The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (328 page)

“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 the 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 like 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.…