by Rice, Anne
“You’re in your dotage already. Make your will.”
“Oooh, so cruel,” he said with his bright smile.
I was going to say something else to him, when I was distracted. There was a little pulling somewhere in my consciousness. Sounds. A car passing very slowly on the narrow road through the distant village, in a blinding snow.
I scanned, caught nothing, merely the snow falling, and the car edging its way along. Poor sad mortal to be driving through the country at this hour. It was four of the clock.
“It’s very late,” I said. “I have to leave now. I don’t want to spend another night here, though you’ve been most kind. It’s nothing to do with anyone knowing. I simply prefer …”
“I understand. When will I see you again?”
“Perhaps sooner than you think,” I said. “David, tell me. The other night, when I left here, hell-bent on burning myself to a crisp in the Gobi, why did you say that I was your only friend?”
“You are.”
We sat there in silence for a moment.
“You are my only friend as well, David,” I said.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Back to London, perhaps. I’ll tell you when I go back across the Atlantic. Is that all right?”
“Yes, do tell me. Don’t … don’t ever believe that I don’t want to see you, don’t ever abandon me again.”
“If I thought I was good for you, if I thought your leaving the order and traveling again was good for you …”
“Oh, but it is. I don’t belong anymore in the Talamasca. I’m not even sure I trust it any longer, or believe in its aims.”
I wanted to say more—to tell him how much I loved him, that I’d sought shelter under his roof and he’d protected me and that I would never forget this, and that I would do anything he wished of me, anything at all.
But it seemed pointless to say so. I don’t know whether he would have believed it, or what the value would have been. I was still convinced that it was not good for him to see me. And there wasn’t very much left to him in this life.
“I know all this,” he said quietly, gracing me with that smile again.
“David,” I said, “the report you made of your adventures in Brazil. Is there a copy here? Could I read this report?”
He stood up and went to the glass-doored bookshelf nearest his desk. He looked through the many materials there for a long moment, then removed two large leather folders from the shelf.
“This is my life in Brazil—what I wrote in the jungles after, on a little rattletrap portable typewriter at a camp table, before I came home to England. I did go after the jaguar, of course. Had to do it. But the hunt was nothing compared to my experiences in Rio, absolutely nothing. That was the turning point, you see. I believe the very writing of this was some desperate attempt to become an Englishman again, to distance myself from the Candomble people, from the life I’d been living with them. My report for the Talamasca was based upon the material here.”
I took it from him gratefully.
“And this,” he said, holding the other folder, “is a brief summary of my days in India and Africa.”
“I would like to read that too.”
“Old hunting stories mostly. I was young when I wrote this. It’s all big guns and action! It was before the war.”
I took this second folder as well. I stood up, in slow gentlemanly fashion.
“I’ve talked the night away,” he said suddenly. “That was rude of me. Perhaps you had things to say.”
“No, not at all. It was exactly what I wanted.” I offered my hand and he took it. Amazing the sensation of his touch against the burnt flesh.
“Lestat,” he said, “the little short story here … the Lovecraft piece. Do you want it back, or shall I save it for you?”
“Ah, that, now that’s a rather interesting tale—I mean how I came in possession of that.”
I took the story from him and shoved it in my coat. Perhaps I’d read it again. My curiosity returned, and along with it a sort of fearful suspicion. Venice, Hong Kong, Miami. How had that strange mortal spotted me in all three places, and managed to see that I had spotted him!
“Do you care to tell me about it?” David asked gently.
“When there’s more time,” I said, “I shall tell you.” Especially if I ever see that guy again, I thought. How ever did he do it?
I went out in a civilized manner, actually making a little bit of deliberate noise as I closed the side door of the house.
It was close to dawn when I reached London. And for the first time in many a night, I was actually glad of my immense powers, and the great feeling of security which they conveyed. I needed no coffins, no dark hiding places, merely a room completely isolated from the rays of the sun. A fashionable hotel with heavy curtains would provide both the peace and the comfort.
And I had a little time to settle in the warm light of a lamp and begin David’s Brazilian adventure, which I looked forward to, with inordinate delight.
I had almost no money with me, thanks to my recklessness and madness, so I used my considerable powers of persuasion with the clerks of venerable old Claridge’s so that they accepted the number of my credit account, though I had no card to verify it, and upon my signature—Sebastian Melmoth, one of my favorite aliases—I was shown to a lovely upper suite crowded with charming Queen Anne furniture and fitted with every convenience I could wish.
I put out the polite little printed notice that I wasn’t to be disturbed, left word with the desk I must not be bothered until well after sunset, then latched all the doors from the inside.
There really wasn’t time to read. The morning was coming behind the heavy gray sky and the snow drifting down still in large soft wet flakes. I closed all the draperies, save one, so that I might look at the sky, and I stood there, at the front of the hotel, waiting for the spectacle of the light to come, and still a little afraid of its fury, and the pain in my skin growing a little worse from that fear, more than anything else.
David was much on my mind; I hadn’t ceased to think about our conversation for a second since I’d left him. I kept hearing his voice and trying to imagine his fragmentary vision of God and the Devil in the café. But my position on all this was simple and predictable. I thought David in possession of the most comforting delusions. And soon he’d be gone from me. Death would have him. And all I would have would be these manuscripts of his life. I couldn’t force myself to believe he would know anything more at all when he was dead.
Nevertheless it was all very surprising, really, the turn the conversation had taken, and his energy, and the peculiar things he’d said.
I was comfortable in these thoughts, watching the leaden sky and the snow piling on the sidewalks far below, when I suddenly experienced a bout of dizziness—in fact, a complete moment of disorientation, as though I were falling asleep. It was very pleasurable, actually, the subtle vibratory sensation, accompanied by a weightlessness, as though I were indeed floating out of the physical and into my dreams. Then came that pressure again which I’d felt so fleetingly in Miami—of my limbs constricting, indeed of my whole form pressing inwards upon me, narrowing me and compressing me, and the sudden frightening image of myself being forced through the very top of my head!
Why was this happening? I shuddered as I had done on that lonely dark Florida beach when it happened before. And at once the feeling was dissipated. I was myself again and vaguely annoyed.
Was something going wrong with my handsome, godlike anatomy? Impossible. I didn’t need the old ones to assure me of such a truth. And I had not made up my mind whether I should worry about this or forget it, or indeed, try to induce it again myself, when I was brought out of my preoccupation by a knock at the door.
Most irritating.
“A message for you, sir. The gentleman requested I put it in your hands.”
Had to be some mistake. Nevertheless I opened the door.
The young man
gave me an envelope. Fat, bulky. For one second I could only stare at it. I had a one-pound note still in my pocket, from the little thief I’d chomped on earlier, and I gave this to the boy, and locked the door again.
This was exactly the same kind of envelope I’d been given in Miami by that lunatic mortal who’d come running towards me across the sand. And the sensation! I’d experienced that bizarre sensation right at the moment my eyes had fallen on that creature. Oh, but this was not possible …
I tore open the envelope. My hands were suddenly shaking. It was another little printed short story, clipped out of a book exactly as the first one had been, and stapled at the upper-left-hand corner in precisely the same way!
I was dumbfounded! How in the hell had this being tracked me here? No one knew I was here! David didn’t even know I was here! Oh, there were the credit card numbers involved, but dear God, it would have taken hours for any mortal to locate me that way, even if such a thing were possible, which it really was not.
And what had the sensation to do with it—the curious vibratory feeling and the pressure which seemed to be inside my own limbs?
But there was no time to consider any of this. It was almost morning!
The danger in the situation made itself immediately apparent to me. Why the hell hadn’t I seen it before? This being did most definitely have some means of knowing where I was—even where I chose to conceal myself during daylight! I had to get out of these rooms. How perfectly outrageous!
Trembling with annoyance, I forced myself to scan this story, which was only a few pages in length. “Eyes of the Mummy” was the title, author Robert Bloch. A clever little tale, but what could it possibly mean to me? I thought of the Lovecraft, which had been much longer and seemed wholly different. What on earth could all this signify? The seeming idiocy of it further maddened me.
But it was too late to think about it anymore. I gathered up David’s manuscripts, and left the rooms, rushing out of a fire exit and going up to the roof. I scanned the night in all directions. I couldn’t find the little bastard! Lucky for him. I would surely have destroyed him on sight. When it comes to protecting my daylight lair, I have little patience or restraint.
I moved upwards, covering the miles with the greatest speed I could attain. At last I descended in a snow-covered wood far, far north of London and there I dug my own grave in the frozen earth as I had done so many times before.
I was in a fury for having to do so. A positive fury. I’m going to kill this son of a bitch, I thought, whoever the hell he is. How dare he come stalking me, and shoving these stories in my face! Yes, I shall do that, kill him as soon as I catch him.
But then the drowsiness came, the numbness, and very soon nothing mattered …
Once again I was dreaming, and she was there, lighting the oil lamp, and saying, “Ah, the flame doesn’t frighten you anymore …”
“You’re mocking me,” I said, miserably. I’d been weeping.
“Ah, but, Lestat, you do have a way of recovering from these cosmic fits of despair awfully fast. There you were dancing under the street lamps in London. Really!”
I wanted to protest, but I was crying, and I couldn’t talk …
In one last jolt of consciousness, I saw that mortal in Venice—under the arches of San Marco—where I’d first noticed him—saw his brown eyes and smooth youthful mouth.
What do you want? I demanded.
Ah, but it is what you want, he seemed to reply.
SIX
I wasn’t so angry with the little fiend when I woke up. Actually, I was powerfully intrigued. But then the sun had set and I had the upper hand.
I decided upon a little experiment. I went to Paris, making the crossing very quickly and on my own.
Now let me digress here for a moment, only to explain that in recent years I had avoided Paris utterly, and indeed, I knew nothing of it as a twentieth-century city at all. The reasons for this are probably obvious. I had suffered much there in ages past, and I guarded myself against the visions of modern buildings rising around Père-Lachaise cemetery or electrically lighted Ferris wheels turning in the Tuileries. But I had always secretly longed to return to Paris, naturally. How could I not?
And this little experiment gave me courage and a perfect excuse. It deflected the inevitable pain of my observations, for I had a purpose. But within moments of my arrival, I realized that I was very truly in Paris—that this could be no place else—and I was overwhelmed with happiness as I walked on the grand boulevards, and inevitably past the place where the Theatre of the Vampires had once stood.
Indeed a few theatres of that period had survived into modern times, and there they were—imposing and ornate and still drawing in their audiences, amid the more modern structures on all sides.
I realized as I wandered the brilliantly lighted Champs Élysées—which was jammed with tiny speeding cars, as well as thousands of pedestrians—that this was no museum city, like Venice. It was as alive now as it had ever been in the last two centuries. A capital. A place of innovation still and courageous change.
I marveled at the stark splendour of the Georges Pompidou Center, rising so boldly within sight of the venerable flying buttresses of Notre Dame. Oh, I was glad I had come.
But I had a task, did I not?
I didn’t tell a soul, mortal or immortal, that I was there. I did not call my Paris lawyer, though it was most inconvenient. Rather I acquired a great deal of money in the old familiar manner of taking it from a couple of thoroughly unsavory and well-heeled criminal victims in the dark streets.
Then I headed for the snow-covered Place Vendôme, which contained the very same palaces which it had in my day, and under the alias of Baron Van Kindergarten, ensconced myself in a lavish suite at the Ritz.
There for two nights, I avoided the city, enveloped in a luxury and style that was truly worthy of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles. Indeed it brought tears to my eyes to see the excessive Parisian decoration all around me, the gorgeous Louis XVI chairs, and the lovely embossed paneling of the walls. Ah, Paris. Where else can wood be painted gold and still look beautiful!
Sprawled on a tapestried directoire daybed, I set at once to reading David’s manuscripts, only now and then breaking off to walk about the silent parlour and bedroom, or to open a real French window, with its encrusted oval knob, and gaze out at the back garden of the hotel, so very formal and quiet and proud.
David’s writing captivated me. I soon felt closer to him than ever before.
What was plain was that David had been wholly a man of action in his youth, and drawn into the realm of books only when they spoke of action, and that he’d always found his greatest pleasure in the hunt. He taken down his first game when he was only ten years old. His descriptions of shooting the big Bengal tigers were infused with the excitement of the pursuit itself and the risks he ultimately endured. Always drawing very close to the beast before he fired his gun, he had almost been killed more than once.
He had loved Africa as well as India, hunting elephants in the days when no one ever dreamed the species would be in danger of dying out. Again, he had been charged innumerable times by the big bulls before he had brought them down. And in hunting the lions of the Serengeti Plain he had courted similar risks.
Indeed, he had gone out of his way to hike arduous mountain trails, to swim in dangerous rivers, to lay his hand upon the tough hide of the crocodile, to overcome his inveterate revulsion for snakes. He had loved to sleep in the open; to scribble entries in his diary by the light of oil lanterns or candles; to eat only the meat of the animals he killed, even when there was very little of it; and to skin his kills without aid.
His power of description was not so very great. He was not patient with written words, especially not when he was young. Yet one could feel the heat of the tropics in this memoir; one heard the buzz of the gnats. It seemed inconceivable that such a man had ever enjoyed the wintry comforts of Talbot Manor, or the luxury of the Motherhouses of the or
der, to which he was somewhat addicted now.
But many another British gentleman had known such choices and done what he thought appropriate to his position and his age.
As for the adventure in Brazil, it might as well have been written by a different man. There was the same sparse and precise vocabulary, and there was the same lust for danger, naturally, but with the turning to the supernatural, a far more clever and cerebral individual had come to the fore. Indeed, the vocabulary itself changed, incorporating many baffling Portuguese and African words for concepts and physical feelings which David felt plainly at a loss to describe.
But the gist was that the deep telepathic powers of David’s brain had been developed through a series of primitive and terrifying encounters with Brazilian priestesses, and spirits as well. And the body of David had become a mere instrument for this psychic power, thereby paving the way for the scholar who had emerged in the years that followed.
There was much physical description in this Brazilian memoir. It told of small wooden rooms in the country where the Candomble believers gathered, lighting candles before their plaster statues of Catholic saints and Candomble gods. It told of the drums and the dancing; and the inevitable trances as various members of the group became unconscious hosts to the spirits and took on the attributes of a certain deity for long spells of unremembered time.
But the emphasis was now entirely upon the invisible—upon the perception of inner strength and the battle with the forces outside. The adventurous young man who had sought truth purely in the physical—the smell of the beast, the jungle path, the crack of the gun, the fall of the prey—was gone.
By the time David had left the city of Rio de Janeiro he was a different being. For though his narrative had been tightened and polished later, and undoubtedly edited, it nevertheless included much of his diary written at the very time. There was no doubt that he had been on the verge of madness in the conventional sense. He no longer saw streets and buildings and people everywhere he looked; he saw spirits, gods, invisible powers emanating from others, and various levels of spiritual resistance upon the part of humans, both conscious and unconscious, to all such things. Indeed, if he had not gone into the jungles of the Amazon, if he had not forced himself to become the British game hunter again, he might have been lost forever from his old world.