personally. They never have to
even leave their palatial homes. You get the call. You show up. Your stuff is pure.
They like you. But I had to move out from there. I wasn't going to be dependent upon
that.
"I was too clever. I made some real-estate deals that were pure brilliance on my part,
and having the cash on hand, and you know those were the days of hellish inflation. I
really cleaned up."
"But how did Terry get involved in it, and Dora?"
"Pure fluke. Or destiny. Who knows? Went home to New Or-leans to see my mother,
brushed up against Terry and got her pregnant. Damned fool.
"I was twenty-two, my mother was really dying this time. My mother said, 'Roger,
please come home.' That stupid boyfriend with die cracked face had died. She was all
alone. I'd been sending her plenty of money all along.
"The boardinghouse was now her private home, she had two maids and a driver to
take her around town in a Cadillac whenever she felt the desire. She'd enjoyed it
immensely, never asking any questions about the money, and of course I'd been
collecting Wynken. I had two more books of Wynken by that time and my treasure
storehouse in New York already, but we can get to that later on.
Just keep Wynken in the back of your mind.
"My mother had never really asked me for anything. She had the big bedroom upstairs
now to herself. She said she talked to all the others who had gone on ahead, her poor
old sweet dead brother Mickey, and her dead sister, Alice, and her mother, the Irish
maid—the founder of our family, you might say—to whom the house had been willed
by the crazy lady who lived there. My mother was also talking a lot to Little Richard.
That was a brother that died when he was four. Lockjaw- Little Richard. She said
Little Richard was walking around with her, telling her it was time to come.
"But she wanted me to come home. She wanted me there in that room. I knew all this.
I understood. She had sat with boarders that were dying. I had sat with others than Old
Captain. So I went home.
"Nobody knew where I was headed, or what my real name was, or where I came
from. So it was easy to slip out of New York. I went to the house on St. Charles
Avenue and sat in the sickroom with her, holding the little vomit cup to her chin,
wiping her spittle, and trying to get her on the bedpan when the agency didn't have a
nurse to send. We had help, yes, but she didn't want the help, you know. She didn't
want the colored girl, as she called her. Or that horrible nurse. And I made the
amazing discovery that these things didn't disgust me much. I washed so many sheets.
Of course there was a machine to put them in, but I changed them over and over for
her. I didn't mind. Maybe I was never normal. In any event, I simply did what had to
be done. I rinsed out that bedpan a thousand times, wiped it off, sprinkled powder on
it, and set it by the bed. There is no foul smell which lasts forever after all."
"Not on this earth at least," I murmured. But he didn't hear me, thank God.
"This went on for two weeks. She didn't want to go to Mercy Hospital. I hired nurses
round the clock just for backup, you know, so they could take her vital signs when I
got frightened. I played music for her. All the predictable things, said the rosary out
loud with her. Usual deathbed scene. From two to four in the afternoon she tolerated
visitors. Old cousins came. 'Where is Roger?' I stayed out of sight."
"You weren't torn to pieces by her suffering."
"I wasn't crazy about it, I can tell you that. She had cancer all through her and no
amount of money could save her. I wanted her to hurry, and I couldn't bear watching
it, no, but there has always been a deep ruthless side to me that says, Do what you
have to do. And I stayed in that room without sleep day in and day out and all night
till she died.
"She talked a lot to the ghosts, but I didn't see them or hear them. I just kept saying,
'Little Richard, come get her. Uncle Mickey, if she can't come back, come get her.'
"But before the end came Terry, a practical nurse, as they called them then, who had
to fill in when we could not get the registered nurse because they were in such
demand. Terry, five foot seven, blonde, the cheapest and most alluring piece of goods
I had ever laid eyes on. Understand. This is a question of everything fitting together
precisely. The girl was a shining perfect piece of trash."
I smiled. "Pink fingernails, and wet pink lipstick." I had seen her sparkle in his mind.
"Every detail was on target with this kid. The chewing gum, the gold anklet, the
painted toenails, the way she slipped off her shoes right there in the sickroom to let
me see the toenails, the way the cleavage showed, you know, under her white nylon
uniform. And her Stupid, heavy-lidded eyes beautifully painted with Maybelline eye
pencil and mascara. She'd file her nails in there in front of me! But I tell you, never
have I seen something that was so completely realized, finished, ah, ah, what can I
say! She was a masterpiece."
I laughed, and so did he, but he went on talking.
"I found her irresistible. She was a hairless little animal. I started doing it with her
every chance I had. While Mother slept, we did it in the bathroom standing up. Once
or twice we went down the hall to one of the empty bedrooms; we never took more
than twenty minutes! I timed us! She'd do it with her pink panties around her ankles!
She smelled like Blue Waltz perfume."
I gave a soft laugh.
"Do I ever know what you're saying," I mused. "And to think you knew it, you fell for
her and you knew it."
"Well, I was two thousand miles away from my New York women and my boys and
all, and all that trashy power that goes along with dealing, you know, the foolishness
of bodyguards scurrying to open doors for you, and girls telling you they love you in
the backseat of the limousine just because they heard you shot somebody the night
before. And so much sex that sometimes right in the middle of it, the best oral job
you've ever had, you can't keep your mind on it anymore."
"We are more alike than I ever dreamed. I've lived a lie with the gifts given me."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"There isn't time. You don't need to know about me. What about Terry? How did
Dora happen?"
"I got Terry pregnant. She was supposed to be on the Pill. She thought I was rich! It
didn't matter whether I loved her or she loved me. I mean this was one of the dumbest
and most simpleminded humans I have ever known, Terry. I wonder if you bother to
feed upon people that ignorant and that dull."
"Dora was the baby."
"Yeah. Terry wanted to get rid of it if I didn't marry her. I made a bargain. One
hundred grand when we marry (I used an alias, it was never legal except on paper and
that was a blessing because Dora and I are in no way legally connected) and one
hundred grand when the baby was born. After that I'd give her her divorce and all I
wanted was my daughter."
" 'Our daughter,' she said.
" 'Sure, our daughter,' I said. What a fool I was. What I didn't figure on, the very
obvious and simple thing, what I didn't figure on was that this woman, this little nailfiling,
gum-chewing, mascara-wearing nurse in her rubber-soled shoes and diamond
wedding ring, would naturally feel for her own child. She was stupid, but she was a
mammal, and she had no intention of letting anybody take her baby. Like hell. I
wound up with visitation rights.
"Six years I flew in and out of New Orleans every chance I had just to hold Dora in
my arms, talk to her, go walking with her in the evenings. And understand, this child
was mine! I mean she was flesh of my flesh from the start. She started running
towards me when she saw me at the end of the block. She flew into my arms.
"We'd take a taxi to the Quarter and go through the Cabildo; she adored it; the
cathedral, of course. Then we'd go for muffaletas at the Central Grocery. You know,
or maybe you don't, the big sandwiches full of olives-"
"I know."
"—She'd tell me everything that had happened in the week since I'd been there. I'd
dance with her in the street. Sing to her. Oh, what a beautiful voice she had from the
beginning. I don't have a good voice. My mother had a good voice, and so did Terry.
And this child got the voice. And the mind she had. We'd ride the ferry together over
the river and back, and sing, as we stood by the rail. I took her shopping at D. H.
Holmes and bought her beautiful clothes. Her mother never minded that, the beautiful
clothes, and of course I was smart enough to pick up something for Terry, you know,
a brassiere dripping with lace or a kit of cosmetics from Paris or some perfume selling
for one hundred dollars an ounce. Anything but Blue Waltz! But Dora and I had so
much fun. Sometimes I thought, I can stand anything if I can just see Dora within a
few days."
"She was verbal and imaginative, the way you were."
"Absolutely, full of dreams and visions. Dora is no naif, now, you have to understand.
Dora's a theologian. That's the amazing part. The desire for something spectacular?
That I engendered in her, but the faith in God, the faith in theology? I don't know
where that came from."
Theology. The word gave me pause.
"Meantime, Terry and I began to hate each other. When school-time came, so did the
fights. The fights were hell. I wanted Sacred Heart Academy for Dora, dancing
lessons, music lessons, two weeks away with me in Europe. Terry hated me. I wasn't
going to make her little girl into a snot. Terry had already moved out of the St.
Charles Avenue house, calling it old and creepy, and settled for a shack of a ranchstyle
tract home on some naked street in the soggy suburbs! So my kid was already
snatched from the Garden District and all those colors, and settled in a place where
the nearest architectural curiosity was the local y-Eleven.
"I was getting desperate and Dora was getting older, old enough perhaps to be stolen
effectively from her mother, whom she did love in a very protective and kind way.
There was something silent between those two, you know, talking had nothing to do
with it. And Terry was proud of Dora."
"And then this boyfriend came into the picture."
"Right. If I had come to town a day later, my daughter and my wife would have been
gone. She was skipping out on me! To hell with my lavish checks. She was going
with this bankrupt electrician boyfriend of hers to Florida!
"Dora knew from nothing and was outside playing down the block. They were all
packed! I shot Terry and the boyfriend, right in that stupid little tract house in
Metairie where Terry had chosen to bring up my daughter rather than on St. Charles
Avenue. Shot them both. Got blood all over her polyester wall-to-wall carpet, and her
Formica-top kitchen breakfast bar."
"I can imagine it."
"I dumped both of them in the swamps. It had been a long time since I'd handled
something like this directly, but no matter, it was easy enough. The electrician's truck
was in the garage anyway, and I bagged them up, and I took them out that way, into
the back of the truck. I took them way out somewhere, out Jefferson Highway, I don't
even know where I dumped them. No, maybe it was out Chef Menteur. Yeah, it was
Chef Menteur. Somewhere around one of the old forts on die Rigules River. They just
disappeared in the muck."
"I can see it. I've been dumped in the swamps myself."
He was too excited to hear my mumblings. He continued.
"Then I went back for Dora, who was by then sitting on the steps with her elbows on
her knees wondering why nobody was home, and the door was locked so she couldn't
get in, and she started screaming, "Daddy! I knew you'd come. I knew you would!"
the minute she saw me. I didn't risk going inside to get her clothes. I didn't want her to
see the blood. I put her with me in the boyfriend's pickup truck and out of New
Orleans we drove, and we left the truck in Seattle, Washington. That was my crosscountry
odyssey with Dora.
"All those miles, insanity, just the two of us together talking and talking. I think I was
trying to tell Dora everything that I had learned. Nothing evil and self-destructive,
nothing that would ever bring the darkness near her, only the good things, what I had
learned about virtue and honesty and what corrupts people, and what was worthwhile.
" 'You can't just simply do nothing in this life, Dora,' I kept saying, 'you can't just
leave this world the way you found it.' I even told her how when I was young I was
going to be a religious leader, and what I did now was collect beautiful things, church
art from all over Europe and the Orient. I dealt in it, to keep the few pieces I wanted.
I led her to believe, of course, that is what had made me rich, and by then, oddly
enough, it was partly true."
"And she knew you'd killed Terry."
"No. You got the wrong idea on that one. All those images were tumbling in my
mind. I felt it when you were taking my blood. That wasn't it. She knew I'd gotten rid
of Terry, or I'd freed her from Terry, and now she could be with Daddy forever, and
fly away with Daddy when Daddy flew away. That's a different thing from knowing
Daddy murdered Terry. That she does not know. Once when she was twelve, she
called, sobbing, and said, 'Daddy, will you please tell me where Mother is, where did
she and that guy go when they went to Florida.' I played it off, that I hadn't wanted to
tell her that Terry was dead. Thank God for the phone. I do very well on the phone. I
like it. It's like being on the radio.
"But back to Dora of six years old. Daddy took Dora to New York and got a suite at
the Plaza. After that, Dora had everything Daddy could buy."
"She cry for Terry even then?"
"Yes. And she was probably the only one who ever did. Before the wedding, Terry's
mother had told me Terry was a slut. They hated each other. Terry's father had been a
policeman. He was an okay guy. But he didn't like his daughter either. Terry wasn't a
nice person. Terry was mean by nature; Terry wasn't even a good person to bump
into in the street, let alone to know or to need or to hold.
'-'Her family back there thought she'd run off to Florida and abandoned Dora to me.
That's all they ever knew till the day the old man and woman died, Terry's parents.
There's some cousins. They still believe that. But they don't know who I am, really,
it's all rather difficult to explain. Of course by now maybe they've seen the articles in
the papers and magazines. I don't know, that's not important. Dora cried for her
mother, yes. But after that big lie I told her when she was twelve, she never asked
about anything again.
"But Terry's devotion to Dora had been as perfect as that of any mammalian mother!
Instinctive; nurselike; antiseptic. She'd feed Dora from the four food groups. She'd
dress Dora up in beautiful clothes, take her to dancing school, and sit there and gossip
with the other mothers. She was proud of Dora. But she rarely ever spoke to Dora. I
think they could go for days without their eyes meeting. It was mammalian. And for
Terry, probably everything was like that."
"This is rather funny, that you should get mixed up with a person like this, you know."
"No, not funny. Fate. We made Dora. She gave the voice to Dora, and the beauty. And
there is something in Dora from Terry which is like hardness, but that's too unkind a
word. Dora is a mixture of us, really, an optimum mixture."
"Well, you gave her your own beauty top."
"Yes, but something far more interesting and marketable happened when the genes
collided. You've seen my daughter. My daughter is photogenic, and beneath the flash
and dash I gave her, there is the steadiness of Terry. She converts people over the
airwaves. 'And what is the true message of Christ!' she declares, staring right into the
camera. 'That Christ is in every stranger you meet, the poor, the hungry, the sick, the
people next door!' And the audience believes it."
"I've watched. I've seen her. She could just rise to the top."
He sighed.
"I sent Dora to school. By this time I was making big, big money. I had to put lots of
miles between me and my daughter. I switched Dora among three schools overall
before graduation, which was hard for her, but she didn't question me about these
maneuvers, or the secrecy surrounding our meetings. I led her to believe I was always
on the verge of having to rush to Florence to save a fresco from being destroyed by
idiots, or to Rome to explore a catacomb that had just been found.
"When Dora began to take a serious interest in religion, I thought it was spiritually
elegant, you know. I thought my growing collection of statues and books had inspired
her. And when she told me at eighteen that she had been accepted to Harvard and that
she meant to study comparative religion, I was amused. I made the usual sexist
assumption: study what you want and marry a rich man. And let me show you my
latest icon or statue.
"But Dora's fervor and theological bent were developing far beyond anything I had
ever experienced. Dora went to the Holy Land when she was nineteen. She went back
twice before she graduated. She spent the next two years studying religions all over
the world. Then she proposed the entire idea of her television program: she wanted to
talk to people. Cable had made possible all these religion channels. You could tune in
to this minister or that Catholic priest.
" 'You serious about this?' I asked. I hadn't known she believed it all. But she was out
to be true to ideals that I had never fully understood myself yet somehow passed on to
her.
" 'Dad, you get me one hour on television three times a week, and the money to use it
the way I want,' she said, 'and you'll see what happens.' She began to talk about all
kinds of ethical questions, how we could save our souls in today's world. She
envisioned short lectures or sermons, punctuated by ecstatic singing and dancing. The
abortion issue—she makes impassioned logical speeches that both sides are right! She
explains how each life is sacrosanct yet a woman must have dominion over her own
body."
"I've seen the program."
"You realize seventy-five different cable networks have picked up this program! You
realize what news of my death may do to my daughter's church?"
He paused, thinking, then resumed as rapid-fire as before.
"You know, I don't think I ever had a religious aspiration, a spiritual goal, so to speak,
that wasn't drenched in something materialistic and glamorous, do you know what I
mean?"
"Of course."
"But with Dora, it's different. Dora really doesn't care about material things. The
relics, the icons, what do they mean to Dora? Dora believes against impossible
psychological and intellectual odds that God exists." He stopped again, shaking his
head with regret.
You were right in what you said to me earlier. I am a racketeer. Even for my beloved
Wynken I had an angle, what they call now an agenda. Dora is no racketeer."
I remembered his remark in the barroom, "I think I sold my soul for places like this." I
had known what he was talking about when he said it. I knew it now.
"Let me get back to the story. Early on, as I told you, I gave up that idea of a secular
religion. By the time Dora started in earnest, I hadn't thought about those ambitions in
years. I had Dora. And I had Wynken as my obsession. I chased down more of
Wynken's books, and managed through my various connections to purchase five
different letters of the period which made clear mention of Wynken de Wilde and
Blanche De Wilde and her husband, Damien, as well. I had searchers digging for me
in Europe and America. Rhineland mysticism, dig into it.

"My researchers found a capsule version of Wynken's story in a couple of German
texts. Something about women practicing the rites of Diana, witchcraft. Wynken
dragged out of the monastery and publicly accused. The record of the trial, however,
was lost.
"It had not survived the Second World War. But in other places there were other
documents, caches of letters. Once you had the code word Wynken—once you knew
what to look for—you were on the way.
"When I had a free hour I sat down and looked at Wynken's little naked people, and I
memorized his poems of love. I knew his poems so that I could sing them. When I
saw Dora for weekends—and we met somewhere whenever possible—I would recite
them to Dora and maybe even show her my latest find.
"She tolerated my 'Burnt-put hippie version of free love and mysticism,' as she called
it. 'I love you, Roge,' she'd say. 'But you're so romantic to think this bad priest was
some sort of saint. All he did was sleep with these women, didn't he? And the books
were ways of communicating among the others ...when to meet.'
" 'Ah, but Dora,' I would say, 'there was not a vicious or ugly word in the work of
Wynken de Wilde. You see for yourself.' Six books I had by then. It was all about
love. My present translator, a professor at Columbia, had marveled at the mysticism
of the poetry, how it was a blending of love of God and the flesh. Dora didn't buy it.
But Dora was already obsessed with her own religious questions. Dora was reading
Paul Tillich and William James and Erasmus and lots of books on the state of the
world today. That's Dora's obsession, the State of the World Today."
"And Dora won't care about those books of Wynken's if I get them to her."
"No, she won't touch any of my collection, not now!" he said.
"Yet you want me to protect all these things," I said.
"Two years ago," he sighed. "A couple of news articles! No connection to her, you
understand, but with her, my cover was blown forever. She'd been suspecting. It was
inevitable, she said, that she'd figure out my money wasn't clean."
He shook his head. "Not clean," he said again. He went on. "The last thing she let me
do was buy the convent for her. One million for the building. And one million to gut it
of all the modern desecrations and leave it the way it had been for the nuns in the
1880s, with chapel and refectory and dormitory rooms and wide corridors. .. .
"But even that, she took with reluctance. As for the artwork, forget it. She may never
take from me the money she needs to educate her followers there, her order or
whatever the hell a televangelist calls it. The cable TV connection is nothing
compared to what I could have made it, fixing up that convent as the base. And the
collection—the statues, icons—imagine it. 'I could make you as big as Billy Graham
or Jerry Falwell, darling,' I said to her. 'You can't turn away from my money, not for
Jesus' sake!"
He shook his head despairingly. "She meets with me now out of compassion, and of
that my beautiful daughter has an endless supply. Sometimes she'll take a little gift.
Tonight, she would not. Once when the program almost went under, she accepted just
enough to get it over the hump. But my saints and angels, she won't touch them. My
books, my treasures, she won't look at them.
"Of course, we both knew the threat to her reputation. You've helped by eliminating
me. But there'll be news of my disappearance soon, has to be. 'Televangist financed
by cocaine king.' How long can her secrecy last? It has to survive my death and she
has to survive my death. At all costs! Lestat, you hear what I'm saying."
"I am listening to you, Roger, to every word you say. They aren't on to her yet, I can
assure you."
"My enemies are a ruthless lot. And the government ...who knows who the hell the
government is or what the hell the government does."
"She's afraid of this scandal?"
"No. Brokenhearted, yes, afraid of scandal, never. She'd take what would come. What
she wanted was for me to give it all up! That became her attack. She didn't care that
the world might find out we were father and daughter. She wanted me to renounce
everything. She was afraid for me, like a gangster's daughter would be, like a
gangster's wife.
" 'Just let me build the church,' I kept pleading. 'Take the money.' The television show
has proved her mettle. But no more ...things are in ruins around her. She's a little onehour
program three times a week. The ladder to heaven is hers alone to climb. I'm out
of it. She's relying on her audience to bring the millions needed to her.
"And the female mystics she quotes, you've heard her read from them, Hildegard of
Bingen, and Julian of Norwich. Teresa of Avila. You've read any of those women?"
"All of them," I said.
"Smart females who want to hear smart females listen to her. But she's beginning to
attract everyone. You cannot make it in this world if you speak to only one gender.
That isn't possible. Even I know that, the marketeer in me knows that, the Wall Street
genius, and I am that, too, have no doubt. She attracts everyone. Oh, if I only had
those last two years to do over, if only I could have launched the church before she
discovered—"
"You're looking at this all wrong. Stop regretting. If you'd made the church big, you
would have precipitated your exposure and the scandal."
"No, once the church was big enough, the scandal wouldn't have mattered. That's just
the catch. She stayed small, and when you're small, a scandal can do you in!" He
shook his head again, angrily. He was becoming too agitated, but the image of him
only grew stronger. "I cannot be allowed to destroy Dora...." His voice drifted off
again. He shuddered. He looked at me:
"What does it come to, Lestat?" he asked.
"Dora herself must survive," I said. "She has to hang on to her faith after your death is
discovered!"
"Yes. I'm her biggest enemy, dead or alive. And her church, you know, she walks a
thin line; she's no puritan, my daughter. She thinks Wynken's a heretic, but she doesn't
know how much her own modern compassion for the flesh is just what Wynken was
talking about."
"I get it. But what about Wynken, am I supposed to save Wynken too? What do I do
with Wynken?"
"She is a genius in her own way, actually," he went on, ignoring me. "That's what I
meant when I called her a theologian. She's done the near impossible thing of
mastering Greek and Latin and Hebrew, even though she was not bilingual as a small
child. You know how hard it is."
"Yes, it's not that way for us, but. . , ." I stopped. A horrible thought had occurred to
me with full force.
The thought interrupted everything.
It was too late to make Roger immortal. He was dead!
I hadn't even realized that I was assuming all this time, all this time, as we talked and
his story poured out, that I could, if I wanted to, actually bring him to me, and keep
him here, and stop him from going on. But suddenly I remembered with a ferocious
shock that Roger was a ghost! I was talking to a man who was already dead.
The situation was so hideously painful and frustrating and utterly abnormal that I was
thunderstruck and might have begun to groan, if I hadn't had to cover it up so that he
would go on.
"What's the matter with you?" he asked.
"Nothing. Talk more about Dora to me. Tell me the sort of things Dora says."
"She talks about the sterility of now, and how people need the ineffable. She points to
rampant crime and goalless youth. She's going to make a religion where nobody hurts
anybody else. It's the American dream. She knows Scripture inside and out, she's
covered all the Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha, the works of Augustine, Marcion, Moses
Maimonides; she's convinced that the prohibition against sex destroyed Christianity,
which is hardly original with her, of course, and certainly appeals to the women who
listen to her, you know...."
"Yes, I understand all that, but she must have felt some sympathy for Wynken."
"Wynken's books weren't a series of visions to her as they are to me."
"I see."
"And by the way, Wynken's books are not merely perfect, they are unique in a number
of ways. Wynken did his work in the last twenty-five years before the Gutenberg
printing press. Yet Wynken did everything. He was scribe, rubicator, that is, the
maker of the fancy letters, and also the miniaturist who added all the naked people
frolicking in Eden and the ivy and vine crawling over every page. He had to do every
step himself at a time when scriptoria divided up these functions.
"Let me finish Wynken. You have Dora now in your mind. Let me go to Wynken.
Yeah, you have to get those books."
"Great," I said dismally.
"Let me bring you right up to date. You're going to love those books, even if Dora
never does. I have all twelve of his books, as I think I told you. He was Rhineland
Catholic, forced into the Benedictines as a young man, and was in love with Blanche
de Wilde, his brother's wife. She ordered the books done in the scriptorium and that's
how it all started, her secret link with her monk lover. I have letters between Blanche
and her friend Eleanor. I have some incidents decoded from the poems themselves.
"Most sad of all, I have the letters Blanche wrote to Eleanor after Wynken was put to
death. She had the letters smuggled out to Eleanor, and then Eleanor sent them on to
Diane, and there was another woman in it, but there are very few extant fragments of
anything in her hand.
"This is what went down. They used to meet in the garden of the De Wilde castle to
perform their rites. It wasn't the monastery garden at all, as I'd once supposed. How
Wynken got there I don't know, but there are a few mentions in some of the letters
that indicate he simply slipped out of the monastery and followed a secret way into his
brother's house.
"And this made sense, of course. They'd wait till Damien de Wilde was off doing
whatever such counts or dukes did, and then they'd meet, do their dance around the
fountain, and make love.
Wynken bedded each of the women in turn; or sometimes they celebrated various
patterns. All this is recorded more or less in the books.
Well, they got caught.
"Damien castrated and stabbed Wynken in front of the women and put them to rout.
He kept the remains! Then, after days of interrogation, the frightened women were
bullied into confessing to their love for Wynken and how he had communicated
through the books; and the brother took all those books, all twelve of the books of
Wynken de Wilde, everything this artist had ever created, you understand—"
"His immortality," I whispered, "Exactly, his progeny! His books! And Damien had
them buried with Wynken's body in the castle garden by the fountain that appears in
all the little pictures in the books! Blanche could look out on it every day from her
window, the place in the ground where Wynken had been laid to rest. No trial, no
heresy, no execution, nothing like that. He just murdered his brother, it was as simple
as that. He probably paid the monastery huge amounts of money. Who knows if it was
even necessary? Did the monastery love Wynken? The monastery is a ruin now where
tourists come to snap pictures. As for the castle, it was obliterated in the bombing of
the First World War."
"Ah. But what happened after that, how did the books get out of the coffin? Do you
have copies? Are you speaking of...."
"No, I have the originals of every one. I have come across copies, crude copies, made
at the behest of Eleanor, Blanche's cousin and confidante, but as far as I know they
stopped this practice of copies. There were only twelve books. And I don't know how
they surfaced. I can only guess."
"And what is your guess?"
"I think Blanche went out in the night with the other women, dug up the body, and
took the books out of the coffin, or whatever poor Wynken's remains had been placed
in, and put everything back right the way it was."
"You think they'd do that?"
"Yes, I think they did it. I can see them doing it, by candlelight in the garden, see
them digging, the five women together. Can't you?"
"Yes."
"I think they did it because they felt the way I do! They loved the beauty and the
perfection of those books. Lestat, they knew they were treasures, and such is the
power of obsession arid such is the power of love. And who knows, maybe they
wanted the bones of Wynken. It's conceivable. Maybe one woman took a thigh bone
and another the bones of his fingers and, ah, I don't know."
It seemed a ghastly picture suddenly, arid it put me in mind, without a second's
hesitation, of Roger's hands, which I had chopped off sloppily with a kitchen knife
and dumped, wrapped in a plastic sack. I stared at the image of these hands before me,
busy, fretting with the edge of the glass, tapping the bar in anxiety.
"How far back can you trace the journey of the books?" I asked.
"Not very far at all. But that's often the case in my profession, I mean antiquities. The
books have turned up one, maybe two at a time. Some from private collections, two
from museums bombed during the wars. Once or twice I've paid almost nothing for
them. I knew what they were the minute I laid eyes on them, but other people didn't.
And understand, everywhere I went I put out the search for this sort of medieval
codex. I am an expert in this field. I know the language of the medieval artist! You
have to save my treasures, Lestat . You can't let Wynken get lost again. I'm leaving
you with my legacy."
"So it seems. But what can I do with these, and all the other relics, if Dora will have
no part of it?"
"Dora's young. Dora will change. See, I still have this vision—that maybe somewhere
in my collection—forget about Wynken—that maybe somewhere among all the
statues and relics is a central artifact that can help Dora with her new church. Can you
gauge the value of what you saw in that flat? YOU have to make Dora touch those
things again, examine them, catch the scent of them! You have to make her realize the
potency of the statues and paintings, that they are expressions of the human quest for
truth, the very quest that obsesses her. She just doesn't know yet."
"But you said Dora never cared for the paint and the plaster."
"Make her care."
"Me? How! I can conserve all this, yes, but how am I to make Dora love a work of
art? Why would you even suggest such a thing, I mean—my having contact with your
precious daughter?"
"You'll love my daughter," he said in a low murmur.
"Come again?"
"Find something miraculous in my collection for her."
"The Shroud of Turin?"
"Oh, I like you. I really do. Yes, find her something that's significant, something that
will transform her, something that I, her father, bought and cherished, that will help
her."
"You're as insane dead as you were alive, you know it? Are you still racketeering,
trying to buy your way into salvation with a hunk of marble or a pile of parchment?
Or do you really believe in the sanctity of all you've collected?"
"Of course I believe in the sanctity of it. It's all I believe in! That's my point, don't you
see? It's all you believe in too ...what glitters and what is gold."
"Ah, but you do take my breath away."
"That's why you murdered me there, among the treasures. Look, we have to hurry. We
don't know how much time we have. Back to the mechanics. Now, with my daughter,
your trump card is her ambition.
"She wanted the convent for her own female missionaries, her own Order, which was
to teach love, of course, with the same unique fire as other missionaries have taught it;
she would send her women into the poor neighborhoods and into the ghettoes and into
the working districts, and they would hold forth on the importance of starting a
movement of love from the core of the people that would reach eventually to all
governments in power, so that injustice would end."
"What would distinguish these women from other such orders or missionaries, from
Franciscans or any sort of preachers...?"
"Well, one that they would be women, and preaching women! Nuns have been nurses,
teachers for little children, servants, or locked in the cloister to bray at God like so
many boring sheep. Her women would be doctors of the church, you see! Preachers.
They would work up the crowds with personal fervor; they would turn to the women,
the impoverished and the depotentiated women, and help them to reform the world."
"A feminist vision, but coupled with religion."
"It had a chance. It had as much of a chance as any such movement. Who knows why
one monk in the 1300s became a crazy? And another one a saint? Dora has ways to
show people how to think. I don't know! You have to figure this all out, you have to!"
"And meanwhile save the church decorations," I said.
"Yes, until she will accept them or until she can turn them to some good. That's how
you get her. Talk about good."
"That's how you get anybody," I said sadly. "That's how you're getting me."
"Well, you'll do it, won't you? Dora thinks I was misguided. She said, 'Don't think you
can save your soul after all you've done by passing on these church objects to me.' "
"She loves you," I affirmed. "I saw that every time I saw her with you."
"I know. I need no such assurances. There's no time now to go into all the arguments.
But Dora's vision is immense, remember that. She's small-time now, but wants to
change the entire world. I mean, she isn't satisfied to have a cult the way I wanted it,
you know, to be a guru with a retreat full of pliant followers. She really wants to
change the world. She thinks somebody has to change the world."
"Doesn't every religious person believe that?"
"No. They don't dream of being Mohammed or Zoroaster."
"And Dora does."
"If Dora knows that that is what's required."
He shook his head, took another little bit of the drink, and looked off over the halfempty
room. Then he made a little frown as if pondering it still.
"She said, 'Dad, religion doesn't come from relics and texts. They are the expression
of it.' She went on and on. After all her studying of Scripture, she said it was the inner
miracle that counted. She put me to sleep. Don't make any cruel jokes!"
"Not for the world."
"What's going to happen to my daughter!" he whispered desperately. He wasn't
looking at me. "Look at her heritage. See it in her father. I'm fervent and extremist and
gothic and mad. I can't tell you how many churches I've taken Dora to, how many
priceless crucifixes I've shown to her, before turning them around for a profit. The
hours Dora and I have spent looking at the ceilings of Baroque churches in Germany
alone! I have given Dora magnificent relics of the true cross embedded in silver and
rubies. I have bought many veils of Veronica, magnificent works that would take your
breath away. My God."
"Was there ever—with Dora, I mean—a concept of atonement in all of this, a guilt?"
"You mean, for letting Terry disappear without explanation, for never asking, until
years later? I thought of that. If it was there in the beginning, Dora's passed it a long
time ago. Dora thinks the world needs a new revelation. A new prophet. But you just
don't become a prophet! She says her transformation must come with seeing and
feeling; but it's no Revival Tent experience."
"Mystics never think it's a Revival Tent experience."
"Of course not."
"Is Dora a mystic? Would you say that?"
"Don't you know? You followed her, you watched her. No, Dora hasn't seen the face
of God or heard His voice and would never lie about it, if that's what you mean. But
Dora's looking for it. She's looking for the moment, for the miracle, for the
revelation!"
"For the arigel to come."
"Yes, exactly."
We were both quiet suddenly. He was probably thinking of his initial proposition; so
was I, that I fake a miracle, I, the evil angel that had once driven a Catholic nun to
madness, to bleeding from her hands and feet in the Stigmata.
Suddenly he made the decision to continue, and I was relieved.
"I made my life rich enough," he said, "that I stopped caring about changing the world
if ever I really thought of it; I made a life, you see, you know, a world unto itself. But
she really has opened her soul in a sophisticated way to ... to something. My soul's
dead."
"Apparently not," I said. The thought that he would vanish, had to, sooner or later,
was becoming intolerable to me, and far more frightening than his initial presence had
ever been.
"Let's get back to the basics. I'm getting anxious...." he said.
"Why?"
"Don't freak on me, just listen. There is money put aside for Dora that has no
connection to me. The government can't touch it, besides, they never got an
indictment against me let alone a conviction, you saw to that. The information's in the
flat. Black leather folders.
File cabinet. Mixed right in with sales slips for all sorts of paintings and statues. And
you have to save all that somewhere for Dora. My life's work, my inheritance. It's in
your hands for her. You can do it, can't you? Look, there's no hurry, you've done away
with me in a rather clever way,"
"I know. And you're asking me now to function as a guardian angel, to see that Dora
receives this inheritance untainted...."
"Yes, my friend, that's precisely what I'm begging you to do. And you can do it! And
don't forget about my Wynken! If she won't take those books, you keep those books!"
He touched my chest with his hand. I felt it, the little knock upon the door of the heart.
He continued. "When my name drops put of the papers, assuming it ever makes it
from the FBI files to the wire service, you get the money to Dora. Money can still
create Dora's church. Dora is magnetic, Dora can do it all by herself, if she has the
money! You follow me? She can do it the way Francis did it or Paul or Jesus. If it
wasn't for her theology, she would have become the charismatic celebrity long ago.
She has all the assets. She thinks too much. Her theology is what sets her apart."
He took a breath. He was talking very rapidly, and I was beginning to shiver. I could
hear his fear like a low emanation from him.
Fear of what?
"Here," he said. "Let me quote something to you. She told me this last night. We've
been reading a book by Bryan Appleyard, a columnist for the papers in England,
you've heard of him? He wrote some tome called Understanding the Present. I have
the copy she gave me. And in it he said things that Dora believed ... such as that we
are 'spiritually impoverished.' "
"Agreed."
"But it was something else, something about our dilemma, that you can invent
theologies, but for them to work they have to come from some deeper place inside a
person... I know what she called it... Appleyard's words ... 'a totality of human
experience.' " He stopped.
He was distracted.
I was desperate to reassure him that I understood this. "Yes, she's looking for this,
courting it, she's opening herself for it."
I suddenly realized that I was holding on to him as tightly as he was holding on to me.
He was staring off.
I was filled with a sadness so awful that I couldn't speak. I'd killed this man! Why had
I done it? I mean, I knew he'd been interesting and evil, but Christ, how could I have
...but then what if he stayed with me the way he was! What if he could become my
friend exactly the way he was.
Oh, this was too childish and selfish and avaricious! We were talking about Dora,
about theology. Of course I understood Appleyard's point. Understanding the Present.
I pictured the book. I'd go back for it. I filed it in my preternatural memory. Read at
once, He hadn't moved or spoken.
"Look, what are you scared of?" I asked. "Don't fade on me!" I clung to him, very
raw, and small, and almost crying, thinking that I had killed him, taken his life, and
now all I wanted to do was hold on to his spirit.
He gave no response. He looked afraid.
I wasn't the ossified monster I thought I was. I wasn't in danger of being inured to
human suffering. I was a damned jibbering empath!
"Roger? Look at me. Go on talking."
He only murmured something about maybe Dora would find what he had never
found.
"What?" I demanded.
"Theophany," he whispered.
Oh, that lovely word. David's word. I'd only heard it myself a few hours ago. And
now it slipped from his lips.
"Look, I think they're coming for me," he said suddenly. His eyes grew wide. He
didn't look afraid now so much as puzzled. He was listening to something. I could
hear it too. "Remember my death," he said suddenly, as if he'd just thought of it most
distinctly. "Tell her how I died. Convince her my death has cleansed the money! You
understand. That's the angle! I paid with my death. The money is no longer unclean.
The books of Wynken, all of it, it's no longer unclean. Pretty it up. I ransomed it all
with my blood. You know, Lestat, use your clever tongue. Tell her!"
Those footsteps.
The distinct rhythm of Something walking, slowly walking.... and the low murmur of
the voices, the singing, the talking, I was get-ting dizzy. I was going to fall. I held on
to him and on to the bar.
"Roger!" I shouted aloud. Surely everybody in the bar heard it. He was looking at me
in the most pacific manner, I don't even know if his face was animate anymore. He
seemed puzzled, even amazed....
I saw the wings rise up over me, over him. I saw the immense obliterating darkness
shoot up as if from a volcanic rip in the very earth and the light rise behind it.
Blinding, beautiful light.
I know I cried out. "Roger!"
The noise was deafening, the voices, the singing, the figure growing larger and larger.
"Don't take him. It's my fault." I rose up against It in fury; I would tear It to pieces if I
had to, to make It let him go! But I couldn't see him clearly. I didn't know where /
was. And It came rolling, like smoke again, thick and powerful and absolutely
unstoppable, and in the midst of all this, looming above him as he faded, and towards
me, the face, the face of the granite statue for one second, the only thing visible, his
eyes—
"Let him go!"
There was no bar, no Village, no city, no world. Only all of them!
And perhaps the singing was no more than the sound of a breaking glass.
Then blackness. Stillness.
Silence.
Or so it seemed, that I had been unconscious in a quiet place for some time.
I woke up outside on the street.
The bartender was standing there, shivering, asking me in the most annoyed and nasal
tone of voice, "Are you all right, man?" There was snow on his shoulders, on the
black shoulders of his vest, and on his white sleeves.
I nodded, and stood up, just so he'd go away. My tie was still in place. My coat was
buttoned. My hands were clean. There was snow on my coat.
The snow was falling very lightly all around me. The most beautiful snow.
I went back through the revolving door into the tiled hallway and stood in the door of
the bar. I could see the place where we had talked, see his glass still there. Otherwise
the atmosphere was unchanged. The bartender was talking in a bored way to someone.
He hadn't seen anything, except me bolt, probably, and stumble out into the street.
Every fiber in me said, Run. But where will you run? Take to the air? Not a chance, it
will get you in an instant. Keep your feet on the cold earth.
You took Roger! Is that what you followed me for? Who are you!
The bartender looked up over the empty, dusty distance. I must have said something,
done something. No, I was just blubbering. A man crying in a doorway, stupidly. And
when it is this man, so to speak, that means blood tears. Make your exit quick.
I turned and walked out into the snow again. It was going to be morning soon, wasn't
it? I didn't have to walk in the miserable punishing cold until the sky brightened, did
I? Why not find a grave now, and go to sleep?
"Roger!" I was crying, wiping my tears on my sleeve. "What are you, damn it!" I
stood and shouted, voice rolling off the buildings. "Damn it!" It came back to me
suddenly in a flash. I heard all those mingled voices, and I fought it. The face. It has a
face! A sleepless mind in its heart and an insatiable personality. Don't get dizzy, don't
try to remember. Somebody in one of the buildings opened a window and shouted at
me to move on. "Stop screaming out there." Don't try to reconstruct. You'll lose
consciousness if you do.
I suddenly envisioned Dora and thought I might collapse where I was, shuddering and
helpless and jabbering nonsense to anyone who came to help me.
This was bad, this was the worst, this was simply cosmically awful!
And what in God's name had been the meaning of Roger's expression in that last
moment? Was it even an expression? Was it peace or calm or understanding, or just a
ghost losing his vitality, a ghost giving up the ghost!
Ah! I had been screaming. I realized it. Lots of mortals around me, high up in the
night, were telling me to be quiet.
I walked on and on.
I was alone. I cried quietly. There was no one in die empty street to hear.
I crept on, bent nearly double, crying out loud. I never noticed anyone now who saw
or heard or stopped or took note. I wanted to reenact it in my mind, but I was terrified
it would knock me flat on my back if I did it. And Roger, Roger ...Oh, God, I wanted
in my monstrous selfishness to go to Dora and go down on my knees. I did this, I
killed, I....
Midtown. I suppose. Mink coats in a window. The snow was touching my eyelids in
the tenderest way. I took off the scarf tie, wiped my face thoroughly so there was no
blood from the tears on it.
And then I blundered into a small bright hotel.
I paid for the room in cash, extra tip, don't disturb me for twenty-four hours, went
upstairs, bolted the door, pulled the curtains, shut off the bothersome stinking heat,
and crawled under the bed and went to sleep, The last strange thought that passed
through my mind before I went into mortal slumber—it was hours before sunrise, and
plenty of time for dreaming—was that David was going to be angry about all this
somehow, but that Dora, Dora might believe and understand ...
I must have slept a few hours at least. I could hear the night sounds outside.
When I woke, the sky was lightening. The night was almost up.
Now would come oblivion. I was glad. Too late to think. Go back into the deep
vampire sleep. Dead with all the other Undead wherever they were, covering
themselves against the coming light.
A voice startled me. It spoke to me very distinctly:
"It's not going to be that simple."
I rose up in one motion, overturning the bed, on my feet, staring in the direction from
which the voice had come. The little hotel room was like a tawdry trap.
A man stood in the corner, a simple man. Not particularly tall, or small, or beautiful
like Roger, or flashy like me, not even very young, not even very old, just a man. A
rather nice-looking man, with arms folded and one foot crossed over the other.
The sun had just come up over the buildings. The fire hit the windows. I was blinded.
I couldn't see anything.
I went down towards the floor, just a little burnt and hurt, the bed falling down upon
me to protect me.
Nothing else. Whoever or whatever it was, I was powerless once the sun had come
into the sky, no matter how white and thick the veil of winter morning.

Chapter Five

Very well," said David. "Sit down. Stop pacing. And I want you to go over every
detail again. If you need to feed before you do this, then we'll go out and—"
"I have told you! I am past that. I don't need to feed. I don't need blood. I crave it. I
love it. And I don't want any now! I feasted on Roger last night like a gluttonous
demon. Stop talking about blood."
"Would you take your place there at the table?"
Across from him, he meant.
I was standing at the glass wall, looking right down on the roof of St. Patrick's.
He'd gotten us perfect rooms in the Olympic Tower and we were only just above the
spires. An immense apartment far in excess of our needs but a perfect domicile
nevertheless. The intimacy with the cathedral seemed essential. I could see the
cruciform of the roof, the high piercing towers. They looked as if they could impale
you, they seemed so sharply pointed at heaven. And heaven as it had been the night
before was a soft soundless drift of snow.
I sighed.
"Look, I'm sorry. But I don't want to go all over it again. I can't. Either you accept it
as I told you, or I... I... go out of my mind."
He remained sitting calmly at the table. The place had come "turnkey," or furnished. It
was the snazzy substantial style of the corporate world—lots of mahogany and leather
and shades of beige and tan and gold that could offend no one, conceivably. And
flowers. He had seen to flowers. We had the perfume of flowers.
The table and chairs were harmoniously Oriental, the fashionable infusion of Chinese.
I think there was a painted urn or two also.
And below we had the Fifty-first Street side of St. Patrick's, and people down there on
Fifth going and coming on the snowy steps, The quiet vision of the snow.
"We don't have that much time," I said. "We have to get uptown, and I have to secure
that place or move all of those precious objects. I'm not allowing some accident to
happen to Dora's inheritance."
"We can do that, but before we go, try this for me. Describe the man again ...not
Roger's ghost, or the living statue, or the winged one, but the man you saw standing in
the corner of the hotel room, when the sun came up.
"Ordinary, I told you, very ordinary. Anglo-Saxon? Yes, probably. Distinctly Irish or
Nordic? No. Just a man. Not a Frenchman, I don't think. No, a routine flavor of
American. A man of good height, my height, but not overwhelmingly tall like you. I
couldn't have seen him for more than five seconds. It was sunrise. He had me trapped
there. I couldn't flee, I went blank. The mattress covered me, and when I woke, no
man. Gone, as if I'd imagined it. But I didn't imagine it!"
"Thank you. The hair?"
"Ash blond, almost gray. You know how ash blond can fade to where it's really truly a
... a graying brown color, or colorless almost, just sort of deep gray."
He gave a little gesture that he understood.
Cautiously I leant on the glass. With my strength it would have been a simple thing to
have accidentally shattered the wall. The last thing I wanted was a blunder.
Obviously he wanted me to say more, and I was trying. I could recall the man fairly
distinctly. "An agreeable face, very agreeable.
He was the kind of man who doesn't impress one with size or physicality so much as a
sort of alertness, a poise and intelligence, I suppose you'd call it. He looked like an
interesting man."
"Clothes."
"Not noticeable. Black I think, maybe even a bit dusty? I think I would remember jet
black, or beautiful black, or fancy black."
"Eyes distinctive?"
"Only for the intelligence. They weren't large or deeply colored. He looked normal,
smart. Dark eyebrows but not terribly heavy or anything like that. Normal forehead,
full hair, nice hair, combed, but nothing dandified like mine. Or yours."
"And you believe he spoke the words?"
"I'm sure he did. I heard him. I jumped up. I was awake, you understand, fully awake.
I saw the sun. Look at my hand."
I was not as pale as I had been before I went into the Gobi desert, before I had
tempted the sun to kill me in the recent past. But we could both see the burn where the
rays of the sun had struck my hand. And I could feel the burn on the right side of my
face, though it wasn't visible there because I'd probably turned my head.
"And you woke and you were under the bed, and it was askew, and had been thrown
over and had fallen back down."
"No question of it. A lamp was overturned. I had not dreamed it any more than I
dreamed Roger or anything else. Look, I want you to come uptown with me. I want
you to see this place. Roger's things."
"Oh, I want to," he said. He stood up. "I wouldn't miss this for the world. It's just I
wanted you to take your ease a little longer, to try to...."
"What? Get calm? After talking to the ghost of one of my victims? After seeing this
man standing in my room! After seeing this thing take Roger, this thing which has
been stalking me all over the world, this herald of madness, this—"
"But you didn't really see it take Roger, did you?"
I thought about it for a moment.
"I'm not sure. I'm not sure Roger's image was animated anymore. He looked
completely calm. He faded. Then the face of the creature or being or whatever it
was—the face was visible for an instant. By that time, I was completely lost—no
sense of balance or locality, nothing. I don't know whether Roger was just fading as it
took him or whether he accepted it and went along."
"Lestat, you don't know that either thing happened. You only know Roger's ghost
disappeared and this thing appeared. That's all you know."
"I suppose that's true."
"Think about it this way- Your Stalker chose to make himself manifest. And he
obliterated your ghostly companion."
"No. They were connected. Roger heard him coming! Roger knew he was coming
even before I heard the footsteps. Thank God for one thing."
"Which is what?"
"That I can't communicate the fear to you. That I can't make you feel how bad it was.
You believe me, which is more than sufficient for the moment, but if you really knew,
you wouldn't be calm and collected and the perfect British gentleman."
"I might be. Let's go. I want to see this treasure-house. I believe you're absolutely
correct that you can't let all these objects slip out of the possession of the girl."
"Woman, young woman."
"And we should check on her whereabouts, immediately."
"I did that on the way here."
"In the state you were in?"
"Well, I certainly snapped out of it long enough to go into the hotel and make certain
she'd left. I had to do that much. A limousine had taken her to La Guardia at nine a.m.
this morning. She reached New Orleans this afternoon. As for the convent, I have no
idea how to reach her there. I don't even know if she has the wiring in it for a phone.
For now, she's as safe as she ever was while Roger was living."
"Agreed. Let's go uptown."
SOMETIMES fear is a warning. It's like someone putting a hand on your shoulder
and saying Go No Farther.
As we entered the flat, I felt that for a couple of seconds. Panic.
Go No Farther.
But I was too proud to show it and David too curious, proceeding before me into the
hallway, and noting, no doubt, as I did, that the place was without life. The recent
death? He could smell it as well as I could. I wondered if it was less noxious to him
since it had not been his kill.
Roger! The fusion of the mangled corpse and Roger the Ghost in memory was
suddenly like a sharp kick in the chest.
David went all the way to the living room while I lingered, looking at the big white
marble angel with its shell of holy water and thinking how like the granite statue it
was. Blake. William Blake had known. He had seen angels and devils and he'd gotten
their proportions right. Roger and I could have talked about Blake....
But that was over. I was here, in the hallway.
The thought that I had to walk forward, put one foot before the other, reach the living
room, and look at that granite statue was suddenly a little more than I could accept.
"It's not here," David said. He hadn't read my mind. He was merely stating the
obvious. He was standing in the living room some fifty feet away, looking at me, the
halogens throwing just a little of their dedicated light on him and he said again,
"There is no black granite statue in this room."
I gave a sigh. "I'm going to hell," I whispered.
I could see David very distinctly, but no mortal could have. His image was too
shadowy. He looked tall and very strong, standing there, back to the dingy light of the
windows, the halogens making sparkles on his brass buttons.
"The blood?"
"Yes, the blood, and your glasses. Your violet glasses. A nice piece of evidence."
"Evidence of what!"
It was too stupid of me to stand here at the back door talking to him over this distance.
I walked down the hall as if going cheerfully to the guillotine, and I came into die
room.
There was only an empty space where the statue had stood, and I wasn't even sure it
was big enough. Clutter. Plaster saints. Icons, some so old and fragile they were under
glass. Last night I hadn't noticed so very many, sparkling all over the walls in the
splinters of light that escaped the directed lamps.
"Incredible!" David whispered.
"I knew you'd love it," I said dismally. I would have loved it, too, if I were not shaken
to the bone.
He was studying the objects, eyes moving back and forth over the icons and then the
saints. "Absolutely magnificent objects. This is ... is an extraordinary collection. You
don't know what any of this is, do you?"
"Well, more or less," I said. "I'm not an artistic illiterate."
"The series of pictures on the wall," he said. He gestured to a long row of icons, the
most fragile.
"Those? Not really."
"Veronica's veil," he said. "These are early copies of the famous mandilion—the veil
itself—which supposedly vanished from history centuries ago. Perhaps during the
Fourth Crusade. This one's Russian, flawless. This one? Italian. And look there, on the
floor, in stacks, those are the Stations of the Cross."
"He was obsessed with finding relics for Dora. Besides, he loved the stuff himself.
That one, the Russian Veil of Veronica—he had just brought that here to New York to
Dora. Last night they quarreled over it, but she wouldn't take it."
It was quite fine. How he had tried to describe it to her. God, I felt as if I had known
him from my youth and we had talked about all of these objects, and every surface for
me was layered with his special appreciation and complex of thoughts.
The Stations of the Cross. Of course I knew the devotion, what Catholic child did not?
We would follow the fourteen different stations of Christ's passion and journey to
Calvary through the darkened church, stopping at each on bended knee to say the
appropriate prayers. Or the priest and his altar boys would make the procession, while
the congregation would recite with them the meditation on Christ's suffering at each
point. Hadn't Veronica come up at the sixth station to wipe the face of Jesus with her
veil?
David moved from object to object. "Now, this crucifix, this is really early, this could
make a stir."
"But couldn't you say that about all the others?"
"Oh, yes, but I'm not speaking of Dora and her religion, or whatever that's about,
simply that these are fabulous works of art. No, you're right, we cannot leave all this
to fate, not possible. Here, this little statue could be ninth century, Celtic,
unbelievably valuable. And this, this probably came from the Kremlin."
He paused, gripped by an icon of a Madonna and Child. Deeply stylized, of course, as
are they all, and this one very familiar, for the Christ child was losing one of his
sandals as He clung to his mother, and one could see angels tormenting Him with
little symbols of his coming passion, and the Mother's head was tenderly inclined to
the son. Halo overlapped halo. The child Jesus running from the future, into his
Mother's protective arms.
"You understand the fundamental principle of an icon, don't you?" David asked.
"Inspired by God."
"Not made by hands," said David. "Supposedly directly imprinted upon the
background material by God Himself."
"You mean like Jesus' face was imprinted on Veronica's veil?"
"Exactly. All icons fundamentally were the work of God. A revelation in material
form. And sometimes a new icon could be made from another simply by pressing a
new cloth to the original, and a magic transfer would occur."
"I see. Nobody was supposed to have painted it."
"Precisely. Look, this is a jewel-framed relic of the True Cross, and this, this book
here ... my God, these can't be the ... No, this is a famous Book of the Hours that was
lost in Berlin in the Second World War."
"David, we can make our loving inventory later. Okay? The point is, what do we do
now?" I had stopped being so afraid, though I did keep looking at the empty place
where the granite devil had stood.
And he had been the Devil, I knew he was. I'd start trembling if we did not go into
action.
"How do we save all this for Dora, and where?" David said. "Come on, the cabinets
and the notebooks, let's put things in order, find the Wynken de Wilde books, let's
make a decision and a plan."
"Don't think about bringing your old mortal allies into this," I said suddenly,
suspiciously, and unkindly, I have to admit.
"You mean the Talamasca?" he asked. He looked at me. He was holding the precious
Book of the Hours in his hand, its cover as fragile as piecrust.
"It all belongs to Dora," I said. "We have to save it for her. And Wynken's mine if she
never wants Wynken."
"Of course, I understand that," he said. "Good heavens, Lestat, do you think I still
maintain contact with the Talamasca? They could be trusted in that regard, but I don't
want any contact with my old mortal allies, as you call them. I never want any contact
with them again. I don't want my file in their archive the way you wanted yours,
remember. 'The Vampire Lestat.' I don't want to be remembered by them, except as
their Superior General who died of old age. Now come on."
There was a bit of disgust in his voice, and grief, also. I recalled that the death of
Aaron Lightner, his old friend, had been "the final straw" with him and his Talamasca.
Some sort of controversy had surrounded Lightner's death, but I never knew what it
was.
The cabinet was in a room before the parlour, along with several other boxes of
records. Immediately I found the financial papers, and went through them while
David surveyed the rest.
Having vast holdings of my own, I'm no stranger to legal documents
and the tricks of international banks. Yes, Dora had a legacy from unimpeachable
sources, I could see that, which could not be touched by those seeking retribution for
Roger's crimes. It was all connected to her name, Theodora Flynn, which must have
been her legal name, as the result of Roger's nuptial alias.
There were too many different documents for me to assess the full value, only that it
had been accumulated over time. It seemed Dora might have started a new Crusade to
take back Istanbul from the Turks had she wanted to. There were some letters... I
could pinpoint the exact date two years ago when Dora had refused all further
assistance from the two trusts of which she had knowledge. As for the rest, I
wondered if she had any idea of the scope.
Scope is everything when it comes to money. Imagination and scope. You lack either
of these two things and you can't make moral decisions, or so I've always thought. It
sounds contemptible, but think about it. It's not contemptible. Money is power to feed
the hungry. To clothe the poor. But you have to know that. Dora had trusts and trusts,
and trusts to pay taxes on all the trusts.
I thought in a moment's sorrow of how I had meant to help my beloved Gretchen—
Sister Marguerite—and how the mere sight of me had ruined everything, and I'd
retreated from her life, with all my gold still in the coffers. Didn't it always turn out
Hke that? I was no saint. I didn't feed the hungry.
But Dora! Quite suddenly it dawned on me—she had become my daughter! She had
become my saint just as she'd been Roger's. NOW she had another rich father. She
had me!
"What is it?" David asked with alarm. He was going through a carton of papers.
"You've seen the ghost again?"
For one moment, I almost went into one of my major tremours, but I got a grip. I
didn't say anything, but I saw it ever more clearly.
Watch out for Dora! Of course I would watch out for Dora, and somehow I'd convince
her to accept everything. Maybe Roger hadn't known the proper arguments. And
Roger was now a martyr for all his treasures. Yes, his last angle had been the right
angle. He'd ransomed his treasures. Maybe with Dora, if properly explained. ...
I was distracted. There they were, the twelve books. Each in a neat thin film of plastic,
lined up on the top shelf of a small desk, right near the file cabinet. I knew what they
were. I knew. And then there were Roger's labels on them, his fancy scribbling on a
small white sticker, "W de W."
"Look," David said, rising from his knees and wiping the dust from his pants. "These
are all simple legal papers on the purchases, everything here is clean, apparently, or
has been laundered; there are dozens of receipts, certificates of authentication. I say
we take all of this out of here now."
"Yes, but how, and to where?"
"Think, what's the safest place? Your rooms in New Orleans are certainly not safe.
We can't trust these things to a warehouse in a city like New York."
"Exactly. I do have rooms here at a little hotel across from the park but that...."
"Yes, I remember, that's where the Body Thief followed you. You mean you didn't
change that address?"
"Doesn't matter. It wouldn't hold all this."
"But you realize that our sizable quarters in the Olympic Tower would hold all this,"
he said.
"You serious?" I asked.
"Of course I am. What could be more secure? Now we've work to do. We can't have
any mortal connections with this. We're going to do all this toiling ourselves."
"Ah!" I gave a disgusted sigh. "You mean wrap all this and move it?"
He laughed. "Yes! Hercules had to do such things, and so have angels. How do you
think Michael felt when he had to go from door to door in Egypt slaying the First
Born of every house? Come on. You don't realize how simple it is to cushion all these
items with modern plastics. I say we move it ourselves. It will be a venture. Why not
go over the roofs."
"Ah, there is nothing more irritating than the energy of a fledgling vampire," I said
wearily. But I knew he was right. And our strength was incalculably greater than that
of any mortal helper. We could have all this cleared out perhaps within the night.
Some night!
I will say in retrospect that labor is an antidote for angst and general misery, and the
fear that the Devil is going to grab you by the throat at any moment and bring you
down into the fiery pit!
We amassed a huge supply of an insulating material made with bubbles of air trapped
in plastic, which could indeed bind the most fragile relic in a harmless embrace. I
removed the financial papers and the books of Wynken, carefully examining each to
make sure I was right about what I had, and then we proceeded to the heavy labor.
Sack by sack we transported all the smaller objects, going over the rooftops as David
had suggested, unnoticed by mortals, two stealthy black figures flying as witches
might to the Sabbath.
The larger objects we had to take more lovingly, each of us toting one at a time in our
arms. I deliberately avoided the great white marble angel. But David loved it, talking
to it all the way until we reached our destination. And all this was slipped into the
secure rooms of the Olympic Tower in a rather proper way through the freight
stairways, with the obligatory mortal pace.
Our little clocks would wind down as we touched the mortal world, and we would
pass into it quickly, gentlemen furnishing their new digs with appropriately and
securely wrapped treasures.
Soon the clean, carpeted rooms above St. Patrick's housed a wilderness of ghostly
plastic packages, some looking all too much like mummies, or less carefully
embalmed dead bodies. The white marble angel with her seashell holy water basin
was perhaps the largest. The books of Wynken, wrapped and bound, lay on the
Oriental dining table. I hadn't really had a chance to look at them, but now was not the
moment.
I sank down in a chair in the front room, panting from sheer boredom and fury that I
had had to do anything so utterly menial. David was jubilant.
"The security's perfect here," David said enthusiastically. His young male body
seemed inflamed with his own personal spirit. When I looked at him, sometimes I saw
both merged—the elderly David, the young strapping Anglo-Indian male form. But
most of the time, he was merely starkly perfect. And surely the strongest fledgling I
had ever produced.
That wasn't due only to the strength of my blood or my own trials and tribulations
before I'd brought him over. I'd given him more blood than I'd ever given the others
when I made him. I'd risked my own survival. But no matter—I sat there loving him,
loving my own work. I was full of dust.
I realized that everything had been taken care of. We had even brought the rugs last,
in rolls. Even the rug soaked with Roger's blood. Relic of the martyred Roger. Well, I
would spare Dora that detail.
"I have to hunt," David said in a whisper, waking me from my calculations.
I didn't reply.
"You coming?"
"You want me to?" I asked.
He stood there regarding me with the strangest expression, dark youthful face without
any palpable condemnation or even disgust.
"Why don't you? Don't you enjoy seeing it, even if you don't want it?"
I nodded. I'd never dreamed he would let me watch. Louis hated it when I watched.
When we'd been together last year, the three of us, David had been far too reticent and
suspicious to suggest such a thing. We went down into the thick snowy darkness of
Central Park.
Everywhere one could hear the park's nighttime occupants, snoring, grumbling, tiny
whiffs of conversation, smoke. These are strong individuals, individuals who know
how to live in the wild in the midst of a city that is itself notoriously fatal to its
unlucky ones.
David found what he wanted quickly—a young male with a skullcap, his bare toes
showing through his broken shoes, a walker in the night, lone and drugged and
insensible to the cold and talking aloud to people of long ago.
I stood back under the trees, wet with snow and uncaring. David reached out for the
young man's shoulder, brought him gently around and embraced him. Classic. As
David bent to drink, the young man began to laugh and talk simultaneously. And then
went quiet, transfixed, until at last the body was gently laid to rest at the foot of a
leafless tree.
The skyscrapers of New York glowed to the south of us, the warmer, smaller lights of
the East and the West Side hemmed us in. David stood very still, thinking what, I
wondered?
It seemed he'd lost the ability to move. I went towards him. He was no calm, diligent
archivest at the moment. He looked to be suffering.
"What?" I asked.
"You know what," he whispered. "I won't survive that long."
"You serious? With the gifts I gave you—"
"Shhhh, we're too much in the habit of saying things to each other which we know are
unacceptable to each other. We should stop."
"And speak only the truth? All right. This is the truth. Now, you feel as if you can't
survive. Now. When his blood is hot and swirling through you. Of course. But you
won't feel that way forever. That's the key. I don't want to talk anymore about
survival. I took a good crack at ending my life; it didn't work, and besides, I have
something else to think about—this thing that's following me, and how I can help
Dora before it closes in on me."
That shut him up.
We started walking, mortal fashion, through the dark park together, my feet crunching
deep into the snow. We wandered in and out of the leafless groves, pushing aside the
wet black branches, the looming buildings of midtown never quite out of sight.
I was on edge for the sound of the footsteps. I was on edge and a dreary thought had
come to me—that the monstrous thing that had been revealed, the Devil himself or
whoever it was, had merely been after Roger....
But then what of the man, the anonymous and perfectly ordinary man? That is what
he had become in my mind, the man I'd glimpsed before dawn.
We drew near to the lights of Central Park South, the buildings rising higher, with an
arrogance that Babylon could not have thrown in the face of heaven. But there were
the comforting sounds of the well-heeled, and the committed, coming and going, and
the neverending push and shove of taxis adding to the din.
David was brooding, stricken.
Finally I said, "If you'd seen the thing that I saw, you wouldn't be so eager to jump to
the next stage." I gave a sigh. I wasn't going to describe the winged thing to either one
of us again.
"I'm quite inspired by it," he confessed. "You can't imagine."
"Going to Hell? With a Devil like that?"
"Did you feel it was hellish? Did you sense evil? I asked you that before. Did you feel
evil when the thing took Roger? Did Roger give any indication of pain?"
Those questions seemed to me a bit hairsplitting.
"Don't get overly optimistic about death," I said. "I'm warning you. My views are
changing. The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even
a bit cocky."
He smiled, dismissively, as he used to do when he was mortal and visibly wore the
laurels of venerable age.
"Have you ever read the stories of Hawthorne?" he asked me softly. We had reached
the street, crossed, and were slowly skirting the fountain before the Plaza.
"Yes," I said. "At some time or other."
"And you remember Ethan Brand's search for the unpardonable sin?"
"I think so. He went off to search for it and left his fellow man behind."
"Recall this paragraph," he said gently. We made our way down Fifth, a street that is
never empty, or dark. He quoted the lines to me: " 'He had lost his hold of the
magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers
or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him
a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as
the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his
puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were
demanded for his study.' "
I said nothing. I wanted to protest, but it was not an honest thing to do. I wanted to say
that I would never, never treat humans like puppets. All I had done was watch Roger,
damn it all, and Gretchen in the jungles, I had pulled no strings. Honesty had undone
her and me together. But then he wasn't speaking of me with these words. He was
talking about himself, the distance he felt now from the human. He had only begun to
be Ethan Brand.
"Let me continue a little farther," he asked respectfully, then began to quote again. "
'Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that his moral
nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect—' " He broke
off.
I didn't reply.
"That's our damnation," he whispered. "Our moral improvement has reached its finish,
and our intellect grows by leaps and bounds."
Still I said nothing. What was I to say? Despair was so familiar to me; it could be
banished by the sight of a beautiful mannikin in the window. It could be dispelled by
the spectacle of lights surrounding a tower. It could be lifted by the great ghostly
shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again.
Meaningless, I almost said, aloud, but what came from my lips was completely
different.
"I have Dora to think of," I said.
Dora.
"Yes, and thanks to you," he said, "I have Dora too, now don't I?"

Chapter Six

How and when and what to tell Dora? That was the question. The journey we made to
New Orleans early the next night.
There was no sign of Louis at the town house in the Rue Royale, but this was by no
means unusual. Louis took to wandering more and more often, and he had been seen
once by David in the company of Armand in Paris. The town house was spotless, a
dream set out of time, full of my favorite Louis XV furnishings, luscious wallpaper,
and the finest carpets to be found.
David, of course, was familiar with the place, though he hadn't seen it in over a year.
One of the many picture-perfect bedrooms, drenched in saffron silks and outrageous
Turkish tables and screens, still held the coffin in which he had slept during his brief
and first Stay here as one of the Undead.
Of course, this coffin was heavily disguised. He had insisted that it be the real thing—
as fledglings almost invariably do, unless they are nomads by nature—but it was
cleverly enough concealed within a heavy bronze chest, which Louis had chosen for it
afterwards—a great hulking rectangular object as defeating as a square piano, with no
perceivable opening in it, though of course, if you knew the right places to touch, the
lid rose at once.
I had made my resting place as I had promised myself, when restoring this house in
which Claudia and Louis and I had once lived. Not in my old bedroom, which now
housed only the de rigueur heavy four-poster and dressing table, but in the attic,
beneath the eave, I had made a cell of metal and marble.
In sum, we had a comfortable base immediately, and I was frankly relieved that Louis
was not there to tell me he didn't believe me when I described the things that I'd seen.
His rooms were in order; new books had been added. There was a vivid and arresting
new painting by Matisse. Otherwise, things were the same.
As soon as we had settled in, checked all security, as immortals always do, with a
breezy scan and a deep resistance to having to do anything mortals have to do, we
decided that I should go uptown and try to catch a glimpse of Dora alone.
I had seen or heard nothing of the Stalker, though not much time had passed, of
course, and I had seen nothing of The Ordinary Man.
We agreed that either might appear at any moment.
Nevertheless, I broke from the company of David, leaving him to explore the city as
he wished.
Before leaving the Quarter for uptown, I called upon Mojo, my dog. If you are
unacquainted with Mojo from The Tale of the Body Thief, let me tell you only what
you need to know—that he is a giant German shepherd, is kept for me by a gracious
mortal woman in a building of which I retain ownership, and that Mojo loves me,
which I find irresistible. He is a dog, no more, or less, except that he is immense in
size, with an extremely thick coat, and I cannot stay long away from him.
I spent an hour or two with him, wrestling, rolling around with him on the ground in
the back garden, and talking to him about everything that happened, then debated as
to whether I should take him with me uptown. His dark, long face, wolflike and
seemingly evil, was full of the usual gentleness and forbearance. God, why didn't you
make us all dogs?
Actually, Mojo created a sense of safety in me. If the Devil came and I had Mojo....
But that was the most absurd idea! I'd fend off Hell on account of a flesh-and-Wood
dog. Well, humans have believed stranger things, I suppose.
Just before I'd left David, I'd asked, "What do you think is happening, I mean with this
Stalker and this Ordinary Man?" And David had answered without hesitation, "You're
imagining both of them, you punish yourself relentlessly; it's the only way you know
how to go on having fun."
I should have been insulted. But I wasn't.
Dora was real.
Finally, I decided I had to take leave of Mojo. I was going to spy upon Dora. And had
to be fleet of foot. I kissed Mojo and left him. Later we would walk in our favorite
wastelands beneath the River Bridge, amid the grass and the garbage, and be together.
That I would have for as long as nature let me have it. For the moment it could wait.
Back to Dora.
Of course Dora didn't know Roger was dead. There was no way that she could know,
unless—perhaps—Roger had appeared to her.
But I hadn't gathered from Roger that such was even possible.
Appearing to me had apparently consumed all his energy. Indeed, I thought he had
been far too protective of Dora to have haunted her in any practical or deliberate way.
But what did I know about ghosts? Except for a few highly mechanical and indifferent
apparitions, I'd never spoken to a ghost until I'd spoken to Roger.
And now I would carry with me forever the indelible impression of his love for Dora,
and his peculiar mixture of conscience and supreme self-confidence. In retrospect,
even his visit seemed to me to exhibit extraordinary self-assurance. That he could
haunt, that was not beyond probability since the world is filled with impressive and
credible ghost stories. But that he could detain me in conversation—that he could
make me his confidant—that had indeed involved an enormous and almost dazzling
pride, I walked uptown in human fashion, breathing the river air, and glad to be back
with my black-barked oaks, and the sprawling, dimly lighted houses of New Orleans,
the intrusions everywhere of grass and vine and flower; home.
Too soon, I reached the old brick convent building on Napoleon Avenue where Dora
was lodged. Napoleon Avenue itself is a rather beautiful street even for New Orleans;
it has an extraordinarily wide median where once streetcars used to run. Now there are
generous shade trees planted on it, just as there were all around the convent that faced
it.
It was the leafy depth of Victorian uptown.
I drew close to the building slowly, eager to imprint its details on my mind. How I'd
changed since last I'd spied on Dora.
Second Empire was the style of the convent, due to a mansard roof which covered the
central portion of the building and its long wings. Old sjates had, here and there,
fallen away from the sloping mansard, which was concave on the central part and
quite unusual on account of that fact. The brickwork itself, die rounded arched
windows, the four corner towers of the building, the two-storey
plantation-house porch on the front of the central building—with its white columns
and black iron railings—all of this was vaguely New Orleans Italianate, and
gracefully proportioned. Old copper gutters clung to the base of the roofs. There were
no shutters, but surely there had once been.
The windows were numerous, high, rounded at the tops on the second and third
stories, trimmed in faded white.
A great sparse garden covered the front of the building as it looked out over the
avenue, and of course I knew of the immense courtyard inside. The entire city block
was dominated by this little universe in which nuns and orphans, young girls of all
ages, had once dwelt. Great oaks sprawled over the sidewalks. A row of truly ancient
crape myrtles lined the side street to the south.
Walking round the building, I surveyed the high stained-glass windows of the twostorey
chapel, noted the flickering of a light inside, as though the Blessed Sacrament
were present—a fact that I doubted—and then coming to the rear I went over the wall.
The building did have some locked doors, but not very many. It was wrapped in
silence, and in the mild but nevertheless real winter of New Orleans, it was chillier
within than without.
I entered the lower corridor cautiously, and at once found myself loving the
proportions of the place, the loftiness and the breadth of the corridors, the intense
smell of the recently bared brick walls, and the good wood scent of the bare yellow
pine floors. It was rough, all this, the kind of rough which is fashionable among artists
in big cities who live in old warehouses, or call their immense apartments lofts.
But this was no warehouse. This had been a habitation and something of a hallowed
one. I could feel it at once. I walked slowly down the long corridor towards the
northeast stairs. Above to my right lived Dora in the northeast tower, so to speak, of
the building, and her living quarters did not begin until the third floor.
I sensed no one in the building. No scent nor sound of Dora. I heard the rats, the
insects, something a little larger than a rat, possibly a raccoon feeding away
somewhere up in an attic, and then I felt for die elementals, as David called them—
those things which I prefer to call spirits, or poltergeists.
I stood still, eyes closed. I listened. It seemed the silence gave back dim emanations of
personalities, but they were far too weak and too mingled to touch my heart or spark a
thought in me. Yes, ghosts here, and here ... but I sensed no spiritual turbulence, no
unresolved tragedy or hanging injustice. On the contrary, there seemed a spiritual
stillness and firmness.
The building was whole and itself.
I think the building liked having been stripped to its nineteenth-century essentials;
even the naked beamed ceilings, though never built for exposure, were nevertheless
beautiful without plaster, their wood dark and heavy and level because all the
carpentry of those years had been done with such care.
The stairway was original. I had walked up a thousand such built in New Orleans.
This building had at least five. I knew the gentle curve to each tread, worn down by
the feet of children, the silky feel of the banister which had been waxed countless
times for a century. I knew die landing which cut directly against an exterior window,
ignoring the shape or existence of the window, and simply bisecting the light which
came from the street outside.
When I reached the second floor, I realized I was at the doorway of the chapel. It had
not seemed such a large space from outside.
It was in fact as large as many a church I'd seen in my years. Some twenty or so pews
were in neat rows on either side of its main aisle. The plastered ceiling was coved and
crowned with fancy molding.
Old medallions still held firmly in the plaster from which, no doubt, gasoliers had
once hung. The stained-glass windows, though without human figures, were
nevertheless very well executed, as the streetlamp showed to good advantage. And the
names of the patrons were beautifully lettered on the lower panes of each window.
There was no sanctuary light, only a bank of candles before a plaster Regina Maria,
that is, a Virgin wearing an ornate crown.
The place must have been much as the Sisters had left it when the building was sold.
Even the holy water fount was there, though it had no giant angel to hold it. It was
only a simple marble basin on a stand.
I passed beneath a choir loft as I entered, somewhat amazed at the purity and
symmetry of the entire design. What was it like, living in a building with your own
chapel? Two hundred years ago I had knelt more than once in my father's chapel. But
that had been no more than a tiny stone room in our castle, and this vast place, with its
old oscillating electric fans for breeze in summer, seemed no less authentic than my
father's little chapel had been.
This was more the chapel of royalty, and the entire convent seemed suddenly a
palazzo—rather than an institutional building. I imagined myself living here, not as
Dora would have approved, but in splendour, with miles of polished floors before me
as I made my way each night into this great sanctuary to say my prayers.
I liked this place. It flamed into my mind. Buy a convent, make it your palace, live
within its safety and grandeur in some forgotten spot of a modern city! I felt covetous,
or rather, my respect for Dora deepened.
Countless Europeans still lived in such buildings, multi-storeyed, wings facing each
other over expensive private courts. Paris had its share of such mansions, surely. But
in America, it presented a lovely picture, the idea of living here in such luxury.
But that had not been Dora's dream. Dora wanted to train her women here, her female
preachers who would declare the Word of God with the fire of St. Francis or
Bonaventure.
Well, if her faith were suddenly swept away by Roger's death, she could live here in
splendour.
And what power had I to affect Dora's dream? Whose wishes would be fulfilled if I
somehow positioned her so that she accepted her enormous wealth and made herself a
princess in this palace? One happy human being saved from the misery which religion
can so effortlessly generate?
It wasn't an altogether worthless idea. Just typical of me. To think in terms of Heaven
on Earth, freshly painted in pastel hues, floored in fine stone, and centrally heated.
Awful, Lestat.
Who was I to think such things? Why, we could live here like Beauty and the Beast,
Dora and I. I laughed out loud. A shiver ran down my back, but I didn't hear the
footsteps.
I was suddenly quite alone. I listened. I bristled.
"Don't you dare come near me now," I whispered to the Stalker who was not there, for
all I knew. "I'm in a chapel. I am safe! Safe as if I were in the cathedral."
I wondered if the Stalker was laughing at me. Lestat, you imagined it all.
Never mind. Walk up the marble aisle towards the Communion Rail. Yes, there was
still a Communion Rail. Look at what is before you, and don't think just now.
Roger's urgent voice was at the ear of my memory. But I loved Dora already, didn't I?
I was here. I would do something. I was merely taking my time!
My footsteps echoed throughout the chapel. I let it happen. The Stations of the Cross,
small, in deep relief in plaster, were still fixed between the stained-glass windows,
making the usual circuit of the church, and the altar was gone from its deep arched
niche—and there stood instead a giant Crucified Christ.
Crucifixes always fascinate me. There are numerous ways in which various details
can be rendered, and the art of the Crucified Christ alone fills much of the world's
museums, and those cathedrals and basilicas that have become museums. But this,
even for me, was a rather impressive one. It was huge, old, very realistic in the style
of the late nineteenth century, Christ's scant loincloth coiling in the wind, his face
hollow-cheeked and profoundly sorrowful.
Surely it was one of Roger's finds. It was too big for the altar niche, for one thing, and
of impressive workmanship, whereas the scattered plaster saints who remained on
their pedestals—the predictable and pretty St. Therese of Lisieux in her Carmelite
robes, with her cross and her bouquet of roses; St. Joseph with his lily; and even the
Maria Regina with her crown at her shrine beside the altar—were all more or less
routine. They were life-size; they were carefully painted; they were not fine works of
art.
The Crucified Christ pushed one to some sort of resolution.
Either "I loathe Christianity in all its bloodiness," or some more painful feeling,
perhaps for a time in youth when one had imagined one's hands systematically pierced
with those particular nails. Lent.
Meditations. The Church. The Priest's voice entoning the words. Our Lord.
I felt both the loathing and the pain. Hovering near in the shadows, watching outside
lights flicker and flare in the stained glass, I felt boyhood memories near me, or
maybe I tolerated them. Then I thought of Roger's love for his daughter, and the
memories were nothing, and the love was everything. I went up the steps that had
once led to the altar and tabernacle. I reached up and touched the foot of the crucified
figure. Old wood. Shimmer of hymns, faint and secretive. I looked up into the race
and saw not a countenance twisted in agony, but wise and still, perhaps in the final
seconds before death.
A loud echoing noise sounded somewhere in the building. I stepped back almost too
fast, and lost my footing stupidly and found myself facing the church. Someone
moved in the building, someone walking at a moderate pace on the lower floor and
towards the same stairway up which I'd come to the chapel door.
I moved swiftly to the entrance of the vestibule. I could hear no voice and detect no
scent! No scent. My heart sank. "I won't take any more of this!" I whispered. I was
already shaking. But some mortal scents don't come that easily; there is the breeze to
consider, or rather the draughts, which in this place were considerable.
The figure was mounting the stairs.
I leant back behind the chapel door so I might see it turn at the landing. And if it was
Dora I meant to hide at once.
But it wasn't Dora, and it came walking so fast right up the stairs, lightly and briskly
towards me, that I realized who it was as he came to a stop in front of me.
The Ordinary Man.
I stood stock-still, staring at him. Not quite my height; not quite my build; regular in
every respect as I remembered. Scentless? No, but the scent was not right. It was
mingled with blood and sweat and salt and I could hear a faint heartbeat... .
"Don't torment yourself," he said, in a very civil and diplomatic voice. "I'm debating.
Should I make my offer now, or before you get mixed up with Dora? I'm not sure
what's best."
He was four feet away at the moment.
I slouched arrogantly against the doorframe of the vestibule and folded my arms. The
whole flickering chapel was behind me. Did I look frightened? Was I frightened? Was
I about to perish of fright?
"Are you going to tell me who you are," I asked, "and what you want, or am I
supposed to ask questions and draw this out of you?"
"You know who I am," he said in the same reticent, simple manner.
Something struck me suddenly. What was outstanding were the proportions of his
figure and his face. The regularity itself. He was rather a generic man.
He smiled. "Exactly. It's the form I prefer in every age and place, because it doesn't
attract very much attention." Again the voice was good-natured. "Going about with
black wings and goat's feet, you know—it overwhelms mortals instantly."
"I want you to get the hell out of here before Dora comes!" I said.
I was suddenly sputtering crazy.
He turned, slapped his thigh, and laughed.
"You are a brat, Lestat," he said in his simple, unimposing voice.
"Your cohorts named you properly. You can't give me orders."
"I don't know why not. What if I throw you out?"
"Would you like to try? Shall I take my other form? Shall I let my wings...." I heard
the chatter of voices, and my vision was clouding.
"No!" I shouted.
"All right."
The transformation came to a halt. The dust settled. I felt my heart knock against my
chest like it wanted to get out.
"I'll tell you what I'm going to do," he said. "I'll let you handle things with Dora, since
you seem obsessed with it. And I won't be able to distract you from it. And then when
you've finished with all this, this girl and her dreams and such, we can talk together,
you and I."
"About what?"
"Your soul, what else?"
"I'm ready to go to Hell," I said, lying through my teeth. "But I don't believe you're
what you claim to be. You're something, something like me for which there aren't
scientific explanations, but behind it all, there's a cheap little core of facts that will
eventually lay bare everything, even the texture of each black feather of your wings."
He frowned slightly, but he wasn't angry.
"We won't continue at this pace," he said. "I assure you. But for now, I'll let you think
about Dora. Dora's on her way home. Her car has just pulled into the courtyard. I'm
going, with regular footsteps, the way I came. And I give you one piece of advice, for
both of us."
"Which is what?" I demanded.
He turned his back on me and started down the stairway, as quick and spry as he had
come up. He didn't turn around till he reached the landing. I had already caught Dora's
scent.
"What advice?" I demanded.
"That you leave Dora alone completely. Turn her affairs over to worldly lawyers. Get
away from this place. We have more important things to discuss. This is all so
distracting."
Then he was gone with a clatter down the lower stairs, and presumably out a side
door. I heard it open and close.
And almost immediately following, I heard Dora come through the main rear entrance
into the center of the building, the way I had entered, and the way he had entered, and
she began her progress down the hall.
She sang to herself as she came, or hummed, I should say. The sweet aroma of womb
blood came from her. Her menses. Maddeningly, it amplified the succulent scent of
the whole child moving towards me.
I slipped back into the shadows of the vestibule. She wouldn't see me or have any
knowledge of me as she went by and on up the next stairway to her third-floor room.
She was skipping steps when she reached the second floor. She had a backpack slung
over her shoulders and wore a pretty, loose old-fashioned dress of flowered cotton
with long, white lace-trimmed sleeves.
She swung round to go up when she suddenly stopped. She turned in my direction. I
froze. She could not possibly see me in this light.
Then she came towards me. She reached out. I saw her white fingers touch something
on the wall; it was a light switch. A simple plastic light switch, and suddenly a flood
came from the bulb above.
Picture this: the blond male intruder, eyes hidden by the violet sunglasses, now nice
and clean, with no more of her father's blood, black wool coat and pants.
I threw up my hands as if to say "I won't hurt you!" I was speechless.
I disappeared.
That is, I moved past her so swiftly she couldn't see it; I brushed her about like the air
would brush her. That's all. I made the two flights to an attic, and went through an
open door in the dark spaces above the chapel, where only a few windows in the
mansard let in a tiny light from the street. One of the windows was broken out. A
quick way to make an exit. But I stopped. I sat down very still in the corner. I shrank
up into the corner. I drew up my knees, pushed my glasses up on my nose, and looked
across the width of the attic towards the door through which I'd come.
I heard no screams. I heard nothing. She had not gone into hysterics; she was not
running madly through the building. She had sounded no alarms. Fearless, quiet,
having seen a male intruder. I mean, next to a vampire, what in the world is as
dangerous to a lone woman as a young human male?
I realized my teeth were chattering. I put my right hand into a fist and pushed it into
my left palm. Devil, man, who the hell are you, waiting for me, telling me not to talk
to her, what tricks, don't talk to her, I was never going to talk to her, Roger, what the
hell am I to do now? I never meant for her to see me like this!
I should never, never have come without David. I needed the anchor of a witness. And
the Ordinary Man, would he have dared to come up if David had been here? I loathed
him! I was in a whirlpool. I wasn't going to survive.
Which meant what? What was going to kill me?
Suddenly I realized that she was coming up the stairs. This time she walked slowly,
and very quietly. A mortal couldn't have heard her. She had her electric torch with
her. I hadn't noticed it before. But now she had it, and the beam came through the
open attic door and ran along the sloping dark boards of the inner roof.
She stepped into the attic and switched off the torch. She looked around very
cautiously, her eyes filling with the white light coming through the round windows. It
was possible to see things fairly distinctly here because of those round windows, and
because the street-lamps were so close.
Then she found me with her eyes. She looked right at me in the corner.
"Why are you frightened?" she asked. Her voice was soothing.
I realized I was jammed into the corner, legs crossed, knees beneath my chin, arms
locked around my legs, looking up at her.
"I... I am sorry...." I said. "I was afraid ... that I had frightened you. I was ashamed that
I had caused you distress. I felt that I'd been unforgivably clumsy."
She stepped towards me, fearlessly. Her scent filled the attic slowly, like the vapor
from a pinch of burning incense.
She looked tall and lithesome in the flowered dress, with the lace at her cuffs. Her
short black hair covered her head like a little cap with curls against her cheeks. Her
eyes were big and dark, and made me think of Roger.
Her gaze was nothing short of spectacular. She could have unnerved a predator with
her gaze, the light striking the bones of her cheeks, her mouth quiet and devoid of all
emotion.
"I can leave now if you like," I said tremulously. "I can simply get up very slowly and
leave without hurting you. I swear it. You must not be alarmed."
"Why you?" she asked.
"I don't understand your question," I said. Was I crying? Was I just shivering and
shaking? "What do you mean, why me?"
She came in closer and looked down at me. I could see her very distinctly.
Perhaps she saw a mop of blond hair and the glint of light in my glasses and that I
seemed young.
I saw her curling black eyelashes, her small but firm chin, and the way that her
shoulders so abruptly sloped beneath her lace and flowered dress that she seemed
hardly to have shoulders at all—a long sketch of a girl, a dream lily woman. Her tiny
waist beneath the loose fabric of the waistless dress would be nothing in one's arms.
There was something almost chilling about her presence. She seemed neither cold nor
wicked, but just as frightening as if she were! Was this sanctity? I wondered if I had
ever been in the presence of a true saint. I had my definitions for the word, didn't I?
"Why did you come to tell me?" she asked tenderly.
"Tell you what, dearest?" I asked.
"About Roger. That he's dead." She raised her eyebrows very lightly. "That's why you
came, wasn't it? I knew it when I saw you. I knew that Roger was dead. But why did
you come?"
She came down on her knees in front of me.
I let out a long groan. So she'd read it from my mind! My big secret. My big decision.
Talk to her? Reason with her? Spy on her? Fool her? Counsel her? And my mind had
slapped her abruptly with the good news: Hey, honey, Roger's dead!
She came very close to me. Far too close. She shouldn't. In a moment she'd be
screaming. She lifted the dead electric torch.
"Don't turn on your flashlight," I said.
"Why don't you want me to? I won't shine it in your face, I promise.
I just want to see you."
"No."
"Look, you don't frighten me, if that's what you're thinking," she said simply, without
drama, her thoughts stirring wildly beneath her words, her mind embracing every
detail in front of her.
"And why not?"
"Because God wouldn't let something like you hurt me. I know that. You're a devil or
an evil spirit. You're a good spirit. I don't know. I can't know. If I make the Sign of the
Cross you might vanish. But I don't think so. What I want to know is, why are you so
frightened of me? Surely it's not virtue, is it?"
"Wait just a second, back up. You mean you know that I'm not human?"
"Yes. I can see it. I can feel it! I've seen beings like you before. I've seen them in
crowds in big cities, just glimpses. I've seen many things. I'm not going to say I feel
sorry for you, because that's very stupid, but I'm not afraid of you. You're earthbound,
aren't you?"
"Absolutely," I said. "And hoping to stay that way indefinitely.
Look, I didn't mean to shock you with the news. I loved your father."
"You did?"
"Yes. And ...and he loved you very much. There are things he wanted me to tell you.
But above all, he wanted me to look out for you."
"You don't seem capable of that. You're like a frightened elf. Look at you."
"You're not the one I'm terrified of, Dora!" I said with sudden impatience. "I don't
know what's happening! I am earthbound, yes, that's true. And I... and I killed your
father. I took his life. I'm the one who did that to him. And he talked to me afterwards.
He said, 'Look out for Dora.' He came to me and told me to look out for you. Now
there it is. I'm not terrified of you. It's more the situation, never having been in such
circumstances, never having faced such questions!"
"I see!" She was stunned. Her whole white face glistened as if she'd broken into a
sweat. Her heart was racing. She bowed her head. Her mind was unreadable.
Absolutely unreadable to me. But she was full of sorrow, anyone could see that, and
the tears were sliding down her cheeks now. This was unbearable.
"Oh, God, I might as well be in Hell," I muttered. "I shouldn't have killed him. I ... I
did it for the simplest reasons. He was just... he crossed my path. It was a hideous
mistake. But he came to me afterwards. Dora, we spent hours talking together, his
ghost and me. He told me all about you and the relics and Wynken."
"Wynken?" She looked at me.
"Yes, Wynken de Wilde, you know, the twelve books. Look, Dora, if I touch your
hand just to try to comfort you, perhaps it will work. But I don't want you to scream."
"Why did you kill my father?" she asked. It meant more than that. She was asking,
Why did someone who talks the way you do, do such a thing?
"I wanted his blood. I feed on the blood of others. That's how I stay youthful and
alive. Believe in angels? Then believe in vampires. Believe in me. There are worse
things on earth."
She was appropriately stunned.
"Nosferatu," I said gently. "Verdilak. Vampire. Lamia.
Earthbound." I shrugged, shook my head. I felt utterly helpless. "There are other
species of things. But Roger, Roger came with his soul as a ghost to talk to me
afterwards, about you."
She started to shake and to cry. But this wasn't madness. Her eyes went small with
tears and her face crumpled with sadness.
"Dora, I won't hurt you for anything under God, I swear it. I won't hurt you...."
"My father's really dead, isn't he?" she asked, and suddenly she broke down
completely, her face in her hands, her little shoulders trembling with sobs. "My God,
God help me!" she whispered. "Roger," she cried. "Roger!"
And she did make the Sign of the Cross, and she sat there, sobbing and unafraid.
I waited. Her tears and sorrow fed upon themselves. She was becoming more and
more miserable. She leant forward and collapsed on the boards. Again, she had no
fear of me. It was as if I weren't there.
Very slowly I slipped out of the corner. It was possible to stand up easily in this attic,
once you were out of the corner. I moved around her, and then very gently reached to
take her by the shoulders.
She gave no resistance; she was sobbing, and her head rolled as if she were drunk
with sorrow; her hands moved but only to rise and grasp for things that weren't there.
"God, God, God," she cried. "God ... Roger!"
I picked her up. She was as light as I had suspected, but nothing like that could matter
anyway to one as strong as me. I took her out of the attic. She fell against my chest.
"I knew it, I knew when he kissed me," she said through her sobbing, "I knew I would
never lay eyes on him again. I knew it...." This was hardly intelligible. She was so
crushably small, I had to be most careful, and when her head fell back, her face was
blanched and so helpless as to make a devil weep.
I went down to the door of her room. She lay against me, still like a rag doll tossed
into my arms, that without resistance. There was warmth coming from her room. I
pushed open the door.
Having once been a classroom perhaps, or even a dormitory, the room was very large,
set in the very corner of the building, with lofty windows on two sides and full of the
brighter light from the street.
The passing traffic illuminated it.
I saw her bed against the far wall, an old iron bed, rather plain, perhaps once a
convent bed, narrow like that, with the high rectangular frame intact for the mosquito
netting, though none hung from it now. White paint flaked from the thin iron rods. I
saw her bookcases everywhere, stacks of books, books open with markers, propped on
makeshift lecterns, and her own relics, hundreds of them perhaps, pictures, and
statues, and maybe things Roger had given her before she knew the truth. Words were
written in cursive on the wooden frames of doors and windows in black ink.
I took her to the bed and laid her down on it. She sank gratefully, it seemed, into the
mattress and the pillow. Things here were clean in the modern way, fresh, and so
repeatedly and thoroughly laundered that they looked almost new.
I handed her my silk handkerchief. She took it, then looked at it and said, "But it's too
good."
"No, use it, please. It's nothing. I have hundreds."
She regarded me in silence, then began to wipe her face. Her heart was beating more
slowly, but the scent of her had been made even stronger by her emotions.
Her menses. It was being neatly collected by a pad of white cotton between her legs. I
let myself think of it now because the menses was heavy and the smell was
overpoweringly delicious to me. It began to torture me, the thought of licking this
blood. This isn't pure blood, you understand, but blood is its vehicle and I felt the
normal temptation that vampires do in such circumstances, to lick the blood from her
nethermouth between her legs, a way of feeding on her that wouldn't harm her.
Except under the circumstances it was a perfectly outrageous and impossible thought.
There was a long silent interval.
I merely sat there on a wooden straight-backed chair. I knew she was beside me,
sitting up, legs crossed, and that she'd found a box of tissue which provided a world of
comfort to her, and she was blowing her nose and wiping her eyes. My silk
handkerchief was still clutched in her hand.
She was extremely excited by my presence but still unafraid, and far too sunk in
sorrow to enjoy this confirmation of thousands of beliefs, a pulsing nonhuman with
her, that looked and talked as if it were human. She couldn't let herself embrace this
right now. But she couldn't quite get over it. Her fearlessness was true courage. She
wasn't stupid. She was someplace so far beyond fear that cowards could never even
grasp it.
Fools might have thought her fatalistic. But it wasn't that. It was the ability to think
ahead, and thereby banish panic utterly. Some mortals must know this right before
they die. When the game's up, and everyone has said farewell. She looked at
everything from that fatal, tragic, unerring perspective.
I stared at the floor. No, don't fall in love with her.
The yellow pine boards had been sanded, lacquered, and waxed. The color of amber.
Very beautiful. The whole palazzo might have this look one day. Beauty and the
Beast. And as Beasts go, I mean, really, I'm quite a stunner.
I hated myself for having such a good time in a miserable moment like this, thinking
of dancing with her through the corridors. I thought of Roger, and that brought me
back quick enough, and the Ordinary Man, ah, that monster waiting for me!
I looked at her desk, two telephones, the computer, more books in stacks, and
somewhere in the corner a little television, merely for study, apparently, the screen no
bigger than four or five inches across though it was connected to a long coiling and
winding black cable, which I knew connected it to the wide world.
There was lots of other blinking electronic equipment. It was no nun's cell. The words
scrawled on the white framework of the doors and windows were actually in phrases,
such as "Mystery opposes Theology." And "Commotion Strange." And, of all things,
"Darkling, I listen."
Yes, I thought, mystery does oppose theology, that was something Roger was trying
to say, that she had not caught on as she should because the mystical and the
theological were mixed in her, and it wasn't working with the proper fire or magic. He
had kept saying she was a theologian. And he thought of his relics as mysterious, of
course. And they were.
Again a dim boyhood memory returned to me, of seeing the crucifix in our church at
home in the Auvergne and being awestruck by the sight of the painted blood running
from the nails. I must have been very small. I was bedding village girls in the back of
that church by the time I was fifteen—something of a prodigy for the times, but then
the lord's son was supposed to be a perfect billygoat in our village. Everyone
expected it. And my brothers, such a conservative bunch, they had more or less
disappointed the local mythology by always behaving themselves. It's a wonder that
the crops hadn't suffered from their paltry virtue. I smiled. I had certainly made up for
it. But when I had looked at the crucifix I must have been six or seven at most. And I
had said, What a horrible way to die! I had blurted it out, and my mother had laughed
and laughed. My father had been so humiliated!
The traffic on Napoleon Avenue made small, predictable, and slightly comforting
noises.
Well, comforting to me.
I heard Dora sigh. And then I felt her hand on my arm, tight and delicate for only an
instant, but fingers pressing through the armour of my clothing, wanting the texture
beneath.
I felt her fingers graze my face.
For some reason, mortals do that when they want to be sure of us, they fold their
fingers inward and they run their knuckles against our faces. Is that a way of touching
someone without seeming to be touched oneself? I suppose the palm of the hand, the
soft pad of the fingers, is too intimate.
I didn't move. I let her do it as if she were a blind woman and it was a courtesy. I felt
her fingers move to my hair. I knew there was plenty enough light to make it fiery and
pretty the way I counted upon it to be, shameless vain preening, selfish, confused, and
temporarily disoriented being that I was.
She made the Sign of the Cross again. But she had never been actually afraid. She was
just confirming something, I suppose. Though precisely what is really open to
question, if you think of it.
Silently she prayed.
"I can do that too," I said. I did it. "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of
the Holy Ghost. Amen." I repeated the entire performance, doing it in Latin.
She regarded me with a still, amazed face, and then she let slip a tiny, gentle laugh.
I smiled. This bed and chair—where we sat so close to each other—were in the
corner. There was a window over her shoulder, and one behind me. Windows,
windows, it was a palazzo of windows.
The dark wood of the ceiling must have been fifteen feet above us. I adored the scale
of it. It was European, to say the least, and felt normal. It had not been sacrificed to
modern dimensions.
"You know," I said, "the first time I walked into Notre Dame, after I'd been made into
this, a vampire, that is, and it wasn't my idea, by the way, I was completely human
and younger than you are now, the whole thing was forced, completely, I don't
remember specifically if I prayed when it was happening, but I fought, that I vividly
remember and have preserved in writing. But... as I was saying, the first time I walked
into Notre Dame, I thought, well, why doesn't God strike me dead?"
"You must have your place in the scheme of things."
"You think? You really believe that?"
"Yes. I never expected to come upon something like you face to face, but it never
seemed impossible or even improbable. I've been waiting all these years for a sign, for
some confirmation. I would have lived out my life without it, but there was always the
feeling... that it was going to come, the sign."
Her voice was small and typically feminine, that is, the pitch was without mistake
feminine, but she spoke with terrific self-confidence now, and so her words seemed to
have authority, rather like those of a man.
"And now you come, and you bring the news that you've killed my father. And you
say that he spoke to you. No, I'm not one for simply dismissing such things out of
hand. There's an allure to what you say, there is an ornate quality. Do you know, when
I was a young girl, the very first reason I believed in the Holy Bible was because it
had an ornate quality! I have perceived other patterns in life. I'll tell you a secret. One
time I wished my mother dead, and do you know on that very day, within the very
hour, she disappeared out of my life forever?
I could tell you other things. What you must understand is I want to learn from you.
You walked into Notre Dame Cathedral and God didn't strike you dead."
"I'll tell you something that I found amusing," I said. "This was two hundred years
ago. Paris before the Revolution. There were vampires living in Paris then, in Les
Innocents, the big cemetery, it's long gone, but they lived there in the catacombs
beneath the tombs, and they were afraid to go into Notre Dame. When they saw me do
it, they, too, thought God would strike me dead."
She was looking at me rather placidly.
"I destroyed their faith for them," I said. "Their belief in God and the Devil. And they
were vampires. They were earthbound creatures like me, half demon, half human,
stupid, blundering, and they believed that God would strike them dead."
"And before you, they had really had a faith?"
"Yes, an entire religion, they really did," I said. "They thought themselves servants of
the Devil. They thought it was a distinction.
They lived as vampires, but their existence was miserable and deliberately penitential.
I was, you might say, a prince. I came swaggering through Paris in a red cloak lined
with wolf fur. But that was my human life, the cloak. Does that impress you, that
vampires would be believers? I changed it all for them. I don't think they've ever
forgiven me, that is, those few who survive. There are not, by the way, very many of
us."
"Stop a minute," she said. "I want to listen to you, but I must ask you something first."
"Yes?"
"My father, how did it happen, was it quick and...."
"Absolutely painless, I assure you," I said, turning to her, looking at her. "He told me
himself. No pain."
She was owl-like with such a white face and big dark eyes, and she was actually
slightly scary herself. I mean, she might have scared another mortal in this place, the
way she looked, the strength of it.
"It was in a swoon that your father died," I said. "Ecstatic perhaps, and filled with
various images, and then a loss of consciousness.
His spirit had left his body before the heart ceased to beat. Any physical pain I
inflicted he never felt; once the blood is being sucked, once I've ... no, he didn't
suffer."
I turned and looked at her more directly. She'd curled her legs under her, revealing
white knees beneath her hem.
"I talked with Roger for two hours afterwards," I said. "Two hours. He came back for
one reason, to make certain I'd look out for you. That his enemies didn't get you, and
the government didn't get you, and all these people he's connected with, or was. And
that, and that his death didn't... hurt you more than it had to."
"Why would God do this?" she whispered.
"What has God got to do with it? Listen, darling, I don't know anything about God. I
told you. I walked into Notre Dame and nothing happened, and nothing ever has...."
Now, that was a lie, wasn't it? What about Him? Coming here in the guise of the
Ordinary Man, letting that door slam, arrogant bastard, how dare he?
"How can this be God's plan?" she asked.
"You're perfectly serious, aren't you? Look, I could tell you many stories. I mean, the
one about the Paris vampires believing in the Devil is just the beginning! Look, there
...there. ..." I broke off.
"What is it?"
That sound. Those slow, measured steps! No sooner had I thought of him, insultingly
and angrily, than the steps had begun.
"I... was going to say. ..." I struggled to ignore him.
I could hear them approaching. They were faint, but it was the unmistakable walk of
the winged being, letting me know, one heavy footfall after another, as though
echoing through a giant chamber in which I existed quite apart from my existence in
this room.
"Dora, I've got to leave you."
"What is it?"
The footsteps were coming closer and closer. "You dare come to me while I'm with
her!" I shouted. I was on my feet.
"What is it?" she cried. She was up on her knees on the bed. I backed across the room.
I reached the door. The footsteps were growing fainter.
"Damn you to hell!" I whispered.
"Tell me what it is," she said. "Will you come back? Are you leaving me now
forever?"
"No, absolutely not. I'm here to help you. Listen, Dora, if you need me, call to me." I
put my finger to my temple. "Call and call and call! Like prayer, you understand. It
won't be idolatry, Dora, I'm no evil god. Do it. I have to go."
"What is your name?"
The footsteps came on, distant but loud, without location in the immense building,
only pursuing me.
"Lestat." I pronounced my name carefully for her—Le-'stat—primary stress on the
second syllable, sounding the final "t" distinctly.
"Listen. Nobody knows about your father. They won't for a while. I did everything he
asked of me. I have his relics."
"Wynken's books?"
"All of it, everything he held sacred ... A fortune for you, and all he possessed that he
wanted you to have. I've got to go."
Were the steps fading? I wasn't certain. But I couldn't take the risk of remaining.
"I'll come again as soon as I can. You believe in God? Hang on to it, Dora, because
you just might be right about God, absolutely right!"
I was out of there like particles of light, up the stairways, through the broken attic
window, and up above the rooftop, moving fast enough that I could hear no footfall,
and the city below had become a beguiling swirl of lights.

Chapter Seven

In moments, I stood in my own courtyard in the French Quarter behind the town
house in the Rue Royale, looking up at my own lighted windows, windows that had
been mine for so long, hoping and praying that David was there, and afraid he wasn't.
I hated running from this Thing! I had to stand there a moment and let my usual rage
cool. Why had I run? Not to be humiliated in front of Dora, who might have seen
nothing more than me terrified by the Thing and thrown backwards onto the floor?
Maybe Dora could have seen it!
Every instinct in me told me I'd done the proper thing, gotten away, and kept that
thing away from Dora. That thing was after me. I had to protect Dora. I now had a
very good reason to fight that thing, for another's sake, not my own.
Only now did the full goodness of Dora take a contained shape in my mind, that is,
only now did I get a full impression of her, untangled from the blood smell between
her legs and her owl-like face peering at me. Mortals tumble through life, from cradle
to grave. Once in a century or two perhaps, one crosses the path of a being like Dora.
An elegant intelligence and concept of goodness, precisely, and the other thing Roger
had struggled to describe, the magnetism which had not burst free as yet from the
tangle of faith and scripture.
The night was warm and receptive.
My courtyard banana trees had not been touched by a freeze this winter, and grew
thick and drowsing as ever against the brick walls.
The wild impatiens and lantana were glowing in the overgrown beds, and the
fountain, the fountain with its cherub, was making its crystalline music as the water
splashed from the cherub's horn into the basin.
New Orleans, scents of the Quarter.
I ran up the back steps from the courtyard to the rear door of my flat.
I went inside, pounding down the hall, a man in a state of visible and ostentatious
confusion. I saw a shadow cross the living room.
"David!"
"He's not here."
I came to a halt in the doorframe.
It was the Ordinary Man.
He stood with his back to Louis's desk between the two front windows, arms folded
loosely, face evincing a patient intellect and a sort of unbreakable poise.
"Don't run again," he said without rancour. "I'll go after you. I asked you to please
leave that girl out of it. Didn't I? I was only trying to get you to cut it short."
"I've never run from you!" I said, quite unsure of myself and determined to make that
the truth from this moment on. "Well, not really! I didn't want you near Dora. What
do you want?"
"What do you think?"
"I told you," I said, gathering all my strength, "if you are here to take me, I am ready
to go to Hell."
"You're drenched in blood sweat," he said, "look at you, you're so afraid. You know,
this is what it takes for me to get through to someone like you." His voice was
reasonable, easy to hear. "Now a mortal?" he asked. "I could have simply appeared
once and said what I had to say. But you, no, that's a different matter, you've already
transcended too many stages, you've got too much to bargain with, that's why you're
worth everything to me just now."
"Bargain? You mean I can get out of this? We are not going to Hell? We can have a
trial of some sort? I can find a modern Daniel Webster to plead for me?" There was
mockery and impatience in all of this, and yet it was the logical question to which I
wanted the logical answer at once.
"Lestat," he said with characteristic forbearance, loosening his folded arms and taking
a leisurely step towards me. "It goes back to David and his vision in the cafe. The
little story he told you. I am the Devil. And I need you. I am not here to take you by
force to Hell, and you don't know the slightest thing about Hell anyway. Hell isn't
what you imagine. I am here to ask your help! I'm tired and I need you. And I'm
winning the battle, and it's crucial that I don't lose."
I was dumbstruck.
For a long moment he regarded me and then deliberately began to change; his form
appeared to swell in size, to darken, the wings to rise once more like smoke curling
towards the ceiling, and the din of voices to begin and fast grow deafening, and the
light suddenly rose behind him. I saw the hairy goat legs move towards me. My feet
had no place to stand, my hands nothing to touch but him as I screamed.
I could see the gleam of the black feathers, the arch of the wings rising higher and
higher! And the din seemed a mixture of almost exquisite music with the voices!
"No, not this time, no!" I hurled myself right at him. I grabbed for him and saw my
fingers wrap around his jet-black wrist. I stared right into his immense face, the face
of the granite statue, only fully animate and magnificently expressive, the horrific
noise of chant and song and howl swelling and drowning out my words. I saw his
mouth open, the great eyebrows scowl, the huge innocent almond-shaped eyes grow
immense and fill with light.
I held fast with my left hand clutching at his powerful arm, certain he was trying to
get away from me and he couldn't! Aha! He couldn't! And then I slammed my right
fist into his face. I felt the hardness, preternatural hardness, as if striking another of
my own kind. But this was no solid vampiric form.
The entire figure blinked even in its density and defensiveness; the image recoiled and
redressed itself and began to grow again; I gave him one last full shove in the chest
with every bit of strength I had in me, my fingers splayed out against his black
armour, the shimmering ornamented breastplate, my eyes so close in the first instant
that I saw the carvings on it, the writing in the metal, and then the wings flapped
above me as if to terrify me. He was far from me, suddenly, gigantic, yes, still, but I'd
thrown him back, damn him. One fine blow that had been. I gave a war cry before I
could stop myself and flew at him, though propelling myself from what base and by
what force I couldn't have said.
There came a swirl of black feathers, sleek and shining, and then I was falling; I
wouldn't scream, I didn't give a damn, I wouldn't. Falling.
Plummeting. As if through a depth that only nightmare can fathom. An emptiness so
perfect we can't conceive of it. And falling fast.
Only the Light remained. The Light obliterated everything visible and was so
beautiful suddenly that I lost all sense of my own limbs or parts or organs or whatever
I am created of. I had no shape or weight. Only the momentum of my fall continued to
terrify, as though gravity remained to ensure utter ruin. There was one great surge of
the voices.
"They are singing!" I cried out.
Then I lay still.
Slowly I felt the floor beneath me. The slightly rough surface of the carpet. Scent of
dust, wax, my home. I knew we were in the same room.
He had taken Louis's chair at the desk, and I lay there on my back, staring at the
ceiling, my chest bursting with pain.
I sat up, crossed my legs, and looked at him defiantly.
He was puzzled. "It makes perfect sense," he said.
"And what's that?"
"You're as strong as one of us."
"No, I don't think so," I said furiously. "I can't grow wings; I can't make music."
"Yes, you can, you've made images before for mortals. You know you can. You've
wrapped them in spells. You are as strong as we are. You have achieved a very
interesting stage in your development. I knew I was right about you all along. I'm in
awe of you."
"In awe of what? My independence? Look, let me tell you something, Satan, or
whoever you are."
"Don't use that name, I hate it."
"That's likely to make me pepper my speeches with it."
"My name is Memnoch," he said calmly, with a small pleading gesture. "Memnoch
the Devil. I want you to remember it that way."
"Memnoch the Devil."
"Aye." He nodded. "That is how I sign my name when I sign it."
"Well, let me tell you, Your Royal Highness of Darkness. I'm not helping you with
anything! I don't serve you!"
"I think I can change your mind," he said calmly. "I think you will come to understand
things very well from my point of view." I felt a sudden sagging, a complete
exhaustion, and a despair.
Typical.
I rolled over on my face and tucked my arm under my head and started crying like a
child. I was perishing from exhaustion. I was worn and miserable and I loved crying. I
couldn't do anything else. I gave in to it fully. I felt that profound release of the utterly
grief-stricken. I didn't give a damn who saw or heard. I cried and cried.
Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it.
But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I
feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing.
Whatever the case, I was too miserable to take much consolation just from feeling
good for a moment in a welter of shudders and salted, bloodstained tears.
I thought of years and years ago, when I had walked into Notre Dame and those
fiendish little vampires had lain in wait for me, Servants of Satan, I thought of my
mortal self, I thought of Dora, I thought of Armand in those days, the immortal boy
leader of Satan's Elect beneath the cemetery, who had made himself a dark saint,
sending forth his ragged blood drinkers to torment mortals, to bring death, to spread
fear and death like pestilence. I was choking with sobs.
"It is not true!" I think I said. "There is no God or Devil. It is not true."
He didn't answer. I rolled over and sat up. I wiped my face on my sleeve. No
handkerchief. Of course, I'd given it to Dora. A faint
perfume of Dora rose from my clothes, my chest against which she'd lain, blood
sweetness. Dora. I should never have left Dora in such distress. Dear God, I was
bound to look out for the sanity of Dora! Damn.
I looked at him.
He was still sitting there, his arm resting on the back of Louis's chair, and he was
simply watching me.
I sighed. "You're not going to leave me alone, are you?"
He was taken aback. He laughed. His face was marvelously friendly, rather than
neutral.
"No, of course not," he said in a low voice, as if careful not to unbalance me any
further. "Lestat, I've been waiting for someone like you for centuries. I've been
watching you yourself for centuries. No, I'm afraid I'm not going to leave you alone.
But I don't want you to be miserable. What can I do to calm you? Some small miracle,
gift, anything, so that we can proceed?"
"And how in hell will we proceed?"
"I'll tell you everything," he said with a slight shrug, his hands open, "and then you'll
understand why I have to win."
"The implication ...it's that I can refuse to cooperate with you, isn't it?"
"Absolutely. Nobody can really help me who doesn't choose to do it. And I'm tired.
I'm tired of the job. I need help. That part your friend David heard correctly when he
experienced that accidental epiphany."
"Was David's epiphany accidental? What happened to that other word? What had it
been ... I don't remember. David wasn't meant to see you or hear you and God talking
together?"
"That's almost impossible to explain."
"Did I upset some plan of yours by taking David, making him one of us?"
"Yes and no. But the point is, David heard that part correctly. My task is hard and I'm
tired! Some of the rest of David's ideas about that little vision, well—" He shook his
head. "The point is, you are the one I want now and it's terribly important you see
everything before you make up your mind."
"I'm that bad, am I?" I whispered, lips trembling. I was going to bawl again. "In all the
world, with all the things humans have done, all the unspeakable horrors men have
visited on other men, the unthinkable suffering of women and children worldwide at
the hands of mankind, and I'm that bad! You want me! David was too good, I
suppose. He didn't become as consummately evil as you thought he would. Is that it?"
"No, of course you're not that bad," he said soothingly. "That's the very point." He
gave a little sigh again.
I was beginning to notice more distinct details of his appearance, not because they
were becoming more vivid as had happened with the apparition of Roger, but because
I was growing more calm. His hair was a dark ashen blond, and rather soft and
curling. And his eyebrows were the same shade, not distinctly black at all, but very
carefully drawn to maintain an expression that contained no closed vanity or
arrogance. He didn't look stupid either, of course. The clothes were generic. I don't
believe they were really clothes. They were material, but the coat was too plain and
without buttons, and the white shirt was too simple.
"You know," he said, "you always have had a conscience! That's precisely what I'm
after, don't you see? Conscience, reason, purpose, dedication. Good Lord, I couldn't
have overlooked you. And I'll tell you something. It was as though you sent for me."
"Never."
"Come on, think of all the challenges you've flung out to the Devil."
"That was poetry, or doggerel, depending on one's point of view."
"Not so. And then think of all the things you did, waking that ancient one Akasha and
almost loosing her on humanity." He gave a short laugh. "As if we don't have enough
monsters created by evolution. And then your adventure with the Body Thief. Coming
into the flesh again, having that chance, and rejecting it for what you were before.
You know your friend Gretchen is a saint in the jungles, don't you?"
"Yes. I've seen mentions of it in the papers. I know."
Gretchen, my nun, my love when I'd been so briefly mortal, had never spoken one
word since the night she fled from me into her missionary chapel and fell on her knees
before the crucifix. She remained in prayer night and day in that jungle village, taking
almost no nourishment, and on Fridays people journeyed miles through the jungle,
and sometimes even came from Caracas and Buenos Aires just to see her bleed from
her hands and her feet. That had been the end of Gretchen.
Although it suddenly struck me for the very first time, in the middle of all this: maybe
Gretchen really was with Christ!
"No, I don't believe it," I said coldly. "Gretchen lost her mind; she's fixed in a state of
hysteria and it's my fault. So the world has another mystic who bleeds like Christ.
There have been a thousand."
"I didn't place any judgment upon the incident," he said. "If we can go back to what I
was saying. I was saying that you did everything but ask me to come! You challenged
every form of authority, you sought every experience. You've buried yourself alive
twice, and once tried to rise into the very sun to make yourself a cinder. What was left
for you—but to call on me? It is as if you yourself said it: 'Memnoch, what more can I
do now?' "
"Did you tell God about this?" I asked coldly, refusing to be drawn in. Refusing to be
this curious and this excited.
"Yes, of course," he said.
I was too surprised to say anything.
I could think of nothing clever. Certain little theological brain twisters flitted through
my mind, and sticky little questions, like "Why didn't God already know?" and so
forth. But we were beyond that point, obviously.
I had to think, to concentrate on what my senses were telling me.
"You and Descartes," he said. "You and Kant."
"Don't lump me with others," I said. "I am the Vampire Lestat, the one and only."
"You're telling me," he said.
"How many of us are there now, vampires, I mean, in the whole world? I'm not
speaking now of other immortals and monsters and evil spirits and things, whatever
you are, for instance, but vampires? There aren't a hundred, and none of them is quite
like me. Lestat."
"I completely agree. I want you. I want you for my helper."
"Doesn't it gall you that I don't really respect you, believe in you, or fear you, not even
after all this? That we're in my flat and I'm making fun of you? I don't think Satan
would put up with this sort of thing. I don't usually put up with it; I've compared
myself to you, you know. Lucifer, Son of Morning. I have told my detractors and
inquisitors that I was the Devil or that if I ever happened upon Satan himself I'd set
him to rout."
"Memnoch," he corrected me. "Don't use the name Satan. Please. Don't use any of the
following: Lucifer, Beelzebub, Azazel, Sammael, Marduk, Mephistopheles, et cetera.
My name is Memnoch. You'll soon find out for yourself that the others represent
various alphabetical or scriptural compromises. Memnoch is for this time and all time.
Appropriate and pleasing. Memnoch the Devil. And don't go look it up in a book
because you'll never find it."
I didn't answer. I was trying to figure this. He could change shapes, but there had to be
an invisible essence. Had I come against the strength of the invisible essence when I'd
smashed his face? I'd felt no real contour, only strength resisting me. And were I to
grab him now, would this man-form be filled with the invisible essence so that it
could fight me off with strength equal to that of the dark angel?
"Yes," he said. "Imagine trying to convince a mortal of these things. But that really
isn't why I chose you. I chose you not so much because it would be easier for you to
comprehend everything but because you're perfect for the job."
"The job of helping the Devil."
"Yes, of being my right-hand instrument, so to speak, being in my stead when I'm
weary. Being my prince."
"How could you be so mistaken? You find the self-inflicted
suffering of my conscience amusing? You think I like evil? That I think about evil
when I look at something beautiful like Dora's face!"
"No, I don't think you like evil," he said. "Any more than do I."
"You don't like evil," I repeated, narrowing my eyes.
"Loathe it. And if you don't help me, if you let God keep doing things His way, I tell
you evil—which is nothing really—just might destroy the world."
"It's God's will," I asked slowly, "that the world be destroyed?"
"Who knows?" he asked coldly. "But I don't think God would lift a finger to stop it
from happening. I don't will it, that I know. But my ways are the right ways, and the
ways of God are bloody and wasteful and exceedingly dangerous. You know they are.
You have to help me.
I am winning, I told you. But this century has been damn near unendurable for us all."
"So you are telling me that you're not evil...."
"Exactly. Remember what your friend David asked of you? He asked you if in my
presence you had sensed evil, and you had to answer that you had not."
"The Devil is a famous liar."
"My enemies are famous detractors. Neither God nor I tell lies per se. But look, I don't
expect for a moment that you should accept me on faith. I didn't come here to
convince you of things through conversation. I'll take you to Hell and to Heaven, if
you like, you can talk to God for as long as He allows, and you desire. Not God the
Father, precisely, not En Sof, but... well, all of this will become clear to you. Only
there's no point if I cannot count upon your willing intent to see the truth, your willing
desire to turn your life from aimlessness and meaninglessness into a crucial battle for
the fate of the world."
I didn't answer. I wasn't sure what I could say. We were leagues from the point at
which we had begun this discussion.
"See Heaven?" I whispered, absorbing all of it slowly. "See Hell?"
"Yes, of course," he said with level patience.
"I want a full night to think it over."
"What!"
"I said I want a night to think it over."
"You don't believe me. You want a sign."
"No, I am beginning to believe you," I said. "That's why I have to think. I have to
weigh all of this."
"I'm here to answer any question, to show you anything now."
"Then leave me alone for two nights. Tonight and tomorrow night. That's a simple
enough request, isn't it? Leave me alone."
He was obviously disappointed, maybe even a little suspicious. But I meant every
word of it. I couldn't say anything but what I had said. I knew the truth as I spoke it,
so fast were thought and word wedded in my mind.
"Is it possible to deceive you?" I asked.
"Of course," he asked. "I rely upon my gifts such as they are, just as you rely on
yours. I have my limits. You have yours. You can be deceived. So can I."
"What about God?"
"Ach!" he said with disgust. "If you only knew how irrelevant that question is. You
cannot imagine how much I need you. I'm tired," he said with a faint rise of emotion.
"God is ... beyond being deceived, that much I can say with charity. I'll give you
tonight and tomorrow night. I won't bother you, stalk you, as you put it. But may I ask
what you mean to do?"
"Why? Either I have the two nights or I don't!"
"You're known to be unpredictable," he said. He smiled broadly.
It was very pleasant. And something else, quite obvious, struck me about him. Not
only were his proportions perfect, there were no visible flaws in him anywhere; he
was a paragon of the Ordinary Man.
He showed no response to this estimation, whether he could read it from my mind or
not. He merely waited on me, courteously.
"Dora," I said. "I have to go back to Dora."
"Why?"
"I refuse to explain further."
Again, he was surprised by my answer.
"Well, aren't you going to try to help her with all this confusion regarding her father?
Why not explain something as simple as that? I only meant to ask you how deeply
you intended to commit yourself, how much you planned to reveal to this woman. I'm
thinking of the fabric of things, to use David's phrase. That is, how will it be with this
woman, after you've come with me?"
I said nothing.
He sighed. "All right, I've waited for your like for centuries. What is another two
nights, such as the case may be. We are speaking of only tomorrow night, really,
aren't we? At the sunset of the following evening, after that I shall come for you."
"Right."
"I'll give you a little gift that will help you believe in me. It's not so simple to me to
fix your level of understanding. You're full of paradox and conflict. Let me give you
something unusual."
"Agreed."
"So this is the gift. Call it a sign. Ask Dora about Uncle Mickey's eye. Ask her to tell
you the truth that Roger never knew." "This sounds like a Spiritualist parlour game."
"Think so? Ask her."
"All right. The truth about Uncle Mickey's eye. Now let me ask you one last question.
You are the Devil. Yes. But you're not evil? Why?"
"Absolutely irrelevant question. Or let me put it a little more mysteriously. It's
completely unnecessary for me to be evil. You'll see. Oh, this is so frustrating for me
because you have so much to see."
"But you're opposed to God!"
"Oh, absolutely, a total adversary! Lestat, when you see
everything that I have to show you, and hear all that I have to say, when you've
spoken with God and better see it from His perspective, and from my point of view,
you will join me as His adversary. I'm sure you will."
He stood up from the chair. "I'm going now. Should I help you up off the floor?"
"Irrelevant and unnecessary," I said crossly. "I'm going to miss you." The words
surprised me as they came out.
"I know," he answered.
"I have all of tomorrow night," I said. "Remember."
"Don't you realize," he answered, "that if you come with me now there is no night and
day?"
"Oh, that's very tempting," I said. "But that's what Devils do so well. Tempt. I need to
think about this, and consult others for advice."
"Consult others?" He seemed genuinely surprised.
"I'm not going off with the Devil without telling anyone," I said. "You're the Devil!
Goddamn it, why should I trust the Devil? That's absurd! You're playing by rules,
somebody's rules. Everybody always is. And I don't know the rules. Well. You gave
me the choice, and this is my choice. Two full nights, and not before then. Leave me
alone all that time! Give me your oath."
"Why?" he asked politely, as if dealing with an ornery child. "So you won't have to
fear the sound of my footsteps?"
"Possibly."
"What good is an oath on this if you don't accept the truth of all the rest that I've
said?" He shook his head as if I were being foolishly human.
"Can you swear an oath or not?"
"You have my oath," he said, laying his hand on his heart, or where his heart should
have been. "With complete sincerity, of course."
"Thank you, I feel much better," I said.
"David won't believe you," he said gently.
"I know," I said.
"On the third night," he said with an emphatic nod, "I shall come back for you here.
Or wherever you happen to be at the time."
And with a final smile, as bright as the earlier one, he disappeared.
It was not the way I tended to do it, by making off with such swiftness no human
could track it.
He actually vanished on the spot.

Chapter Eight

I stood up shakily, brushed off my clothes, and noted without surprise that the room
was as perfect as it had been when we entered it. The battle obviously had been fought
in some other realm. But what was that realm?
Oh, if only I could find David. I had less than three hours before the winter dawn and
set off at once to search.
Now, being unable to read David's mind, or to call to him, I had but one telepathic
tool at my command, and that was to scan the minds of mortals at random for some
image of David as he passed in some recognizable place.
I hadn't walked three blocks when I realized that not only was I picking up a strong
image of David, but that it was coming to me from the mind of another vampire.
I closed my eyes, and tried with my entire soul to make some eloquent contact. Within
seconds, the pair acknowledged me, David through the one who stood beside him, and
I saw and recognized the wooded place where they were.
In my days, the Bayou Road had led through this area into country, and it had been
very near here once that Claudia and Louis, having attempted my murder, had left my
remains in the waters of the swamp.
Now the area was a great combed park, filled by day, I supposed, with mothers and
children, containing a museum of occasionally very interesting paintings, and
providing in the dark of night a dense wood.
Some, of the oldest oaks of New Orleans lay within the bounds of this area, and a
lovely lagoon, long, serpentine, seemingly endless, wound under a picturesque bridge
in the heart of it.
I found them there, the two vampires communing with one another in dense darkness,
far from the beaten path. David was as I expected, his usual properly attired self.
But the sight of the other astonished me.
This was Armand.
He sat on the stone park bench, boylike, casual, with one knee crooked, looking up at
me with the predictable innocence, dusty all over, naturally, hair a long, tangled mess
of auburn curls.
Dressed in heavy denim garments, tight pants, and a zippered jacket, he surely passed
for human, a street vagabond maybe, though his face was now parchment white, and
even smoother than it had been when last we met.
In a way, he made me think of a child doll, with brilliant faintly red-brown glass
eyes—a doll that had been found in an attic. I wanted to polish him with kisses, clean
him up, make him even more radiant than he was.
"That's what you always want," he said softly. His voice shocked me. If he had any
French or Italian accent left, I couldn't hear it. His tone was melancholy and had no
meanness in it at all.
"When you found me under Les Innocents," he said, "you wanted to bathe me with
perfume and dress me in velvet with great embroidered sleeves."
"Yes," I said, "and comb your hair, your beautiful russet hair." My tone was angry.
"You look good to me, you damnable little devil, good to embrace and good to love."
We eyed each other for a moment. And then he surprised me, rising and coming
towards me just as I moved to take him in my arms. His gesture wasn't tentative, but
it was extremely gentle. I could have backed away. I didn't. We held each other tight
for a moment. The cold embracing the cold. The hard embracing the hard.
"Cherub child," I said. I did a bold thing, maybe even a defiant thing. I reached out
and mussed his snaggled curls.
He is smaller than me physically, but he didn't seem to mind this gesture.
In fact, he smiled, shook his head, and reclaimed his hair with a few casual strokes of
his hand. His cheeks went apple-perfect suddenly, and his mouth softened, and then
he lifted his right fist, and teasingly struck me hard on the chest.
Really hard. Show-off. Now it was my turn to smile and I did.
"I can't remember anything bad between us," I said.
"You will," he responded. "And so will I. But what does it matter what we
remember?"
"Yes," I said, "we're both still here."
He laughed outright, though it was very low, and he shook his head, flashing a glance
on David that implied they knew each other very well, maybe too well. I didn't like it
that they knew each other at all. David was my David, and Armand was my Armand.
I sat down on the bench.
"So David's told you the whole story," I said, glancing up at Armand and then over at
David.
David gave a negative shake of the head.
"Not without your permission, Brat Prince," David said, a little disdainfully. "I would
never have taken the liberty. But the only thing that's brought Armand here is worry
for you."
"Is that so?" I said. I raised my eyebrows. "Well?"
"You know damned good and well it is," said Armand. His whole posture was casual;
he'd learned, beating about the world, I guess. He didn't look so much like a church
ornament anymore. He had his hands in his pockets. Little tough guy.
"You're looking for trouble again," he went on, in the same slow manner, without
anger or meanness. "The whole wide world isn't enough for you and never will be.
This time I thought I'd try to speak to you before the wheel turns."
"Aren't you the most thoughtful of guardian angels?" I said sarcastically.
"Yes, I am," he said without so much as blinking. "So what are you doing, want to let
me know?
"Come, I want to go deeper into the park," I said, and they both followed me as we
walked at a mortal pace into a thicket of the oldest oaks, where the grass was high and
neglected, and not even the most desperate homeless heart would seek to rest.
We made our own small clearing, among the volcanic black roots and rather cool
winter earth. The breeze from the nearby lake was brisk and clean, and for a moment
there seemed little scent of New Orleans, of any city; we three were together, and
Armand asked again: "Will you tell me what you're doing?" He bent close to me, and
suddenly kissed me, in a manner that seemed entirely childlike and also a bit
European. "You're in deep trouble. Come on.
Everyone knows it." The steel buttons of his denim jacket were icy cold, as though he
had come from some far worse winter in a very few moments of time.
We are never entirely sure about each other's powers. It's all a game. I would no more
have asked him how he got here, or in what manner, than I would ask a mortal man
how precisely he made love to his wife.
I looked at him a long time, conscious that David had settled down on the grass,
leaning back on his elbow, and was studying us both.
Finally I spoke: "The Devil has come to me and asked me to go with him, to see
Heaven and Hell."
Armand didn't answer. Then he frowned just a little.
"This is the same Devil," said I, "which I told you I didn't believe in, when you did
believe in him centuries ago. You were right at least on one point. He exists. I've met
him." I looked at David. "He wants me as his assistant. He's given me tonight and
tomorrow night to seek advice from others. He will take me to Heaven and then to
Hell. He claims he is not evil."
David looked off into the darkness. Armand simply stared at me, rapt and silent.
I went on. I told them everything then. I repeated the story of Roger for Armand, and
of Roger's ghost, and then I told them both in detail about my blundering visit to
Dora, about my exchanges with her, and how I'd left her, and then how the Devil had
come pursuing me and annoying me, and we'd had our brawl.
I put down every detail. I opened my mind, without calculation, letting Armand see
whatever he could for himself.
Finally I sat back.
"Don't say things to me that are humiliating," I averred. "Don't ask me why I fled from
Dora, or blurted out to her all this about her father. I can't get rid of the presence of
Roger, the sense of Roger's friendship for me and love for her. And this Memnoch the
Devil, this is a reasonable and mild-mannered individual, and very convincing. As for
the battle, I don't know what happened, except I gave him something to think about.
In two nights, he's coming back, and if memory serves me correctly, which it
invariably does, he said he'd come for me wherever I was at the time."
"Yes, that's clear," Armand said sotto voce.
"You aren't enjoying my misery, are you?" I admitted with a little sigh of defeat.
"No, of course not," Armand said, "only, as usual, you don't really seem miserable.
You're on the verge of an adventure, and just a little more cautious this time than
when you let that mortal run off with your body and you took his."
"No, not more cautious. Terrified. I think this creature, Memnoch, is the Devil. If you
had seen the visions, you would think he was the Devil too. I'm not talking about
spellbinding. You can do spellbinding, Armand, you've done it to me. I was battling
that thing. It has some essence which can inhabit actual bodies! It's objective and
bodiless itself, of that I'm sure. The rest? Maybe all that was spells. He implied he
could make spells and so could I."
"You're describing an angel, of course," said David offhandedly, "and this one claims
to be a fallen angel."
"The Devil himself," mused Armand. "What are you asking of us, Lestat? You are
asking our advice? I would not go with this spirit of my own will, if I were you."
"What makes you say this?" David asked before I could get out a word.
"Look, we know there are earthbound beings," Armand said, "that we ourselves can't
classify, or locate, or control. We know there are species of immortals, and types of
mammalian creatures which look human but are not. This creature might be anything.
And there is something highly suspicious in the manner in which he courts you ... the
visions, and then the politeness."
"Either that," said David, "or it simply makes perfect sense. He is the Devil, he is
reasonable, the way you always supposed, Lestat—not a moral idiot, but a true angel,
and he wants your cooperation. He doesn't want to keep doing things to you by force.
He's used force as his introduction."
"I would not believe him," said Armand. "What does this mean—he wants you to help
him? That you would begin to exist simultaneously on this earth and in Hell? No, I
would shun him for his imagery, if nothing else, for his vocabulary. For his name.
Memnoch. It sounds evil."
"Oh, all these are things," I admitted, "that I once said, more or less, to you."
"I've never seen the Prince of Darkness with my own eyes," said Armand. "I've seen
centuries of superstition, and the wonders done by demonic beings such as ourselves.
You've seen a little more than I have. But you're right. That is what you told me
before and I'm telling it to you now. Don't believe in the Devil, or that you are his
child.
And that is what I told Louis, once when he came to me seeking explanations of God
and the universe. I believe in no Devil. So I remind you. Don't believe him. Turn your
back."
"As for Dora," said David quietly, "you've acted unwisely, but it's possible that that
breach of preternatural decorum can somehow be healed."
"I don't think so."
"Why?" he asked.
"Let me ask you both ... do you believe what I'm telling you?"
"I know you're telling the truth," said Armand, "but I told you, I don't believe this
creature is the Devil himself or that he will take you to Heaven or Hell. And very
frankly, if it is true ... well, that's all the more reason perhaps that you shouldn't go."
I studied him for a long moment, fighting the darkness I had deliberately sought,
trying to draw from him some impression of his complete disposition on this, and I
realized he was sincere. There was no envy in him, or old grudge against me; there
was no hurt, or trickery, or anything. He was past all these things, if ever they had
obsessed him. Perhaps they'd been fantasies of mine.
"Perhaps so," he said, answering my thoughts directly. "But you are correct in that I
am speaking to you directly and truly, and I tell you, I would not trust this creature, or
trust the proposition that you must in some way verbally cooperate."
"A medieval concept of pact," said David.
"Which means what?" I asked. I hadn't meant it to be so rude.
"Making a pact with the Devil," said David, "you know, agreeing to something with
him. That's what Armand is telling you not to do. Don't make a pact."
"Precisely," said Armand. "It arouses my deepest suspicions that he makes such a
moral issue of your agreement." His young face was sorely troubled, his pretty eyes
very vivid for a second in the shadows. "Why do you have to agree?"
"I don't know if that's on the mark or not," I said. I was confused.
"But you're right. I said something to him myself, something about this being played
by rules."
"I want to talk with you about Dora," said David in a low voice. "You must heal what
you've done there very quickly, or at least promise us that you won't. ..."
"I'm not going to promise you anything about Dora. I can't," I said.
"Lestat, don't destroy this young mortal woman!" said David forcefully. "If we are in
a new realm, if the spirits of the dead can plead with us, then maybe they can hurt us,
have you ever thought of that?"
David sat up, disconcerted, angry, the lovely British voice straining to maintain
decency as he spoke: "Don't hurt the mortal girl. Her father asked you for a species of
guardianship, not that you shake her sanity to the foundations."
"David, don't go on with your speech. I know what you're saying. But I tell you right
now, I am alone in this. I am alone. I am alone with this being Memnoch, the Devil;
and you both have been friends to me. You've been kindred. But I don't think anyone
can advise me what to do, except for Dora."
"Dora!" David was aghast.
"You mean to tell her this entire tale?" Armand asked timidly.
"Yes. That's exactly what I mean to do. Dora's the only one who believes in the Devil.
Dear God, I need a believer right now, I need a saint, and I may need a theologian,
and to Dora I'm going."
"You are perverse, stubborn, and innately destructive!" said David. It had the tone of a
curse. "You will do what you will!" He was furious. I could see it. All his reasons for
despising me were being heated from within, and there really was nothing I could say
in my defense.
"Wait," said Armand with gentleness. "Lestat, this is mad. It's like consulting the
Sibyl. You want the girl to act as an oracle for you, to tell you what she, a mortal,
thinks you must do?"
"She's no mere mortal, she's different. She has no fear of me whatsoever. None. And
she has no fear of anything. It's as though she's a different species, but she's the
human species. She's like a saint, Armand. She's like Joan of Arc must have been
when she led the army. She knows something about God and the Devil that I don't
know."
"You're talking about faith, and it's very alluring," said David, "just as it was with
your nun companion, Gretchen, who is now stark raving mad."
"Stark mutely mad," I said. "She doesn't say anything but prayers, or so say the
papers. But before I came along, Gretchen didn't really believe in God, keep that in
mind. Belief and madness, for Gretchen, are one and the same."
"Do you never learn!" said David.
"Learn what?" I asked. "David, I'm going to Dora. She's the only person I can go to.
And besides, I can't leave things with her as I did!
I have to go back, and I am going back. Now from you, Armand, a promise, the
obvious thing. Around this Dora, I've thrown a protective light. None of us can touch
her."
"That goes without saying. I won't hurt your little friend. You wound me." He looked
genuinely put out.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I know. But I know what blood is and innocence and how
delicious both can be. I know how much the girl tempts me."
"Then you must be the one to give in to that temptation," said Armand crossly. "I
never choose my victims anymore, you know this. I can stand before a house as
always, and out of the doors will come those who want to be in my arms. Of course I
won't hurt her. You do hold old grudges. You think I live in the past. You don't
understand that I actually change with every era, I always have as best I can. But what
in the world can Dora tell you that will help you?"
"I don't know," I said. "But I'm going directly tomorrow night. If there were time left,
I'd go now. I'm going to her. David, if something happens to me, if I vanish, if I ... you
have all Dora's inheritance."
He nodded. "You have my word of honor on the girl's best interests, but you must not
go to her!"
"Lestat, if you need me—" Armand said. "If this being tries to take you by force!"
"Why do you care about me?" I asked. "After all the bad things I did to you? Why?"
"Oh, don't be such a fool," he begged gently. "You convinced me long ago that the
world was a Savage Garden. Remember your old poetry? You said the only laws that
were true were aesthetic laws, that was all you could count on."
"Yes, I remember all that. I fear it's true. I've always feared it was true. I feared it
when I was a mortal child. I woke up one morning and I believed in nothing."
"Well, then, in the Savage Garden," said Armand, "you shine beautifully, my friend.
You walk as if it is your garden to do with as you please. And in my wanderings, I
always return to you. I always return to see the colors of the garden in your shadow,
or reflected in your eyes, perhaps, or to hear of your latest follies and mad obsessions.
Besides, we are brothers, are we not?"
"Why didn't you help me last time, when I was in all that trouble, having switched
bodies with a human being?"
"You won't forgive me if I tell you," he said.
"Tell me."
"Because I hoped and prayed for you, that you would remain in that mortal body and
save your soul. I thought you had been granted the greatest gift, that you were human
again, my heart ached for your triumph! I couldn't interfere. I couldn't do it."
"You are a child and a fool, you always were."
He shrugged. "Well, it looks like you're being given another chance to do something
with your soul. You'd best be at your very strongest and most resourceful, Lestat. I
distrust this Memnoch, far worse than any human foe you faced when you were
trapped in the flesh. This Memnoch sounds very far from Heaven. Why should they
let you in with him?"
"Excellent question."
"Lestat," said David, "don't go to Dora. Will you remember that my advice last time
might have saved you misery!"
Oh, there was too much to comment on there, for his advice might have prevented
him from ever being what he was now, in this fine form, and I could not, I could not
regret that he was here, that he had won the Body Thief's fleshly trophy. I couldn't. I
just couldn't.
"I can believe the Devil wants you," said Armand.
"Why?" I asked.
"Please don't go to Dora," said David seriously.
"I have to, and it's almost morning now. I love you both."
Both of them were staring at me, perplexed, suspicious, uncertain.
I did the only thing I could. I left.

Chapter Nine

The next night, I rose from my attic hiding place and went directly out in search of
Dora. I didn't want to see or hear any more of David or Armand. I knew I couldn't be
prevented from what I had to do.
How I meant to do it, that was the question. They had unwittingly confirmed
something for me. I was not totally mad. I was not imagining everything that was
happening around me. Some of it, perhaps, I was imagining, but not all.
Whatever the case, I decided upon a radical course of action with Dora, and one
which neither David nor Armand could conceivably have approved.
Knowing more than a little about her habits and her whereabouts, I caught up with
Dora as she was coming out of the television studio on Chartres Street in the Quarter.
She'd spent the entire afternoon taping an hour-long show, and then visiting with her
audience afterwards. I waited in the doorway of a nearby shop as she said farewell to
the last of her "sisters" or seeming worshippers. They were young women, though not
girls, and very firm believers in changing the world with Dora, and had about them a
careless, nonconformist air.
They hurried off, and Dora went the other way towards the square and towards her
car. She wore a slender black wool coat and wool stockings with heels that were very
high, her very favorites for dancing on her program, and with her little cap of black
hair she looked extremely dramatic and fragile, and horribly vulnerable in a world of
mortal males.
I caught her around the waist before she knew what was happening.
We were rising so fast, I knew she could not see or understand anything, and I said
very close to her ear, "You're with me, and you're safe." Then I wrapped her totally in
my arms, so that no harm at all could come to her from the wind or the speed we were
traveling, and I went up just as high as I dared to go with her, uncovered and
vulnerable and depending upon me, listening keenly beneath the howl of the wind for
the proper functioning of her heart and her lungs.
I felt her relaxing in my arms, or more truly, she simply remained trusting. It was as
surprising as everything else about her. She had buried her face in my coat, as though
too afraid to try to look around her, but this was really more a practical matter in the
cold than anything else. At one point, I opened my coat, and covered her with one side
of it, and we went on.
The journey took longer than I had supposed; I simply could not take a fragile human
being up that high into the air. But it was nothing as tedious or dangerous as it might
have been had we taken a fuming and stinking and highly explosive jet plane.
Within less than an hour, I was standing with her inside the glass doors of the
Olympic Tower. She awoke in my arms as if from a deep sleep. I realized this had
been inevitable. She'd lost consciousness, for a series of physical and mental reasons,
but she came to herself at once, her heels striking the floor, and looked at me with
huge owl eyes, and then out at the side of St. Patrick's rising in all its obdurate glory
across the street.
"Come on," I said, "I'm taking you to your father's things." We made for the elevators.
She hurried after me, eagerly, the way that vampires dream mortals will do it, which
never, never happens, as if all this were wondrous and there was no reason under
Heaven to be afraid.
"I don't have much time," I said. We were in the elevator speeding
upwards. "There is something chasing me and I don't know what it wants of me. But I
had to bring you here. And I'll see that you get home safe."
I explained that I knew of no rooftop entrances to this building; indeed, the whole
place was new to me, or I would have brought her in that way, and I explained this
now, embarrassed that we would cover a continent in an hour and then take a rattling,
sucking, and shimmering elevator that seemed only slightly less marvelous than the
gift of vampiric flight.
The doors opened onto the correct floor. I put the key in her hand, and guided her
towards the apartment. "You open it, everything inside is yours."
She looked at me for a moment, a slight frown on her forehead, then she stroked
carelessly at her wind-torn hair, and put the key in the lock and opened the door.
"Roger's things," she said with the first breath she took.
She knew them by the smell as any antiquarian might have known them, these icons
and relics. Then she saw the marble angel, poised in the corridor, with the glass wall
way beyond it, and I thought she was going to faint in my arms.
She slumped backwards as if counting upon me to catch her and support her. I held
her with the tips of my fingers, as afraid as ever that I might accidentally bruise her.
"Dear God," she said under her breath. Her heart was racing, but it was hearty and
very young and capable of tremendous endurance. "We are here, and you've been
telling me true things."
She sprang loose from me before I could answer and walked briskly past the angel
and into the larger front room of the place. The spires of St. Patrick's were visible just
below the level of the window. And everywhere were these cumbersome packages of
plastic through which one could detect the shape of a crucifix or saint. The books of
Wynken were on the table, of course, but I wasn't going to press her on that just now.
She turned to me, and I could feel her studying me, assessing me. I am so sensitive to
this sort of appraisal that I actually think my vanity is rooted in each of my cells.
She murmured some words in Latin, but I didn't catch them, and no automatic
translation came up in my mind.
"What did you say?"
"Lucifer, Son of Morning," she whispered, staring at me with frank admiration. Then
she plopped down into a large leather chair. It was one of the many tiresome
furnishings of the place, meant for businessmen but completely comfortable. Her eyes
were still locked on me.
"No, that's not who I am," I said. "I'm only what I told you and nothing more. But
that's who's after me."
"The Devil?"
"Yes. Now listen, I'm going to tell you everything, and then you must give me your
advice. Meantime—" I turned around, yes, there was the file cabinet. "Your
inheritance, everything, money you have now that you don't know about, clean and
taxed and proper, it's all explained in black folders in those files. Your father died
wanting you to have this for your church. If you turn away from it, don't be so sure it's
God's will. Remember, your father is dead. His blood cleansed the money."
Did I believe this? Well, it sure as hell was what Roger wanted me to tell her.
"Roger said to say this," I added, trying to sound extremely sure of myself.
"I understand you," she said. "You're worrying about something that doesn't really
matter now. Come here, please, let me hold you. You're shivering."
"I'm shivering!"
"It's warm in here, but you don't seem to feel it. Come."
I knelt down in front of her and suddenly took her in my arms the way I had Armand.
I laid my head against hers. She was cold but would never even on the day of her
burial be as cold as I was, nothing young. Her mother had been a maid in the Garden
District, like many an Irish maid. And Roger's Uncle Mickey was one of those
easygoing characters who made nothing of himself in anyone's eyes at all.
"My father never knew about the real life of Uncle Mickey. My mother's mother told
me to show me what airs my father put on, and what a fool he was, and how humble
his origins had been."
"Yes, I see."
"My father had loved Uncle Mickey. Uncle Mickey had died when my father was a
boy. Uncle Mickey had a cleft palate and a glass eye, and I remember my father
showing me his picture and telling me the story of how Uncle Mickey lost his eye.
Uncle Mickey had loved fireworks, and once he'd been playing with firecrackers and
one had gone off in a tin can, and wham, the can hit him in the eye. That's the story I
always believed about Uncle Mickey. I knew him only from the picture. My
grandmother and my great-uncle were dead before I was born."
"Right. And then your mother's people told you different."
"My mother's father was a cop. He knew all about Roger's family, that Roger's
grandfather had been a drunk and so had Uncle Mickey, more or less. Uncle Mickey
had also been a tout for a bookie when he was young. And one time, he held back on a
bet. In other words, he kept the money rather than placing the bet as he should have,
and unfortunately the horse won."
"I follow you."
"Uncle Mickey, very young and very scared I imagine, was in Corona's Bar in the
Irish Channel."
"On Magazine Street," I said. "That bar was there for years and years. Maybe a
century."
"Yes, and the bookie's henchmen came in and dragged Uncle Mickey to the back of
the bar. My mother's father saw it all. He was there, but he couldn't do anything about
it. Nobody could. Nobody would. Nobody dared. But this is what my grandfather saw.
The men beat and kicked Uncle Mickey. They were the ones who hurt the roof of his
mouth so he talked as if something were wrong with him. And they kicked out his
eye. They kicked it across the floor. And the way my grandfather said it every time he
told it was, 'Dora, they could have saved that eye, except those guys stepped on it.
They deliberately stepped on it with those pointed shoes.' "
human could be that cold. I had sopped up the winter's worst as though I were porous
marble, which I suppose I was.
"Dora, Dora, Dora," I whispered. "How he loved you, and how much he wanted
everything to be right for you, Dora."
Her scent was strong, but so was I.
"Lestat, explain about the Devil," she said.
I sat down on the carpet so that I could look up at her. She was perched on the edge of
her chair, knees bare, black coat carelessly open now, and a streak of gold scarf
showing, her face pale but very flushed, in a way that made her radiant and at the
same time a little enchanted, as though she were no more human than me.
"Even your father couldn't really describe your beauty," I said.
"Temple virgin, nymph of the wood."
"My father said that to you?"
"Yes. But the Devil, ah, the Devil told me to ask you a question.
To ask you the truth about Uncle Mickey's eye!" I had just remembered it. I had not
remembered to tell either David or Armand about this, but what difference could that
possibly make?
She was surprised by these words, and very impressed. She sank back a little into the
chair. "The Devil told you these words?"
"He gave it to me as a gift. He wants me to help him. He says he's not evil. He says
that God is his adversary. I'll tell you everything, but he gave me these words as some
sort of little extra gift, what do we call it in New Orleans, lagniappe? To convince me
that he is what he says he is."
She gave a little gesture of confusion, hand flying to her temple as she shook her
head. "Wait. The truth about Uncle Mickey's eye, you're sure he said that? My father
didn't say anything about Uncle Mickey?"
"No, and I never caught any such image from your father's heart or soul, either. The
Devil said Roger didn't know the truth. What does it mean?"
"My father didn't know the truth," she said. "He never knew. His mother never told
him the truth. It was his uncle Mickey, my grandmother's brother. And it was my
mother's people who told me the real story—Terry's people. It was like this, my
father's mother was rich and had a beautiful house on St. Charles Avenue."
"I know the place, I know all about it. Roger met Terry there."
Yes, exactly, but my grandmother had been poor when she was.
She stopped.
"And Roger never knew this."
"Nobody knows it who is alive," she said. "Except for me, of course. My grandfather's
dead. For all I know, everyone who was ever there is dead. Uncle Mickey died in the
early fifties. Roger used to take me out to the cemetery to visit his grave. Roger had
always loved him. Uncle Mickey with his hollow voice and his glass eye. Everybody
sort of loved him, the way Roger told it. And even my mother's people said that too.
He was a sweetheart. He was a night watchman before he died. He rented rooms on
Magazine Street right over Baer's Bakery. He died of pneumonia in the hospital
before anyone even knew he was ill. And Roger never knew the truth about Uncle
Mickey's eye. We would have spoken of it if he had, naturally."
I sat there pondering, or rather picturing what she had described. No images came
from her, she was closed tight, but her voice had been effortlessly generous. I knew
Corona's. So did anyone who had ever walked Magazine Street in those famous
blocks of the Irish hey-day. I knew the criminals with their pointed shoes. Crushing
the eye.
"They just stepped on it and squashed it," said Dora, as though she could read my
thoughts. "My grandfather always said, 'They could have saved it, if they hadn't
stepped on it the way they did with those pointed shoes.'"
A silence fell between us.
"This proves nothing," I said.
"It proves your friend, or enemy, knows secrets, that's what it proves."
"But it doesn't prove he's the Devil," I said, "and why would he choose such a story,
of all things?"
"Maybe he was there," she said with a bitter smile.
We both gave that a little laugh.
"You said this was the Devil but he wasn't evil," she prompted me. She looked
persuasive and trusting and thoroughly in command.
I had the feeling that I had been absolutely correct in seeking her advice. She was
regarding me steadily.
"Tell me what this Devil has done," she said.
I told her the whole tale. I had to admit how I stalked her father and I couldn't
remember if I had told her that before. I told her about the Devil stalking me in similar
fashion, going through it all, just as I had for David and Armand, and found myself
finishing with those puzzling words, "And I'll tell you this about him, whatever he is,
he has a sleepless mind in his heart, and an insatiable personality! And that's true.
When I first used those words to describe him, they just occurred to me as if from
nowhere. I don't know what part of my mind intuited such a thing. But it's true."
"Say again?" she asked.
I did.
She lapsed into total silence. Her eyes became tiny and she sat with one hand curled
under her chin.
"Lestat, I'm going to make an absurd request of you. Send for some food. Or get me
something to eat and drink. I have to ponder this."
I found myself leaping to my feet. "Anything you wish," I said.
"Doesn't matter at all. Sustenance. I haven't eaten since yesterday. I don't want my
thoughts distorted by an accidental fast. You go, get something for nourishment and
bring it back here. And I want to be alone here, to pray, to think, and to walk back and
forth among Father's things. Now, there is no chance this demon will take you sooner
than promised?"
"I don't know any more than I told you. I don't think so. Look, I'll get you good food
and drink."
I went on the errand immediately, leaving the building in mortal fashion and seeking
out one of those crowded midtown restaurants from which to purchase a whole meal
for her that could be packed up and kept hot until I returned. I brought her several
bottles of some pure, brand-name water, since that's what mortals seem to crave in
these times, and then I took my time going back up, the bundle in my arms.
Only as the elevator opened on our floor did I realize how unusual my actions had
been. I, two hundred years old, ferocious and proud by nature, had just gone on an
errand for a mortal girl because she asked me very directly to do it.
Of course there were mediating circumstances! I'd kidnapped her and brought her
over hundreds of miles! I needed her. Hell, I loved her.
But what I'd learnt from this simple incident was this: She did have a power, which
saints often have, to make others obey. Without question, I'd gone to get the food for
her. Cheerfully gone myself, as though there were grace in it.
It took her less than six and one half minutes to devour the meal. I've never seen
anyone eat so fast. She stacked up everything and took it into the kitchen. I had to
draw her away from the chores, and bring her back into the room. This gave me a
chance both to hold her warm, fragile hands and to be very close to her.
"What is your advice?"
She sat down and pondered, or drew together her thoughts.
"I think you have little to lose by cooperating with this being. It's perfectly obvious he
could destroy you anytime he wanted. He has many ways. You slept in your house,
even after you knew that he, the Ordinary Man, as you call him, knew the location.
Obviously you aren't afraid of him on any material level. And in his realm, you were
able to exert sufficient force to push him away from you. What do you risk by
cooperating? Suppose he can take you to Heaven or Hell. The implication is that you
can still refuse to help him, can't you?
You can still say, to use his own fine language, 'I don't see things from your point of
view.' "
"Yes."
"What I'm saying is, if you open yourself to what he wants to show you, that does not
mean you have accepted him, does it? On the contrary, the obligation lies with him to
make you see from his perspective, or so it seems. Besides, the point is, you break the
rules whatever they are."
"He can't be tricking me into Hell, you mean."
"You serious? You think God would let people be tricked into Hell?"
"I'm not people, Dora. I'm what I am. I don't mean to draw any parallels with God in
my repetitive epithets. I only mean I'm evil. Very evil. I know I am. I have been since
I started to feed on humans.
I'm Cain, the slayer of his brothers."
"Then God could put you in Hell anytime he wanted. Why not?"
I shook my head. "I wish I knew. I wish I knew why He hasn't. I wish I knew. But
what you're saying is that there is power involved here on both sides."
"Clearly."
"And to believe in some sort of trickery is almost superstitious."
"Precisely. If you go to Heaven, if you speak with God...." She stopped.
"Would you go if he were asking you to help him, if he were tell-"
I brought the meal inside the apartment and set it down for her on the table. The
apartment was now flooded with her mingling aromas, including that of her menses,
that special, perfumed blood collecting neatly between her legs. The place breathed
with her.
I ignored the predictable raging desire to feast on her till she dropped.
She was sitting crouched over in the chair, hands locked together, staring before her. I
saw that the black leather folders were open all over the floor. She knew about her
inheritance or had some idea of it.
She wasn't looking at that, however, and she seemed absolutely unsurprised by my
return.
She drifted towards the table now, as though she couldn't break out of her reverie.
Meantime, I stirred about in the kitchen drawers of the apartment for plates and
utensils for her, found some mildly inoffensive stainless-steel forks and knives and a
china plate. I set these down for her, and laid out the cartons of steaming food—meat
and vegetables and such, and some sort of sweet concoction, all of it as alien to me as
it had always been, as if I hadn't recently been in a mortal body and tasted real food. I
didn't want to think about that experience!
"Thank you," she said absently, without so much as looking at me. "You are a darling
for having done it." She opened a bottle of the water and drank it all greedily.
I watched her throat as she did this. I didn't let myself think about her in any way
except lovingly, but the scent of her was enough to drive me out of the place.
That's it, I vowed. If you feel you cannot control this desire, then you leave!
She ate the food indifferently, almost mechanically, and then looked up at me.
"Oh, forgive me, do sit down, please. You can't eat, can you? You can't take this kind
of nourishment."
"No," I said. "But I can sit down."
I sat next to her, trying not to watch her or breathe her scent any more than I had to. I
looked directly across the room, out the glass at the white sky. If snow was falling
now, I couldn't tell, but it had to be. Because I couldn't see anything but the
whiteness. Yes, that meant that either New York had disappeared without a trace, or
that it was snowing outside.
"What could you possibly lose by doing it?" she said.
I didn't answer.
She walked about, thinking, her black hair falling forward in a curl against her cheek,
her long black-clad legs looking painfully thin yet graceful as she paced. She had let
go of the black coat a long time ago, and I realized now that she wore only a thin
black silk dress. I smelled her blood again, her secret, fragrant, female blood.
I looked away from her.
She said, "I know what I have to lose in such matters. If I believe in God, and there is
no God, then I can lose my life. I can end up on a deathbed realizing I've wasted the
only real experience of the universe I'll ever be permitted to have."
"Yes, exactly, that's what I thought when I was alive. I wasn't going to waste my life
believing in something that was unprovable and out of the question. I wanted to know
what I was permitted to see and feel and taste in my life."
"Exactly. But you see, your situation is different. You are a vampire.
You are, theologically speaking, a demon. You are powerful in your own way, and
you cannot die naturally. You have an edge."
I thought about it.
"Do you know what happened today in the world," she said, "just this one day? We
always begin our broadcast with such reports; do you know how many people died in
Bosnia? In Russia? In Africa? How many skirmishes were fought or murders
committed?"
"I know what you're saying."
"What I'm saying is, it's highly unlikely this thing has the power to trick you into
anything. So go with it. Let it show you what it promises. And if I'm wrong ...if you're
tricked into Hell, then I've made a horrible mistake."
"No, you haven't. You've avenged your father's death, that's all. But I agree with you.
Trickery is too petty to be involved here. I'm going by instincts. And I'll tell you
something else about Memnoch, the Devil, something maybe that will surprise you."
"That you like him? I know that. I understood that all along."
"How is that possible? I don't like myself, you know. I love my-self, of course, I'm
committed to myself till my dying day. But I don't like myself."
"You told me something last night," she said. "You said that if I needed you I was to
call to you with my thoughts, my heart."
ing you he wasn't evil, but that he was the adversary of God, that he could change
your mind on things?"
"I don't know," she said. "I might. I would maintain my free will throughout the
experience, but I very well might."
"That's just it. Free will. Am I losing my will and my mind?"
"You seem to be in full possession of both and an enormous amount of supernatural
strength."
"Do you sense the evil in me?"
"No, you're too beautiful for that, you know it."
"But there must be something rotten and vicious inside me that you can feel and see."
"You're asking for consolation and I can't give that to you," she said. "No, I don't
sense it. I believe the things you've told me." "Why?"
She thought for a long time. Then she stood up and went to the glass wall.
"I have put a question to the supernatural," she said, looking down, perhaps at the roof
of the cathedral. I could not see it from where I stood. "I have asked it to give me a
vision."
"And you think I might be the answer."
"Possibly," she said, turning and looking at me again. "That is not to say that all of
this is happening because of Dora and what Dora wants. It is, after all, happening to
you. But I have asked for a vision, and I've been given a series of miraculous
incidents, and yes, I believe you, as surely as I believe in the existence of and the
goodness of God."
She came towards me, stepping carefully through the scattered folders.
"You know, none of us can say why God allows evil."
"Yes."
"Or whence it came into the world. But the world over, there are millions of us—
People of the Book—Moslem, Jew, Catholic, Protestant—descendants of Abraham—
and over and over we keep being drawn into tales and schemes in which evil is
present, in which there is a Devil, in which there is some element that God allows,
some adversary, to use your friend's word."
"Yes. Adversary. That's exactly what he said."
"I trust in God," she said.
"And you're saying I should do that too?"
"Yes."
"You do the same. If you go with this creature, and you need me, call to me. Let me
say it this way: If you cannot pull away of your own volition and you need my
intercession, then send out your call! I'll hear you. And I'll cry out to the heavens for
you. Not for justice but for mercy. Will you make me that promise?"
"Of course."
"What will you do now?" she asked.
"Spend the remaining hours with you, taking care of your affairs. Making sure,
through my numerous mortal alliances, that nothing can hurt you in terms of all these
possessions."
"My father's done it," she said. "Believe me. He's covered it very cleverly."
"Are you sure?"
"He did it with his usual brilliance. He left more money to fall into the hands of his
enemies than the fortune he left to me. They have no need to go looking for anyone.
Once they realize he is dead, they will begin to snatch his available assets right and
left."
"You are certain of all this."
"Without question. Put your affairs in order tonight. You don't need to worry about
mine. Take care of yourself, that you are ready to embark on this."
I watched her for a long time. I was still seated at the table. She stood with her back to
the glass. It struck me that she had been drawn against it in black ink except for her
white face.
"Is there a God, Dora?" I whispered. I had spoken these same words so many times! I
had asked this question of Gretchen when I was flesh and blood in her arms.
"Yes, there is a God, Lestat," Dora answered. "Be assured of it. Maybe you've been
praying to Him so loud and so long that finally He has paid attention. Sometimes I
wonder if that isn't the disposition of God, not to hear us when we cry, to deliberately
shut His ears!"
"Shall I leave you here or take you home?"
"Leave me. I don't ever want to make a journey like that again. I will spend a good
part of the rest of my life trying to remember it precisely and failing to do so. I want
to stay here in New York with my father's things. With regard to the money? Your
mission has been accomplished."
"And you accept the relics, the fortune."
"Yes, of course, I accept them. I'll keep Roger's precious books until such time as they
can be properly offered for others to see—his beloved heretical Wynken de Wilde."
"Do you require anything further of me?" I asked.
"Do you think ... do you think you love God?"
"Absolutely not."
"Why do you say that?"
"How could I?" I asked. "How could anyone love Him? What did you just tell me
yourself about the world? Don't you see, everybody hates God now. It's not that God
is dead in the twentieth century. It's that everybody hates Him! At least I think so.
Maybe that's what Memnoch is trying to say."
She was amazed. She frowned with disappointment and yearning. She wanted to say
something. She gestured, as though trying to take invisible flowers from the air to
show me their beauty, who knows?
"No, I hate Him," I said.
She made the Sign of the Cross and put her hands together.
"Are you praying for me?"
"Yes," she said. "If I never lay eyes on you again after tonight, if I never come across
a single shred of evidence that you really exist or were here with me, or that any of
these things were said, I'll still be transformed by you as I am now. You are my
miracle of sorts. You're greater proof than millions of mortals have ever been given.
You're proof not only of the supernatural and the mysterious and the wondrous, you're
proof of exactly what I believed"
"I see." I smiled. It was all so logical and symmetrical. And true. I smiled, truly
smiled, and shook my head. "I hate to leave you," I said.
"Go," she said, and then she clenched her fists. "Ask God what He wants of us!" she
said furiously. "You're right. We hate Him!" The anger blazed in her eyes, and then
subsided, and she stared at me, her eyes looking larger and brighter because they were
wet now with salt and tears.
"Good-bye, my darling," I said. This was so extraordinary and painful.
I went out into the heavy, drifting snow.
The doors of the great cathedral of St. Patrick's were closed and bolted, and I stood at
the foot of the stone steps looking up at the high Olympic Tower, wondering if Dora
could see me as I stood here, freezing in the cold, and letting the snow strike my face,
softly, persistently, harmfully, and with beauty.
"All right, Memnoch," I said aloud. "No need to wait any longer.
Come now, please, if you will."
Immediately I heard the footsteps!
It was as though they were echoing in the monstrous hollow of Fifth Avenue, among
the hideous Towers of Babel, and I had cast my lot with the whirlwind.
I turned round and round. There was not a mortal in sight!
"Memnoch the Devil!" I shouted. "I'm ready!"
I was perishing with fear.
"Prove your point to me, Memnoch. You have to do that!" I called.
The steps were getting louder. Oh, he was up to his finest tricks.
"Remember, you have to make me see it from your point of view! That's what you
promised!"
A wind was collecting, but from where I couldn't tell. All of the great metropolis
seemed empty, frozen, my tomb. The snow swirled and thickened before the
cathedral. The towers faded.
I heard his voice right beside me, bodiless and intimate. "All right, my beloved one,"
he said. "We'll begin now."

Chapter Ten

We were in the whirlwind and the whirlwind was a tunnel, but between us there fell a
silence in which I could hear my own breath.
Memnoch was so close to me, his arm locked around me, that I could see his dark face
in profile, and feel the mane of his hair against the side of my own face.
He was not the Ordinary Man now, but indeed the granite angel, the wings rising out
of my focus, and folded around us, against the force of the wind.
As we rose, steadily, without the slightest reference to any sort of gravity, two things
became apparent to me at once. The first was that we were surrounded by thousands
upon thousands of "'individual souls. I say souls! What did I see? I saw shapes in the
whirlwind, some completely anthropomorphic, others merely faces, but surrounding
me, everywhere, were distinct spiritual entities or individuals, and very faintly I heard
their voices—whispers, cries, and howls—mingling with the wind.
The sound couldn't hurt me now, as it had in the prior apparitions, nevertheless I
heard this throng as we shot upwards, turning as if on an axis, the tunnel narrowing
suddenly so that the souls seemed to touch us, and then widening, only to narrow
again.
The second thing which I instantly realized was that the darkness was fading or being
drained utterly from Memnoch's form. His profile was bright and even translucent; so
were his shapeless unimportant garments. And the goat legs of the dark Devil were
now the legs of a large man. In sum, the entire turbid and smokelike presence had
been replaced by something crystalline and reflective, but which felt pliant and warm
and alive.
Words came back to me, snatches of scripture, of visions and prophetic claims and
poetry; but there was no time to evaluate, to analyze, to seal into memory.
Memnoch spoke to me in a voice that may not have been technically audible, though I
heard the familiar accentless speech of the Ordinary Man.
"Now, it is difficult to go to Heaven without the slightest preparation, and you will be
stunned and confused by what you see. But if you don't see this first, you'll hunger for
it throughout our dialogue, and so I'm taking you to the very gates. Be prepared that
the laughter you hear is not laughter. It is joy. It will come through to you as laughter
because that is the only way such ecstatic sound can be physically received or
perceived."
No sooner had he finished the last syllable than we found ourselves standing in a
garden, on a bridge across a stream! For one moment, the light so flooded my eyes
that I shut them, thinking the sun of our solar system had found me and was about to
burn me the way I should have been burnt: a vampire turned into a torch and then
forever extinguished.
But this sourceless light was utterly penetrating and utterly benign.
I opened my eyes, and realized that we were once again amid hundreds of other
individuals, and on the banks of the stream and in all directions I saw beings greeting
each other, embracing, conversing, weeping, and crying out. As before, the shapes
were in all degrees of distinctness. One man was as solid as if I'd run into him in die
street of the city; another individual seemed no more than a giant facial expression;
while others seemed whirling bits and pieces of material and light. Others were utterly
diaphanous. Some seemed invisible, except that I knew they were there! The number
was impossible to determine.
The place was limitless. The waters of the stream itself were brilliant with the
reflected light; the grass so vividly green that it seemed in the very act of becoming
grass, of being born, as if in a painting or an animated film!
I clung to Memnoch and turned to look at him in this new light form. He was the
direct opposite now of the accumulating dark angel, yet the face had the very same
strong features of the granite statue, and the eyes had the same tender scowl. Behold
the angels and devils of William Blake and you've seen it. It's beyond innocence.
"Now we're going in," he said.
I realized I was clinging to him with both hands. "You mean this isn't Heaven!" I
cried, and my voice came out as direct speech, intimate, just between us.
"No," he said, smiling and guiding me across this bridge. "When we get inside, you
must be strong. You must realize you are in your earthbound body, unusual as it is,
and your senses will be overwhelmed! You will not be able to endure what you see as
you would if you were dead or an angel or my lieutenant, which is what I want you to
become."
There was no time to argue. We had passed swiftly across the bridge; giant gates were
opening before us. I couldn't see the summit of the walls.
The sound swelled and enveloped us, and indeed it was like laughter, waves upon
waves of shimmering and lucid laughter, only it was canorous, as though all those
who laughed also sang canticles in full voice at the same time.
What I saw, however, overwhelmed me as much as the sound.
This was very simply the densest, the most intense, the busiest, and the most
profoundly magnificent place I'd ever beheld. Our language needs endless synonyms
for beautiful; the eyes could see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.
Once again, people were everywhere, people filled with light, and of distinct
anthropomorphic shape; they had arms, legs, beaming faces, hair, garments of all
different kinds, yet no costume of any seemingly great importance, and the people
were moving, traveling paths in groups or alone, or coming together in patterns,
embracing, clasping, reaching out, and holding hands.
I turned to the right and to the left, and then all around me, and in every direction saw
these multitudes of beings, wrapped in conversation or dialogue or some sort of
interchange, some of them embracing and kissing, and others dancing, and the clusters
and groups of them continuing to shift and grow or shrink and spread out.
Indeed, the combination of seeming disorder and order was the mystery. This was not
chaos. This was not confusion. This was not a din. It seemed the hilarity of a great and
final gathering, and by final I mean it seemed a perpetually unfolding resolution of
something, a marvel of sustained revelation, a gathering and growing understanding
shared by all who participated in it, as they hurried or moved languidly (or even in
some cases sat about doing very little), amongst hills and valleys, and along pathways,
and through wooded areas and into buildings which seemed to grow one out of
another like no structure on earth I'd ever seen.
Nowhere did I see anything specifically domestic such as a house, or even a palace.
On the contrary, the structures were infinitely larger, filled with as bright a light as the
garden, with corridors and staircases branching here and there with perfect fluidity.
Yet ornament covered everything. Indeed, the surfaces and textures were so varied
that any one of them might have absorbed me forever.
I cannot convey the sense of simultaneous observation that I felt. I have to speak now
in sequence. I have to take various parts of this limitless and brilliant environment, in
order to shed my own fallible light on the whole.
There were archways, towers, halls, galleries, gardens, great fields, forests, streams.
One area flowed into another, and through them all I was traveling, with Memnoch
beside me, securely holding me in a solid grip. Again and again, my eyes were drawn
to some spectacularly beautiful sculpture or cascade of flowers or a giant tree reaching
out into the cloudless blue, only to have my body turned back around by him as if I
were being kept to a tightrope from which I might fatally fall.
I laughed; I wept; I did both, and my body was convulsing with the emotions. I clung
to hum and tried to see over his shoulder and around him, and spun in his grip like an
infant, turning to lock eyes with this or that person who happened to glance at me, or
to look for a steady moment as the groups and the parliaments and congregations
shifted and moved.
We were in a vast hall suddenly. "God, if David could see this!" I cried; the books and
scrolls were endless, and there seemed nothing illogical or confusing in the manner in
which all these documents lay open and ready to be examined.
"Don't look, because you won't remember it," Memnoch said.
He snatched at my hand as if I were a toddler. I had tried to catch hold of a scroll that
was filled with an absolutely astonishing explanation of something to do with atoms
and photons and neutrinos. But he was right. The knowledge was gone immediately,
and the unfolding garden surrounded us as I lost my balance and fell against him.
I looked down at the ground and saw flowers of complete perfection; flowers that
were the flowers that our flowers of the world might become! I don't know any other
way to describe how well realized were the petals and the centers and the colors. The
colors themselves were so distinct and so finely delineated that I was unsure suddenly
that our spectrum was even involved.
I mean, I don't think our spectrum of color was the limit! I think there was some other
set of rules. Or it was merely an expansion, a gift of being able to see combinations of
color which are not visible chemically on earth.
The waves of laughter, of singing, of conversation, became so loud as to overwhelm
my other senses; I felt blinded by sound suddenly; and yet the light was laying bare
every precious detail.
"Sapphirine!" I cried out suddenly, trying to identify the greenish blue of the great
leaves surrounding us and gently waving to and fro, and Memnoch smiled and nodded
as if in approval, reaching again to stop me from touching Heaven, from trying to grab
some of the magnificence I saw.
"But I can't hurt it if I touch, can I?" It seemed unthinkable suddenly that anyone
could bruise anything here, from the walls of quartz and crystal with their ever-rising
spires and belfries, to the sweet, soft vines twining upwards in the branches of trees
dripping with magnificent fruits and flowers. "No, no, I wouldn't want to hurt it!" I
said.
My own voice was distinct to me, though the voices of all those around me seemed to
overpower it.
"Look!" said Memnoch. "Look at them. Look!" And he turned my head as if to force
me not to cower against his chest but to stare right into the multitudes. And I
perceived that these were alliances I was witnessing, clans that were gathering,
families, groups of kindred, or true friends, beings whose knowledge of each other
was profound, creatures who shared similar physical and material manifestations! And
for one brave moment, one brave instant, I saw that all these beings from one end of
this limitless place to the other were connected, by hand or fingertip or arm or the
touch of a foot. That, indeed, clan slipped within the womb of clan, and tribe spread
out to intersperse amongst countless families, and families joined to form nations, and
that the entire congregation was in fact a palpable and visible and interconnected
configuration! Everyone impinged upon everyone else. Everyone drew, in his or her
separateness, upon the separateness of everyone else!
I blinked, dizzy, near to collapsing. Memnoch held me.
"Look again!" he whispered, holding me up.
But I covered my eyes; because I knew that if I saw the interconnections again, I
would collapse! I would perish inside my own sense of separateness! Yet each and
every being I saw was separate.
"They are all themselves!" I cried. My hands were clapped on my eyes. I could hear
the raging and soaring songs more intensely; the long riffs and cascades of voices.
And beneath all there came such a sequence of flowing rhythms, lapping one over the
other, that I began to sing.
I sang with everyone! I stood still, free of Memnoch for a moment, opened my eyes,
and heard my voice come out of me and rise as if into the universe itself.
I sang and I sang; but my song was full of longing and immense curiosity and
frustration as well as celebration. And it came home to me, thudded into me, that
nowhere around me was there anyone who was unsafe or unsatisfied, was there
anything approximating stasis or boredom; yet the word "frenzy" was in no way
applicable to the constant movement and shifting of faces and forms that I saw.
My song was the only sad note in Heaven, and yet the sadness was transfigured
immediately into harmony, into a form of psalm or canticle, into a hymn of praise and
wonder and gratitude.
I cried out. I think I cried the single word "God." This was not a prayer or an
admission, or a plea, but simply a great exclamation.
We stood in a doorway. Beyond appeared vista upon vista, and I was vaguely sensible
suddenly that over the nearby balustrade there lay below the world.
The world as I had never seen it in all its ages, with all its secrets of the past revealed.
I had only to rush to the railing and I could peer down into the time of Eden or
Ancient Mesopotamia, or a moment when Roman legions had marched through the
woods of my earthly home. I would see the great eruption of Vesuvius spill its horrid ,
deadly ash down upon the ancient living city of Pompeii.
Everything there to be known and finally comprehended, all questions settled, the
smell of another time, the taste of it—I ran towards the balustrade, which seemed to
be farther and farther away. Faster and faster I headed towards it. Yet still the distance
was impossible, and suddenly I became intensely aware that this vision of Earth
would be mingled with smoke and fire and suffering, and that it might utterly
demolish in me the overflowing sense of joy. I had to see, however. I was not dead. I
was not here to stay.
Memnoch reached out for me. But I ran faster than he could.
An immense light rose suddenly, a direct source infinitely hotter and more
illuminating than the splendid light that already fell without prejudice on everything I
could see. This great gathering magnetic light grew larger and larger until the world
down below, the great dim landscape of smoke and horror and suffering, was turned
white by this light, and rendered like an abstraction of itself, on the verge of
combusting.
Memnoch pulled me back, throwing up his arms to cover my eyes. I did the same. I
realized he had bowed his head and was hiding his own eyes behind me.
I heard him sigh, or was it a moan? I couldn't tell. For one second the sound filled the
universe; all the cries and laughter and singing; and something mournful from the
depths of Earth—all this sound-was caught in Memnoch's sigh.
Suddenly I felt his strong arms relaxed and releasing me.
I looked up, and in the midst of the flood of light I saw again the balustrade, and
against it stood a single form.
It was a tall figure who stood with his hands on the railing, looking over it and down.
This appeared to be a man. He turned around and looked at me and reached out to
receive me.
His hair and eyes were dark, brownish, his face perfectly symmetrical and flawless,
his gaze intense; and the grasp of his fingers very tight.
I drew in my breath. I felt my body in all its solidity and fragility as his fingers clung
to me. I was on the verge of death. I might have ceased to breathe at that moment, or
ceased to move with the commitment to life and might have died!
The being drew me towards himself, a light flooding from him that mingled with the
light behind him and all around him, so his face grew brighter yet more distinct and
more detailed. I saw the pores of his darkening golden skin, I saw the cracks in his
lips, the shadow of the hair that had been shaved from his face.
And then he spoke loudly, pleadingly to me, in a heartbroken voice, a voice strong
and masculine and perhaps even young.
"You would never be my adversary, would you? You wouldn't, would you? Not you,
Lestat, no, not you!"
My God.
In utter agony, I was torn out of His grip, out of His midst, and out of His milieu.
The whirlwind once again surrounded us. I sobbed and beat on Memnoch's chest.
Heaven was gone!
"Memnoch, let go of me! God, it was God!"
Memnoch tightened his grip, straining with all his force to carry me downwards, to
make me submit, to force me to begin the descent.
We plummeted, that awful falling, which struck such fear in me that I couldn't protest
or cling to Memnoch or do anything except watch the swift currents of souls all
around us ascending, watching, descending, the darkness coming again, everything
growing dark, until suddenly we traveled through moist air, full of familiar and
natural scents, and then came to a soft and soundless pause.
It was a garden again. It was still and beautiful. But it was Earth. I knew it. My earth;
and it was no disappointment in its intricacy or scents or substance. On the contrary, I
fell on the grass and let my fingers dig into the earth itself. I felt it soft and gritted
under my fingernails. I sobbed. I could taste the mud.
The sun was shining down on us, both of us. Memnoch sat looking at me, his wings
immense and then slowly fading, until we became two manlike figures; one prone and
crying like a child, and the other a great Angel, musing and waiting, his hair a mane
of gradually settling light.
"You heard what He said to me!" I cried. I sat up. My voice should have been
deafening. But it seemed only loud enough to be perfectly understood. "He said, 'You
wouldn't ever be my adversary!' You heard Him! He called me by name."
Memnoch was completely calm, and of course infinitely more seductive and
enchanting in this pale angelic shape than ever he could have been as the Ordinary
Man.
"Of course he called you by name," he said, his eyes widening with emphasis. "He
doesn't want you to help me. I told you. I'm winning."
"But what were we doing there! How could we get into Heaven and yet be his
adversaries!"
"Come with me, Lestat, and be my lieutenant, and you can come and go there
whenever you like."
I stared at him in astonished silence.
"You mean this? Come and go there?"
"Yes. Anytime. As I told you. Don't you know the Scriptures? I'm not claiming an
authenticity for the fragments that remain, or even the original poetry, but of course
you can come and go. You won't be of that place until you are redeemed and in it. But
you can certainly get in and out, once you're on my side."
I tried to realize what he was saying. I tried to picture again the galleries, the libraries,
the long, long rows of books, and realized suddenly it had become insubstantial; the
details were disappearing. I was retaining a tenth of what I'd beheld; perhaps even
less. What I have described here in this book is what I could remember then and now.
And there had been so much more!
"How is that possible, that He would let us into Heaven!" I said. I tried to concentrate
on the Scriptures, something David had said once a long time ago, about the Book of
Job, something about Satan flying around and God saying, almost casually, Where
have you been? Some explanation of the bene ha elohim or the court of heaven—
"We are his children," said Memnoch. "Do you want to hear how it all started, the
entire true story of Creation and the Fall, or do you want to go back and just throw
yourself into His arms?"
"What more is there!" I asked. But I knew. There was understanding of what
Memnoch was saying. And there was also something required to get in there! I
couldn't just go, and Memnoch knew it. I had choices, yes, and they were these, either
to go with Memnoch or return to the earth. But admission to Heaven was hardly
automatic. The remark had been sarcastic. I couldn't go back and throw myself in His
arms.
"You're right," he said. "And you're also very wrong."
"I don't want to see Hell!" I said suddenly. I drew myself up. I recoiled. I looked
around us. This was a wild garden, this was my Savage Garden, of thorny vines and
hunkering trees, of wild grass, and orchids clinging to the mossy knuckles of
branches, of birds streaking high above through webs of leaves. "I don't want to see
Hell!" I cried. "I don't want to, I don't! .. ."
Memnoch didn't answer. He seemed to be considering things.
And then he said, "Do you want to know the why of all of it, or not? I was so sure
you would want to know, you of all creatures. I thought you would want every little
bit of information!"
"I do!" I cried. "Of course I want to know," I said. "But I ... I don't think I can."
"I can tell you as much as I know," he said gently, with a little shrug of his powerful
shoulders.
His hair was smoother and stronger than human hair, the strands were perhaps thicker,
and certainly more incandescent. I could see the roots of his hair at the top of his
smooth forehead. His hair was tumbling soundlessly into some sort of order, or just
becoming less disheveled. The flesh of his face was equally smooth and apparently
pliant all over, the long, well-formed nose, the full and broad mouth, the firm line of
the jaw.
I realized his wings were still there, but they had become almost impossible to see.
The pattern of the feathers, layer after layer of feathers, was visible, but only if I
squinted my eyes and tried to make out the details against something dark behind him,
like the bark of the tree.
"I can't think," I said. "I see what you think of me, you think you've chosen a coward!
You think you've made a terrible mistake. But I tell you, I can't reason. I... I saw Him.
He said, 'You wouldn't be my adversary!' You're asking me to do it! You took me to
Him and away from Him."
"As He Himself has allowed!" Memnoch said with a little rise to his eyebrows.
"Is that so?"
"Of course!" he answered.
"Then why did He plead with me! Why did He look that way!"
"Because He was God Incarnate, and God Incarnate suffers and feels things with His
human form, and so He gave you that much of Himself, that's all! Suffering! Ah,
suffering!"
He looked to heaven and shook his head. He frowned a little, thoughtfully. His face in
this form could not appear wrathful or twisted with any ugly emotion. Blake had seen
into Heaven.
"But it was God," I said.
He nodded, with his head to the side. "Ah, yes," he said wearily, "the Living Lord."
He looked off into the trees. He didn't seem angry or impatient or even weary. Again,
I didn't know if he could. I realized he was listening to sounds in the soft garden, and I
could hear them too.
I could smell things—animals, insects, the heady perfume of jungle flowers, those
overheated, mutated blooms that a rain forest can nourish either in the depths or in its
leafy heights. I caught the scent of humans suddenly!
There were people in this forest. We were in an actual place.
"There are others here," I said.
"Yes," he said. And now he smiled at me very tenderly. "You are not a coward. Shall I
tell you everything, or simply let you go? You know now more than millions ever
glimpse in their lifetimes. You don't know what to do with that knowledge, or how to
go on existing, or being what you are ...but you have had your glimpse of Heaven.
Shall I let you go? Or don't you want to know why I need you so badly?"
"Yes, I do want to know," I said. "But above all, more than anything else, I want to
know how you and I can stand there side by side, adversaries, and how you can look
as you look and be the Devil, and how ...and how ..." I laughed. "...and how I can look
like I look and be the Devil I've been! That's what I want to know. I have never in my
whole existence seen the aesthetic laws of the world broken.
Beauty, rhythm, symmetry, those are the only laws I've ever witnessed that seemed
natural.
"And I've always called them the Savage Garden! Because they seemed ruthless and
indifferent to suffering—to the beauty of the butterfly snared in the spiderweb! To the
wildebeast lying on the veldt with its heart still beating as the lions come to lap at the
wound in its throat."
"Yes, how well I understand and respect your philosophy," he said. "Your words are
my words."
"But I saw something more up there!" I said. "I saw Heaven. I saw the perfected
Garden that was no longer Savage. I saw it!" I began to weep again.
"I know, I know," he said, consoling me.
"All right." I drew myself up again, ashamed. I searched in my pockets, found a linen
handkerchief, pulled it out and wiped my face. The linen smelled like my house in
New Orleans, where jacket and handkerchief both had been kept until sunset this
night, when I'd taken them out of the closet and gone to kidnap Dora from the streets.
Or was it the same night?
I had no idea.
I pressed the handkerchief to my mouth. I could smell the scent of New Orleans dust
and mold and warmth.
I wiped my mouth.
"All right!" I declared breathlessly. "If you haven't become completely disgusted with
me—"
"Hardly!" he said, as politely as David might have said.
"Then tell me the Story of Creation. Tell me everything. Just go on! Tell me! I...."
"Yes ... ?"
"I/we to know!"
He rose to his feet, shook the grass from his loose robe, and said:
"That's what I've been waiting for. Now, we can truly begin."

Chapter Eleven

Let’s move through the forest as we talk," he said. "If you don't mind the walking."
"No, not at all," I said.
He brushed a little more of the grass from his garment, a fine spun robe that seemed
neutral and simple, a garment that might have been worn either yesterday or a million
years ago. His entire form was slightly bigger all over than mine, and bigger perhaps
than that of most humans; he fulfilled every mythic promise of an angel, except that
the white wings remained diaphanous, retaining their shape under some sort of cloak
of invisibility, more it seemed for convenience than anything else.
"We're not in Time," he said. "Don't worry about the men and the women in the
forest. They can't see us. No one here can see us, and for that reason I can keep my
present form. I don't have to resort to the dark devilish body which He thinks is
appropriate for earthly maneuvers, or to the Ordinary Man, which is my own
unobtrusive choice."
"You mean you couldn't have appeared to me on Earth in your angelic form?"
"Not without a lot of argument and pleading, and frankly I didn't want to do it," he
said. "It's too overwhelming. It would have weighted everything too much in my
favor. In this form, I look too inherently good. I can't enter Heaven without this form;
He doesn't want to see the other form, and I don't blame Him. And frankly, on Earth,
it's easiest to go about as the Ordinary Man."
I stood up shakily, accepting his hand, which was firm and warm. In fact, his body
seemed as solid as Roger's body had seemed near the very end of Roger's visitation.
My body felt complete and entire and my own.
It didn't surprise me to discover my hair was badly tangled. I ran a comb through it
hastily for comfort, and brushed off my own clothes—the dark suit I had put on in
New Orleans, which was full of tiny specks of dust, and some grass from the garden,
but otherwise unharmed. My shirt was torn at the collar, as if I myself had ripped it
open hastily in an effort to breathe. Otherwise, I was the usual dandy, standing amid a
thick and verdant forest garden, which was not like anything I'd ever seen.
Even a casual inspection indicated that this was no rain forest, but something
considerably less dense, yet as primitive.
"Not in Time," I said.
"Well, moving through it as we please," he said, "we are only a few thousand years
before your time, if you must know it. But again, the men and women roaming here
won't see us. So don't worry. And the animals can't harm us. We are watchers here but
we affect nothing. Come, I know this terrain by heart, and if you follow me, you'll see
we have an easy path through this wilderness. I have much to tell you. Things around
us will begin to change."
"And this body of yours? It's not an illusion? It's complete."
"Angels are invisible, by nature," he said. "That is, we are immaterial in terms of earth
material, or the material of the physical universe, or however you would like to
describe matter for yourself. But you were right in your early speculation that we have
an essential body; and we can gather to ourselves sufficient matter from a whole
variety of sources to create for ourselves a complete and functioning body, which we
can later shatter and disperse as we see fit."
We walked slowly and easily through the grass. My boots, heavy enough for the New
York winter, found the uneven ground no problem at all.
"What I'm saying," Memnoch continued, looking down at me—he was perhaps three
inches taller—with his huge almond-shaped eyes—"is that this isn't a borrowed body,
nor is it strictly speaking a contrived body. It's my body when surrounded and
permeated with matter. In other words, it's the logical result of my essence drawing to
it all the various materials it needs."
"You mean you look this way because you look this way."
"Precisely. The Devilish body is a penance. The Ordinary Man is a subterfuge. But
this is what I look like. There were angels like me throughout Heaven. Your focus
was mainly on human souls in Heaven. But the angels were there."
I tried to remember. Had there been taller beings, winged beings? I thought so, and
yet I wasn't certain. The beatific thunder of Heaven beat in my ears suddenly. I felt the
joy, the safety, and above all the satisfaction of all those thriving in it. But angels, no,
I had not noticed.
"I take my accurate form," Memnoch continued, "when I am in Heaven, or outside of
Time. When I am on my own, so to speak, and not bound to the earth. Other angels,
Michael, Gabriel, any of those can appear in their glorified form on earth if they want
to. Again, it would be natural. Matter being drawn to them by their magnetic force
shapes them to look their most beautiful, the way God created them. But most of the
time they don't let this happen. They go about as Ordinary Men or Ordinary Women,
because it's simply much easier to do so. Continuously overwhelming human beings
do not serve our purposes—neither our Lord's nor mine."
"And that is the question. What is the purpose? What are you doing, if you're not
evil?"
"Let me start with the Creation. And let me tell you right now that I know nothing of
where God came from, or why, or how. No one knows this. The mystic writers, the
prophets of Earth, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Hebrew, Egyptian—all recognized the
impossibility of understanding the origin of God. That's not really the question for me
and never has been, though I suspect that at the end of Time we will know."
"You mean God hasn't promised that we will know where He came from."
"You know what?" he said, smiling. "I don't think God knows. I think that's the whole
purpose of the physical universe. He thinks through watching the universe evolve,
He's going to find out. What He has set in motion, you see, is a giant Savage Garden,
a giant experiment, to see if the end result produces beings like Himself. We are made
in His image, all of us—He is anthropomorphic, without question, but again He is not
material."
"And when the light came, when you covered your eyes in Heaven, that was God."
He nodded. "God, the Father, God, the Essence, Brahma, the Aten, the Good God, En
Sof, Yahweh, God!"
"Then how can He be anthropomorphic?"
"His essence has a shape, just as does mine. We, His first creations, were made in His
image. He told us so. He has two legs, two arms, a head. He made us invisible images
of the same. And then set the universe into motion to explore the development of that
shape through matter, do you see?"
"Not quite."
"I believe God worked backwards from the blueprint of Himself. He created a
physical universe whose laws would result in the evolution of creatures who
resembled Him. They would be made of matter. Except for one striking and important
difference. Oh, but then there were so many surprises. You know my opinion already.
Your friend David hit upon it when he was a man. I think God's plan went horribly
wrong."
"Yes, David did say that, that he thought angels felt God's plan for Creation was all
wrong."
"Yes. I think He did it originally to find out what it would have been like had He been
Matter. And I think He was looking for a clue as to how He got where He is. And why
He is shaped like He is, which is shaped like me or you. In watching man evolve, He
hopes to understand His own evolution, if such a thing in fact occurred. And whether
this has worked or not to His satisfaction, well, only you can judge that for yourself."
"Wait a minute," I said. "But if He is spiritual and made of light, or made of
nothing—then what gave Him the idea for matter in the first place?"
"Ah, now that is the cosmic mystery. In my opinion, His imagination created Matter,
or foresaw it, or longed for it. And I think the longing for it was a most important
aspect of His mind. You see, Lestat, if He Himself did originate in Matter ...then all
this is an experiment to see when Matter can evolve into God again.
"If He didn't originate Matter, if He proceeded and it is something He imagined and
desired and longed for, well, the effects upon Him are basically the same. He wanted
Matter. He wasn't satisfied without it. Or He wouldn't have made it. It was no
accident, I can assure it.
"But let me caution you, not all the angels agree on this interpretation, some feel the
need for no interpretation, and some have completely different theories. This is my
theory, and since I am the Devil, and have been for centuries, since I am the
Adversary, the Prince of Darkness, the Ruler of the World of Men and of Hell, I think
my opinion is worth stating. I think it's worth believing in. So you have my article of
faith.
"The design of the universe is immense, to use a feeble word, but the whole process of
evolution was His calculated experiment, and we, the angels, were created long before
it began."
"What was it like before Matter began?"
"I can't tell you. I know, but I don't, strictly speaking, remember. The reason for this
is simple: When Matter was created, so was Time. All angels began to exist not only
in heavenly perfection with God but to witness and be drawn into Time.
"Now we can step out of it, and I can to some extent recall when there was no lure of
Matter or Time; but I can't really tell you what that early stage was like anymore.
Matter and Time changed everything totally. They obliterated not only the pure state
that preceded them, they upstaged it; they overshadowed it; they, how shall I say... ?"
"Eclipsed it."
"Exactly. Matter and Time eclipsed the Time before Time."
"But can you remember being happy?"
"Interesting question. Dare I say this?" he asked himself as he continued to speculate.
"Dare I say, I remember the longing, the incompleteness, more than I remember
complete happiness? Dare I say there was less to understand?
"You cannot underestimate the effect upon us of the creation of the physical universe.
Think for one moment, if you can, what Time means, and how miserable you might
be without it. No, that's not right. What I mean is, without Time you could not be
conscious of yourself, either in terms of failure or achievement, or in terms of any
motion backwards or forwards, or any effect."
"I see it. Rather like the old people who've lost so much intelligence that they have no
memory moment to moment. They're vegetative, wide-eyed, but they are no longer
human with the rest of the race because they have no sense of anything ...themselves
or anyone else."
"A perfect analogy. Though let me assure you such aged and wounded individuals
still have souls, which will at some point cease to be dependent upon their crippled
brains."
"Souls!" I said.
We walked slowly but steadily, and I tried not to be distracted by the greenery, and
the flowers; but I have always been seduced by flowers; and here I saw flowers of a
size which our world would surely find impractical and impossible to support. Yet
these were species of trees I knew. This was the world as it had once been.
"Yes, you're correct on that. Can you feel the warmth around you? This is a time of
lovely evolutionary development on the planet. When men speak of Eden or Paradise,
they 'remember' this time."
"The Ice Age is yet to come."
"The second Ice Age is coming. Definitely. And then the world will renew itself, and
Eden will come again. All through the Ice Age, men and women will develop. But
realize of course that even by this point, life as we know it had existed for millions of
years!"
I stopped. I put my hands to my face. I tried to think it through again. (If you want to
do this, just reread the last two pages.)
"But He knew what Matter was!" I said.
"No, I'm not sure He did," said Memnoch. "He took that seed, that egg, that essence
and He cast it in a form which became Matter!
But I don't know how truly He foresaw what that would mean. You see, that's our big
dispute. I don't think He sees the consequences of His actions! I don't think He pays
attention! That's what the big fight is about!"
"So He created Matter perhaps by discovering what it was as He did it."
"Yes, Matter and energy, which are interchangeable as you know, yes, He created
them, and I suspect that the key to Him lies within the word 'energy,' that if human
anatomy ever reaches the point where angels and God can be satisfactorily explained
in human language, energy will be the key."
"So He was energy," I said, "and in making the universe, He caused some of that
energy to be changed into Matter."
"Yes, and to create a circular interchange independent of himself. But of course
nobody said all this to us at the beginning. He didn't say it. I don't think He knew it.
We certainly didn't know it. All we knew was that we were dazzled by His creations.
We were absolutely astonished by the feel and taste and heat and solidity and
gravitational pull of Matter in its battle with energy. We knew only what we saw."
"Ah, and you saw the universe unfolding. You saw the Big Bang."
"Use that term with skepticism. Yes, we saw the universe come into existence; we
saw everything set into motion, as it were. And we were overawed! That's why almost
every early religion on earth celebrates the majesty, the grandeur, the greatness and
genius of the Creator; why the earliest anthems ever put into words on Earth sing the
glories of God. We were impressed, just as humans later would come to be impressed,
and in our angelic minds, God was Almighty and Wondrous and Beyond
Comprehension before man came into being.
"But let me remind you, especially as we walk through this magnificent garden, that
we witnessed millions of explosions and chemical transformations, upheavals, all of
which involved nonorganic molecules before 'life' as we call it ever came to exist."
"The mountain ranges were here."
"Yes."
"And the rains?"
"Torrents upon torrents of rain."
"Volcanos erupted."
"Continuously. You can't conceive of how enthralled we were. We watched the
atmosphere thicken and develop, watching it change in composition.
"And then, and then, came what I will call for you the Thirteen Revelations or
mystical Evolution. And by revelation, I mean what was revealed in the process to the
angels, to those of us who Watched, to us.
"I could tell you in greater detail, take you inside every basic species of organism that
ever thrived in this world. But you wouldn't remember it. I'm going to tell you what
you can remember so that you can make your decision while you're still alive."
"Am I alive?"
"Of course. Your soul has never suffered physical death; it's never left the earth,
except with me by special dispensation for this journey. You know you are alive.
You're Lestat de Lioncourt, even though your body has been mutated by the invasion
of an alien and alchemic spirit, whose history and woes you have recorded yourself."
"To come with you ... to decide to follow you ... I have to die then, don't I?"
"Of course," he said.
I found myself stopped still again, hands locked to the side of my head. I stared down
at the grass underneath my boots. I sensed the swarm of insectile light gathered in the
sun falling on us. I looked at the reflection of radiance and verdant forest in
Memnoch's eyes.
He lifted his hand very slowly, as if giving me full opportunity to move away from
him, and then he laid his hand on my shoulder. I loved this sort of gesture, the
respectful gesture. I tried so often to make this sort of gesture myself.
"You have the choice, remember? You can return to being exactly what you are now."
I couldn't answer. I knew what I was thinking. Immortal, material, earthbound,
vampire. But I didn't speak the words. How could anyone return from this? And
again, I saw His face and heard His words. You would never be my adversary, would
you?
"You are responding very well to what I tell you," he said warmly.
"I knew you would, for several reasons."
"Why?" I asked. "Tell me why. I need a little reassurance. I'm too shattered by all my
past weeping and stammering, though I have to confess, I'm not too interested in
talking about myself."
"What you are is part of what we are doing," he said. We had come to an enormous
spiderweb, suspended over our broad path by thick, shimmering threads. Respectfully,
he ducked beneath it rather than destroy it, drawing his wings downward around him,
and I followed his lead.
"You're curious, that's your virtue," he said. "You want to know. This is what your
ancient Marius said to you, that he, having survived thousands of years, or well,
nearly... would answer your questions as a young vampiric creature, because your
questions were truly being asked! You wanted to know. And this is what drew me to
you also.
"Through all your insolence, you wanted to know! You have been horribly insulting
to me and to God continuously, but then so is everyone in your time. That's nothing
unusual, except with you there was tremendous genuine curiosity and wonder behind
it. You saw the Savage Garden, rather than simply assuming a role there. So this has
to do with why I have picked you."
"All right," I said with a sigh. It made sense. Of course I remembered Marius
revealing himself to me. I remembered him saying the very things to which Memnoch
referred. And I knew, too, that my intense love of David, and of Dora, revolved
around very similar traits in both beings: an inquisitiveness which was fearless and
willing to take the consequence of the answers!
"God, my Dora, is she all right?"
"Ah, it's that sort of thing which surprises me, the ease with which you can be
distracted. Just when I think I've really astonished you and I have you locked in, you
step back and demand to be answered on your own terms. It's not a violation of your
curiosity, but it is a means of controlling the inquiry, so to speak."
"Are you telling me that I must, for the moment, forget about Dora?"
"I'll go you one better. There is nothing for you to worry about. Your friends,
Armand and David, have found Dora, and are looking out for her, without revealing
themselves to her."
He smiled reassuringly, and gave a little doubtful, maybe scolding, shake of the head.
"And," he said, "you must remember your precious Dora has tremendous physical and
mental resources of her own. You may well have fulfilled what Roger asked of you.
Her belief in God set her apart from others years ago; now what you've shown her has
only intensified her commitment to all that she believes. I don't want to talk anymore
about Dora. I want to go on describing Creation."
"Yes, please."
"Now, where were we? There was God; and we were with Him. We had
anthropomorphic shapes but we didn't call them that because we had never seen our
shapes in material form. We knew our limbs, our heads, our faces, our forms, and a
species of movement which is purely celestial, but which organizes all parts of us in
concert, fluidly. But we knew nothing of Matter or material form. Then God created
the Universe and Time.
"Well, we were astonished, and we were also enthralled! Absolutely enthralled.
"God said to us, 'Watch this, because this will be beautiful and will exceed your
conceptions and expectations, as it will Mine.' "
"God said this."
"Yes, to me and the other angels. Watch. And if you go back to scripture in various
forms, you will find that one of the earliest terms used for us, the angels, is the
Watchers."
"Oh, yes, in Enoch and in many Hebrew texts."
"Right. And look to the other religions of the world, whose symbols and language are
less familiar to you, and you will see a cosmology of similar beings, an early race of
godlike creatures who looked over or preceded human beings. It's all garbled, but in a
way—it's all there. We were the witnesses of God's Creation. We preceded it, and
therefore did not witness our own. But we were there when He made the stars!"
"Are you saying that these other religions, that they contain the same validity as the
religion to which we are obviously referring? We are speaking of God and Our Lord
as though we were European Catholics—"
"It's all garbled, in countless texts throughout the world. There are texts which are
irretrievable now which contained amazingly accurate information about cosmology;
and there are texts that men know; and there are texts that have been forgotten but
which can be rediscovered in time."
"Ah, in time."
"It's all essentially the same story. But listen to my point of view on it and you will
have no difficulty reconciling it with your own points of reference, and the symbology
which speaks more clearly to you."
"But the validity of other religions! You're saying that the being I saw in Heaven
wasn't Christ."
"I didn't say that. As a matter of fact, I said that He was God Incarnate. Wait till we
get to that point!"
We had come out of the forest and stood now on what seemed the edge of a veldt. For
the first time I caught sight of the humans whose scent had been distracting me—a
very distant band of scantily clothed nomads moving steadily through the grass. There
must have been thirty of them, perhaps less.
"And the Ice Age is yet to come," I repeated. I turned round and round, trying to
absorb and memorize the details of the enormous trees. But even as I did so, I realized
the forest had changed.
"But look carefully at the human beings," he said. "Look." He pointed. "What do you
see?"
I narrowed my eyes and called upon my vampiric powers to observe more closely.
"Men and women, who look very similar to those of today. Yes, I would say this is
Homo sapiens sapiens. I would say, they are our species."
"Exactly. What do you notice about their faces?"
"That they have distinct expressions that seem entirely modern, at least readable to a
modern mind. Some are frowning; some are talking; one or two seem deep in thought.
The shaggy-haired man lagging behind, he seems unhappy. And the woman, the
woman with the huge breasts—are you sure she can't see us?"
"She can't. She's merely looking in this direction. What differentiates her from the
men?"
"Well, her breasts, clearly, and the fact that she is beardless. The men have beards.
Her hair is longer of course, and well, she's pretty; she's delicate of bone; she's
feminine. She isn't carrying an infant, but the others are. She must be the youngest, or
one who hasn't given birth."
He nodded.
It did seem that she could see us. She was narrowing her gaze as I did mine. Her face
was longish, oval, what an archaeologist would call Cro-Magnon; there was nothing
apelike about her, or about her kin. She wasn't fair, however, her skin was dark
golden, rather like that of the Semitic or Arab peoples, like His skin in Heaven Above.
Her dark hair lifted exquisitely in the wind as she turned and moved forward.
"These people are all naked."
Memnoch gave a short laugh.
We moved back into the forest; the veldt vanished. The air was thick and moist and
fragrant around us.
Towering over us were immense conifers and ferns. Never had I seen ferns of this
size, their monstrous fronds bigger by far than the blades of banana trees, and as for
the conifers, I could only compare them to the great, barbaric redwoods of the western
California forests trees which have always made me feel alone and afraid.
He continued to lead us, oblivious to this swarming tropical jungle through which we
made our way. Things slithered past us; there were muted roars in the distance. The
earth itself was layered over with green growth, velvety, ruckled, and sometimes
seemingly with living rocks!
I was aware of a rather cool breeze suddenly, and glanced over my shoulder. The
veldt and the humans were long gone. The shadowy ferns rose so thickly behind us
that it took me a moment to realize that rain was falling from the sky, high above,
striking the topmost greenery and only touching us with its soft, soothing sound.
There had been no humans in this forest ever, that was certain, but what manner of
monsters were there, which might step from the shadows?
"Now," Memnoch said, easily moving aside the dense foliage with his right arm as we
continued to walk. "Let me get to the specifics, or what I have organized into the
Thirteen Revelations of Evolution as the angels perceived them and discussed them
with God. Understand, throughout we will speak of this world only—planets, stars,
other galaxies, these have nothing to do with our discussion."
"You mean, we are the only life in the entire universe."
"I mean my world and my heaven and my God are all that I know."
"I see."
"As I told you, we witnessed complex geological processes; we saw the mountains
rise, we saw the seas created, we saw the continents shift. Our anthems of praise and
wonder were endless. You cannot imagine the singing in Heaven; you heard a mere
taste of it in a Heaven filled with human souls. Then we were only the celestial choirs,
and each new development prompted its psalms and canticles. The sound was
different. Not better, no, but not the same.
"Meantime, we were very busy, descending into the atmosphere of earth, oblivious to
its composition, and losing ourselves in contemplation of various details. The
minutiae of life involved a demand on our focus which did not exist in the celestial
realm."
"You mean everything there was large and clear."
"Precisely and fully illuminated, the Love of God was in no way enhanced or enlarged
or complicated by any question of tiny details."
We had come now to a waterfall, thin, fierce, and descending into a bubbling pool. I
stood for a moment, refreshed by the mist of water on my face and hands. Memnoch
seemed to enjoy the same.
For the first time I realized his feet were bare. He let his foot slip into the water itself,
and watched the water swirl around his toes. The nails of his toes were ivory,
perfectly trimmed.
As he looked down into the churning, bubbling water, his wings became visible,
rising straight up suddenly to great peaks above him, and I could see the moisture
glittering as it coated the feathers. There was a commotion; the wings appeared to
close, exactly like those of a bird, and to fold back behind him, and then to disappear.
"Imagine now," he said, "the legions of angels, the multitudes of all ranks—and there
are ranks—coming down to this earth to fall in love with something as simple as the
bubbling water we see before us or the changing color of sunlight as it pierces the
gases surrounding the planet itself."
"Was it more interesting than Heaven?"
"Yes. One has to say yes. Of course, on reentry, one feels complete satisfaction in
Heaven, especially if God is pleased; but the longing returns, the innate curiosity,
thoughts seemed to collect inside our minds. We became aware of having a mind in
this fashion, but let me move on to the Thirteen Revelations.
"The First Revelation was the change of inorganic molecules to organic molecules .. .
from rock to tiny living molecule, so to speak. Forget this forest. It didn't exist then.
But look to the pool. It was in pools such as this, caught in the hands of the mountain,
warm, and busy, and full of gases from the furnaces of the earth, that such things
started—the first organic molecules appeared.
"A clamour rose to Heaven. 'Lord, look what Matter has done.' And the Almighty
gave His usual beaming smile of approval. 'Wait and Watch,' He said again, and as we
watched, there came the Second Revelation: Molecules commenced to organize
themselves into three forms of Material: cells, enzymes, and genes. Indeed, no sooner
had the one-celled form of such things appeared than the multicellular forms began to
appear; and what we had divined with the first organic molecules was now fully
apparent; some spark of life animated these things; they had a crude form of purpose,
and it was as if we could see that spark of life and recognize it as a tiny, tiny evidence
of the essence of life which we in abundance possessed!
"In sum, the world was full of commotion of a new kind altogether; and as we
watched these tiny multicelled beings drift through water, collecting to form the most
primitive algae, or fungi, we saw these green living things then take hold upon the
land itself! Out of the water climbed the slime which had clung for millions of years
to its shores. And from these creeping green things sprang the ferns and the conifers
which you see around us, rising finally until they attained massive size.
"Now angels have size. We could walk beneath these things on the green-covered
world. Again, listen, if you will, in your imagination, to the anthems of praise that
rose to heaven; listen if you will to the joy of God, perceiving all this through His own
Intellect and through the choruses and tales and prayers of his angels!
"Angels began to spread out all over the earth; they began to delight in certain places;
some preferred the mountains; others the deep valleys, some the waters, some the
forest of green shadow and shade."
"So they became like the water spirits," I said, "or the spirits of the woods—all the
spirits that men later came to worship."
"Precisely. But you jump way ahead!
"My response to these very first Two Revelations was like that of many of my
legions; as quickly as we sensed a spark of life emanating from these multicelled plant
organisms, we also began to sense the death of that spark, as one organism devoured
another, or overran it and took its food from it; indeed we saw multiplicity and
destruction!
"What had been mere change before—exchange of energy and matter—now took on a
new dimension. We began to see the beginning of the Third Revelation. Only it did
not come home to us until the first animal organisms distinguished themselves from
plants.
"As we watched their sharp, determined movement, with their seemingly greater
variety of choices, we sensed that the spark of life they evinced was indeed very
similar to the life inside ourselves. And what was happening to these creatures? To
these tiny animals and to plants?
'They died, that's what was happening. They were born, lived and died, and began to
decay. And that was the Third Revelation of Evolution: Death and Decay."
Memnoch's face became the darkest I'd ever seen it. It retained the innocence, and the
wonder, but it was clouded with something terrible that seemed a mixture of fear and
disappointment; maybe it was only the naive wonder that perceives a horrible
conclusion.
"The Third Revelation was Death and Decay," I said. "And you found yourself
repelled by it."
"Not repelled! I just assumed it had to be a mistake! I went soaring to heaven! 'Look,'
I said to God, 'these tiny things can cease to live, the spark can go out—as it could
never go out of You or us, and then what is left behind them in matter rots.' I wasn't
the only angel who went flying into the face of God with this great cry.
"But I think my anthems of wonder were more colored by suspicion and fear. Fear
had been born in my heart. I didn't know it, but it had come to me with the perception
of decay and death; and the perception felt punitive to my mind."
He looked at me. "Remember, we are angels. Until this time, there had been nothing
punitive to our minds; nothing that made suffering in our thoughts! You grasp? And I
suffered; and fear was a tiny component of it."
"And what did God say?"
"What do you think He said?"
"That it was all part of the plan."
"Exactly. 'Watch. Watch, and look, and you will see that essentially nothing new is
happening; there is the same interchange of energy and matter.'"
"But what about the spark?" I cried.
" 'You are living creatures,' said God. 'It is a credit to your fine intellect that you
perceive such a thing. Now watch. More is to come.'"
"But suffering, the punitive quality. ..."
"It was all resolved in a Great Discussion. Discussion with God involves not only
coherent words but immense love of God, the light you saw, surrounding and
permeating us all. What God gave us was reassurance, and perhaps the reassurance
that this inkling of suffering in me required—that there was Nothing To Fear."
"I see."
"Now comes the Fourth Revelation, and remember my organization of these
revelations is arbitrary. I cannot take you through the minutiae, as I've said. The
Fourth Revelation I call the Revelation of Color, and it began with flowering plants.
The creation of flowers; the introduction of an entirely more extravagant and visibly
beautiful means of mating between organisms. Now understand mating had always
taken place. Even in the one-celled animals there had been a mating.
"But flowers! Flowers introduced in profusion colors which had never been before in
nature, except in the rainbow! Colors we had known in Heaven and thought to be
purely celestial and now we saw they were not purely celestial but could develop in
this great laboratory called earth for natural reasons.
"Let me say at this time that spectacular colors were also developing in sea creatures,
in fishes in warm waters. But the flowers struck me in particular as exquisitely
beautiful, and when it became obvious that the species would be numberless, that the
patterns of petals should be endless, our anthems again rose to Heaven in such music
that everything before seemed lesser, or not so deep.
"This music had of course already been tinged with something dark... dare I say it—
the hesitation or the shadow produced in us by the Revelation of Death and Decay.
And now with the flowers, this dark element grew even stronger in our songs and
exclamations of wonder and gratitude, for when the flowers died, when they lost their
petals, when they fell to the earth, it seemed a terrible loss.
"The spark of life had emanated most powerfully from these flowers, and from the
larger trees and plants that were growing everywhere in profusion; and so the song
took on its sombre notes.
"But we were more than ever enthralled with the earth. In fact, I would say at this
time that the character of Heaven had been changed utterly. All of Heaven, God, the
angels in all ranks, were now focused on the Earth. It was impossible to be in Heaven
merely singing to God as before. The song would have to have something in it about
Matter and process and beauty. And of course those angels who make the most
complex songs did wind together these elements—death, decay, beauty—into more
coherent anthems than those which came from me.
"I was troubled. I had a sleepless mind in my soul, I think. I had something in me
which had already become insatiable. ..."
"Those words, I spoke those words to David when I spoke of you, when you first
stalked me," I said.
"They come from an old poem that was sung of me, written in Hebrew and now rarely
found in translation anywhere in the world. Those were the words of the Sibylline
Oracle when she described the Watchers ...we angels whom God had sent to observe.
She was right. I liked her poetry, so I remember it. I adopted it in my definition of
myself. God only knows why other angels are more nearly content."
Memnoch's whole manner had become sombre. I wondered if the music of Heaven
which / had heard included this sombre quality he was describing to me, or whether
its pure joy had been restored.
"No, you hear now the music of human souls in heaven as well as angels. The sounds
are completely different. But let me go on quickly through the Revelations, because I
know that they aren't easy to grasp except as a whole.
"The Fifth Revelation was that of Encephalization. Animals had differentiated
themselves in the water from plants some time ago, and now these gelatinous
creatures were beginning to form nervous systems and skeletons and with this
formation came the process of encephalization. Creatures began to develop heads!
"And it did not escape our notice for one divine instant that we, as angels, had heads!
The thinking processes of these evolving organisms were centered in the head. So it
was with us, obviously! No one had to tell us. Our angelic intelligence knew how we
were organized. The eyes were the giveway. We had eyes, and these eyes were part
of our brains and sight led us in our movements, and in our responses, and in our
search for knowledge more than any other sense.
"There was a tumult in heaven. 'Lord,' I said, 'what is happening? These creatures are
developing shapes ... limbs ... heads.' And once again the anthems rose, but this time
mingled with confusion as well as ecstasy, fear of God that such things could happen,
that from Matter things could spring which had heads.
"Then even before the reptiles began to crawl out of the sea into the land, even before
that happened, there came the Sixth Revelation, which struck nothing short of horror
in me. These creatures, with their heads and their limbs, no matter how bizarre, or
various in their structures, these things had faces! Faces like ours. I mean the simplest
anthropoid had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. This is a face, such as I have! First the
head, now the face, the expression of intelligence within the mind!
"I was aghast! I raised the worst arguments. 'Is this something you want to happen?
Where will this end? What are these creatures? The spark of life from them grows
stronger, flares hotter, and dies hard! Are you paying attention!' Some of my fellow
angels were horrified. "They said, 'Memnoch, you are pushing God too far!
Obviously there is a kinship between us, magnificent as we are, the Sons of God, the
inhabitants of the bene ha elohim, and these creatures. The head, the face, yes, it's
evident. But how dare you challenge the plan of God?'
"I couldn't be comforted. I was too full of suspicion, and so were those who agreed
with me. We were puzzled, and back down to Earth we went, persuaded by the earth
to wander, to walk. I could now measure myself in size by the scale of things as I
earlier mentioned, and I could lie amongst soft bowers of plants, listening to them
grow and thinking about them, and letting their colors fill my eyes.
"Yet, still the promise of disaster haunted me. Then an exceptional thing happened.
God came to me.
"God doesn't leave Heaven when He does this. He merely extends Himself, so to
speak; His light came down and took me in where I was, rolled me up into it and
against Him, and He began to talk to me.
"Of course this was immediately comforting. I had denied myself the bliss of Heaven
for long periods, and now to have this bliss come down and enfold me in perfect love
and quiet, I was satisfied. All my arguments and doubts left me. Pain left me. The
punitive effect upon my mind of death and decay was eased.
"God spoke. I was of course fused with Him and had no sense of my form in this
moment; we had been so close many a time in the past, and we were this close when I
had been made, and came forth out of God. But nevertheless it was a profound,
merciful gift for it to happen now.
" 'You see more than other angels,' He said. 'You think in terms of the future, a
concept which they are just beginning to learn. They are as mirrors reflecting the
magnificence of each step; whereas you have your suspicions. You do not trust in me.'
"These words filled me with sorrow. 'You do not trust in me.' I had not thought of it as
distrust, my fears. And no sooner had I realized this than that realization was
sufficient for God, and He called me back to Heaven and said that now I should watch
more often from that vantage point and not go so deep into the foliage of the world."
I could only stare at Memnoch as he explained all these things. We stood on the bank
of the stream still. He didn't seem comforted now as he told me about this comfort.
Only eager to go on with his tale.
"I did go back to Heaven, but as I told you, the entire composition of Heaven was now
changed. Heaven was focused on Earth. Earth was the Heavenly Discourse. And
never was I so aware of it as on this return. I went to God, I knelt in adoration, I
poured out my heart, my doubts, above all my gratitude that He had come to me as He
had. I asked if I was free again to return to the World below.
"He gave one of His sublime noncommittal answers, meaning, 'You are not forbidden.
You are a Watcher and your duty is to Watch.' So I went down—"
"Wait," I said. "I want to ask you a question."
"Yes," he answered patiently. "But come, let's continue on our journey. You can step
on the rocks as you cross the stream."
I followed him this way easily enough, and within minutes we had left the sound of
the water behind us, and we were in an even denser forest alive, I think, with
creatures, though I couldn't tell.
"My question," I pressed, "was this. Was Heaven boring compared to Earth?"
"Oh, never, it's just that the Earth was the focus. One could not be in Heaven and
forget about Earth because everybody in Heaven was watching Earth and singing
about it. That's all. No, Heaven was as fascinating and blissful as ever; in fact, the
sombre note which had been introduced, the solemn acknowledgment of decay and
death had added to the infinite variation of things which might be said and sung and
dwelt upon in Heaven."
"I see. Heaven expanded with these revelations."
"Always! And remember the music, never, never think that that is a cliche of religion.
The music was reaching new heights all the time in its celebration of wonder. It would
be millennia before physical instruments would reach a level where they could make
even a pale imitation of the sounds of the music of the angels—their voices, mingling
with the beat of their wings, and some interplay with the winds that rose from Earth."
I nodded.
"What is it?" he asked. "What do you want to say?"
"I can't put it in words! Only that our understanding of Heaven fails again and again
because we are not taught this, that Heaven is focused upon the earth. Why, all my
life, I've heard nothing but the contrary, the denigration of matter, and that it is a
prison for the soul."
"Well, you saw Heaven for yourself," he said. "But let me continue:
"The Seventh Revelation was that the animals came out of the sea. That they came
into the forests which now covered the land and they found ways to live in it. The
Reptiles were born. They became great lizards, monsters, things of such size that even
the strength of angels couldn't have stopped them. And these things had heads and
faces, and now they not only swam with their legs—legs like ours—but they walked
upon them, and some walked on two legs instead of four, holding against their chests
two tiny legs like our arms.
"I watched this happen as someone watches a fire grow. From the tiny blaze, giving
warmth, I now saw a conflagration!

"Insects in all forms developed. Some took to the air with a form of flight very
different and monstrous compared to our own. The world swarmed with all these new
species of the living and mobile and the hungry, for creature fed upon creature just as
it had always been, but now with the animals, the feasting and killing was far more
obvious and happened not merely in minuscule but with giant skirmishes amongst
lizards who tore each other to pieces, and great reptilian birds who could glide down
upon the lesser crawling things and carry them away to their nests.
"The form of propagation began to change. Things were born in eggs. Then some
spawn came live from the mother.
"For millions of years I studied these things, talking to God about them, more or less
absently, singing when I was overwhelmed with beauty, going up to the heavens, and
generally finding my questions disturbing to everyone as before. Great debates
happened. Should we question nothing? Look, the spark of life flares monstrous and
hot from the giant lizard as he dies! And again and again into the womb of God I was
taken, just when I thought my agitation would give me no peace.
" 'Look at the scheme more closely. You are deliberately seeing only parts of it,' He
said to me. He pointed out as He had from the beginning that waste was unheard of in
the universe, that decay became food for others, that the means of interchange was
now Kill and Devour, Digest and Excrete.
" 'When I'm with you,' I told Him, 'I see the beauty of it. But when I go down there,
when I roll in the high grass, I see differently.'
" 'You are my angel and my Watcher. Overcome that contradiction,' He said.
"I went back down to the Earth. And then came the Eighth Revelation of Evolution:
the appearance of warm-blooded birds with feathered wings!"
I smiled. It was partly the expression on his face, the knowing, patient expression, and
the emphasis with which he had described the wings.
"Feathered wings!" he said. "First we see our faces on the heads of insects, of lizards
and monsters! And now behold, there is a warm-blooded creature, a creature
completely more fragile and pulsing with precarious life and it has feathered wings! It
flies as we fly. It rises, it spreads its wings, it soars.
"Well, for once mine was not the only outcry in heaven. Angels by the thousands
were astonished to discover that little beings of matter had wings so like our own.
Feathers, such as the feathers that covered ours, made them soft and made them move
through the wind ... all this now had its corollary in the material world!
"Heaven was stormy with songs, exclamations, outcries. Angels took flight after
birds, surrounding them in the air, and then following them and imitating them and
following them to their nests and watching as chicks were born from these eggs and
grew to full size.
"Now, you know we had seen this entire question of birth, growth, maturity in other
creatures, but in nothing that so resembled ourselves."
"God was silent?" I asked.
"No. But this time He called us all together and He asked us why we had not learnt
enough by now that we were not insulated from such horror and pride. Pride, he said,
is what we suffered; we were outraged that such puny, tiny-headed things, things that
had really very limited faces, actually, had feathered wings. He gave us a stern lesson
and warning: 'Once again, I tell you, this process will continue and you will see things
that will astonish you, and you are my angels and you belong to me, and your trust is
mine!'
"The Ninth Revelation of Evolution was painful for all angels. It was filled with
horror for some, and fear for others; indeed it was as if the Ninth Revelation mirrored
for us the very emotions it produced in our hearts. This was the coming of mammals
upon the earth, mammals whose hideous cries of pain rose higher to Heaven than any
noise of suffering and death that any other animal had ever made! Ooooh, the
promise of fear that we had seen in death and decay was now hideously fulfilled.
"The music rising from Earth was transformed; and all we could do in our fear and
suffering was sing in even greater amazement, and the song darkened, and became
more complex. The countenance of God, the light of God, remained undisturbed.
"At last the Tenth Revelation of Evolution. The apes walked upright!
Was not God Himself mocked! There it was, in hairy, brutal form, the two-legged,
two-armed upright creature in whose image we had been made! It lacked our wings,
for the love of Heaven; indeed the winged creatures never even came close to it in
development. But there it lumbered upon the earth, club in hand, brutal, savage,
tearing the flesh of enemies with its teeth, beating, biting, stabbing to death all that
resisted it—the image of God and the proud Sons of God, his angels—in hairy
material form and wielding tools! "Thunderstruck, we examined its hands. Had it
thumbs? Almost. Thunderstruck, we surrounded its gatherings. Was speech coming
from its mouth, the audible eloquent expression of thoughts? Al-most! What could be
God's plan? Why had He done this? Would this not rouse His anger?
"But the light of God flowed eternal and unceasingly, as if the scream of the dying
ape could not reach it, as if the monkey torn to pieces by its larger assailants had no
witness to the great flaring spark that sputtered before it died.
" 'No, no, this is unthinkable, this is unimaginable,' I said. I flew in the face of Heaven
again, and God said, very simply, and without consolation, 'Memnoch, if I am not
mocked by this being, if it is my creation, how can you be mocked? Be satisfied,
Memnoch, and enjoy amazement in your satisfaction, and trouble me no more!
Anthems rise all around you which tell me of every detail my Creation has
accomplished. You come with questions that are accusations, Memnoch! No more!'
"I was humbled. The word 'accusations' frightened or caused a long pause in my
thoughts. Do you know that Satan means in Hebrew 'the accuser'?"
"Yes," I said.
"Let me continue. To me this was a wholly new concept and yet I realized that I had
been flinging accusations at God all along. I had insisted that this evolutionary
process could not be what He wanted or intended.
"Now He told me plainly to stop, and to examine further. And He also gave me to
know again, in wide perspective, the immensity and diversity of the developments I
witnessed. In sum, He visited upon me a flash of His perspective, which mine could
never be.
"As I said, I was humbled. 'May I join with you, Lord?' I asked. And He said, 'But of
course.' We were reconciled, and slumbering in the divine light, yet I kept waking as
an animal might wake, ever on alert for its lurking enemy, waking and fearing, But
what is happening now down there!
"Lo and behold! Are those the words I should use, or shall I speak like J, the author of
the book of Genesis, and say 'Look!' with all its fierce power. The hairy upright ones
had begun a strange ritual. The hairy upright ones had begun all kinds of different
patterns of complex behavior. Allow me for the moment to skip over to the most
significant. The hairy upright ones had begun to bury their dead."
I narrowed my eyes, looking at Memnoch, puzzled. He was so deeply invested in this
tale that he looked for the first time convincingly unhappy, and yet his face retained
its beauty. You couldn't say unhappiness distorted him. Nothing could.
"Was this then the Eleventh Revelation of Evolution?" I asked.
"That they should bury their dead?"
He studied me a long time, and I sensed his frustration, that he couldn't begin to get
across to me all that he wanted me to know.
"What did it mean?" I pressed, impatient and eager to know.
"What did it mean, they buried their dead?"
"Many things," he whispered, shaking his finger emphatically, "for this ritual of
burying came along with a kinship we had seldom if ever witnessed in any other
species for more than a moment—the caring for the weak by the strong, the helping
and the nourishing of the crippled by the whole, and finally the burial with flowers.
Lestat, flowers! Flowers were laid from one end to the other of the body softly
deposited in the earth, so that the Eleventh Revelation of Evolution was that Modern
Man had commenced to exist. Shaggy, stooped, awkward, covered with apelike hair,
but with faces more than ever like our faces, modern man walked on the earth! And
modern man knew affection such as only angels had known in the universe, angels
and God who made them, and modern man showered that affection upon his kindred,
and modern man loved flowers as we had, and grieved as—with flowers—he buried
his dead."
I was silent for a long time, considering it, and considering above all Memnoch's
starting point—that he and God and the angels represented the ideal towards which
this human form was evolving before their very eyes. I had not considered it from
such a perspective. And again came the image of Him, turning from the balustrade,
and the voice asking me with such conviction, You would never be my adversary,
would you?
Memnoch watched me. I looked away. I felt the strongest loyalty to him already,
rising out of the tale he was telling me and the emotions invested in it, and I was
confused by the words of God Incarnate.
"And well you should be," said Memnoch. "For the question you must ask yourself is
this: Knowing you, Lestat, as surely He must, why He does not already consider you
His adversary? Can you guess?"
Stunned.
Quiet.
He waited until I was ready for him to continue, and there were moments there when I
thought that point might never come. Drawn to him as I was, totally enthralled as I
was, I felt a sheer mortal desire to flee from something overwhelming, something that
threatened the structure of my reasoning mind.
"When I was with God," Memnoch continued, "I saw as God sees—I saw the humans
with their families; I saw the humans gathered to witness and assist the birth; I saw
the humans cover the graves with ceremonial stones. I saw as God sees, and I saw as
if Forever and in All Directions, and the sheer complexity of every aspect of creation,
every molecule of moisture, and every syllable of sound issuing from the mouths of
birds or humans, all seemed to be nothing more than the product of the utter Greatness
of God. Songs came from my heart which I have never equaled.
"And God told me again, 'Memnoch, stay close to me in Heaven. Watch now from
afar.'
" 'Must I, Lord?' I asked. 'I want so badly to watch them and over them. I want with
my invisible hands to feel their softening skin.'
" 'You are my angel, Memnoch. Go then and watch, and remember that all you see is
made and willed by me.'
"I looked down once before leaving Heaven, and I do speak now in metaphor, we
both know this, I looked down and I saw the
Creation teeming with Watcher angels, I saw them everywhere engaged in their
various fascinations as I have described, from forest to valley to sea.
"But there seemed something in the atmosphere of Earth that had changed it; call it a
new element; a thin swirl of tiny particles? No, that suggests something greater than
what it was. But it was there.
"I went to Earth, and immediately the other angels confirmed for me that they, too,
had sensed this new element in the atmosphere of Earth, though it was not dependent
upon the air as was every other living thing.
" 'How can this be?' I asked.
" 'Listen,' said the Angel Michael. 'Just listen. You can hear it.'
"And Raphael said, 'This is something invisible but living! And what is there under
Heaven that is invisible and lives but us!'
"Hundreds of other angels gathered to discuss this thing, to speak of their own
experience of this new element, this new presence of invisibility which seemed to
swarm about us, unaware of our presence yet making some vibration, or that is,
inaudible sound, which we struggled to hear.
" 'You've done it!' said one of the angels to me, and let him remain nameless. 'You've
disappointed God with all your accusing and all your rages, and He has made
something else other than us that is invisible and has our powers! Memnoch, you have
to go to Him and find out if He means to do away with us, and let this new invisible
thing rule.'
" 'How can that be so?' asked Michael. Michael is, of all the angels, one of the most
calm and reasonable. Legend tells you this; so does Angelology, folklore, the whole
kit and caboodle. It's true. He is reasonable. And he pointed out now to the distressed
angels that these tiny invisible presences of which we were aware could not
conceivably equal our power. They could scarcely make themselves known to us, and
we were angels, from whom nothing on earth could possibly hide!
" 'We have to find out what this is,' I said. 'This is bound to the earth and part of it.
This is not celestial. It is here, dwelling close to the forests and hills.'
"Everyone agreed. We were beings from whom the composition of nothing was
secret. You might take thousands of years to understand cynobacteria, or nitrogen, but
we understood them! But we didn't understand this. Or let me say, we could not
recognize this for what it was."
"Yes, I understand."
"We listened; we reached out our arms. We perceived that it was bodiless and
invisible, yes, but that it had to it a continuity, an individuality, indeed, what we
perceived were a multitude of individualities. And they were weeping, and very
gradually, that sound was heard within our own realm of invisibility, and by our own
spiritual ears."
He paused again.
"You see the distinction I make?" he asked.
"They were spiritual individuals," I said.
"And as we pondered, as we opened our arms and sang and tried to comfort them,
while stepping invisibly and artfully through the material of Earth, something
momentous made itself known to us, shocking us out of our explorations. Before our
very eyes, the Twelfth Revelation of Physical Evolution was upon us! It struck us like
the light from Heaven; it distracted us from the cries of the covert invisible! It
shattered our reason. It caused our songs to become laughter and wails.
"The Twelfth Revelation of Evolution was that the female of the human species had
begun to look more distinctly different from the male of the human species by a
margin so great that no other anthropoid could compare! The female grew pretty in
our eyes, and seductive; the hair left her face, and her limbs grew graceful; her
manner transcended the necessities of survival; and she became beautiful as flowers
are beautiful, as the wings of birds are beautiful! Out of the couplings of the hairy ape
had risen a female tender-skinned and radiant of face. And though we had no breasts
and she had no wings, she looked like US!!!!"
We stood facing each other in the stillness.
Not for one second did I fail to grasp.
Not for one second did I seek to understand. I knew. I looked at him, at his large
beautiful face and streaming hair, at his smooth limbs, and his tender expression, and I
knew that he was right, of course. One need not have been a student of evolution to
realize that such a moment had surely come to pass with the refinement of the species,
and he did embody the empowered feminine if ever a creature could. He was as
marble angels, as the statues of Michelangelo; the absolute preciseness and harmony
of the feminine was in his physique.
He was agitated. He was on the verge it seemed of wringing his hands. He looked at
me intently, as if he would look into me and through me.
"And in short order," he said, "the Thirteenth Revelation of Evolution made itself
known. Males mated with the loveliest of the females, and those who were most lithe,
and smooth to touch, and tender of voice. And from those matings came males
themselves who were as beautiful as the females. There came humans of different
complexions; there came red hair and yellow hair as well as black hair and locks of
brown and startling white; there came eyes of infinite variety—gray, brown, green, or
blue. Gone was the man's brooding brow and hairy face and apish gait, and he, too,
shone with the beauty of an angel just as did his female mate."
I was silent.
He turned away from me, but it seemed impersonal. It seemed he required of himself
a pause, and a renewal of his own strength. I found myself staring at the high arched
wings, drawn close together, their lower tips just above the ground where we stood,
each feather still faintly iridescent. He turned around to face me, and unfolding out of
the angelic shape, his face was a graceful shock.
"There they stood, male and female, He created them, and except for that, Lestat,
except for—that one was male and one was female, they were made in the Image of
God and of His Angels! It had come to this! To this! God split in Two! Angels split in
Two!
"I don't know how long the other angels held me but finally they could no longer, and
I went up to Heaven, ablaze with thoughts and doubts and speculations. I knew wrath.
The cries of suffering mammals had taught me wrath. The screams and roars of wars
amongst apelike beings had taught me wrath. Decay and death had taught me fear.
Indeed all of God's Creation had taught all I needed to speed before him and say, " 'Is
this what you wanted! Your own image divided into male and female! The spark of
life now blazing huge when either dies, male or female! This grotesquerie; this
impossible division; this monster! Was this the plan?'
"I was outraged. 1 considered it a disaster! I was in a fury. I flung out my arms,
calling on God to reason with me, to forgive me, and save me with reassurance and
wisdom, but nothing came from God. Nothing. Not light. Not words. Not
punishment. Not judgment.
"I realized I stood in Heaven surrounded by angels. All of them were watching and
waiting.
"Nothing came from Almighty God but the most tranquil light. I was weeping. 'Look,
tears such as their tears,' I said to the others, though of course my tears were
nonmaterial. And as I wept, and as they watched me, I realized I wasn't weeping
alone.
"Who was with me? I turned round and round looking at them: I saw all the choruses
of angels, the Watchers, the Cherubim, the Seraphim, the Ophanim, all. Their faces
were rapt and mysterious, and yet I heard a weeping!
" 'Where is the weeping coming from!' I cried.
"And then I knew. And they knew. We came together, wings folded, heads bowed,
and we listened, and rising from the earth we heard the voices of those invisible
spirits, those invisible individualities; it was they—the immaterial ones—who wept!
And their crying reached to Heaven as the Light of God Shone on Eternal, without
change upon us all.
" 'Come now and witness,' said Raphael. 'Come watch as we have been directed.'
" 'Yes, I have to see what this is!' I said, and down I went into the earth's air, and so
did all of us, driving in a whirlwind these tiny wailing, weeping things that we could
not even see!
"Then human cries distracted us! Human cries mingled with the cries of the invisible!
"Together, we drew in, condensed and still a multitude, invisibly surrounding a small
camp of smooth and beautiful human beings.
"In their midst one young man lay dying, twisting in his last pain on the bed they'd
made for him of grass and flowers. It was the bite of some deadly insect which had
made his fever, all part of the cycle, as God would have told us had we asked.
"But the wailing of the invisible ones hovered over this dying victim.
And the lamentations of the human beings rose more terrible than I could endure.
"Again I wept.
" 'Be still, listen,' said Michael, the patient one.
"He directed us to look beyond the tiny camp, and the thrashing body of the feverish
man, and to see in thin air the spirit voices gathering and crying!
"And with our eyes we saw these spirits for the first time! We saw them clustering
and dispersing, wandering, rolling in and falling back, each retaining the vague shape
in essence of a human being. Feeble, fuddled, lost, unsure of themselves, they swam
in the very atmosphere, opening their arms now to the man who lay on the bier about
to die. And die that man did."
Hush. Stillness.
Memnoch looked at me as if I must finish it.
"And a spirit rose from the dying man," I said. "The spark of life flared and did not go
out, but became an invisible spirit with all the rest. The spirit of the man rose in the
shape of the man and joined those spirits who had come to take it away."
"Yes!"
He gave a deep sigh and then threw out his arms. He sucked in his breath as if he
meant to roar. He looked heavenward through the giant trees.
I stood paralyzed.
The forest sighed in its fullness around us. I could feel his trembling, I could feel the
cry that hovered just inside him and might burst forth in some terrible clarion. But it
only died away as he bowed his head.
The forest had changed again. The forest was our forest. These were oaks and the dark
trees of our times; and the wildflowers, and the moss I knew, and the birds and tiny
rodents who darted through the shadows.
I waited.
"The air was thick with these spirits," he said, "for once having seen them, once
having detected their faint outline and their
ceaseless voices, we could never again not see them, and like a wreath they
surrounded the earth! The spirits of the dead, Lestat! The spirits of the human dead."
"Souls, Memnoch?"
"Souls."
"Souls had evolved from matter?"
"Yes. In His image. Souls, essences, invisible individualities, souls!"
I waited again in silence.
He gathered himself together.
"Come with me," he said. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. As he reached
for mine, I felt his wing, distinctly for the first time, brush the length of my body, and
it sent a shiver through me akin to fear, but not fear at all.
"Souls had come out of these human beings," he said. "They were whole and living,
and hovered about the material bodies of the humans from whose tribe they had come.
"They could not see us; they could not see Heaven. Whom could they see but those
who had buried them, those who had loved them in life, and were their progeny, and
those who sprinkled the red ochre over their bodies before laying them carefully, to
face the east, in graves lined with ornaments that had been their own!"
"And those humans who believed in them," I said, "those who worshipped the
ancestors, did they feel their presence? Did they sense it? Did they suspect the
ancestors were still there in spirit form?"
"Yes," he answered me.
I was too absorbed to say anything else.
It seemed my consciousness was flooded with the smell of the wood and all its dark
colors, the endlessly rich variations of brown and gold and deep red that surrounded
us. I peered up at the sky, at the shining light fractured and gray and sullen yet grand.
Yet all I could think and consider was the whirlwind, and the souls who had
surrounded us in the whirlwind as though the air from the earth to Heaven were filled
with human souls. Souls drifting forever and ever. Where does one go in such
darkness? What does one seek? What can one know?
Was Memnoch laughing? It sounded small and mournful, private and full of pain. He
was perhaps singing softly, as if the melody were a natural emanation of his thoughts.
It came from his thinking as scent rises from flowers; song, the sound of angels.
"Memnoch," I said. I knew he was suffering but I couldn't stand it any longer. "Did
God know it?" I asked. "Did God know that men and women had evolved spiritual
essences? Did he know, Memnoch, about their souls?"
He didn't answer.
Again I heard the faint sound, his song. He, too, was looking up at
the sky, and he was singing more clearly now, a sombre and humbling canticle, it
seemed, alien to our own more measured and organized music, yet full of eloquence
and pain.
He watched the clouds moving above us, as heavy and white as any clouds I'd ever
beheld.
Did this beauty of the forest rival what I had seen in Heaven?
Impossible to answer. But what I knew with perfect truth is that heaven bad not made
this beauty dim by comparison! And that was the wonder. This Savage Garden, this
possible Eden, this ancient place was miraculous in its own right and in its own
splendid limitations. I suddenly couldn't bear to look on it, to see the small leaves
flutter downwards, to fall into loving it, without the answer to my question.
Nothing in the whole of my life seemed as essential.
"Did God know about the souls, Memnoch!" I said. "Did He know!"
He turned to me.
"How could He not have known, Lestat!" he answered. "How could He not have
known! And who do you think flew to the very heights of Heaven to tell Him? And
had He ever been surprised, or caught unawares, or increased or decreased, or
enlightened, or darkened, by anything I had ever brought to His Eternal and
Omniscient attention?"
He sighed again, and seemed on the verge of a tremendous outburst, one that would
make all his others look small. But then he was calm again and musing.
We walked on. The forest shifted, mammoth trees giving way to slender, more
gracefully branching species, and here and there were patches of high, waving grass.
The breeze had the smell of water in it. I saw it lift his blond hair, heavy as this hair
was, and smooth it back from the side of his face. I felt it cool my head and my hands,
but not my heart.
We peered into an open place, a deep, wild valley. I could see distant mountains, and
green slopes, a ragged and rambling wood breaking here and there for spaces of
blowing wheat or some other form of wild grain. The woods crept up into the hills and
into the mountains, sending its roots deep into the rock; and as we grew closer to the
valley, through the branches I would see the glitter and twinkling light of a river or
sea.
We emerged from the older forest. This was a marvelous and fertile land. Flowers of
yellow and blue grew in profusion, caught this way and that in dancing gusts of color.
The trees were olive trees and fruit trees, and had the low, twisted branches of trees
from which food has been gathered for many generations. The sunlight poured down
upon all.
We walked through tall grasses—the wild wheat perhaps—to the edge of the water,
where it lapped very gently without a tide, I think, and it was clear and shimmering as
it shrank back, exposing the extraordinary array of pebbles and stones.
I could see no end to this water either to the right or to the left, but I could see the far
bank and the rocky hills growing down towards it as if they were as alive as the roots
of the straggling green trees.
I turned around. The landscape behind us now was the same. The rocky hills, rising
eventually to mountains, with miles upon miles of scalable slopes, copses of fruit
trees, black, open mouths of caves.
Memnoch said nothing.
He was stricken and sad and staring down at the waters, and to the far horizon where
the mountains came as if to close in the waters, only to be forced to let the waters flow
out and beyond our sight.
"Where are we?" I asked gently.
He took his time to answer. Then he said, "The Revelations of Evolution are, for the
time being, finished. I've told you what I saw—the thin outline of all you'll know once
you die.
"Now what is left is the heart of my story, and I should like to tell it here. Here in this
beautiful place, though the rivers themselves are long gone from the earth and so are
the men and women who roamed at this time. And to answer your question, 'Where
are we?' Let me say: Here is where He finally flung me down from Heaven. Here is
where I Fell."