The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (327 page)

“For the angel 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 out 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 getting 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 I 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 the 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.

“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 corning 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!”