The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (321 page)

“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. I 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 clear my 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, and 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 little 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.

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.”