The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (336 page)

“I can believe the Devil wants you,” said Armand.

“Why?” I asked.

“Please don’t go to Dora,” said David seriously.

“I have to, and it’s almost morning now. I love you both.”

Both of them were staring at me, perplexed, suspicious, uncertain.

I did the only thing I could. I left.

The next night, I rose from my attic hiding place and went directly out in search of Dora. I didn’t want to see or hear any more of David or Armand. I knew I couldn’t be prevented from what I had to do.

How I meant to do it, that was the question. They had unwittingly confirmed something for me. I was not totally mad. I was not imagining everything that was happening around me. Some of it, perhaps, I was imagining, but not all.

Whatever the case, I decided upon a radical course of action with Dora, and one which neither David nor Armand could conceivably have approved.

Knowing more than a little about her habits and her whereabouts, I caught up with Dora as she was coming out of the television studio on Chartres Street in the Quarter. She’d spent the entire afternoon taping an hour-long show, and then visiting with her audience afterwards. I waited in the doorway of a nearby shop as she said farewell to the last of her “sisters” or seeming worshippers. They were young women, though not girls, and very firm believers in changing the world with Dora, and had about them a careless, nonconformist air.

They hurried off, and Dora went the other way towards the square and towards her car. She wore a slender black wool coat and wool stockings with heels that were very high, her very favorites for dancing on her program, and with her little cap of black hair she looked extremely dramatic and fragile, and horribly vulnerable in a world of mortal males.

I caught her around the waist before she knew what was
happening. We were rising so fast, I knew she could not see or understand anything, and I said very close to her ear,

“You’re with me, and you’re safe.” Then I wrapped her totally in my arms, so that no harm at all could come to her from the wind or the speed we were traveling, and I went up just as high as I dared to go with her, uncovered and vulnerable and depending upon me, listening keenly beneath the howl of the wind for the proper functioning of her heart and her lungs.

I felt her relaxing in my arms, or more truly, she simply remained trusting. It was as surprising as everything else about her. She had buried her face in my coat, as though too afraid to try to look around her, but this was really more a practical matter in the cold than anything else. At one point, I opened my coat, and covered her with one side of it, and we went on.

The journey took longer than I had supposed; I simply could not take a fragile human being up that high into the air. But it was nothing as tedious or dangerous as it might have been had we taken a fuming and stinking and highly explosive jet plane.

Within less than an hour, I was standing with her inside the glass doors of the Olympic Tower. She awoke in my arms as if from a deep sleep. I realized this had been inevitable. She’d lost consciousness, for a series of physical and mental reasons, but she came to herself at once, her heels striking the floor, and looked at me with huge owl eyes, and then out at the side of St. Patrick’s rising in all its obdurate glory across the street.

“Come on,” I said, “I’m taking you to your father’s things.” We made for the elevators.

She hurried after me, eagerly, the way that vampires dream mortals will do it, which never, never happens, as if all this were wondrous and there was no reason under Heaven to be afraid.

“I don’t have much time,” I said. We were in the elevator speeding upwards. “There is something chasing me and I don’t know what it wants of me. But I had to bring you here. And I’ll see that you get home safe.”

I explained that I knew of no rooftop entrances to this building;
indeed, the whole place was new to me, or I would have brought her in that way, and I explained this now, embarrassed that we would cover a continent in an hour and then take a rattling, sucking, and stammering elevator that seemed only slightly less marvelous than the gift of vampiric flight.

The doors opened onto the correct floor. I put the key in her hand, and guided her towards the apartment. “You open it, everything inside is yours.”

She looked at me for a moment, a slight frown on her forehead, then she stroked carelessly at her wind-torn hair, and put the key in the lock and opened the door.

“Roger’s things,” she said with the first breath she took.

She knew them by the smell as any antiquarian might have known them, these icons and relics. Then she saw the marble angel, poised in the corridor, with the glass wall way beyond it, and I thought she was going to faint in my arms.

She slumped backwards as if counting upon me to catch her and support her. I held her with the tips of my fingers, as afraid as ever that I might accidentally bruise her.

“Dear God,” she said under her breath. Her heart was racing, but it was hearty and very young and capable of tremendous endurance. “We are here, and you’ve been telling me true things.”

She sprang loose from me before I could answer and walked briskly past the angel and into the larger front room of the place. The spires of St. Patrick’s were visible just below the level of the window. And everywhere were these cumbersome packages of plastic through which one could detect the shape of a crucifix or saint. The books of Wynken were on the table, of course, but I wasn’t going to press her on that just now.

She turned to me, and I could feel her studying me, assessing me. I am so sensitive to this sort of appraisal that I actually think my vanity is rooted in each of my cells.

She murmured some words in Latin, but I didn’t catch them, and no automatic translation came up in my mind.

“What did you say?”

“Lucifer, Son of Morning,” she whispered, staring at me with frank admiration. Then she plopped down into a large leather chair. It was one of the many tiresome furnishings of the place, meant for businessmen but completely comfortable. Her eyes were still locked on me.

“No, that’s not who I am,” I said. “I’m only what I told you and nothing more. But that’s who’s after me.”

“The Devil?”

“Yes. Now listen, I’m going to tell you everything, and then you must give me your advice. Meantime—” I turned around, yes, there was the file cabinet. “Your inheritance, everything, money you have now that you don’t know about, clean and taxed and proper, it’s all explained in black folders in those files. Your father died wanting you to have this for your church. If you turn away from it, don’t be so sure it’s God’s will. Remember, your father is dead. His blood cleansed the money.”

Did I believe this? Well, it sure as hell was what Roger wanted me to tell her.

“Roger said to say this,” I added, trying to sound extremely sure of myself.

“I understand you,” she said. “You’re worrying about something that doesn’t really matter now. Come here, please, let me hold you. You’re shivering.”

“I’m shivering!”

“It’s warm in here, but you don’t seem to feel it. Come.”

I knelt down in front of her and suddenly took her in my arms the way I had Armand. I laid my head against hers. She was cold but would never even on the day of her burial be as cold as I was, nothing human could be that cold. I had sopped up the winter’s worst as though I were porous marble, which I suppose I was.

“Dora, Dora, Dora,” I whispered. “How he loved you, and how much he wanted everything to be right for you, Dora.”

Her scent was strong, but so was I.

“Lestat, explain about the Devil,” she said.

I sat down on the carpet so that I could look up at her. She was perched on the edge of her chair, knees bare, black coat carelessly open now, and a streak of gold scarf showing, her face pale but very flushed, in a way that made her radiant and at the same time a little enchanted, as though she were no more human than me.

“Even your father couldn’t really describe your beauty,” I said. “Temple virgin, nymph of the wood.”

“My father said that to you?”

“Yes. But the Devil, ah, the Devil told me to ask you a question. To ask you the truth about Uncle Mickey’s eye!” I had just remembered it. I had not remembered to tell either David or Armand about this, but what difference could that possibly make?

She was surprised by these words, and very impressed. She sank back a little into the chair. “The Devil told you these words?”

“He gave it to me as a gift. He wants me to help him. He says he’s not evil. He says that God is his adversary. I’ll tell you everything, but he gave me these words as some sort of little extra gift, what do we call it in New Orleans, lagniappe? To convince me that he is what he says he is.”

She gave a little gesture of confusion, hand flying to her temple as she shook her head. “Wait. The truth about Uncle Mickey’s eye, you’re sure he said that? My father didn’t say anything about Uncle Mickey?”

“No, and I never caught any such image from your father’s heart or soul, either. The Devil said Roger didn’t know the truth. What does it mean?”

“My father
didn’t
know the truth,” she said. “He never knew. His mother never told him the truth. It was his uncle Mickey, my grandmother’s brother. And it was
my
mother’s people who told me the real story—Terry’s people. It was like this, my father’s mother was rich and had a beautiful house on St. Charles Avenue.”

“I know the place, I know all about it. Roger met Terry there.”

“Yes, exactly, but my grandmother had been poor when she was young. Her mother had been a maid in the Garden District, like many an Irish maid. And Roger’s Uncle Mickey was one of those easygoing characters who made nothing of himself in anyone’s eyes at all.

“My father never knew about the real life of Uncle Mickey. My mother’s mother told me to show me what airs my father put on, and what a fool he was, and how humble his origins had been.”

“Yes, I see.”

“My father had loved Uncle Mickey. Uncle Mickey had died when my father was a boy. Uncle Mickey had a cleft palate and a glass eye, and I remember my father showing me his picture and telling me the story of how Uncle Mickey lost his eye. Uncle Mickey had loved fireworks, and once he’d been playing with firecrackers and one had gone off in a tin can, and wham, the can hit him in the eye. That’s the story I always believed about Uncle Mickey. I knew him only from the picture. My grandmother and my great-uncle were dead before I was born.”

“Right. And then your mother’s people told you different.”

“My mother’s father was a cop. He knew all about Roger’s family, that Roger’s grandfather had been a drunk and so had Uncle Mickey, more or less. Uncle Mickey had also been a tout for a bookie when he was young. And one time, he held back on a bet. In other words, he kept the money rather than placing the bet as he should have, and unfortunately the horse won.”

“I follow you.”

“Uncle Mickey, very young and very scared I imagine, was in Corona’s Bar in the Irish Channel.”

“On Magazine Street,” I said. “That bar was there for years and years. Maybe a century.”

“Yes, and the bookie’s henchmen came in and dragged
Uncle Mickey to the back of the bar. My mother’s father saw it all. He was there, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Nobody could. Nobody would. Nobody dared. But this is what my grandfather saw. The men beat and kicked Uncle Mickey. They were the ones who hurt the roof of his mouth so he talked as if something were wrong with him. And they kicked out his eye. They kicked it across the floor. And the way my grandfather said it every time he told it was, ‘Dora, they could have saved that eye, except those guys stepped on it. They deliberately stepped on it with those pointed shoes.’ ”

She stopped.

“And Roger never knew this.”

“Nobody knows it who is alive,” she said. “Except for me, of course. My grandfather’s dead. For all I know, everyone who was ever there is dead. Uncle Mickey died in the early fifties. Roger used to take me out to the cemetery to visit his grave. Roger had always loved him. Uncle Mickey with his hollow voice and his glass eye. Everybody sort of loved him, the way Roger told it. And even my mother’s people said that too. He was a sweetheart. He was a night watchman before he died. He rented rooms on Magazine Street right over Baer’s Bakery. He died of pneumonia in the hospital before anyone even knew he was ill. And Roger never knew the truth about Uncle Mickey’s eye. We would have spoken of it if he had, naturally.”

I sat there pondering, or rather picturing what she had described. No images came from her, she was closed tight, but her voice had been effortlessly generous. I knew Corona’s. So did anyone who had ever walked Magazine Street in those famous blocks of the Irish heyday. I knew the criminals with their pointed shoes. Crushing the eye.

“They just stepped on it and squashed it,” said Dora, as though she could read my thoughts. “My grandfather always said, ‘They could have saved it, if they hadn’t stepped on it the way they did with those pointed shoes.’ ”

A silence fell between us.

“This proves nothing,” I said.

“It proves your friend, or enemy, knows secrets, that’s what it proves.”

“But it doesn’t prove he’s the Devil,” I said, “and why would he choose such a story, of all things?”

“Maybe he was there,” she said with a bitter smile.

We both gave that a little laugh.

“You said this was the Devil but he wasn’t evil,” she prompted me. She looked persuasive and trusting and thoroughly in command.

I had the feeling that I had been absolutely correct in seeking her advice. She was regarding me steadily.

“Tell me what this Devil has done,” she said.

I told her the whole tale. I had to admit how I stalked her father, and I couldn’t remember if I had told her that before. I told her about the Devil stalking me in similar fashion, going through it all, just as I had for David and Armand, and found myself finishing with those puzzling words, “And I’ll tell you this about him, whatever he is, he has a sleepless mind in his heart, and an insatiable personality! And that’s true. When I first used those words to describe him, they just occurred to me as if from nowhere. I don’t know what part of my mind intuited such a thing. But it’s true.”