The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (316 page)

“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 corning 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 things 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 clichéd 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 cruelest. 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 café. 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.”