The Tale of the Body Thief (7 page)

I realized David was standing at the far end of the hallway, beckoning for me to come near. But something in my appearance alarmed him. Ah, well, I was covered with snow and a thin layer of ice.

We went into the library together and I took the chair opposite
his. He left me for a moment during which time I was merely staring at the fire and feeling it melt the sleet that covered me. I was thinking of why I had come and how I would put it into words. My hands were as white as the snow was white.

When he appeared again, he had a large warm towel for me, and I took this and wiped my face and my hair and then my hands. How good it felt.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You looked a statue,” he said.

“Yes, I do look that way, now, don’t I? I’m going on.”

“What do you mean?” He sat down across from me. “Explain.”

“I’m going to a desert place. I’ve figured a way to end it, I think. This is not a simple matter at all.”

“Why do you want to do that?”

“Don’t want to be alive anymore. That part is simple enough. I don’t look forward to death the way you do. It isn’t that. Tonight I—” I stopped. I saw the old woman in her neat bed, in her flowered robe, against the quilted nylon. Then I saw that strange brown-haired man watching me, the one who had come to me on the beach and given me the story which I still had, crammed inside my coat.

Meaningless. You come too late, whoever you are.

Why bother to explain?

I saw Claudia suddenly as if she were standing there in some other realm, staring at me, waiting for me to see her. How clever that our minds can invoke an image so seemingly real. She might as well have been right there by David’s desk in the shadows. Claudia, who had forced her long knife through my chest. “I’ll put you in your coffin forever, Father.” But then I saw Claudia all the time now, didn’t I? I saw Claudia in dream after dream … 

“Don’t do this,” David said.

“It’s time, David,” I whispered, thinking in a vague and distant way how disappointed Marius would be.

Had David heard me? Perhaps my voice had been too soft. Some small crackling sound came from the fire, a bit of kindling collapsing perhaps or sap still moist and sizzling within the huge log. I saw that cold bedchamber in my boyhood home again, and suddenly, I had my arm around one of those big dogs, those lazy loving dogs. To see a wolf slay a dog is monstrous!

I should have died that day. Not even the best of hunters should
be able to slay a pack of wolves. And maybe that was the cosmic error. I’d been meant to go, if indeed there is any such continuity, and in overreaching, had caught the devil’s eye. “Wolf killer.” The vampire Magnus had said it so lovingly, as he had carried me to his lair.

David had sunk back in the chair, putting one foot absently on the fender, and his eyes were fixed on the flames. He was deeply distressed, even a little frantic, though he held it inside very well.

“Won’t it be painful?” he asked, looking at me.

Just for a moment, I didn’t know what he meant. Then I remembered.

I gave a little laugh.

“I came to say good-bye to you, to ask you if you’re certain about your decision. It seemed somehow the right thing to tell you I was going, and that this would be your last chance. It seemed sporting, actually. You follow me? Or do you think it’s simply another excuse? Doesn’t matter really.”

“Like Magnus in your story,” he said. “You’d make your heir, then go into the fire.”

“It wasn’t merely a story,” I said, not meaning to be argumentative, and wondering why it sounded that way. “And yes, perhaps it’s like that. I honestly don’t know.”

“Why do you want to destroy yourself?” He sounded desperate.

How I had hurt this man.

I looked at the sprawling tiger with its magnificent black stripes and deep orange fur.

“That was a man-eater, wasn’t it?” I asked.

He hesitated as if he didn’t fully understand the question, then as if waking, he nodded. “Yes.” He glanced at the tiger, then he looked at me. “I don’t want you to do it. Postpone it, for the love of heaven. Don’t do it. Why tonight, of all times?”

He was making me laugh against my will. “Tonight’s a fine night for doing it,” I said. “No, I’m going.” And suddenly there was a great exhilaration in me because I realized I meant it! It wasn’t just some fancy. I would never have told him if it was. “I’ve figured a method. I’ll go as high as I can before the sun comes over the horizon. There won’t be any way to find shelter. The desert there is very hard.”

And I will die in fire. Not cold, as I’d been on that mountain when the wolves surrounded me. In heat, as Claudia had died.

“No, don’t do it,” he said. How earnest he was, how persuasive. But it didn’t work.

“Do you want the blood?” I asked. “It doesn’t take very long. There’s very little pain. I’m confident the others won’t hurt you. I’ll make you so strong they’d have a devil of a time if they tried.”

Again, it was so like Magnus, who’d left me an orphan without so much as a warning that Armand and his ancient coven could come after me, cursing me and seeking to put an end to my newborn life. And Magnus had known that I would prevail.

“Lestat, I do not want the blood. But I want you to stay here. Look, give me a matter of a few nights only. Just that much. On account of friendship, Lestat, stay with me now. Can’t you give me those few hours? And then if you must go through with it, I won’t argue anymore.”

“Why?”

He looked stricken. Then he said, “Let me talk to you, let me change your mind.”

“You killed the tiger when you were very young, didn’t you? It was in India.” I gazed around at the other trophies. “I saw the tiger in a dream.”

He didn’t answer. He seemed anxious and perplexed.

“I’ve hurt you,” I said. “I’ve driven you deep into memories of your youth. I’ve made you aware of time, and you weren’t so aware of it before.”

Something happened in his face. I had wounded him with these words. Yet he shook his head.

“David, take the blood from me before I go!” I whispered suddenly, desperately. “You don’t have a year left to you. I can hear it when I’m near you! I can hear the weakness in your heart.”

“You don’t know that, my friend,” he said patiently. “Stay here with me. I’ll tell you all about the tiger, about those days in India. I hunted in Africa then, and once in the Amazon. Such adventures. I wasn’t the musty scholar then as I am now … ”

“I know.” I smiled. He had never spoken this way to me before, never offered so much. “It’s too late, David,” I said. Again, I saw the dream. I saw that thin gold chain around David’s neck. Had the tiger been going for the chain? That didn’t make sense. What remained was the sense of danger.

I stared at the skin of the beast. How purely vicious was his face.

“Was it fun to kill the tiger?” I asked.

He hesitated. Then forced himself to answer. “It was a man-eater. It feasted on children. Yes, I suppose it was fun.”

I laughed softly. “Ah, well, then we have that in common, me and the tiger. And Claudia is waiting for me.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“No. I guess if I did, I’d be afraid to die.” I saw Claudia quite vividly … a tiny oval portrait on porcelain—golden hair, blue eyes. Something fierce and true in the expression, in spite of the saccharine colors and the oval frame. Had I ever possessed such a locket, for that is what it was, surely. A locket. A chill came over me. I remembered the texture of her hair. Once again, it was as if she were very near me. Were I to turn, I might see her beside me in the shadows, with her hand on the back of my chair. I did turn around. Nothing. I was going to lose my nerve if I didn’t get out of here.

“Lestat!” David said urgently. He was scanning me, desperately trying to think of something more to say. He pointed to my coat. “What’s that in your pocket? A note you’ve written? You mean to leave it with me? Let me read it now.”

“Oh, this, this strange little story,” I said, “here, you may have it. I bequeath it to you. Fitting that it should be in a library, perhaps wedged somewhere on one of these shelves.”

I took out the little folded packet and glanced at it. “Yes, I’ve read this. It’s sort of amusing.” I tossed the packet into his lap. “Some fool mortal gave it to me, some poor benighted soul who knew who I was and had just enough courage to toss it at my feet.”

“Explain this to me,” said David. He unfolded the pages. “Why are you carrying it with you? Good Lord—Lovecraft.” He gave a little shake of his head.

“I just did explain it,” I said. “It’s no use, David, I can’t be talked down from the high ledge. I’m going. Besides, the story doesn’t mean a thing. Poor fool … ”

He had had such strange glittering eyes. Whatever had been so wrong about the way he came running towards me across the sand? About his awkward panic-stricken retreat? His manner had indicated such importance! Ah, but this was foolish. I didn’t care, and I knew I didn’t. I knew what I meant to do.

“Lestat, stay here!” David said. “You promised the very next time
we met, you would let me say all I have to say. You wrote that to me, Lestat, you remember? You won’t go back on your word.”

“Well, I have to go back on it, David. And you have to forgive me because I’m going. Perhaps there is no heaven or hell, and I’ll see you on the other side.”

“And what if there is both? What then?”

“You’ve been reading too much of the Bible. Read the Lovecraft story.” Again, I gave a short laugh. I gestured to the pages he was holding. “Better for your peace of mind. And stay away from
Faust
, for heaven’s sake. You really think angels will come in the end and take us away? Well, not me, perhaps, but you?”

“Don’t go,” he said, and his voice was so soft and imploring that it took my breath away.

But I was already going.

I barely heard him call out behind me:

“Lestat, I need you. You’re the only friend I have.”

How tragic those words! I wanted to say I was sorry, sorry for all of it. But it was too late now for that. And besides, I think he knew.

I shot upwards in the cold darkness, driving through the descending snow. All life seemed utterly unbearable to me, both in its horror and its splendour. The tiny house looked warm down there, its light spilling on the white ground, its chimney giving forth that thin coil of blue smoke.

I thought of David again walking alone through Amsterdam, but then I thought of Rembrandt’s faces. And I saw David’s face again in the library fire. He looked like a man painted by Rembrandt. He had looked that way ever since I’d known him. And what did we look like—frozen forever in the form we had when the Dark Blood entered our veins? Claudia had been for decades that child painted on porcelain. And I was like one of Michelangelo’s statues, turning white as marble. And just as cold.

I knew I would keep my word.

But you know there is a terrible lie in all this. I didn’t really believe I
could
be killed by the sun anymore. Well, I was certainly going to give it a good try.

T
HE Gobi Desert.

Eons ago, in the saurian age, as men have called it, great lizards died in this strange part of the world by the thousands. No one knows why they came here; why they perished. Was it a realm of tropical trees and steaming swamps? We don’t know. All we have now in this spot is the desert and millions upon millions of fossils, telling a fragmentary tale of giant reptiles who surely made the earth tremble with each step they took.

The Gobi Desert is therefore an immense graveyard and a fitting place for me to look the sun in the face. I lay a long time in the sand before the sunrise, collecting my last thoughts.

The trick was to rise to the very limit of the atmosphere, into the sunrise, so to speak. Then when I lost consciousness I would tumble down in the terrible heat, and my body would be shattered by this great fall upon the desert floor. How could it then dig in beneath the surface, as it might have done, by its own evil volition, were I whole and in a land of soft soil?

Besides, if the blast of light was sufficiently strong to burn me up, naked and so high above the earth, perhaps I would be dead and gone before my remains ever struck the hard bed of sand.

As the old expression goes, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Nothing much could have deterred me. Yet I did wonder if the other immortals knew what I meant to do and whether or not they were in the least concerned. I certainly sent them no farewell messages; I threw out no random images of what I meant to do.

At last the great warmth of dawn crept across the desert. I rose to my knees, stripped off my clothing, and began the ascent, my eyes already burning from the faintest bit of light.

Higher and higher I went, propelling myself well beyond the place where my body tended to stop and begin to float of its own accord. Finally I could not breathe, as the air was very thin, and it took a great effort to support myself at this height.

Then the light came. So immense, so hot, so blinding that it seemed a great roaring noise as much as a vision filling my sight. I saw
yellow and orange fire covering everything. I stared right into it, though it felt like scalding water poured into my eyes. I think I opened my mouth as if to swallow it, this divine fire! The sun was mine suddenly. I was seeing it; I was reaching for it. And then the light was covering me like molten lead, paralyzing me and torturing me beyond endurance, and my own cries filled my ears. Still I would not look away, still I would not fall!

Thus I defy you, heaven! And there were no words suddenly and no thoughts. I was twisting, swimming in it. And as the darkness and the coldness rose up to envelop me—it was nothing but the loss of consciousness—I realized that I had begun to fall.

The sound was the sound of the air rushing past me, and it seemed that the voices of others were calling to me, and through the horrid mingled roar, I heard distinctly the voice of a child.

Then nothing … 

Was I dreaming?

We were in a small close place, a hospital smelling of sickness and death, and I was pointing to the bed, and the child who lay on the pillow, white and small and half dead.